Piling on Judy Miller

BY JOSEPH PLANTA

Monday, 14 November 2005

VANCOUVER - My colleague Marlon Richmond e-mailed not so long ago with a complaint. He was wondering why Arianna Huffington was spending so much space on her blog discussing Judith Miller and the imbroglio surrounding her role in the CIA leak investigation headed up by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald, if you didn't know, is charged with investigating just who in the White House had leaked the name of Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who was a CIA agent. Those now attending White House refresher courses on ethics will probably learn that leaking the name of a covert agent is a no-no. This case has been somewhat convoluted, even for those inside the Beltway. The leak supposedly came from a high-level staffer in the Bush administration, who passed the name onto the syndicated columnist Robert Novak who dropped the name in a column.

Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper were somehow implicated in this case, but even I couldn't tell you how. Neither had put the Plame name in any of the stories they were writing, yet both were threatened with jail time had they not participated in the investigation by Fitzgerald. Cooper was spared jail time at the eleventh hour this summer when he testified to the special prosecutor's satisfaction. Miller on the other hand chose not to, and spent some time in prison. She was recently released, when she finally agreed to divulge that she had spoken with Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff about Valerie Plame. Libby was recently indicted forced to resign from the White House, while Miller was wrestling with her newspaper. She and the paper have since parted ways, not before she was permitted to explain her side of this story on the paper's pages.

Judy Miller will say that she went to prison to defend her journalistic right to protect sources. Only in a society when journalists are permitted to protect their sources can democracy flourish, she'll perhaps say. Others will say she's showboating, making herself to be some sort of martyr for the first amendment, perhaps in an effort to finagle a book deal.

Miller, a reporter with the Times, is also a fascinating character in the story of the run up to the Iraq war. Her reporting prior to the war, often discussed a so-called case for war, talking up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, sometimes recycling spin from the administration. It's said that she helped persuade the court of public opinion that an invasion of Iraq was necessary, what with her articles in the Times. Some say that now that the Iraq war is seen as a public relations disaster, Miller is backing away from previously held assertions and shifting focus on advocating for shield laws for whistleblowers.

The columnist Maureen Dowd piled on recently, with a biting column in the Times where she added her two cents about Miller. Besides being the only female op-ed columnist at the Times, Dowd has as many supporters as she has detractors. Suffice it to say, they're all readers. She's considered the liberal Ann Coulter, and much has been made about her love life, as its safe to say she's been half way around the block herself. It's reported that she's dated Michael Douglas and Aaron Sorkin, among others.

Now, Dowd will claim her critics bring up her love life to discredit whatever opinions she may have. That she's perhaps not taken as seriously because she's a woman, and that her identity as a female is something that dogs her in a way being a man doesn't encumber Thomas L. Friedman or David Brooks. As Judy Miller was making the rounds on talk shows like Larry King last week, Dowd was on television pushing her new book, Are Men Necessary?, a treatise on the relationships had between men and women.

On 22 October 2005, the Dowd column ran with the headline, "Woman of Mass Destruction," on Judy Miller and her character, as well an incident during a briefing during the first Bush White House, where it seems Dowd was sitting in a chair that Miller wanted, who was seemingly exorcised about not having a seat. Dowd brings up the seat incident to reflect just how bombastic Miller is, and how perhaps unstable she is with her work.

It seems rather petty to the average reader, but to folks like me who like a little gossip about the powerful and influential, this is priceless. Just as Miller's own seat at the Times is being debated and how she's having it from all angles from the press and the politicians, Dowd, the biting columnist piles on. The chickens, as Imus put it, have come home to roost. The lesson here, of course is never forget, and even if it takes fifteen years, you've gotta get even.

Dowd's piece from the 22nd, though perhaps unfair, is brilliant writing. Miller had written in the Times, providing her side of the story, "If your sources are wrong, you are wrong." Dowd's rejoinder: "But investigative reporting is not stenography."

Maureen Dowd's first book was the bestselling and acclaimed Bushworld, which was a collection of her columns on the Bush presidencies, focusing primarily on the current President. Dowd, a passionate and an avowed liberal, is always critical of the Bush administration, and makes a good point that's perhaps lost on my colleague Marlon Richmond. What gets Huffington's knickers in a knot that Judy Miller was shilling for the administration, giving credence to less than stellar intelligence and paying more than enough attention to her friend, Ahmad Chalabi. In a way, with the administration on trial for supposedly leaking the name of a covert CIA agent, and Judith Miller's public agonies, the Iraq war is the common denominator-the elephant in the room. As confidence in the Iraq conflict wanes, questions are rightfully being asked as to whether the public was misled into going into war. If that's the case, we ought to know just who else is culpable.

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An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE.