on c-span, q and day with former new york times reporter judith miller. followed by a preview of an upcoming supreme court case on same-sex marriage. later, opposition to the same-sex marriage act and how it could affect religious freedom. ♪ announcer: this week on q&a, our guest is judith miller, former new york times reporter and author of the book "the story: a reporter's journey," which chronicles her account of her reporting leading up to the american invasion in iraq in 2003. brian: judy miller, author of "the story: a reporter's journey." deep in the book you

have a chapter, this paragraph. the worst part of jail was not sleeping on a paperthin yoga mat. nor the vile food, mystery meat drenched in thick, brown sauce. accompanied by starches and carbohydrate in shades of brown and gray. what was the worst thing about being in jail? judith: for me, it was probably being locked up all of the time without any control over my life. we take watches and cell phones for granted. you know what time it is, you know what you're supposed to be doing. jail means a total loss of control. you work on their schedule.

you sleep on their schedule. because i was in a kind of high-security jail, it was not the martha stewart camp cupcake kind of jail. there was no access to the outdoors. i think i had about four hours of real, breathable, outdoor air in 85 days. for me, that was the toughest part of the adjustment to my new life. brian: when were you in jail and where? judith: i was in the alexandria detention center in alexandria virginia. i had to say this, it was extremely professional. it was very well run. the people that were there had worked there for a long time. they knew the inmates. they knew the degenerations of inmates. what i tried to say to myself was that the best thing that the

best way to survive this was to turn this into an assignment. how did this jail work? who is there? who are my fellow inmates? what are the problems of the jail? it was a very interesting, difficult reporting experience. i was in jail because i refused to reveal the identity of the source whom i thought did not want his identity revealed. in our business, as you know brian, protecting sources is the lifeblood of independent journalism. i really felt that unless the people that i routinely spoke to, who had access to classified information, unless they could trust me to protect them, my sources would dry up.

and eventually, i would just be writing what the government wanted me to write. i felt this was a question of principle that i did not have much choice. brian: are you still the longest serving jail time journalist in history in the country? judith: there was another woman who is not a reporter. she wrote books. she was in longer than i was. a lot longer. for a newspaper person, yes, i think i hold that guinness book of records. brian: what was the timeframe? judith: it was 85 days in 2005. it was an experience that was essential. not one that i would like to repeat. brian: were you a celebrity at the jail? how do they look at you? judith: they were very nice to me because they said i was not a snitch. i had not ratted out on my source. i was treated relatively well by fellow inmates. i was astonished at who was in jail. first of all, there were few women. there were about 75 women and several hundred men in separate areas. the only time that you were together was in bible class which made that class extremely popular. apart from that, it was completely segregated. the women really surprised me. some of them i learned after i got out of jail, were actually

quite violent. in an incarcerated facility like that, you just get a chance to talk and you don't see them as potential killers or potentially violent people. what i found interesting was, i concluded that most of the women that were there should not have been there. what they really needed was drug rehabilitation programs, marriage counseling, or significant other counseling because a lot of them were not married. these were women that had never been told that there was an alternative to picking up an ice pick and stabbing him after he had beaten you for the 15th

time. i have stayed in touch with several of the women i was incarcerated with. brian: was there a time when you were there that you said -- i want to get out of here? judith: just about every day. everyone kept telling me that i held the key to my jail. that i was unique in that facility. any time i wanted to leave, i could give up my source and get out of there. even after my source straightened out a confusion among my lawyers about whether

or not he really wanted me to testify and cooperate, even after that, i held out for a month because the prosecutor wanted access to all of my notebooks. he wanted to be able to ask me about other sources and about other topics unrelated to the issue. that the special prosecution was focused on. i said no. i just sat there. eventually something changed. brian: who said this? may the person who said this get ear cancer. [laughter] judith: i think that was bill safire. i had two fierce champions while i was in jail. bill safire who was the conservative columnist at the times and he died several years later. and rosenthal, the executive

