When I was much younger and naive, I believed that doing something wrong or illegal was enough to get you in trouble. It didn't take me long to realize that people do things wrong every day, and get away with it fine, as long as they know the right people or don't get caught. However, it has become clear to me—most spectacularly and especially during the Reagan/Bush presidencies when the felons responsible for Iran-Contra were all pardoned, and again during this most corrupt of presidential administrations, the Bush administration—that even if you do something wrong and get caught, you can still get away with it.

It would seem that now it's okay to break the law and even get caught, as long as you don't lie about it.

Judith Miller's reports in the NY Times during the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq by American forces wholeheartedly supported the untrue Bush administration claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The Times, to its discredit, never bothered to measure Miller's reports against, say, the known facts, or even the preponderance of evidence. The Times was also less than responsible when it came to Miller's involvement in the Plame betrayal.

Now, it appears, the Times has decided that enough is enough. There seems to be some friction between Judith Miller and the Executive Editor, Bill Keller, who said Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, when she told him in the fall of 2003 that she was not one of the recipients of a leak about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame. Miller vehemently denies she ever misled Taubman.

According to a Times story on Oct. 16, Miller told Taubman two years ago that the subject of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson and Wilson's wife, Plame, had come up in casual conversation with government officials, but that Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information." It is strange that anyone intelligent enough to be the Times Washington bureau chief would believe Miller's claim when her misinformation campaign about Iraq non-existent weapons of mass destruction was proof in the immediate past that she had, in fact, been a part of a "deliberate organized effort" to put out misinformation.

Be that as it may, what we are seeing now is not that Judith Miller is being held accountable for participating in a campaign to mislead the American people, but that she lied about it.

If you ever wondered why it was that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney agreed to testify to the 9/11 commission only if it was together and not under oath, this is the reason. Lying while not under oath is not against the law. All of the self-serving lies they told to the 9/11 commission may come back to haunt them in some fleeting, I-told-you-so way, but they can never be held accountable and prosecuted for lying under oath because they simply refused to testify under oath. Judith Miller also was not under oath when she apparently misled her bosses, but they don't need to prosecute her. They can simply fire her.