Should The New York Times Fire Judith Miller and Apologize to Readers?

[Ehrenreich discusses the latest about Times' reporter Judith Miller and the CIA leak story. She criticizes the Times' editors for their handling of the affair: "This has called into question the judgment of the newspaper that I rely on."

* Barbara Ehrenreich, author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine.]

. . . that she would make such a comment. But then, when they publish you, I guess that influences you.

Or, perhaps, there is irony, as in, she relies upon it to tell her what the elite thinks.

Anyway, for another perspective, go here:

http://amleft.blogspot.com/archives/2005_10_01_amleft_archive.html#112953269033347171

The long-awaited “explanations”—one from the New York Times and another from the newspaper’s senior correspondent Judith Miller—about what led her to go to jail rather than testify before a federal grand jury, and then testify 85 days later, have raised more questions than answers.

The Times’ page one news story and Miller’s “personal account” published Sunday portray behavior that has far more in common with government plots and dirty tricks than with the defense of journalistic principles, the confidentiality of sources, or freedom of the press.

At the heart of the Miller case—and whatever fallout is to come in terms of potential indictments against Bush administration officials—is not simply a government plot to smear a critic of the war, but a criminal conspiracy by the Bush administration, aided and abetted by both Congress and the media, to drag the American people into a war based upon lies.

Both the Times’ and Miller’s account deal with three discussions the reporter held with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, in June and July of 2003, concerning former ambassador Joseph Wilson and Wilson’s wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Wilson had conducted a CIA-organized trip to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that the African country was selling weapons-grade uranium to the Saddam Hussein regime. On the basis of his trip, he reported that there were no grounds for such claims. Nonetheless, the administration made the alleged uranium purchases a key element in its attempt to terrorize the American people into supporting an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.

Bush included the claim—the notorious “16 words”—in his January 2003 State of the Union speech, prompting Wilson to begin speaking out on what he viewed to be the falsification of intelligence to create a pretext for war. He became an unnamed source for a number of commentaries by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and, on July 6, 2003, the Times published an opinion piece under his byline charging that the intelligence had been “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

The first of Miller’s discussions with Libby took place in the Old Executive Office Building on June 23, two weeks before Wilson’s article was published. She met him again at Washington’s St. Regis Hotel on July 8, two days after the piece appeared. The third discussion took place July 12, two days before right-wing columnist Robert Novak, citing “two senior administration officials,” published a column identifying Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative and claiming it was her idea to send him to Niger.

The column touched off a political firestorm, with the CIA demanding that the Justice Department investigate. The intentional identification of a covert agent is a federal crime under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a statute enacted with the aim of silencing those trying to expose US intelligence operations abroad.

There has been widespread speculation that the two unnamed officials cited by Novak are Libby and White House chief advisor Karl Rove, who has been called four times to testify before the grand jury convened by the special counsel appointed to investigate the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Miller and the Times claim that the reporter’s decision last month to reverse her previous stand and testify before Fitzgerald’s panel, and thereby obtain her release from prison, was based on personal assurances given by Libby in September that he had voluntarily released her from her pledge to keep his name confidential. Libby’s lawyer, however, insists that Libby had already made such a waiver of confidentiality a year before.

The account given by Miller of her discussions with Libby and her decision first to go to jail, and then to testify, is riddled with inconsistencies. Her “personal account” reads like a series of evasions and half-truths crafted with her lawyer—establishment powerbroker Robert Bennett—to provide her with deniability.

Thus she writes, “My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson’s wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent...” This kind of legalese leaves up in the air the issue of whether or not Libby actually identified Valerie Wilson by name, or divulged to Miller her covert status.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/mill-o18.shtml

Over the past week, the New York Times has carried pages of self-examination, mea culpas and even sharp criticism in response to the deepening debacle surrounding the case of its senior correspondent, Judith Miller.

The newspaper, which has long presented itself as the paper of record for America’s liberal establishment, has been thoroughly discredited by the Miller affair. The recent revelations regarding the investigation into the Bush administration’s leaking of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame have implicated the newspaper in a criminal state conspiracy aimed at intimidating political dissent and silencing opposition to the war in Iraq.