editor of the paper. both of them were fierce champions of the position that i had taken. they were wonderful colleagues and they cheered me up. brian: here is bill safire on a little bit of tape. for those who don't remember him. he was talking. it gives you some background. [video clip] bill safire: if you hate the people that hate you, you destroy yourself. that was a great lesson that he learned and internalized. it sums up half of the watergate, after reaching the heights, and then hitting the depth. he took that out. there is a lesson to be made about today. in 2008. you cannot react with hatred against the people who hate you. you have to understand them and deal with it. brian: he was talking about richard nixon, but in your book, there is a lot of hate. what i am reading is hate at the time, between the scenes?

judith: i hope that is not what was conveyed. i kind of agreed with bill. even though bill was very jewish, and very religious. that is a christian sentiment and it is one that i share. i have no reason, i am not bitter about what happened. i am sad about what happened at the time. i am not filled with hate towards anyone. i am really lucky. i have, in this era of brand journalism and culture, i have a great life. i have a lot of very satisfying work. i have great colleagues at the manhattan institute and at fox news. i have a wonderful husband and a great dog. i really feel enormously blessed and lucky. that is what i hoped -- to look at the mistakes made on the part

of the paper that i respect, this is not a score settling book. it is an effort to clarify the record and to tell my side of the story which i never did until now. brian: explain it. i go back to october 22, 2005. this is a column written by maureen dowd. the headline -- woman of mass destruction. here is one paragraph. judy story about wmd fit to perfectly with the white house's case for work. she was close to ahmed chalabi. -- case for war. so he could get his hands on iraq. i worried she was playing a leading role. using iraqi defectors and exiles, mr. chalabi planted bogus stories with judy and other journalist. you said she was a friend.

judith: i wouldn't call her a friend. that was very painful for me. especially because, we had worked together at the washington bureau and that she worked for me when i was the news editor. she was an enormously gifted writer and journalist. i was heartsick after i read it. and very disappointed. one, it was not true. and two, it seems the paper was buying into something that i had been fighting the whole time. the notion that we were lied into the war in iraq. to have someone for my own paper, i know she was a columnist so she was entitled to her own view. to have someone feed into that was unfortunate because a lot of americans to this day believe we were lied into a war, rather than what happened. which it should be deeply disturbing to americans. 16 intelligence communities paid billions of dollars a year to look at an issue at such as whether a country has wmd. all got it wrong.

i don't know why people feel better about the notion that we were lied into a war versus the intelligence community on which we depend every day for information on iran, north korea, the former soviet union

and now russia. they don't know as much as they claim to or that we like to think that they do. i was obsessed with that issue and i still am. brian: i want to go back to a story you wrote in 2001. we found this clip in journeyman pictures. i want to talk about that 2001 story. [video clip] >> this man was one of the key sources. when he fled iraq in 2001, he had quite a story to tell. he was an engineer, he claimed used by saddam to build specialized bunkers for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons research. >> these buildings. i finished them for clean air.

>> he brought out documents also. plans, specifications, locations. he told his briefers that there were hundreds of sites throughout iraq. brian: the headline on this story in 2001. an iraqi defector tells work on 20 different weapons sites. where did you interview him? judith: in thailand. i have never seen that video. that is very interesting to me. i do know him. he was branded a fabricator by several people who criticized at my story. one thing i wanted to do in this book is go back and look at what

i got right and what i got wrong and how these stories are put together. this is really a book about journalism and how we do it or how we try to do it. this man never told me that he had actually seen a weapon of mass destruction. he said that what he had done was rehabilitate or restore places were transform them so that they could hold or store chemical or biological or nuclear weapons. he was very clear with me at least, about the fact that he had never seen a weapon but that the work he was doing was consistent with weapons' storage.

