More than two dozen prominent European film directors, writers and journalists have published an open letter calling for the release of Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who is today spending her 50th day in jail for refusing to identify confidential sources.
The film directors Pedro Almodovar and Wim Wenders, the German writer Günter Grass and the former BBC reporter Kate Adie were among the 27 signatories of the letter, which called Miller’s imprisonment ”more than a crime: it’s a miscarriage of justice”.
”In the name of our common values, we urge the American judicial system to reconsider its decision concerning Judith Miller, who was merely performing her duties as a journalist,” the letter said.
Miller’s lawyer, Floyd Abrams, said he would deliver the letter to Miller on Thursday, her 50th day in the Alexandria detention centre in Virginia.
Abrams described the jail as ”grim” and said the celebrated journalist was tired and thin.
Miller was jailed last month for refusing to identify government sources she talked to in 2003 about a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, who is married to Joseph Wilson, an administration critic who had questioned the justification for the Iraq war.
Miller did not write about Plame, but her name was revealed by another journalist. The deliberate leak of a covert agent’s identity is a crime and a special prosecutor was hired to investigate. Miller refused to cooperate with that investigation by naming her sources, arguing that to do so would undermine the independence of American journalists.
The Plame investigation is still under way, but the grand jury convened for the investigation is due to expire in October. Abrams said Miller could not be kept in prison any later without new charges.
”We are hopeful with the expiration of the grand jury will be the end of her incarceration,” Abrams said. ”The facility is safe but it is grim and her life is difficult there, as is the case for all other prisoners.”
Miller, who began her incarceration sharing a cell but now has one to herself, is controversial among US journalists and liberals for her reporting before the Iraq invasion which gave prominence to claims by administration officials and Iraqi exiles about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — claims which were later found to be groundless. – Guardian Unlimited Â