Judge Jails Times Reporter Over Source - Yahoo! News

Judge Jails Times Reporter Over Source - Yahoo! News:

"New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed Wednesday for refusing to divulge a confidential source to a grand jury investigating the Bush administration's leak of an undercover
CIA operative's name. Another reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed to talk and avoided jail.

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Cooper said his source had given him a waiver just before the court session, enabling the journalist to cooperate with the probe into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
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Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating the question of who leaked the identity of CIA officer Plame. Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer's identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the person who released that information knew of the officer's secret status.

Plame's name was disclosed in a column by Robert Novak days after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, questioned part of
President Bush's justification for invading
Iraq.

Wilson was sent to Africa by the Bush administration to investigate an intelligence claim that
Saddam Hussein may have purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger in the late 1990s for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson said he could not verify the claim and accused the administration for manipulating the intelligence to "exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Novak, whose column cited as sources two unidentified senior Bush administration officials, has refused to say whether he has testified before the grand jury or has been subpoenaed. Cooper's story mentioning Plame's name appeared after Novak's column. Miller did some reporting, but never wrote a story.

Among the witnesses Fitzgerald's investigators have questioned are Bush; Vice President
Dick Cheney; Bush political adviser Karl Rove; Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who is now the attorney general. Fitzgerald has said his probe is finished except for hearing from Miller and Cooper."