Crooks & Liars posts the text of a memo from editor Bill Keller to the New York Times staff.

Short version: I apologize for letting Judy Miller screw the New York Times.

Sample:

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details — the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes — to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper. …

… if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.

It’s not just Bill Keller. Miller’s colleague Mo Dowd writes a column today (behind the bleeping subscription wall) that takes Judy down, although gently (for Dowd).

Shorter version: Somebody should have stopped her a long time ago.

Sample:

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.”

Judy’s stories about W.M.D. 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 Senator Bob Graham, now retired, dubbed “incestuous amplification.” Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D. issues. But he acknowledged in The Times’s Sunday story about Judy’s role in the Plame leak case that she had kept “drifting” back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she “got it totally wrong” about W.M.D. “If your sources are wrong,” she said, “you are wrong.” But investigative reporting is not stenography.

At the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten discusses the Keller memo.

Shorter version: Miller’s a liar.

Sample:

The Times is a great news organization with a newfound capacity for self-criticism and a demonstrated capacity to renew itself. Miller, the reporter, represents something far more persistent and pernicious in American journalism. She’s virtually an exemplar of an all-too-common variety of Washington reporter: ambitious, self-interested, unscrupulous and intoxicated by proximity to power. …

… As Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported in Newsweek’s online edition this week, Libby deceived Miller during that breakfast meeting when he told her — according to her own account — that a classified National Intelligence Estimate “had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium” for a nuclear bomb. In fact, it called reports of Baghdad’s purchase of African uranium “highly dubious.”

Miller makes no mention whatsoever of this in her evasive published account of their dealings; what does that make her?

Sloppy and reckless — but apparently something more….

…Given Miller’s demonstrable conviction that a true picture can be repainted in situationally convenient hues, it’s not hard to figure out whom you believe on this one. A line of poetry comes to mind:

And what is truth, said Pilate, and washed his hands.

Ouch.

Colbert King of the Washington Post suggests that Miller’s relationship with her sources was way too cozy.

Shorter version: The White House did a no-no, and Judy helped.

Sample:

…the CIA leak case belongs in a class of its own. The Bush administration, having denied any knowledge or involvement in the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, appears to be up to its eyeballs in the whole affair. But security transgressions, if that’s what they are, appear to extend beyond blowing an agent’s cover.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published reporter Judith Miller’s firsthand account of her grand jury appearance in connection with the leak case. According to Miller, the inquiry that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald conducted before the grand jury roamed beyond the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name. Miller wrote that Fitzgerald, referring to Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, asked “if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby, and I said I believed so, but could not be sure.” Miller said she told Fitzgerald and the grand jury that I. Lewis Libby treated classified material very carefully and that while he had not shown her any documents, “I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.”

Miller does not have a security clearance, though she claimed she had one when she was embedded with a special military unit in Iraq two years ago. She later modified that statement to say she had signed a nondisclosure form with the military giving her temporary access to classified information under rules set by her military hosts, according to Thursday’s Times. At any rate, she no longer had authorized access to classified information after the Iraq assignment.

Before the release of the Keller memo, Jack Shafer at Slate was calling for an exorcism at the Times.

Shorter version: Miller should not only be dismissed from the Times, she should be drummed out of journalism.

Sample:

The Sunday Times account about Miller read alone paints her as an insubordinate, self-serving, and undisciplined menace you couldn’t trust to assemble entertainment listings let alone file national-security stories. Conceding in the Times piece that her WMD reporting was “totally wrong,” Miller proves she doesn’t understand how journalism works when she says, “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.” That is a lie. Reporters aren’t conduits through which sources pour information into newspapers. And sources aren’t to blame if a reporter gets a story wrong. A real reporter tests his sources’ findings against other evidence in hopes of discovering the truth, something Miller was apparently loath to do. …

…Asking the Times to exhume Miller’s work and revisit the methods and practices that led to flawed WMD journalism at the paper isn’t a veiled way of asking that witches be arrested for burning at the stake. Journalistic standards were betrayed at the Times. It was the Times, not me, that stated in its May 26, 2004, mini culpa that “the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation” is “unfinished business” and promised that the paper would “continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.” Unless the paper wants to hear Judith Miller’s name yodeled with that of Walter Duranty on every occasion Times haters assemble, one last public exorcism must be conducted to drive out the demons forever.

Time will tell if the New York Times has actually learned anything from this mess. As I wrote here, the Times has a pattern of compromised reporting that predates the Bush Regime. Let’s see if they can remember how to cover news.

Update: More on MoDo from Steve Gilliard.