he did have contracts. i did come back from thailand and give the copies of the contracts to the international inspectors, or unscom as it was then called. i quoted charles dilfer who went on to lead americans. he was quoted as saying -- these contracts look authentic. the work that he describes is consistent with what american inspectors suspect about saddam. i had many people on the record asserting that what he was saying was correct. my newspaper in 2004, i believe it was, wrote an article about him saying he could not be found because they were going back and looking at the defectors who led us to war.

two weeks after that article was run, i was sitting with him having tea in his house. here in centreville, virginia. he had never left the country. he had never been thrown out of the country. he told me and his lawyer told me, that he had received quite a large payment from the cia. he did not say what it was for. the cia neither confirmed nor denied that. i was not able to confirm that independently. usually, we do not allow fabricators to stay in our country if they have taken the country to war or if they are responsible for line. i don't think that curveball whom the cia touted as being the source that said there were mobile biological laboratories in iraq, i don't think he would be welcome in our country. the idea was that the times has reported that he could not be

found. and yet, there he was. sitting with me. it raises questions in my mind. i told my executive director, we have to report this. the source is right here. brian: was that a front-page story? judith: oh yes. brian: the thing that seems to upset people that do not like the reporting that you did, the interview was arranged by the iraqi national congress. the main iraqi opposition group. what you think of mr. ahmed chalabi today? judith: many think he is a terrible person.

i think he was someone that was very open, all of the time about his agenda. he wanted the united states to help him overthrow saddam hussein so that a different kind of iraq could be built. he never hid his agenda. as far as i know, he never lied to me. what i always did, in my stories, i always told readers who he was and what his agenda was so that they could evaluate what he was telling us. we did not hide the fact that the story came to us from ahmed chalabi. one more thing i would add to set the record straight and clarify is that he was not responsible for most of my wmd stories. he was responsible for that story alone. brian: for those of you who have forgotten him, here is ahmed

chalabi. [video clip] >> it is improbable that they would take the word of a person or an exiled organization and act upon it. to go into the country and wage war. they made their own decision. i think the various investigations that happened afterwards, showed that our input into the intelligence was marginal in getting them to do the work at the time. judith: that is accurate. the studies that were done afterward, the senate select committee on intelligence all say that ahmed chalabi played a marginal role in the wmd case. and yet, people do not want to believe it. sometimes, narratives that we come to believe are very comfortable. when people come along and try to poke holes in them, it is not easy to accept. you have to remember, i worked with him in two areas. one, the wmd area in one story. the second, was as the leader of the iraqi opposition.

while others have fled iraq, he is still in iraq. he is still there and trying to make his country work. i think my own experience with him did not support what a lot of people believe about him. i am not saying they are wrong or that he did not like to them, but in terms of my own reporting, i do not believe that he misled me. brian: where is that source? judith: he is still in virginia. one thing i find distressing is that i have tried to go back and look at the follow-up to my story and say -- what is true and what did i get right and wrong. no one is pointing out the new information. very few reviewers seem to be interested in the fact that the two sources that i quoted the most, both of them turned out to be useful in some respect to the

u.s. government. brian: you have a paragraph early in the book on page 59. does this have anything to do with why people are not your biggest fans? in the 1960's, i had what was then regarded as a male attitude towards sex. i enjoyed fairly casual encounters that neither my partners nor i assumed would lead to a long-term commitment. with very few exceptions, i remain on good terms with the men i dated. did you think that one out? judith: i did. there had been so much written about my alleged sourcing of

stories. this had been a repeated scene. -- repeated theme. not just me, but other women. nobody asks a man how they got a story. did you sleep with the secretary? or the assistant to the powerful men you are covering? but, it comes up with women repeatedly and i wanted to set the record straight. i am a daughter of the 1960's. i smoked dope. i inhale. i enjoyed it. that was then. i think it should be decriminalized, to this day. i don't like to see people in jail for marijuana use. but that was not how i did my work. my work is the result of really unglamorous reporting. getting to the office at 7:30 a.m., trying to reach people before they went to work or after they came back from work. countless calls. countless visits with people who did not particularly want to see me.

