New York Times Story on Leak Raises Questions

Critics inside the paper and in the wider journalism community said Monday that they found particularly disturbing the revelation that the newspaper's editors seemed unable to control Miller and that the reporter agreed to use a misleading identification to shield the identity of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

The Pentagon also raised doubts about Miller's contention that she had a special security clearance that allowed her to report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Some critics were particularly harsh, noting that the 57-year-old Miller's work had been questioned before.

Her editors had pulled her off coverage of Iraq and weapons issues in 2003 and later ran an unusual editors' note admitting that they could no longer stand by six stories about weapons of mass destruction, or WMD -- including five that Miller wrote or co-wrote.

"I don't know why she was allowed to do all these things and where the people were who were supposed to manage her," said one Times reporter, who asked not to be named out of concern of antagonizing the paper's editors.

Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, was even more pointed in a criticism published Monday in the trade publication's online edition.

"Most disturbing is the sense that the Times at times is a ship without a skipper or, better yet, an asylum run by the inmates," Rieder wrote. "Strong leadership and editorial oversight seem hard to come by."

The reactions followed the Times' Sunday story and an accompanying first-person account by Miller about her four hours of testimony before a federal grand jury.

The panel, directed by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is expected to decide by Oct. 28 whether Libby or any other official will be indicted for revealing the identity of Plame, a covert CIA operative. The investigation is focused on determining whether Plame was exposed in retaliation for her husband's attacks on the Bush administration's Iraq policies.

In a memo to his staff Monday, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller praised his paper's 5,000-plus-word account of Miller's reporting about Plame. He called the story a "fine, rigorous piece of journalism."