The newspaper suppressed information from its readers in order to protect the relationship between Miller and her co-thinkers within the administration, with whom she collaborated in making the phony “weapons of mass destruction” case for the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

On Sunday, the Times published a critique by its public editor Byron Calame, who condemned “the deferential treatment of Ms. Miller by editors who failed to dig into problems before they became a mess.”

In addition to this special treatment, Calame cited the failure of the editors to own up to Miller’s false reporting—which mirrored the administration’s fraudulent claims—on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for more than a year after it became obvious that no such weapons ever existed.

“The paper should have addressed the problems of the coverage sooner,” said Calame. “It is the duty of the paper to be straight with its readers, and whatever the management reason was for not doing so, the readers didn’t get a fair shake.”

The newspaper also published an internal email from its executive editor Bill Keller, who acknowledged, “By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester.” As an alibi, Keller claimed that, after he assumed the editorship in the wake of the overblown controversy surrounding the comparatively insignificant journalistic misconduct of junior reporter Jayson Blair, “It felt somehow unsavory to begin my tenure by attacking the previous regime... I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.”

The reality is that the reluctance to “come clean” with its readers about its role in publishing lies about Iraqi WMD stemmed from the newspaper’s—and Keller’s own—support for the Iraq war. It is the catastrophic failure of this imperialist military adventure that has plunged not only the newspaper, but the Bush administration and the American political establishment as a whole into deep crisis.

Miller’s false reporting and intimate collaboration with administration officials were integral to the role played by the newspaper in manufacturing an ostensibly liberal perspective designed to bolster the shabby pretexts advanced by the Bush administration for the war.

This perspective was elaborated in its most finished form in the cynical columns of the Times’s foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman.

In the midst of the furor over Miller, Friedman has, not coincidentally, felt compelled to defend this perspective against what he acknowledges is a “ton of mail” attacking his support for the war. He did so October 15 in an online statement entitled, “On Iraq: What was I Thinking? Here’s What.”

Friedman’s attempt “to explain where I was, and am, coming from” is riddled with absurdities and internal contradictions. It reveals the cowardly and utterly unprincipled outlook that underlay the decision of the self-styled liberals of the New York Times to support the war.

Friedman explains that he did not embrace the “neo-con drumbeat to invade Iraq” that began more than a decade before the war itself. Yet, he became convinced “that the Bush team was going to invade Iraq no matter who was against it—Congress, columnists or whatever.”

He declares himself “flattered that some people think my column was so influential that had I come out against the war, it would have made a difference.” He hastens to add, “It would have made no difference.”

This modesty is both false and serf-serving. Friedman is arguably the most influential columnist writing for the most influential newspaper in the United States, yet he asserts that nothing he wrote could have made the slightest difference in the Bush administration’s war plans.

This is absurd on its face. If the Bush administration was so indifferent to the role of the media, why did it exert such effort to concoct its bogus pretexts, orchestrating a media campaign for war led by the Times’s Judith Miller? Why did it then go to such lengths to muzzle the reporting on the war itself, with the introduction of “embedded journalists?”

Moreover, Friedman ignores the far-reaching implications of his own rationalizations. To claim that the Bush administration can launch a war in open defiance of the press and the public is to acknowledge the collapse of democracy and the existence of a presidential dictatorship. He, of course, draws no such conclusion.

In fact, the media’s response was very much part of the administration’s calculations, and Friedman and the Times fell right into line.

Having concluded that nothing he wrote would stop the war, Friedman tells us, he assumed a new and novel mission: “Because I believed that if this war were mounted in the right way for the right reasons, it could have a truly important outcome, I wanted to use my column to do what little I could to try to tilt the administration to fight the right war, the right way.”

What was the “right war?” It was a war to “produce a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.”

Friedman acknowledges that the Bush administration launched the war based upon lies. “I never believed or wrote,” he states, “that invading Iraq on the pretext of WMD was legitimate”—though that is precisely what happened.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/frie-o25.shtml