SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL: I think that anyone who says what you just said ill-serves their own cause. Let me speak to the question of Judy Miller. I think that there are many unanswered questions about Judy Miller. Judy is in jail because she won't reveal her sources as the prosecutor wants them revealed. But the problem with Judy is: Is it that there are sources or was Judy a disseminator of information and a source herself? We don't know that, and we don't know what the prosecutor seeks from Judy.

What we do know is that the prosecutor filed eight pages to the court of sealed affidavit of his evidence. It was apparently so convincing that the three-judge panel, including Judge Tatel, who is a Clinton appointee, ruled that Judy and Matt Cooper had to testify given the great significance of the material that they saw, but to which their lawyers were not privy. Judge Hogan, Thomas Hogan, the U.S. District Court Judge in the case, ruled that there is new evidence in the case based on the sealed affidavit, an ex parte filing by the prosecutor, and that the prosecutor has gone in new directions, which we don't know about, and that Judy had to testify.

Now, the Times has -- the New York Times has stood on the First Amendment grounds here, but I think other media institutions, including the Washington Post and Time magazine, have made other decisions and have worked out arrangements with the prosecutor. The Times, I believe, has made a miscalculation by taking a rigid stand and creating new case law against journalistic privilege. Furthermore, is there a journalistic privilege here if your source was misleading? And that's a very interesting question, because I believe that journalists should not protect bad sources. In fact, there's an internal New York Times policy about that. Is it being adhered to? These are questions that the Times really must answer internally right now, as their own reporter languishes in jail, now in her ninth day.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that policy for one minute?

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL: The policy is that if a -- journalists make arrangements, contracts, if you will, with sources about information, and they agree to protect their anonymity, but not to an ultimate degree. If a source is not acting in good faith, has provided you with false information, damaging information, damages the credibility of your news organization, then your obligation to that source is invalidated. That's an internal New York Times policy. It's the policy of many newspapers and news organizations.

But the Times is not upholding its own policy, as I understand it. Here's why. To begin with, what -- I mean, who did -- when you say that you're protecting your sources -- we know that Matt Cooper's source, for example, was Karl Rove, and what was Karl saying? He was saying that Joe Wilson was sent on this mission by his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, who was a covert C.I.A. operative. Now, you know, I'm getting in the weeds a little bit about this, but it's very interesting, I think, because it’s -- to begin with, this has no relevance to the law and how it plays out. It has no relevance to the case. It's used to distract and to discredit Wilson, even though it doesn't do so. It's what is called in propaganda “chaff.”

But the other problem is that it's factually untrue. Wilson has had -- when I mean Wilson, I mean Valerie Plame -- had no authority to send her husband out on the mission. She was, if you will, in this operation a Major, and not a General. She worked in the Directorate of Operations on the task force of counter-proliferation at C.I.A. out of Langley. She had worked abroad before. She has been sent on missions abroad. She was certainly a covert C.I.A. operative. She had been trained that way and operated as a N.O.C., a non-official cover. It’s the most dangerous and valuable kind of agent the C.I.A. has. It means you don't travel under a diplomatic passport. When I was in the White House, I traveled under a diplomatic passport. That meant if I got in trouble, I was saved. But, if you travel without it, and you are a spy, you can even be executed. So, for the C.I.A., this is a very valuable asset.

AMY GOODMAN: Sidney Blumenthal. You have made a lot of points, former advisor to President Clinton. I’d like to get Norman Solomon’s response, well-known media critic, author of War Made Easy.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Yeah, well, there's a lot of lives at stake. Perhaps some of those agents’ lives are at stake. Certainly, many thousands of people’s lives are at stake in Iraq, both Americans and Iraqis. I think there’s a real irony in the statement that Sid made a minute ago that newspapers need not protect bad sources, because if you look at the run-up to this war on Iraq, which, of course, continues, you see that exactly that took place, and most egregiously in the case of the New York Times. The New York Times protected very bad sources in the case of Ahmed Chalabi. We found out by accident because of a leaked email that, in fact, this ballyhooed source that was utilized to put lies on the front page before the war about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was Mr. Chalabi in many cases, somebody who was nurtured by the very officials who then pointed to the New York Times front page coverage on the Sunday chat shows and so forth to cite supposed evidence for their claim that war would be necessary.

This goes, I think, to a deeper question, which is, can we have a sense of proportion and perspective where we don't just have two choices? Either we say it's meaningless to protect a C.I.A. agent's identities or there is nothing more important. Certainly, it's a valid issue to protect some government workers in this situation, but do we put it at the very top notch in terms of not only media coverage but also political emphasis and say that that is equivalent to the slaughter of thousands of people in Iraq, which continues because of the U.S. presence?

And I think this raises also the question of the role of the Democratic Party here. Under Howard Dean, the Democratic Party in the United States now has a pro-war position. Let me repeat that. The Democratic Party has a pro-war position as the war in Iraq continues. And so, how well-positioned is the Democratic Party and its leadership, such as it is, to raise these issues about lies on behalf of war and also raise these issues about the meaningfulness of this war. When -- during the Vietnam War, and I know Sid Blumenthal, as well as myself, were active in writing about that war at the time, we had a situation where there were many people in the Congress who had a similar position to Howard Dean and most in the Democratic Party leadership today on this war. During the Vietnam War, they said, “Well, we can’t cut and run. We can't pull out.” That was a pro-war position. And so what kind of political discourse can we have about lies about a war that continues right now?

One other thing I'd like to mention. In 1968, as previously, and I was able to hear this in person at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1968, Senator Wayne Morris, the senior Senator from Oregon, a Democrat said, and I'm quoting here from transcript, “I do not intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.” Here we are in the midst of the Iraq war, and I am looking for one United States senator willing to say that he or she is unwilling to put the blood of this war on his or her hands. We don't have a single senator today willing to say that.