Miller and the Times blow it!!

The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=29143

Posted 10/16/2005 @ 12:16am
CIA Leak Scandal: Judy Miller and the Times Speak


Finally, the New York Times and Judith Miller speak, and the paper and reporter leave their readers with as many questions as answers. In Sunday's edition, the Times publishes a lengthy account by three reporters (Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak and Clifford Levy) of what it calls "the Miller case" and a first-person account by Miller. Neither piece explains all.

Miller spent eighty-five days in a federal prison after she refused to cooperate with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Bush Administration leak that outed undercover CIA officer Valerie Wilson, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush White House. She was released from jail after she received a personal waiver from a confidential source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, that granted her permission to discuss their conversations with Fitzgerald. With that waiver in hand, she cut a deal with Fitzgerald that limited his questioning only to her discussions with Libby (not other sources) and that compelled Miller to turn over her notes of these conversations with Libby.

The denouement of Miller's legal tussle with Fitzgerald was rather puzzling. Libby's lawyer indicated that Miller could have had the personal waiver a year earlier. And after Miller and the Times had spent months crowing that Miller--unlike other reporters--would stand on principle and not submit to Fitzgerald's zealous pursuits, her final settlement with Fitzgerald (which resembled that of the other reporters) was not in sync with the grand we're-protecting-journalism rhetoric the Times and Miller had hurled. Moreover, there were new and old questions about Miller's involvement in the case. Why had Fitzgerald subpoenaed her? How did it come to happen that she only recently discovered a notebook containing notes of Miller's first conversation with Libby about Joseph (and possibly Valerie) Wilson? What had Libby told her? What sort of relationship did she have with Libby? Was Miller eager to discredit Wilson because her prewar reporting on Iraq's WMDs had overstated and hyped the claim that Saddam Hussein presented a WMD threat?

<<snip>>

Miller's account of the June 23, 2003, discussion with Libby indicates that the White House was already looking to discredit Wilson's account prior to Wilson going public with his story--and that this was part of a White House effort to protect itself from intelligence leaks suggesting that the Bush Administration had played up the prewar intelligence on WMDs in Iraq. This was, of course, occurring at a time when the absence of WMDs in Iraq was becoming a problem for the White House. It is not surprising that Libby tried to peddle to Miller the argument that the White House had not relied on skimpy intelligence to go to war. And in this conversation, according to Miller, Libby told her that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/national/16leak.html?ex=1130126400&en=2acdf549539799ce&ei=5009&partner=MSN_NYTHOME ---------------------------------------------------------------------http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/national/16miller.html