the stuff that journalists do. over time, because i was operating in an area which is extremely sensitive, which is national security reporting involving weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. you have to have the trust of people who are talking to you or they will not talk to you. this was a pursuit of many years. the sources that i quoted on wmd, these were the same sources who had been absolutely right about the danger posed by bin laden. they had fed me the information and enabled the times that i to write the stories. in retrospect, it is even more extraordinary -- this series on al qaeda that ran in 2001 before september 11. these are the same sources who

told us about the biological weapons program of iraq. it was not actually destroyed until five years after saddam claimed to have done so. these are the people who steered me in the direction of the biological and chemical the sillies the former soviet union. which i got invitations to and visited. i had seen the stuff firsthand and they had always been right. i had no way to know that they were feeding me a line or lying to me. i think they were just as horrified as i was to learn, later on, that they had gotten it wrong. i write, how much of the irritation was the your dictation you had towards congressman les aspen? you lived with him for how long? judith: we remained friends until his death. we lived together for about a year and a half. before i joined the paper, we were living together. afterwards, working for the times, and not being able to cover what i wanted to cover which was foreign policy and national security.

which i had been able to cover when i worked for the magazine and lived with him. brian: the chairman of the armed services committee. and then secretary of defense. judith: a terribly important thinker about defense issues. one thing i always admired about him was that he had come to congress as a vietnam war critic. and yet, he was one of the president's biggest supporters when he decided to go to war in iraq.

in 1991, george bush decided to invade. so few people change their mind about things they have believed in for a long time. i always found it to be comforting to know that there were a lot of people -- or some people around who really did believe that that was part of the job. to rethink things all of the time. brian: how much of the unhappiness with your reporting -- how often do you find people that link your reporting in the new york times for us going to war? judith: i get that all of the time. i would like to believe that i am that powerful. or was. that is not why we went to war. wouldn't that be something. a journalist takes the country to war. i think -- reading all of the memoirs of the people involved in that situation, it was very complex. a book i admired very much with peter baker's book on the relationship between bush and cheney. which describes that tension between them over the issue. the people who took us to war are the very people who are paid to make those decisions. the president, the vice president, his administration, the military.

what i was trying to do, and i think i did it, with as much honesty and fervor as i could, was to tell america that kind of information that they were not getting upon which they were making these decisions. if they believed that there were aluminum tubes being used to enrich uranium, i thought, and michael gordon bought, with whom i wrote that story, that that was important for americans to know that. brian: you went over to iraq and were embedded. what did they tell you you could do? judith: i had written a letter

to secretary rumsfeld, whom i had not met. that said, knowing will believe you if you find wmd in iraq. i was already over in iraq when i got the word that the permission had come through and i would be able to follow the soldiers. it was an extraordinary experience. watching soldiers in action. i had never done that before. sitting in washington, i thought i knew what covering the military was like. boy, was i wrong. to see these guys -- they were an artillery brigade. they were told that they were going to hunt for wmd. they were given support from the dia and the cia. they did that job day after day under difficult and dangerous situations. i had the privilege of watching them and covering them. i went from march until june. when i came back, i had a long list of questions about why we were not finding what everyone

expected us to find. if i could just return for a minute to this notion of -- it was me, it was the times. everyone was writing more or less, the same story. they were writing it based on the collective judgments of the intelligence communities. i am not just talking about the american intelligence community, but also the british and the french. even countries that did not want to go to war such as germany and the russians. their intelligence agencies had also concluded that saddam was keeping and hiding wmd.

