MONDAY'S LETTERS: Fire Judith Miller, Or Nominate Her to Supreme Court?

By: E&P Staff Wow, what a weekend. The internal disagreements over at The New York Times spilled out in full public view over the last few days, first with Bill Keller's mea culpa, then Judith Miller's rebuttal, then Public Editor Byron Calame weighing in, and finally Miller's rebuttal of Calame. We'll continue to cover each twist and turn in the Judy Miller saga, as well as the CIA leak investigation, and ask that you continue to feed us your thoughts, questions, interpretations, and occasional humor. Here's the latest.

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Unpaid Bill

Your Judy Miller column was eloquent and persuasive, and without a doubt contributed to Bill Keller's decision to offer a mea culpa today.

I remember Miller at the first major conference on nuclear issues and the press, run by the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media in 1983. She was aggressively contemptuous of anyone who suggested that coverage of nuclear issues had been influenced by reporters' reluctance to pose searching questions about national security policy. Judging by her own account of her role in Plamegate printed in the Times, the 22 intervening years did little to make her more reflective about the relationship between reporters and their government sources.

Now she's paying the price, and the full bill hasn't even been tendered yet. In counting up the costs of her wildly wrong reporting before and during the Iraq war, as you began to do in your column, let's not forget the 1900 American dead, the tens of thousands of U.S. wounded, and Iraqi casualties that are reliably pegged at more than 100,000 and counting.

Of course, the damage this war has done to American security by causing a metastatic growth of extremist Islam and global anti-Americanism is literally incalculable. It's for this reason that many experts and former officials in a position to know (both D. and R.) have begun calling this war the greatest blunder in American history. Should that in fact be so, Judith Miller and her ilk have much yet to answer for.

Robert Manoff
Professor of Journalism
Director, Center for War, Peace, and the News Media
Boston University

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More Critical Thinking Needed at The New York Times

I am not a journalist although I do write for the press here and abroad, and occupy the not entirely ornamental position of member of The Nation's Editorial Board. Greg Mitchell's remarks on the NY Times and the case of Judith Miller (or Judith Miller and the case of the New York Times) -- and the response of many other journalists, including quite a few working for the Times itself -- surely expresses what a large number of indignant but somewhat resigned readers of the newspaper think.

What accounts for the newspaper's indulgence of Ms. Miller's long history of integration in the national security apparatus? Perhaps one answer is that the newspaper itself, in terms of behaviour, ideology and persons, has not always been at great pains to maintain critical distance from power. The present publisher's grandfather, to cite one example, did accede to a request from John Kennedy that he not publish a report on preparations for what was to become the disaster of the Bay of Pigs.

There were countervailing trends of course, evident in the publication of The Pentagon Papers, David Halberstam's reporting from Vietnam, and the publication in the late '60s of material on the CIA's covert sponsorship of groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Still, too much of the newspaper's reporting from Europe on European autonomy in international affairs, and on the European welfare state, reads like dutiful rewrites of press briefings by our embassies. (One day Elaine Sciolino managed in the same article to report on the German Chancellor's call for a total recasting of relations between U.S. and Europe and to claim that the Europeans were anxiously seeking affection from the U.S.) As for larger issues at home, a certain amount of writing in the paper sedulously echoes what we may charitably term the thought of the Democratic Leadership Council. And in today's Times, a report on an Arab-American Museum in Dearborn, Michigan by Edward Rothstein is written in patronizing tones the paper would certainly not use were it talking about a Jewish cultural institution.

In short, perhaps the Miller scandal could encourage the newspaper to think critically about itself in larger terms.

Norman Birnbaum
University Professor Emeritus
Georgetown University Law Center

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Fire Judy Miller

It is clear that Judy Miller is no Rosa Parks, as the Times editorial page famously called her, destroying their credibility in the process. Reading her response to the Public Editor it is clear she is not credible either. For the sake of its reputation, the Times needs to fire Miller, and the editor and publisher who enabled her.

And since she still labors under the delusion that she is a hero, let me ask her and the world this: if Judy Miller went to jail to protect a principle, why is she not still in jail protecting her principle?

The Times has done some good things in the past week but clearly not enough to settle with its readers. An editorial needs to be written apologizing for the Rosa Parks analogy. Another needs to be written once again addressing the Iraq war. Firings need to happen from the top down. Only then will any credibility be restored.

Greg Klein
Hell's Kitchen, New York City

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Judy For Supreme Court

I got it! After Harriet Miers' nomination goes down the tubes, how about Bush nominating Judy Miller for the Supreme Court! Look at the problems it resolves -- she stays employed, the NY Times gets out of a sticky situation, the Bush administration rewards her -- and she's sure to get Senate approval. Law school schmaw school, she went to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, didn't she? OK! Justice Judith Miller, all right!

Back to you in the booth,

Tom Miller

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Conflicted

Do the source and the journalist become the parishioner and the priest in the confessional, and, furthermore, who has more to confess? Or is neither confessing anything, but just relaying the story. And is it just a story, or is it really the news? And if news is stamped classified, how do you report it. Judy was obviously discussing and gathering info, but did not write the articles. Was she jailed only for not revealing her administration source? Judy said that in her discussions with Mr. Libby, she would frequently use an incorrect or fictionalized form of the Valerie name, of which she was already aware, to see whether he would correct her with the accurate name. She noted that she had rarely referred to Valerie as Mrs. Wilson, which she seemed to understand Mr. Libby's reference to be. She frequently used fictionalized, but identifiable names in her notebooks, identifying in the notebooks her source for that particular paragraph perhaps by the version of the name she recorded. So unless Judy was making up this story for the benefit of the Grand Jury, we still don't know who her Plame sources were. She stated that she did not remember.

Had she spoken with Matthew Cooper? He had spoken with both Libby and Rove.

He is also married to longtime Clinton advisor Mandy Grunwald. There seem to be quite a few journalists familiar with the Plame name. Then there are problems such as undercover agent suggesting and introducing non-undercover spouse for non-undercover job under auspices of undercover-and-non-undercover-agency as at State Dept. meeting with CIA mission memo. You can stamp it "secret" or label it "S" all you want to, but this is Wash D.C. here. Unless they see "Classified" or "Eyes Only," who knows how the issue will be skirted, and neither Libby nor Rove were at that meeting. Was this whole thing orchestrated to target Libby and Rove, if not Cheney and Bush, forgetting any journalist sources that may have laid the frame. Then there are those some of whom were also in the State Dept. of the previous administration as well as journalists and media outlets who would love nothing more than to bring two to their knees before the 2008 election....

So does the fourth estate really belong in the justice department?

Bridget Ashmore

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Who has the moral authority to fire miller?

Jon Landman? Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson?

Because it sure doesn't seem like Bill Keller or Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Louis Trager