Scapegoat Scribe?

Scapegoat Scribe?

The prominent scribe of New York Times, Judith Miller, seems to be heading for a fall out with her employers, following the ongoing mess about the CIA protégé leak This comes after Executive Editor Bill Keller sent a circular to his team yesterday, stating that Miller is seen as having mislead the newspaper about her not being privy to the revelation about a CIA agent's identity by certain White House officials.

The CIA undercover in question is Valerie Plame, who is also the wife of Joseph Wilson, the famous anti-Bush diplomat, who recently raised a lot of dust with his revelatory article in the New York Times, dated July 6, 2003. His article shattered the hyperbole surrounding Bush's anti-Iraq campaign.

When it was reported that Saddam was trying to purchase uranium from Niger, Wilson visited Niger to investigate the story, and returned refuting the authenticity of the report, and in the subsequent article, was very critical of the Bush administration's obsession with an imaginary Iraqi nuclear plan.

The Bush lobby pushing for war was ruffled by Wilson's stand and reacted by discrediting his trip to Niger, saying it was sponsored by the CIA with the help of his wife Valerie, an undercover agent for the intelligence agency.

Valerie's name appeared openly in July 2003 in a piece by column writer Robert Novak, who stated his source was "two senior administration officials". The crime that it is to reveal a CIA agent's identity deliberately, a case ensued to investigate the same.

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The two year trial has lead special investigator Patrick Fitzgerald to close in on some top Washington officials, expectedly Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, the latter being Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Though Judith Miller has never written about Valerie Plame, she is now stuck in a transparency issue, because she is said to have deliberately hidden the fact that she was one of a group of journalists who were reportedly told about Valerie's identity.

To recount a Times story on October 16, two years ago Miller told Phil Taubman, Washington bureau chief of New York Times, that though she had talked casually about Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie with some White House officials, she had not been a part of a manipulated effort to leak unauthorized information.

When investigations began, Miller went to jail as she denied cooperation with lead lawyer Patrick Fitzgerald. Initially, she had the support of her editors and the paper fraternity, as they took up her cause to prelude a law for protection of reporting sources. She was released from jail on September 29 when she agreed to give her testimony. She stated in court that she had spoken of Wilson and his wife to Lewis Libby about thrice in June-July 2003.

Her statement stirred doubts about her involvement in the whole matter. And now, Bill Keller's memo has catapulted the issue into an internal fight, marring the newspaper's reputation as a responsible news source. It has already being under flak previously when Miller's Iraq war articles were criticized as being biased and univocal about the Bush administration's stand.

The paper had to tender an apology for the skewed reporting. To worsen her case, Sunday Times Editor Byron Calame has spoken of her “journalistic shortcuts that (she) seems comfortable taking." One such incident he mentioned is when Miller was ok with referring to Libby as a "former Hill staffer" if she ever used information given by him.

However, Miller has denied any deliberate attempt to leak information and says her intention was never to mislead. In response to Keller's critical memo, Miller said, "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."

As the investigation moves to an end, it is leaving in its trail an internal squabble which is probably leading a much revered newspaper towards a phase of low profile publicity and malignant reputation.