A Great Letter to the Times about Miller/Cooper

[TomClash]

No kidding. Why can't Fitzgerald get the names from Novak?

To the Editor:

Re "Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges" (front page, Feb. 16):

I don't get it. Federal appeals court judges order that two reporters - Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine - should be jailed for contempt for refusing to name their sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.

Yet you say it is "not known" if Robert Novak, who disclosed Ms. Plame's identity in his syndicated column, has even been subpoenaed. If Mr. Novak has been subpoenaed, he has either revealed his source or refused to reveal it. If he has revealed the source, why hold Ms. Miller or Mr. Cooper for contempt? If he has not, using the flawed logic of the court, why has Mr. Novak not been cited for contempt?

Why are Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper being harassed when Mr. Novak was the one who disseminated the identity of Ms. Plame in the first place?

Thomas Linden, M.D.
Chapel Hill, N.C., Feb. 16, 2005
The writer is a professor of medical journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/opinion/l18press.html?

[Skink]

1. Probably both Democrats.

[TomClash]

2. bingo! nt

[tom_paine]

3. NoFacts is a Member of THE PARTY

In Imperial Amerika, stooges of the Imperial Family and other Members of THE PARTY are ALMOST (but not quite yet equivalently) as immunized as Communist Party Members in Brezhnev's Soviet Union from investigation or prosecution for crimes committed.

ALMOST as immunized as KKK murderers were in the Bushevik South in the 1880s-1970s from investigation or prosecution.

A great EVIL is descending on Amerika, a Totalitarian Darkness unlike any we've ever seen.

This is one tiny symptom of a much larger national disease. Do not expect PARTY Members in an Orwellian Totalitarian nation like Amerika (or Pigboy Lima, or the Bushevik Anthrax assassin who only sent anthrax to DEMOCRATS) to be subject to the same rules Non-Party members and other Enbemies of the State are treated in the Empire.

[enki23]

4. maybe, though i'm going out on a limb here...

it's because they are reserving the option to charge novak with a crime?

of course that doesn't seem very damned likely, considering who's in charge. maybe someone in the system is doing their job, though, or trying. even if the bush administration will later pull the strings that will make novak walk out the courtroom door.

[underpants]

5. I think that is it-We know what happened

SO we just need the names of the "two administration officials". Novak should be charged for the act of outing a CIA but he doesn't have to reveal his sources-we know it happened (unless Novak says the whole article was a lie) WE JUST NEED THE TWO NAMES.