It's Miller Time

The New York Times has published three stories about testimony by its reporter, Judith Miller, to a grand jury investigating the question of whether Bush administration officials tried to discredit White House critic Joseph C. Wilson by illegally leaking information to the press about his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. The stories include Miller's first-person recounting of what she told the grand jury, a chronology of the Miller case, and an analysis suggesting that I. Lewis Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, may still be a focus of the criminal investigation. Miller's own account of her testimony contains some notable ambiguities, such as her inability to remember how a misspelled mention of Plame's name wound up in her notebook from an interview with Libby. And in an independent critique, Norman Solomon points out some disturbing details in Miller's account, such as her admission that she was given “clearance” by the Pentagon “to see secret information” which she “was not permitted to discuss” with her own editors. "There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government," Solomon states. "But if she’s supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that The New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper."