WASHINGTON, Aug 18 (AFP) - Five US journalists were found in civil contempt of court Wednesday, after a federal judge ruled they had failed to comply with a court order to identify government sources used in their reporting on the case of Taiwanese-born nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson also imposed on each of the five a 500-dollar-a-day fine, but stayed its collection until an appeal can be heard.
Under the order, James Risen and Jeff Gerth of The New York Times, Robert Drogin of The Los Angeles Times, Josef Hebert of the Associated Press and Pierre Thomas of ABC News are to continue paying the fines until they comply with the disclosure order.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Lee moved to the United States in 1965 to study engineering, became a US citizen and was hired in 1978 as weapons designer by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
But in March 1999, he was fired from his job amid charges he had spied for China and might have helped Beijing obtain highly classified technical data about the W-88 nuclear warhead seen as one of the most sophisticated in the US nuclear arsenal.
Lee, who vehemently denied the charges, ended up spending nine months in jail. But the case started falling apart when several officials said the government was trying to single him out on the basis of his Chinese ethnicity.
The case ended in a plea bargain, under which Lee pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling sensitive materials and was released.
He is now suing the Departments of Energy and Justice, accusing them of leaking false information about his to the press and damaging his reputation.
Last October, the five reporters were ordered by a federal court here to "truthfully answer questions as to the identity of any officer or agent of defendants, or any of them, who provided information to them directly about Wen Ho Lee."
All of them have refused.
Wednesday's finding follows a federal court decision last week that found in contempt a Time magazine reporter in connection with the public outing of CIA employee Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked to the media in July 2003.
Plame is married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who investigated and dismissed allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from the African nation of Niger, a claim used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq.
Disclosing the name of an undercover Central Intelligence Agency officer is a crime in the United States, and a special prosecutor is investigating the case.