T H E H U F F I N G T O N P O S T

This week, the White House rolled out Harriet Miers version 1.2, Tom DeLay smiled for the mug shot cameras (call it a "smugshot"), and Judy Miller revealed a heretofore undetected sense of humor when she accepted a First Amendment Award on Tuesday. Here is a collection of posts I wrote this week about the Miller/New York Times/ Plamegate story.

Dangerous New Conventional Wisdom Forming Off the East Coast
Posted October 20, 2005 at 3:25 p.m. EDT

Here's a newly minted bit of MSM groupthink that needs to be stamped out before it congeals into conventional wisdom: that only people on the left are upset about the way the White House used lies and deception to lead us into a reckless and unnecessary war. A sub-version of this is that the only people upset about Judy Miller and Plamegate are anti-war types who care about the role Miller and the neocons played in helping the Bush White House market the war.

This nugget first hit my radar screen Tuesday night. I was on CNN being interviewed by Aaron Brown (in my experience, one of the best interviewers in the business), when, to my surprise, he suddenly suggested that "a lot of the animosity that's being directed towards Ms. Miller, a lot of the hits she's taken...are just simply coming from the left, people opposed to the war...[and] what was clearly flawed reporting leading up to the war."

I thought it was an isolated incident. But there I was this morning, still on my first venti latte, reading Howard Kurtz's column, when I came upon the nugget again. After quoting Miller's assertion that people are "upset about the war in Iraq, about the Bush administration; they want to know whether they were misled into this war," Kurtz wrote: "She's right... the passion, especially on the left, is driven by the war."

So what are you saying guys -- that only lefties "want to know whether they were misled into this war"? And that those on the right are perfectly okay with being lied to?

Nonsense.

Some of the strongest opponents of the war in Iraq are on the right -- people like Bill Buckley, Pat Buchanan, and conservatives in Congress like Sen. Chuck Hagel, and Rep. Walter Jones. They too are pretty "upset" and "passionate" about the war.

So is Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff, who spoke yesterday about how the Cheney/Rumsfeld "cabal" hijacked US foreign policy and "courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran."

Here's the bottom line: a recent poll showed that 50 percent of Americans say Congress should consider impeaching Bush if it turns out he "did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq." Fifty percent -- they can't all be card carrying members of MoveOn.

So come on Aaron and Howie (and anyone else preparing to pick up the thread), let's put an end to this "it's only the left" stuff here and now.

That dog won't hunt.



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Memo to Bill Keller: The War in Iraq is NOT a "Loose End"
Posted October 19, 2005 at 7:52 p.m. EDT

In the memo he sent to his staff earlier this week, Bill Keller, who is traveling in China, wrote, "When I get back I'll still have some important loose ends to tie up from this episode."

And what might those be? Find out who was Judy Miller's "other source"? Find out which phantom editor rejected Miller's "strong recommendation" that an article be written about Joe and Valerie Wilson? Find out why officials from the CIA, the DIA, and the Pentagon all say they have no idea what Miller was talking about when she claimed she had "security clearance"?

And then there is the mother of all "loose ends": how Miller and the Times served as accomplices in the White House's "marketing" of the war in Iraq. Because, in the end, that's what Plamegate has always been about.

In May 2004, in the Times' mea culpa for its criminally inaccurate WMD coverage, the paper said: "We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight."

In the ensuing 17 months they've done nothing of the sort. Indeed, the Miller "episode" -- and Arthur Sulzberger's decision to give Judy the wheel of the Times car -- made the paper of record even less aggressive, something Keller himself admitted when he told staffers this week: "With any luck you can resume your undistracted, full-throttle pursuit of putting out the best news report in the world."

It's time for the Times to reengage in "aggressive reporting."

And this would be a particularly opportune time to do so, with indictments likely and a growing chorus of MSM voices reaffirming the bigger Plamegate picture:

Howard Kurtz: "It's the war, of course. We're re-fighting the war through this case."
Howard Fineman: "We're going to reargue the run-up to the war in Iraq, and the aftermath of it."
Chris Matthews: "If [Fitzgerald] does prosecute... it will be a WMD story. It will be a casus belli story."
Frank Rich: "What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy... that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war."

