Ms. Run Amok

Judy Miller, the New York Times reporter and acrobatic careerist, calls herself or did call herself in her salad days “Ms. Run Amok.” She was referring to her power to put anything she cared to on the front page of the world’s most influential publication.

These days she is calling herself Ms. Martyr for a Free Press for refusing to tell a grand jury her part in outing the CIA employment of Valerie Plame and going to jail for it. As long as she can keep us focused on what she may or may not have done in this not atypical, despicable Washington intrigue, Ms. Run Amok has hopes that she will continue to be regarded by the credulously idealist as a bearer of the torch of liberty.

While we watch to see if Karl Rove, the official White House button man, is branded a criminal, Ms. Run Amok goes unrecognized as a criminal of another sort. It is she who wrote a string of articles publicizing the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were false as The Times with unbecoming slowness has admitted. Now Ms. Run Amok has told her employer: "W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," she said. "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."

The best job Judy Run Amok could do or wanted to do? This is a woman who says: "I have strong elbows, but I'm not a dope." She is, however, a heedless, out of control careerist. At the time she was doing “the best job that I could,” the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus and many others were laying bare the unreliability and corrupt motives of Ms. Run Amok’s analysts, experts and sources.

In exchange for propagating the Administration line Ms. Run Amok was rewarded with all sorts of entree and the juicy little tidbitteries Washington journalism dotes on. Therein lies her criminality. Those fraudulent stories of hers played a part in the deaths, maimings and misery of thousand upon thousands of people, not least of whom are members of our own military.

These days Ms. Run Amok is taking victory laps about the banquet and awards circuit picking up medals for her selfless dedication to the highest ideals of her calling. May the shadows of the dead and the weeping of the survivors follow her into the banqueting rooms.