The Next Hurrah: Judy's Vanity

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March 16, 2006

Judy's Vanity

by emptywheel

The bloggers were without editing, without a way for people to understand what was good, what was well reported--to distinguish between the straight and the slanderous. Things would get instantly picked up, magnified, and volumized. . . . I was appalled, not by the blogs--that would be like getting appalled at the Industrial Revolution--but by my colleagues, who believed what they read on the blogs.

So says Judy Miller, a reporter famous for her ability to elude the editor's pen, or even the editor's authority. A reporter also famous for magnifying (and probably volumizing, whatever that means) discredited nuggets of intelligence on the front page of the nation's leading newspaper. So she says in a Vanity Fair article that paints a rosy picture of the events surrounding Judy's own involvement in the Plame Affair.

There are already several good accounts of this article. Arianna delivers her rebuttal here. E&P's Greg Mitchell provides a good overview here. Larisa joins the fun here. And I know Jane is working on it, because she kindly shared her copy with me, stay tuned for it on the new FDL site. I'm actually going to take two stabs at the article. Today, I'll review the kind portrayal Judy's good friend Marie Brenner painted of Judy's involvement, which obscures all the remaining questions. And sometime in the next few days, I'll look at the purpose such obscureness serve--a very sloppy claim that the Plame case is all just an attack on journalism.

The Never-Ending Erasure of Joseph Lelyveld

With regards to Judy's involvement, this article tells a common story. Howell Raines, who oversaw Judy's pre-war and embedded reporting, got in trouble at about the time Judy returned from Iraq. Not long after, Bill Keller, who had worked with Judy well in the past but who tried to reel her in, was named Executive Editor.

In other words, this story repeats the misrepresentation that everyone else who tells this story makes, that Howell Raines or Bill Keller was Executive Editor when Judy first started reporting on the Plame leak. They weren't. The VF story admits that Raines resigned on June 5. And it notes that Keller wasn't appointed until 5 weeks later.

On June 5, Raines and Boyd both resigned under pressure. Five weeks later Bill Keller, Raines's chief rival at the paper, became the new executive editor.

Though even this is misleading. Keller was named on July 14, but according to NYT's own tell-all story on Plame, Keller did not officially take over until the July 30.. Now, frankly, I have no idea why the NYT and anyone talking about them keeps making this misrepresentation. I don't know what role Joseph Lelyveld had in this affair and why no one wants to admit he was interim editor for the entire period of interest to the Plame Affair. But in this case, the misrepresentation permits assertions such as:

Back from Iraq in June 2003, Miller realized that she was losing her authority. She had worked with Bill Keller for years, and she admired his reporting. He was a fellow Pulitzer winner. But now Keller was in a sensitive situation. Miller would have to be reeled in. "You are radioactive," she says he told her. "You can see it on the blogs." "Why do you give a shit about the blogs?," Miller remembered asking Keller. "They do not know anything." (Keller responds: "I'm pretty sure I never said any such thing.")

That is, this allows Brenner to portray Judy's "loss of authority" as an effect of Keller's rise, rather than an effect of Gerald Boyd's (whom Brenner calls Miller's "confidant") disgraceful departure. Or a short-term move by Joseph Lelyveld.

The misrepresentation also allows Brenner to play with the chronology a bit. She portrays Judy receiving nasty emails while still in Baghdad in May 2003. But then she describes Judy's insubordination of John Burns, then Baghdad bureau chief, as if it occurred well after Judy returned home in mid-May, rather than May 1, when Judy claims that nasty emails started arriving. So Brenner separates one the most public (but by no means the most egregious case) of Judy's sins while in Baghdad from emails that may have been a well-deserved response. Brenner effectively removes abundant evidence of cause and effect--between not just Judy's pre-war reporting, but also her embedded shillery, which was every bit as problematic as her pre-war work.

What Did Judy Do During Her Return Trip to Iraq?

The article does add detail to a question I've never been able to fully answer. It mentions that Judy returned to Iraq; the article portrays this as occurring before Boyd and Raines' departure, over the objections of the NYT foreign editor..

