Judy Held Out for THIS? Plus, a Bonus MoDo Letter

by emptywheel

One of the big sticking points, in the severance negotiations between the NYT and Judy Miller, was Judy's demand that she get to answer her critics with one last op-ed in the NYT, published today in letter form.

I gotta say, she needn't have bothered.

The letter does little to refute Miller's critics. As Anonymous Liberal points out, Judy's claims she was protecting the First Amendment are clearly bogus. And Jane slaps down the rest of the farewell. The only paragraph I found remotely interesting was this one:

In a commencement speech I delivered at Barnard College in 2003, a year before that note was published, I asked whether the administration's prewar W.M.D. intelligence was merely wrong, or was it exaggerated or even falsified. I believed then, and still do, that the answer to bad information is more reporting. I regret that I was not permitted to pursue answers to the questions I raised at Barnard. Their lack of answers continues to erode confidence in both the press and the government.

Here's the commencement address in question. And here's the soul-searching passage Judy refers to:

I think there are other questions, too, that the Bush administration will now have to answer: Will the weapons hunters find the weapons of mass destruction programs that were cited repeatedly as the major justification for the invasion? Could inspectors have uncovered the dual use equipment that was hidden – sometimes in plain sight – throughout the country without a war? Were the concerns about anthrax clouds over our cities exaggerations? Were they justified by what we knew then, as opposed to what we know now? Was the intelligence that produced them politically distorted? Were those who wanted to go to war deceiving themselves about Saddam’s capabilities? Was the war really necessary, not just for Iraq, but to protect American national security?

When I return permanently home to the U.S., I will be among those trying to find answers to these questions – questions I wondered about so often in the field. Now I may have impressions, but they are only that.

Beyond the fact that Judy is still clearly parrotting the party line (dual use equipment hidden in plain sight? well maybe it was not hidden, did you ever think of that? anthrax clouds over our cities? was that our concern, or yours? and it's worse in the rest of the address, where Judy throws in Neoconish proclamations like "I am deeply disturbed that our country did not deliver Iraq from that tyrant’s hands in 1991 when we first had the chance." Hell, the whole thing is still a justification for war). I'm struck by Judy's claim--then and now--that she came back from Baghdad intent on finding out whether the warmongers were deceiving themselves about Saddam's capabilities. Beyond the obvious refrain (where is the concern about your own reporting, Judy, rather than just the exaggerations of others?), I find it remarkable that that Judy's first action--in an attempt to find out the truth about the war--was to go back to one of her primary sources, the guy who exaggerated and deceived in the first place--and ask him to retell the Administration's justification for war. Oh, and listen to him rail against one of the guys who was offering an explanation about why

Or let me put it this way. One of the first things Judy did when she got back to the US was stand in front of the graduating class at Barnard and declare she wanted to find out what went wrong. Then, in a meeting a month later, a source told her about a guy named Joe Wilson who was claiming he knew exactly what went wrong--the Administration had ignored all the evidence that refuted their claims. Rather than giving Joe Wilson a call to pursue this story, Judy returned to her original source two more times to let him deny this Joe Wilson guy's claims. This is reporting?

But the rest of the farewell? Eh. So if you're looking for fireworks from Judy's last farewell, you're going to be disappointed.

What is worth a gander, however, is the letter to MoDo Judy posted on her website.

Beyond revealing that Judy still doesn't get it--if you want to figure out what went wrong with the intelligence, you don't give one of your main sources three chances to throw sand in your eyes. You go to the guy the source is complaining about, who claims he can answer your questions.

Just to remind you, I never went to see Scooter Libby to hear character assassination against Joe Wilson. I was trying to get to the bottom of the intelligence failures that were very important to me because they had led to my publishing several incorrect stories based on that intelligence.

Judy's letter to MoDo provides much more specific details on two points relating to her case than she published in her own full explanation. Judy tries to explain why her memory is so damn bad.

Five, I have already addressed the “Valerie Flame” issue publicly in my answers to reporters at the Senate hearing on the shield law. And again, as I told Calame, “more than two years later, I cannot remember when or why I wrote that misspelled name in my notes. The name is free-floating, separated by two pages from the end of an interview with Mr. Libby and written in a different color ink from my Libby interviews. It is not embedded in any other interview. I spoke to dozens of people when I returned from Iraq about a wide variety of WMD topics that I did write about. I don’t know why you and Tina doubt my word, but you should know that I gave this account under oath as well.

