Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Crime and Punishment	excon	07/11/05
Hello experts: I don’t understand something. Clear it up for me. There is a NY Times reporter in jail for refusing to name Karl Rove as her source. We KNOW Karl Rove was her source, so what’s the point of keeping her in jail? Is the point of her jailing to find out who her sources are, or to punish her for her arrogance? Karl Rove is the prick who should be in the slam. Robert Novak is a prick who should be in the slam. But, no, Judith Miller is in the slam, for what I don’t know. But, I’m sure you’ll tell me. By the way, I didn’t know arrogance was a crime. If it is, Dubya qualifies. excon
Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 07/11/05 12:08 pm: if she is taking the rap ;it is self imposed .if it is the principle ;then I think she is misguided . do I think the prosecutor went overboard ;yes . But as I have said ;I do not think a reporters right to protect sources is absolute ;and I do not think it a Constitutional violation to compel she reveal them. Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 07/12/05 2:58 am: my mom used to make anual pilgrimages to Medagorje .She was there in 1992(I think) during the shelling of Dobrinja . They must be a great people to bear no hard feelings . People in the US do not realize that was a seige resembling World War II in intensity and length and brutality They would set fire on a residence and then take sniper shots at the folks trying to rescue the trapped ..
Answered By		Answered On
tomder55		07/11/05
She should learn when to pick her fights . You don't believe she is in jail for protecting Rover ,do you ? Matt Cooper's notes mentioned Rove but never suggests he used Plame's name .I do not believe he would risk jail time to protect Rove either . They are protecting someone else'perhaps another reporter ? Andrea Mitchell was asked, on MSNBC, whether it was generally known to news people, before the incident that Plame worked for the CIA. She answered that it was. If Andrea Mitchell knew this, I bet Robert Novak knew it, too. So, he didn't need a leak to tell him that Plame worked for the CIA. He was just interested in whether or not she had anything to do with Wilson's mission to Niger.He also has this tendency to embellish his reporting a little too much for my liking .He always has this cache of beltway insider ananomous sources that he quotes . At best Rove is one of the sources .I don't think that reporters should be able to shield sources who are suspected of committing crimes.Do I think there should be some form of a Federal Shield law ;yes ,but not without restricions . Both Novak and Rove testified before the Grand Jury .One would think that if Novak and Rove both went before the Grand Jury and said what seems to be the content of the Emails and notes that Time surrendered to the prosecutor; why was he not indicted for outing Plame before now? If Novak says Rove is his source and Rove says he leaked her to the press, then that would be enough to secure potential indictments right there. Unless the leak had nothing to do with Ms. Plame's status as a covert agent. What do we know about the case The illusion that Joe Wilson was an innocent State Department official who is being persecuted for "being honest", and Valerie Plame was a noble CIA field agent whose career and personal safety is now in jeopardy has been disproved by revelations, accepted by a bipartisan Senate committee. Wilson was dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa.He was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.Wilson's assertions about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the informationwere undermined by the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. The Senate Intelligence committee panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case . And contrary to Wilson's assertions the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. Plame had already made up her mind about the truthfulness of the report, and dispatched her husband to Niger not to investigate, but specifically to come back with debunking evidence. The information Wilson returned with actually strengthened the administration's case, so he lied about what its conclusions were to the press. The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post . He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.Committee staff asked how he could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have, "misspoken" to reporters. The documents ;sales agreements between Niger and Iraq ; were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger. Wilson lied about how he got to Niger, he lied about seeing a report that didn't even exist at the time, he lied about the conclusions of his own report; he lied about what the administration had been told, and his wife, Valerie Plame, specifically sent him on a mission to intentionally debunk a claim, not to find facts or perform inspections. Rove ,attempting to discredit the ludicrously false claims,told the press that Wilson was sent to Niger on dubious premises in the first place at the recommendation of his wife(he never disclosed her name ;Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Not that it matters since she is the darling of the cover of Vanity Fair) . It was Judith Miller's own NY Slimes that beat the drum loudest for an aggressive prosecutor for the case(December 31, 2003 editorial)

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