Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record—testimony, exhibits, the lot—will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq—and other military excursions—for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

From the start, when he was named special prosecutor in late 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to understand and embrace this much wider significance.

Yet he was careful not to overreach, crafting the indictment of Mr. Libby narrowly: He had lied to a grand jury, and to F.B.I. agents, about leaks he had given his favorite media people to discredit a vocal critic of the war.

The critic was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr. Wilson, whose diplomatic service had included work in Africa, was asked in 2002 by the C.I.A. to investigate unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein had recently tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be further refined to produce nuclear weapons.

Mr. Wilson went to Africa, consulted his sources, and found no meaningful evidence of such a plot. He reported these negative findings to the C.I.A. And further investigations by several parties, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, established that the uranium story was phony. Yet Messrs. Bush, Cheney and others in the President’s close circle kept presenting the uranium story as part of the pressing rationale for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Even as the White House found itself apologizing for a January 2003 State of the Union address which continued to tout the uranium story and other known falsehoods about the Iraqi threat, it continued the push for war. The invasion began on March 20, 2003.

Mr. Wilson responded to the White House in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article for The New York Times, charging that the administration had manufactured evidence to win support for the war. It was this story, published in the country’s most influential news organ, that drove the White House into a frenzy—in particular Mr. Cheney, the administration’s leading hawk.

The smear campaign against Mr. Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, went into high gear. Conservative pundit Robert Novak, a frequent conduit for White House whispers, wrote a column on July 14, 2003, attacking Mr. Wilson and outing Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. “operative.” The trial has since identified one of the unnamed senior administration officials Mr. Novak cited as his sources: Karl Rove, the advisor closest to the President.

The Justice Department responded to calls for an investigation into the leak by naming the U.S. Attorney for Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald, as special prosecutor for the case.

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald gets a conviction, he has created a trial record that establishes the administration's guilt. Sprinkled throughout are the names of most of the neoconservatives who had been planning the current Iraq War ever since the 1991 Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in power.

They came out in the open in 1997 when they formed a Washington think tank of their own—the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their first public act was a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, calling for the swift “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Citing those still-undiscovered “weapons of mass destruction,” they said: “[W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition … to uphold the [U.N.] sanctions …. ”

Then, in 2000, just before Mr. Bush’s elevation to the White House by the Supreme Court, the PNAC war-seekers issued a lengthy manifesto calling for a major escalation of the country’s military mission. This 81-page document proposed a buildup that would make it possible for the United States to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” The report depicted these wars as “large scale” and “spread across [the] globe.”

Iraq was named as a major threat.

Another aim of this escalation was as follows: “Control the new ‘international commons’ of space and cyberspace, and pave the way for the creation of a new military service—U.S. Space Forces—with the mission of space control.”

Perhaps the eeriest sentence in the document is found on page 51, conjuring up images of 9/11: “The process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” (The PNAC documents can be found online at newamericancentury.org.)

Among the 25 signatories to the PNAC founding statement: Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalizad.

Most of these names echo throughout the Libby trial record. Besides the damning notes from Mr. Cheney, accounts of conversations between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby and Mr. Libby’s subsequent conversations with other pivotal administration officials, there is at least one document, in Mr. Cheney’s handwriting, that suggests the President had direct knowledge of the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.

The trial and its record was always all about the unnecessary war—a war created by massive and deliberate lying about an imminent security threat that wasn’t there. That’s why the President and his men were desperate to shut Mr. Wilson up.

He was the imminent threat—to their delusional empire-building.

The question that now hangs over the President and the Vice President is whether they lied to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald—the same crime for which their fall guy Scooter now faces possible imprisonment and disgrace. According to published reports, the special counsel interviewed both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney during the summer of 2004. The only way for them to dispel the suspicion that they may have lied to him is to permit full disclosure of those interviews.

Doubts about the candor of Messrs. Bush and Cheney date all the way back to September 2003, before the appointment of the special counsel, when the President supposedly declared his sincere determination to “get to the bottom of this.”

By “this,” he meant the apparent conspiracy among administration officials to reveal that Ms. Wilson was an undercover C.I.A. officer in an effort to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. A former U.S. ambassador and national-security official, Mr. Wilson had incurred the wrath of the Bush White House by revealing what he knew about the dubious justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

“There’s been nothing—absolutely nothing—brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement,” said Scott McClellan, then the Presidential press secretary, in attempting to cover Karl Rove and the rest of the White House staff with a blanket exoneration.

We have long since learned otherwise. We know, for instance, that Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby and former Presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer were all involved in leaking Ms. Wilson’s identity to the media. We also know that Mr. Libby, by his own testimony, learned about her C.I.A. identity from the Vice President. They had hoped to discredit Mr. Wilson by hinting at nepotism in his C.I.A.-sponsored trip to Niger to gather information about alleged uranium trading with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (Actually, he undertook the difficult journey to that unprepossessing nation as a public service, without pay.) In short, we know that top officials in the Bush White House were behind the campaign to discredit the Wilsons.

