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| Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything Or Don't We? |
| 2005-07-29 |
| From The Huffington Post, by Adrianna Huffington Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity. But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out. This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)⊠but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did. This version of events has divided the Times into two camps: those who want to learn everything about this story, and those who want to learn everything as long as it doesn't downgrade the heroic status of their "colleague" Judy Miller. .... Of course, the division over Miller is nothing new⊠it predates her transformation into media martyr by many months. For an early look at this riff, check out Howard Kurtz' May 2003 reporting on the way Miller ferociously fought to keep Ahmad Chalabi, her top source on WMD, to herself and the anger it caused at the paper. And also the paper's extraordinary mea culpa from May 2004, in which its editors admitted that the Times' reporting on Iraq "was not as rigorous as it should have been" -- yet steadfastly refused to even mention the less-than-rigorous reporter whose byline appeared on 4 of the 6 stories the editors singled out as being particularly egregious. "It looks," the Times' public admission concluded, "as if we, along with the administration, were taken in." .... Amazingly, however, even as her reporting has been debunked -- and her sources discredited -- Miller has steadfastly refused to apologize for her role in misleading the public in the lead up to the war. Indeed, in an interview with the author of Bush's Brain, James Moore, she, in the words of Moore, "remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions", telling him: "I was proved fucking right." .... But one thing is inescapable: Miller -- intentionally or unintentionally -- worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine (for a prime example, check out this Newsweek story on how the aluminum tubes tall tale went from a government source to Miller to page one of the New York Times to Cheney and Rice going on the Sunday shows to confirm the story to Bush pushing that same story at the UN). .... Huffington continues on another page. The more I'm reading about Judy Miller and her actions leading up to and during the early days of the war, and then through the unfolding Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal, the more Iâm struck by the special access and relationships she enjoyed with many of the key players in the Iraq debacle (which, at the end of the day, is really what Plamegate is all about). For starters, of course, we have her still unfolding involvement in the Plame leak. Earlier this month, Howard Kurtz reported that Miller and Libby spoke a few days before Novak outed Plame -- and Iâm hearing that the Libby/Miller conversation occurred over breakfast in Washington. Did Valerie Plame come up -- and, if so, who brought her up? There is no question that Miller was angry at Joe Wilson⊠and continues to be. A social acquaintance of Miller told me that, once, when she spoke of Wilson, it was with âa passionate and heated disgust that went beyond the political and included an irrelevant bit of deeply personal innuendo about him, her mouth twisting in hatred.â .... Millerâs special relationships go much further than Scooter Libby, Richard Perle and the rest of the neocon establishment. Take her involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagonâs Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting down Saddamâs WMD. .... Was this the reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting? .... Millerâs assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a âJudith Miller team.â Another officer said that Miller âcame in with a plan. She was leading them⊠She ended up almost hijacking the mission.â A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: âItâs impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.â ..... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #7 Huffington ... isn't she that rich TWIT from SanFran? Got what? Maybe 1% of the vote running for Gov. Even Jessie pulls more weight than she does. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-07-29 11:34 |
| #6 Hi, Judy! We're thinking of you here at the Times. Thought I'd say hello from the limo. The Hamptons traffic is brutal as usual, even this early. Looks like fine weather for the weekend though. Martha's been giving me good tips on her dealings with the prison experience so I thought I'd share with you. She says to avoid the larger women, especially the ones sporting tatoos. Says they signify some tribal prison ranking. Curry favor with anyone refered to as a "Boss Dyke" I believe she called them. This person can supposedly be helpful in making the incarceration experience more palatable. She offered so many fascinating bon mots on the incarceration experience, but unfortunately my secretary was not available to chronicle them. Another time, perhaps? Well, ta-ta. Don't let the bed bugs bite. And if they do, Martha said that lighter fluid worked wonders in combating them. I'll say hello for you at the club. Kiss-kiss. |
| Posted by: Pinchy 2005-07-29 11:21 |
| #5 Yawn. As I said before, let her rot in jail until she's ready to talk to the Grand Jury. |
| Posted by: Neutron Tom 2005-07-29 11:01 |
| #4 All the Media outlets are claiming that Judith Miller is in jail for refusing to reveal her sourde. What she is really there for is for refusing to answer certain questions that the Special Prosecutor was asking. He already knows her source. Instapundit had a very good article a few days ago laying all this out. Finally, the Times notes the Judy Miller situation in passing, telling us this: With Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, in jail for refusing to divulge her source for the same information about Ms. Wilson, and the grand jury set to expire in October, the outcome of the investigation remains unclear. "Refusing to divulge her source"? It is possible that, in a very broad sense, this is true (and conspiracy buffs love it!). However, based on the record established in the court hearings, the Special Counsel has subpoenaed Ms. Miller to discuss her conversation with a specific, named individual who, we have been told, has waived confidentiality (but not to Ms. Miller's satisfaction). She is not "refusing to divulge her source" - Fitzgerald has identified this source. She is refusing to discuss her conversation with a particular person, known to the prosecutor, who may or may not have been her source for information about Ms. Wilson. That strikes me as a subtle but important distinction. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2005-07-29 09:21 |
| #3 How can their be hope for a caliphate when Mossad and the Neocons (read zionist cabal) are so clever?? First bin Laden is a stooge, meant to turn the world against Islam. Then the London bombings clearly had their fingerprints on it. We all might as well surrender to them now. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-07-29 08:53 |
| #2 This is classic. This whole thing makes my eyes glaze over, but I've followed it enough to wonder if, as Miller is about to be exposed (ie: Time Magazine) for being the orginal source - and the left, once again looking like fools led to the Kos Kool-aid, we have them now turning on Miller and implying she's a Rumsfeld stooge. Millerâs special relationships go much further than Scooter Libby, Richard Perle and the rest of the neocon establishment. Take her involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagonâs Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting down Saddamâs WMD. .... Was this the reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting? .... Millerâs assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it Is Karl Rove really this brilliant - willing even to offer himself up as bait to reel them in once again? Oh, gosh. It must suck not to be able to think for yourself and have to have the DNC tell you how to look like an idiot. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-07-29 08:27 |
| #1 Mike and Arianna -- a match made in heaven. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-29 07:16 |