Why Judith Miller may be in jail

Arianna Huffington's usually not particuarly worth reading, but today her post on Miller and the NY Times is worth reading, but doesn't really explore one issue in depth:

What if indeed it was Miller who spread the news that Valerie Plame was a covert agent?

While indeed she, too, would be unlikely to be prosecuted under the "revealing the covert operatives" act or whatever it's called, it would give a black eye to the Times unlike anything the right has dished up against them with Jayson Blair, or against Dan Rather.

That's because it if came out that way, it will likely be shown that it is Miller, and by command responsibility her overseers at the Times, who was trying to out a covert operative to maintain the false pretenses she wrote as justifications for the war in Iraq.

Now of course, at this point, the Times has is always read skeptically (but read) by pretty much everyone, left, right, and center. But if the Times through Miller is shown to be doing this, it will have metastized into something beyond mere false reporting by a Blair, or the credulous reporting of Gerth on Ken Starr's prosecutory extravaganza. If true, the Times will have become something that not only provides inaccurate coverage, but attempts to maintain a coverup of inaccurate coverage, and thereby creates something orders of magnitude worse- and affecting national secuirity- than the original inaccurate coverage. After all, it's one thing to spin stories to go rah rah for a war. It's quite another to spin the stories and then facilitate endangering national security to silence a critic.

Whether it's Bush's folks or Miller or Bush's folks plus Miller, Novak, et al., the situation is reprehensible.


HT: Armando at Kos.