Where does that leave the President and the Vice President? Over the past several days, the outlines of Mr. Cheney’s role in the nasty attack on the Wilsons and the subsequent cover-up have become increasingly plain. He not only oversaw the activities of his chief of staff, but went so far as to order Mr. McClellan to “clear” Mr. Libby in a press briefing.

That incident came up during the testimony of David Addington, who now holds Mr. Libby’s old job as Vice Presidential chief of staff and was formerly counsel to the Vice President. The defense brought into evidence a note written by Mr. Cheney himself, explaining why he insisted that the White House press staff defend Mr. Libby just as vigorously as Mr. Rove, whom the Vice President seems to have blamed for the exposure of the conspiracy.

The angry note said, “not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” Although Mr. Cheney had crossed out the words “this Pres.” and replaced them with the phrase “that was,” the reference to Mr. Bush remains perfectly legible—and deeply incriminating.

According to published reports, the special prosecutor conducted interviews of the President and the Vice President during the summer of 2004. Those reports indicate that Mr. Bush, accompanied by private counsel, wasn’t placed under oath during his interview. But even if neither he nor Mr. Cheney was sworn during those encounters, that wouldn’t excuse them from telling the truth. To do otherwise would expose them to prosecution for making false statements to federal investigators—a felony—as well as possible counts of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Did the President ask Mr. Libby to take the fall for others in the White House? Did the President know the extent of the Vice President’s involvement in the effort to ruin the Wilsons? When did he learn what Messrs. Cheney, Libby, Rove and Fleischer had done to advance that scheme?

Most important, did Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney tell the truth when Mr. Fitzgerald and his investigators interrogated them about those issues? That is the inescapable question at the bottom of this case—and sooner or later, the Congress and the press must demand answers.

Now, as the pre-trial jousting in Mr. Libby’s case picks up momentum, the onetime loyal West Wing confidant—Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney—will have to choose between protecting himself and protecting the White House. Specifically, insiders say, he will have to choose between a not-guilty verdict and a Presidential pardon.

“It does put him in this difficult situation of putting the administration on trial,” said a lawyer in the case. “Things are coming out that would never have come out, solely because he’s going to fight the charges.”

As Mr. Libby’s lawyers serve demand after demand for evidence that they hope will exculpate their client, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald rallies back with briefs seeded with less-than-flattering assertions about Mr. Libby’s bosses.

Responding to Mr. Libby’s lawyers in a May 12 filing, for example, Mr. Fitzgerald included what many considered to be a shocking and revealing document: a copy of The New York Times Op-Ed column “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and calling into question some of the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program, annotated in Mr. Cheney’s script with the question: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?”

On Friday, Mr. Libby’s lawyers filed a response with the court, saying their client hadn’t seen the clipping until the F.B.I. showed him a copy—an argument that served to distance himself from the Vice President, if not exactly contradicting him.

But more importantly, this exhibit painted a picture of a Vice President angered by the column, and with clear knowledge of the relationship between Mr. Wilson, his wife and the circumstances of his trip to Niger.

This is the second time that Mr. Libby’s lawyers have been slapped in the face with information that they themselves requested to aid in his defense.

In a letter in January, and then in a filing with more detail last month, Mr. Fitzgerald reported that the President allowed Mr. Cheney to authorize selective leaking of a classified National Intelligence Estimate report to counter administration critics on Iraq. The leak prompted outrage from Democrats, who saw a contradiction in Mr. Bush’s insistence that leaks were indefensible, and led Representative Jane Harman to crown him the “leaker-in-chief.”

“In defending himself, he’s already had to reveal the degree to which the Vice President, the President and others have approved and/or directed the leaking of what might be classified information,” said a defense lawyer who has handled government clients. It’s “exposed the inner workings of what they may have preferred to keep private. His defense keeps the spotlight on the workings of the White House, which have proved to be sometimes embarrassing.”

As in many discovery processes, the prosecutor wants to minimize the amount of material provided to the defense, and the defense wants to maximize their haul.

“Fitzgerald puts this stuff out to raise the cost to Libby, because he knows Libby doesn’t want this stuff out there,” suggested one lawyer familiar with the investigation. “Every time Libby punishes him on discovery, he’ll punish the guy that Libby lied to protect …. There’s certainly tension, and [Fitzgerald] obviously perceives that pushing on this stuff is going to cause [Libby] a great deal of pain.”

Others rejected that theory. “Fitzgerald is the straightest-shooting prosecutor in the country. He’s not playing any kind of game or retaliating. He’s just showing the court what he needs,” said a lawyer familiar with the case. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to respond.

One former administration official downplayed the significance of Mr. Fitzgerald’s findings.

