I was going to write a long post yesterday about Fair Judy's self-serving report in the NYT of her testimony in front of the grand jury but decided against it. It's such transparently self-congratulatory tripe pretending to be factual and objective confession, and there are so many holes in it, that I found I actually had very little to say about it except 'Bullshit'. Jeff Alworth at Low on the Hog, who has more patience for such things than I do and anyway is better at it, does a nice job of tearing it apart (here and here) if you're interested.

Let's deal first with Miller, whose story is fairly straightforward, if elusive. Miller uses language bordering on comic it's so neutral: "During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak's article." She's in just-the-facts-ma'am mode, posing as the courageous journalist who may be telling all, but not gossiping. Yet there's something decidedly evasive in the prose.

That about sums it up. Nothing in Miller's 'explanation' can be trusted, not because she's necessarily lying (although she does) so much as because she's leaving out or glossing over key questions, and what's left presents a false picture of high-minded journalistic ethics. As Jeff points out, you have to read between the lines to get at anything like overall accuracy.

Take for instance this little gem that Jeff doesn't mention, being concerned with weightier matters: she met Libby 4 years ago when he asked for her autograph. How she must have glowed with pride! The new Veep's right-hand man! Golly. I bet she blushed.

Want an asset to be loyal? Flatter them from a position higher than their own. There's nothing like the great bending a knee to the near-great for cementing obedience. And it must have worked because the very first note she took during their very first meeting relevant to the Plame Affair was a dutiful rehash of the administration line Libby had brought her there to feed her.

On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby, who was known to be an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments, which were already coming under fierce criticism. The first entry in my reporter's notebook from this interview neatly captured the question foremost in my mind.

"Was the intell slanted?" I wrote, referring to the intelligence assessments of Iraq and underlining the word "slanted."

I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show

So Scooter, 'an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments', was supposedly unhappy with CIA 'intell' (she's the only one I've ever seen who spells intel with 2 ll's) that said Iraq was full of WMD's and might be 'slanted' that way for cover. Our Judy conscientiously writes this down as if it were important. Well, it was important: it was her mission.

This meeting has few of the earmarks of a reporter/source meeting. It does, however, have all the earmarks of a meeting wherein a covert control gives one of his joes her new assignment. Miller doesn't have anywhere in either her notes or her memory anything relating to questions she might have (should have) asked Libby about the administration's position. Serious questions had been raised for months about the accuracy of Scooter's boss' insistence than he knew where those WMD's were, yet she has just come back from the unsuccessful search for them and apparently doesn't question Libby for a second when he blames it all on the CIA. He tells her the intel was slanted and she writes it down. That's not a reporter probing, that's an agent/operative getting her marching orders.

We know now (and there were reports at the time) that Scooter's boss had spent much of the run-up to the invasion running back and forth to Langley trying to intimidate CIA analysts who were insisting there was no evidence of WMD's in Hussein's Iraq into reversing themselves and going along with the admin position that there were WMD's in abundance. Miller could NOT have been ignorant of that attempt to stack the deck, or at least of the reports, yet she never displayed the slightest doubt that Scooter's spin was legitimate. (For an almost-comprehensive list of lies, misdirections, and evasions in Judy's piece, see The Left Coaster.) Conclusion: Miller wasn't then and isn't now a 'reporter'. She went there to get the admin TP's from one of her controllers so she'd know what they wanted her to write.

What came across to me from reading between those lengthy lines was that at best Miller was a wide-eyed dupe breathless with awe about her inclusion in top govt circles, a rube so clueless that all they had to do was call her to the WH and she'd do anything they told her to do. The is the woman, remember, who once defined a journalist's job as 'reporting the administration's positions' as if a reporter's job was to be a govt stooge. A belief like that would make her a perfect and perfectly blind pawn, a self-consciously unconscious puppet they could use at will.

But I don't think so. I think her own report shows she was an op. I think she knew what she was doing and, like Armstrong Williams, did it quite consciously, quite deliberately, on orders. Jeff makes it pretty clear that her story doesn't hold water and her credibility is thin-to-anorexic. Seems to me that an innocent dupe would at this stage be trying to explain how she got caught in the web, not making up more lies to cover her ass, but that's just me. I'm such a pollyanna.