For those of us who love newspapers, it’s hard to take even a competitor’s pleasure in the autophagy under way at the New York Times, whose own reporters and columnists are writing in the paper to attack one another and, most of all, Judith Miller. While she was in jail, the Times ran editorial after editorial defending her.

Now, only days after she emerged, her colleagues have tried to transform her from First Amendment hero to “Miss Run Amok,” not even fit to work at the paper. Suddenly the newspaper that was denouncing the special prosecutor for being overly aggressive against Ms. Miller is now hanging on every detail of his investigation in the hope he will use the same kind of aggression against aides to Vice President Cheney and President Bush.

Our own interest in the matter is not so much in the turmoil of a great paper but rather in the substance of the Iraq war. In an attack on Ms. Miller that was published in Saturday’s Times, Maureen Dowd wrote, “Judy’s stories about W.M.D. fit too closely with the White House’s case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq … Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.”

Ms. Dowd also notes that “Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.” The April column by Ms. Dowd described Mr. Chalabi as a “convicted embezzler in Jordan, suspected Iranian spy, doublecrosser of America, purveyor of phony war-instigating intelligence.” It described Mr. Chalabi as “the resourceful thief of Baghdad.”

Where is the public editor of the Times when Ms. Dowd mounts this high horse and starts on about “bogus stories” and “credulous journalists”? The fact is that Mr. Chalabi’s conviction in Jordan was a highly politicized case; he has filed a lawsuit against Jordan in federal court in Washington to clear his name. The newspaper that has plumped for, say, Lori Berenson has not raised a peep of protest about what many believe was a Hashemite effort to frame Mr. Chalabi.

Nor has the Times, or anyone else, produced a jot of evidence — other than an anonymous whispering campaign of the kind that an editor like, say, A.M. Rosenthal or Byron Calame would never have joined — to support the claim that Mr. Chalabi spied for Iran. Nor has anyone else. Mr. Chalabi has offered to appear before Congress to confront that smear, and Vice President Cheney told The New York Sun in an interview, even after the smear, that he would be willing to meet with Mr. Chalabi. Mr. Chalabi, meantime, has emerged, after months and months of ridiculing by the Times, among the most important freely elected officials in a liberated Iraq.

As for the libel that Mr. Chalabi double-crossed America, it would be more accurate to say that America double-crossed him, raiding his headquarters in Iraq and leaking inaccurate, anonymous allegations against him. As for the charge that Mr. Chalabi purveyed phony pre-war intelligence, well, let us just say that Secretary Powell and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, reached the same conclusions he did by their own means.

Huge amounts of intelligence conveyed by Mr. Chalabi and, for that matter, the Bush administration about Iraq was essentially correct and is attested to by the ammunition dumps and the mass graves of tens of thousands recovered after the war. What has the Times done about the gassing of the Kurds? What has Ms. Dowd ever done for the Kurds or Shiites or anyone else in the Middle East? The fact is that Saddam’s regime was unusually brutal, deadly, and dangerous to an entire region.

Mr. Calame wrote yesterday that Ms. Miller somehow “deprived” Times readers of “a potentially exclusive look into an apparent administration effort to undercut Mr. Wilson and the other critics of the Iraq war.” That is one way of looking at it.

Another way, as Ms. Miller pointed out in her article in the October 16 Times, is that since the Times had run Joseph Wilson’s original essay, “it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility.” For instance, the allegation that his wife worked for the CIA, an agency that was trying to deflect blame to the neoconservatives for whatever its own faults were on Iraq.

Mr. Wilson’s claims about Iraq’s innocence with respect to Niger and Uranium have in any event since been undercut by both the British Butler commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. There are some of us who remember the days when there was a New York Times that would not have sat for the CIA trying to overturn decisions of a democratically elected American government, whatever political party was involved.

For our part, we recall walking down Park Avenue South with Mr. Chalabi a few years ago, after September 11, 2001, but before the Iraq war, when the free Iraqi leader’s cell phone rang and it was Judith Miller on the other end, irate at the news that an Iraqi defector had surfaced to tell his tale on CNN rather than in the pages of the New York Times.

Mr. Chalabi, after hanging up, made some comment to the effect that the defector was probably tired of waiting to have the story be cleared by Times editors. Ms. Miller was annoyed at being scooped, which is the instinct of a real reporter. Ms. Miller bared that instinct last weekend, when she wrote about seeing Robert Novak’s column outing Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee. “I told the grand jury I was annoyed at having been beaten on a story,” she wrote.

Who has been the better journalist — Judith Miller or those attacking her in her own paper’s pages? Ms. Miller was sounding the alarm about the Iraqi threat and working her sources and fighting not to get beat. Ms. Dowd was parroting unsubstantiated smears, and Mr. Wilson was falsely downplaying Iraq’s effort to obtain weapons of mass destruction, without disclosing to Times readers his wife’s institutional interests.

And huge numbers of Times reporters have been complaining about her to competing news companies. To which we can only say that if Ms. Miller is to be run out of the Times in favor of Ms. Dowd and Mr. Wilson and those who believe, falsely, that the Iraq war was all just an elaborate con job by Mr. Chalabi and his neoconservative allies — well, then the Times is in even worse straits than we thought.