The New York Times and Judy Miller (aka, General Judy, Judy Kneepads) have gone on record with their versions of her story, in what promises to be two of the most thoroughly analyzed articles the paper has ever published:
The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal by Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak and Clifford Levy New York Times 10/16/05 (published on Web 10/15/05)
A Personal Account: My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room by General Judy, self-styled First Amendment martyr, New York Times 10/16/05 (published on Web 10/15/05)
Gene Lyons shared his thoughts about Judy and the Times last Wednesday: Autumn Leaves Daily Dunklin Democrat 10/12/05. He clearly doesn't buy the storyline about her heroice defense of the freedom of the press:
Then there's Judith Miller, the flamboyant New York Times reporter and neo-conservative pin-up girl whose discredited "exclusives" on Iraq's imaginary nuclear weapons helped drive the nation to war. Miller said waivers provided by her sources--she never wrote a story about Plame--were the result of prosecutorial strong-arming, hence worthless to so fierce an advocate of First Amendment press freedom as herself.
Accompanied by a series of passionate New York Times editorials comparing her to everybody from Martin Luther King Jr. to Gandhi, Miller went to jail, vowing to stay as long as necessary to preserve our liberty. She became the neo-con Susan McDougal, the Whitewater holdout who said Kenneth Starr wanted her to lie about the Clintons.
Until last week, that is, when Miller's source "Scooter" Libby supposedly persuaded her it was OK to sing. Except Libby's lawyer insists he gave her attorneys exactly the same information a year ago. Lawyerly scuffling broke out, but it seemed clear that Miller had simply reconfigured her lofty principles - possibly to avoid criminal contempt charges.
He explains that Scooter Libby's now-famous two-page letter to Judy Gandhi while she was in jail could have easily been construed as an attempt to direct the saintly lady's testimony. In fact, in her Times article, the noble martyr recounts how prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked her about that during her grand jury testimony. She writes:
Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me," Mr. Libby wrote.
The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.
Gene Lyons mused:
Here's all I know: If Hillary Clinton had written Susan McDougal a letter like that, the Washington press would have exploded with indignation. The TV talking heads would be predicting indictments, and the phrase of the week would be "criminal conspiracy."
But "9/11 changed everything," I guess.
Salon has run a couple of article the last few days describing the context of Martyr Judy's situation: Hard Times by Farhad Manjoo 10/14/05 and Judy Miller and the neocons by Juan Cole 10/14/05. Manjoo writes:
What's Judy Miller's relationship with powerbrokers in Washington?
This is the most volatile question the Times will need to address -- and, for many readers, the most important. Critics of Miller's flawed reporting on weapons of mass destruction have long suggested she has a propensity to cozy up to Bush insiders. The story of her dealings with key players in the Plame investigation threatens to underscore that relationship -- witness exhibit A, for instance, the bizarrely familiar letter Libby sent to Miller to release her from her confidentiality promise. In the letter, Libby effusively praised Miller's work and suggested that she report next on the question of Iranian nuclear capacity. He also added an inscrutable -- and, some bloggers say, perhaps coded -- reference to Aspens turning out West because "their roots connect them." You don't have to be a critic of the Times to wonder: How are Miller's roots connected to Libby's?
"I want to know how Miller fits into this whole world of operatives and information hounds that stretched out from the Bush White House outward," Rosen says. "Where does she interact with these people, this network of Republican activists, Republican campaigners, opposition research people."
The articles published on the Web Saturday hardly address that central issue.
Juan Cole suggests the importance of that question:
In any case, Miller began to uncritically parrot even some of the neocons' loonier claims. On CNN's "American Morning With Paula Zahn" for May 14, 2002, Miller explained the controversy that had broken out about allegations that Cuba had a biological weapons program. She told Zahn, "And there are a lot of very unsavory contacts, as the administration regards them, between Cuba and especially Iranians who are involved in biological weapons." Such frankly weird assertions raise questions about where in the world Miller got her so-called information. No serious intelligence professional believes that either Iran or Cuba has a significant biological weapons program, much less that a communist Latin American dictatorship was being helped by a Shiite Muslim fundamentalist state with deadly microbes.
Miller's statement only makes sense in light of the speech given by John Bolton, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, in May of 2002, in which he alleged that Cuba had a biological weapons program. Thomas Fingar, head of the State Department's Intelligence bureau, along with a retired national security officer, demurred from the charges in Bolton's speech. When Christian Westermann at the State Department intelligence bureau raised questions about the intelligence on which Bolton was basing his campaign, Bolton called him into his office, chewed him out, and then allegedly tried to have him fired, according to the April 18, 2005, edition of the Washington Post. Miller was channeling Bolton in her comments to Paula Zahn, and very likely was simply repeating whatever Bolton himself had told her. Washington political analyst Steven. C. Clemons asserted that Bolton was a regular source for Miller in her reporting on national security and weapons of mass destruction issues. Bolton has a special interest in getting up a U.S. war against Iran, accounting for the bogus charge that it was active in Havana.
While Miller was in jail, John Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, came to visit her.
I was intrigued to see in the Times article that one of Miller's visitors in jail was former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, certainly no fan of the neocons or the Iraq War.
Judith Miller's role in the runup to the Iraq War and in the Plame case, even though we still don't know the whole story on either, is one of the more rotten subplots in the awful story of the war.
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