The latest on the Plame investigation:

In a court filing yesterday, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald said that Cooper still must agree to cooperate with prosecutors to avoid jail, even though Time last week turned over notes and e-mails that identify his sources for an article on the disclosure of an undercover CIA operative’s identity.

In unusually blunt language, Fitzgerald told Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan that Cooper and Miller pretend that journalists have a broader right to protect confidential sources than lawyers, presidents and law enforcement officers.

“Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality — no one in America is,” he wrote.

Yep.

Fitzgerald may learn more details from Cooper’s notes. Sources close to the investigation say there is evidence in some instances that some reporters may have told government officials — not the other way around — that Wilson was married to Plame, a CIA employee.

Gee. I wonder who was so invested in this war, they’d do that. Speaking of:

… Fitzgerald has repeatedly said he already knows the identity of Miller’s source and that person has relieved Miller of her duty to protect the source’s anonymity. Yesterday, he suggested Miller will likely spend time in jail thinking about “whether the interests of journalism at large, and even more broadly, the proper conduct of government, are truly served” by her continued refusal to discuss her sources.

“Miller’s views may change over time,” he said, if her “irresponsible martyrdom” is later viewed by her industry colleagues as hurting, rather than helping, reporters’ efforts to protect their sources, he wrote.

If you’re confused, Needlenose puts it all into perspective for you:

Could Judy Miller have been enough of a “true believer” in the cause of the administration’s WMD scare campaign that she passed along Plame’s name to one of her Bushite contacts, where it then was funneled along to Rove and others? Anyone who has read Miller’s angry defense of her WMD propaganda journalism (”I was proved fucking right”) might be inclined to say yes.

And that would explain why she absolutely refuses to confess tell the Plame grand jury about her conversations on or about July 6, wouldn’t it? Not to mention, perhaps, why the Washington Monthly’s plea not to imprison Matthew Cooper so noticeably excluded Miller. But at least the rest of us could take some measure of comfort in knowing that, in a sense, the party guilty of originating the Plame leak really might go to jail.