Journalist Doug Ireland writes today on his blog Direland [3], "I was more than happy to lend my name in support of Sarah Olson's courageous and principled refusal to join in the prosecution effort to send Lt. Watada to jail, so I asked a number of my journalist and writer friends to join me in signing a statement against the military's attempt to subpoena Olson and other journalists, and most of them -- like sportswriter and HBO boxing commentator Larry Merchant, Pulitizer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, best-selling author John Berendt, and Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg (hero of the movie "The Killing Fields," based on his book about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges)-- said yes. Schanberg wrote me: 'Yes, Doug, please add my name to the appeal. Sarah Olson's principled stand is a crucial one at a time when the mainstream press is bargaining away, in bigger and bigger chunks, the privacy of reporters' notebooks, confidential conversations, e-mails, etc.ad infinitum. Her professional product has been published and is available to the government. As she says, reporters betray their role as fact-seekers for the public if they are forced -- through threat of imprisonment -- to become agents of a particular government's agenda."