“Would they rather not have had to deal with it? Sure. Did it flip everybody’s views on Scooter? Probably not.” And, in fact, many of the Republican faithful—including former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin—have joined the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust in a show of support. Of course, many others have not.

“From the administration’s view, the not-flattering stuff tends to be the not-flattering debates that already happened,” said the official.

Mr. Libby discussed portions of the National Intelligence Estimate used to make the case for the Iraq war, and whose credibility has since been seriously undermined.

“Why you get defensive on it is that it highlights that subsequent events have proven that to be an inaccurate assessment,” the official added.

In a key document request in March, the defense wrote: “The actions of government officials from the White House, the State Department and the CIA—and the documents they generated—are part and parcel of this story.”

Telling that story is their job. Keeping that story under wraps is the White House’s.

Mr. Libby’s sprawling legal-defense team—which includes lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Baker Botts in Washington, D.C.; Jones Day in California; and Dechert in Philadelphia—declined to comment on how Mr. Libby’s loyalty to the administration has shaped his defense strategy.

(Last month, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threatened to issue a gag order to lawyers in the case after reporters were informed of a filing in the case before it was filed with the court.)

Mr. Libby is accused of obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury coming out of his testimony in an investigation into the possibly illegal disclosure of a C.I.A. operative’s identity. The charges are based on alleged contradictions between statements Mr. Libby made to the F.B.I. and a grand jury and his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2003.

Based on the court’s filings and conversations with lawyers familiar with the case, Mr. Libby’s team appears to be conducting a broad and vigorous defense.

Their basic claim is that Mr. Libby was so busy he lost track of whom he talked to, which helps to explain why he didn’t remember where he had learned of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative whose leaked identity is at the center of the present inquiry, nor whom he talked to about her.

So they’ve requested an avalanche of information that would seem to convey exactly what that was like—among them the President’s daily intelligence briefings, as well as notes and drafts of stories from reporters. They’ve argued that Ms. Plame’s C.I.A. affiliation was not a closely held secret, and questioned the authority of Mr. Fitzgerald to bring his charges.

Lawyers said that the goal seemed to be to offer enough diversions from the narrow questions of who originally told Mr. Libby that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. operative, and what his state of mind was when he talked to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury before his indictment.

They described it as a typical defense strategy of providing a broad and sometimes confusing story in place of the prosecutor’s focused and narrow one.

“I’m not hearing that the basic charges are false with the discussion that’s been going on in the court papers,” said a lawyer familiar with the case.

But if the facts of the case are not in question, Mr. Libby has nevertheless pleaded not guilty. So his defense must rest in the interpretation of those facts, and the environment in which these facts emerged.

The tension between a defendant and his or her employer—whether in the case of a C.E.O. and a company or a Congressional staffer and a Congressional office—always exists, argued Abbe Lowell, a prominent D.C. defense attorney. “What’s uncommon is that it’s one of the highest-ranking government officials’ highest-ranking deputy,” he said.

One obvious tactic for defendants is to argue that they were simply executing orders. Yet Mr. Libby’s team is taking a more nuanced approach, trying to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Mr. Libby as charged with massive responsibilities in his role as Mr. Cheney’s deputy, and not pointing the finger at his boss. In other words, a consistent defense that is still not embarrassing to the White House.

Lawyers said it was impossible to know whether there were lines of inquiry that the defense was not pursuing at the behest of Mr. Libby.

“There are some times people might go down and say, ‘I’m not going to raise this, I’m not going to do this’—friendship, family, employers, it could be a whole host of facts that could enter into a decision,” explained a lawyer with a small involvement in the case.

But some with experience in these types of fraught situations said that while clients will typically comply with their lawyers’ suggestions, sometimes that resolution is hard-won.

“There is a real tension there, because you’re doing your utmost to defend your client, who has extreme loyalty,” said a Washington lawyer familiar with independent-counsel investigations. “It takes a lot of convincing with a client to let you do your job to complete the defense.”

The lawyer added: “It’s going to be very, very difficult to get Libby to point the finger to one or two above him—if that, in fact, occurred.”

But in a move that seemed to favor Mr. Libby’s White House associates, his lawyers seemed quite willing to finger the leaker. In a hearing held to debate subpoenas issued to reporters and media outlets, William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby’s lead attorneys, strongly hinted that at an alibi source for former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, and possibly for Robert Novak and Bob Woodward (two of the other journalists embroiled in the case) as well: someone “maybe [in the] State Department.”

“Your honor, we respectfully would submit that we think the source for Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward, who wasn’t even in the White House—we think the fact that what he knew, which is certainly as much or more than Mr. Libby knew about Ms. Wilson, convinced him that there was nothing wrong with disclosing her name to a reporter. That she was not covert. She was not classified.”

For observers, this raises questions about whether the defense strategy is designed to get Mr. Libby off, or to try to get gratitude from the administration.