She lies, of course, when she says, "about a wide variety of WMD topics that I did write about." As I've discussed to the point of boredom, there is almost nothing in her post-war reporting that appears in her articles (partly because there are so few postwar articles). In addition to her July 20 article, she co-wrote an article on Stephen Hatfill's involvement in prototyping mobile bioweapons labs for us, and a few articles on the purported mobile bioweapons labs (for the latter, Judy was the recipient of a doozy of a leak that was later the source of some consternation within the intelligence community). So if she lied about that, why believe the other details here? Well, I'll just register the claim that "Valerie Flame" shows up after the Libby notes and in a different color ink (was it red, so Judy would remember what the agreed on pseudonym was?). At least it gives us some guidance on the timing.

Also, Judy denies she was perjury trapped into revealing details about June 23.

It is true that the special prosecutor asked about whether I had had an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby in June. But as I testified, the discovery of the notebook was prompted by an entirely different matter the special prosecutor had raised. Once again, I found the notebook, which was not covered by the subpoena, as I was searching for additional notes on where I was when I conducted my July 12th interview with Libby. As I told Calame, “Under oath, I had promised the special counsel I would search for any additional notes I might have relevant to Mr. Libby and Plame/Wilson that would clarify whether the notes had been taken in a taxi in D.C. or at my home in Sag Harbor. On my first evening back at the Times while I was on the phone with my lawyer, Bob Bennett, I came upon the notebook as I was looking through a shopping bag filled with notebooks kept under my computer beneath my desk. I discovered that it contained an interview in June with Mr. Libby…I told Bob Bennett what I had found, and he immediately informed the special prosecutor.”

These details are a bit more intriguing. It suggests several things:

• If you believe Judy (?), Fitzgerald had reason to push Judy both for information about the June 23 meeting and for more notes ... for unrelated reasons. Which suggests (if you believe Judy), that Fitzgerald had reason to believe she had both.
• If you believe Judy (?), Fitzgerald apparently thought it important whether she learned particular details in the cab from NYC or in Sag Harbour. I imagine Fitzgerald thought it important to clarify the chronology of Libby's conversation with Dick on Air Force Two, Libby's first conversation with Judy, Libby's second conversation with Judy, and Libby's conversation with Cooper. Or maybe there are other events he's trying to fit into the chronology.
• Geez Louise. You mean to tell me these notes were in a shopping bag under Judy's desk at NYT all this time? They must have funny cleaning staff at NYT, because I can't count the number of times I've lost bags of stuff I've left under my various office desks.And you want me to believe that Judy would leave sensitive notes--notes that could sink the Vice President--just lying there, under her desk, while she was in prison for several months? You mean to tell me Judy left these notes out there in a shopping bag, with a newsroom full of curious journalists--people spending a good deal of time trying to figure out what the story is--who don't particularly care for Judy in the first place?

Or maybe Judy's just lying through her teeth.

Well, that's that then. Go read Judy's farewell if you want to be bored. Better yet, go read Judy's letter to MoDo. Or, if you want to be interested (rather than lulled to sleep by Judy's prattling about how she saved the First Amendment), go read some of the tell-all articles about Judy, appearing as if she just passed away.

Comments

[emptywheel]

Oh, one more detail about the Barnard speech. It appears Judy barely made it back for the commencement. So she stops writing on May 12 and arrives back in NYC on May 20? Also, at that point, she believed she was only back in the US temporarily. So she must not have learned about her new "leash" from the NYT yet.

[drinkof]

"Or let me put it this way. One of the first things Judy did when she got back to the US was stand in front of the graduating class at Barnard and declare she wanted to find out what went wrong."

What does this remind me of? Wasn't there some guy who was going to find the 'real killers'? Yeah, now I recall ...

[cs]

I won't be able to read Judy's letter until it's available for free . . . Let me begin by saying I deplore her reporting on wmds and the Times' -- I believe, willing -- role in the selling of the war.

That said, I'm also profoundly interested in getting to the facts and truth (to degree objective truth is possible). Given that objective, I think it's important to try and determine/wait to find out if Judy's account about her notes bears any relation to facts.

I've been a student off and on all my life and have consequently always taken self-designed student-style notes in any job-related meeting/discussion I've ever had.

For a long time afterward, notes I take make sense to me, even when I jot something down in isolation. They are idiosyncratic mnemomic tools that in most instances only I could decode. But after not revisiting them for a long time, I've had the experience of not knowing where they came from or what I meant.

