Judith Miller: A Profile In Deception (A Wily, Mendacious, Dilettante!)

Some time ago, I must now shamefully admit, I histrionically wrote about New York Times reporter Judy Miller's "heroic" refusal to comply with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's request for information about her sources. Yup, I had her on my short list of candidates for a profile in courage medal; or better yet, an addendum chapter to the old John Kennedy book detailing all those heroic profiles from the past.

At the time Fitzgerald seemed overly zealous in pursing a mandate aimed at finding out who, if anybody, outed the covert CIA agent. Though it did seem rather odd, indeed incomprehensible, that he would be legally harassing an innocent reporter who hadn't even written a story about the Wison-Plame matter while seemingly ignoring the reporter who did. Why, I'd written, hadn't the special prosecutor hauled Robert Novak's ass before the grand jury. After all, he was the slim ball columnist who wrote the original story revealing CIA agent Plame's identity to the world. Poor Judy, wedded to high, time honored, journalistic principles would rather rot in jail than debase her lofty profession; toward that end, she spent the next 85 days in jail; that's how it looked at the time.

Well, now we know the rest of the story, or at least a good bit of it. With her release from prison, the Times, with some grudging help from Judy, has filled in a few more details. So what do we know now that we didn't know before Judy's painful 85 day sojourn in prison?

We know that prior to her encounter with prosecutor Fitzgerald, she'd long since compromised her journalistic integrity by schmoozing with the Iraqi expatriates, most notably Ahmad Chalabi and those expatriates he brought forward to support the rush to war. Make no mistake about it, Ahmad Chalabi had designs on Iraq and saw a chance to use the neocons in that effort. Using fabricated information from the Iraqi expatriates, Judy Miller also became an unwitting participant writing stories about the nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

It is now quite clear that the riff between the Bush White House and the CIA relates to the basic conflict between their intelligence and what the Bush people wanted to believe. Bush and the neocons clearly shunted the CIA aside in favor of Mr. Chalabi and his sycophants. (Former White House Advisor Richard Clark details these problems in his book.) It's also clear that during her appearances before the Fitzgerald Grand Jury she was at best a reluctant witness. She omitted any mention of an earlier meeting she'd had with Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, until informed that his appointments log gave evidence of such a meeting; she had testified about some later meetings. It is not hard to believe that Ms. Miller's purpose in not revealing Mr. Libby's name as a principal source of information was due to her desire to protect him.

Whatever her motives might have been, the fact remains that Ms. Miller became a conduit for Mr. Chalabi and neocons fabrications about the nonexistent WMD's. Not willing to defend the indefensible, Ms. Miller has candidly acknowledged that her stories were completely off the mark–there were no WMDs. "If your sources are wrong," she blithely stated, "you are wrong." Are we to conclude that she was merely a recorder? She didn't need to worry about source credibility?

It is not so easy to evade responsibility in such matters. As others have noted, a reporter is more than a mere stenographer who records and passes along information. Her personal involvement in the issue is also reflected in her reaction to journalists who criticized Ahmad Chalabi in print. Maureen Dowd, after writing a piece critical of Chalabi, received an e-mail message from Miller in April of this past year, 2004, defending him. . .a message written at a time when it was clear to everyone that Mr Chalabi’s had waged a misinformation campaign; there were no WMDs. Ms. Miller was not defending high journalistic principles, No! She was defending a friend whose political crap she’d swallowed hook, line and sinker; the hokum that she’d uncritically accepted as true and presented as fact in series of New York Times articles.

We do know that Ms. Miller's boss, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in the summer of 2003, prohibited her from further coverage of Iraq and the WMD issues; however, we also know that she willing ignored that probation and continued to collude with Libby and company.

One does have to wonder, given her continued meetings with Libby, why she didn't write a story about the covert CIA Agent Valiery Plame. She has written that she failed to write such a story because the Times Washington based bureau chief , Jill Abramson, wouldn't let her. Ms. Abramson denies that, stating that Judy had never asked for such permission.

Based upon the evidence, I think it's fair to surmise that Ms. Miller didn't write about the covert CIA agent because she was ideologically involved in the issues, and her reasons had nothing to do with her role as a New York Times journalist.

In good drama a writer reveals character, personality and the like on the stage by placing characters in situations that force interactions designed to help us understand who they are, what their values are, whether the individuals are kind or mean, arrogant or humble etc. Such revelatory situations work dramatically because they mirror life; we find out about the people that inhabit our world in much the same way; we watch, evaluate and make character assessments, but in life, unlike the theater, the minutia of our daily existence often surrounds revelatory behavior making it difficult to get it in a focus sharp enough for all but the most discerning eyes. However, at times, there are exceptions, times when we see individual behavior unobscured by social noise, life's minutia. In a recent column, Maureen Dowd offers us such a revelator glimpse of Judy Miller:

“Once when I was covering the first Bush White House,” wrote Dowd, “ I was in The Times’s 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,” concluded Dowd, “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.”
(New York Times, October 22, 2005)

Yes, I was wrong about Judy Miller. She’s apparently as vain as the above suggests. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we know a lot more about her, and the additional exposure is of an indecent journalist not likely to win any awards; there’s apparently good reason why so many of her colleagues at the Times uniformly disliked her.