“I just don’t think that folks in the administration are saying that Libby should fall on his sword so as not to embarrass people,” said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. “He crossed that bridge when he decided to defend the case.”

I thought the ambassador's name was Joe Wilson, or as his book, The Politics of Truth, is bylined, Joseph Wilson. I was curious about who all the other Joseph C. Wilsons were and I leafed through the book. Nothing. He says his mother's family was a big political family in California, but only says that his parents were "expatriate journalists and authors," though his father also "had a couple of jobs bringing American products to European customers, but the enterprises didn't work out." That's not very forthcoming. I have the strong sense that Wilson, former ski bum and diplomat, is a rich kid.

Yes, he was right about Niger, and we can hope this case brings Karl Rove and Dick Cheney down—but what sort of packaging is going on? Could the truthteller have a little more plain dealing about his own background?

Most important, his investigation has proved that the exposure of C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame Wilson, as a reprisal against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, originated within the highest levels of the Bush administration. Those revelations directly contradict the repeated and fervent denials that have emanated from the White House.

What cannot yet be said with certainty is whether the President himself lied to us or whether his top aides, including the Vice President, lied to him—or what George W. Bush knew and when he knew it.

Back in September 2003, before the appointment of the special counsel, the President reportedly said, “I want to get to the bottom of this.” His press secretary, Scott McClellan, told the country that Mr. Bush considered the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity “a very serious matter.” Speaking for the President, Mr. McClellan said: “If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.” But while specifically exonerating Mr. Rove, the press secretary also offered a broad, categorical denial. “There’s been nothing—absolutely nothing—brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement,” he said.

That statement, to quote another press secretary, is no longer operative. Months ago, we learned that Mr. Rove had spoken with reporters about Ms. Wilson’s employment by the C.I.A. The Presidential aide had hoped to discredit Ms. Wilson’s husband by suggesting nepotism in his C.I.A.-sponsored trip to Niger to gather information about alleged uranium trading with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (Actually, the former ambassador undertook that arduous trip without pay as a public service—the kind of act that Mr. Rove may find difficult to understand.)

In more recent weeks, we have learned about the involvement of Irving Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff, who evidently revealed Ms. Wilson’s C.I.A. identity to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and perhaps others. Now The Times has reported that Mr. Libby first learned about Ms. Wilson from his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney.

It has become crystal clear, in fact, that the highest officials in the Bush White House were deeply involved in the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson in retaliation for his dissent from the Iraq war policy and the fabricated “weapons of mass destruction” argument for invasion.

As for the President—who once vowed to take “appropriate action” against anyone in his government who had leaked classified information—the New York Daily News reported on Oct. 19 that he has known about Mr. Rove’s role in this matter from the beginning of the investigation.

“An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair,” wrote the paper’s Washington bureau chief, Thomas DeFrank, whose Republican sources are reputed to be excellent. The story went on to quote “a presidential counselor” who said that the President had “made his displeasure known to Karl. He made his life miserable about this.”

Perhaps so, but the President did not make his displeasure—or the truth about this matter—known to the rest of us. If the Daily News story is accurate, then Mr. Bush was complicit in the lying and covering up that now implicates Messrs. Cheney, Libby, Rove and almost surely others.

Whether this deficit of candor matters very much depends on who answers—and when. Six or seven years ago, nothing mattered more than whether Bill Clinton had lied about his personal entanglement with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” After the independent-counsel investigation finally exposed his lying about that relationship and forced him to confess his shame, many people demanded his resignation or impeachment.

“He lied to the American people!” they repeated in an unceasing drone. Worse still, he had lied about that relationship while giving a deposition in the Paula Jones case, raising the possibility that he had committed perjury.

These days, however, leading Republicans in Washington seem wholly unconcerned with lying in the White House, even about issues far graver and more consequential than oral sex. Perjury and obstruction of justice—once regarded by the Republican leadership as terrible threats to the moral fiber of the nation—are now dismissed as technicalities scarcely worthy of public attention, let alone indictment.

That is the current opinion of Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, as she stated on Meet the Press last Sunday. Speaking of the possible indictment of White House officials, she said: “I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment … that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality …. ”

And let us also hope that, with or without indictments, we will assess the high price in human life and national honor that this lying has exacted.

In the end, we just decided to launch a men's blog instead, since, you know, men actually get things done instead of just jawing about them all day long. (Oh, don't look at us like that, gals!) So, without further ado, welcome to... The Cockpit!

—The Transom

He would provide the covert smears, and she would mislead the public about her source.

The Times reporter and the White House official shared a powerful urge to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose informed criticism of Bush administration claims about Iraq’s alleged attempts to procure uranium in Africa had embarrassed both. At the behest of administration officials such as Mr. Libby, she had exaggerated the prewar threat from Baghdad in her newspaper—and was reportedly enraged by Mr. Wilson’s audacious debunking of the myths she had propagated.

