Byron Calame, the NY Times’s "public editor," has published his long-promised column on the Judith Miller affair. By and large, I found it to be disappointing.
A while back Calame posed four important questions that he hoped he’d be able to answer in the course of providing a full accounting of this whole fiasco to the readers of the Times. And, as I noted here, the Times’s own report by Don Van Natta et al., as well as Judith Miller’s first-person account of her grand jury testimony, pretty much failed to answer any of those questions (oddly, Calame’s column today claims that his "fundamental questions" were answered, but I just don’t see how that’s true). I was hoping that Calame would make a real effort to fill in the gaps and answer the questions that he himself had posed.
He may have made the effort, but he doesn’t have much to show for it. Miller famously refused to discuss her conversations with editors with Van Natta, and she stonewalled Calame as well. So we still don’t know to whom she supposedly proposed writing a Plame/Wilson story – Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, continues to deny emphatically that she received any such proposal from Miller. But that doesn’t add much to the story.
Calame also tried, but failed, to nail down the Miller "security clearance" issue.
