Judi is out of the Joint!

NY Times reporter Judith Miller got sprung from the slammer yesterday, CNN reports

She was held for 12 weeks on a contempt citation for withholding the identity of government officials she may have spoken with about the role Valerie Plame played in getting hubby Joe Wilson sent to Africa to look for Iraq nuke connections.

Miller agreed to speak to a grand jury afrer being released from a vow confidentiality by VP Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Previously, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper avoided jail after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove released him from a similar confidentiality agreement.

The flap arose after columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson had been picked for the Africa mission by Plame, a CIA analyst -- not the vice president and the CIA director, as Wilson had implied. Plame was apparently operating undercover, and revealing intentionally revealing her identity could be a crime.

It gets confusing, because Plame apparently had multiple identities and it's not clear who knew which one she was using when or that she was undercover.

I'm going to point out the obvious now -- although, apparently it's not obvious to everyone because I have seen no major news organization report it.

If Libby or Rove had actually revealed Plame's undercover status to Cooper and Miller:

1) The reporters would have written stories saying so, which they did not;

2) Libby and Rove would not have released the reporters from their confidentiality agreements.