Shame on the New York Times

As I've said on a few other threads, the Times' decision to protect Miller at the expense of its reputation has been terribly disheartening. They've even dummied up the Public Editor:




Will Judith Miller Probe Go 'Public'?
By Joe Strupp

Published: October 12, 2005 3:20 PM ET

NEW YORK: New York Times public editor Byron Calame comes under scrutiny for declining to comment on the newspaper's current coverage of the Judith Miller saga, former public editor Daniel Okrent tells E&P this is the kind of issue he would love to tackle were he still on the job.

Calame, meanwhile, told E&P today, "When I have something to say, I will say it first to the readers. I am watching the developments and doing it with special interest." When asked what would prompt him to weigh in on the paper's coverage (which has been criticized for being so muted), he added "if I decide that's important, I will tell the readers."

He would not say why he had not written about Miller's jailing, release, or testimony yet, and rejected the notion, floated by some, that the Times should have assigned the task of writing a full account of the Miller affair to someone outside the newsroom -- namely, Calame.

While Okrent declined to comment on how the Times had been covering the Miller story, or on Calame's decision so far not to write about it, he indicated he would have savored such an issue to review.

"If I were there, this is exactly the kind of issue I would want to get my teeth into. It is interesting stuff and it is important," Okrent said during a phone interview from Cape Cod, where he is working on a book about Prohibition.

Okrent, the paper's first public editor who left the post after 18 months in May, also revealed that a compilation of his Times columns was in the works. He said a contract with Public Affairs Books had been signed last month, with publication likely in May 2006.

He noted that he had written at least three public editor columns related to Judith Miller. The first, in May 2004, discussed a controversial editors' note the Times ran the same week admitting mistakes in its past WMD coverage. In that column, Okrent noted "the flimsiness" of a Miller story in 2003 related to WMDs.

The other columns were a Feb. 6, 2005 piece in which Okrent criticized Miller for breaking news about her case on MSNBC rather than in the Times, while a brief portion of his last column in May 2005 said the prospect of Miller being jailed for protecting a source was "nausea-inducing."

Miller's showdown with the special prosecutor "is important, the world is talking about it and the paper should pay attention," Okrent said about the ongoing saga. "But I don't want to comment on how they are doing it. I have chosen not to comment on what the Times does these days."

Calame, who took over the public editor column in June and has a two-year contract to write it, declined to comment on Okrent's views. He hinted, however, that he may eventually have to write something about the Miller coverage, given the interest from readers and the fact that the newspaper is busily preparing its promised report on Miller's involvement.

The current public editor said he did not want to be part of the expected news report. "I don't think the public editor should be involved," he said. "It is pretty clear they are doing something and pressing ahead with it as fast as they can. You will get my opinion when I see what they do."

Calame also declined to comment on why the paper had printed so few letters to the editor on Miller, or why no columnists (besides Frank Rich) have written about her lately. "I can't speak for the editorial page at all," he said. "I am not part of [that] department."
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

The Judith Miller Story: Not Ready Yet
N.Y. Times Staffers Voice Dismay at Newspaper's Coverage

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 13, 2005; C01


The anguish among New York Times staffers over the paper's handling of the Judith Miller saga has mounted in recent days, much to the consternation of its top executives.

"Of course I'm concerned by the very palpable frustration in the newsroom," Executive Editor Bill Keller said yesterday. "I share it. It's excruciating to have a story and not be able to tell it, and annoying to be nibbled at by the blogs and to watch preposterous speculation congeal into conventional wisdom."

As Miller, who served 85 days in jail in the CIA leak case, finished her grand jury testimony yesterday, she returns to a newspaper that has been torn by anger and confusion, not just over her conduct and dealings with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, but over the way the paper has handled a story in which it has played a central role.

"A lot of the reporters have really been wondering and doubting their editors," said Adam Clymer, a former Times political editor and chief Washington correspondent. "It wasn't that they knew the defense of Judy was wrong, but they didn't have a sense of what was being defended. . . . People all over the paper think the Times should have been covering the story harder."

George Freeman, the Times Co.'s assistant general counsel, met with the Washington bureau last week to address staff complaints. "There was so much rumor and untruth and speculation going around," Freeman said. "I wouldn't characterize it as people being unhappy. People had a lot of questions and concerns. I hope to some degree I assuaged the concerns."

The Times has a team of journalists working on a major piece on the subject, under the supervision of Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman, but has maintained it was impossible to publish such an article until Miller no longer faced legal liability from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and could cooperate with the paper's reporters. That stance -- challenged by critics who note there is no legal bar to a witness discussing her own grand jury testimony -- has left a vacuum.

"Within the Times, there's a great deal of concern about how this is going to reflect on the Times as an institution and therefore on them," said Alex Jones, a former Times reporter and now a Harvard media analyst. "Everybody wants a clean breast." He said of the editors: "Why they decided they could not speak, I really do not understand."

But Keller said yesterday that the paper was hamstrung by Miller declining, on the advice of her lawyers, to discuss what she told the grand jury. "It's very hard to disentangle the story of Judy's ordeal from the story of her testimony. It's hard to appraise, or even relate, the paper's handling of this case without some sense of what happened during those encounters with her source. I know it's hard because we've tried.

"And despite the understandable yearning for a simple parable, this is a complicated narrative involving a large cast of editors, lawyers and other officials of the paper, and involving imperfect human memories and differing points of view. We'll do our best to tell that story. And I hope we will do it justice."

Miller never wrote an article about the 2003 efforts of White House officials to disclose that Valerie Plame, wife of administration critic Joe Wilson, was a CIA operative. NBC's Tim Russert, Washington Post reporters Glenn Kessler and Walter Pincus, and Time's Matthew Cooper all testified in the case under waivers of confidentiality from their sources.

But Miller refused to accept a waiver from her source, Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, because she did not consider it voluntary. Miller left an Alexandria jail two weeks ago, agreeing to testify after Libby wrote her a letter and assured her by telephone that he was voluntarily releasing her from her pledge of confidentiality. That, in turn, made many journalists, inside and outside the Times, wonder why she had gone to jail in the first place.

"It isn't clear to me, and it isn't clear to people at the paper, exactly why the waiver wasn't acceptable in its earlier form when other people found ways to find it acceptable," Clymer said.

Interviews with nearly a dozen Times staffers, all of whom refused to be identified because they did not want to openly challenge their bosses, provided a mixed picture. Some said the newsroom is more demoralized now than during the 2003 debacle over Jayson Blair's serial fabrications, because top editors were deceived by Blair but in this case have embraced Miller's handling of the controversy and level of disclosure. The Blair revelations sparked a staff revolt against the autocratic management style of executive editor Howell Raines, who was ousted and replaced by Keller, a former managing editor.

While some staffers say Keller and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. have allowed their passionate defense of Miller to cloud their journalistic judgment in pursuing the story, others, who respect Keller's more collegial management style, give them the benefit of the doubt for delaying a definitive account.

Miller has long been a lightning rod for her coverage -- some of which turned out to be wrong -- of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before and soon after the U.S. invasion. But Clymer said some of the animosity stems from her tenure as a deputy Washington bureau chief in the late 1980s, when he said Miller tried to force several reporters to leave the bureau.

"Judy is a very aggressive, hard-driving reporter," Clymer said. "She often demands that people do things, and bruises feelings. People in the Washington bureau tried unsuccessfully to persuade editors that her reporting about weapons of mass destruction was wrong."

