[Mb-civic] Salon on Judy Miller

[Mike Blaxill]

It's Miller time

Salon editorial fellow Aaron Kinney looks at the
latest news about Times reporter Judy Miller.

Judy Miller isn't the only one who has discovered
previously undisclosed documents related to the
Plame investigation. As Michael Isikoff writes in
Newsweek, the attorney for Karl Rove found an
e-mail that Rove sent to Deputy National Security
Advisor Stephen Hadley on July 11, 2003, the same
day Rove talked to reporter Matthew Cooper of
Time magazine. The attorney, Robert Luskin,
claims the e-mail popped up after he employed a
new set of search terms while trolling for
electronic messages.

The e-mail, which Luskin said he discovered
sometime after Rove's testimony in 2004, was
crucial to the investigation of special counsel
Patrick Fitzgerald because it contradicted Rove's
statements to the FBI and the Plame grand jury,
in which he never mentioned his conversation with
the reporter, Isikoff writes.

As for Miller, the notes she turned over to the
grand jury after she testified less than two
weeks ago pertain to a conversation she had with
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff,
Scooter Libby, in June 2003. These notes are of
interest in part because they predate former
ambassador Joseph Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed
of July 6, the event that started the affair by
allegedly triggering the White House to retaliate
and reveal the identity of Wilson's wife, CIA
operative Valerie Plame. Did Miller know Plame's
identity before Wilson went public in July? In
Wilson's book, "The Politics of Truth," he
asserted that his name was "openly circulating
among the press" in the weeks before his article
was published. (He had served as a background
source in numerous articles that year, including
one by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.)

Meanwhile, the letter Miller received from Libby
last month that freed her to testify before the
grand jury Sept. 30 has become the subject of
intense scrutiny on the Internet. Greg Mitchell
of Editor and Publisher is among the scribes who
are wondering whether the bizarre last paragraph
was intended as some sort of code. In case you
missed it, here's how it ran:

"You went into jail in the summer. It is fall
now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi
elections and suicide bombers, biological threats
and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where
you vacation, the aspens will already be turning.
They turn in clusters, because their roots
connect them. Come back to work -- and life.
Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and
prayers -- With admiration, Scooter Libby."

If Libby was not trying to slip Miller a message
about how she ought to testify, as Mitchell and
others have theorized, then what are we to make
of this cryptic prose poem? One conclusion we can
safely draw is that Miller and Libby are more
than professional acquaintances. Based on that
presumption, the relationship between Miller and
the neoconservatives in the Defense Department
and in Cheney’s office who orchestrated the Iraq
war appears more and more suspect.

This murky relationship, upon which the New York
Times has to a very real degree staked its
reputation, is certainly worthy of more attention
from the Times itself, which has repeatedly been
scooped in reporting on developments in Miller's
case. So it was with bemusement that we read the
article by the Times' public editor on Sunday,
which was devoted, not to Miller or indeed
anything news related, but to "what the Times
news staff thinks" about its readers.

Public Editor Byron Calame, charged with being
the representative of the readers vis-à-vis the
Times, told readers in his column that "your
curiosity was the characteristic that editors and
reporters mentioned more than any other." Can
Calame guess what readers are curious about right
now?

-- Aaron Kinney


http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/10/10/plame/index.html