Oh, for fuck’s sake

Please can the Republicans just install the proper totalitarian regime they clearly want and love right away, rather than pissing about by doing it gradually? The latest innovation is jailing journalists – almost like they’re *trying* to follow in Fidel and Saddam’s footsteps…

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10 thoughts on “Oh, for fuck’s sake

  1. The latest innovation is jailing journalists
    Bollocks, Jaling journalists who broke the law, or maybe possessing a journalist title is a guarantee against prosecution?
    Second, She could avoid jail if she wants to. All she has to do is snitch. Her choice. I doubt journalists would get such an option from Saddam or Fidelski.

  2. Holy smokes, Angry-And-Uninformed Man, you mean the Plame investigation was actually a complex Republican plot to get Judith Miller imprisoned? How fiendish.

    Tune in next week to hear Angry-And-Uninformed Man explain that Saddam must have been hiding something because he expelled the UN weapons inspectors…

  3. Seeing as Miller is going to jail for protecting a source that was leaking information to discredit a prominent Bush critic I doubt very much it’s the Republicans doing this.

  4. She could avoid jail if she wants to. All she has to do is snitch. Her choice.

    …albeit one that would involve flushing her career down the toilet, as who would talk to her in confidence after that? Compared to that, going to jail to protect the integrity of her source (as well as a fundamental principle of journalism) seems like a very sensible move.

  5. Journalists don’t have extra rights that other people don’t. The whole point of freedom of the press is that everyone should be free to publish their opinion without government license. And they are. Freedom of the press does not mean immunity from prosecution for journalists when they break the law. And it shouldn’t.

  6. I believe Fidel, if not Saddam, to be extremely keen on releasing people on the grounds that they’ve grassed up everyone else.

    There’s no way the investigation could have reached the stage of jailing Miller without government backing. Presumably they believe the principle of being allowed to lock up hacks outweighs the value of whomever Miller’s protecting.

    Since they obviously know who Miller is protecting, I suspect they’re probably in a strong position to make that judgement.

  7. Surely it’s not a difficult moral problem. Why can’t the Bush Administration just reveal who the source was? Or confirm, given everyone knows who it was.

  8. Freedom of the press does not mean immunity from prosecution for journalists when they break the law. And it shouldn’t.

    Absolutely – which is why this is such a difficult call: career or jail?

    Mind you, it’s not that tough: it’s only a four-month sentence, with ample opportunity for feature spin-offs (both in the publishing and film rights sense), so I suspect she’ll end up doing rather well out of it.

  9. It’s not just her credibility which is at stake, but the credibility of journalists in general. If people think that journalists are going to have to make a choice between revealing their sources and going to prison, they’re not going to have much confidence in guarantees of anonymity. That’s what makes this an attack on press freedom.

  10. There’s no way the investigation could have reached the stage of jailing Miller without government backing.

    I don’t think the American legal system is that compromised (yet). It seems to be purely the work of a zealous prosecutor.

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