Fears for press freedoms as US jails journalist

A big chill. That’s what advocates of press freedom in the US fear following the jailing of journalist Judith Miller, who covers national security at the New York Times. She refused to name a source in a scandal about a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative that reaches into the bowels of the White House.
The scandal, the talk of Washington for the past two years, is shrouded in official secrecy and complicated by high-level political smear tactics and by Miller’s own history of relying on unnamed sources for major stories.
The leak of the undercover agent’s name – Valerie Plame – though it may originate with the Bush administration’s need to justify the Iraq war and is classified information, is unlikely to become another Watergate with a Deep Throat that topples a president. But the implications of Miller’s imprisonment, part of a broader trend of legal pressures on US journalists, are huge.
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