That blur you saw in the middle of yesterday's big tell-some in the Times was Judy Miller, in the midst of being airbrushed out of the paper's group photo. As it's rare—not to mention rather a contradiction in terms—for an unpersoning to document itself, students of the form should take careful notes.

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.

Interviews show that the paper's leaders, in taking what they considered to be a principled stand, ultimately left the major decisions in the case up to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control.

"This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said. ...

On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.

Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."  ...

Ms. Miller's article on the hunt for missing weapons was published on July 20, 2003. It acknowledged that the hunt could turn out to be fruitless but focused largely on the obstacles the searchers faced.

Neither that article nor any in the following months by Ms. Miller discussed Mr. Wilson or his wife.

It is not clear why. Ms. Miller said in an interview that she "made a strong recommendation to my editor" that an article be pursued. "I was told no," she said. She would not identify the editor.

[Jill] Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation. ...

Mr. Sulzberger said it was impossible to know whether Ms. Miller could have struck a deal a year earlier, as at least four other journalists had done.

"Maybe a deal was possible earlier," Mr. Sulzberger said. "And maybe, in retrospect, looking back, you could say this was a moment you could have jumped on. If so, shame on us. I tend to think not." ...

"It's too early to judge it, and it's probably for other people to judge," said Mr. Keller, the executive editor. "I hope that people will remember that this institution stood behind a reporter, and the principle, when it wasn't easy to do that, or popular to do that."

"It is not clear why": the article's motto, and maybe a good candidate to replace "All the news that's fit to print" on the masthead. Nobody knowed nothin' about Judy's bidness, did they? And if anybody abetted the crazy, freebooting bitch, well it was only from an excess of kindness, and principle, and herrrm herrrm harrrummm humph. Please, please don't get the impression that anything in this story implicates the Times and its leadership in any systemic corruption, that any structures might have been created (or distorted) to give Judy license to catapult the neocon propaganda. It's all just a bunch of stuff that happened!

Miss Run Amok now appears to have been some kind of poltergeist afflicting the Times offices: you'd be working on a story, there'd be a crash behind you, all your crap would have been swept off your desk, but there was no one there. Newsroom legend has it, as I'm informed by an anonymous Times staffer, that if you say Judy Miller's name three times while looking in a mirror at midnight, she appears at your back—and the next day, false claims about Iraqi WMDs have inserted themselves in your copy. Especially disconcerting if you were writing about, say, an auction at Sotheby's.

To be fair, though, Miller herself—under no doubt her valedictory NYT byline—has assisted her own unpersoning, managing the odd feat of virtually writing herself out of her first-person account of her grand jury appearances.

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.) ...

My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson's name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson's charges. According to my notes, he told me at our June meeting that Mr. Cheney did not know of Mr. Wilson, much less know that Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to verify reports that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium for a weapons program.

Or perhaps Miller was using one of the newfangled robo-notebooks they're all talking about, and (delicately anticipating her future gig as a stoolie?) sent it alone, in her place, to interview Scooter.

Symmetries are usually pleasing, especially when they exemplify not just an aesthetic but a moral order. The Times has defended Judy Miller with exactly as much tenacity, and every bit the good faith, as Miller has defended Scooter Libby, and First Amendment principle. The pair deserve each other.

posted by michael  12:18:30 PM  
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