Some media analysts intensified their criticism when the Times got scooped online, first on the story of Miller's release from jail and again on her discovery of additional, earlier notes of a conversation with Libby, which triggered yesterday's second appearance before the grand jury.

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, said on his PressThink blog that the Times "has lost the capacity to tell the truth about itself in this story. . . . What we don't know is why the Times has gone into editorial default."

American Journalism Review Editor Rem Rieder wrote on his magazine's Web site that the longer the Times waits, "it begins to look like there's something to hide. And credibility accrues to those nasty theories that Miller really went to jail to salvage her reputation in the wake of the botched WMD coverage."

Times columnist Frank Rich said in a CNN interview that he has been "frustrated" by the situation: "I think the Times, now that she has testified, has to be transparent about what happened, why her situation was different from Matt Cooper's, and indeed ultimately about her grand jury testimony, which, as I understand it legally, she's free to disclose, or will be presumably after Mr. Fitzgerald is finished with her."
©*2005*The Washington Post Company

[rollhead]

I've been either a reporter, copy editor or editorial writer at six newspapers, and each of them had, even if unwritten, rules against diddling sources.

Apparently, The Times has no such rule, at least when it comes to Judith Miller.

Here is an excerpt from a New York magazine story about her:

Where Miller exhibited so much hostility to other reporters, she would be fawning and generous to her sources. “Judy treats her sources well, with a sense of loyalty. She’s an attentive and courteous person to them,” one Times reporter says. Her strength was that she viewed the relationships as more than transactional. Her sources were her friends.

According to some of her critics, they have occasionally been more than friends. In the early eighties, she shared a Georgetown house with her boyfriend, Wisconsin congressman Les Aspin—a rising star in the Democratic Party, who went on to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of Defense. Aspin, many noted, had appeared a dozen times in Miller’s pieces, offering sage words about national security. Certain catty colleagues liked to read these stories aloud. Each time the phrase “Aspin said” appeared, a reporter would add, “rolling over in bed.” When Reagan nominated Richard Burt to be assistant secretary of State for European affairs, Jesse Helms and other right-wingers bludgeoned him for their relationship. “It would help [your chances for confirmation],” Orrin Hatch delicately wrote to Burt, “if you could lay to rest the rumors about Judith Miller’s articles on arms control appearing so soon after your own meetings with her. . . .”

The gossip about Miller’s romantic life was circulated most widely by a columnist writing in Spy magazine under the pseudonym J. J. Hunsecker. He chronicled her exploits, referring to her as “frisky deputy bureau chief Judith ‘Is that a banana in your pocket . . .?’ Miller.” As a commentator on the mores of the Times, Hunsecker lacked a certain subtlety. “Miller has been enriching the lives of high-level sources around Washington with her own very special brand of journalistic involvement,” the columnist sneered in 1988. But gradually, the allegations moved from innuendo to out-and-out rumormongering. The column reported, outlandishly, that President George H. W. Bush called his resident political genius, Lee Atwater, into his office “and informed him that it might be better if he ended his very special relationship with Miller.” Hunsecker was hardly credible. He could produce some howlers, and nothing he wrote could necessarily be believed. But the point wasn’t his information, but the way he obtained it. Colleagues within the Times had come to despise Miller so greatly that they apparently picked up the phone, called Spy, and dished their hearts out.

Jeeze, did she fuck Ahmed Chalabi and Scooter Libby?
Captain Hate somewhere suggested she's got comprimising photos of Pinch, which I would not doubt at this point.

[clinthopson]

The NY Times, ain't what it used to be but compared to the eviscerating of the LA Times by the Tribune Company, it's still pretty good.

[rollhead]

I think the eviceration started before the Tribune Co. aquired the LATimes. Mark Willes -- the former cereal company executive -- was named publisher in 1997 before Times Mirror merged/sold to the Tribune. Reporters called Willes "Captain Crunch" because he fired so many people, closed so many bureaus, killed so many initiatives, and compared selling newspapers to selling breakfast cereal.

While the stock (of course) went up, Willes totally missed the Internet boat, so he was booted by the Board. Of course his firing was totally unrelated to the LATimes' news coverage.

When i got my first newspaper job in the 1970s, I think most papers -- especially small ones -- were still family owned. The first paper I worked for the Pine Bluff Commercial in Pine Bluff, AR, was family owned, had an excellent reputation and a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer. The new owners -- a chain, of course -- treat the paper like a glorified cash cow with no regard for the quality of the paper. It only wants it to sell ads.

At one time, there were a lot of little papers around the country like that -- the Delta Demcrat Times in Greenville, MS, was owned by the Hodding Carter family and had an excellent reputation for excellence. I am assuming it has been sold by now to a blood-sucking chain.

Actually, the LA Times got back on track when Carroll was put in charge, and for a few years he helped restore and revitalize them back into the major leagues again. They won a lot of Pulitzers for great stories, but then the Tribune cut his legs out and eventually, after a series of scale-backs, he left this year.

Now it's in a shaky position and will no doubt decline and decline and become more focused on info-tainment. I'm an occasional contributor (5-6 times a year) to the daily Book Review, and I hope I'm not sent celebrity bios or celebrity authored books to review. I think Ethan Hawke has another bad novel in the works....

[Clay Fink]

Originally Posted by achilles

Jeeze, did she fuck Ahmed Chalabi and Scooter Libby?

Just where did the "scooter" come from anyway?

[Paul B]

Ken Auletta has a nice piece about the LA Times--and the problems caused by its corporate overlords in Chicago--in last week's New Yorker.

[sonic1]

This is going to be a 101 question maybe. I have not been following this story as close as I should. But one thing I am left wondering: I believe all parties responsible in this case should be reprimanded. Does that not include the media? I mean, did they HAVE to go along with publicizing this information.

(Forgive me if I am missing a key componant to this story. )

[Dr Dave]

So the New York Times should be ashamed? The phrase forming on my lips is "rush to judgment." Cool it, ye righteous, and read this:

October 16, 2005
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal
By DON VAN NATTA Jr., ADAM LIPTAK and CLIFFORD J. LEVY

In a notebook belonging to Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, amid notations about Iraq and nuclear weapons, appear two small words: "Valerie Flame."

Ms. Miller should have written Valerie Plame. That name is at the core of a federal grand jury investigation that has reached deep into the White House. At issue is whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, an undercover C.I.A. operative, to reporters as part of an effort to blunt criticism of the president's justification for the war in Iraq.

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame's name.

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

Whether Ms. Miller's testimony will prove valuable to the prosecution remains unclear, as do its ramifications for press freedom. Yet an examination of Ms. Miller's decision not to testify, and then to do so, offers fresh information about her role in the investigation and how The New York Times turned her case into a cause.

The grand jury investigation centers on whether administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, whose husband, a former diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV, became a public critic of the Iraq war in July 2003. But Ms. Miller said Mr. Libby first raised questions about the diplomat in an interview with her that June, an account suggesting that Mr. Wilson was on the White House's radar before he went public with his criticisms.

Once Ms. Miller was issued a subpoena in August 2004 to testify about her conversations with Mr. Libby, she and The Times vowed to fight it. Behind the scenes, however, her lawyer made inquiries to see if Mr. Libby would release her from their confidentiality agreement. Ms. Miller said she decided not to testify in part because she thought that Mr. Libby's lawyer might be signaling to keep her quiet unless she would exonerate his client. The lawyer denies that, and Mr. Libby did not respond to requests for an interview.

