What's the Deal With Jailing Reporters?

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took a look at the recent spate of reporters being thrown in jail in the U.S. He noted several examples including the one most of us are most familiar with, the Valerie Plame case.

Why are Judith Miller of the NY Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine the ones being placed on the proverbial butcher's block for following the rules of journalism? Why is that coy, smarmy schmuck Robert Novak [and I am so glad he broke his 98-year-old hip, there I said it] getting off without a hitch?

Robert Novak. I learned, while watching Bush's Brain a documentary on Karl Rove, that Rove was fired by GHWB for leaking info for a negative story to... Robert Novak. And who was the one who "broke" the story on Plame? Novak. Here is the paragraph where Novak outs Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Why the fuck do you think Wilson didn't want to answer "any question about [his] wife?" Because she's a fucking under cover CIA agent working on WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. What did this lead to? One of Plame's associates being murdered. Wonderful. Thanks Novak. Here's a pat on the back and an immunity card, please play again.

Kristof reminds us of the history of keeping secret sources secret and what we can learn from those who have done their job to protect that ethical pact:

Protecting confidential sources has been a sacred ethical precept in publishing ever since John Twyn was arrested in 1663 for printing a book that offended the king. Twyn refused to reveal the name of the book's author, so he was publicly castrated and disemboweled, and his limbs severed from his body. Each piece of his body was nailed to a London gate or bridge.

So, on the bright side, we have evidently progressed.

In May, Iran's secret police detained me in Tehran and demanded that I identify a revolutionary guard I had quoted as saying "to hell with the mullahs." My interrogators threatened to imprison me unless I revealed my source. But after a standoff, the Iranian goons let me go. Imprisoning Western journalists for protecting their sources was too medieval, even for them. Let's hope the U.S. judicial system shows the same restraint as those Iranian thugs.

Let us look to Tehran folks, for they are wise and just, at least in this manner. And don't you think for an instant that drawing and quartering is considered "cruel and unusual" by this administration.