The paper's defenders note that there's no evidence for the most fevered speculations about Miller's role. And reporters at the Times -- even a few who were concerned about the way Miller's role has been handled -- said there was one reason to be optimistic that things might turn out OK for the paper: The Times has assigned a solid, no-nonsense team of reporters and editors to the Miller story. The reporting team is headed by Jonathan Landman, a deputy managing editor admired for the facility with which he performs tough assignments. Outside the Times, Landman is best known for a famous e-mail warning colleagues about Blair's journalistic transgressions: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now." Staffers spoke glowingly of Landman's independence; if higher-ups at the paper had wanted to whitewash the Miller story, they wouldn't have put Landman on it, they said. Landman doesn't do whitewashes.

Stephen Labaton, one of the few Times reporters willing to go on the record about the case, wrote in an e-mail: "I have a lot of faith in the professionalism of the reporters who have been assigned to examine what happened. I, along with my colleagues, are hopeful that they will provide a definitive account of this saga that will both lay to rest some of the myths that may be out there and also aggressively look at how events were handled by Judy, her editors, and the leadership of the paper."

But observers still see storm clouds on the horizon for the Times, notwithstanding the journalistic talent it has put on this story. In many conversations about what the Times is facing, these were the most common questions:

Will Miller talk? And if she does, how much will she say?

Rosen, who has been unrelenting in his criticism of the Times on his blog Pressthink, believes the Times hierarchy -- Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher -- have expressed a kind of blind faith that Miller will cooperate with the paper. But any thorough report on Miller's role in the Plame story will inevitably raise a host of uncomfortable questions for Miller and for the paper that she may feel she cannot answer -- questions about the nature of her relationship with key Bush administration officials both in the summer of 2003 and for months, and maybe years, before that.

Rosen stresses that he's only guessing that Miller won't feel comfortable divulging everything Landman's team asks of her. Still, if she balks, he sees disaster for the Times. "The moment of truth is going to come when they determine she's not cooperative," he says.

What happens if Miller doesn't talk?

In that event, one thing the paper might do is hang Miller out to dry -- Landman's team can treat her as a kind of hostile witness in much the same way reporters investigating Blair's sins did with him. "At that point you begin to report against the things she says," says Rosen. "If her story's not holding up, you build up the anomalies and report those -- like the Times does all the time when they're doing investigations of corrupt officials."

This scenario presents some obvious problems for the paper, not to mention for Miller. So far, Miller has been zealously protected by the Times -- in public statements, Keller and Sulzberger have offered fierce support of her stand, and the paper has praised her in its editorials. To produce a report that was the least bit negative about Miller -- a report that suggests either that she got too cozy with Bush administration officials, or that she was just being cagey about her actions -- wouldn't look good for the paper, let alone for the woman it had held up as the paragon of journalistic ethics.

That's why the paper could take another tack if Miller refuses to tell all: It could respect her secrets, and produce a report that didn't tell all. But this too wouldn't look good. As Alex Jones points out, everyone at the paper knows that a report it's been promising for weeks will be microscopically scrutinized when it's finally published. "If the account addresses the questions of why and who and what and has the feeling of a story that lets the chips fall, then it settles the question," Alex Jones says. "But if the account has gaping holes people are going to notice. That's not going to do."

What story was Miller working on when she first became entangled with the Plame case?

According to notes Miller's attorneys found last week, she first spoke to I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, about Wilson in June 2003, before Wilson published his Op-Ed questioning the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear material from Niger. Why did she meet with Libby then? Why was Plame discussed? At the time, Wilson had been discussing his theories with many journalists -- so was the White House trying to quietly tamp down this whisper campaign by contacting reporters like Miller?

No story by Miller on Wilson or Plame ever appeared in the Times. But did Miller ever write such a story that was never published (a thing that happens often in the news business)?

Who at the paper was Miller working for at the time, and did anyone else at the paper know of her conversations about Wilson and/or Plame?

There is considerable mystery over how Miller operates at the Times -- who assigns her stories, who monitors her work, and who keeps her in line. Like any newsroom, the Times operates according to a hierarchy of editors and reporters where there are clear delineations between departments and coverage areas. Miller's role, though, seemed sui generis; since 9/11 she's worked in Washington, New York and Iraq, and according to some reports had no real boss for much of that time.

In July, Times reporter Douglas Jehl wrote that in the summer of 2003 Miller was working for "Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times." But lawyers for the Times declined to tell Jehl "whether she tried to write a story about [Wilson's Niger trip], or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson."

What's Judy Miller's relationship with powerbrokers in Washington?

This is the most volatile question the Times will need to address -- and, for many readers, the most important. Critics of Miller's flawed reporting on weapons of mass destruction have long suggested she has a propensity to cozy up to Bush insiders. The story of her dealings with key players in the Plame investigation threatens to underscore that relationship -- witness exhibit A, for instance, the bizarrely familiar letter Libby sent to Miller to release her from her confidentiality promise. In the letter, Libby effusively praised Miller's work and suggested that she report next on the question of Iranian nuclear capacity. He also added an inscrutable -- and, some bloggers say, perhaps coded -- reference to Aspens turning out West because "their roots connect them." You don't have to be a critic of the Times to wonder: How are Miller's roots connected to Libby's?

"I want to know how Miller fits into this whole world of operatives and information hounds that stretched out from the Bush White House outward," Rosen says. "Where does she interact with these people, this network of Republican activists, Republican campaigners, opposition research people."

Answering this question fully would lead one much beyond Miller's involvement in the Plame investigation, all the way back to the "origins of some of these events," Rosen says, "when the whole case for war began to be put together. What was her role? Was the kind of relationship she had to sources during the WMD period mirrored in the reporting?"

If the Times dares to ask those questions -- and if Miller ventures any answers -- the result could prove more disconcerting to the paper even than its most recent scandal.

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