by Maureen Dowd/The New York Times




She
never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in
need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and
that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than
earned her sobriquet “Miss Run Amok.”



[Judith
Miller’s] stories about WMD fit too perfectly with the White House's
case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was
conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on
Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the
dangerous echo chamber that former Senator Bob Graham dubbed
“incestuous amplification.” Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr.
Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.



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.



Judy
coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after
prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met
with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people
wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career
rehabilitation project.



I admire
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing
reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's
case into a First Amendment battle, they should have [tied] her to a
chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.