New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified on Friday before a grand jury investigating the CIA leak case, one day after she was released from a detention center on the outskirts of the nation's capital.

Miller spent over three hours inside a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., with the grand jury, which was investigating who leaked the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame more than two years ago.

Miller, who had been jailed since July 6 for refusing to testify in the CIA leak case, was released after her lawyers reached an agreement with a federal prosecutor in which she agreed to testify, following a waiver offered "voluntarily and personally " by her source who said she was no longer bound by any pledge of confidentiality made to him.

The source was I. Lewis Libby, US Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, whom Miller met with on July 8, 2003, and talked with on the phone later that week, according a report in Friday's edition of The New York Times.

Discussions between officials and journalists that week that may have disclosed the identity of Plame, who was married to Joseph C. Wilson, a former ambassador, have been a central focus of the investigation.

The probe, led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the case, has centered on whether anyone in the Bush administration illegally disclosed Plame's identity to the news media.

The first published reference to Plame was in July 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert. D. Novak, days after Wilson wrote an article in The Times criticizing the Bush administration for twisting intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The timing of Wilson's article embarrassed the White House, which had failed to find the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that President George W. Bush had used as the main justification for going to war.

New details about the case made public in recent months showed Karl Rove, Bush's senior political strategist, and Libby both discussed Plame with reporters, according The Times report.

Source: Xinhua