It's Wednesday, which means that the New York Observer gets to publish even more on Judith Miller, in addition to the scoops and updates of the past two weeks. On paragraph in particular really crystallized the conficting versions of Miller that have emerged from the whole sordid affair:
And so the contradiction endures: Ms. Miller, the steadfast First Amendment hero; Ms. Miller, the self-impelled loose cannon: or worse, Ms. Miller, the "credulous" political tool of a White House determined to go to war in Iraq, reporting cooked books and sprung from jail by a strangely romantic letter from Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
(NB There's also version four: "Judith Miller, Double Super-Secret Agent" based on her claims of high security clearance, but we're prepared to include that in the "Judy was a tool of the White House" theory).
God is in the juicy details, and the NYO's Tom Scocca, Gabriel Sherman and Anna Schneider-Mayerson unearthed quite a few, including the following:
We know now that Bill Keller had specifically taken Miller off the national security beat, and we know that she sort of "drifted back" into the realm in her own little renegade way. Apparently, this did not sit well with Keller and managing editor Jill "What do I regret? Everything" Abramson; the NYO reports that they summoned Miller this past winter and forbade her to cover national security in any way any more.
Apparently Miller wrote her 3,400 personal account with Times investigative reporter David Barstow.
Miller told the Times investigative team that "she would only answer questions about her negotiations to secure a waiver of anonymity from Mr. Libby, not about her testimony." We already knew she wasn't overly accommodating, but the NYO reveals that yes, things were tense and Miller hung up on Don Van Natta at least once.
Running into Van Natta in the elevator as the article was being prepared, Miller asked "what kind of reporter are you?" (presumably because Van Natta's team had not contacted two friends of hers).
The NYO cites "a newsroom rumor" that Miller had grudgingly written her version only after an ultimatum from Keller.
In May 2003, Miller and Patrick Tyler, the Baghdad bureau chief at the time, clashed over her plans to write "a political piece on the de-Baathification process." They apparently had a public row in Iraq over Tyler's assertion that Miller could not write political stories on Iraq ifshe was not "officially working for the Baghdad bureau" (Miller was an embed at the time. Tyler threw it down in an email to Miller and copied to Raines and other masthead members: "Either you are in my bureau or you are doing WMD." Tyler won that round, but as we have since learned Miller managed to "drift" back toward the subject.
This we are compelled to point out simply becauase it is a beautiful turn of phrase: "Those feelings have notched a perforation down the very center of the newspaper." Nice one.
The NYO team writes about the NYT's "tale of a dysfunctional staffer running loose at a dysfunctional institution, with historic consequences." You just know they were dying to write "amok."
UPDATE:
Rush and Molloy report that Miller and Bill Keller were overheard "screaming at each other in the hours before the story went to bed" over criticism of Miller in the Times team's investigative piece. She reportedly "implored Keller to tone down the piece's criticism of her"; we're guessing that didn't go so well (although if it did we'd love to read the piece that was toned down).
Times Does Duty, and So Does Judy -- But It's A Hash [NYO]
An Exchange of Words at the Times [NYDN]
Amanda Ernst
