08. 07. 2005

NEW YORK TIMES JOURNALIST IN JAIL

NEW YORK, July 8, 2005 – New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller has been sentenced to prison after refusing to divulge the name of a confidential source. Judith Miller refused to reveal the name of her source to the Grand Jury which was investigating how the name of the CIA operative agent had leaked into public. Judge Tomas Hogan sent her to prison, where she would stay until she decided to talk or until the term of the Grand Jury expired in October. The journalist however stated that she, despite the fact that she did not want to go to prison, had to protect her sources. “If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then the journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press”, said Miller. The Grand Jury has tried to determine who from the United States 2003 administration had revealed the name of the CIA agent Valerie Plaim to the media, and whether certain legislations had been breached with this act. The name of the CIA agent leaked to public after her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson, had criticized the war in Iraq, and his earlier attempts in Africa to prove that the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been trying to procure uranium in the early nineties. Reporters without Frontiers stated that the imprisonment of the journalist was a sad day for the freedom of press. The judge’s decision to lock her up is absurd, a dangerous precedent and very bad message that USA sends to the rest of the world”, said in the statement of the Reporters without Frontiers, in which this organization called on the USA Congress to bring the Draft legislation on the federal level as soon as possible, which would give the right to journalists to protect their sources of information.