Probe into leak of CIA agent's identity takes a strange turn

It's been 15 months since a Washington columnist exposed the identity of a CIA agent whose husband had angered the Bush administration and nine months since Patrick Fitzgerald was named a special prosecutor to investigate the leak. And finally there is a break in the case!
At Fitzgerald's request, a judge has issued a contempt citation against ... a New York reporter who declined to run the story.
Now we understand why a Scripps Howard News Service editorialist recently wrote that, "leak investigations are almost always a bad idea."
Setting the stage
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote July 14, 2003, that two "senior administration officials" had told him that Valerie Plame was a CIA officer. This was deemed to be news because Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, had accused the administration of exaggerating Iraq's nuclear capabilities to build a case for war.
After Novak's column ran, Wilson said be believe his wife's identity was disclosed to discredit his report and to intimidate him and other critics of the administration.
Disclosing the identity of a CIA agent is risky business, not only for the agent. The revelation could endanger contacts the agent worked with over the years on foreign assignments.
Initially, President Bush said the White House would cooperate fully in an investigation and he instructed Attorney General John Ashcroft to conduct one. Not long after, the president allowed as how it might be impossible to ever get to the bottom of the case, and several months later, Ashcroft announced that he was turning the investigation over to Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in Chicago, was described as a prosecutor with the tenacity of Elliot Ness, the Prohibition era organized-crime buster. Since January, he has required government officials to sign waivers releasing from a pledge of confidentiality any reporters they may have talked to. He subpoenaed at least five reporters to testify, including three who never wrote about the leak. And he is seeking the phone records of two reporters in an unrelated inquiry he somehow picked up along the way.
This inquiry would have seemed to be close to an open and shut case, given that the president of the United States had said going in that he expected everyone in his administration, which would seem to include any "senior administration officials" to cooperate fully. Instead, it has taken on broad and unfortunate First Amendment implications.
Who got nabbed?
Now, New York Times reporter Judith Miller faces up to 18 months in jail for refusing to cooperate with prosecutors investigating the leak. Miller, who gathered material for a story but never wrote one, was held in contempt Thursday by a federal judge in Washington.
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, who allowed Miller to remain free while pursuing an appeal, called the case "a classic confrontation of conflicting interests." He said reporters do not have absolute First Amendment protection from testifying before grand juries about confidential sources and that there was ample evidence that Fitzgerald had exhausted other means of obtaining the information he wants from Miller.
While Miller is the most immediate victim, the public is the real loser, because inevitably such draconian measures as those pursued by Fitzgerald result in sources becoming timid and reporters becoming more cautious.
It isn't possible, is it, that this administration -- the most secretive in modern history -- was hoping for exactly that?