As Ms. Miller, 57, remained resolute and moved closer to going to jail for her silence, the leadership of The Times stood squarely behind her.

"She'd given her pledge of confidentiality," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher. "She was prepared to honor that. We were going to support her."

But Mr. Sulzberger and the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller's conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller's notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the "Valerie Flame" notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday.

Interviews show that the paper's leaders, in taking what they considered to be a principled stand, ultimately left the major decisions in the case up to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control.

"This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said.

Once Ms. Miller was jailed, her lawyers were in open conflict about whether she should stay there. She had refused to reopen communications with Mr. Libby for a year, saying she did not want to pressure a source into waiving confidentiality. But in the end, saying "I owed it to myself" after two months of jail, she had her lawyer reach out to Mr. Libby. This time, hearing directly from her source, she accepted his permission and was set free.

"We have everything to be proud of and nothing to apologize for," Ms. Miller said in an interview Friday.

Neither The Times nor its cause has emerged unbruised. Three courts, including the Supreme Court, declined to back Ms. Miller. Critics said The Times was protecting not a whistle-blower but an administration campaign intended to squelch dissent. The Times's coverage of itself was under assault: While the editorial page had crusaded on Ms. Miller's behalf, the news department had more than once been scooped on the paper's own story, even including the news of Ms. Miller's release from jail.

Asked what she regretted about The Times's handling of the matter, Jill Abramson, a managing editor, said: "The entire thing."

A Divisive Newsroom Figure

In the spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war in Iraq, where she had been embedded with an American military team searching unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Back in the States, another battle was brewing.

Ms. Miller had written a string of articles before the war - often based on the accounts of Bush administration officials and Iraqi defectors - strongly suggesting that Saddam Hussein was developing these weapons of mass destruction.

When no evidence of them was found, her reporting, along with that of some other journalists, came under fire. She was accused of writing articles that helped the Bush administration make its case for war.

"I told her there was unease, discomfort, unhappiness over some of the coverage," said Roger Cohen, who was the foreign editor at the time. "There was concern that she'd been convinced in an unwarranted way, a way that was not holding up, of the possible existence of W.M.D."

It was a blow to the reputation of Ms. Miller, an investigative reporter who has worked at The Times for three decades. Ms. Miller is known for her expertise in intelligence and security issues and her ability to cultivate relationships with influential sources in government. In 2002, she was part of a team of Times reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for articles on Al Qaeda.

Inside the newsroom, she was a divisive figure. A few colleagues refused to work with her.

"Judy is a very intelligent, very pushy reporter," said Stephen Engelberg, who was Ms. Miller's editor at The Times for six years and is now a managing editor at The Oregonian in Portland. "Like a lot of investigative reporters, Judy benefits from having an editor who's very interested and involved with what she's doing."

In the year after Mr. Engelberg left the paper in 2002, though, Ms. Miller operated with a degree of autonomy rare at The Times.

Douglas Frantz, who succeeded Mr. Engelberg as the investigative editor, said that Ms. Miller once called herself "Miss Run Amok."

"I said, 'What does that mean?' " said Mr. Frantz, who was recently appointed managing editor at The Los Angeles Times. "And she said, 'I can do whatever I want.' "

Ms. Miller said she remembered the remark only vaguely but must have meant it as a joke, adding, "I have strong elbows, but I'm not a dope."

Ms. Miller said she was proud of her journalism career, including her work on Al Qaeda, biological warfare and Islamic militancy. But she acknowledged serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons.

"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," she said. "The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."

In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.

Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."

Although criticism of Ms. Miller's Iraq coverage mounted, Mr. Keller waited until May 26, 2004, to publish an editors' note that criticized some of the paper's coverage of the run-up to the war.

The note said the paper's articles on unconventional weapons were credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were written or co-written by Ms. Miller.

'A Good-Faith Source'

On June 23, 2003, Ms. Miller visited Mr. Libby at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. Mr. Libby was the vice president's top aide and had played an important role in shaping the argument for going to war in Iraq. He was "a good-faith source who was usually straight with me," Ms. Miller said in an interview.

Her assignment was to write an article about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq. She said Mr. Libby wanted to talk about a diplomat's fact-finding trip in 2002 to the African nation of Niger to determine whether Iraq sought uranium there. The diplomat was Mr. Wilson, and his wife worked for the C.I.A.

Mr. Wilson had already become known among Washington insiders as a fierce Bush critic. He would go public the next month, accusing the White House in an opinion article in The Times of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

But Mr. Libby was already defending Vice President Dick Cheney, saying his boss knew nothing about Mr. Wilson or his findings. Ms. Miller said her notes leave open the possibility that Mr. Libby told her Mr. Wilson's wife might work at the agency.

On July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson's article appeared in The Times, the reporter and her source met again, for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, near the White House.

The notebook Ms. Miller used that day includes the reference to "Valerie Flame." But she said the name did not appear in the same portion of her notebook as the interview notes from Mr. Libby.

During the breakfast, Mr. Libby provided a detail about Ms. Wilson, saying she worked in a C.I.A. unit known as Winpac; the name stands for weapons intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control. Ms. Miller said she understood this to mean that Ms. Wilson was an analyst rather than an undercover operative.

Ms. Miller returned to the subject on July 12 in a phone call with Mr. Libby. Another variant on Valerie Wilson's name - "Victoria Wilson" - appears in the notes of that call. Ms. Miller had by then called other sources about Mr. Wilson's wife. In an interview, she would not discuss her sources.

Two days later, on July 14, Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, wrote that Mr. Wilson's wife had suggested sending him to Niger, citing "two administration sources." He went on to say, without attributing the information, that Mr. Wilson's wife, "Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Ms. Miller's article on the hunt for missing weapons was published on July 20, 2003. It acknowledged that the hunt could turn out to be fruitless but focused largely on the obstacles the searchers faced.

Neither that article nor any in the following months by Ms. Miller discussed Mr. Wilson or his wife.

It is not clear why. Ms. Miller said in an interview that she "made a strong recommendation to my editor" that an article be pursued. "I was told no," she said. She would not identify the editor.

Ms. Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation.

In the fall of 2003, after The Washington Post reported that "two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists," Philip Taubman, Ms. Abramson's successor as Washington bureau chief, asked Ms. Miller and other Times reporters whether they were among the six. Ms. Miller denied it.

"The answer was generally no," Mr. Taubman said. Ms. Miller said the subject of Mr. Wilson and his wife had come up in casual conversation with government officials, Mr. Taubman said, but Ms. Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information."

Enter a Special Prosecutor

The Novak column prompted a criminal investigation into whether government officials had violated a 1982 law that makes it a crime in some circumstances to disclose the identity of an undercover agent. At the end of December 2003, the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was appointed special prosecutor.

Around the same time, F.B.I. investigators working for Mr. Fitzgerald asked officials in the White House, including Mr. Libby, to sign waivers instructing reporters that they could disregard earlier promises of confidentiality and reveal who their sources were.

When Ms. Miller was subpoenaed in the investigation in August 2004, The Times immediately retained Floyd Abrams, who had often represented the paper and is a noted First Amendment lawyer.

The Times said it believes that attempts by prosecutors to force reporters to reveal confidential information must be resisted. Otherwise, it argues, the public would be deprived of important information about the government and other powerful institutions.

The fact that Ms. Miller's judgment had been questioned in the past did not affect its stance. "The default position in a case like that is you support the reporter," Mr. Keller said.

