The long-awaited Times piece on the Judith Miller fiasco comes nowhere near explaining this bizarre journalistic puzzle, and instead it serves only to make almost everyone involved look foolish, sleazy, stupid or all of the above. Judith Miller and Bill Keller insist they have fought a battle for journalistic principle and won a victory for the profession. Instead, they are dragging it down into the muck.

Some thoughts on the winners and losers:

Let’s start with the losers, because there are more of them.

1) Bill Keller. Is there any aspect of this case that Keller did not mishandle? He didn’t ask to see Miller’s notes, he restrained his other reporters from investigating her case, he allowed his newspaper to be scooped by other papers…all to defend a reporter whose actions appear indefensible. After all, Miller lied to her own editors about whether she had been a recipient of the Valerie Plame leak. And, as the article makes clear, even now Miller refuses to cooperate with her own newspaper beyond the bare minimum.

This is the second instance recently in which Bill Keller went to bat for a reporter when conceding mistakes seemed the more honest course. Recently, he defended Allesandra Stanley’s wacky claim that Geraldo Rivera had pushed an aid worker out of a camera shot to aid a hurricane victim—even though the video showed no such thing. Keller’s response: Rivera was a “four-letter word” and the word “nudge” was meant to be figurative. Lame.

Since this type of thing does not seem to happen with male reporters and Bill Keller, one has to wonder if the gender of the reporters is not a factor in Mr. Keller’s judgment….

2) Judith Miller. She claims she went to jail to protect a source…but now she can’t even remember who the source is. Was it Scooter Libby who provided her with the identity whose leak was a potential violation of the law? Or did tell someone else give her the name “Valerie Flame”? She has multiple variations on Valerie Plame’s name written in her notes, but she has no idea where they came from. As Mickey Kaus smartly points out, Miller claims she’s won a victory for journalistic principle, but all she’s done is establish that if you send a reporter to jail for a couple months, she’s bound to spill the beans.

3) Floyd Abrams. I’ve written before regarding my low opinion of Floyd Abrams: As a First Amendment lawyer, he makes a great media whore. Nothing in this account changes that opinion. Quite the contrary. First, he appears to have badly botched negotiations with Scooter Libby’s lawyer, Joseph A. Tate. (To be fair, this comes from Judith Miller’s representation of what Abrams told her, and she’s not the most reliable teller.) Miller writes in her account, “Mr. Libby had singed a blanket form waiver, which hsi lawyer signaled to my counsel was not really voluntary.” Tate adamantly denies this, and it’s unclear what signal made Abrams so sure: a special, double-secret handshake?

There is no question that once D.C. lawyer Bob Bennett got involved with the case, and Abrams was backburnered—the Times is unclear about how his status changed after Bennett got involved—things started moving, talks with Tate were reopened (after a year of silence, which appears to have astounded Tate), and Miller was soon on her way to receiving a get out of jail free card.

Abrams’ own quote to the Times is highly curious. He said of his negotiations with Mr. Tate: “On more than one occasion, Mr. Tate asked me for a recitation of what Ms. Miller would say [in her potential testimony to the grand jury]. I did not provide one.”

Why not? There are only two options. Miller would either testify that Libby was her source, or she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t that be pertinent information for Tate as he advised Libby on whether to proffer Miller a waiver of his source confidentiality? Why not tell Tate what Miller would testify to?

Consider the scenarios: If Abrams says Miller will testify that it wasn’t Libby, then Tate can reaffirm the waiver with no qualms.

If Abrams says that Miller will testify that it was Libby, then Tate can be much clearer about whether Libby’s waiver was really voluntary, and Miller can go to jail under much less ambiguous circumstances.

So why wouldn’t Abrams spell it out?

Unless, of course, Abrams is simply lying now—that he detailed exactly what Miller would say, and he is now misleading the Times’ reporters because if he were now to disclose what Miller would testify to, then he would be, in effect, outing her source.

Either way, his decision not to contact Tate for a year is bizarre. As the Times piece notes, “Mr. Bennett called Mr. Tate on Aug. 31 [2005]. Mr. Tate told Mr. Bennett that Mr. Libby had given permission to Ms. Miller to testify a year earlier. ‘I called Tate and this guy could not have been clearer—”Bob, my client has given a waiver,”‘ Mr. Bennett said.”

4) Other Times reporters. Throughout the article, other Times reporters are chafing to explore this story aggressively…and at every turn, they are thwarted, so that Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger (also a loser in this affair) can protect Judy Miller. Funny how, in trying to defend their paper, they wound up debasing it.

5) Scooter Libby. Miller says she can’t remember if he gave her the exact name, but it’s clear that he enjoyed a cozy relationship with Miller, and was willing to use that relationship to smear an administration critic. A two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis? My lord, what was going on there exactly? At the very least, the length of that breakfast shows how important trashing Joe Wilson was to the White House. Most times, the only reporter who gets two hours of a White House staffer’s time is Bob Woodward.

Winners:

1) Bob Bennett. Granted, Bennett has long known how to make himself look good in the press. But there’s no question he seems to have proved far more adept in this Washington maze than was Abrams. Moreover, he got special prosecutor Joseph Fitzgerald to agree to question Miller only on Scooter Libby and the Plame matter, which, now that Miller says that Plame’s name may have come from someone else, looks like a significant victory.

2) Bloggers. Arianna Huffington has been particularly good on this matter…but lots of blogs have kept the heat on.

Um…that’s about it for winners.

All right, we’ll throw in Joe Wilson, who has long maintained that there was an orchestrated White House plan to smear his wife, and long suggested that Scooter Libby was involved, and now appears to be exactly right.

I once defended Judy Miller for what, at the time, struck me as a principled defense of journalistic privilege. It’s clear to me now that that was a mistake. Judith Miller strikes me now as a propagandist more than a journalist, and the Times, which has only suffered from its association with her, should fire her.