Of course, this is not the first opportunity we, as a nation, have had to delve into the administration lies that took us into the debacle in Iraq. In fact, the stench of White House deception has wafted up many times -- both during the run up to the war and after the flowers that were supposed to be tossed at our feet were supplanted by IEDs.

We could have had a sustained national discussion back in May 2002, when Time published an article describing Cheney as saying that "the question was no longer if the U.S. would attack Iraq... the only question was when," and offering that "Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an [Iraq] attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed."

We could have had a sustained national discussion in July 2003, when, following publication of Joe Wilson's op-ed, a firestorm broke out regarding the president's use of the Niger/Saddam uranium connection in his 2003 State of the Union speech, even though the bogus claim had been thoroughly discredited many times over. The administration fanatics so badly wanted it to be true they refused to let it die the death it deserved (still wonder why the White House wanted to discredit Wilson?)

We could have had a sustained national discussion in January 2004, when Paul O'Neill let it be known that invading Iraq had been Bush's goal before he had even learned where the Oval Office supply closet was, just 10 days after the president was inaugurated. "It was all about finding a way to do it," O'Neill said. "That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'"

We could have had a sustained national discussion in March 2004, when Richard Clarke published "Against All Enemies," painting a devastating portrait of an administration teeming with zealots for whom evidence is little more than an obstacle on the path to greater glory: "'Look,'" Clarke quoted Bush as saying on the day after 9/11, "'I know you have a lot to do and all, but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.' 'But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this.' 'I know, I know -- but see if Saddam was involved. Just look...'"

We could have had a sustained national discussion in April 2004, when Bob Woodward published "Plan of Attack," which showed a vice-president so obsessed with linking Saddam to 9/11 that no piece of intelligence that supported his hypothesis was deemed too unreliable to be used. Cheney was like an al Qaeda alchemist, converting shards of faulty intel into golden reason for pre-emptive war. It also revealed how Colin Powell -- further out of the war loop than Prince Bandar -- made like a Good Soldier when the president asked him to carry his sample vial of anthrax at the UN, and set out to hoodwink the world.

And we could have had a sustained national discussion in May of this year when the Downing Street Memo story hit, and we learned that, in July 2002, Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, had reported that in Washington "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

For a variety of reasons -- including a spineless opposition and a go-along media -- the debate never took hold.

But things have changed. Emboldened by their work on Katrina, many in the media have rediscovered their balls (sadly, the same can't be said yet for the leaders of the Democratic Party). Plus, the post-Katrina reality makes it harder for the utter recklessness and incompetence of the Bush administration to be ignored. There is also a greatly invigorated blogosphere, Bush's plummeting approval rating, the cloud of corruption hovering over the GOP, the ongoing chaos in Iraq, and the fast-approaching milestone of 2,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq.

In Dante's "Inferno," deceivers are sentenced to have their souls encased in flames, hypocrites are forced to wear a cloak weighted with lead, and those who use their powers of persuasion for insidious ends are doomed to suffer a continual fever so intense that their body sizzles and smokes like a steak tossed on a George Foreman grill. Maybe Satan will give Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby and their accomplices at the New York Times a three-afflictions-for-the-price-of-one deal.

There is nothing more immoral in the life of a nation than waging an unnecessary war -- which Iraq surely is. It is time for America to confront the terrible truth that we have allowed ourselves to be blinded to. And it is way past time for those that led us into that war, from the White House Iraq Group to Judy Miller and the New York Times , to be held accountable for their actions.

That's one hell of a "loose end."



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The Times Judy-Culpa: Random Thoughts and Unanswered Questions
Posted October 19, 2005 at 2:07 p.m. EDT

Sources close to New York Times public editor Barney Calame tell me that he is doing some "very vigorous reporting within the paper" for his upcoming column about the Judy Miller stories that appeared on Sunday (The New York Observer has been doing some great reporting on this too).

I have been reexamining the stories myself, like a Talmudic scholar inspecting each word of the ancient text looking for hidden meanings. I have yet to find the illumination I seek. But I have accumulated a growing collection of random thoughts and even more unanswered questions.