It was in these early days that Mr. Keller and Mr. Sulzberger learned Mr. Libby's identity. Neither man asked Ms. Miller detailed questions about her conversations with him.

Both said they viewed the case as a matter of principle, which made the particulars less important. "I didn't interrogate her about the details of the interview," Mr. Keller said. "I didn't ask to see her notes. And I really didn't feel the need to do that."

Still, Mr. Keller said the case was not ideal: "I wish it had been a clear-cut whistle-blower case. I wish it had been a reporter who came with less public baggage."

Times lawyers warned company executives that they would have trouble persuading a judge to excuse Ms. Miller from testifying. The Supreme Court decided in 1972 that the First Amendment offers reporters no protection from grand jury subpoenas.

Ms. Miller authorized Mr. Abrams to talk to Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate. The question was whether Mr. Libby really wanted her to testify. Mr. Abrams passed the details of his conversation with Mr. Tate along to Ms. Miller and to Times executives and lawyers, people involved in the internal discussion said.

People present at the meetings said that what they heard about the preliminary negotiations was troubling.

Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate had said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife.

That raised a potential conflict for Ms. Miller. Did the references in her notes to "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" suggest that she would have to contradict Mr. Libby's account of their conversations? Ms. Miller said in an interview that she concluded that Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.

According to Ms. Miller, this was what Mr. Abrams told her about his conversation with Mr. Tate: "He was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn't give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave me this, 'Don't go there, or, we don't want you there.' "

Mr. Abrams said: "On more than one occasion, Mr. Tate asked me for a recitation of what Ms. Miller would say. I did not provide one."

In an e-mail message Friday, Mr. Tate called Ms. Miller's interpretation "outrageous."

"I never once suggested that she should not testify," Mr. Tate wrote. "It was just the opposite. I told Mr. Abrams that the waiver was voluntary."

He added: " 'Don't go there' or 'We don't want you there' is not something I said, would say, or ever implied or suggested."

Telling another witness about grand jury testimony is lawful as long as it is not an attempt to influence the other witness's testimony.

"Judy believed Libby was afraid of her testimony," Mr. Keller said, noting that he did not know the basis for the fear. "She thought Libby had reason to be afraid of her testimony."

Ms. Miller and the paper decided at that point not to pursue additional negotiations with Mr. Tate.

The two sides did not talk for a year.

Ms. Miller said in an interview that she was waiting for Mr. Libby to call her, but he never did. "I interpreted the silence as, 'Don't testify,' " Ms. Miller said.

She and her lawyers have also said it was inappropriate for them to hound a source for permission to testify.

Mr. Tate, for his part, said the silence of the Miller side was mystifying.

"You never told me," Mr. Tate wrote to Mr. Abrams recently, "that your client did not accept my representation of voluntariness or that she wanted to speak personally to my client." Mr. Abrams does not dispute that.

Talks between Ms. Miller's lawyer and the prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald, were at a dead end, too.

Not long after breaking off communications with Mr. Tate, Mr. Abrams spoke to Mr. Fitzgerald twice in September 2004. Mr. Abrams wanted to narrow the scope of the questions Ms. Miller would be asked if she testified before the grand jury.

Mr. Abrams said he wanted Mr. Fitzgerald to question Ms. Miller only on her conversations with Mr. Libby about Ms. Wilson. And he wanted a promise that Mr. Fitzgerald would not call her back for further questioning after she testified once.

Mr. Fitzgerald said no. His spokesman declined to comment for this article.

With negotiations at an impasse, Ms. Miller and The Times turned to the courts but were rebuffed. In October 2004, Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Federal District Court in Washington held Ms. Miller in contempt for not testifying. She remained free while she pursued appeals.

A few weeks later on Capitol Hill, in November 2004, Ms. Miller bumped into Robert S. Bennett, the prominent Washington criminal lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and who is known for his blunt style and deal-making skills.

Ms. Miller recalled Mr. Bennett saying while he signed on to her case: "I don't want to represent a principle. I want to represent Judy Miller."

After the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, Ms. Miller made a final plea to Judge Hogan to stay out of jail: "My motive here is straightforward. A promise of confidentiality once made must be respected, or the journalist will lose all credibility and the public will, in the end, suffer."

Judge Hogan ordered her jailed at Alexandria Detention Center in Northern Virginia until she agreed to testify or the grand jury's term expired on Oct. 28.

"She has the keys to release herself," the judge said. "She has a waiver she chooses not to recognize."

Rising Tensions at Newspaper

While the paper's leaders were rallying around Ms. Miller's cause in public, inside The Times tensions were growing.

Throughout this year, reporters at the paper spent weeks trying to determine the identity of Ms. Miller's source. All the while, Mr. Keller knew it, but declined to tell his own reporters.

Even after reporters learned it from outside sources, The Times did not publish Mr. Libby's name, though other news organizations already had. The Times did not tell its readers that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source until Sept. 30, in an article about Ms. Miller's release from jail.

Mr. Keller said that before Ms. Miller went to jail, Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher, asked him to participate in meetings on legal strategy and public statements. Mr. Keller said he then turned over the supervision of the newspaper's coverage of the case to Ms. Abramson, though he said he did not entirely step aside.

"It was just too awkward," Mr. Keller said, "to have me coming from meetings where they were discussing the company's public posture, then overseeing stories that were trying to deal with the company's public posture."

Ms. Abramson called The Times's coverage of the case "constrained." She said that if Ms. Miller was willing to go to jail to protect her source, it would have been "unconscionable then to out her source in the pages of the paper."

Mr. Keller and Ms. Abramson said this created an almost impossible tension between covering the case and the principle they believed to be at the heart of it.

Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.

Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said.

In August, Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, two other Washington reporters, sent a memo to the Washington bureau chief, Mr. Taubman, listing ideas for coverage of the case. Mr. Taubman said Mr. Keller did not want them pursued because of the risk of provoking Mr. Fitzgerald or exposing Mr. Libby while Ms. Miller was in jail.

Mr. Taubman said he felt bad for his reporters, but he added that he and other senior editors felt that they had no choice. "No editor wants to be in the position of keeping information out of the newspaper," Mr. Taubman said.

Both Mr. Taubman and Ms. Abramson called the situation "excruciatingly difficult."

One result was that other news organizations broke developments in the case before The Times. Reporters found it especially frustrating when on the day that Ms. Miller left jail, The Times had an article prepared at 2 p.m. but delayed posting it on its Web site until after the news appeared on the Web site of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

"We end up being late on our own story," Mr. Johnston said.

There were other awkward moments. On Oct. 7, shortly before Ms. Miller was to conduct a telephone interview with two Times reporters, George Freeman, a Times company lawyer, sent her a four-page memorandum.

Ms. Miller and her outside lawyer, Mr. Bennett, reacted furiously, calling it a "script" and nearly canceling the interview. Mr. Freeman said later that he had prepared and sent what he called a "narrative" of what happened to Ms. Miller. Mr. Freeman said it had been written long before the interview with Ms. Miller had even been contemplated.

"It was not meant to be a script," Mr. Freeman said.

The editorial page, which is run by Mr. Sulzberger and Gail Collins, the editorial page editor, championed Ms. Miller's cause. The Times published more than 15 editorials and called for Congress to pass a shield law that would make it harder for federal prosecutors to compel reporters to testify.

Mr. Sulzberger said he did not personally write the editorials, but regularly urged Ms. Collins to devote space to them. After Ms. Miller was jailed, an editorial acknowledged that "this is far from an ideal case," before saying, "If Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places."

