Posted on 10/22/2005 7:53:24 PM PDT by Saynotosocialism
New York Times reporter Judith Miller speaks during the 2005 SPJ Convention & National Journalism Conference in Las Vegas Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005. Miller, who was jailed 85 days for refusing to reveal a source, defended her decision to go to jail to protect the source and told a journalism conference Tuesday that reporters need a federal shield law so that others won't face the same sanctions. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) WASHINGTON -- In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case.
In a memo to the staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller says Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was not one of the recipients of a leak about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Miller says Keller's criticism is "seriously inaccurate."
"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," Miller was quoted as saying in a Times story Saturday.
According to a Times story on Oct. 16, Miller told Taubman two years ago that the subject of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson and Wilson's wife, Plame, had come up in casual conversation with government officials, but that Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information."
In recent weeks, Miller testified to the grand jury in the leak probe that she had discussed Wilson and his wife in three conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June and July of 2003.
Keller wrote that if he had known of Miller's "entanglement" with Libby, he might have been more willing to explore compromises with the prosecutor who was trying to get her testimony for the criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's identity.
Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She was freed on Sept. 29 when she finally agreed to testify.
Responding to Keller's criticism, Miller told the newspaper, "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."
"As for your reference to my 'entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social or other relationship with him except as a source," Miller said.
Underlying the issue is Miller's own flawed prewar reporting on Iraq.
Her stories pointing to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq helped clear a path for the administration's arguments in favor of going to war. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and Keller said he regretted waiting a year before confronting problems with Miller's reporting.
In his memo, Keller wrote that the newspaper in the summer of 2003 had just been through the trauma of the Jayson Blair episode, in which a reporter was found to have fabricated articles, resulting in the departure of the Times' executive editor and managing editor.
"It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors," Keller wrote. By waiting more than a year, he said, "We allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers."
Op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd weighed in with further criticism in Saturday's Times. "Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, (Miller) was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers," Dowd wrote.
If Miller returns to covering national security issues, Dowd wrote, "the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands."
In a column written for Sunday's editions of The Times, public editor Byron Calame wrote, "It seems to me that whatever the limits put on her, the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter."
http://www.bdpgabon.org/ancien_site/bdp/revelationspol1.html Salinger wrote a book on the first Gulf War, “Dossier.” In it are about ten pages of a recounting of conversations between Saddam and Wilson. I can only guess Wilson was the source. -- Source: FreeRepublic's Shermy , in 1 posted on 04/16/2004 1:01:47 PM PDT by Shermy
In late July 1990, Glaspie, who had already delayed her annual vacation to America twice, packed her bags and came home, leaving Wilson in charge.The night of August 1, [1990] Wilson had dinner with someone he describes as "Saddam's principal arms buyer in Paris. It was so hot the air was literally shimmering right in front of the windshield. "I get to this guy's house, and it had been chilled to 45, 50 degrees ... roaring fire in the fireplace and over in a corner a white baby grand piano and a guy playing classical music on it. The guy looks like a Pancho Villa figure, Mexican bandito.... We sat down to dinner, just him, myself, my wife, and five bodyguards-armed." ---- Wilson
The wife is Jacqueline, not Valerie. The one who was a "cultural counselor" for a French embassy when he met her. I wonder why they had dinner together... 17 posted on 04/29/2004 7:46:03 PM PDT by Shermy
To: Grampa Dave; Dog Gone
She's mentioned in Vanity Fair. Met in Africa. Married 12 years or so. She was a French diplomat. In Vanity Fair he talks about how she and Wilson attended a dinner with one of Saddam's top arms purchasers on the eve of the invasion of Kuwait. In his book this wife is wholly absent and unmentioned. Wilson specifies he went to the dinner "alone."
37 posted on 03/26/2005 10:49:37 AM PST by Shermy
Actually what MoDo wrote is this:
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.
Quite an amazing admission about the NYT.
A sample of the content from that:
Intelligence collection against Iraq fell far short of the mark. The intelligence base for collection and analysis was thin and sketchy. The Intelligence Community had nothing like the richness, density, and detail that it worked hard to develop and became accustomed to having on Soviet issues during the Cold War. To a significant extent this resulted from the reduction over the past decade of the professional collection management cadre capable of integrating HUMINT, imagery, and signals intelligence capabilities into coherent strategies. This development was compounded by the increased separation of collection professionals from the analytic cadre who had been intimately involved in identifying collection gaps, needs, and priorities and developing collection strategies.
I find it highly interesting all the knives that have come out for Miller. Obviously something is going on that is not being reported.
Note all the consternation about her reporting on WMD. There has not been a word said about all the bad reporting on all the "rapes" that occurred in NO after Katrina. I haven't heard anyone bad mouthing Rather either. It really seems they are out to discredit Miller for some reason.
Went back and reread the Vanity Fair article. Couldn't help but notice that the article describes Joe Wilson as having a full head of gray hair. Look up at the picture, and it appears he has washed the gray away. Guess he was also incognito that day.
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