NYT reporter Judy Miller now says she was tipped in the summer of 2001 to an intercepted al-Qaeda communication warning of “something big” to come:

NEW YORK Judith Miller, the embattled former reporter for The New York Times who spent 85 days in jail last year for refusing to reveal a source and ultimately left the paper after a dispute, has another new twist to her Times tenure.
In an interview with the Web site Alternet.org, Miller now claims she had advance intelligence information leaked to her months before the Sept. 11 attacks indicating Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on the United States.
Posted today, the story contends that Miller was sparked by the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole to increase her reporting of al-Qaida. She says that ultimately led, in July 2001, “to a still-anonymous top-level White House source who shared top-secret NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an even bigger impending al-Qaida attack, perhaps to be visited on the continental United States.
“Ultimately, Miller never wrote that story,” the Alternet piece continues. “But two months later — on Sept. 11 — Miller and her editor at the Times, Stephen Engelberg, both remembered and regretted the story they ‘didn’t do.’”

Sounds interesting, but it’s important to keep perspective here. As Miller tells it, the intelligence did not include anything specific about the nature of the planned attack. What might have been gained from informing the public about this intelligence? It’s impossible to say, but that won’t stop people from asking, “What if?”