"I told Judy that she could not go back," Roger Cohen, the foreign editor of the Times, told me recently. "There were concerns about her sources and her sourcing. . . . We talked about it in my office for an hour." Miller was able to prevail, however, and she returned briefly to Iraq, she later said, "to try to report on why the W.M.D. had not been found." She concentrated on one crucial aspect: why there were doubts about the mobile labs. "I wanted to find out how the intelligence services had gotten this so wrong," she said. "There was a tremendous divide over it."

William Jackson places the trip in the first few days of June, which would make it just before (or just when) Raines and Boyd resigned and just before Judy publishes her second article with William Broad on June 7, a somewhat balanced article offsetting some of Judy's earlier shillery. The trip would also fall into the period when the 75th XTF was transitioning control of the WMD hunt to the ISG, but well before ISG leader David Kay would arrive in Iraq.

The June 7 article makes it sound like Judy might have actually done some reporting while in Iraq.

American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.

''Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion,'' said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, ''I am very upset with the process.''

The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof.

Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light.

But from Jackson's description, it sounds like she didn't get close enough to really know.

After months of enjoying "embedded" status (and then some), Miller unexpectedly returned to Baghdad via Kuwait in the middle of the night in early June, military officials and journalists told me, but was denied permission to rejoin the weapons-hunting teams and was put on the next plane out.

According to a public affairs officer (PAO) on the scene, she sought an embed arrangement different from the "terms of accreditation to report" which she had originally signed. Most of her contacts had been replaced by new people from David Kay's Iraqi Survey Group (ISG). Col. Richard McPhee, commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force in Iraq, whose teams had been looking for evidence of WMDs in the spring, refused an interview with her.

The trip still doesn't add up for several reasons: Jackson's version puts her on a plane out of Iraq before she does any reporting. Roger Cohen apparently still had serious concerns that she was relying on dicey sourcing. And the June 7 article was most important because it leaked the contents of the intelligence community White Paper. The White Paper is almost certainly another case of ~~Bolton~~ someone leaking directly to Judy to pre-empt the discussion of dissenters within the Intelligence Community. When Kay released his interim report in the September, the Intelligence Community treated his report very carefully, explicitly trying to avoid the kind of leak that had occured with the mobile weapons lab White Paper. And finally, the June 7 article features one of Judy's trademarks, SAOs (the latter of whom sounds just like Bolton) supporting dodgy intelligence in spite of all the counter-evidence.

A senior administration official conceded that ''some analysts give the hydrogen claim more credence.'' But he asserted that the majority still linked the Iraqi trailers to germ weapons.

[snip]

A senior official said ''we've considered these objections'' and dismissed them as having no bearing on the overall conclusions of the white paper. He added that Iraq, which declared several classes of mobile vehicles to the United Nations, never said anything about hydrogen factories.

All of these items suggest Judy may have been trying to squelch doubts about the trailers, rather than air them. But then, that's what she seemed to be doing when she was interviewing Scooter Libby in late June, too.

Judy's First Libby Meeting

And then Brenner offers her version of Judy's involvement in the Plame affair. Oddly, she limits the presentation to Judy's June 23 meeting with Libby; she provides no details of the other Libby meetings or her other reporting on Wilson and Plame.

Brenner does add one detail to Judy's notes about the June 23 meeting. In her own tell all, Judy does not describe when Libby imagined Bush would have been warned that the 16 words were wrong.

"No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,' " he said, according to my notes.

But Brenner portrays this as happening after the SOTU.

He told her, "No briefer cam in [after the State of the Union address] and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President.'"

The information in brackets could just be Brenner's elaboration, her understanding of what Judy might have meant. But it's an odd addition. Why would a briefer come in after the SOTU to correct the President? Wouldn't a briefer (or Alan Foley) try to correct the SOTU before it is delivered? Or is this just Judy's attempt to make one of Libby's assertions appear true?

And while Brenner leaves out almost all details of Judy's involvement in the Plame affair, she does try to muster skepticism about Judy forgetting this June meeting.

Although it would take her two years to remember this particular meeting--a fact impossible for many to believe--she wrote at the top of one page of her notes, "Valerie Flame." She has said that she does not know who the source was.

