As everyone knows by now, NY Times reporter Judith Miller ended her self-inflicted martyrdom by agreeing to testify before the Novak-Plame-gate grand jury, thereby releasing herself from jail.
A lot has already been said about today’s events, and I don’t have a lot to add. Here are my two cents: (1) Miller’s claim that she has "finally" received a "personal" waiver from her confidential source (Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff) is patently absurd – Libby’s lawyers were widely quoted today as saying, essentially, we gave her the same waiver we gave her months ago, and we have no idea why she went to jail over this issue. Fact is, it became clear that Fitzgerald was going to keep her in jail for months longer, so she caved. Thus proving that the NY Times was flat-out wrong, to claim (as they repeatedly did) that Miller would never cave so there was no point in keeping her incarcerated. (2) Arianna Huffington is absolutely right that Miller ought to follow in fellow Plamegate reporter Matt Cooper’s footsteps and promptly publish, on page 1 of the NY Times, a full account of what she told the grand jury and of her role in the whole nasty Plamegate affair. The Times has really sullied itself over its now-revealed-to-the-world-as-laughable insistence on what a martyr Miller was when, in fact, her source released her from confidentiality ages ago. The least it could do is make public its reporter’s involvement in one of the most vicious political vendettas to have come down the pike in a while.
We look forward to hearing from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the near future.
