Why Wasn't Judith Miller Indicted?

In 1992, an Israeli cop was killed. The response was to deport 400 Palestinian men, suddenly leaving 400 families behind. The UN condemned that action. Money was raised worldwide, including in the United States, with contributions from Muslim communities around the country. In Chicago, Mohammad Salah was chosen by the imam of his mosque--presumably because he was *not* involved with Hamas or any other militant organizations--to deliver the money to humanitarian agencies in the West Bank.

He flew to Israel on January 15, 1993. Apparently, he was followed from the moment his plane landed. He gave money to the organizations, was arrested a couple of weeks later and severely tortured. A couple of weeks after the torture began, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin himself invited Judith Miller to observe part of Salah's interrogation. (His torture continued for approximately the same number of days that Ms. Miller would later spend in prison.)

In 1998, Miller wrote in "Reporting From a Militant Middle East: God Has Ninety-Nine Names" that, although she didn’t know what had happened to Salah before she saw him, he looked just fine to her--“as he answered questions from the ‘good cop,’" adds someone close to the case. “All the cops were working together, of course, but the ‘good cop’ is seen as the savior when you’re being tortured. Which explains why Salah would be more relaxed with him than he was when the bad cops questioned him. The cops and the Israeli government wanted Miller to see Salah when he was being treated reasonably.”

It has been speculated that, because the Israeli government was unhappy about what the U.S. was doing to interdict the fundraising for Hamas, they decided to force Salah to say that he was an active big wheel in Hamas, and the way to spread that disinformation was was to get it into the New York Times. Miller was considered a longtime friend of Israel--there are those who have even suggested that she was in the employ of Mossad--but at any rate, she wrote a piece about fundraising for Hamas in America.

Enter Patrick Fitzgerald, who, besides his role as special prosecutor in the CIA leak scandal, is the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, and he will be prosecuting the Salah case. In March, there will be a hearing in Chicago federal court on a motion to suppress Salah’s statements, since the statements he made under torture are essentially the basis of the indictments against him. If defense attorneys can get those statements suppressed, it would be hard to prosecute the case.

According to my source, “What Miller wrote in her book, and spoke about on "Sixty Minutes," is what she says the Israelis told her that Salah had said. The statements that Fitzgerald intends to use in the trial took place before and after February 11, 1993, the same day that Miller claims to have seen part of the interrogation.”

In order to preserve the ethical righteousness of calling Miller to testify in the Salah case--in effect, vouching for her honesty--Fitzgerald had to make a decision whether to indict Miller for perjury and/or obstruction of justice in Plamegate.

If he had indicted her for (1) intentionally concealing from the grand jury a particular meeting with Lewis Libby, and/or (2) lying about her inability to recall how the entry “Valerie Flame” appeared in her notebook right in the middle of notes on her conversation with Libby, then Fitzgerald would have faced a serious ethical dilemma. If he indicted Miller for perjury, he couldn’t vouch for her honesty.

Could that be a key reason why she wasn’t indicted along with Libby?