[Reader-list] The Other Side of Judith Miller's Martyrdom

[Vivek Narayanan]

Before we get all het up about "censorship" and restrictions of press freedom, let's not forget that Judith Miller was responsible for the false planting of the Weapons of Mass Destruction, thus one of the principal actors responsible for the Iraq war.

--V.

>From "Pariah" to "St. Judy"

The Luckiest Martyr

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Is there ever anyone luckier than Judy Miller! All last year she was 
pilloried as the prime saleslady for the imaginary WMDs that offered 
the prime pretext for the invasion of Iraq. Although it refused to 
denounce her by name the New York Times publicly castigated itself for 
poor reporting, and Miller's career seemed to be at an end, except for 
the occasional excursion to CNN studios for tete a tetes with Larry 
King.

But then came a glimmer of hope. With unexpected zeal, special 
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was pressing his investigation of who 
exactly outed Valerie Plame as a CIA officer. Plame as the world knows, 
is the wife of Joe Wilson, who had incurred the displeasure of the Bush 
White House by discrediting the phony yellowcake of Niger story, part 
of their vast propaganda operation to sell the Iraq attack to Congress 
and the American people.

He was threatening journalists with prison time unless they disclosed 
their sources. It wasn't long before some journalists informed the 
zealous Fiztgerald that they had been released from confidentiality by 
their sources. Indeed Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, declared 
publicly that any journalist who had talked to him was free to discuss 
such conversations with Fitzgerald. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus 
and Glenn Kessler testified forthwith before the federal grand jury, as 
did Tim Russert of NBC. The general assumption is Robert Novak, who'd 
outed Plame in his column in July 2003, was subpoenaed by Fitzgerald 
and duly testified.

How Miller's heart must have leaped. Here was the glorious prospect of 
her instant conversion from pariah, only one rung up from Jayson Blair, 
to martyr to free speech, only one rung below John Peter Zenger. She 
and Matt Cooper of Time magazine reclined to testify or furnish their 
notes. Encumbered by the counsel of that perennial incompetent, Floyd 
Abrams, (representing the NYT) their cases commenced their climb up 
through the federal courts, until the US Supreme Court refused to 
review the ruling of the federal appeals court in favor of Fitzgerald.

Time magazine roared its dedication to free speech, while 
simultaneously declaring it had to obey the law of the land. Against 
his proclaimed wishes Time handed over Cooper's notes to Fitzgerald. 
The New York Times said it would not comply.

But Fitzgerald was not appeased by Time's ductility. He said he was not 
to be appeased by only Cooper's notes. By now he wanted to grill the 
two journalists on the stand. The issue was not just the matter of the 
identity of the White House source, but the handy standby of all 
federal prosecutors, the matter of perjury. Ask Martha Stewart. It was 
her misleading declarations to federal investigators that put her in 
prison.

Cooper bid a manly adieu to his family, packed his toothbrush and made 
himself ready for incarceration at least as far as October, when the 
grand jury's term expires. Then came the dramatic release from 
confidentiality by Cooper's source. Cooper went off to court, embraced 
Judy Miller in a fine display of solidarity and then told the judge he 
would comply with Fitzgerald's subpoena.

Miller of course was publicly adamant. But there seems to be no reason 
why she should not have echoed Cooper's statement to Judge Thomas 
Hogan. Fitzgerald has publicly declared that not only does he know the 
identity of Miller's source, but also that this source has released 
Miller from confidentiality.

But Miller was not be balked of the martyrdom that will make her the 
heroine of the Fourth Estate, with lucrative lecture fees and book 
sales for the rest of the decade. Never, she told the judge, would she 
reveal the Name that could not be named. The gates of the federal 
prison in Alexandria invitingly beckoned.

There are curious questions hanging over Miller's determined march 
towards her prison cell, not far from that of Moussaoui, who is 
probably offering her free legal advice on the prison grapevine.

Miller never actually wrote a story in the New York Times about Plame 
being in the CIA. So why has Fitzgerald been so eager to have her 
testify? The answer may lie in a paragraph buried in Wednesday's 
Washington Post, reading as follows: "Sources close to the 
investigation say there is evidence in some instances that some 
reporters may have told government officials  not the other way around 
that Wilson was married to Plame, a CIA employee."

We could conjecture that when Fitzgerald interviewed White House 
political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff,
again this is surmise  might well have learned this from one of her 
other sources, whether Perle or Chalabi or someone else in the 
intelligence world.

After all, this is Miller's style of reporting. Learn something 
(entirely false in the case of the WMDs) from one source, then bounce 
it off another, and then put together a story citing two sources. In 
the case of the WMDs Chalabi would give her a "defector" who would duly 
impart his fantasies about Saddam's arsenal. She would relay the 
defector's story to "a high intelligence source" who would confirm it.

We applaud prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's gallant bid to do what now 
departed Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent should have done: grill Miller 
about the techniques and veracity of her reporting. Here, after all, is 
a journalist with blood on her hands, a fabricator who played a major 
role (rivaled perhaps only by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg) in 
selling a war with one fabrication after another, eagerly offered to 
the public by the New York Times.

But alas, all hopes that her career would expire in ignominy have now 
been dashed. As swift as the moves to canonize John Paul II, the 
vestments of sainthood are being draped over St Judy. If her past 
career is anything to go by, already the prison guards are melting 
before her winsome smiles and confiding the little secrets and 
disclosures that will soon being (sic) their careers to end and their 
families to the brink of starvation. It would require the pen of Henry 
Fielding to do her proper justice