Dowd on Miller: Woman of Mass Destruction

Mo likes Judy, she really does...and yet: "When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D. issues. But he acknowledged in The Times's Sunday story about Judy's role in the Plame leak case that she had kept 'drifting' back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she 'got it totally wrong' about W.M.D. 'If your sources are wrong,' she said, 'you are wrong.' But investigative reporting is not stenography.

The Times's story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said yesterday in an e-mail note to the staff, Judy seemed to have 'misled' the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.

She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a 'former Hill staffer' because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't."