As Ms. Miller recently explained in her own Times account, Mr. Libby provided information to her about Mr. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame Wilson. In turn, she agreed to pretend that the smears came not from the White House, but from a “former [Capitol] Hill staffer.” By thus violating the Times rules for identifying unnamed sources, obscuring motivation and misleading readers, she became an accomplice of the Bush administration’s effort to silence a critic—and worse, to expose a loyal intelligence officer.

In short, Ms. Miller essentially volunteered to continue what she already had been doing for many months, in articles that eventually had to be disowned by her newspaper. She would again serve as an instrument of government propaganda and official malfeasance.

Her explanations of her behavior in this affair mock credulity, except at the pinnacle of authority in the Times offices, where they will apparently believe anything. She allowed her attorney, Robert Bennett, to tell special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that she had gone to jail to conceal a single source who had discussed the Wilsons with her, namely Mr. Libby. Now she says there was another source whose name she cannot recall. (Then again, she told reporters for The Times and other papers that she would not discuss her other sources, rather than claiming that she couldn’t remember them. Presumably she didn’t want her colleagues to laugh in her face.)

All of these contradictions and more draw fresh attention to a career marked by inexplicable failures of supervision, which in other cultures would require severe self-criticism from Ms. Miller and her superiors. Instead, the Times leadership appears as oblivious and arrogant as ever, although the many good people who work for them are anguished.

As for Ms. Miller, she continues to blame her terrible reporting about Iraq on others, and to wonder why so many reporters and readers now distrust her. Evidently, she still doesn’t understand what her scheming with Scooter shows about her loyalties and values.

With the support of her newspaper’s management, she has dramatically portrayed herself as a martyr to the principle of journalistic independence from government. Yet she also claims to have possessed a special “security clearance” supposedly provided to her by the Pentagon.

That boast—which raised eyebrows among many experienced reporters covering the military and the intelligence community—brought to mind the tales of Ms. Miller’s fruitless post-invasion search for the weapons of mass destruction she had done so much to publicize. The deal that she and her editors made with the Pentagon included exclusive access to Mobile Exploitation Team (M.E.T.) Alpha—the elite unit assigned to find Saddam Hussein’s elusive arsenal. While embedded with M.E.T. Alpha, she even donned an Army uniform and reportedly interfered with command decisions.

In exchange for her super-special access, Ms. Miller and her editors agreed to Pentagon censorship of her articles, according to New York magazine. But that deal didn’t work out quite the way she must have expected. Her stories were wrong, and there were, alas, no weapons to be found—as she might have understood much earlier, had she only paid attention to sources other than her fellow zealots in the Defense Department and the White House.

On the question of Saddam’s mythical nuclear program, for example, she could have examined the findings of the International Atomic Energy Authority and its chief, Mohammed ElBaradei. Their complete vindication by subsequent events has been capped with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The saddest aspect of the Miller saga is how the misplaced loyalty of her bosses led to their humiliation twice over. They entrusted her with journalistic latitude far beyond what her competence and integrity merited. They defended her—indeed, lionized her—long after her flaws and falsehoods had been laid bare.

And now her own words prove that from the beginning of this strange episode, she ignored their rules, betrayed their confidence and disgraced their stewardship of a great American institution.

He would provide the covert smears, and she would mislead the public about her source.

The Times reporter and the White House official shared a powerful urge to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose informed criticism of Bush administration claims about Iraq’s alleged attempts to procure uranium in Africa had embarrassed both. At the behest of administration officials such as Mr. Libby, she had exaggerated the prewar threat from Baghdad in her newspaper—and was reportedly enraged by Mr. Wilson’s audacious debunking of the myths she had propagated.

As Ms. Miller recently explained in her own Times account, Mr. Libby provided information to her about Mr. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame Wilson. In turn, she agreed to pretend that the smears came not from the White House, but from a “former [Capitol] Hill staffer.” By thus violating the Times rules for identifying unnamed sources, obscuring motivation and misleading readers, she became an accomplice of the Bush administration’s effort to silence a critic—and worse, to expose a loyal intelligence officer.

In short, Ms. Miller essentially volunteered to continue what she already had been doing for many months, in articles that eventually had to be disowned by her newspaper. She would again serve as an instrument of government propaganda and official malfeasance.

Her explanations of her behavior in this affair mock credulity, except at the pinnacle of authority in the Times offices, where they will apparently believe anything. She allowed her attorney, Robert Bennett, to tell special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that she had gone to jail to conceal a single source who had discussed the Wilsons with her, namely Mr. Libby. Now she says there was another source whose name she cannot recall. (Then again, she told reporters for The Times and other papers that she would not discuss her other sources, rather than claiming that she couldn’t remember them. Presumably she didn’t want her colleagues to laugh in her face.)

