@@ Judy Miller the neocon and $1.2 million book deal @@
Arash
October 14, 2005
Judy Miller and the neocons
Arrogance, poor editing, and getting too close to her sources -- not ideology -- led
to her fall.
By Juan Cole
New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified again on Wednesday before a grand
jury regarding allegations that [JEW] Irving Lewis Libby
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Lewis_Libby), Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff, outed an undercover CIA operative in summer of 2003.
After spending 85 days in jail for refusing to testify before the grand jury, Miller
was released after receiving a personal waiver from Libby -- who turned out to be her
confidential source.
Judith Miller's reputation had already been deeply sullied by her inaccurate and
one-sided reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war.
http://home.earthlink.net/~imfalse/not_fit_to_print.html
Questions have swirled about her relationship with the small coterie of
neoconservatives, including Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who staffed key positions in the
Bush administration, and who were allied with Ahmad Chalabi, a corrupt Iraqi
expatriate and notorious liar who became Miller's principal source on WMD issues.
Suspicions that Judith Miller had crossed an ethical line and grown too close to her
sources increased after the waiver letter she received from Libby was disclosed. That
letter ended with this bizarre, highly personal passage: "You went into jail in the
summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide
bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you
vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their
roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life. Until then, you will remain in my
thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Lewis Scooter Libby".
All of which raises the question: Should Judith Miller herself be understood as a
neocon?
The evidence suggests that she is not. Rather it was a combination of hawkish
convictions about Saddam, ambition, arrogance pumped up by her pre-9/11 work on WMD
and jihadis, lax editorial oversight, and her long-standing tendency to get too close
to her sources, that led her to become a credulous mouthpiece for those who sought to
justify war with Iraq.
Judith Miller clearly agrees with the neocons on some subjects. But she is too
knowledgeable about the Middle East and Islam, too evenhanded on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and too much of a liberal on domestic U.S. issues, to
be considered a neoconservative herself (http://www.alternet.org/story/15481). A
veteran Middle East correspondent (she headed the Times' Cairo bureau) who speaks
some Arabic, she had a more balanced and nuanced view of the region than the
neocons -- at least until 9/11.
She probably has more in common with "liberal hawks"
(http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041025/lieven) such as New York Times columnist [JEW]
Tom Friedman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman) and Harvard professor
[JEW] Michael Ignatieff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ignatieff), who were
driven to support a U.S. war on Iraq by fears of Saddam's weapons, a belief that
military action could end Arab/Muslim terrorism, and impatience with the glacial pace
of political reform in the Middle East.
Although some critics have noted that Judith Miller associated herself with the
Jewish Middle East Forum (http://www.antiwar.com/forbes/?articleid=2673), headed by
[JEW] Daniel Pipes (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/pipes/pipes.php), and had a
brief relationship with [JEW] Eleana Benador Associates
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/benador/benador.php), a neoconservative booking
agency, neither association is more than circumstantial evidence for an ideological
affinity with the neoconservatives.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Benador_Associates
Rather, her research on radical Muslim movements gave her something in common with
the Jewish Middle East Forum at a time when such interests were often viewed as
eccentric in the Washington policy establishment. Her actual position on figures such
as Sudanese Islamist Hasan Turabi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_al-Turabi) is
much more nuanced than that of the typical Jewish Middle East Forum authors.
Judith Miller should be judged by what she said, not by what Web pages she allowed
her name to be listed at.
Miller's trajectory on major issues departs significantly from that of the
neoconservatives. [JEW] Paul Dundes Wolfowitz
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Paul_Wolfowitz), deputy secretary of
defense 2001-2005, immediately regretted that the U.S. did not go on to Baghdad in
1991, whereas as late as 1993 Judith Miller saw Iraq as defanged.
In 1996, in the now-notorious paper titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Defending the Realm" (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm),
[JEW] Richard Norman Perle
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Perle), [JEW] Douglas Jay Feith
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Feith) and [JEW] David Wurmser
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/wurmser_d/wurmser-d.php), among others, advised
then Israeli candidate for prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to scrap the Oslo Peace
Accords and refuse to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, as well as to support a
war against Iraq.
In contrast, Judith Miller supported Oslo and stressed that it was important that
both Israelis and Palestinians felt secure so as to attract investment. As late as
1998 she was unsure what to do about Iraq, sometimes supporting bombing raids but at
others raising questions about what options the U.S. had in the aftermath.
Yet over time Judith Miller came to subscribe to key neocon ideas -- and began
increasingly to rely on neocons and their allies for sources. As a June 7, 2004
profile of Judith Miller (http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226)
in New York magazine makes clear, perhaps the pivotal moment in this evolution came
in the '90s, when Judith Miller began focusing on the link between terrorism and WMD.
She was particularly interested in al-Qaida's plans to acquire WMD.
