Washington ? As a reporter, Judith Miller is used to telling the story. But now she is the story.

The veteran New York Times journalist was the focus of attention Wednesday in a federal courtroom, where she had one last chance to avoid jail by agreeing to divulge the name of a source to federal prosecutors.

She refused to cooperate.

“I do not want to go to jail, but I feel I have no choice,” she told U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan.

“The public in the end will suffer” she said, unless sources know that they can talk confidentially.

Hogan then sent her to jail, saying, “There is still a realistic possibility that confinement might cause her to testify.”

Led away seconds after the hearing concluded, Miller’s story adds further intrigue to what already was one of the most closely watched press freedom cases in recent history.

Another reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after disclosing that his source had given him permission to do so hours earlier. Cooper’s about-face, coming after nearly two years of refusals to disclose the information, spared him the likelihood of jail.

“I do not view myself as above the law,” Miller told Hogan. “You are right to send me to prison.”

But she said she had an obligation to protect a confidential source: “I do not make confidentiality pledges lightly, but when I do I must honor them.”

Hogan was adamant that Miller comply with the court’s order to testify.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller looks out the window of a police car at the entrance of the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia.

Cooper said his source had given him a waiver just before the court session, enabling the journalist to cooperate with the probe into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Cooper said that he had been prepared to go to jail and that on Tuesday night, “I hugged my son goodbye and told him it might be a long time before I see him again.”

Hogan held the reporters in civil contempt of court in October, rejecting their argument that the First Amendment shielded them from revealing their sources. Last month the Supreme Court refused to intervene.

The use of anonymous sources has long been debated. News organizations say they seek to balance a need to promise confidentiality – to elicit key information – against a desire to be open about their sources to readers, viewers and listeners.

The Miller-Cooper case has been seen as a test of press freedom, and numerous media groups have lined up behind the reporters. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have shield laws protecting reporters from having to identify their confidential sources, though there is no federal protection. Congress is considering a bill, however, and Cooper and others involved in the case have urged passage.

Mark Naymik, Richard Peery and John Kuehner, from left, journalists with the Plain Dealer newspaper, rally in front of the Carl B. Stokes Federal Courthouse in Cleveland on Wednesday. Ohio journalists rallied in support of two reporters threatened with jail for refusing to reveal their sources to a prosecutor; Miller was sent to jail while another reporter agreed to cooperate and divulge his source.

Unless she decides to talk, Miller will be jailed until the grand jury ends its work in October. Hogan speculated Miller’s confinement might cause her source to give her a more specific waiver of confidentiality, as Cooper’s source had.

The judge did not say where she would be incarcerated, but she was seen entering the Alexandria Detention Center. The Virginia facility’s best-known resident is convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating the question of who leaked the identity of CIA officer Plame. Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer’s identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the person who released that information knew of the officer’s secret status.

Plame’s name was disclosed in a column by Robert Novak days after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, questioned part of President Bush’s justification for invading Iraq.

Wilson was sent to Africa by the Bush administration to investigate an intelligence claim that Saddam Hussein may have purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger in the late 1990s for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson said he could not verify the claim and accused the administration for manipulating the intelligence to “exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Novak, whose column cited as sources two unidentified senior Bush administration officials, has refused to say whether he has testified before the grand jury or has been subpoenaed. Cooper’s story mentioning Plame’s name appeared after Novak’s column. Miller did some reporting, but never wrote a story.