Judy Gets Out of Jail

Judith Miller agreed to testify before a grand jury today. She held a brief press conference after being released from jail, where she spent the past 85 days for her prior refusal to cooperate in the investigation into the CIA leak that made Valerie Plame a household name.

During a very short speech, prior to taking very few questions, Miller continued to play-up her role as a conscience-driven martyr, reminding the media that she "would have stayed in jail longer" had her source not finally provided the "personal, explicit, voluntary waiver" Miller required before agreeing to testify.

But her fellow reporters were not easily led. One asked why she didn't ask for the waiver sooner and said that her source, Scooter Libby, had told reporters that he would have provided whatever she needed, if she had merely asked for it.

Miller got a little huffy at that. I guess she didn't like the implication: that there was absolutely no need for her to have spent even one night in jail. That would make her seem a little stupid, wouldn't it?--or worse--like she may have deliberately landed herself in jail so she could:
a) delay the investigation into the leak while the White House scrambled to position itself;
b) build sympathy for her plight, which would translate into anger at the prosecutor; or
c) allow her to work out a deal (remarkably like the one she got) that allows her to limit her testimony to her conversation with Scooter Libby and stay mum about everything else that she did, knows and/or has heard.

(Personally, I vote for d--"all of the above").

But Judy held her own and said that she could not speak to that issue because that was all handled by her lawyer. I guess we are expected to believe that Miller spent 85 days in jail because it did not occur to her (or her lawyer) to call Libby and ask for a waiver. A second waiver, that is. She already had a waiver, but that waiver wasn't the waiver she wanted.

And it makes no difference to Miller, apparently, that her source is possibly guilty of a federal crime. She sees nothing mitigating in the fact that she is not protecting a whistle-blower or victim or even an average citizen from people who might be tempted to take revenge on her source as a result of her testimony; she is preventing a high-level figure in the White House, who may have committed a felony, from being brought to justice.

With characteristic self-righteousness, Miller has managed to convince herself (if no one else) that she is doing something noble. But what she's actually doing is obstructing justice and actively enabling the Bush White House to do the same.

As she was clear to point out today, it was the combination of the "personal, explicit, voluntary waiver" provided by Libby, and the agreement to testify regarding her conversation with Libby BUT NOTHING ELSE, that finally opened the door to reason.

I strongly suspect it's not the Libby waiver that is key here. Rather, it's the narrow subject matter to which she has managed to limit her testimony, thus allowing her to feign cooperation and moral integrity while continuing to withhold the most crucial evidence in this investigation: her own actions in the lead-up to the possibly felonious disclosure of Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative.

As Arianna Huffington pointed out some weeks ago, Miller is a White House favorite. She is also the woman for whom her employer, the New York Times, had to apologize after they repeatedly printed her stories confirming the WMDs claims made by the White House in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Turns out those stories were un-substantiated White House propaganda.

Ms. Miller, as a result, had a little egg on her face, and one of the people who helped to put it there was none other than former ambassador, Joe Wilson. It was Wilson's refusal to let the Bush administration get away with inserting unfounded claims about an Iraq/Niger uranium deal in the President's State of the Union address that got the White House and Miller hot under the collar. So together they plotted to discredit Joe Wilson. As Karl Rove, Machiavellian White House manipulator extraordinaire, told MSNBC's Chris Matthews "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game."

Things were starting to look pretty bad for the White House when that got out, but the administration has, so far, managed to convince all but the most savvy media members that by not using Ms. Plame's name, they didn't break the law.

They are coasting along on the assumption that we are all so ridiculously literal as to believe that saying "Joe Wilson's wife works for the CIA" isn't blowing her cover because her name wasn't used. Unable to take the most obvious next step in critical thinking, they apparently expect the public to be similarly dimwitted; and, therefore, unable to reach the most obvious of conclusions: that Joe Wilson only has one wife. And at least one of her names is Mrs. Joe Wilson.