[snip]

The June meeting, she would later insist, slipped from her mind. "I did not remember the meeting until I saw the notes," she told me, "Can you imagine that?"

No, Judy. I can't.

But then events jump miraculously from that moment, June 2003, to the time when Judy begins to get heat for her involvement. Brenner portrays Judy going to NYT counsel George Freeman--implying this conversation takes place before Judy is subpoenaed.

"I said, 'George, I think we are going to have a problem,'" Miller recalled. "I knew Valerie Plame's name. I knew who she was. I talked to many people in the government about her. He said, 'Before Novak's article?' And I said, 'Before and after.' . . . He said, 'Don't worry about it,' I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'Because I'm sure they'll go after Novak first. He's the one who outed her.'"

There are several things of note in this passage. Clearly, this conversation occurs at a time when Judy had not yet been subpoenaed. She knew she had information Fitzgerald would want, and she warned Freeman of it before she received a subpoena. But note, too, what she was concerned about. She had conversations with many people in the government, "Before and after." Weigh this comment against Judy's own statement that,

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred.

At some point in 2004, Judy certainly knew when those conversations occurred and may have known who they were with. At that point, Judy was concerned not only about conversations she had before Novak outed Plame, but of conversations she had after he outed her. This would support several of my wild-assed theories about Judy: That when she told Phil Taubman that...

In the fall of 2003, after The Washington Post reported that "two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists," Philip Taubman, Ms. Abramson's successor as Washington bureau chief, asked Ms. Miller and other Times reporters whether they were among the six. Ms. Miller denied it.

"The answer was generally no," Mr. Taubman said. Ms. Miller said the subject of Mr. Wilson and his wife had come up in casual conversation with government officials, Mr. Taubman said, but Ms. Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information.

...she had been coached on the same early investigation strategy as Novak had, to deny she had learned of Plame as part of an organized leak. And that she had received the name Flame in October 2003 (though Brenner does mention this, seemingly in connection with the June 23 meeting), when they were trying to burn Brewster and Jenning and really ruin Plame's cover. In any case, Judy (or Freeman) seems to admit here that Judy's involvement doesn't end with her June 12 conversation with Scooter Libby.

Wherein Judy Uses Richard Perle as a Character Witness

One of the funniest details in this article are two bits Judy includes, I think, to prove she's not that close with Libby. First, there's her defense against the claim of entanglement with Libby:

I've never interviewed the vice president, never met the president, and have met Karl Rove only once. I operated at the wonk level. That is why all of this stuff that came later about my White House spin is such bullshit. I did not talk to these people. . . . Libby was not a social friend, like [neocon] Richard Perle.

Several things to note about this passage. Judy does not deny meeting the Veep, or even spending significant time with him. Which may be relevant for discussions of Aspens turning. Then there's Judy's purported belief that, just because she relied on such "wonks" as Libby and Bolton, she was not propagating White House spin. As if Libby and Bolton really have any expertise--or objective assessment--about WMDs and Iraq. And finally, Richard Perle??? You absolve yourself of guilt by association with Scooter Libby by mentioning your friendship with Richard Perle? Richard Perle, the patron saint of Douglas Feith's OSP? Wow. Someone involved with this article is just downright clueless.

Then Judy or Brenner raises Perle again in this delightful anecdote:

On the train to Washington the next day, Jason Epstein turned to his wife. "You know, you can still get out of this thing. It is not too late. This is like Watergate. You are in a tight spot. By taking a stand on principles, you are going to be accused of protecting bad people." Though he had no idea who Miller's source was, he had little respect for people such as Richard Perle and Ahmad Chalabi, both promoters of the war. While Miller was in Iraq, Epstein had been writing and article that would be published in The New York Review of Books, comparing Bush's invasion of Iraq to Captain Ahab's obsession in Moby Dick.

"How can you say that to me?," Miller snapped at him. "You know what's at stake here." She was so angry that she moved to another seat.

Epstein seems to have a much better read on the character of Judy's primary sources than Judy. And he was certainly proven right about Judy protecting bad people.

