Marble Composition

What's The Frequency, Bitch?

I was going to write this post, really I was, but Will Bunch, who's an amazing journalist, beat me to it. What tingled the memory banks was a story I read quite some time ago about Judith Miller, who aside from being Ahmed Chalabi's sounding board, was all too embedded with a military unit searching for stockpiles of non-existant WMD. Via Atrios, I'm robbing from Will in entirety:

Why this journalist thinks that Judy Miller should go to jail

Earlier today, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for America's most prestigious newspaper was escorted out of a federal courtroom and taken to a jail cell in suburban Virginia because she wouldn't reveal the name of a White House contact.

We know we are supposed to be outraged by today's events. We've written about many issues since we started Attytood back in February, but none so passionately as virtually absolute freedom of the press -- in America, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

And so, in an era where government secrecy is on the rise and press freedoms are under assault, we should recoil in horror at the notion that an American journalist -- even one whose work we've criticized in the past -- could be jailed for doing her job.

Indeed, as recently as a few days, we didn't want to see Judy Miller of the New York Times (or Time's Matt Cooper, whose case turned out quite differently) sent to jail. But frankly, our reasoning was pretty much along the same lines that the NRA uses to make hideous arguments to allow assault rifles or cop-killer bullets -- the "slippery slope" argument.

So what if the "source" that Miller (and Cooper) have been protecting may have committed a serious crime, naming an undercover CIA agent and possibly even exposing her to fatal consequences, as happened when American spies were "outed" in the 1970s. In the "slippery slope" argument, those facts are irrelevant. If Judy Miller goes to jail today, under this thinking, it makes it more likely for a good and honest journalist who's on the brink of exposing true corruption to be jailed tomorrow.

Today, we realized that the "slippery slope" argument is wrong, and so were we. We're not happy that Judy Miller is going to jail, but we think -- in this case -- that if she won't cooperate with the grand jury, then it's the right thing.

That's because Judy Miller's actions in recent years -- a pattern that includes this case -- have been the very antithesis of what we think journalism is and should be all about. Ultimately, the heart and soul of real journalism is not so much protecting "sources" at any cost. It is, rather, living up to the 19th Century maxim set forth by Peter Finley Dunne, that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That is why the ability of reporters to keep the identity of their true sources confidential is protected by shield laws in 31 states and the District of Columbia (although not in federal courts). Without such protections, the government official would not be able to report the wrongdoing of a president (remember "Deep Throat," the ultimate confidential source?), nor would the corporate executive feel free to rat out a crooked CEO. The comfortable and corrupt could not be afflicted.

But the Times' Judy Miller has not been afflicting the comfortable. She has been protecting them, advancing their objectives, and helping them to mislead a now very afflicted American public. In fact, thinking again about Watergate and Deep Throat is a good way to understand why Judy Miller should not be protected today. Because in Watergate, a reporter acting like Miller would not be meeting the FBI's Mark Felt in an underground parking garage. She would be obsessively on the phone with H.R. Haldeman or John Dean, listening to malicious gossip about Carl Bernstein or their plans to make Judge Sirica look bad.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller -- working with her "sources" inside the Bush administration and their friends in the Iraqi exile community like the discredited Ahmed Chalabi -- wrote a number of stories that now seem meant to dupe the American people into to thinking Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were a threat.

Turns out, as you know, there weren't any. When the Times looked back on the fiasco, it found that Miller wrote or co-wrote nine of the "problematic stories" on the topic.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, Miller acted not so much as a journalist as someone working with the American side to prove there really were WMD in Iraq. Re-read this remarkable story, which Suburban Guerrilla reminded us of today:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials, prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a "rogue operation."

More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say.

And rather than act humbled when the basis for many of her stories proved false, by this year she had adopted yet another pet cause of the Bush administration, the oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations.

Then, seemingly out of left field, comes her involvement in the case of Valerie Plame, the "outed" CIA operative. The facts of the case are still murky, and so we want to tread carefully as we write about it. What is clear is that Judy Miller wasn't on the side of the person seeking to expose government wrongdoing -- that would have been Plame's husband, ex-ambassador Joe Wilson, who revealed the White House's lies about uranium and Iraq.

Instead, the special prosecutor wants to know about conversations that Miller had with a person, or persons, who wanted to squash the whistleblowers. He wants to know if Miller, perhaps unwittingly, abetted what would have been a criminal act against the whistleblower and his family. In fact, there's a theory that Miller might even have been a person who told Bush administration officials that Plame was a CIA agent.

We don't know what it's all about, except we do know that this isn't really journalism. It's about whether she continued her longtime pattern of aiding those in power and spreading their propaganda. What ever it is, we don't think it's protected by the shield laws that are on the books.

Nor do we think her jailing is the end of the world for a truly free press. And we're not alone. This is what Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center, a free-speech advocacy organization based in Washington and Nashville, said today -- he doesn't seem too worked up.

"One of the aspects of a free press is we don't have a lockstep approach. I have no doubt many reporters will not like Time's decision. But that's every journalist's decision to make under the First Amendment."

Indeed, cases like these have come and gone since 1735 and Peter Zenger -- the outcome changes, but the fight for freedom remains. And so some time in the near future, another American reporter will be threatened with jail -- this time because he won't reveal a source who exposed corruption, not a source who caused it.

And we will be fighting alongside that reporter every step of the way, right up to the jailhouse door.

Maybe Judy Miller will be a free woman by then. Maybe she won't. Either way, it's her own fault -- and the result of the choices that she has made over the years.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 7/06/2005 08:22:00 PM