Things are finally coming to the boil in the Valerie Plame saga in the US with the imprisonment of New York Times journalist Judith Miller for refusing to testify and reveal her sources to the special prosecutor investigating the outing of CIA agent Plame in 2003.

For those not familiar with the case, a little history:

In 2002, Ambassador Joseph Wilson was asked by the Bush administration to investigate “indisputable” claims that Iraq had bought uranium yellowcake from Niger during the 1990s in order to further Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. Wilson found that, for obvious reasons, Niger’s uranium mining is strictly monitored and there was no way any yellowcake could have been sold to Iraq. It was later discovered that the evidence of the sale was based on poorly forged documents.

The British Government made the claim again based of the forged documents and Bush repeated the assertion in his State of the Union address in 2003. A critical Wilson blew the whistle to the New York Times saying intelligence had been “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat”. Shortly afterwards, an anonymous source leaked the name of Wilson’s wife - Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent - to a right-wing journalist, Robert Novak who duly published her name.

Such a leak is a federal offence in the US, punishable by up to ten years in prison. Former president and CIA director George Bush Snr said in 1999: “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed to get to the bottom of the leak but proved, shall we say, unorthodox in his methods. Pressure was brought to bear on two journalists, the now-jailed Miller and Time Magazine’s Matt Cooper who had written about the case, to reveal their sources. No such threat was applied to Novak, the original publisher of Plame’s identity.

The jaw-dropper is that the original source of the leak is believed to be Karl Rove, George W Bush’s senior advisor and chief political strategist, spin doctor and fixer, who the president apparently - and affectionately - calls “Turd Blossom”, For those on the liberal left his name is merely mud.

(A fragrant character, Rove recently said, “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Conservatives “saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.”)

Which is where the story gets big. A parallel for UK readers: Imagine, a couple of years ago, Alastair Campbell leaking to a sympathetic columnist, say The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh, secret information that discredited whistleblower Katharine Gun. Two other journalists repeat the information, John Pilger in the New Statesman and Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian. In the ensuing investigation Kavanagh is left alone but Pilger and Norton-Taylor are threatened with jail for refusing to reveal their sources, Norton-Taylor ultimately seeing the inside of a jail cell.

But this is the quandary. Protecting their sources is probably the one code of honour that journalists are expected to uphold. “If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press,” said Judith Miller. Reveal your sources left, right and centre and your career is going to dry up pretty quickly. Important whistleblowers will think twice before coming forward. Andrew Gilligan’s giving up of David Kelly as his source to an MP arguably contributed to the scientist’s suicide.

Matt Cooper says his own source has given him permission to testify and is off the hook. Miller, being afforded no such luxury, opted for jail. How long she remains there depends on whether she cracks or the prosecutor obtains elsewhere the information he’s seeking. Prosecutor Fitzgerald said, “journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality - no-one in America is.” The constitutional implications with regard to the First and Fifth amendments - at the very least - will probbaly fill scores of books.

Seeing a scumbag like a Campbell or, in the real world, Karl Rove brought low is an seductive idea. It all depends on where you stand on what passes for journalistic ethics. For some, journalists can’t sink much lower so a little more probably wouldn’t hurt. But for those of us dependent on - admittedly woeful - press to satisfy our appetites information on what goes on inside government, it’s an interesting moral dilemma to say the least.

(Also published at The Sharpener.)