brian: why did knight ridder see it differently? jonathan landakes and his team of reporters? judith: they were talking to people that said the evidence it was then. the problem for me -- with those stories, at that point, they did not have a bureau -- or a paper in washington. days would pass before i would see the material. secondly, there were no specifics in the stories. there was not a single example that i could find of an instance in which the evidence was then. let me give you an example -- in one of their stories that turned out to be absolutely right, they wrote the evidence was thin and people had doubts. that story appeared a few days after michael gordon and i had disclosed the existence of the aluminum tubes and the importance of leading the

intelligence community to think that saddam's program was up and running. you can disagree, and we subsequently wrote five days later, that there is a debate within the intelligence community about the purpose of those two. that story did not run on the front page. did i want it to? absolutely. you can say that even if saddam has wmd, that is not sufficient grounds to go to work. what you cannot say, after we have disclosed the existence of the tubes, is that there is no new information. as far as the cia was concerned, this was new, hot, important information. john mclaughlin, the deputy director of the cia, subsequently said in an interview that he had been carting around parts of the tubes to briefings.

brian: here is another paragraph that you wrote. you wrote this about yourself. page 231. i was not a perfect reporter. i had broken quite a few rules in my 30 years of journalism and committed my share of journalistic sins. as a foreign correspondent, i had occasionally drunk too many martinis. into many hotel rooms, on the road after 18 hours long reporting date. i have yelled at at many

colleagues who i felt had failed to carry their weight on a story. i was perpetually late filing expense accounts. i had sharp elbows. i resisted being cut out of stories. i failed to appreciate the importance of building a network of friends. why do you feel this was necessary? judith: because, it was true. none of us are perfect. but i had my share of journalistic sins. brian: was that one of the reasons of bill keller or others did not back you up? judith: none of us is perfect. i don't think so. i think what i wrote could apply to many reporters. the importance is that we need to go back to the story and keep reporting it. to keep reporting it until we think we have hit the truth. and, what i feel terrible about is, not the original stories that i wrote, because i think i was as skeptical as i could be and because i wrote those stories with other colleagues, but what really infuriated me and made me sad was that the

paper and the leadership at the paper did not let me go back and continue to work on why we had gotten it wrong. it is so important to understand that, even today. i left of the times in 2005 in october after i came out of jail. i am currently at the manhattan institute as an adjunct fellow. they write long and important and interesting work. i am interested in their work on counterterrorism in police departments in this country, which i spend a lot of time at. i am a contributor at fox news. some of my friends cannot understand how i can be at fox news. i have to tell you, it is a great place to work. you are there neighbors here. no one ever tells me what i can say and cannot say. i am a commentator. i have taken up a new hat as a

theater reviewer because i live in new york. i have a lot of very satisfying and interesting work. too much, actually. i also have a life. and that is important. brian: let's go back to the whole story about valerie plame and joe wilson. scooter libby. here is a story that ran. we will run this report about when you got out of jail. [video clip] >> judith miller got out of jail last month escorted by her editor. the times remains solidly behind the message was her.

and that is what she told lou dobbs. judith miller: they let me know that they were thinking about me. it made such a difference. >> but oh, how things suddenly change. in a memo, executive editor of the times then said if i had known the details of her entitlement with scooter libby i would have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense. miller fired back in a memo. as for your reference to my entanglement with mr. libby, i have no personal am a social, or other relationship with him except as a source. in a controversial column, maureen dowd called her column a woman of mass destruction. wondering if miller's time in jail was, in part, a career rehabilitation project.

brian: that was from cnn back in 2006. what was going on? that was your husband on the side. jason epstein. and on the left was the man who runs the new york times. judith: what was going on? brian: did you get a sense that they had turned against you at that point? judith: one of the reason i wanted to write this book was to talk about what happened inside the new york times. for me, there were two wars going on. one was the war in iraq. the second was the one at the newspaper. people forget that the former executive editor had been fired in june. i was in iraq when that happened. brian: fired because of? judith: that is a complicated issue. they were fired for losing the trust of the staff, basically. brian: jason blair?

