The Times is finally on record

The NYT has finally put themselves on record with the stories about Miller, Libby and Fitzgerald.

See the Times story about the whole mess here and Judith Miller's personal take on it here and a timeline for the whole escapade-to-date(from Wilson's trip in 2002 to Miller's release and testimony this week) here (with Miller's personal timeline here).

My personal opinion is that the NYT dropped their shorts on this story, and failed to keep its editorial ducks all in their rows, in how it handled both Miller's relations with the grand jury and about how the paper handled its own reporting of the paper's involvement.

As for Miller, I do not think a reporter of her experience would really not "remember" her source for such an explosive detail as the first reference, in her own notes, to Valerie Wilson's maiden name (to me, the misspelling as "flame" indicates that this was the first reference she had to that name), nor to why her notes, from another meeting with Libby, use Valerie Wilson rather than Plame.

Frankly, I think that Miller is soon going to take a long sabbatical to work on her book, and the NYT editors and publishers need to take a long and hard look at how they allowed themselves to, through Miller's pre-Iraq war coverage, and the attempts by Libby to spin the official White House line about Cheney's non-involvement, to become largely uncritical shills for this White House.

The paper needs to do this as a service to itself, to its readers, and to the thousands of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed and maimed in this distraction from actually pursuing the people who really attacked the U.S. -- the terrorists.