THE biggest and bloodiest conflict ever fought in this hemisphere occurred when two groups of Americans -- the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia -- blundered into each other in a Pennsylvania crossroads called Gettysburg and found themselves locked in mortal struggle on ground neither side would have chosen.
It's a mordant recollection to entertain on what ought to be a celebratory morning.
After all, New York Times reporter Judith Miller is free after spending 85 days unjustly -- though, unfortunately, not illegally -- behind bars for refusing to identity a confidential source before a federal grand jury. Her jailing at the behest of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was an affront to decency and something that should outrage every American who believes that a free and independent press plays an indispensable role in vindicating the people's 1st Amendment rights.
This is especially true since Miller never wrote a story about the issue Fitzgerald ostensibly is investigating -- the question of whether government officials working out of the White House broke the law two years ago by revealing illegally that Valerie Plame was a covert agent of the CIA. That revelation -- first printed in a July 2003 syndicated column by Robert Novak -- followed publication in the New York Times of an op-ed piece by Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. In that article, the ex-diplomat charged that the conclusions he had drawn from a CIA-sponsored fact-finding trip to the sub-Saharan country of Niger contradicted allegations President Bush made in an address to Congress concerning Iraq's purported attempt to obtain yellow-cake uranium from Niger. The president's contention was central to the case he then was making for a preemptive attack on Iraq, whose dictator, Saddam Hussein, supposedly was attempting to build weapons of mass destruction.
In the days that followed publication of Wilson's comments, various administration officials -- including Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and presidential political advisor Karl Rove -- apparently told a number of reporters that Wilson had been put up to his trip by the CIA, where his wife worked. Whether Plame actually was named remains unknown.