judith: jason blair. plagiarism. no one made the effort that the but journal did to expose what , jason had done to the paper. and the extent to which he has lied and cheated to his editors and readers. they did an exhaustive investigation which contributed to their firing, dismissal. i have to say a word about joe who has now died. he was the first african-american managing editor of the paper. it was stunning to me that the publisher and the new leadership just turned on them. they had one of paper seven pulitzers. i got one along with my team. their reporting and their

stewardship of the taper was controversial and hard-hitting. he could be difficult. they could be difficult together. they were great editors and great leaders. even though a lot of people did not like them. a lot of people didn't, i know that. the new leadership, i think, and i write in this book, was very concerned about their own jobs. i cannot get inside their heads. but i do know what the publisher , said to me and what the fight between the publisher in and me was about, and i disclosed that in this book. he basically wanted me to stay in jail after i had gotten all of the terms met, all of the reasons why i had gone to jail. he wanted me to stay in one more month. so that we could have a decisive legal victory in an important first amendment case. brian: did you ever date him? judith: it never. no.

he was married when we met. brian: because you talk about how good a friend you were with him. judith: we were friends. we had worked together at the washington bureau. brian: he got a job from his father. did he turn against you? judith: i think that he decided after i had come out of jail, and we knew i would have to testify, that this had not been the victory that his father had wanted in the pentagon papers. he was disappointed. you would have to ask him why he turned on me after i had spent time in jail. after i had worked so hard for the paper for so many years. he will one day write his own book, and i'm sure he will tell you. for me, i considered it an act of the trail is i really thought i had done nothing wrong. i tried to defend the first amendment. i had gone to jail to defend my sources. i had succeeded in doing that. scooter libby was the source that i had gone to jail to protect. he gave me a waiver. beyond that, i was able to protect all of my other sources. the special prosecutor never saw my notebook. he was never able to ask me about another source.

i felt that we had won. that we had really secured a great victory because he had not been able to get what he wanted out of me. but apparently, that was not enough. brian: back to 2005, here is patrick fitzgerald who you write about. he was the prosecutor. let's watch him and he talks about you. [video clip] >> valerie wilson's cover was blown in 2003. the first sign of that cover being blown was mr. novak published a column in 2003. mr. novak was not the first reporter to be told that wilson's wife, valerie wilson worked at the cia.

several other reporters were told. in fact, mr. libby was the first official known to a told the reporter when he talked to judith miller in june, 2003, about valerie wilson. but in addition to focusing on how he wrote this information, it is important to focus on what mr. libby said to reporters. in the account that he gave to the fbi, was that he told other reporters, at the end of the week, on july 12. he said he gave them the information that he got from other reporters. the other reporters were saying this and mr. libby did not know it was true. mr. libby testified that he did not even know if mr. wilson had a wife. we now know that mr. libby discussed this information about valerie wilson at least four times prior to july 14, 20 03. on three occasions with judith miller and one occasion with

matthew cooper of time magazine. brian: is that true? judith: no. i testified that i had learned that valerie plame was an agent from, i believed, scooter libby, though i said at the time that my memory was very foggy and that my memory was note driven. i thought that it was scooter libby that had told me about it because we had been talking about wmd and what had gone wrong with the information. i was not focused on the wife. i had an ambiguous notation in my notebook. i thought it came from scooter libby. mr. fitzgerald knew that, at the time, that it wasn't scooter libby who had outed valerie plane. it was richard armitage who was the top assistant to colin powell who was a critic of the war. this whole notion of, we were lied into the war, to punish joe wilson for having criticized the administration, this was not true.

this was the administration's own war critics who outed miss plame. he also knew that she had used as her cover a state department's office. brian: when she was working for the cia. judith: yes. in my notes, i had an odd notation. it was printed seeds. -- it was parentheses (wife works in bureau?).

i thought at the time, and patrick fitzgerald suggested that it was scooter libby that told me this. this meant that he and i had talked about her. when i learned from her own memoir in 2010, i did not read it until then. when i learned that she had used the state department as cover, i suddenly knew that the notation i had written it not refer to something that scooter libby had told me. it referred to something that i had been told by someone elsewhere who knew that she worked at the state department and talked about her work for the bureau. all of a sudden, a little bell went off in my head. that testimony was probably wrong. that was a horrible feeling. brian: in front of the grand jury? judith: and in testimony against scooter libby at the actual trial. i said that we had discussed it, i thought. once again my memory was shaky.