Asked in the interview whether he had any regrets about the editorials, given the outcome of the case, Mr. Sulzberger said no.

"I felt strongly that, one, Judy deserved the support of the paper in this cause - and the editorial page is the right place for such support, not the news pages," Mr. Sulzberger said. "And secondly, that this issue of a federal shield law is really important to the nation."

Ms. Miller said the publisher's support was invaluable. "He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff," she said. "He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me."

More Thoughts of a Waiver

Inside her cell in the Alexandria Detention Center this summer, Ms. Miller was able to peer through a narrow concrete slit to get an obstructed view of a maple tree and a concrete highway barrier. She was losing weight and struggling to sleep on two thin mats on a concrete slab.

Although she told friends that she was feeling isolated and frustrated, Ms. Miller said she comforted herself with thousands of letters, the supportive editorials in The Times and frequent 30-minute visits from more than 100 friends and colleagues. Among them were Mr. Sulzberger; Tom Brokaw, the former anchor at NBC News; Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism official; and John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.

Every day, she checked outdated copies of The Times for a news article about her case. Most days she was disappointed.

She said she began thinking about whether she should reach out to Mr. Libby for "a personal, voluntary waiver."

"The longer I was there, the more chance I had to think about it," Ms. Miller said.

On July 20, William Safire, the former longtime columnist at The Times, testified about a federal shield law on Capitol Hill. Ms. Miller read his testimony and found it "inspiring."

While she mulled over her options, Mr. Bennett was urging her to allow him to approach Mr. Tate, Mr. Libby's lawyer, to try to negotiate a deal that would get her out of jail. Mr. Bennett wanted to revive the question of the waivers that Mr. Libby and other administration officials signed the previous year authorizing reporters to disclose their confidential discussions.

The other reporters subpoenaed in the case said such waivers were coerced. They said administration officials signed them only because they feared retribution from the prosecutor or the White House. Reporters for at least three news organizations had then gone back to their sources and obtained additional assurances that convinced them the waivers were genuine.

But Ms. Miller said she had not gotten an assurance that she felt would allow her to testify. And she said she felt that if Mr. Libby had wanted her to testify, he would have contacted her directly.

While Mr. Bennett urged Ms. Miller to test the waters, some of her other lawyers were counseling caution. Mr. Freeman, The Times's company lawyer, and Mr. Abrams worried that if Ms. Miller sought and received permission to testify and was released from jail, people would say that she and the newspaper had simply caved in.

"I was afraid that people would draw the wrong conclusions," Mr. Freeman said.

Mr. Freeman advised Ms. Miller to remain in jail until Oct. 28, when the term of the grand jury would expire and the investigation would presumably end.

Mr. Bennett thought that was a bad strategy; he argued that Mr. Fitzgerald would "almost certainly" empanel a new grand jury, which might mean Ms. Miller would have to spend an additional 18 months behind bars.

Mr. Freeman said he thought Mr. Fitzgerald was bluffing. Mr. Abrams was less sure. But he said Judge Hogan might release Ms. Miller if Mr. Fitzgerald tried to take further action against her.

"At that point," Ms. Miller said, "I realized if and when he did that, objectively things would change, and at that point, I might really be locked in."

After much deliberation, Ms. Miller said, she finally told Mr. Bennett to call Mr. Libby's lawyer. After two months in jail, Ms. Miller said, "I owed it to myself to see whether or not Libby had had a change of heart, the special prosecutor had had a change of heart."

Mr. Bennett called Mr. Tate on Aug. 31. Mr. Tate told Mr. Bennett that Mr. Libby had given permission to Ms. Miller to testify a year earlier. "I called Tate and this guy could not have been clearer - 'Bob, my client has given a waiver,' " Mr. Bennett said.

Mr. Fitzgerald wrote to Mr. Tate on Sept. 12, saying he was concerned that Ms. Miller was still in jail because of a "misunderstanding" between her and Mr. Libby.

Three days later, Ms. Miller heard from Mr. Libby.

In a folksy, conversational two-page letter dated Sept. 15, Mr. Libby assured Ms. Miller that he had wanted her to testify about their conversations all along. "I believed a year ago, as now, that testimony by all will benefit all," he wrote. And he noted that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."

When Ms. Miller testified before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked her about the letter. She said she responded that it could be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby "to suggest that I, too, would say that we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity." But she added that "my notes suggested that we had discussed her job."

Ms. Miller, though, wanted more than Mr. Libby's letter to feel free to testify. She told her lawyers that she still needed to hear from Mr. Libby in person. When that could not be arranged, she settled for a 10-minute jailhouse conference call on Sept. 19 with Mr. Libby, while two of her lawyers and one of Mr. Libby's listened in.

Ms. Miller said she was persuaded. "I mean, it's like the tone of the voice," she said. "When he talked to me about how unhappy he was that I was in jail, that he hadn't fully understood that I might have been going to jail just to protect him. He had thought there were other people whom I had been protecting. And there was kind of like an expression of genuine concern and sorrow."

Ms. Miller said she then "cross-examined" Mr. Libby. "When I pushed him hard, I said: 'Do you really want me to testify? Are you sure you really want me to testify?' He said something like: 'Absolutely. Believe it. I mean it.' "

At 1 p.m. on Sept. 26, Ms. Miller convened her lawyers in the jailhouse law library. All the lawyers agreed that Mr. Libby had released Ms. Miller from the pledge of confidentiality.

The next day, Mr. Bennett called Mr. Fitzgerald. He informed the prosecutor that Ms. Miller had a voluntary, personal waiver and asked Mr. Fitzgerald to restrict his questions to her conversations with Mr. Libby.

Mr. Bennett, who by now had carefully reviewed Ms. Miller's extensive notes taken from two interviews with Mr. Libby, assured Mr. Fitzgerald that Ms. Miller had only one meaningful source. Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questions to Mr. Libby and the Wilson matter.

Claudia Payne, a Times editor and a close friend of Ms. Miller, said that once Ms. Miller realized that her jail term could be extended, "it changed things a great deal. She said, 'I don't want to spend my life in here.' "

Ms. Payne added, "Her paramount concern was how her actions would be viewed by her colleagues."

On Sept. 29, Ms. Miller was released from jail and whisked by Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller to the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown for a massage, a manicure, a martini and a steak dinner. The next morning, she testified before the grand jury for three hours. Afterward, Ms. Miller declared that her ordeal was a victory for journalists and the public.

She testified before the grand jury for a second time on Wednesday about notes from her first meeting with Mr. Libby.

Last week, Mr. Sulzberger said it was impossible to know whether Ms. Miller could have struck a deal a year earlier, as at least four other journalists had done.

"Maybe a deal was possible earlier," Mr. Sulzberger said. "And maybe, in retrospect, looking back, you could say this was a moment you could have jumped on. If so, shame on us. I tend to think not."

A Puzzling Outcome

On Oct. 3, four days after Ms. Miller left jail, she returned to the headquarters of The New York Times on West 43rd Street.

Before entering the building, she called her friend Ms. Payne and asked her to come downstairs and escort her in. "She very felt frightened," Ms. Payne said. "She felt very vulnerable."

At a gathering in the newsroom, she made a speech claiming victories for press freedom. Her colleagues responded with restrained applause, seemingly as mystified by the outcome of her case as the public. (Video From Miller's Speech)

"You could see it in people's faces," Ms. Miller said later. "I'm a reporter. People were confused and perplexed, and I realized then that The Times and I hadn't done a very good job of making people understand what has been accomplished."

