Oh Judy!

[From the diaries by susanhu. Fascinating, sybil!]




From Raw Story

Judith Miller wanted to write an OpEd defending herself against charges of “entanglement” with sources among other things but the NY Times refused.

Instead she was allowed to write a letter to the editor, a long letter to the editor. She scooped her own letter to the editor in the New York Times using her own website.

She also had an interview with RAW STORY and with the Washington Post, below…




The Reporter’s Last Take
[choice bits]
[…]a parade of Judys appears. Outraged Judy. Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Wise Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the star New York Times reporter turned beleaguered victim of the gossipmongers and some journalists who have made her “sick to death of the regurgitation of lies and easily checkable falsehoods.” That’s why she’s agreed to talk.
[…]
It goes on like this for three hours. She answers questions — or refuses. She turns the tables, asking about her interviewer’s life. She takes calls. She grabs the tape recorder. She waxes eloquent, even in anger. At times, tears well up. There’s something frantic about her — not vulnerable, mind you, for that’s the last thing she is.
[…]
She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

The story was too soft, she complained — and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.
[…]
“But I will make no apologies for my continuous commitment, my desire to pursue stories about threats to our country,” she says emphatically, almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears. [end, sob, sob]

As for her promotion of the invasion of Iraq, she is using the White House talking point of “faulty intelligence.”

Even before I went to jail, I had become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war. Several articles I wrote or co-wrote were based on this faulty intelligence. [from her NYTimes Letter to the Editor and the world]

Come on Judy, people are getting killed in a war that you encouraged. Have you got any solutions for “the Iraq problem?” Don’t go away mad, don’t go away protecting your self, make some atonement by working to end the slaughter over there that you helped to start based on your reporting. Yeah, yeah, we know, it wasn’t your fault, it was “faulty intelligence.”

24 thoughts on “Oh Judy!”

  1. Everything you have said and more!!!!!!!!!! I agree she needs to slither under any rock she came from.  She is not worth the words to send her to hell.  I detest someone such as she.  God have mercy on her soul, is all I can say.  She has much blood on her hands and she should reflect on this for the rest of her natural life.

    Every reporter should look on Judy ans see what kind of person she is and try to decide is she is a hero or a devil and then decide what kind of reporter they want to be.  NO one is any worse than she is/was and continues to be.

    1. Dear Maureen, I’m glad you always liked me. But in the interests of journalistic accuracy at a very sensitive time for The Times and for me, I wish you had checked some of these damaging assertions about me before you printed them. If you had, there are seven specific mistakes you could have avoided. As important, you could have avoided creating a false and damaging impression that I had tried to cover up for a crime, or that I had convenient memory lapses at the behest of the administration.

      I actually did not pick up the inferences that Judy got really cozy with her sources until I read the WaPo article which details Judy’s coziness.

      Judy “the volcano” is also well known by colleagues for her eruptions and abuse of employees.

      Now what about those notes referring to an earlier meeting with Liddy that Judy “forgot” about? That keeps sticking in my mind because I believe that more than anything is the cause for her dismissal at the NYTimes. She must have lost what little support she had when that news came out.

    2. I was going to mention this and that I think it’s Larry King. I never make it too far into his program but I might try this one.

  4. I listened to Maureen on Fresh Air yesterday afternoon while running around with shopping.  I wasn’t impressed.  She’s another ‘all about me’ person.  What is it with these people?  Maybe I’m getting too old, but in my time (Kennedy administration) we actually judged people on what they did, not who they were.

    1. Funny you should mention that.  Gene Lyons wrote a very critical column about Dowd yesterday:

      Everywhere you look, there’s the Shyest Woman in Washington, demurely avoiding the spotlight. That would be Maureen Dowd, the acerbic New York Times columnist, promoting her new book, “Are Men Necessary?” An excerpt in the Sunday Magazine was illustrated by a photo of the author perched elegantly on a barstool, wearing basic black, red stiletto pumps and fishnet stockings. She gazes coolly into the camera as if to say, “Forget it, big boy. You can’t afford me.” Elsewhere, Dowd appeared on “Imus in the Morning,” got profiled in The Washington Post, and in New York magazine by Ariel Levy, who called her “the most dangerous columnist in America.” In return, Dowd plugged Levy’s book, “Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,” in an online chat with readers. It’s called networking, but it’s ordinarily done more subtly. Nobody begrudges Dowd the attention. It’s just funny to hear her friends carry on about the pundit’s bashfulness when she’s on TV all the time.

