Judith Miller is Full of Crap.
Sun Oct 16, 2005 at 07:11:06 PM PDT
In the event you've been busy washing your socks and have not heard of Judith Miller, she is a New York Times reporter who recently spent 85 days in jail after refusing to testify before a grand jury. That grand jury happens to be assisting U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald with his investigation of who is responsible for leaking the identity of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame, whose undercover status with the CIA was made public in a Robert Novak column in 2003.
"Outing" an undercover CIA agent is, in some circumstances, a crime. The apparent motive for this outing was the Bush Administration's dissatisfaction with Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who recently had publicly called out the Administration for its lies about there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Wilson was in a position to know, having personally investigated the Administration's bogus claim, made by Bush in his State of the Union Address, that Iraq sought uranium to be used in nuclear weapons from the country of Niger).
Initially, the Shrub said if anyone in his administration played a role in the Plame leak, they would be gone. Now that odds have it that Scooter Libby (assistant to V.P. Dick "Halliburton Made Me Rich With Their Humanitarian Act" Cheney) and/or Karl "Turd Blossom and King Maker" Rove (AKA Shrub's Brain) could be targets of this investigation, Shrub has amended that promise. He now says anyone in his administration who has "committed a crime" will be gone. So he's right on top of things, unless his guy is not guilty on a technicality. Too bad he didn't feel that way as the Governor of Texas, when he presided over the executions of 152 men and women, pretty much all of whom were killed after their appeals were denied based on a "technicality."
Anyway, it happens that Judith Miller, she of the questionable reporting ability with respect to the story of whether Iraq actual had weapons of mass destruction, was one of a multitude of reporters who spoke with "Scooter" Libby about Plame. Miller claimed that she went to jail rather than testify before the grand jury because Libby wouldn't release her from her promise to keep his identity as a source confidential. But now it seems that he actually consented to let her testify more than a year ago; she chose to go to jail anyway, and only agreed to testify after he assured her, in the presence of two of her lawyers and one of his, that it really, really was okay for her to testify.
Others have covered this story in much more depth than I can, but here is my snarky and ill-informed take on the narrow topic of Miller's own article on this "incident," published today in the NYT, which left me so incensed that writing about it is the only possible hope I have of going to sleep tonight:
Miller doesn't want to risk telling an untruth in her story, so she merely tells us what she told the Prosecutor. Miller continually cites in the article what her "notes indicate" and leans on the phrase, "according to my notes . . . ", rather than saying what actually was or wasn't discussed, in her multiple interviews with Libby. It doesn't take a lawyer (or special investigator) to know this is a classic framing of an answer that doesn't really give an answer.
Miller sure knows a lot for someone who can't recall her sources or conversations with said sources. Miller says Libby signed a blanket form waiver before she went to jail "[a]t the behest of President Bush and Mr. Fitzgerald." Strangely, she does not attribute any source that would indicate how she can be sure Bush agitated for Libby to sign the waiver. Shoddy reporting for a longtime NYT writer.
Miller drew interesting parameters on her grand jury testimony. Miller claims that Fitzgerald's initial reluctance to limit his questioning to the topic of Libby would have left her "unable to protect other confidential sources who had provided information--unrelated to Mr. Wilson or his wife--for articles published in The Times." Interesting that she wanted the topic limited to Libby. It would seem that limiting it to the subject of Plame and her husband would have been sufficient. But no--Judy wanted an even narrower limitation than that, indicating (at least to me) that there is someone else she's protecting.
For a journalist, Miller seems remarkably sloppy in her investigative skills. Miller wrote the name, "Valerie Flame" in her notes taken around the time of her discussions with Libby, but claims she "could not recall where that name came from, when [she] wrote it or why the name was misspelled." This is CRAP. I take notes when speaking with clients or coworkers about topics of importance, and I can always tell on reading over my notes again where the information came from. I can only think this would be especially true if the notes concerned a topic that controlled my professional life for two years, resulting in me being subpoenaed to testify in front of a grand jury on multiple occasions, which I refused, resulting in me spending nearly 3 months in jail with nothing to do but think.
It is clear that Miller knows she discussed Plame with someone other than Libby; she just doesn't want to talk about it. Miller says she testified to the grand jury that she did not believe that name came from Libby, "in part because the notation does not appear in the same part of my notebook as the interview notes from him." Note that she merely says what she "testified to"--and does not state this as an actual fact. This is a recurring theme throughout her article, so I won't repeat it again, but it seems a convenient way to merely recite what she told Fitzgerald without actually reporting as fact these various tidbits of information that she imparted to him. Also, what is the other "part" of the fact equation that led her to believe Libby didn't give her the name? This is, conveniently, left unanswered. Except of course, for the part of the article in which Miller says she told Fitzgerald she "believed the information came from another source, whom I cannot recall." Again, not stated as fact; just stated as what she told Fitzgerald. Strangely, Miller also told Fitzgerald that while she had discussed the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources, she "could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred."
Miller lied to her own editors. Miller later told her editor at the NYT, upon his/her inquiry, that she did not believe the Administration was trying to disseminate information to discredit Wilson as punishment for his story on WMD. But she admits that in her second interview with Libby, Libby asked her to credit him not as a "senior administration official" (which he agreed to after their first meeting), but instead to call him a "former Hill staffer." She apparently acknowledged to Fitzgerald that she understood this to mean that Libby "did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson." Ever add 2 and 2 and count 4, Judy? I mean, you are only a multi-decade journalist, covering international news for one of the more preeminent news sources in the free world; isn't this feigned ignorance beneath you? Why didn't you come clean with your editor?
My grand conclusion:
I believe Miller may have engaged in perjury before the grand jury. If so, I hope she is jailed for it, this time for more than 85 days. And if not, I still hope she loses her job, as she has brought dishonor on the house of journalism and the house of the New York Times (based on their article and what she would/would not tell her own employer, which has spent millions of dollars defending her). Permitting her to continue reporting as a person who ostensibly enjoys the public trust is simply not acceptable.
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