"Ms. Miller’s revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.
This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised. It is all the more puzzling that a reporter who as a matter of principle would sacrifice 85 days of her freedom to protect a source would so willingly agree to be officially muzzled and thereby deny potentially valuable information to the readers whose right to be informed she claims to value so highly.
One must assume that Ms. Miller was required to sign a standard and legally binding agreement that she would never divulge classified information to which she became privy, without risk of criminal prosecution. And she apparently plans to adhere to the letter of that self-censorship deal; witness her dilemma at being unable to share classified information with her editors."
Folks who still adhere to the "koolaid" version of history profess to despise the New York Times. They see the Times as a bastion of leftist influence in America. I don’t care for the Times much myself but in my case it is because it is a New York newspaper, a different complaint.
Judy Miller is/was part of the conspiracy that Mr Fitzgerald is investigating. That is why she is
"playing games" with him. She has to camouflage a couple of things, but this is just opinion on my part:
1-She was an active participant in the plot to smear the Wilsons and discredit them in the eyes of the American people. She still is. Why? I really don’t know or am unwilling to give an opinion.
2-She used the NY Times as a vehicle for propagandizing the American people to whip them up for the Iraq war on the basis that Iraq was, in effect, Nazi Germany come again, and that this time the pseudo Nazis were going to provide the Jihadi nuts across the world with nuclear weapons with which to attack us at home. To obfuscate this point of performance, she went to jail for contempt hoping to emerge from this "soulless" place (down the street from my house in Alexandria and run by one of my neighbors, the sheriff) as a champion of press freedom for whom all would be forgiven.
She should be indicted along with her neocon Jacobin and Mayberry Machiavellian pals. They were all in this together.
She called me up once at the point in history at which her BS about the Iraqi WMD program was falling apart. She tried to get me to "sign up" to the idea that "it must have been true." I told her that I did not wish to participate in her fantasy life. She was disappointed. Given Wilson’s experience, I have to wonder what she was trying to "set me up for."
Just my opinion.
Pat Lang
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001306732
Thanks be to the Ineffable she hath so few redeeming qualities.
In that we are fortunate.
So, I understand she went to jail for 85 days to protect the identity of a source she can’t recall?
Sounds like that old Nixon-era “modified limited hang out” to me.
A couple of thoughts:
1. Judy Miller is clearly a master manipulator. Just look at how she manipulated the management at the NY Times and in the process did great damage to that paper.
2. She is definately playing games with the special prosecutor. She told him and the grand jury that she couldn’t remember who gave her the name “Valerie Flame”. She obtained this name shortly before Novak wrote his column outing Wilson’s wife. There is NO WAY that she would have forgotten who gave her the name. She is lying to the special prosecutor. That is a very dangerous thing to do. Why is she doing it? It doesn’t make sense to me that it is to protect Libby since she has already burned him with her other testimony. I think it has to be someone else she is protecting. It may be that she has another source that she doesn’t want to give up, but she also doesn’t want to go back to jail. Her supposed agreement with the prosecutor to limit her testimony to Libby not withstanding, she may have decided to claim poor memory rather than chance another showdown that could either force her back to jail or force her to give up a second source who did not give her a waiver. If she did the latter, she couldn’t claim to be standing up for the journalistic principle of protecting her sources.
Fitzgerald won’t go after her because in the end she is a small fish – a journalist who didn’t even write a story. Her culpability is limited to any perjurious statements and/or obstructive behavior. She is the only person to go to jail so far.
Sure, it appears as if she forgot her role as a journalist and acted as a propagandist. Bad on her, fire her, excoriate her, she deserves it all.
When you are getting ready to indict some of the most powerful political figures in the country, the interest in Judy Miller is simply as a supporting witness. We still don’t know what she told Fitzgerald. We have no reason to believe whatever she told us was the full truth and/or all the news that is fit to print…
Anybody has opinion about Judy having some security clearance? Is there a way to check this? Cause this can explain a lot of Judy’s weird behavior.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_10_16_atrios_archive.html#112957117673288845
Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Washington
Post’s Barton Gellman overlapped in the unit for a day, Miller instructed
its members that they couldn¹t talk with him. According to Pomeroy, ‘She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn’t.’ (One other witness confirms this account.)
Very right-on commentary about Judy. She’s not helping anybody by her behavior, not even herself. Her myopia is as tragic as her co-horts.
The NYT still has plenty of good reporters, but after Jason Blair and Judy, their trust capital has certainly been affected.
Did Miller have clearance?: Rep. John Conyers wants to know
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/19513/419
October 17, 2005
The Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld
Secretary
Department of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301-1000
Dear Mr. Secretary:
We write about reports that journalists who were embedded with U.S. forces in Iraq were given security clearances. In her recounting of discussions with Scooter Libby, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, disclosed her belief that she had a security clearance. She specifically wrote, “[d]uring the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment `embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” She also noted she was not certain whether her clearance was in existence at the time she met with Mr. Libby.