In the days since, The Times has been consumed by discussions about how the newspaper handled the case, how Times journalists covered the news of their own paper - and about Ms. Miller herself.

"Everyone admires our paper's willingness to stand behind us and our work, but most people I talk to have been troubled and puzzled by Judy's seeming ability to operate outside of conventional reportorial channels and managerial controls," said Todd S. Purdum, a Washington reporter for The Times. "Partly because of that, many people have worried about whether this was the proper fight to fight."

Diana B. Henriques, a business reporter, said she and others at the paper took "great pride and comfort" in how The Times stood by Ms. Miller. But she said the episode and speculation surrounding it "left a lot of people feeling confused and anxious" about Ms. Miller's role in the investigation.

On Tuesday, Ms. Miller is to receive a First Amendment award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She said she thought she would write a book about her experiences in the leak case, although she added that she did not yet have a book deal. She also plans on taking some time off but says she hopes to return to the newsroom.

She said she hopes to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country."

The Times incurred millions of dollars in legal fees in Ms. Miller's case. It limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day. Even as the paper asked for the public's support, it was unable to answer its questions.

"It's too early to judge it, and it's probably for other people to judge," said Mr. Keller, the executive editor. "I hope that people will remember that this institution stood behind a reporter, and the principle, when it wasn't easy to do that, or popular to do that."

Janny Scott contributed reporting for this article.

[QUOTE=Dr Dave]So the New York Times should be ashamed? The phrase forming on my lips is "rush to judgment." Cool it, ye righteous, and read this:]


I don't think this article does much to absolve the Times. Miller was not cooperative with the reporters on this piece. And what the piece shows is what people have been saying for months: that the Times pretty much abdicated its journalistic responsibility in order to protect one particular reporter whose actions and motivations are, at the least, highly questionable.

And we're supposed to believe that a woman who's been a reporter for over 30 years, has won many prizes, has 'forgotten' her original source on the Plame leak?

I'm a life-long reader of the Times, and will remain so. But they've swapped their soul for Judy Miller; first on her shilling for the Iraq war, and then this.
So yes, Shame on them. Keller and Miller should be sent packing, and Pinch should decided what the role of publisher is and stick with it.

from Atrios, but pointed out on other sites as well:

"There is one enormous journalism scandal hidden in Judith Miller's Oct. 16th first person article about the (perhaps lesser) CIA leak scandal. And that is Ms. Miller's revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.

This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised. It is all the more puzzling that a reporter who as a matter of principle would sacrifice 85 days of her freedom to protect a source would so willingly agree to be officially muzzled and thereby deny potentially valuable information to the readers whose right to be informed she claims to value so highly.

One must assume that Ms. Miller was required to sign a standard and legally binding agreement that she would never divulge classified information to which she became privy, without risk of criminal prosecution. And she apparently plans to adhere to the letter of that self-censorship deal; witness her dilemma at being unable to share classified information with her editors."

copied and pasted from the above Times article:

"In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.

Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."

Although criticism of Ms. Miller's Iraq coverage mounted, Mr. Keller waited until May 26, 2004, to publish an editors' note that criticized some of the paper's coverage of the run-up to the war.

The note said the paper's articles on unconventional weapons were credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were written or co-written by Ms. Miller."

[Dr Dave]

Thank you for making my point: The Times is airing its own dirty laundry. Better than most news outlets.

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

Thank you for making my point: The Times is airing its own dirty laundry. Better than most news outlets.

If your point is they had to be shamed into it, and that they let their reputation as the paper of record suffer because of it, and allowed the morale of the newsroom to sink to shit, then we do agree, absolutely.

[Dr Dave]

Originally Posted by achilles

If your point is they had to be shamed into it, and that they let their reputation as the paper of record suffer because of it, and allowed the morale of the newsroom to sink to shit, then we do agree, absolutely.

Upon reflection, I think we do agree completely. Judith Miller is scum, and a cancer on the Times. The Times was right to insist on her right to protect her sources, but disasterously misjudged her personal ethics. They seemed to think, as far as I can tell, that they could keep her reputation separate from that of the newspaper she works for. Oh, boy were they wrong.

On the other hand, the fat lady ain't sung yet, and I think the Times will realize in short order that it had better get its house in order, for which effort Job One will be relieving Ms. Miller of her duties.

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

Upon reflection, I think we do agree completely. Judith Miller is scum, and a cancer on the Times. The Times was right to insist on her right to protect her sources, but disasterously misjudged her personal ethics. They seemed to think, as far as I can tell, that they could keep her reputation separate from that of the newspaper she works for. Oh, boy were they wrong.

On the other hand, the fat lady ain't sung yet, and I think the Times will realize in short order that it had better get its house in order, for which effort Job One will be relieving Ms. Miller of her duties.

Now we totally agree.
Word is that Miller's done at the Times. She's taking a leave,
but I doubt she'll be brought back.

[rollhead]

Here is a short piece from E&P about the highly decorated Judith Miller:

Former Miller Colleague Called Her An 'Advocate' and Threat to 'Integrity'

By E&P Staff

Published: October 17, 2005 11:00 AM ET

NEW YORK In his column in The Washington Post Monday, Howard Kurtz reveals that Craig Pyes, a former contract writer for the Times (now with the Los Angeles Times) who teamed up with Judith Miller for a series on al-Qaeda, complained about her in a December 2000 memo to Times editors. In the memo, he asked that his byline not appear on one piece.

"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller. ... I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. ... She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies," and "tried to stampede it into the paper."

Pyes told Kurtz yesterday he had no problem with the articles as published, which helped win one of two Pulitzer Prizes he shared at the paper. Miller did not respond to a phone message from Kurtz, and her attorney declined to comment.

[rollhead]

New York Times Story on Leak Raises Questions
An article meant to clarify coverage of the Valerie Plame case has prompted concern over a veteran reporter and the paper's leadership.
By James Rainey
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 18, 2005

A story published by the New York Times on Sunday to clarify its coverage of the Valerie Plame leak case has instead raised a series of new questions and complaints about veteran reporter Judith Miller and her supervisors in the long-running controversy.

Critics inside the paper and in the wider journalism community said Monday that they found particularly disturbing the revelation that the newspaper's editors seemed unable to control Miller and that the reporter agreed to use a misleading identification to shield the identity of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

The Pentagon also raised doubts about Miller's contention that she had a special security clearance that allowed her to report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Some critics were particularly harsh, noting that the 57-year-old Miller's work had been questioned before.

Her editors had pulled her off coverage of Iraq and weapons issues in 2003 and later ran an unusual editors' note admitting that they could no longer stand by six stories about weapons of mass destruction, or WMD — including five that Miller wrote or co-wrote.

"I don't know why she was allowed to do all these things and where the people were who were supposed to manage her," said one Times reporter, who asked not to be named out of concern of antagonizing the paper's editors.

Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, was even more pointed in a criticism published Monday in the trade publication's online edition.

"Most disturbing is the sense that the Times at times is a ship without a skipper or, better yet, an asylum run by the inmates," Rieder wrote. "Strong leadership and editorial oversight seem hard to come by."

The reactions followed the Times' Sunday story and an accompanying first-person account by Miller about her four hours of testimony before a federal grand jury.

The panel, directed by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is expected to decide by Oct. 28 whether Libby or any other official will be indicted for revealing the identity of Plame, a covert CIA operative. The investigation is focused on determining whether Plame was exposed in retaliation for her husband's attacks on the Bush administration's Iraq policies.

