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Former Carter arms control advisor William E. Jackson has been reporting for months that Miller claimed to have had a Pentagon security clearance while embedded with US military teams hunting for banned weapons in Iraq. Now that Miller has confirmed that is the case, it's worth revisiting Jackson's piece:
Link. Which Pentagon authority? How exactly did this come about? Update: More here (via Atrios)....An e-mail message to me from her [Miller's] PAO sergeant escort regarding a three-week trip with META in April stated: "She did not have a SECRET clearance." She was "high maintenance and came to the field badly prepared. The problem I had with her was that whenever other members of the press showed up, which they did as embeds from other units or as unilaterals, she would insist that I get rid of them and that the 75th's story was her story, exclusively. She didn't seem to have any idea that the Army needed as much coverage of the 75th's mission as possible and that excluding everyone else was detrimental to the credibility of what the 75th was trying to accomplish. Never mind that we didn't find a damn thing ... She could not understand why Michael Gordon, covering the war at ground force headquarters, could have his stuff read and cleared at any time of the day or night while she had to wait. She would talk about the 'news cycle' and how important it was, and threaten me or my boss with the wrath of the NYT or her buddies up at DoD."
Team leader Navy Cdr. David Beckett of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in a brief phone conversation, sarcastically dismissed the idea of her "supposedly having some sort of clearance." However, Colonel McPhee, the overall task force commander, is known to have said that Miller was "cleared at the secret level." Regardless, it was generally believed and commonly said in the field that Miller was cleared for information classified "secret." Either she pulled off a hoax, or a very unusual clearance for a journalist was granted by some Pentagon authority...