Boy, if this ain't a novel way to drip out bad news.
The headline should be in large fonts on the front page "MILLER CAUGHT HIDING KEY EVIDENCE".
Instead, it's a minor article about a mea culpa from the editor.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller listens to other panellists speak during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on reporters' privilege legislation on Capitol Hill, October 19, 2005. Miller was jailed 85 days for refusing to testify about her conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff regarding undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
So is thepoint of this that Judith Miller had security clearance and that she leaked classified info?
Let me see if I can paraphrase here...
How about: "The Times lied ... people died"
Reminds me of Dan Rather....
Jayson Blair deja vu
And "Blinky" Matthews and the MSM keep on telling us that its Rove and Libby who are guilty of withholding information from the prosecutor
They say in this article that Libby revealed Plame's identity BEFORE Wilson wrote the op-ed. But they'll still continue to say that he revealed Plame's identity BECAUSE Wilson wrote the op-ed.
Can't have the revisionist history both ways. Either the notes on Plame from June were in there because Libby told her, or Libby outed Plame because of the op-ed in July.
Does this guy think kicking Judith Miller to the curb will placate the liberals who work for him? Yeah, the Times' problem is that it wrote about weapons of mass destruction. Brilliant.
Did Judith Miller act as the point-person for springing this whole MSM/Joe Wilson trap on the WH?? Did she tell him things that helped to push the saga forward and/or draw him out on matters that he should have avoided? I'm not suggesting Libby will not bear legal responsibility if he crossed any red lines, though that remains to be seen, but it may well be that Judith Miller (and other MSM reporters) played a role of entrapment, getting Libby into discussions and details he should have avoided. I'm not sure why any Republican WH official would EVER want to risk their name and reputation in talking with treacherous MSM reporters, anyway, but they may feel they have to do so to try to get the WH story out in the face of continual MSM/Democrat smear campaigns.
Consider these points:
1) She had means and opportunity, i.e., meeting with Libby on June 23 before Wilson's op-ed had even appeared (but weeks after he had been quoted anonymously by Kristof in NY Times and Pincus in WaPo).
2) We know from her statement about "Victoria Wilson" that she had a technique of popping a somewhat incorrect but similar name at a source to see if they knew the correct name and corrected her. Perhaps she was pulling the same kind of thing with "Valerie Flame" to see if Libby would correct her with "Plame"???
3) As stated above, she certainly had means and opportunity to try to draw Libby into the trap. Here's why she may very well have felt MOTIVE: by mid-June 2003 the clamor about "no WMDs" in Iraq was becoming intense and Miller was on the spot, more than any other individual in US journalism. [speculation here]: Could she have seen her best chance at redemption with the NY Times and fellow journalists to ensnare Libby and the WH in the emerging Joe Wilson/Niger uranium saga??? I'm not saying she consciously intended to set a trap for illegal behavior for Libby or anyone else, but she certainly may have resented Libby very strongly by that point in time and may well have wanted to draw him into an open battle with Joe Wilson that she could write about and referee.....
The NYT seems to be missing the alarm bells on more than Miller. They still refuse to admit the Joe Wilson editorial is a pack of lies.
"If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that THIS time the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty of its readers," he said.
Time to give Okrent his job back...