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