1. Anonymous says:

    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 â€leash†from the NYT yet.

  2. Anonymous says:

    â€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.â€

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

  3. Anonymous says:

    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 . . .

  4. Anonymous says:

    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?

  5. Anonymous says:

    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 (â€Rove’s right-hand manâ€) is scheduled for a third grand jury appearance…

  6. Anonymous says:

    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.

  7. Anonymous says:

    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.

  8. Anonymous says:

    I loved this line:

    â€the answer to bad information is more reportingâ€

    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.

  9. Anonymous says:

    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.

  10. Anonymous says:

    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.

  11. Anonymous says:

    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 â€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.

  12. Anonymous says:

    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.

  13. Anonymous says:

    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.

  14. Anonymous says:

    Emptywheel,

    Both Judy Miller and Steve Engelberg can answer the question:

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

    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.

  15. Anonymous says:

    EW – thnx again.

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

    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 â€flame†was 2 pages before the end of the interview – which could put the reference either before or after the start of the interview.

  16. Anonymous says:

    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

  17. Anonymous says:

    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.

  18. Anonymous says:

    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

  19. Anonymous says:

    Three phrases should be among the most common in our daily usage. They are: Thank you, I am grateful and I appreciate.