Gary Younge (Guardian Utd): Judith Miller no stranger to controversy

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Thursday July 7

Veteran Middle East specialist no stranger to controversy
By Gary Younge

"When it comes down to it, to go to jail over something like this is to make quite a lonely stand," says the media commentator and Vanity Fair columnist, Michael Wolff, of Judith Miller. "There's a kind of personal heroism to this because it may be what is needed to defend a general principle."

What makes it all the more strange is that Ms Miller never actually wrote a story about the leak and it has not yet been ascertained if anyone committed a crime.

"I would be going to jail for a story I didn't write, for reasons which I don't know, for something which may not actually have been a crime," she told an audience at Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium this year. "It's become kind of Kafkaesque."

Ms Miller is no stranger to controversy. Yesterday US journalists clamoured to support her as she was led away by US marshals to up to four months in jail for refusing to reveal her source to investigators seeking the truth behind the leaking of the CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media. But over the past two years her reporting has been the subject of intense criticism because of accusations that she was insufficiently critical of the Bush administration's claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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