Reporter misled Times, editor says In a message to the paper's staff, he says Miller did not reveal to bosses her detailed knowledge of CIA leak
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FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
October 22, 2005
WASHINGTON - The New York Times reporter who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify in the CIA leak inquiry appears to have misled her newspaper about the extent of her involvement in the case, her boss declared Friday.
In a dramatic e-mail sent to Times newsroom employees, executive editor Bill Keller wrote that he wished he'd more carefully interviewed Judith Miller. He said he had "missed what should have been significant alarm bells" that she had been the recipient of leaked information about the CIA officer Valerie Plame.
"Judy seems to have misled [Washington bureau chief] Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement," Keller wrote, in what he described as a lessons-learned e-mail. "This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper."
Keller said he might have been more willing to compromise with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald "if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement" with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby.
Fitzgerald is investigating the disclosure of Plame's identity. White House critics have charged that officials there leaked the name to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for questioning intelligence cited by the Bush administration as a justification for the Iraq war.
Miller's attorney, Bob Bennett, did not immediately return calls seeking her response to Keller.
The editor's e-mail was designed to quell tensions inside a newsroom roiled by Miller's close connections to Libby, a key figure in the leak probe.
Miller was already a controversial figure for her reporting on the possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion. Her stories bolstered the Bush administration's arguments for action.
Later, after no WMD weapons were found, she and the paper admitted some information she reported was flawed. The Bush administration likewise acknowledged some of its prewar intelligence was erroneous.
In an editor's note the paper published last year, Keller said that "some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated."
In a news story published Sunday, the Times reported that many staffers had questioned "Miller's seeming ability to operate outside of conventional reportorial channels and managerial controls," in the words of Washington reporter Todd Purdum. In his e-mail, Keller said he believed the paper was too slow to correct the original reporting and to get to the bottom of the facts about Miller's involvement with Libby.
"If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that this time the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty of its readers," he said.
Poster Comment:
I wonder if he suspects that she's an Israel agent?