In a memo to his staff Monday, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller praised his paper's 5,000-plus-word account of Miller's reporting about Plame. He called the story a "fine, rigorous piece of journalism."

But the editor proved prescient when he added that "it's too early to hope" that the controversy over Miller's role in the Plame case would go away.

Colleagues noted with concern how Miller and her supervisors frequently came into conflict over the Plame case.

In one instance, Miller denied to the paper's Washington bureau chief that anyone in the Bush administration had discussed Plame with her. (She later publicly acknowledged discussing Plame with Libby.)

In another case, Miller said she had proposed writing a story about Plame — something that another of her supervisors did not recall. Finally, Keller conceded that Miller had returned to coverage of national security issues, even after he had ordered her off the topic.

Not all of the staffers who gathered to discuss the case in the Times Washington bureau Monday morning criticized Miller. Some said she still deserved support for going to jail to protect the identity of a confidential source.

Miller's attorney, Floyd Abrams, said in an interview that "piling on" by critics ignored Miller's 85 days behind bars, which ended when Libby freed her late last month from a confidentiality agreement and she testified before the grand jury.

"It seems to me one thing to criticize her for certain errors in particular coverage, but it's deeply disturbing to see so many journalists ignore or discount the significant 1st Amendment battle she has just engaged in," Abrams said.

But some of her colleagues and others said her relationship with Libby appeared too cozy.

They noted that Miller told how Libby asked her for an autographed copy of her book on biological weapons. And they were upset that Miller agreed to Libby's request to be identified as "a former Hill staffer" instead of "a senior administration official." Miller wrote no stories about the Plame matter.

Such an identification would have allowed Libby to take potshots at Plame without identifying the true source of the attacks.

New York Times policy states: "The Times is truthful. We do not dissemble about our sources."

Daniel Okrent, public editor of the Times until May, said he would not comment directly on Sunday's report. But he said the paper's policy made the importance of precise attribution clear.

"What obviously this wouldn't have done is tell the reader anything about motivation," Okrent said in an interview. "And identification of anonymous sources is all about telling the readers as much as you can about the motivation of the person speaking."

Several Times reporters and outsiders said they were also troubled by Miller's description in her story Sunday of the special "security clearance" that allowed her to be embedded with military units hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Although many reporters were embedded with the military in Iraq, a security clearance would represent a level of government approval that some found disconcerting.

"This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised," Bill Lynch, a veteran CBS correspondent, wrote to a media website.

Miller and the Times had already weathered considerable criticism for being too ready to accept Bush administration accounts about Iraqi weapons.

"This just adds grist to the idea that Judy had become an advocate and not a just a dispassionate reporter," said another of her colleagues, who also requested anonymity. Miller has previously cited commanders of the reconnaissance units she embedded with in Iraq as knowing of her special security clearance.

Abrams, the lawyer, said he believed Miller had a "secret," but not a "top secret" clearance.

But senior Pentagon officials said Monday that Miller did not receive a security clearance as part of her embedding, which came as the U.S. searched for weapons after the conclusion of the major initial combat.

*

Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.

[rollhead]

Still more on this --

Journalism Community Turns On Times, Miller
Submitted by editor4 on October 18, 2005 - 2:14pm.
By DAVID B. CARUSO
Source: Newsday

With a ferociousness usually reserved for presidents caught lying to the public, the journalism world has turned on The New York Times and its reporter Judith Miller, who only weeks ago was being lauded for going to jail to protect a source.

A few media critics and academics suggested Monday that the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter should be fired for her actions covering the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Miller also was blasted for failing to explain how she learned the identity of the CIA agent wife of a Bush administration critic.

"It's not enough that Judith Miller, we learned Saturday, is taking some time off and `hopes' to return to the New York Times newsroom," Greg Mitchell, the editor of the journalism trade publication Editor & Publisher, wrote in an online column. "She should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism, and her own newspaper."

The reaction stemmed from a pair of articles published over the weekend in the Times, which revealed several new details about Miller's coverage of the war and interactions with administration officials.

Among the revelations: Miller said she didn't believe I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, first told her the name of agent Valerie Plame, but she said she couldn't remember who did. She said she had agreed to identify Libby in a story only as a "former Hill staffer," even though he worked not for Congress but for Cheney.

Also, a first-person account by Miller said the Pentagon had given her "clearance to see secret information" while she traveled in Iraq with a military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Embedded reporters were regularly granted access to some classified information about basic military operations, but it wasn't clear from Miller's article whether she was describing such a routine arrangement or implying she had broader clearance.

Miller did not immediately return a call to her cell phone Monday night in Las Vegas, where she was scheduled to receive the Society of Professional Journalists's First Amendment Award Tuesday for going to jail to protect a source.

Alex Jones, a former New York Times reporter who directs the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, said the newspaper had not yet sufficiently explained Miller's behavior.

"The credibility of The New York Times is at stake," he said. "She either needs to be given a clean bill of health, or she needs to be told that she can't represent the Times anymore."

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in a memo to staff, expressed the hope that the brouhaha would subside but he did not disclose what further action, if any, the paper would take.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for initially refusing to tell a grand jury whether Libby had spoken to her about Plame, a covert CIA official whose identity was leaked to journalists in 2003.

Miller was released from jail in late September after she agreed to testify, saying that her source had released her from her vow to keep his identity a secret.

The Times offered a pair of stories on its own role in the episode Sunday, one written by staff reporters, and the other Miller's first-person account.

The ensuing criticism stunned some of Miller's allies.

Floyd Abrams, a lawyer for Miller and The New York Times, blamed this week's criticism, in part, to lingering unhappiness over a number of Miller stories that strongly suggested the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"This seems to be a day for piling on Judy Miller," he said. "It is regrettable that more than a few journalists seem unable to distinguish between their criticism of particular stories she has written, and her principled defense of the First Amendment."

In its Sunday articles, the Times painted an at-times unflattering picture of Miller and her editors.

It said the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Keller, "knew few details about Ms. Miller's conversations with her confidential source other than his name," and never reviewed her notes.

It also described Miller as "an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control." The Times has acknowledged publicly that several of Miller's stories on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were most likely wrong, and criticized itself for not questioning them more closely.

Miller was taken off of Iraq and weapons stories but drifted back onto the national security beat, the Sunday article said.

She had a rare degree of autonomy that once prompted her to jokingly call herself "Miss Run Amok," the article said, and some of her colleagues refused to work with her.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, praised the Times for its willingness to be candid about the divisions within its newsroom.

He added, though, that he was among those who believed the newspaper had more explaining to do about what led to Miller's release from jail, and whether she really couldn't remember who told her Plame's name.

[tristano's ghost]

Gene Lyons on the disgrace of the NY Times:

With everybody in Washington anticipating dramatic, possibly
melodramatic, developments in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation, it’s worth thinking about what it reveals about the appalling state of American political journalism. As one with firsthand experience of the odd blend of arrogance, high-handedness and sheer professional incompetence in high places at The New York Times, very little in that newspaper’s coverage of self-dramatizing reporter Judith Miller surprises me. Shocks me, yes. Surprises me, no. In a very limited sense, the Times ’ eight-year infatuation with Whitewater was worse than its boosterism regarding Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction. No state secrets were involved. Any reasonably skeptical reporter with a working brain could deconstruct the coverage. Correct the errors and fill in the blanks, and the Whitewater “scandal,” as even Kenneth Starr eventually had to conclude, basically vanished. Having written two books on the subject (one with Joe Conason ), I’ll spare you a rehash.

