That Would Be Bad
Arianna Huffington presents a creepily plausible scenario about Judith Miller's role in "Plamegate," as the Huffington Post likes to call it.
Short version: Miller was so pro-war that she's the one who told Scooter Libby and Karl Rove of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, in order to discredit ambassador Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, who was writing anti-war editorials in the pages of Miller's own newspaper.....
Which, if true, would make me recant all the nice things I've previously said about Judith Miller's principled stand on sourcing. More important, it would just be appalling—terrible for journalism, terrible for the Times.
Is it possible? I think so. I once saw Judith Miller speak about the war in Iraq, and was impressed by her passionate hatred of Saddam Hussein's regime—this was a subject about which she clearly had no objectivity. Of course, you can understand why. But her cold fury did seem to have affected her ability to report on the war without sounding boosterish. At one point, describing her status as an embedded correspondent with a group of soldiers, she described American soldiers in Iraq using the first person plural....
