Ariana Huffington has a great post on former journalist Judy Miller and the NYT's inability to call Judy the partisan intelligence maniupulator that she, based on the evidence, is. Ariana makes a convincing case that Judy's not sitting in jail because Judy's protecting a source, she's sitting in jail because she, Judy Miller, is a source.
Here's a snippet:
It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.
This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source.
Now, if you were the head of Halliburton, wouldn't you hire someone who would lie, repeatedly, in order to help out Dick Cheney? Not to mention that the lies led to a war which netted billions for Halliburton.
Read the whole piece on Ariana's blog.