Brenner, by contrast, has less of a clue. Rather than considering whether Judy really might have been doing no more than protecting bad people, Brenner finally suggests that Judy lost public support simply because her lawyers lost the battle of public opinion with the blogs.

Playing by the outmoded rules of the MSM, however, the lawyers seemed to be losing in the court of public opinion.

I'll comment more on the role of the media in a later post. But it's worth repeating that Judy was already playing by the rules Brenner accuses blogs of playing by--no editors, no validation, magnification of crap. Judy, I guess you live by the free flow of information, and you die by the free flow of information.

March 16, 2006 at 09:00 in Blogs Internet and New Media, Bush/Republican Scandals, Contributor--emptywheel, Press and Media | Permalink

Comments

Great Post EW, love the "I did not remember the meeting until I saw the notes," she told me, "Can you imagine that?"

I think you've probably seen these, but I'll throw them in anyway.

A couple of additional references to Judy's forgotten sources.

In an interview with the BBC, Judy Miller admitted that others told her about Valerie Plame. Recording can be found here.

BBC INTERVIEWER: Who was it who told you that Valerie Plame was a spy?

JUDY MILLER: I don't remember who supplied the name. I remember and I testified before a Grand Jury to who it was that told me that Valerie Plame worked at the agency in the WMD area and that individual was Lewis Libby.. Scooter Libby.

BBC INTERVIEWER: Was there anybody else who named Valerie Plame to you as a CIA agent?

JUDY MILLER: Yes, other people did, but I - my notes - these interviews were two years old. I never wrote a story about it. It wasn't - I didn't consider it very important information at the time and my notes have no indication of who those other people were - and I really couldn't remember.

BBC INTERVIEWER: But if it was Karl Rove, for example, you'd remember.

JUDY MILLER: I'm not going to talk about who my other sources were or were not.

The BBC article about the interview is here.

The interview was broadcast on BBC on Novemeber 30, 2005, the source information is in the 2nd Miller segment. The interview included questions about Miller's reporting on WDM as well.

Murray Waas also indicated that Miller had other Bush Administration sources [note the pural] in his National Journal article on 10/11/05.

Miller had spent 85 days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to testify before the grand jury about her conversations with Libby and other Bush administration officials regarding Plame.
Waas 10/11/05

Miller would not ask her sources to waive their anonymity. She said intelligence officials might feel coerced into admitting they had talked to a reporter.
LATimes

And this CNN headline from 10/12/05, it was changed shortly after it went up. The story associated with the headline never mentioned a second source. It could have been an error.

We all know she has other sources, but it would be very interesting if you actually testified about another one.

New York Times reporter disclosed conversation with second source

Posted by: pollyusa | March 16, 2006 at 10:24

this from a virtual pillar of truth and justice
hard to understand why she still villifies the people that are smart enough to see the difference between truth and lies. Is it that journalists are taught to speak down to the public?

Posted by: oldtree | March 16, 2006 at 16:40

oldtree

Don't know if you've got a copy of VF. But the pictures are amazing. Woodward, with no books, looking like a Degas portrait. Pincus, surrounded by chaos and books stacked high. Judy, looking like a diva, next to her desk with anally arranged books, the spines all facing the camera.
I'll take pincus of the three any day.

Posted by: emptywheel | March 16, 2006 at 17:35

Emptywheel,

I'm curious what you make of the assertion by Vanity Fair that Ben Bradlee revealed Bob Woodward's source in the Plame Affair as being Richard Armitage. Norah O'Donnell reported on Keith Olbermann's Tuesday (March 14, 2006) show, concerning the Ben Bradlee supposed leak, that Dick Armitage is an old friend of Bob Woodward‘s and that he had been the source for other material that Bob Woodward has written in the past.

I am also curious why Armitage would be a source for Novak on Plame. Was Armitage a known source for Bob Novak regarding similiar issues in the past?

Thanks!

Posted by: Jon | March 16, 2006 at 23:14

Jon

Go here for more on my opinion of Armitage as Woodward's and Novak's source than you probably want!

Posted by: emptywheel | March 17, 2006 at 11:57

Thanks Emptywheel! A great piece!

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