Here are a few of them, along with the excerpts that inspired them:

"Inside her cell in the Alexandria Detention Center this summer, Ms. Miller was able to peer through a narrow concrete slit to get an obstructed view of a maple tree and a concrete highway barrier. She was losing weight and struggling to sleep on two thin mats on a concrete slab."

Was she there long enough to find out whether maple trees also turn in clusters? And isn't "two thin mats on a concrete slab" Secret Service code for "Rove, Libby, and Cheney"?

"Every day, she checked outdated copies of The Times for a news article about her case. Most days she was disappointed."

Just like Times readers check the paper every day for articles that will finally tell the truth about Miller's and the Times ' role in Plamegate. And every day -- including this past Sunday -- they are disappointed.

"Mr. Freeman, The Times's company lawyer, and Mr. 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."

They were right, of course. Though the cave-in that really mattered was three years ago, when Miller and the Times became willing accomplices in the administration's plans to sell a war based on lies and deceptions.

"Ms. Miller said she was persuaded [after she spoke to Libby]: 'There was kind of like an expression of genuine concern and sorrow.'"

It's the same feeling I get whenever I see Judy Miller's byline.

"Mr. Keller said he learned about the 'Valerie Flame' notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday."

In addition, Sulzberger learned about Nick and Jessica's breakup only yesterday. According to Times ' sources, the revelation has left him "angry and bewildered."

"'This car had [Miller's] hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk,' Mr. Sulzberger said."

Reminder to Sulzberger: Friends don't let friends drive when they're drunk on power and access.

"Ms. Miller said the publisher's support was invaluable. 'He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff,' she said. 'He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me.'"

Can't you just imagine the follow-up line: "Then I showed him my scoops, and he showed me his nut graphs. It was magical."

"It was in these early days that Mr. Keller and Mr. Sulzberger learned Mr. Libby's identity. Neither man asked Ms. Miller detailed questions about her conversations with him."

Keller and Sulzberger had stopped asking Judy detailed questions a long time ago. Why should they start now? If Chalabi passes your smell test, why turn up your nose at Libby?

"'I didn't interrogate her about the details of the [Libby] interview,' Mr. Keller said. 'I didn't ask to see her notes. And I really didn't feel the need to do that.'"

Good thinking, Bill. Reading a Judy Miller piece is a lot like eating sausage. It goes down easier if you don't know how it was made.

"'W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong,' [Miller] said. 'The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong.'"

Well, not quite "all." For starters, have a chat with recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei. You might learn something about the value of extending your source Rolodex beyond the confines of your neocon clubhouse.

"[Miller] said she hopes to cover 'the same thing I've always covered -- threats to our country.'"

In other words, a personal column.

"Ms. Miller said she was proud of her journalism career, including her work on Al Qaeda, biological warfare and Islamic militancy. But she acknowledged serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons."

Hey, who hasn't had a screw up or two at work that helped lead a nation into war?

"Asked what she regretted about The Times's handling of the matter, Jill Abramson, a managing editor, said: 'The entire thing.'"

Join the club.



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Judy Miller's Reporting: A Cancer on the New York Times ?
Posted October 17, 2005 at 7:15 p.m. EDT

Signs of trouble and Judy Miller were like Mary and her little lamb. Everywhere that Judy went, a flashing warning sign was sure to follow.

Indeed, in looking back on her career, it's clear that there were more red flags popping up around Judy Miller's work as a journalist than at a May Day parade in Red Square.

We now know that Miller's bosses were being warned about serious credibility problems with her reporting as far back as 2000 -- a warning that came from a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller who was so disturbed by her journalistic methods he took the extraordinary step of writing a warning memo to his editors and then asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on.

In today's WaPo, Howard Kurtz quotes from a December 2000 memo sent by Craig Pyes, a two time Pulitzer winner who had worked with Miller on a series of Times stories on al-Qaeda.

"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller... I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies," and "tried to stampede it into the paper."

It's the journalistic equivalent of Dean telling Nixon that Watergate was "a cancer on the presidency." But while the Times corrected the specific stories Pyes was concerned about, the paper, like Nixon, ignored the long-term diagnosis. And, of course, the very same issues Pyes raised in 2000 -- Miller's questionable judgment, her advocacy, her willingness to take dictation from government sources -- were the ones that reappeared in Miller's pre-war "reporting" on Saddam's WMD.

