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The true facts in the CIA-leak case are now becoming astonishingly clear. New York Times reporter Judith Miller's testimony, as she describes it in the Sunday edition of her paper, proves that the wrong people are under investigation. It's not really a story about Bush officials Lewis Libby and Karl Rove and their conversations with the press. Rather, it's a story about a CIA bureaucracy working to undermine the Bush administration through the media and cover up for its own mistakes.

It's now obvious that Bush officials are spending time before a grand jury and big money on lawyers for the alleged "crime" of trying to use the press to get out their side of the story. They trusted the press and got burned. Now, if the media have their way, these officials may be further punished by being indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. This would be a gross miscarriage of justice.

The case has been a revealing and disappointing look into how Bush administration officials tried to work with various reporters, in order to counteract false accusations about the administration's Iraq policy that had appeared in the press. In the end, they failed. It's a failure that demonstrates the folly of trying to curry favor with the liberal press.

Journalists, by contrast, may come out of this drama with special rights. Senator Arlen Specter's Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday on a proposed federal media "shield law" to protect some journalists from disclosing sources to a grand jury. Miller will be the star witness. Accuracy in Media has been denied the opportunity to testify in person against the bill because of opposition from Democratic congressional staffers.

In the same way that Democrats still call the shots on Capitol Hill, despite a Republican Senate majority, the Times and other liberal media forced the Bush administration to agree to their demands for an investigation in the CIA leak case. Fitzgerald was appointed by the Bush Justice Department and administration officials have been cooperating from the start. By contrast, the Times and Miller, who just recently left jail to testify before the grand jury in the case, had been obstructing the investigation. All Miller had to do to avoid jail was to tell the truth. She now has done so, and her account of what she told the grand jury under oath turns the media version of this bizarre case completely upside down.

Most of the coverage had created the impression that the administration was out to damage or destroy an administration opponent, Joseph Wilson, by illegally identifying the identity of his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame. Her name originally appeared in a Robert Novak column citing administration officials.

But Miller's account indicates that she was in contact with Libby after Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist at the paper, published a claim that Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate an Iraq-uranium link "at the behest" of Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Libby knew that was false and wanted to get the truth out. But there was much more to it than that. Libby was upset about the CIA's role in sending Wilson on the trip.

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