All of these contradictions and more draw fresh attention to a career marked by inexplicable failures of supervision, which in other cultures would require severe self-criticism from Ms. Miller and her superiors. Instead, the Times leadership appears as oblivious and arrogant as ever, although the many good people who work for them are anguished.

As for Ms. Miller, she continues to blame her terrible reporting about Iraq on others, and to wonder why so many reporters and readers now distrust her. Evidently, she still doesn’t understand what her scheming with Scooter shows about her loyalties and values.

With the support of her newspaper’s management, she has dramatically portrayed herself as a martyr to the principle of journalistic independence from government. Yet she also claims to have possessed a special “security clearance” supposedly provided to her by the Pentagon.

That boast—which raised eyebrows among many experienced reporters covering the military and the intelligence community—brought to mind the tales of Ms. Miller’s fruitless post-invasion search for the weapons of mass destruction she had done so much to publicize. The deal that she and her editors made with the Pentagon included exclusive access to Mobile Exploitation Team (M.E.T.) Alpha—the elite unit assigned to find Saddam Hussein’s elusive arsenal. While embedded with M.E.T. Alpha, she even donned an Army uniform and reportedly interfered with command decisions.

In exchange for her super-special access, Ms. Miller and her editors agreed to Pentagon censorship of her articles, according to New York magazine. But that deal didn’t work out quite the way she must have expected. Her stories were wrong, and there were, alas, no weapons to be found—as she might have understood much earlier, had she only paid attention to sources other than her fellow zealots in the Defense Department and the White House.

On the question of Saddam’s mythical nuclear program, for example, she could have examined the findings of the International Atomic Energy Authority and its chief, Mohammed ElBaradei. Their complete vindication by subsequent events has been capped with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The saddest aspect of the Miller saga is how the misplaced loyalty of her bosses led to their humiliation twice over. They entrusted her with journalistic latitude far beyond what her competence and integrity merited. They defended her—indeed, lionized her—long after her flaws and falsehoods had been laid bare.

And now her own words prove that from the beginning of this strange episode, she ignored their rules, betrayed their confidence and disgraced their stewardship of a great American institution.

Mr. Keller was right. Eight days later, on Oct. 11, he was preparing another staff missive. Ms. Miller had played a key, if entirely murky, role in Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leaking of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s name to the press. Why had the paper still not published a full account?

Ms. Miller, Mr. Keller wrote, “remains under a contempt-of-court order and is not yet clear of legal jeopardy.” As a result, the paper’s effort to report the piece was on hold: “[T]he story is incomplete until we know as much as we can about the substance of her evidence, and she is under legal advice not to discuss that until her testimony is completed.”

Ms. Miller’s testimony had appeared to be complete on Sept. 30. But even as Mr. Keller was composing his message, she was back in Washington, D.C., for another meeting with Mr. Fitzgerald—lasting into the early evening hours.

In an Oct. 7 news story, The Times had disclosed the news that Ms. Miller would be meeting Mr. Fitzgerald for further talks. Later that day, The Observer reported on its Media Mob Web site that Ms. Miller had turned over a second set of notes to Mr. Fitzgerald.

The existence of the new batch of notes appeared to surprise the prosecutor, according to a lawyer familiar with the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald had already obtained notes and testimony from Ms. Miller about a pair of July 2003 conversations she’d had with Vice Presidential chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the once-anonymous source she had spent 85 days in jail to protect. But the new material dealt with an earlier conversation between the two, reportedly on June 23, 2003.

Newsweek reported this week that the new material had been found at The Times’ Washington bureau. That struck many as odd, since Ms. Miller doesn’t really work out of the Washington bureau. Washington bureau staffers said that they were unaware of any notes turning up on their turf.

“She’s not been here since her confinement,” a Washington bureau staffer said. “We’ve been left out of this story, and then suddenly it seemed like the bureau was involved, when in fact we weren’t.”

A lawyer familiar with the case said the new material came from Ms. Miller’s own notebook, turned over by her legal team.

Mr. Keller didn’t return calls seeking comment. A Times spokesperson didn’t return messages seeking information about Ms. Miller’s testimony today. Lawyers for Ms. Miller and Mr. Libby didn’t respond to calls seeking comment. A spokesperson for Mr. Fitzgerald wouldn’t comment on the investigation.

The shift of Mr. Fitzgerald’s attention from Ms. Miller’s July conversations to ones held in June embroils The Times even more deeply in the origins of the Plame leak case. Originally, the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity appeared to have been inspired by a guest op-ed in The Times by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, on July 6, 2003.

But Mr. Wilson’s revelations—poking holes in the Bush administration’s claims about Iraqi attempts to purchase African uranium—had appeared in The Times even earlier. On May 6, 2003, Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof had written a column telling the same story, with an anonymous Mr. Wilson as his principal source.

“I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger,” Mr. Kristof wrote. “In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.”

