One of the first rules of journalism is to take good notes. So it is baffling why a top New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, can’t make sense of the notes she took during critical meetings and phone calls with a White House official. Her confusion raises many more questions, which she and the Times should answer.

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal her source to the special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative’s name to the media – a source she says now she may not be able to recall. The CIA employee, Valerie Plame, is married to Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who was sent to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

The claim was included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. In a July column in the New York Times, Mr. Wilson wrote that he had found no evidence to back up the uranium claim. A week later, syndicated columnist Robert Novak named Mr. Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative.

Since then there has been much speculation about the Bush administration “outing” Ms. Plame to call Mr. Wilson’s credibility into question. A special prosecutor was named to investigate the matter since revealing the name of a covert agent is a crime.

Although she did not write a story about the Wilsons, Ms. Miller talked to the vice president’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, at least three times about the validity of pre-war intelligence. During those conversations, she apparently took haphazard notes and didn’t ask obvious follow-up questions. In a lengthy first-person account in Sunday’s paper, Ms. Miller recounts what she says she told the grand jury. She said she didn’t know how or why the name “Valerie Flame” appeared in a different part of the notebook she used during an interview with Mr. Libby. Ms. Miller also wrote that she didn’t know why she wrote “Victoria Wilson,” an apparent reference to Valerie Wilson, using her married name, in a notebook used during a phone conversation with Mr. Libby.

Also troubling is her relationship with Mr. Libby. She readily agreed to identify him as a “former Hill staffer” rather than a “senior administration official,” although Mr. Libby had not worked on Capitol Hill for years. In a letter Ms. Miller requested to allow her testify, Mr. Libby wrote: “Your reporting, and you, are missed.” Ms. Miller had published stories about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, including aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons, which the Times later said were inaccurate.

Times executive editor Bill Keller said Ms. Miller was taken off the Iraq story but kept drifting back – the paper should explain that. Her lack of memory of crucial details -details that with her experience she would have known were crucial at the time – harm the credibility of the Times and should be addressed. Reporters at the Times, and other papers, have wondered why there was so little oversight of a writer with a history of problems.

Now, thanks to her own confusing accounts of the situation, many others are wondering the same thing.