WASHINGTON – After nearly three months behind bars, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released Thursday after agreeing to testify about the Bush administration’s disclosure of a covert CIA officer’s identity.
Miller left the federal detention center in Alexandria, Va., after reaching an agreement with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She will appear this morning before a grand jury investigating the case.
“My source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise of confidentiality regarding our conversations,” Miller said.
Her source was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, reported The Times, which supported her contention that her source should be protected.
Miller has been in custody since July 6. A federal judge ordered her jailed when she refused to testify before the grand jury investigating the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s name by White House officials.
The disclosure of Plame’s identity by syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July 2003 triggered an inquiry that has caused political damage to the Bush White House and could still result in criminal charges against government officials.
The federal grand jury delving into the matter expires Oct. 28. Miller would have been freed at that time, but prosecutors could have pursued a criminal contempt of court charge against the reporter if she continued to defy Fitzgerald.
Of the reporters swept up in Fitzgerald’s investigation, Miller is the only one to go to jail. She was found in civil contempt of court.
Miller is a veteran national security reporter. In the 1980s, she became the first woman to be named chief of The Times’ Cairo bureau in Egypt. For her work on Osama bin Laden in 2001, she won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism as part of a small team of Times reporters.
The news media is in a less-than-ideal position in the Plame probe.
The reporters’ sources – rather than being whistle-blowers exposing wrongdoing and facing retaliation if identified – are government officials whose motives in leaking appear to have been to undermine the credibility of a critic of the Bush administration.
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