And Pyes wasn't the only one at the Times raising concerns about Miller's reporting. As Roger Cohen, who was foreign editor at the time of Miller's WMD reporting, put it in Sunday's article: "I told her there was unease, discomfort, unhappiness over some of the coverage." And as has been reported by New York Magazine's Franklin Foer, Cohen did not express his concerns only to Miller: "During the run-up to the war, investigations editor Doug Franz and foreign editor Roger Cohen went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller's over-reliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions... But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed management's faith in her by putting her stories on page 1."

Franz and Cohen's visits (piled on top of the Pyes memo) are eerily reminiscent of the email Jon Landman sent regarding Jayson Blair, in which he wrote "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now." Here it was a number of respected journalists all but pleading: "We have to stop Judy from reporting for the Times. Right now."

But, instead, Miller was allowed to keep doing pretty much whatever she pleased. In fact, as a journalistic insider told me: "Howell Raines was thrilled with Judy's WMD coverage, however credulous, because it allowed the Times to slough off the liberal label and present themselves as born again tough hawks -- perfect for the post-9/11 zeitgeist." That was Raines. What was Keller's excuse?

Because perhaps the most damning admission in the Times' quasi-self-examination was Keller's pathetic claim that, despite being removed from her WMD beat, Miller "kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm." "Kept kind of drifting on her own"? When did the Times stop being edited?

So Miller was very questionable goods. And everyone knew it. Yet this is the person they chose to rally behind, body and soul. And reputation.

The Times is in the midst of severe cutbacks, laying off 200 workers earlier in the year, with another 500 to come. "The paper is cracking down on expenses to such an extent," a Times staffer told me, "all travel now has to be approved by an editor. Used to be, if a story broke, a national correspondent could just book a flight and go -- and not have to wait six hours to get the trip approved. Now you need to have the agreement of an editor saying, 'Yes, this story is worth spending the money on, go'. That's a very big change for the New York Times . Yet the paper's management chose to spend millions of dollars in legal fees defending Judy Miller."

It's an utter disgrace, and an integral part of the paper's disastrous WMD coverage, which is without a doubt the blackest mark in the paper's long history.

And yet, even after all that we've learned, the Judy-ites continue to defend her.

"Judy has always been a pioneer and an agent of change." That was Tom Friedman on CNN. Yesterday. Hadn't he read his paper's story and Judy's laughable companion piece? Or maybe by "agent of change" he meant someone who has changed the culture of integrity at the Times to its polar opposite.

Tom Friedman -- and anyone else still hanging out at Camp Judy (I notice we haven't heard from Lou Dobbs or Tom Brokaw since the Judy-culpa came out) -- really need to update their talking points. Maybe they can all chip in and get a group rate on a good rewrite man. I suggest looking for a writer with a background in novels -- because trying to present Judy as anything even remotely resembling a journalist will now require someone very adept at crafting fiction.



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TimesSelective: Judy-Culpa Raises More Questions Than It Answers... [UPDATED]
Posted October 15, 2005 at 6:04 p.m. EDT

The first question raised by the Times ' Judy-Culpa and by Judy Miller's own account is: Who told Judy about Valerie Plame (or "Flame" as the name appears in Judy's notes)? According to these two pieces, the name was immaculately conceived. "As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from," Miller writes.

When the Plame case broke open in July 2003, these notes were presumably no more than a few weeks old. But who had revealed Plame's name was not seared on Miller's mind?

This is as believable as Woodward and Bernstein not recalling who Deep Throat was. It also means that Judy went to jail to protect a source she can't recall.

Update: Not Since Geraldo Cracked Open that Vault...

Now that I have spent a few hours absorbing this latest installment in the ongoing soap opera "Desperate Editors," I can safely say that not since Geraldo cracked open Al Capone's vault has there been a bigger anticlimax or a bigger sham. After all, the question everybody has been asking is: who was the source who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Judy Miller?

And the answer? She can't remember.

Given the "gee-whiz, it all just sort of, like, happened, and I don't know when or why or where or who..." tone of her mea no culpa , maybe Judy is vying for a role on MTV's "Laguna Beach."