Again, that said, I tend to think Judy would have been concentrating consciously and frequently on what she was being told about Wilson / Plame before, during and after the story began to break -- whether she was thinking in terms of actually writing stories about it or not. In my experience, I've been able, even after several years, to return to notes on subjects that were particularly important when I made them and decode both their meanings and where they came from -- most of the time.

As far as the notes in a bag go, I've known professors who stored stuff like that. Or think of Sandy Berger, a pubic figure who not long ago became an example of a smart, important person viewed by colleagues as someone whose work space and habits seemed highly disorganized . . . i.e., it's plausible that Judy's the kind of person who sticks notebooks full of notes in a bad beneath her desk -- and that the stuff in her work area could remain untouched precisely because it was her work space and considered sacrosanct. I once worked next to a guy who was Pig Pen incarnate, but without anything remotely like the status Judy enjoyed. Now and again someone would complain about the mess on and surrounding his desk and he'd be urged to straighten things up. But whether he did or didn't, the mess itself was off limits to anyone other than him.

I'm not defending Judy. I'm just saying I've worked and known others who work in the ways she's described. It would be interesting if folks who know her work habits and are familiar with her work-space environment could verify or contradict independently some of her claims.

Personally, my hypothesis is that the Times management willingly compromised its obligations to investigate and report the truth on BushCo's pre-war marketing plan -- and any number of other stories. It has acted as a propaganda organ rather than a publication dedicated to thorough and objective reporting on this administration and its and aims since day one.

Judy has been a celebrity-journalist participant in all that. But that doesn't mean she's necessarily lying about finding notes in a bag about a meeting outside the timeframe she negotiated to testify on, that when she did she told her attorney, and that he advised her to inform Fitz.

Whether the scenario is true or false, I do wonder if she has broken the attorney-client privilege by writing publicly about it, though . . .

[orionATL]

thanks for persisting in the analysis. americans are suckers for non mea culpas published a discreet time after the dirty deeds have been reported on and forgotten.

a post in ATTITOOD that i read yesterday said that bill keller had been seduced by wolfowitz and consequently had taken a view similar to judy miller's on the essential rightness of the iraq war. or at least on the character, wisdom, and vision of wolfowitz.

if true, this would be a big missing piece of the puzzle. how was it that such biased, unsubstatiated journalism could ever have appeared in the new york times-- not just once but multiple times. whatever the organization or institiution, rotteness like this can only happen where there is concurrence and protection at the top.

was it really keller, rather than sultzberger, who was judy's protector and director of missions?

[QuickSilver]

Good work, 'wheel.

As you know, I was convinced that Fitz knew Miller possessed or could produce notes from the June 23rd meeting. I'm betting now that she blurted out something about a June 23rd notebook in an effort to avoid getting slapped back in jail... It's telling that Bennett was on the phone with her when she 'discovered' them in a shopping bag filled with notebooks. (Yes, I like to clean up my desk with a $500+/hour lawyer on the phone!) Tellingly, we don't find out if the shopping bag is at her home or in the Times bureau.

Good catch on that Barnard commencement address. My own take is that Judy knew she was on probation at that point, but (obviously) didn't want to tell her audience, or fully admit to herself the implications of her reporting coming under suspicion.

By the way, though I don't know if it's a reliable source (or accurately reported), the Philippine News said yesterday that Susan Ralston ("Rove's right-hand man") is scheduled for a third grand jury appearance...

[ArtShu]

WHO THE HELL TOLD JUDY MILLER ABOUT THE 9/11 ATTACKS BEFORE THEY HAPPENED?

Libby?
Rove?
Chalabi?
Cheney?

See this link: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/5/judycode.asp

In July of 2001, Steve Engelberg, then an editor at The New York Times, looked up to see Judy Miller standing at his desk. As Engelberg recalls, Miller had just learned from a source about an intercepted communication between two Al Qaeda members who were discussing how disappointed they were that the United States had never attempted to retaliate for the bombing of the USS Cole. Not to worry, one of them said, soon they were going to do something so big that the U.S. would have to retaliate.

[emptywheel]

ArtShu

I don't think anyone will accuse me of being an apologist for Judy. But I'm not all that worried about that.

We know, from Judy's prison visitors, that Richard Clarke was one of Judy's sources. We also know that Richard Clarke was trying as hard as he could to get more people to take Al Qaeda serious the summer of 2001. We also know he was trying to get people to take intelligence like this seriously.

