Judy Miller seems to be engaged either in some kind of perverse self-deception, or she is simply brilliant at manipulating the rest of us. As has been widely reported, she seems to have unnecessarily gone off to jail as she was protecting a source who never wanted protection. . .or she strong-armed a deal with Prosecutor Fitzgerald in which she didn’t have to tell anything beyond her interactions with Vice President Cheney’s Chief-of-Staff Scooter Libby.
Nonetheless, we have all been duped. It felt like moment after Matt Cooper was ordered by the courts to testify, he not only suspended his resistance, he immediately told his story in Time magazine.
But in Judith Miller’s case, NOTHING has appeared under her by-line in the New York Times explaining this case or her behavior. She’s no reporter. She’s a huckster, and we are all being duped.
Arianna Huffington seems to have insider knowledge that Miller is securing a $1.2 million book deal from her public swindle:
P.S. Oh, she also told the Times that “she was uncertain whether she would write her own account, either in the newspaper or in a book.” Two questions: (1) Does she really, really, think anybody will believe that? (2) If she intended to maintain her completely selfless pose a little longer, she simply should have refrained from talking to her friends about her $1.2 million book deal because, as she herself proved last week, people talk.
The New York Times should immediately fire her and discredit her immediately. This whole episode has been as fake and contrived — and corrupt — as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Armstrong Williams.
She is planning to get rich off her shenanigans, which included misreporting about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and helping to set up an environment conducive to America’s invasion of Iraq.
An apologist for Judith Miller — and someone very close to her legal team — told me recently that “George Bush did not go to war because of or inspite of Judy Miller’s reporting. These soldiers didn’t die because of her.”
Well, I disagree. Judith Miller helped tip the balance. She carries a significant portion of the blame and bears a burden of responsibility for the deaths of American service men and women as well as tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
But what is more disgusting is that she is planning to CASH IN on this war and on her contrived battle that had nothing to do with freedom of the press and the protection of sources.
Judith Miller is a war-profiteer of the grossest kind.
— Steve Clemons
