Last week, former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby asserted that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had given him permission to release previously classified information in an effort to rebut criticism of the Iraq war. Libby's assertion has shone a renewed spotlight on the "Plamegate" scandal - a scandal whose journalistic implications the Daily's Patrice Taddonio will explore in these pages over the next week-and-a-half.
Matt Bai, who covers national politics for the New York Times Magazine, woke up the morning of Feb. 27, hopped on the elliptical machine in his living room, turned on the TV and flipped to a TIVO'd episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."
"It featured this reporter who goes to jail for not revealing her source - the federal government is going after her," says the Tufts graduate. "At the end, a cop who's a source and comes to visit the reporter says, 'You've got to give them my name.' She says, 'If I give them your name, they win. You go do your job; I'm doing mine.' And she says, 'Without a free press, there's no freedom.'"
Bai pauses and then continues, incredulous: "I was amazed to feel, in the end, that 'Law and Order' understood more about the significance of this than virtually anyone in Washington."
The "this" to which Bai refers is journalists' commitment to their confidential sources-a concept that has drawn much media attention (and prompted much media introspection) in conjunction with U.S Attorney and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's still-unfolding investigation of what has been dubbed "Plamegate."
The single spark that started the "Plamegate" fire was a 16-word sentence spoken by President George W. Bush in his Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
On July 6 of that year, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson - who had gone on the trip upon which Bush's claim was based - took issue with those 16 words in a Washington Post Op-Ed titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Wilson's ultimate conclusion? That "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The following day, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleisher (who has since been succeeded by Scott McClellan) sounded the 16 words' death knell, telling the press that "the information...did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect."
In an alternate reality, that might have been the end of it. But in a Washington that thrives on innuendoes, where politicos and members of the press frequently forsake the moral for the mutually beneficial, the end was nowhere in sight.
Eight days after the publication of Wilson's incendiary Op-Ed, Robert Novak wrote "Mission to Niger." The July 14 column revealed that Wilson's wife Valerie Plame worked for the CIA and alleged that Plame had had a hand in orchestrating her husband's trip to Niger.
Whether the leak of Plame's identity was a retaliatory action knowingly orchestrated and perpetrated by Bush administration officials - and therefore, a federal offense - has yet to be determined. The details of who leaked what to whom, and with what intent, have yet to be released to the public. Indeed, pretty much all of what went on behind the White House scenes between July 6 and July 14, 2003 has yet to be defined-and it's been almost three years.
Which means it's been almost one year since U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan sent New York Times reporter Judith Miller to a federal detention center in Alexandria, Virginia because she refused to testify about her conversations with an anonymous source, later identified as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. (In a move that will give grist to the conspiracy-theorist mill, Miller was sentenced to jail on July 6, 2005, two years to the day after Wilson's op-ed was published.)
When the 57-year-old Miller entered her jail cell, she had a Pulitzer Prize, two books, and nearly 30 years at the New York Times under her belt. She spent 1977 through 1983 working out of the newspaper's Washington bureau, covering politics, the securities industry and foreign affairs. Her aptitude for reporting on issues involving the Middle East and nuclear proliferation led to her appointment in 1983 as the first female chief of the Times' Cairo bureau. She came full-circle in 1988, when she became a news editor and deputy bureau chief at the newspaper's Washington bureau.
Two years later, the Times dubbed her their special correspondent to the Persian Gulf, and in the time between then and her prison stay, Miller's reporting remained centered on that tumultuous region. Her 1997 book "God Has Ninety-Nine Names" explored militant Islamism in the Arab world (and, incidentally, has a kicker of an opener: "On my first day as Cairo bureau chief of The New York Times in August 1983, I saw a donkey drop dead just outside my office," it begins).
No donkeys dropped on the first page of Miller's next book, 2001's "Germs," an acclaimed chronicle of the genesis of biological weapons and bioterrorism written with fellow Times reporters Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. In the wake of Sept. 11, the book - rendered suddenly and terrifyingly timely - reached number one on the Times' non-fiction bestseller list.
But by the time I speak with Bai over the phone on that late-February morning, Miller is known less for her triumphant ascension within the Times' ranks (and on its bestseller list) than for her 85-day incarceration.
I ask Bai about his immediate reaction - both personal and professional-to Miller's imprisonment.
"You're the first person who's asked me how I feel about this publicly," he tells me.
Though he may not have spent a great deal of time talking about his opinion on Miller's incarceration, he's clearly spent a great deal of time thinking about it: out of all the journalists with whom I'll go on to speak about Miller, it's Bai who articulates his sentiments with the most clarity, conviction, and elegance.
"My feelings aren't especially complicated," he says. "So many people who would have traditionally been staunch defenders of the press - a lot of my liberal friends, a lot of people writing for newspapers and magazines, people you would expect to always stand up for freedom of the press and the first amendment - were the first people to say, 'This is different, a crime may have been committed in the transmission of the information, she should give her source away, she's protecting the administration.' It was prevalent, the sense that somehow, this is different because a crime may have been committed, and it's not worth protecting your source because it's just about somebody sleazy trying to hurt someone else. Therefore, it was somehow petty and unpatriotic to not reveal your source."
"So the sense was, 'It's not Watergate, so reveal it'?" I ask.
"Exactly," Bai says, repeating "'It's not Watergate, so reveal it,'" before continuing. "I find this to be absolutely heinous, and very typical of our political moment: everything is ideological, nobody thinks clearly any more and every philosophical or legal point of view, in the end, has to support one's ideological aims. So because this scandal had the potential to hurt the Bush administration, suddenly all the great liberal defenders of freedom of the press were angry at the reporter for not naming her sources."