,you know, ryan when i began , researching this book, i felt so bad about my memory. it turns out, and i did a lot of reporting on memory, it is called misattribution or thinking that you heard a set of facts from one individual and heard it from another. it is a common memory mistake. it is one of the most common. i was not so unusual. in fact when i began looking at , the testimony of other witnesses that mr. fitzgerald questions about scooter libby, they all had memory problems. i began to think, not only and should this case have never , been brought, because there was no crime, no one was ever charged with outing an agent. and in fact the cia general , counsel said that this was a colossal waste of time. and i argued that it was more , than that. it could have changed the course of the war.

brian: why would patrick fitzgerald go through all of this -- if he knew richard armitage was the original source, why would he not have told the world? what was the point? judith: because he was the special prosecutor and he has spent a lot of money and time finding a crime. brian: has he ever explained it? judith: he has never explained it. i hope that one day he does. he is now working at the law firm in chicago that represented me. brian: have you ever talked to him? judith: i tried to talk to him. i talked to my lawyer to ask him if he would cooperate. i sent him e-mails and a registered letter. i asked everyone that was connected to the war to talk to me. brian: did you talk to joe wilson or valerie plame? judith: i did not. she was so angry at me by that time. for reasons that are still unclear to me.

she has accused me of being a cheerleader for the war. i never took a position on the war. i was a reporter, i could not. i had my own personal views. i understand her anger and her pain over feeling that she had to leave the cia. i wish that it was directed at the people who were responsible for her outing which was richard armitage and the others who leaked her identity. brian: has he ever spoken about it? judith: he spoke in early interviews, not recently. colin powell would not allow me to interview him.

i really wanted to but he did write a book in which he expresses his displeasure with the people who now claim that they had doubts about the intelligence information. he wrote in his own book -- where were they when the country was going to war? where were they when he was giving his u.n. speech? i think he has made his own view pretty clear. brian: back in 2010 here is a brief interview with scooter libby conducted at fox news. so people can see him, you don't see him very often. i think he is he now works at now over at the hudson institute he now works at the hudson let's watch this the hudson institute. [video clip] >> that absurd witchhunt that you were subjected to. during the valerie plame case. your sentence was commuted but you never did get a pardon. are you still hopeful that you might still get a pardon? scooter libby: i worked 12 years for the federal government in national security. in that time, i met kurds who suffered under the atrocities of saddam hussein. i met american families who lost kids overseas.

i learned two things. the world is not just. and at the second is, it does not do a lot of good to wine. -- whine.] brian: did you talk to him for your book? judith: i did. i am not sure the book would have been written because it was difficult for me to write about me. that doesn't come naturally to reporters. when i bumped into him at a conference in israel, a national security conference, we had a conversation and he urged me to read valerie plame's book. that is when i began to understand that my testimony might have been wrong. over the course of the following months, i reached out to him and i said, would you cooperate with my effort to set the record straight. that is what i want to do in this book, show people how

reporting is done and how people get things right and how i get things right and wrong. i wanted to set the record straight with respect to mr. libby. brian: back to your jail time. how many people visited you in the jail? judith: it was amazing. i lost track. i have the list of people who visited me. i still keep that along with my identification card and a few other tokens of that magical summer. many, many, many. the last time he visited me, he had just come back from machu picchu. he brought me a necklace. which he held up i could not sit , in a room. i never touched anyone who was not a lawyer. who was connected to my life from the outside. because you had it -- it is kind of like a bad grade b movie. there was plexiglas.

