Miller Time

All of which is to say that while I may not be her favorite reporter, I was extremely interested in how she would handle her testimony under duress. Here's my report:

Judith Miller slept on the floor of an Alexandria jail for 85 days to avoid taking the hot seat she found herself in yesterday.

She lost a battle of wills with a special prosecutor, surrendered her job at the New York Times and became an unwanted symbol of journalistic coziness with the Bush administration and media missteps in covering an unpopular war.

In taking the stand in U.S. District Court against her once-secret source, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Miller found herself answering questions about the very methods that she has spent a professional lifetime concealing. Rather than pointing out flaws in the accounts of public officials, she found herself struggling to explain a spotty memory and to justify why she wrote nothing about the sensitive -- and, as it turned out, classified -- information she had been handed. Once an independent operator who called herself "Miss Run Amok," she disputed what her many critics said was obvious: that Vice President Cheney's former top aide had been trying to manipulate her.

Throughout the afternoon, an unspoken question hung in the air: What do journalists give up when they agree to protect high officials in exchange for juicy information?

In a steady but slightly nervous voice, Miller described how her relationship with Libby began: with a bit of flattery. In their first meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Miller recalled Libby saying that "he liked my reporting on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism." Libby's only quibble was that he had never received an inscribed copy of "Germs," a book on bioterrorism that she co-authored. Miller said she apologized for the oversight.

Gazing through rimless glasses at prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Miller, 59, described one of the most common transactions in journalism: how the contours of the reporter-source relationship are defined.

When she "expressed a desire" for regular conversations, Libby said "he would prefer not to see his name in print," Miller said. "We could continue meeting as long as I would identify him as an administration official or senior administration official." She readily agreed.

When Miller returned from a post-invasion trip to Iraq in 2003 -- where she wrote stories about the U.S. military's hunt for illegal weapons -- she said she was surprised that some of the public anger about the lack of WMD was directed at her. There was anger, too, at the Times, which later acknowledged serious flaws in some of her reporting and where the top editor eventually said he felt misled by Miller.

She seemed unenthusiastic about her former employer when asked whether she read newspapers upon her return -- especially the New York Times. "Not particularly," she said. "You usually read the competition before you read your own."

At a meeting in Libby's office in June 2003, Libby seemed "agitated and frustrated and angry," not to mention "annoyed," Miller said. He was concerned that the CIA, through a "perverted war of leaks," was distancing itself from its prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons.

So Libby would combat these leaks by leaking to Miller, she explained in a tone that indicated this was the most natural thing in the world. Miller said he told her that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador who was challenging the administration's account that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium in Africa, worked for "the bureau" -- prompting Miller to put a question mark in her notes until she realized that Libby meant the CIA.