Bai's voice has now taken on a tone that's equal parts disgust and disappointment. "Forget the precedent, forget the ideal - it was all about hurting Karl Rove and finding some kind of twisted logic by which you could make the argument that somehow, the reporter was wrong to do her job," he says.
Thinking Bai is finished, I open my mouth to ask him for his thoughts on the practice of anonymous sourcing. He beats me to the punch.
"Now look," he says, "if we make the test of whether or not to protect your source the legality of the conversation, where does that take us? What about the Pentagon Papers? The transmission of that information wasn't a crime? Should they have come out and named the source and refused to run the Pentagon Papers?
"We don't get to pick and choose which leaks are more moral than others and which mandate our protecting this person and which don't," Bai continues, building to an impassioned crescendo. "So yes, it is unfortunate, distasteful, and frustrating to be in trouble with the law because you're protecting the identity of someone who wanted to smear his enemies. But we protect everyone's identity! It's our job to check the information: she never printed the story; she did her job."
Indeed, unlike TIME magazine's Matt Cooper, who was also subpoenaed, Miller did not write an article on Wilson and his wife: she chose not to run with information given by an anonymous source.
It's pure speculation, but perhaps Miller's decision not to take the anonymous-source path in this instance was influenced by the fallout of her series of anonymous source-reliant - and ultimately inaccurate - page-one Times articles about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
In 2001 and 2002, Miller wrote what the New Yorker's Franklin Foer described as "a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein's ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by [Bush-administration-ally-turned-Iranian-spy-suspect Ahmad] Chalabi and his allies-almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate." In the first-person account of her saga that appeared in the Times on Oct. 16, 2006, Miller herself admitted that her WMD stories had contained inaccuracies.
After the invasion, another series of articles - which Miller wrote while embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha, the military unit searching Iraq for WMDs - further substantiated the Bush administration's assertions that Iraq was in possession of WMDs.
Miller's "bombshell" article (so to speak), published in April of 2003, centered around an anonymous Iraqi scientist's claim that right before the United States' invasion, Iraq had demolished its stash of biological and chemical weapons. The scientist, Miller reported, even led MET Alpha to a stash of buried chemical weapons-production materials.
On an episode of "PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Miller trumpeted the significance of this development, telling Lehrer, "I think they found something more than a 'smoking gun.' What they've found is what is being called here by the members of MET Alpha...a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual - a scientist, as we've called him - who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand, and who has led MET Team Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions[...] The scientist, who has been cooperating with MET Alpha, has actually said that he participated in - he kind of watched, you know, a warehouse being burned that contained potentially incriminating biological equipment. So clearly what Saddam Hussein wanted to do was cover his weapons of mass destruction tracks."
As it turns out, Miller was wrong. With or without her knowledge, her anonymous source (later revealed to be Ahmed Chalabi) had pulled the proverbial wool over her eyes, and by extension, the eyes of the Times-reading American public: Iraq did not in fact have WMDs, nor did the country possess the materials to make them.
And there's yet another "as it turns out." Despite the inaccuracy of Miller's WMD coverage, she was still the Times' primary WMD reporter at the beginning of the summer of 2003 - a fact that continues to amaze the Boston Phoenix's Mark Jurkowitz.
"I mean, I frankly was astounded that the New York Times had someone covering what was arguably the biggest story in the country up to then - whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not - who was essentially unsupervised!" marvels the affable and articulate Jurkowitz, who served as the Boston Globe's first full-time media critic for the better part of a decade before joining the Phoenix.
"The classic line in the Times' postmortem was that she operated with 'a degree of autonomy rare at the Times,'" Jurkowitz continues. "I mean, they took her off the national security beat - and somehow, she kept writing about it!"
Miller's handling of at least one of her WMD search group stories does in fact reveal a troubling disconnect between her and her editors. In response to Miller's May 1, 2003 Chalabi-reliant story, John Burns, the Times' Baghdad bureau chief, sent Miller an e-mail containing the following admonishment: "I am deeply chagrined at your reporting and filing on Chalabi after I had told you on Monday night that we were planning a major piece on him - and without so much as telling me what you were doing," Burns wrote in the internal e-mail, which was published in late May of 2003 in the Washington Post. "We have a bureau here; I am in charge of that bureau until I leave; I make assignments after considerable thought and discussion, and it was plain to all of us to whom the Chalabi story belonged. If you do this, what is to stop you doing it on any other story of your choosing? And what of the distress it causes the correspondent who is usurped? It is not professional, and not collegial."
Miller's e-mail response was a territorial one: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him," she wrote. "He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."
In late May of 2004, the Times published a vague apology for those inaccurate exclusives. Obliquely, that apology did not mention Miller's name: "We have found ... instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been," the piece read. "In some cases, the information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge ... We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight."
Despite having what he calls "the requisite doubts about Judy Miller's journalism and her relationships with her sources," Jurkowitz's initial reaction to her incarceration was in line with Bai's.
"The principle that she stood up for and upheld in choosing to go to jail rather than reveal her conversations with her sources, that fundamental principal of honoring the agreement with a confidential source, is of crucial importance in journalism," Jurkowitz tells me in the course of our February phone conversation. "So my fundamental instinct was, though I had questions about some of the work she did, and I thought that she might be protecting a source who was just interested in smearing Wilson for political reasons, I respected the principle that she stood for."
Jurkowitz's use of the past tense belies the doubts that have sprung up in his mind since Miller first went to jail.
"To this day," he says, "I am confused by the accounts given, and I'm confused about whether or not Judy Miller actually had to spend a day in jail."
Part II of "Miller the Martyr?" will appear in tomorrow's Daily.