Washington journalists said that Mr. Kristof’s column marked Mr. Wilson’s debut as a Bush-administration-debunking background source.

“The first sign [of Wilson] was Nick Kristof’s column in May,” Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus said. “I read that, and it took me two weeks to find out who the ambassador was.”

Mr. Kristof was traveling—in Niger, by coincidence—and couldn’t be reached at his hotel for comment on the role his piece may have played in the Wilson affair.

Mr. Pincus said that following Mr. Kristof’s lead, he eventually wrote a June 12 front-page piece in The Washington Post that discussed Mr. Wilson without naming him. “It took me another week to work that piece out,” Mr. Pincus said. “I talked to every agency involved, and I never had to mention who the ambassador was. They all knew about it.”

Last week, on Oct. 2, The Post reported that during the weeks when Mr. Wilson was appearing as a background source, the State Department had prepared a memo about his Niger expedition, including Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. agent—which was “in a section marked ‘(S)’ for secret.”

“Around that time, Libby knew about the trip’s origins, though in an interview with The Washington Post at the time, he did not mention any role played by Wilson’s wife,” The Post reported.

Times editors wouldn’t comment on what Ms. Miller was assigned to do in June of 2003 or why she may have talked to Mr. Libby then. It was a relatively fallow spell for Ms. Miller—and for The Times’ news pages as a whole—on the subject of Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.

The split between Mr. Wilson and the administration was mirrored in the split at the time between The Times’ news and opinion sections.

While Mr. Kristof was using his Op-Ed column to dismantle the case for the Iraqi nuclear threat, Ms. Miller was in Iraq, on her much-discussed embedded mission with the Mobile Exploration Teams. It was her last major flurry of W.M.D. claims: “an unconfirmed report that looters may have taken anthrax samples” … “offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq” … “a tractor-trailer truck … [that] could be a mobile biological weapons lab” … “growth media that might have been used to culture germs” … “what is thought to be radioactive Cobalt-60.”

Those hints, however, failed to hold up. On June 7, in a joint-bylined piece with William J. Broad, Ms. Miller reported that analysts had concluded that the purported mobile bioweapons lab was nothing of the sort. It was her last dispatch of the sort. On July 19, she reappeared in The Times, with the “with” share of a joint byline, writing from the U.S. about the suicide of British weapons expert David Kelly; on July 20, she did a postmortem on why the Army teams had failed to find convincing evidence of W.M.D.

In the meantime, Mr. Wilson had picked up Mr. Kristof’s crusade under his own name. “As you know, we never coordinate anything with the news side,” editorial-page editor Gail Collins said, when asked about the divergent coverage at that time. “We don’t cover topics like the news department. We don’t offer the ultimate answer on the Op-Ed page. We’re very happy when people in the news can offer special insight or their own unique perspective and want to write for us.”

But so far, since Ms. Miller’s decision to leave jail and testify, the opinion and news pages have been in harmony—if silence counts as harmony. As speculation about the case burns up the blogosphere, none of the Times columnists have weighed in on the subject.

Ms. Collins said there’s no edict barring the Op-Ed crew from writing about Ms. Miller.

“They choose their own subjects,” Ms. Collins said, “and they’re edited only by a copy editor. I have no idea what they will write until I see it in the paper.”

Apparently, Mr. Keller has a better idea what’s going into the news report. Before word came about the second set of notes and Ms. Miller’s return trip, Mr. Keller had told a Times reporter that the paper might be running a Miller piece as soon as the weekend, Oct. 8 or 9. Instead, the paper and Ms. Miller have remained silent indefinitely.

Deputy managing editor Jon Landman—who is overseeing a Miller-case reporting team that includes Adam Liptak, Janny Scott and Don Van Natta Jr.—said that the delay is a matter of full access, not permission.

“What Bill is talking about is not when we can write a story,” Mr. Landman said. “What he is talking about is when [Ms. Miller] can be expected to tell what happened.”

The Times is handling the situation the way that other publications caught up in Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation handled their own reporters’ cases, Mr. Landman said.

“What is holding up the Times reporting on this is Judy’s continued legal entanglements,” he continued. “The reporting goes on, but the publication of the story that you’re talking about will be determined when she’s out from contempt. It’s the same as [Time magazine’s] Matt Cooper. When the contempt citation was served, he didn’t write something. Once it was lifted, he wrote something. And Time also did something with it.”

The difference is that Mr. Cooper didn’t surprise anyone by coming up with an extra set of notes after his grand-jury appearance.

Amid the confusion, The Times’ failure to write about the case is wearing on the rank and file.

“None of us is aware what the story is,” one Times staffer said. “We’re awaiting information just like our readers are. There are a huge number of mysteries that need to be resolved. The paper needs to resolve it for their readers—and staff.”

