The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

Name:
Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Sunday, October 16, 2005

Judith Miller reveals all. Sort of.

Salon has details of Judith Miller and the Times "coming clean" on the Plame story. To the extent that we don't really learn anything of significance.

The Times is right that these accounts brim with fascinating details, and few them cast Miller, the paper, or, more importantly, Bush administration officials in a very good light. But what's most striking about the two reports is what's missing -- any information on who told Miller Valerie Plame's name. Miller's notes clearly show that someone disclosed to her that Joseph Wilson, the former diplomat who began questioning the Bush administration's WMD evidence in the summer of 2003, was married to a CIA employee named Valerie Plame. The names "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" appear in notebooks Miller used during interviews she conducted with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. But Miller says that she told Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leak, that Libby was not her source for Plame's identity, and that she cannot recall who the source was.

"It is also difficult, more than two years later, to parse the meaning and context of phrases, of underlining and of parentheses" contained in the notebooks, Miller writes. "As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where ["Valerie Flame"] came from, when I wrote it or why the name was misspelled."

Thrilling stuff, huh?