A reporter goes to jail.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Judith Miller is in jail today because of a complicated case involving conflicts between press freedom and government authority, between national security and political maneuvering. But in the end, the case boils down to a matter of honor: Miller promised not to reveal the identity of a confidential source, and she is committed to keeping that pledge regardless of the consequences to her.

Miller has not placed herself above the law, as some claim. To the contrary, she has accepted her imprisonment. But as a reporter, a citizen and a human being, Miller had to obey her conscience. Miller gave her word, and she elevates her profession by remaining bound by it.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitz- gerald subpoenaed Miller, a New York Times reporter, and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to testify before a grand jury in the investigation of leaks that disclosed the identity of a CIA operative. Miller and Cooper fought the subpoenas all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost.

Time then agreed to turn Cooper's notes over to Fitzgerald. On Wednesday, Cooper agreed to testify, saying he had been released from his pledge of confidentiality by his source. Miller said she had received no similar release, suggesting the existence of more than one source.

Also on Wednesday, a federal judge found her in contempt of court and ordered that she be jailed until she agrees to testify, or until the grand jury concludes its work.

Fitzgerald is investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's identity was disclosed in an apparent effort to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had been sent to Niger to investigate alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium. Wilson wrote a column for The New York Times discounting the allegations, undercutting the Bush administration's warnings of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Columnist Robert Novak first named Plame as having suggested that Wilson be given the Niger assignment.

Whoever fed the information about Plame to Novak may have violated a federal law protecting intelligence agents' identities. Novak, however, has never faced the type of pressure to which Miller and Cooper have been subjected. If Novak has revealed his source to investigators, the vigorous pursuit of Miller and Cooper is unnecessary. If he hasn't, Novak's having avoided a similar pursuit is inexplicable.

Miller, unlike Novak and Cooper, never wrote a story about Plame's identity. And Miller can't be counted as an ally of Wilson's; her reporting before the invasion of Iraq buttressed the Bush administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction to such a degree that The New York Times' editors felt obliged to offer a self-critical public postmortem of the newspaper's pre-war coverage.

Yet she's the one sitting in jail.

Miller's predicament has strengthened calls for a national shield law similar to the ones in most states, including Oregon, that protect reporters from government demands that they identify sources. Yet even shield laws usually contain exemptions for cases in which prosecutors have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed.

Sources ultimately must believe that reporters' promises of confidentiality can be trusted. Miller has shown that they can be.