Special Agent Judy Miller

How much more evidence do we need to realize that Judy Miller was working for the Bush White House in the run-up to war, during the war, and after the war during the search for those elusive WMDs? She had a security clearance, was told what she could and couldn't report on (which she admits to expressing frustration about with Scooter Libby) and then went to jail rather than spill the beans on the whole operation. Yet, Fitzgerald eventually won out by threatening even more time in the slammer for the Queen of All Iraq and so she talked, partially.

Yet, as Josh points out something doesn't quite add up. I'd like to add my own speculation, which is that Fitzgerald has some evidence that the leaking of the name "Valerie Plame" isn't the only classified information that may have been leaked, that perhaps administration officials, in the run-up to warm leaked parts of the classified national intelligence estimate to bolster the case for war to reporters like Judy Miller. Miller's own emphasis on her supposed "security clearance" - which know one else will confirm but her - is an effort to justify the information Libby was passing on to her that he shouldn't have been.

...TPM has an update explaining, in part, Judy's "security clearance." Other key portions of the article Josh links to.

The war in Iraq was going to be Miller’s journalistic victory lap. Just before the bombs began falling on Baghdad, Miller embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha—the unit charged with scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. No other journalist would have such access, which meant she would have the exclusive when they uncovered the WMD stockpiles, the smoking gun.
...


As MET Alpha began its work in April, Miller sent home a blockbuster about an Iraqi scientist in her unit’s custody. According to Miller, the scientist had told the unit that Iraq had destroyed chemical- and biological-warfare equipment on the eve of the war. And—here’s the real coup—the scientist had led the squad to buried ingredients for chemical-weapons production. Although she told readers that her unit prevented her from naming these precursor elements or the scientist, the military did permit Miller to view him from a distance. “Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried,” she wrote. And on PBS’s NewsHour, she was even more emphatic: “What they found is a silver bullet in the form of a person.”

But these scoops, like the story about the scientist, tended to melt quickly in the Iraqi desert. And very soon into the postwar era, the costs of her embedding agreement and her passion for the story became clear. Even though she had more access to MET Alpha, the best seat in the house, she was the only major reporter on the WMD beat to miss the story so completely. MET Alpha was a bumbling unit; and even if it hadn’t been bumbling, it wouldn’t have made a difference—there were no WMDs. The Post’s Gellman, on the other hand, hadn’t embedded with a unit, and didn’t negotiate any access agreements. What’s more, he had the intellectual honesty to repudiate some of his own earlier reporting. He came away from Iraq with a stark, honest story: “Odyssey of Frustration: In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners.”