(CBS) Letter from London is Larry Miller's weekly look at news from across the pond.

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Had Deep Throat's cover been blown, how much time should he been given behind bars? Would we rather not have known what the Watergate plumbers were up to? Was it our business anyway, or something that should rightfully have remained behind the closed doors of Nixon's Oval Office?

These questions about whistleblowers are not rhetorical, at least not to British Civil Servant David Keogh and parliamentary researcher Leo O'Connor. They received six and three months respectively for leaking a memo of a White House meeting between President Bush and Prime Minster Tony Blair, during which Mr. Bush reportedly suggested that bombing the Arab TV station Al Jazeera might be a good way of controlling its coverage of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Were it an American station, free speech would have come into the equation, but that's another issue.

The memo in question was a four-page record of a meeting on April 16, 2004. A month later Keogh leaked the document to O'Connor, hoping it would be brought before Parliament. However the Labor lawmaker he gave it to blew the whistle on the whistleblowers.

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Between then and now there is a big black hole, except for a report in London's Daily Mirror newspaper, which can no longer be reprinted or broadcast at home. The newspaper reported it was no joke, and that a deadly serious Mr. Bush was talked out of it by Blair, who said bombing al Jazeera would provoke a worldwide backlash and lead to a massacre in Qatar where the station is based, which just happens to be a key ally.

Very little is known about what led to the conviction of the whistleblowers, who were charged with breaching Britain's Official Secrets Act. The case was held in secret and the judge has banned repeating even the answers the men gave in their defense.

The British media have been threatened with contempt of court if they whisper a word of it. We do know a little about what the judge said though, that Keogh, a 25-year civil servant had committed a gross breach of trust. We only have the judge's word that the leak put "lives in danger." Was that real lives or political lives? The secrecy imposed, greater than that even in terrorist trials, begs that question.

We also know that Keogh is not a big fan of the President's and feels the war in Iraq was wrong and that it was the people's right to know what the two leaders may have been conspiring.

Had Mr. Bush been serious about knocking al Jazeera off the air, that would have been a violation of international law. If Keogh knew but said nothing, would he not be an unwitting accomplice? If he had not leaked the memo how can we be sure we wouldn't in the midst of an anti-Western conflagration far worse than anything being experienced in Iraq.

The two men were sentenced on the day Tony Blair said he is resigning, relegating this story to the depths of newspapers not allowed to report it properly.

While the jail sentences are relatively short, the two men have no careers to come back to. But at least they will be alive, unlike scientist, weapons inspector and civil servant David Kelly, who killed himself after telling a reporter the Blair government had "sexed up" the dossier that led to the war in Iraq.

Incidentally, the government has just been told that under the Freedom of Information Act, it needs to disclose an early draft of this dossier to show if the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes was inserted at the last minute to "sex it up." The government can, of course, choose not to disclose it.

By Larry Miller
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