Judy Miller, what can one say that she doesn't say better in her own words.
These new versions of events regarding her security clearance were covered in a WaPo article on testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the need for a national shield law to protect journalists. I can't get over the consistent disregard for acccuracy and the changing stories she test markets as she testifies in various venues. She is in a position to damage the national proposal to protect journalists which is a needed law to assure the First Amendment is a reality. She is the walking and talking embodiment of why we should loathe much of the MSM.
Ms. Miller's first-person account of her grand jury testimony, published Sunday in The Times, raised additional questions about her conversations with I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Ms. Miller suggested that she had received a security clearance from the Pentagon to allow her to see classified information as part of her assignment with a military unit that was hunting for unconventional weapons in Iraq.
"I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq," Ms. Miller wrote, referring to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor leading the C.I.A. leak investigation.
Some Pentagon officials and journalists questioned whether her arrangement was actually what many journalists covering the Iraq war had: a written agreement to see and hear classified information but treat it as off the record unless an ad hoc arrangement was reached with military hosts.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Ms. Miller said this so-called nondisclosure form was precisely what she had signed, with some modifications, adding that what she had meant to say in her published account was that she had had temporary access to classified information under rules set by her unit.
Ms. Miller said that under the conditions set by the commander of the unit, Col. Richard R. McPhee, she had been allowed to discuss her most secret reporting with only the senior-most editors of The Times, who at the time were Howell Raines, the executive editor, and Gerald M. Boyd, the managing editor.
When asked if she had ever left the impression with sources, including Mr. Libby, that she had access to classified information after leaving her assignment in Iraq, Ms. Miller said she could not recall. "I don't remember if I ever told him I was disembedded," she said. "I might not have." But she added, "I never misled anybody."
Link Journalists Testify in Favor of Shield Law