When New York Times reporter Judith Miller visited Fox News on Wednesday, the first question put to her was whether leaking the ending of the last Harry Potter book was a criminal act.
Asked, "Obviously, you would not agree with somebody exposing all these details," Miller -- who went to jail while refusing to testify in the Valerie Plame leak case -- replied, "No, I wouldn't, but I would defend to the death his right to do it."
More seriously, Miller was asked about the recently-released National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. "It shouldn't be a surprise that al Qaeda is regrouping in that tribal land between Pakistan and Afghanistan," she said. However, she also emphasized that "American law enforcement has made tremendous strides in cracking down on militant Islamic groups in this country."
During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry was widely mocked by conservatives for suggesting that fighting terrorism is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation." Miller now has an article in The City Journal which argues that the efforts of the New York and Los Angeles police departments have been the most effective counter against terrorism.
Miller told the Fox hosts about a "Hollywood cell" of North Africans that the LAPD had under surveillance and suspected of being an al Qaeda support group. "Using local laws and statues, they were able to deport every single one of these people or put them in jail," said Miller. "So that's what law enforcement can do if it has the resources and the intelligence to do it."
When asked about the intimations in her article that "the NYPD is more capable of counter-terrorism than the feds," Miller replied, "I don't think the FBI likes to hear that, but ... 1000 people in this city are devoted to fighting terrorism every single day. There are only 12,000 agents, FBI agents in the entire country, and only some of them are doing counter-terrorism. So you do the math."
The following video is from Fox's Fox & Friends, broadcast on July 18.