[Mb-civic] Maureen Dowd

[Mike Blaxill]

Woman of Mass Destruction
    By Maureen Dowd
    The New York Times

    Saturday 22 October 2005

    I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often
wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made
of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

    The traits she has that drive many reporters
at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful
men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar
mixture of hard work and hauteur - never bothered
me. I enjoy operatic types.

    Once when I was covering the first Bush White
House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded
White House press room, listening to an
administration official's background briefing.
Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as
a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New
York, but she showed up at this national security
affairs briefing.

    At first she leaned against the wall near
where I was sitting, but I noticed that she
seemed agitated about something. Midway through
the briefing, she came over and whispered to me,
"I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

    It was such an outrageous move, I could only
laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the
room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her
rightful power perch.

    She never knew when to quit. That was her
talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight
editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all,
and that has hurt this paper and its trust with
readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss
Run Amok."

    Judy's stories about WMD fit too perfectly
with the White House's case for war. She was
close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was
conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he
could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that
she was playing a leading role in the dangerous
echo chamber that former Senator Bob Graham
dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi
defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus
stories with Judy and other credulous
journalists.

    Even last April, when I wrote a column
critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to
me defending him.

    When Bill Keller became executive editor in
the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering
Iraq and W.M.D issues. But he admitted in The
Times' Sunday story about Judy's role in the
Plame leak case that she had kept "drifting"
back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

    Judy admitted in the story that she "got it
totally wrong" about WMD "If your sources are
wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But
investigative reporting is not stenography.

    The Times' story and Judy's own first-person
account had the unfortunate effect of raising
more questions. As Bill said in an e-mail note to
the staff on Friday, Judy seemed to have "misled"
the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about
the extent of her involvement in the Valerie
Plame leak case.

    She casually revealed that she had agreed to
identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's
chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer"
because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The
implication was that this bit of deception was a
common practice for reporters. It isn't.

    She said that she had wanted to write about
the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor
would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill
Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief,
denied this, saying that Judy had never broached
the subject with her.

    It also doesn't seem credible that Judy
wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like
"Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that
she doesn't know how the name got into her
notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not
believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

    An Associated Press story yesterday reported
that Judy had coughed up the details of an
earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after
prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log
showing that she had met with him on June 23,
2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people
wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail
was in part a career rehabilitation project.

    Judy is refusing to answer a lot of questions
put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes
that she shared with the grand jury. I admire
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for
aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs
of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case
into a First Amendment battle, they should have
nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire
story of her escapade.

    Judy told The Times that she plans to write a
book and intends to return to the newsroom,
hoping to cover "the same thing I've always
covered - threats to our country." If that were
to happen, the institution most in danger would
be the newspaper in your hands.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102205A.shtml