At long last The New York Times has published its long-awaited exposé detailing its role and that of its Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Judith Miller in the scandal that has come to be commonly referred to as “Plamegate.”
It is not a pretty picture. Neither the Times nor Judith Miller emerge from this article looking at all favorable. More problematical for the Times, whose reputation has been badly tarnished by this affair, the article seemingly raises more questions than it answers both about the veracity of Judith Miller and the transparency of America’s “newspaper of record,” The New York Times.
The new Times article is far from kind to Judith Miller, nor does it offer compelling justification for Miller’s long refusal to testify before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury that has been investigating the July 2003 outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert CIA agent involved in preventing the proliferation of WMD.
The article notes that “three courts, including the Supreme Court declined to back Ms. Miller.” The Times neglected to point out that some of the judges supported the principle of a journalist being allowed to protect sources, but felt that national security considerations along with the evidence that a serious crime had been committed outweighed any right Miller might ordinarily have to protect this source.
The Times also neglected to mention that Fitzgerald knew all along that Miller’s source was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He identified Libby in his initial court filings against Miller. The Times dances around speculation that Miller herself might be a target of Fitzgerald’s investigation, and that some feel her refusal to testify might indicate a desire to shield herself rather than Libby. The article does note that some “critics said The Times was protecting not a whistle-blower but an administration campaign intended to squelch dissent.”
Below: AN UNFLATTERING PORTRAIT OF JUDITH MILLER’S REPORTING …
AN UNFLATTERING PORTRAIT OF JUDITH MILLER’S REPORTING
Neither Judith Miller’s personality nor the veracity of her reporting emerge unscathed in the Times article:
On Miller’s uncritical reporting about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capabilities:
When no evidence 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 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.”
Miller does not defend her reporting:
“W.M.D. – I got it totally wrong,” she said.
But nor does she accept responsibility for the flawed reporting. She suggests, as she has elsewhere, that it is her sources who are to blame, not her failure to question or further investigate the validity of what they were feeding her:
“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.”
“We have everything to be proud of and nothing to apologize for,” Ms. Miller said in the interview Friday.
AND AN UNFLATTERING PORTRAIT OF JUDITH MILLER:
Excerpts from the article:
- 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…”
- Douglas Frantz, who succeeded Mr. Engelberg as investigative editor, recalled that Ms. Miller once called herself “Miss Run Amok.” [meaning] “’I can do whatever I want.” [Yet it was not until ten months later, on May 26, 2004 that Executive Editor Bill Keller published] “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.”
While the Times article does not question Miller’s veracity outright, it is implicit that Miller stretched the truth in at least one instance:
It is not clear why Ms. Miller said in an interview that she “made a strong recommendation to my editor” that the [Plame] story be pursued. “I was told no,” she said. She would not identify the editor
But…
Ms. Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation.
And when asked about a report in The Washington Post [that] 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,” …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.”
POOR COVERAGE AND OBSTRUCTION AT THE TIMES”
While the Times article paints a picture of a newspaper working diligently to protect and stand by its reporter, it is clear that the upper hierarchy at the Times was, in the process, consciously protecting a high-level government official who might well have committed a serious crime and compromised national security by outing Valerie Plame.
Miller was subpoenaed by the grand jury in August 2004, and “It was in these early days that Mr. Keller and [Times publisher Arthur] Sulzberger Jr., learned Mr. Libby’s identity.” There can be little doubt that publication of this information could have seriously damaged the Bush administration in the midst of a Presidential campaign. It might well have influenced the outcome of the election. That it was a major news story is undeniable. Yet “neither man asked Ms. Miller detailed questions about her conversations with Mr. Libby.” And “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,” despite realizing that 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.”
The case would make its way through the courts for nearly a year while the Times kept its knowledge of a possible criminal conspiracy involving the Vice President’s chief of staff from the public. In fact, the Times went to extraordinary lengths to keep its own reporters from reporting on this story:
While the paper’s leaders were rallying around Ms. Miller’s cause in public, inside The New York 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.
The Times even killed stories that might have shed some light on the case:
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.
And even when Judith Miller’s own resolve began to erode, key decision-makers at the Times encouraged her to maintain her resistance:
While [Miller attorney Robert S.] Bennett urged Ms. Miller to test the waters, some of her other lawyers were counseling caution. Mr. Freeman, The Times’s company lawyer, and [Floyd] 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…
Judith Miller apparently felt otherwise fearing an extended incarcerartion: “I realized… at that point, I might really be locked in.” (Clearly this contradicts Miller’s public insistence that she relented only after Fitzgerald accepted her conditions — Jpol).
PRESSURE FROM THE TOP TO CONCEAL:
While the Times article in no way concedes that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was directing the Times coverage, there can be little doubt where he stood. He knew early on that Miller was protecting Libby.
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…
It is hard to believe that Sulzberger’s aggressive involvement in the Times’ editorial stance did not spill over into the news coverage (or lack thereof) even though the Times does not suggest that in this article.
The Times leaves the issue of why Miller refused to testify dangling. Miller insists that she thought Libby’s waver was coerced while Libby and his attorney insist it was not, and that they had told Miller’s attorney that from the beginning. Her notes clearly show that she had several meetings and conversations with Libby in which both Joseph Wilson and/or his wife Valerie Plame (or “Flame” in Miller’s notebook) were discussed beginning on June 23, 2003 – two weeks before Wilson publicly challenged the administration’s claim that Saddam had tried to buy yellow cake from Niger.
In at least one instance Floyd Abrams seems to delicately avoid calling his client a liar: “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.’ ”
But Abrams version is rather more benign: “On more than one occasion, Mr. Tate asked me for a recitation of what Ms. Miller would say. I did not provide one.”
While Libby and Tate clearly have a vested interest in claiming that they had long ago given Miller a non-coerced waver, the judge in the case clearly agreed from the beginning.:
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 expired on Oct. 28.
“She has the keys to release herself,” the judge said. “She has a waiver she chooses not to recognize.”
There are reasons to believe that Libby did want Miller to limit her testimony including “a folksy, conversational two-page letter dated Sept. 15” from Libby to Miller that many feel was laced with code, and that Libby apparently never thought would be made public. In it he assures 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.’ “ He sent it three days after Patrick Fitzgerald urged him to reiterate his waver to Miller in a tangible way.
Even now, it is far from clear that Judith Miller is coming clean either with the Times or with the grand jury:
Where did the name “Valerie Flame” (sic) come from?: “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.
” 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 Oct. 7, shortly before Ms. Miller was to conduct a telephone interview with two Times reporters [she reacted furiously to ] “a four-page memorandum” calling it a “script”…. and nearly canceling the interview…”
Where this story will go from here is anybody’s guess. We have only the assurances of Judith Miller that she is not a target of Fitzgerald’s inquiry and does not face indictment. Miller insists that her stand was justified, if misunderstood: “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.”
Many at the Times remain unconvinced: “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.”
And what of Miller? The Times implies that Miller has a home at the Times, but Raw Story suggests otherwise:
While few are talking to the outside, the newsroom is abuzz with gossip surrounding the case. At least two reporters say they’ve heard that Miller plans to resign after the paper runs their examination… According to the Huffington Post, Miller has inked a $1.2 million deal for a tell-all expose. [The Times confirms that Miller is considering a book, but claims she does not yet have a book contract].