Her work on this subject put her in contact with Ahmad Chalabi
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Chalabi), whose party line she began to recite as
early as 1998. Before 9/11, her beat made her look obsessed; afterward, as the
piece's author, Franklin Foer, notes, "she seemed more like Cassandra, the only one
who'd been right. And this fact gave her tremendous power at the paper".
In any case, Judith Miller began to uncritically parrot even some of the neocons'
loonier claims. On CNN's "American Morning With Paula Zahn" for May 14, 2002, Miller
explained the controversy that had broken out about allegations that Cuba had a
biological weapons program. She told Zahn, "And there are a lot of very unsavory
contacts, as the administration regards them, between Cuba and especially Iranians
who are involved in biological weapons".
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/americas/05/14/carter.miller.cnna/
Such frankly weird assertions raise questions about where in the world Judith Miller
got her so-called information. No serious intelligence professional believes that
either Iran or Cuba has a significant biological weapons program, much less that a
communist Latin American dictatorship was being helped by a Shia Muslim
fundamentalist state with deadly microbes.
Judith Miller's statement only makes sense in light of the speech given by John
Bolton, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, in
May of 2002, in which he alleged that Cuba had a biological weapons program.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/americas/05/06/cuba.weapons/?related
Thomas Fingar, head of the State Department's Intelligence bureau, along with a
retired national security officer, demurred from the charges in John Bolton's speech.
When Christian Westermann at the State Department intelligence bureau raised
questions about the intelligence on which John Bolton was basing his campaign, Bolton
called him into his office, chewed him out, and then allegedly tried to have him
fired, according to the April 18, 2005, edition of the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61304-2005Apr17.html
Judith Miller was channeling John Bolton in her comments to Paula Zahn, and very
likely was simply repeating whatever John Bolton himself had told her. Washington
political analyst Steven C. Clemons asserted that Bolton was a regular source for
Miller in her reporting on national security and weapons of mass destruction issues.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000798.html
John Bolton (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/bolton/bolton.php) has a special
interest in getting up a U.S. war against Iran, accounting for the bogus charge that
it was active in Havana.
While Judith Miller was in jail, John Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations, came to visit her.
Judith Miller's reporting on this subject, as with so many other subjects involving
the claims of the hawks and neocons, was embarrassingly bad
(http://www.williambowles.info/media/massing_media.html). Since John Bolton had so
many detractors in the intelligence community, it would have been easy for a good
reporter to double-check his claims (http://www.spectrezine.org/global/Cuba3.htm) and
to discover with what suspicion they were viewed by the professionals. (Bolton is
merely a bad-tempered lawyer who did political work for the Republican Party,
including helping Bush-Cheney stop the Florida recount in 2000, and has no special
knowledge of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs, much less of the
Middle East http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=2320).
That Miller neglected to seek out the whole story but rather contented herself with
serving as a stenographer for figures such as Bolton and Iraqi fraudster Ahmad
Chalabi suggests either a conviction on her part of an ideological sort, or an
excessive trust in her sources -- probably both.
Judith Miller was not always a dupe of far-right-wing hawks. After the second Persian
Gulf War, she responded on CNN to a 1993 speech by Saddam in which he claimed that
Iraq was stronger and wiser since the 1991 war. On January 8, 1993, Judith Miller
told anchor Donna Kelley, "I don't think that the allied forces at this stage face
any real threat from Saddam. He has suffered a real body blow through the secong
Persian Gulf War (1991). His nuclear capability, for the moment, has been eradicated.
The U.N. has destroyed thousands of chemical munitions. They continue searching for
biological and other weapons of mass destruction. I think a lot of this is just
bravado. This is the mother of all rhetoric, that's Saddam, and I don't think anyone
believes it, inside Iraq or outside of the area".
Judith Miller's description of the state of Iraq's weapons programs in 1993 was
entirely accurate, though the biological program was not completely shut down by
Hussein Kamel
(http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/un/unscom-iaea_kamal-brief.htm),
head of Iraq's WMD program (and Saddam's son in law), until 1995. In this interview
she was still functioning as a balanced news reporter who did not allow her obvious
hatred for Saddam to interfere with her analytical judgment about the sort of threat
he posed.
But by the late 1990s, Judith Miller had emerged as a hawk on the Iraq issue again.
The heating up of the conflict had been provoked by the replacement of Rolf Ekeus
(http://www.osce.org/hcnm/13021.html) as head of the United Nations weapons
inspection team, UNSCOM, with Australian Richard Butler, who made a series of wild
allegations against Iraq with little or no evidence
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/butler.html). He
demanded access to Saddam's presidential palaces in early 1998, which Saddam at that
time refused. Saddam, a germophobe, is later alleged to have told his U.S. captors
that he feared the U.N. inspectors would make his palaces "dirty". No unconventional
weapons were discovered in them.
