RAW STORY informs us, via a New York Times spokesperson, that Judith Miller is taking a little holiday. Note the wording:
“until we decide”
That suggests that this is not a voluntary leave.
Read MoreAs if the torture, endless detentions, lack of rebuilding progress and the refusal to count Iraqi casualties weren’t enough harm to perpetrate on the Iraqi people, the US military has now added a new tactic in its so-called War on Terrorism: just starve Iraqis.
Human rights investigator Jean Ziegler said they had driven people out of insurgent strongholds that were about to be attacked by cutting supplies.
Mr Ziegler, a Swiss-born sociologist, said such tactics were in breach of international law.
A US military spokesman in Baghdad denied the allegations.
What’s up?
Read MoreHomophobic D.C. pastor and Millions More March organizer Willie Wilson pulled Keith Boykin. (via PageOneQ):
Read MoreA month-long effort by the National Black Justice Coalition and the D.C. Coalition to secure a speaker at the Millions More Movement commemoration event that met with apparent success mid-week, was quashed this morning.
When NBJC president Keith Boykin and vice-president Donna Payne reported to the event on the Mall, they say, they were blocked from speaking by MMM organizer Rev. Willie Wilson.
Boykin was supposed to to represent the black LGBT community at the event.
Back at the Freedom Plaza rally, Payne said that when she and Boykin arrived at the MMM site, Wilson said, “They will not be speaking.”
“I’m so angry, so angry,” Payne said.
These are a few of my impressions of the NYT’s article.
But Mr. Sulzberger and the paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller’s conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller’s notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the “Valerie Flame” notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday.
As I’ve said for some time in posts and comments here, I’ve had a “gut” hunch that Judith Miller lied or withheld key information from the NYT, which hampered her editors and publishers’ realistic appraisal of her case and how they represented her case to the paper’s readers.
Once Ms. Miller was jailed, her lawyers were in open conflict about whether she should stay there. She had refused to reopen communications with Mr. Libby for a year, saying she did not want to pressure a source into waiving confidentiality.
Judith Miller’s attorneys — Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment specialist also representing the NYT, and Bob Bennett, a criminal attorney, both spoke on September 30, independently of each other and on different talk shows, about their communications with Joseph Tate, Scooter Libby’s attorney. Neither Abrams or Bennett ever referred to the other in interviews that day.
Their lack of referral to each other, and seeming independent work on contacts with Tate, lead me to believe that the two men were competing for the limelight or did not get along. Such discord on a legal team can adversely affect clients, in this case both Ms. Miller and the NYT.
But in the end, saying “I owed it to myself” after two months of jail, she had her lawyer reach out to Mr. Libby. This time, hearing directly from her source, she accepted his permission and was set free.
Wrong. Just plain wrong. Judith Miller’s attorneys weren’t the ones successful in reaching out to Joseph Tate. It was Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s September letter to Tate that got the ball rolling, reported the A.P.’s Peter Yost yesterday. (Yost: “It was Fitzgerald’s letter to Libby’s lawyer in September that helped resolve the impasse over Miller, resulting in her testimony.”)
“W.M.D. – I got it totally wrong,” she said. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them – we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.”
Judith Miller perpetuated easily disproved lies that have led to the deaths of almost 2,000 American soldiers, the injuries of tens of thousands, and the injuries and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqs. She has NO excuse. She did the worst job possible for a highly influential newspaper that affects how news is subsequently reported around the world.
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