you spoke to people on phones. there were many such conversations. he came to see me to ask me to stay in jail another month. after we had gotten our terms met. brian: bob bennett was your lawyer. did you have other lawyers? judith: yes. great lawyer. floyd abrams, a great supporter of the first of amendment. susan buckley. fantastic people who worked very hard on my case. with very different attitudes about whether or not i should be in jail and how long i should be there. i remember bob bennett said to me -- i said to him, you have to understand. you're not just representing me. you are representing a cause. freedom of the press. and he said -- i do not want to represent a cause, i want to represent judy miller and i don't want you to be in jail. brian: what is the impact of the jail time? judith: for me, jail was something that happens. i had been in iraq watching soldiers do incredibly dangerous

work. sleeping on the ground with them. camping out in abandoned weapons facilities. eating mre's for three months. freezing in the desert. i kept saying that's where is -- i kept saying, where is that whether that is too hot to fight it? -- that weather that is too hot to fight in? i turned it into a reporting assignment. what was painful though was the

times. that fight -- that war was much more peaceful than going to jail. i feel i went to jail for the right reasons and that the decision was correct. i would do the same thing again tomorrow if i had to. if i had to protect us source, it is the only thing you can do. i have no regrets about any of this. as scooter libby says, life is unfair. i think i have been left with a great life and a great career. brian: there is a whole bit in here that you write about regarding the jail and the m&ms and the apples. you were there with masawi? judith: i was there with another convicted terrorist who was being held and subsequently was convicted. brian: what is the story about you trying to interview him? either one. judith: he had a floor to himself and i wanted to ask him if he was the 20th hijacker. by the way deputies tell me he , was crazy as a loon. but crazy, vicious. crazy, dangerous. but i still wanted to try and , interview him. i worked in the laundry part-time and does the library and part-time. to keep myself busy. i arranged to deliver his sheets and, and towels one day.

at the time that he was on the list to get them. when he opened the door to his suite, i was going to pop the question. the day that i was scheduled to deliver his sheets and towels, i learned that patrick fitzgerald was on his way to the jail to offer me a deal that would get me out of jail. for a moment i thought, do you think he could come back tomorrow? then i realized, that was silly. this would have to be another story that i did not get to write. brian: did you have to trade something to get up to his cell? most sallies? -- masawi's cell. brian: i did take a pause. you wrote that you were throwing

up from the food that you had to eat. explain that. how bad was it? judith: it was indescribable. i was once locked down for sorting apples. -- hoarding apples. i had been in that jail and i had never seen a food with color. i had never seen a fresh vegetable. or anything with color. one day, they gave us apples. i could not resist storing one in my cell. which of course, i called my room. and they caught it and i was locked down and punished. i understood that i had been wrong because storing food in cells attracts insects. there was a reason to this madness. i am not a perfect journalist and i was not a perfect prisoner. brian: what did they feed you that was so bad? judith: it was indescribable.

there was a piece of meat that was so heavy that i could not eat the meat, the gravy, the mashed potatoes. they were not mashed potatoes and there were no vegetables. there was no salad. there was no coffee. there with tea. once a week, on sunday with a hard-boiled egg. i lived on what i could order from the canteen. but really, this is not suffering. what is suffering is being one of those inmates who never had a visitor, and could not afford the outrageous phone calls, the price of the phone calls that are charged to women and men in jail. these are people who never had enough money to either have a decent lawyer or to order anything from the canteen. that is suffering. and those are the women i wanted to write about. and that is why there is a jail chapter. it is not about me, it is about

them. brian: and the times, paid the $1 million in legal fees. judith: they were terrific about that. brian: there is a lot more in this book. we've only covered a little bit. the name of the book is "the story: a reporter's journey." our guest has been judith miller. thank you very much. judith: thank you very much. ♪ announcer: for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> remarkable partnerships, iconic women, their stories in "first ladies: the book." >> that was one of the things

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