New York Times reporter Judith Miller testifies on exposure of CIA agent

Miller and the Times had maintained that her earlier decision to refuse to testify and accept imprisonment on civil contempt charges was a principled defense of freedom of the press and, in particular, the ability of reporters to use unnamed confidential sources without being forced to disclose them through state intimidation.

There is no doubt that such press freedoms are under attack and must be defended. The use of state power to coerce journalists into revealing confidential sources threatens to suppress any form of independent and critical reporting on the operations of the government. The jailing of a reporter represents one of the most egregious forms of government intimidation and deserves to be condemned.

However, there are other issues and interests in Miller’s case that pertain not to the press’s freedom to inform the public, but rather the government’s manipulation of a pliant media to deceive the people and intimidate its political opponents. Rather than exposing government wrongdoing, Miller’s actions appear to be aimed at covering it up.

Miller herself played a prominent role as a conduit for government propaganda about “weapons of mass destruction” in the period leading up to the war in Iraq, and she shared the Bush administration’s concerns as these lies began to unravel. The agreement Miller and her lawyers reached with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on her testimony strongly suggests that it was these latter interests that were paramount in her case.

Miller was hardly protecting a persecuted whistleblower exposing government secrets. Rather, as she reportedly testified to the grand jury, her source was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and reputedly one of the most powerful figures in the administration.

Their conversations came in July 2003, just days after the Times had published an opinion column by Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who had been sent to Niger the year before to investigate claims that the African country had negotiated sales of uranium to Iraq for use in nuclear weapons production. Wilson had reported back to the US government that the purported intelligence pointing to such sales was fraudulent. When the Bush administration continued making the false uranium claims, Wilson went public, causing deep political embarrassment and anger in the White House.

Wilson’s revelation hit the administration hard by exposing its deliberate fabrication of a pretext for war under conditions in which the US occupation was confronting a growing insurgency, and no evidence of “weapons of mass destruction,” the supposed motive for the war, had turned up in Iraq.

Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/mill-o06.shtml