Which is just as well, because if these two articles have revealed anything at all, it's that Judy Miller is no journalist.

Judy Miller: A Victory for Journalism?

The Times articles are inconclusive about a lot of issues, but they are devastatingly conclusive about Miller as a journalist -- including, the confirmation that, within a few weeks of assuming the editorship of the Times, "in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues," and including the Times ' long-delayed acknowledgement that 5 of the 6 articles in its WMD mea culpa "were written or co-written by Ms. Miller."

Here are some more problems about Miller as a journalist:

Her account of her meetings with Libby shows how off-target her journalistic radar was. Is it because of how off-target her loyalties were? Here is a quote: "My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative..." My notes show? Wasn't she there?

One thing we do know about Judy Miller is that she's no dummy. Whether or not Libby said the words "Valerie Plame," and whether or not Libby knew or revealed that Plame was covert, it's inconceivable that Miller did not know what was going on: a high-level administration official was trying to smear a critic of the administration. That's news. That's something the readers of the New York Times --and the American people -- deserved to know, and yet she did nothing with the information. Indeed, she still calls Libby a "good-faith source who was usually straight with me." Was it an example of Scooter being straight with Judy (and the public) that he asked to be described not as "a senior administration official" (as was their "prior understanding") but as a "former Hill staffer"? "I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill." Mr. Libby had also once been to high school. So how about "former high school student" to really disguise the identity of the White House henchman from her readers?

And here are some questions for Miller's editors:

Did Miller mislead them when she denied that she was one of the journalists to whom White House officials disclosed Plame's identity? Here's the quote from today's article:

"In the fall of 2003, after The Washington Post 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."

If she denied it falsely, is there any journalistic institution in the United States that would keep on a reporter who is dishonest to her editors?

Also, in her interview with the Times reporters, Miller says that she made a strong recommendation that a story be pursued on Joe Wilson, but that her editor rejected it. Problem is, Miller refuses to identify the editor. Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, says it was not her. So who was it? And why is Miller refusing to supply the name of the editor? It's not classified. It does not require a waiver. What journalistic rules is she abiding by?

And how overidentified with her sources was she that she felt she "was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information" from Libby about Iraq because of the government security clearance she had?

And here is a question for Abramson: she said that she regrets "the entire thing." Can she elucidate what aspects of "the entire thing" she specifically regrets?

Is Anybody Clearer Now About Why Miller Went to Jail?

It is clear from the two Times pieces that Miller did not go to jail because she did not have a voluntary waiver from Scooter Libby -- who, incidentally, we should stop referring to as her source since, according to Miller, he was not the one who revealed to her Valerie Plame's name.

For months, Miller and the Times pooh-poohed waivers, their position most clearly presented by Bill Safire when he testified before Congress on July 20th: "I don't have to pussyfoot about this, because it's a matter of principle. I think waivers of confidentiality are a sham, a snare and a delusion."

Contrary to this stance, it becomes obvious from both Times pieces that Miller was not standing on any lofty principle when she went to jail. As soon as criminal contempt charges or the empanelment of a new grand jury became real possibilities, she chose to do what she could have done before going to jail: reach out to Libby to get a verbal confirmation from him. Even Sulzberger, Judy's staunchest supporter, can no longer utter a ringing endorsement of her: "Maybe a deal was possible earlier... If so, shame on us. I tend to think not." I tend to think not? Is that the best he can do? After the endless absurdities that appeared on the Times editorial page about Judy the Martyr, including, "If she is not willing to testify after 41 days, then she is not willing to testify"?

On Meaningful Sources

Miller refuses to say -- both to the Times reporters and in her own sham of an account -- who else she discussed Valerie Plame with.

Yet, according to today's story, "Mr. Bennett, who by now had carefully reviewed Ms. Miller's extensive notes taken from two interviews with Mr. Libby, assured Mr. Fitzgerald that Ms. Miller had only one meaningful source. Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questions to Mr. Libby and the Wilson matter."

In what way was Libby the only "one meaningful source," if he didn't leak Plame's identity to Miller? Whoever gave Miller Plame's name was a pretty damned meaningful source. Although evidently not meaningful enough for her to remember who it was.

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