Playing Dumb About Scooter

Disingenuous is probably the best word to describe how Judy Miller came across this weekend in the pages of the New York Times. The instances were many, and some more obvious than others. But each was head shaking in its own way. For instance, asked by Times reporters about her often erroneous pre-war reporting on Saddam's alleged weapons stockpile, Miller said, "W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."

Yet six paragraphs later Miller described Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby as "a good-faith source who was usually straight with me." What Miller, and to a degree the Times reporters, conveniently omitted was the fact that Libby was clearly one of the pre-war sources Miller relied on as she hyped the administration's line about WMD's. i.e. Libby was one of her sources who got it wrong. So why pretend he was a "straight shooter?"