Lots of weirdness surrounding this supposed clearance she got.
First, Atrios pulls a great snippet from E&P about the implications of Miller getting a secret security clearance.
Not only does this mean the government is in essence licensing journalists, but Miller is agreeing to muzzle herself should she receive any classified information during her work. I suspect that the agreement Miller signed to get her clearance, if she really got one at all, made her promise not to divulge ANY classified info that came her way at all, even if the info came to her way via sources back in DC that she had BEFORE she got the clearance. That means prior to the clearance Miller could have reported whatever she wanted that she heard in DC, but after the clearance she would have been legally muzzled by her own signature even if the info had nothing to do with her embedding in Iraq. That's a hell of a trade-off for a journalist.
Then there's this from E&P, which calls into question whether she had a clearance at all:
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.
Barton Gellman of the Washington Post spent one day on the scene with Miller, accompanying a nuclear survey team at the Tuwaitha site at the beginning of May. Some of the soldiers asked whether Gellman had a "secret" clearance, "as Judy did."
"I said I had no such clearance, but did have the commander's permission to be there," Gellman told me. "The team leader, Navy Cdr. Beckett, did talk to me" but Gellman was asked to step away from a conversation about a classified matter. "I heard Judy tell him, 'I'm cleared for that, but he isn't.'"
