What I Didn't Find in the New York Times this Weekend
This weekend Judith Miller finally went public with her version of her testimony for the grand jury. Most people, I imagine, will take notice of the unexplained appearance of the name “Valerie Flame” and “Victoria Wilson” in her notebook that included her notes from interviews with Scooter Libby. According to Miller, the names just sort of got there and she’s doesn’t think they came from Libby. Both seem to have appeared in the notebook before Joe Wilson published his op ed in Miller’s newspaper, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” I read over her article and the Times’s version of the events last night and I literally just kept staring at the page.
First, tens of thousands of people have died because Judith Miller trusted information fed to her by these inner circle sources. I’m inclined to believe that she’s an accessory to mass murder. Apparently, she insists that she was doing her job and just fell victim to faulty sources. Second, while she was hiding behind “journalistic integrity”, there are a bunch of creepy people who put American human intelligence assets at risk. There’s no indication whatsoever that this troubled her in any way. In fact, she appears to go out of her way to persuade us that the vice president in particular knew little to nothing about it.
Judith Miller didn’t protect the confidentiality of her sources, she was and still is protecting the sources themselves.
Most shocking of all, her 5 page explanation of her role shows no awareness of the fact that as a reporter she had any duty to be protecting our right to know. Libby is complaining to her that the CIA was hedging on its WMD information by leaking doubts about it. It never apparently occurred to Miller to ask what those doubts were, how credible they were, or to follow up in any way. In the meantime, Libby appeared to be telling her more and more about who Joe Wilson’s wife was and what she did for the CIA. Miller did nothing. In fact, she took steps over the next two years to cover up Libby’s identity as her source and allowed the Republicans to win the last election knowing what they had done.
After she wrote the article, she then flew to San Diego to present Mark Felt with an award for his contributions during Watergate, as Deep Throat. Felt wasn’t there.
Judith Miller is not a champion of the rights of free press, she’s a more pathetic version of Armstrong Williams.
posted by Chancelucky @ 11:02 PM
2 Comments:
I give Judy Miller the Elvis Grbac Award of the year -- "the 2005 Embarrassment to Humankind Award."
If the NYT maintains this so-called reporter, I will be so sad. You've hit most of the nails on the head, chancelucky, but you haven't an ear for her appalling crushful behavior towards these neonutcons.
I guess all you have to do is wear bluejeans & a cowboy hat and people will lie and (by proxy)will kill for you. When Karl Rove saw George Bush the first time, it's the Skoal chewing tobacco tin in George's bluejean rump-pocket that he describes and he Karlsie was 'in love.' Judy & Scooter's meeting up at the Jackson Hole rodeo is damned odd in that she abruptly ends her article without telling us anything of what happened AFTER. They have all these long breakfasts at the St. Regis. It's all too much aspen roots entwining for me.
(Not that I haven't done really lunatic things under the influence of the Crush Hallucinogen. I have embarrassed myself -- but not to the tune of 100,000 Iraqis blown to bits + my neighbor's son & the 15,000 other mangled.)
I think she's deathly afraid, like Bob Woodward, to give up all that lovely access with which she was silver-spoon-fed. If she'd come entirely clean & ratted, it would have been Scooter & all the others slam the door.
If I were Fitzgerald, I'd put her back in the slammer until she remembered who told her Valerie Flame. (My guess is it was a derisive dirty joke by whomever. I understand that she loathes Joe Wilson for some reason. Probably for being repelled by her eye-batting way of dealing with powerful guys.) And seeing as this story broke WIDE open a few weeks after she wrote that in her notes, NO way she forgets who told her. None nada pues nada.
lol, yes the long lingering breakfasts at the St. Regis did make me wonder where they were immediately before the breakfast.
It's not so much what her article admits or doesn't admit, it's what she's so clearly unaware of that I find so appalling. Very similar to Barbara Bush suggesting that the victims of Katrina were better off in Houston than New Orleans or W insisting that he needed his vacation while a mother of a dead soldier waited outside his ranch.
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