As always, ever on the watch for ya,

Davy Crockett
--
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of others, never as a means only but always equally as an end.

--Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

President Harding Revisited ( Updated 13 October)

With the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist and the Leader of the House, Tom DeLay both under investigation for impropriety, coupled with the resignation and subsequent arrest of the director Bush put in charge of government procurement, the Bush Administration is looking more like a vintage reincarnation of Warren Harding’s Administration than I suspected. History, some wag once said, is the yardstick we have to measure the influence the past has on the present. And though I think one must be very cautious in attempting to see historical patterns from the past in the present, I do think there are some patterns from the Harding years that fit current circumstances with little, if any, distortion and may help illuminate the path we seem to be taking toward the cliff.

I’m of course aided by a number of standard history texts, most notably John M. Blum et. al.’s National Experience, 4th edition; John M. Blum wrote the material consulted. In sketching the backdrop Blum writes, “Warren Harding brought to government the qualities of his own weak person. . . .he was an ignorant, naive, confused man whose loose standards made him particularly vulnerable to his intellectual deficiencies and to the corrupt character of the hail-fellows with whom he instinctively surrounded himself.” Now, it is hardly a stretch to see “W” in Blum's character sketch. Remember, during the first campaign, the stories about Bush’s directionless life, the booze and drug parties, the DWI charges, all of which Bush refused to talk about; the failed business ventures that Daddy or one of Daddy's friends bailed him out of; the AWOL Air Force fighter pilot who didn’t report for duty? Who couldn’t name a friend who’d served with him in the Alabama guard unit he claimed to have served in? There was no John Kerry like band of combat brothers following “W” around on the campaign trail. No! Not one! He couldn’t even name one.

But back to Bush’s historical mentor, Warren Harding. Harding’s appointees, the Secretary of the Interior, the Attorney General, just to name a couple, were falling like flies, some ending up in jail. The stress and the strain were clearly wearing on the President. Blum writes that “. . .The President unburdened himself to William Allen White: “My God, this is a hell of a job. I have no trouble with my enemies. . . .But my damned friends, my god-damned friends. . . .they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!” Now at this point I must confess the comparison between the Bush and Harding Administration may be invidious, I don’t think Bush feels the moral pressure; he’s not, I think, walking the floor at night.

Blum’s narrative contains a few more gems. For example he writes, “Vulgarity and scandal were the sordid fruits . . .of a government that sought all the advantages of power but none of the responsibilities of organized self-interest that sought special favors in bonuses, bounties, lower taxes, and higher tariffs. Pressure groups had gained advantages for big business. . .those interests dominated the federal government as they had not since the 1890s.” To be sure, one doesn’t have to distort the historical pattern to see it in the current administrations machinations.

Let me conclude with Harding’s self-description from William Allen White’s, Masks in a Pageant, 1928:
“I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then- -God!–I talk to the other side and they seem just as right. . . .I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! What a job.”

Again, one has to be careful attempting to see patterns from the past in the present. I don’t think Bush , as I’ve noted, agonizes over these difficulties as Harding obviously did. Beyond those clear differences, Harding did do a few things that revisionist historians are now putting in a far more favorable light. The passage of time does help clear the historical perspective. Harding did stop the wholesale civil rights abuses that characterized the Wilson years, and he did pardon one of my historical heros Eugene V. Debs.

The cupidity, the base self-serving behavior, that one thinks about in connection with the Harding scandals have been visited upon the Bush Administration in spades. The one party government in Washington, protects the modern day scoundrels from the Congressional scrutiny they so richly deserve. Instead what do we get? Pseudo Republican investigators perpetrating an investigative fraud, sham and a hoax all in one package. There was Mike Brown, supposedly fired from his position as director of FEMA testifying as a $150,000.00 a year FEMA consultant before a committee of Republicans who want to sweep this whole mess under the rug before the looming off year Congressional elections. . .just 13 months away. Yes, they fired him and then quietly put him back on the payroll as a $150,000.00 a year advisor. And then there was mild mannered Sen. Frist, telling us that he didn’t sell his family owned corporate stock the day before the price fell to make a profit; he did it to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Yeah, this is the same Senator Frist who said when ask about this specific investment two years ago, “I don’t know what my holding are, they’re all in a blind trust.” The day that trust lost its blinders and Frist started managing it is the day when the conflict of interest became more real than apparent.

NOTE: from the Washington Post, 13 October, page 1

"Frist held a substantial amount of his family's hospital stock outside of blind trusts between 1998 and 2002 -- a time when he asserted he did not know how much of the stock he owned.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Frist earned tens of thousands of dollars from HCA stock in a partnership controlled by his brother, outside of the blind trusts he created to avoid a conflict of interest.

"It seems that for years, Frist may have misled his constituents and the American people about his health care industry stock holdings and the conflict of interest they created as he drafted our nation's health care policy," said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney. "This deal raises even more questions about the Republican culture of corruption in Washington, D.C."

During his decade in the Senate, Frist has been active in shaping health care policy, including creation of a Medicare prescription drug benefit."



The Harding Scandals are with us again.

Ever on the Watch for ya,

Davy Crockett