      “When she appeared on `Letterman’ to promote her first book, `Bushworld,’ in 2004,” Levy writes, “she wore a little black dress with spaghetti straps, and with her red hair fluffed in an Old Hollywood wave…. `You look tremendous, and I guess you must be going somewhere after this because nobody gets this nicely dressed for me,’ Letterman told her. `I did,’ she breathed. `I’ve been in love with you forever.'”

      OK, so Letterman’s a big on-screen flirt, too. Kool Mo D, as I’ve called Dowd since she emerged as queen of the Washington “Heathers” during the Clinton years, was just playing along. But what would she write about a public figure who made her career lampooning the personal foibles of politicians, but insisted that her own intimate life was nobody’s business, then invited magazine writers into her home to explore it?

      She’d say that person was confused.

      What’s significant about Dowd’s confusion is how it illuminates the paradoxical rise of the celebrity pundit, journalists who achieve sublunary stardom by treating politics as “infotainment,” appearing on TV and copping an attitude. Her witty eviscerations of President Bush would be more persuasive, however, had she not also mocked Al Gore as “the teacher’s pet from hell,” Bill Clinton as “the Animal House president,” etc. Back then, Dowd treated Bush as a down-to-earth alternative to the humorless Gore.

      John Kerry was a dork, too. Dowd and her cohorts treat presidential politics like a TV dating game. Heaven help the first woman presidential candidate. No outfit, no hairstyle, no speech mannerisms exist which cannot be mocked.

      “[W ] hile it was great entertainment to read her verbal shanking of [fellow New York Times reporter ] Judy Miller,” comments blogger DCMediaGirl at dcmediagirl. com, “let me say that I found her bitchy, veiled, disapproving reference to Miller’s `relationships’ with powerful men to be a bit rich.” The reference is to Dowd’s romances with people like actor Michael Douglas and “West Wing” impresario Aaron Sorkin. …

  6. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

    The story was too soft, she complained — and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.

    How did this woman keep her job as long as she did?

    1. Isn’t that stunning.

      How long has she been an “operative” of sorts, or officially?

      But wouldn’t an operative be a bit more subtle than to make those kinds of calls, and to quote Lee Atwater?

      Wuoldn’t a more clever approach be, “I’ve read the Dukakis draft, and must say that it seems to be a bit less objective than it might be….”  or something like that?

      1. It’s pretty fascinating. You have to wonder what goes on this woman’s mind that she thinks she can use Lee Atwater’s, and by extension the President’s, authority to pull rank on a senior editor. As if the Times should have to answer to the White House. It’s an awfully strange mindset for a member of the fourth estate. She’s a glorified stenographer. She calls herself a patriot, but she’s really a statist like the rest of her neo-con ilk. But what the hell was going on with the Times that someone could get away with such total a total lack of professionalism for so long?

    2. If I was her boss, that would have been her last day.

      And if I was prevented by the next level higher from firing her, I’d have replied “You have put me in an untenable situation.  Please take this as my 2 weeks notice.”  (In fact, I have made statements like that.  Does wonders to focus your bosses’ attention, or to clarify to yourself that it’s time to move on…)

      If her boss(es) didn’t have the spine to take that kind of decisive action, they deserve – they encourage – they enable – they help create – employees like Judy.

      It’s called insubordination, folks.

      Anyplace I’ve ever worked undermining your own organization and leaking confidential company information (the story was not yet published) were cause for termination.

      Hell, they fire the Budweiser truck driver for drinking a Coors in public.  Oh yeah – those standards only apply to the “little people…”

  9. Darling Judy, how dreadful that you, an intrepid journalist who went to jail to protect criminal gossipmongers would now fall victim to the same.  Can’t they see that you’re special?

    You’re right, you were never meant to be the story, only to sell the story.  And if there is justice for you in this cold, cruel world, you’ll never be the story again. Not even when you try to peddle your book on every talk show in America.

