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SBD
Admiral
Joined: 19 Aug 2004
Posts: 1022
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 Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 7:47 pm Post subject: Bolton Visited Judith Miller in Jail? |
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Any idea why Bolton would visit Judith Miller?
| Quote: | No heroine's welcome for reporter who spent her summer in jail
By David Usborne in New York
Published: 02 October 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article316612.ece
Confusion and murk yesterday continued to surround the affair of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who emerged from her prison cell on Friday to testify in a two-year-old investigation into the alleged leaking by the White House of the name of an undercover CIA operative to her and other journalists.
The sudden surrender of Ms Miller to the district attorney investigating the case, Patrick Fitzgerald - who had sent her to prison in the first place for refusing to compromise her source before his grand jury - was so important to the New York Times that the newspaper made it its lead front-page story yesterday, and continued poring over the details of her actions for many column-inches inside.
Unfortunately for the paper more questions than answers have been thrown up by Ms Miller's abrupt volte-face.
Should she be celebrated as a media martyr who stood up for the right of reporters to protect the identities of sources? Or is this to do with her - and the paper's - mistaken reporting before the Iraq war of Saddam Hussein's purported stash of weapons of mass destruction?
The furore over Ms Miller and her motivations - her name is in the headline of every single political blog in America this weekend - is in a sense a sideshow to the investigation itself.
The true importance of her having at last testified on Friday is that the probe may now almost be over. And that could spell new trouble for President Bush, already reeling from the indictment of Tom DeLay, the former Republican House leader, last week and from the fall-out from Hurricane Katrina.
If Mr Bush is worried, so will be the New York Times. It has still not fully recovered from the mis-steps in its reporting on Iraq before the 2003 invasion.
In March 2004, the paper published an astonishing mea culpa, singling out six articles that had given credence to the administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction without sufficient evidence. Four of those were written by Ms Miller. Coincidentally, it was in the pages of the New York Times that this whole saga first started. There, in the summer of 2003, a former US ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson, wrote an article directly criticising Mr Bush for one claim he had made prior to the invasion - that Saddam had been trying to import uranium from West Africa to help him build nuclear weapons.
Not true, wrote Mr Wilson, who earlier had made the same disclosures to The Independent on Sunday.
The questions on the table now are these: how was it that within days of the New York Times article, a number of journalists began learning that Mr Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked undercover for the CIA? Did they hear it from White House officials? Were they breaking the law in revealing her name? And did they do it as political pay-back on Mr Wilson for making his damaging criticism of the President?
Some facts are now known, notably that the contacts in the White House who were free with Ms Plame's name appear to have included Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and Mr Bush's ever-powerful top aide, Karl Rove.
It is not beyond anyone's imagination that both men could soon be facing criminal charges which, at the very least, would mean them leaving the White House. Doubts about Ms Miller's version of events continue to intensify. She said last week that she changed her mind because Mr Libby told her - in a letter and on the telephone - that he was releasing her from any confidentiality agreement and that she was therefore free to appear before the grand jury.
But letters exchanged between lawyers seem to show that Mr Libby made exactly the same offer to Ms Miller exactly a year ago.
Even the New York Times, in a lead editorial, was forced yesterday to ask the question: if that's the case, why did she wait until Friday to testify, and why did she spend most of her summer in a prison cell?
There is much still to be explained. It has also been reported that among those who went to visit Ms Miller in prison was the controversial US envoy to the UN, John Bolton. No one knows what his involvement in this affair might be.
Critics speculate the following, however: Ms Miller's reputation was in shreds after the Iraq invasion. Going to prison on behalf of journalists everywhere provided a good distraction.
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Anker-Klanker
Admiral
Joined: 04 Sep 2004
Posts: 1033
Location: Richardson, TX
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 9:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Maybe, maybe not... Notice that the article is a UK news piece. They seem to have a propensity over there for floating totally false information. Probably best to just wait and see... |
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SBD
Admiral
Joined: 19 Aug 2004
Posts: 1022
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 3:17 am Post subject: |
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| Anker-Klanker wrote: | | Maybe, maybe not... Notice that the article is a UK news piece. They seem to have a propensity over there for floating totally false information. Probably best to just wait and see... |
Apparently she was pretty busy entertaining visitors, Bob Dole included!!
| Quote: |
Judith Miller's Visitors List Revealed--Bolton's Name 'Raises Eyebrows'
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001138705
By E&P Staff
Published: September 17, 2005 11:15 AM ET
NEW YORK Increasingly overlooked or forgotten by the media in recent weeks, jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miler has still received plenty of upclose and personal support. According to a document, exactly 99 friends or supporters (or former sources) visited her between her July 6 detention and Labor Day. Among them, confirming earlier rumors, was John R. Bolton, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Others on the list: Tom Brokaw, film director Irwin Winkler, Richard Clarke and two of his former aides, Iraqi weapons hunter Charles Duelfer, Bob Dole, publisher Mort Zuckerman, Sen. Arlen Spector, and famed book editor Alice Mayhew. Many more are turned away, as Miller and an assistant to her lawyer manage the flood of requests.
"She's very popular, and it's kind of hard to get on the schedule," longtime friend Ellen Chesler, who visited Miller in July but has not been able to get back in since, told the Washington Post, which obtained the document.
One court official familiar with her schedule told the Post: "She's running an office down there."
The Post reported that as a low-risk prisoner, Miller, 57, is generally allowed as many as three visitors a day for a total of 30 minutes.
Miller's attorney, Robert S. Bennett, said jail authorities give his client no special treatment.
“Bolton's visit raised some eyebrows in Washington,” the Post said. “A vocal defender of administration claims in 2003 that Iraq was seeking weapons of mass destruction, he could have had access to a State Department memo, parts of which were classified, that detailed Wilson's trip to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking uranium there and identified his wife as a covert CIA operative. Who saw or discussed the memo has been a central question for Fitzgerald.
“Bolton declined through a spokesman to discuss his visit to Miller or his reasons for going. ‘This has nothing to do with his job here,' the spokesman said. 'He doesn't want to talk about it.’”
Miller will remain jailed for another month or more, when the grand jury investigating the Plame/CIA leak will probably disband.
"Well, she's not the most famous person we have here," one employee at the detention center, which also houses convicted al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, told the Post "But she does have some visitors."
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