$1.2 MILLION and VALERIE FLAME

According to Arianna Huffington:

[Judith] Miller has absolutely, positively been telling friends that she has a $1.2 million book deal. Period. The end.

In other words, if you want to understand what Judith Miller was doing in jail for 85 days, all you have to do is follow the money.

It wasn't about principle, or protecting sources, or journalistic integrity.

It was a stunt, a means to an end. It was about a book deal.

There is no other explanation. It was a self-aggrandizement dance, pure and simple.

The credibility of the New York Times once again has been diminished by its employees.

On Oct. 3, four days after Ms. Miller left jail, she returned to the headquarters of The New York Times on West 43rd Street.

Before entering the building, she called her friend Ms. Payne and asked her to come downstairs and escort her in. "She very felt frightened," Ms. Payne said. "She felt very vulnerable."

At a gathering in the newsroom, she made a speech claiming victories for press freedom. Her colleagues responded with restrained applause, seemingly as mystified by the outcome of her case as the public.

"You could see it in people's faces," Ms. Miller said later. "I'm a reporter. People were confused and perplexed, and I realized then that The Times and I hadn't done a very good job of making people understand what has been accomplished."

In the days since, The Times has been consumed by discussions about how the newspaper handled the case, how Times journalists covered the news of their own paper - and about Ms. Miller herself.

"Everyone admires our paper's willingness to stand behind us and our work, but most people I talk to have been troubled and puzzled by Judy's seeming ability to operate outside of conventional reportorial channels and managerial controls," said Todd S. Purdum, a Washington reporter for The Times. "Partly because of that, many people have worried about whether this was the proper fight to fight."

Of course, there's confusion.

Miller is presenting herself as a heroine of press freedoms. However, it's hard to be viewed as a heroine when there was never a fight.

The day Miller went to jail, I wrote that I didn't understand why.

According to the account in the New York Times, July 6, 2005:

"If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press," she read from a statement as she stood before Judge Hogan. "The right of civil disobedience is based on personal conscience, it is fundamental to our system and it is honored throughout our history," she said before court officers led her away, looking shaken.

The executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, said outside the courthouse that Ms. Miller's decision to go to jail rather than disclose her source was a "brave and principled choice."

"Judy Miller made a commitment to her source and she's standing by it," he said. "This is a chilling conclusion to an utterly confounding case."

..."Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality - no one in America is," Mr. Fitzgerald told the judge on Tuesday.

Mr. Fitzgerald also said in the court papers that the source for both Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller had waived confidentiality, giving the reporters permission to reveal where they got their information. The prosecutor did not identify that person, nor say whether the source for each reporter was the same person.

...Mr. Fitzgerald, who until then had been restrained in his public filings, was also harshly critical of the position taken by Ms. Miller and of statements supporting her by The Times.

...He added: "Much of what appears to motivate Miller to commit contempt is the misguided reinforcement from others (specifically including her publisher) that placing herself above the law can be condoned." Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, has repeatedly said the newspaper supports Ms. Miller.

At the time, I wrote:

Does this make sense?

Fitzgerald said that the source for both Cooper and Miller had waived confidentiality. So, based on the source taking the burden of confidentiality off, Cooper has agreed to cooperate and Miller won't. The source said it was OK for Miller to talk.

What's her problem? She can't be seen as some sort of martyr if the need for her to go to jail doesn't exist. Her source has given her the green light to reveal what she knows. The source has freed Miller; but she's choosing jail.

Miller wants to make a point. There's no other reason for her to refuse to cooperate since her source has given her the go ahead.

...I don't get it. She doesn't have to go to jail.

Of course, now I do get it.

She wouldn't have a $1.2 million book deal if she hadn't spent 85 days in jail.

Miller's shameless stunt and the ridiculous manner in which The Times tried to elevate her to folk hero status is truly an embarrassment.

The Times writes:

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame's name.

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

So, Miller was protecting a source, who had LONG ago released her from any pledge of confidentiality. Plus, Miller said her source was Libby, but she didn't think he told her about Valerie Plame. She can't recall the person who did reveal Plame's name.

Huh?

According to the Washington Post:

Miller said her lawyer Floyd Abrams told her that Libby's attorney, Joseph A. Tate, had related part of Libby's grand jury testimony and was "pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn't give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave me this, 'Don't go there, or, we don't want you there.' "

Tate strongly denied such a conversation in an e-mail to the Times, calling the account "outrageous" and insisting that "I never once suggested that she should not testify. It was just the opposite."

I hope Miller's $1.2 million book deal is for fiction.

I think she'll have trouble delivering a non-fiction manuscript.