[Hprof]

I loved this line:

"the answer to bad information is more reporting"

Well, ok ... except the question here wasn't whether there should be more reporting, but whether Miller was qualified to do it. And when it was her bad reporting that publicized so much of that bad information in the first place, the answer is pretty clearly not.

[PSoTD]

I give her a year before the crywhore book.

[ArtShu]

I'm sure that if Richard Clarke was the source for this particular warning - not Rove, Libby, Chalabi or Cheney, he would gladly confirm that fact. If this is in fact the case, Mr. Clarke would be shown to have been even more of a national hero than he already is. If, however, it was someone in the administration, however, it's a completely different story because it would imply a pre-9/11 coverup.

[emptywheel]

cs

You can read her letter for the price it's worth (that is, free) over at Judy's site: judymiller.org.

Hprof

Ah, now that is the question, isn't it.

ArtShu

I'm sorry, I don't agree. You're supposing that a guy whom the Administration would love to silence for a good long time would willingly admit that he leaked highly classified information. Of the same sort that Fristie just launched a witchhunt over and much more serious than they took Sandy Berger to court for. Frankly, if Clarke WAS Judy's source (and since he's the only one who was trying to make this a story at the time, it is likely it was him), I hope he doesn't admit it. Becuase if he does, the GOP will have him in prison within a week.

Also, the coverup idea doesn't work very well. Judy was TRYING to write about this. It's the NYT (ironically) that wouldn't let her, not her neocon sources.

[Sara]

I suspect Judith is going to find the world quite cold and unforgiving once she runs out the string of interviews and appearances related to her "retirement" from the NYT. Given how much she cost the Times in Legal fees, she is not going to easily find a connection that can afford her other than on a free-lance, you pay the insurance basis. I doubt if she will easily find a book market except among the kept publishers, and I would not be surprised if demonstrators target her -- responsible for the lies that led the country into war. Perhaps she should take up the genre of spy fiction.

[ArtShu]

Judy's editor at that time is now in Siberia, no I mean Oregon. I think the American people need to know the nature of this information. If the leaker was a true whistleblower they should be protected. Whoever the leaker was, it certainly points to the fact that the administration either knew of these reports, or should have know (holding hands over their ears and babbling so as not to hear what the don't want to hear). If the leaker was an insider or Neocon, they should be tried and executed.

[dksbook]

I just read this over at Arianna's Place, by Jay Rosen. His conclusion is that Judy Miller's whole point was to not enlighten her readers (or anybody else), but to, in the words of Our Fitz, throw sand in everybody's eyes. His conclusion suggests to me that we may have been, in a sense, spinning our wheels wondering about her dark motives, her disgusting ass-sniffing, and her bright-faced smiles when all around her are tearing out their hair. Maybe there is no there there after all; she may be as empty a suit as our prez.

[ArtShu]

Emptywheel,

Both Judy Miller and Steve Engelberg can answer the question:

"Did Judy Miller's pre-9/11 attack warning come from a whistleblower,
neocon (traitor) or some other type of source?"

If both of their answers agree, it can be assumed to be true.

I think that survivors of the 3,000 victims have a right to know.

[John Lopresti]

Know any people, students, who attended the Barnard address?

[lukery]

EW - thnx again.

Riffing off Jay Rosen about how we normally know less after reading judy - she uses odd phrasing in this sentence: "The name is free-floating, separated by two pages from the end of an interview with Mr. Libby"

a normal person would say that 'the name was two pages *after* the interview' - given how judyjudy loves trying to be clever - its *possible* that "flame" was 2 pages before the end of the interview - which could put the reference either before or after the start of the interview.

[Saugatak]

DKSBook, thanks for the Jay Rosen piece.

However, not sure if Rosen is saying that Judy is crazy like a fox, or too dumb to realize the disconnect between what she says and what she does.

My vote is stupid, and desperately lying and spinning to save her career, we just can't penetrate the web of lies due to all the other lies and lack of information available to Fitz.

--Saugatak

[dksbook]

Saug, I agree with you, and I think Jay Rosen does, too! Judy's sand is to confuse readers into thinking she knows something they don't, because it is easier to throw sand than to actually report substantively, let alone, gasp!, investigate. if she had put 1/10th the effort into actually learning something substative that she put into looking cool, she could have been a pretty good war reporter. What really bothers me the most about her, though, as a woman, is the ick factor of her cozy relationship with her warrant officer friend, whose name escapes me now. He was obviously thinking with his other brain, letting her suggest ops. I would really like to know what becomes of him in all this. I'll bet his career is finished.