What surprised me then was how reporters and editors acted as if they had a property right in an accusatory version of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated real estate investment. Careers were at stake. Critics weren’t treated as rivals, but vandals. Once they’d apprenticed themselves to Starr’s leak-omatic prosecutors, the scandal acquired a life of its own. Even dispositive facts could be pitched into the memory hole to keep it going.

Editors appeared to protect themselves by failing to learn basic facts about the controversy ; also by acting as if the newspaper was, by definition, beyond criticism and above reproach. The essence of it was “We’re The New York Times and you’re not.”

Hopefully, Miller’s public pratfall has taught them something. A True Believer, Miller apparently became an amanuensis to neo-conservative dogmatists in the Bush administration intoxicated by their own propaganda and determined to invade Iraq. Five of the six stories touting Saddam Hussein’s imaginary arsenal of WMD for which the Times has apologized carried her byline.

Then after the WMD fantasy began to come apart during the spring of 2003, her White House pals appeared to believe that they could count on Miller to help trash their enemies, specifically former Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

In the Times ’ front-page account of Miller’s off-again, on-again refusal to testify before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury, editor Bill Keller admits some embarrassment.

“I wish it had been a clear-cut whistleblower case,” he said.

I wonder what they’re putting in the water coolers up on West 43 rd Street. It wasn’t a whistleblower case at all. It was the exact opposite : the most powerful people in the United States using the press to damage a whistleblower by endangering his wife, something even the Mob won’t do. Indeed, it’s intriguing to speculate that Wilson, outspoken critic of pre-war propaganda about Iraq’s nuclear weapons programs, wasn’t the leak’s main target. White House apparatchiks may have been more leery of Plame, a specialist in nuclear proliferation, and her CIA colleagues. Here’s why : In a Times interview, “Little Miss Run Amok,” as Miller dubbed herself due to her ability to avoid editorial supervision on her way to fame and glory, admitted what the Times called “serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons.” “ WMD—I got it totally wrong, ” she said. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.”

But that’s simply not so.

“Infighting among U. S.

intelligence agencies fuels dispute over Iraq” was the headline of an October 2002 article by Knight Ridder’s Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay. The article detailed a “bitter feud over secret intelligence” between the CIA and Bush administration appointees at the Pentagon. “The dispute,” they wrote, “pits hardliners long distrustful of the U. S. intelligence community against professional military and intelligence officers who fear the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq.” In an earlier article co-written with John Walcott, the authors quoted an unidentified official who said that “analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books.” Nobody else they interviewed disagreed. Maybe that’s the story Scooter Lewis and the country-club toughs in the White House really feared. What’s more, it was always there to be written, but not by Washington courtier-journalists who pride themselves more on the quality of their dinner party invitations and TV appearances than their professional integrity and skepticism. Do I believe that Miller can’t remember who told her “Valerie Flame’s” name ? A child wouldn’t believe it. The more clever of my two basset hounds would be suspicious. The real shame is that, absent an aggressive prosecutor, none of this would have become known.

—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

This, the top so-called "liberal" paper in the country, letting a reporter first help drag us into war on unwarranted grounds, then letting her aid the administration in its attempt to smear a critic and destroy his wife's career as a WMD op for the CIA. Save us, please, from the SCLM.

[rollhead]

Gene Lyons was one of my college English professors.

He and Joe Conason wrote a book called the "Hunting of the President."

Here is Joe's take on this:

Do Miller’s Bosses
Still Believe Her?

By: Joe Conason (from the New York Observer)

Of all the evidence that has emerged so far in the C.I.A. leak case, perhaps the most troubling is the bargain struck in July 2003 between New York Times reporter Judith Miller and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

He would provide the covert smears, and she would mislead the public about her source.

The Times reporter and the White House official shared a powerful urge to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose informed criticism of Bush administration claims about Iraq’s alleged attempts to procure uranium in Africa had embarrassed both. At the behest of administration officials such as Mr. Libby, she had exaggerated the prewar threat from Baghdad in her newspaper—and was reportedly enraged by Mr. Wilson’s audacious debunking of the myths she had propagated.

As Ms. Miller recently explained in her own Times account, Mr. Libby provided information to her about Mr. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame Wilson. In turn, she agreed to pretend that the smears came not from the White House, but from a “former [Capitol] Hill staffer.” By thus violating the Times rules for identifying unnamed sources, obscuring motivation and misleading readers, she became an accomplice of the Bush administration’s effort to silence a critic—and worse, to expose a loyal intelligence officer.

In short, Ms. Miller essentially volunteered to continue what she already had been doing for many months, in articles that eventually had to be disowned by her newspaper. She would again serve as an instrument of government propaganda and official malfeasance.

Her explanations of her behavior in this affair mock credulity, except at the pinnacle of authority in the Times offices, where they will apparently believe anything. She allowed her attorney, Robert Bennett, to tell special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that she had gone to jail to conceal a single source who had discussed the Wilsons with her, namely Mr. Libby. Now she says there was another source whose name she cannot recall. (Then again, she told reporters for The Times and other papers that she would not discuss her other sources, rather than claiming that she couldn’t remember them. Presumably she didn’t want her colleagues to laugh in her face.)

All of these contradictions and more draw fresh attention to a career marked by inexplicable failures of supervision, which in other cultures would require severe self-criticism from Ms. Miller and her superiors. Instead, the Times leadership appears as oblivious and arrogant as ever, although the many good people who work for them are anguished.

As for Ms. Miller, she continues to blame her terrible reporting about Iraq on others, and to wonder why so many reporters and readers now distrust her. Evidently, she still doesn’t understand what her scheming with Scooter shows about her loyalties and values.

With the support of her newspaper’s management, she has dramatically portrayed herself as a martyr to the principle of journalistic independence from government. Yet she also claims to have possessed a special “security clearance” supposedly provided to her by the Pentagon.

That boast—which raised eyebrows among many experienced reporters covering the military and the intelligence community—brought to mind the tales of Ms. Miller’s fruitless post-invasion search for the weapons of mass destruction she had done so much to publicize. The deal that she and her editors made with the Pentagon included exclusive access to Mobile Exploitation Team (M.E.T.) Alpha—the elite unit assigned to find Saddam Hussein’s elusive arsenal. While embedded with M.E.T. Alpha, she even donned an Army uniform and reportedly interfered with command decisions.

In exchange for her super-special access, Ms. Miller and her editors agreed to Pentagon censorship of her articles, according to New York magazine. But that deal didn’t work out quite the way she must have expected. Her stories were wrong, and there were, alas, no weapons to be found—as she might have understood much earlier, had she only paid attention to sources other than her fellow zealots in the Defense Department and the White House.

On the question of Saddam’s mythical nuclear program, for example, she could have examined the findings of the International Atomic Energy Authority and its chief, Mohammed ElBaradei. Their complete vindication by subsequent events has been capped with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The saddest aspect of the Miller saga is how the misplaced loyalty of her bosses led to their humiliation twice over. They entrusted her with journalistic latitude far beyond what her competence and integrity merited. They defended her—indeed, lionized her—long after her flaws and falsehoods had been laid bare.

And now her own words prove that from the beginning of this strange episode, she ignored their rules, betrayed their confidence and disgraced their stewardship of a great American institution.


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