Keller still doesn't understand. His lukewarm memo dances around placing blame where it belongs: on Judith Miller and Times management. He also spends considerable effort to spin this as a free speech issue; that if the Times had known this and that way back then, it would have gone to court to fight the subpoena for the grand jury, and torpedo the investigation into who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame.

Apparently the Times management believes that because they are a news organization, they and their employees are not subject to the same laws as the rest of us; they believe in special entitlements allowing them to avoid disclosure of their sources when ordered by the court, and thus avoid prosecution. This is why they now want Congress to specifically enact a so-called shield law for them to avoid this situation again, regardless of whether it runs counter to the interests of justice.

Make no mistake: Judith Miller is a discredity 'journalist' who willingly participated in a conspiracy to cover up a felony crime that endangers our national security. She had the opportunity to come clean long ago, but chose not to do so. It wasn't out of principle, as she claimed, but rather to avoid embarassment and public knowledge of her slipshod methods.

It's long past time to send a chilling message to the Times and other news organizations that they can be held accountable and sent to jail.

I wrote a letter to the Times back when they made their attempt at coming clean about their shoddy reporting on WMD, which, to my surprise, they ran. This article was printed on page A10, and, as I recall, had no front-page lead-in. My point to them was that if they wanted to be so diligent in letting their readership know they had messed up then maybe they should have made it a lead news article, putting in on page A1 and above the fold, even though it was essentially an editorial and not a hard news item. (For the full article and all of the letters go here: http://www.urielw.com/refs/040526.htm).

I might have further added, and this is a bit of hindsight on my part as well, that they should have fired Judy Miller. Right then and there they could have washed their hands of this whole mess.

When Ms. Miller went to jail I think a lot of us were torn. First, here was a journalist who was going to the mat for her source, about as laudable a thing a journalist can do, ethics-wise. But second, it was Judy "Aluminum Tubes" Miller, whose credibility had been utterly shot. The whole thing stank. Still does.

A federal shield law is a good idea, and is supported by many states attorneys general. What is not a good idea is for a respectable news agency -- any respectable news agency -- to stand by reporters and their editors who grotesquely mess stories up. The first amendment doesn't even have to come into it. Judy Miller and whoever was running the international desk should have been stricken from the Gray Lady, and the editor, Bill Keller or his predecessor, should have had the balls to do so. I mean this is only war we're talking about!

This, of course, pretty accurately reflects the lassitude and cowardice of much of the mainstream media. A lot of news agencies around here need to, ahem, grow a pair.

Who knows if it's just internal politics and first amendment righteousness that drove the Times to do what it did. Am I mad at the Times? Absolutely. But not half as mad as I am at the administration. The Times, to me, merely comes off as being pathetic. Of course, if the worst-case scenario is considered, then they become complicit, but I'm not sure I buy it. And, even if it's too little too late, at least they have the nerve to attempt coming clean. Mr. Bush, while he is "presidenting," might want to consider that himself. (Whoever wrote, "while I am presidenting," for the Bush/Bono thing is the man! Or woman!)

Bill Keller wrote:

"By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers."

The readers? How about the welfare of the Unites States of America? Typical self-centered CEO narcissism. What about the welfare of the U.S.???? What the Times and the other print medias did, and continue to do is put profit and "readership" first. They have turned the NY Times into a soap opera. It is a joke. I don't read it or the Washington Post any longer.

Bill Keller doesn't get it and he never will.

ApleAnee

I find myself, even forlornly, feeling a faint queasyness about the NY Times. The whale-size red herrings Judy Miller & presumably her editor(s) swallowed from the scrupleless Mr. Chalabi et ilk led this country to make the biggest foreign policy error in modern times.

When it became clear that she had been suckered, duped, hornswoggled with 30-World-Trade Towers worth of Iraqis mutilated; our own dead and crippled kids, our loss of any international credibility, and $200,000 per minute worth of gruesome consequences, Ms. Miller should have been fired.

Jayson Blair seems small cheese --the fiction he wrote was 'the truth'; the 'truth' she wrote was fiction.

She knew she was neck-deep in a coziness that would allow a source to write about entwining aspen roots to her. That's too "connected" for our need to know to be confident.

She should be fired now. I see no other statement by the Times which could restore its readers' trust in the seriousness of the Times towards their sacred & honorable relationship with us.

Salon

i guess i was guilty of an emily latilla moment..here i was thinking.."what's the big fuss over the whitehouse forming a group of whigs"...just like 17th century england.... a group all for social reform in opposition to the tories or conservatives who were against change and wanted everybody to be part of their church...the church of england..

oh...WHIGS..."never mind"....that's different...when you put the letters in the upper case they become different kind of reformers...they want to reform the way newspapers report things and how spies report things and they want to make sure that nobody gets to say the wrong things about why they go to war and why they want to reform the laws and stuff.

never mind

tom coombs

kaslo bc canada

tcmbs@telus.net