  10. .
    Lies may be capitalized :: LIES and advocate of the devil, strike that last word, advocate of neocon U.S. policy on WMD and Iraq, that cost more than 2,000 American lives and 100,000+ Iraqi lives.

    “In my future writing, I intend to call attention to the internal and external threats to our country’s freedoms – Al Qaeda and other forms of religious extremism, conventional and W.M.D. terrorism, and growing government secrecy in the name of national security – subjects that have long defined my work. “

    From her website —
    For information on her prosecution for refusing to reveal sources to …

    What the hell?
    Does Ms Miller think she is a martyr and victim of some sort of persecution? What a bullsh.. , she meets and surpasses all my expectations!

    From her statement and contradictio in termines, I have long believed Ms Miller is not mentally stable in her writings and does not know what she has wrought on her country, whichever nation that may be she believes she is supporting. She has a whole new career ahead of her, in the footsteps of Ollie North.

    Ms. Miller, 57, said in an interview that she was “very satisfied” with the agreement and described herself as a “free woman,” free from what she called the “convent of The New York Times, a convent with its own theology and its own catechism.”

    I do hope PF is not done with her as witness for more WH indictments.

    Fine, Judy didn’t screw Libby. Just the American public. Good riddance.

  11. Slate – Miller Time (Again)
    Feb. 12, 2004

    “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
    For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

    ▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

  12. WaPo:
    “”””
    There is something about Miller — something that seems like a crusade, a personal mission, against terror.
    To her critics, she’s an ideologue. She’s often criticized as a neoconservative, because she seems to have bought a policy line from particular sources because of an ideological kinship.
    Some point to Miller’s relationship just after Sept. 11, 2001, with Benador Associates, a conservative speaker’s bureau whose roster at that time included neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, a Reagan-era defense official. Miller says she was connected to Benador only briefly, and her one potential speaking engagement ultimately fell through.
    As further evidence that Miller toes a particular line, some point to Laurie Mylroie, Miller’s co-author in the 1990 book “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.” Mylroie, a policy pundit, has argued that Iraq was connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and to the attacks of 2001.
    Miller, when asked about this, says she does not agree with those theories.
    “I am not a neoconservative,” Miller says adamantly. She calls herself a centrist.
    “”””

    Yeah, and Iraq is full of WMDs too…

    The Neo-Clowns are thankfully in their last throes.

    1. Couldn’t Judith “I found more notes” Miller just come right out and say to the world “I am so sorry that I promoted the invasion of Iraq based on such flimsy lies.”

      after that, let’s hear if from war pimp Chris “I make things up” Hitchens.

  13. .

    Oui’s Chronicle – The Spider In The Web

    The CIA and the media by Carl Bernstein
    Rolling Stone – Oct. 20, 1977

    The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception . . . .

    Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, The Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.

    ● Judith Miller :: A Need To Know Basis
    ● Judith Miller :: Libya – Gaddafi – Poindexter

    ● Frontline :: Hunting Bin Laden – Interview Judith Miller
    A correspondent for The New York Times since 1977, she has covered Osama bin Laden since 1993. In this interview, conducted September 12, 2001, Miller discusses what was learned about bin Laden’s network from the trials of the 1998 U.S. embassy terrorists and from the failed series of terrorist attacks planned to coincide with the millennium celebrations. She also discusses the warnings prior to the September 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon and destruction of the World Trade Center.

    How Credible Is Your Source?!!   The New York Times

    REFERENCES —

    1. That Awful Power: How Judy Miller Screwed Us All
    2. United States Institute of Peace
    3. Middle East Forum
    4. CASE CONCLUSION :: NO SHADE OF DIFFERENCE
      JUDITH MILLER ACTING AS A CIA OPERATIVE
      JUST LIKE ARTHUR SULZBERGER BEFORE 1977.

    ● As Time Evolves :: Neocon Think – A DEEP THROAT?

    ● CIRCLE CLOSED :: Neocons – AIPAC – Shill Reporter ¶ Laurie Mylroie – Benador Associates

    ● Prosecutor Fitzgerald Zeroes In :: Cheney – CIA Feud!  

    “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
    For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

    ▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

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