Tipsters fearing that The New York Times doesn’t listen to them have had their suspicions confirmed lately by the sound of an endless busy signal. Last month, news clerks were notified that the paper had disconnected 556-3690, the line known on West 43rd Street as the “kook fax.”

The kook fax, which also received automated press releases, served as the escape option for clerks fielding phone calls that offered unwanted or incomprehensible scoops. Clerks would advise the caller to fax the relevant information to 556-3690.

The various desks at The Times have at least one fax line each, for reporters’ use and other authorized paper traffic. The numbers to those are kept semi-private.

The public’s unsolicited documents would arrive instead at the newspaper’s comm center, the department that also handled broken televisions and fax machines. There they would be tucked into manila envelopes, then hand-delivered to the clerks for review.

The envelope, one ex-clerk said, would contain “a lot of handwritten pages … and like pages with things Scotch-taped and photocopied.”

“[I]f you gave them a fax number that we actually use,” another clerk wrote, “then you’d have them faxing us their dissertations.”

But last month, the paper abolished the comm center, reassigning its repair duties to the systems-support department. Now habitual faxers get the busy signal, and callers are often told that The Times doesn’t have a fax machine, which can leave them “indignant,” according to the clerk. Any information, the clerks inform them, should be e-mailed to the general mailbox for the relevant desk, such as metro@nytimes.com.

—Tom Scocca

New York Times pundit standings, Oct. 4-10, 2005

1. Maureen Dowd, score 6.0 [rank last week: tie—1st]

2. Frank Rich, 3.0 [tie—1st]

3. (tie) David Brooks, 0.0 [tie—4th]

Thomas L. Friedman, 0.0 [tie—4th]

Bob Herbert, 0.0 [tie—4th]

Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [tie—4th]

Paul Krugman, 0.0 [3rd]

John Tierney, 0.0 [tie—4th]

The No. 1 story on the Most E-Mailed list for the week: Sandra Blakeslee’s Oct. 4 piece about how bicycle seats can dig into the perineum, causing lasting damage to a rider’s erectile apparatus. Sort of like TimesSelect and the Op-Ed columnists’ performance! Only the supremely stimulating Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich were able to fight off the spreading numbness, as the number of pundits on the week’s list drooped from three to two.

—T.S.

In a phone conversation this afternoon, Kristof said he had been on the list. He also said that he had never heard from Bush administration officials about his columns, and had never discussed the subject with Times reporter Judith Miller.

Word that the columnist had been on the list "seeped to me unofficially," Kristof said. He added that people both inside and outside the Times had told him of his role in Fitzgerald's investigation, and of a possible subpoena.

Earlier today, Miller testifed for two hours in a return trip to Fitzgerald's grand jury, which is investigating the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's identity to the press. Her first round of testimony came after she spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her conversations with vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, on the grounds she was protecting a confidential source.

Kristof said that though he had written about Joseph Wilson, he never heard from Libby, presidential advisor Karl Rove or other administration officials about his columns. Kristof also said that he did not discuss the columns with Miller. It remains unclear what story Miller was working on when she spoke with Libby in 2003, or for what editor.

The leak was widely thought to have followed from Joseph Wilson's July 2003 Times op-ed piece, in which the ex-diplomat, citing his own CIA-assigned investigation, cast doubt on the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger.

But last week, Miller revealed to Fitzgerald that she had conversed with vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby in June of 2003--not merely in July, as her previous testimony had established.

Kristof had written about Joseph Wilson's uranium inquiries on May 6, 2003, using the ex-diplomat as an anonymous background source. That column inspired Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus to report about Wilson--also without using his name--in a front-page piece on June 12.

Pincus was among the reporters summoned to testify before Fitzgerald's grand jury, but Kristof was not. The prosecutor apparently abandoned plans to subpoena Kristof after it was pointed out that Kristof's writings on the subject--on May 6 and June 13, 2003--all predated the Robert Novak column in July that revealed Valerie Wilson's identity.

"It was correct I was on such a list," Kristof said. "Several months later, I did hear unofficially there was a decision not to call me."

Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis would neither confirm nor deny whether Kristof had been on Fitzgerald's subpoena list.

"As you know the grand jury proceedings are secret," Mathis said in an e-mail. "We are only aware of the subpoenas that we actually received. Mr. Kristof did not receive one."

A spokesperson for Fitzgerald declined to comment.

Kristof also said that he had been planning to write about Miller's incarceration. He had arranged to meet with Miller at the Alexandria Detention Center on October 3, but Miller negotiated her release before the appointed day.

The purpose of the meeting was to write a column about Miller's prison experience, Kristof said.

"I was planning to write a column describing her condition and saying a reporter has no business being in prison and should be out," he said. "I'm waiting, as a lot of people are, for the Times opus on it, and I don't feel right now that I understand it well enough to weigh in. I'm eagerly looking forward to that piece. I think it's important, and I may write about it if I have something useful to add."

--Gabriel Sherman