Miller commented on the crisis on CNN & Co. on January 28, 1998, saying, "Well, I
think the Israelis are busy buying gas masks after Richard Butler made his remarks
about Saddam possibly having enough biological agents to blow Tel Aviv and other
cities off the map". Miller was uninterested in the dissenters among the weapons
inspectors who deeply disagreed with Butler. She admitted that it was not clear what
the U.S. options were after an airstrike. But then in another interview on January
29, 1998, Miller said on MSNBC's "News at Issue" that an airstrike against Iraq might
force Saddam to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions.
In mid-August of 1998, at a time when some observers suspected that the Clinton
administration might engage Iraq militarily to take the focus in Washington off the
Lewinsky scandal, Miller dropped a new bombshell. She published an article in the New
York Times based on an interview with Khidhir Hamza, who claimed to be "the highest
ranking scientist ever to defect from Iraq", and who had come to the U.S. in 1994.
Khidhir Hamza asserted that Iraq continued to have a viable nuclear weapons program
and that only half of it had been destroyed by the second Persian Gulf War. One of
Hamza's critics, Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri, maintains that Hamza had only
been given the lead position in the Iraqi nuclear program for six months in 1987, but
was soon dismissed for petty embezzlement. He left the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission
in 1989, became a college lecturer and businessman, then went to Libya in 1994.
http://www.iraqsnuclearmirage.com/YellowTimes/Khidhir_Hamza_The_Bogus_Intelligence_Source.htm
Imad Khadduri says that Khidhir Hamza established links to the Iraqi National
Congress of Ahmad Chalabi and began publishing articles in the British press on
Iraq's alleged nuclear program in 1995. He alleges that the Times on Sunday sent
documents provided by Khidhir Hamza to the International Atomic Energy Commission
(IAEA), which declared them false, but that the newspaper published Hamza's pieces
anyway. Coming to the United States, Khidhir Hamza was picked up by Jewish Eleana
Benador Associates (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/corp/benador.php), a public
relations firm and speakers' bureau closely associated with neoconservatives and
their causes, including support for the expansionist Likud Party in Israel.
Judith Miller gave an interview with National Public Radio about her piece on Khidhir
Hamza, on August 17, 1998, with Linda Wertheimer
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1931801). Miller gushed, "In
fact, Linda, I think what struck my colleague and I when we were listening to Dr.
Hamza talk, was Saddam's determination at all costs to have a nuclear bomb".
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1033965
She reported that the second Persian Gulf War bombings of Iraq's nuclear sites only
hit about half of them, according to Khidhir Hamza. In fact, Iraq's nuclear
facilities were found and ordered destroyed after the war by the United Nations
inspectors, and they were extremely thorough, as inspector and former U.S. Marine
Scott Ritter insisted. When Linda Wertheimer asked if Khidhir Hamza was credible,
Judith Miller said, "Yes. We were able to speak to people, intelligence officials,
administration officials, nuclear experts, a great variety of people, all of whom
found Dr. Hamza very credible".
In fact, the story that Khidhir Hamza was telling was extremely controversial and was
controverted by knowledgeable persons. Either Judith Miller was lying when she
reported unanimity in the judgment of Khidhir Hamza's credibility, or she only talked
to a handful of hawks. Wertheimer adds, "I gather that the CIA almost missed him. The
story of his defection and his attempts to find a safe haven in the United States
reads sort of like a cross between a thriller and a farce".
The transcript reports "LAUGHTER". Of course, the reason that the CIA "almost missed
him" was that he was a minor bit player who had not been involved in the Iraqi
nuclear program at all since 1989 and had no new information aside from baldfaced
lies. (In 2001 Scribner published Khidhir Hamza's mendacious book, which described
him as "Saddam's Bombmaker", and thereafter he became a constant presence on American
television news, flacked by Jewish Benador Associates, purveying his lurid and
completely false tales of an Iraq near to having a nuclear bomb.
Already by 1998, Judith Miller was reporting Iraqi National Congress propaganda,
purveying an image of Iraq completely different from that she gave in 1993, when she
admitted that the country's weapons of mass destruction programs had been dismantled.
On December 29, 1998, she commented to Diane Dimond of CNBC's "Upfront Tonight" about
the Clinton administration's bombing of Iraq and the $100 million that the U.S.
Congress had appropriated to support the Iraqi expatriates who were attempting to
overthrow Saddam. She complained, "But I did notice that just before the bombing,
Ahmed Chalabi, who was one of the leaders of the opposition, told me that he only had
about four hours notice. The administration called him and said, 'Oh, by the way,
we're going to start bombing in a few hours'. This doesn't leave the opposition with
a lot of time to prepare a kind of internal action, if it has the ability to do that.
And we're not sure if the Iraqi opposition could stage a coup or start a rebellion at
this point. It may be a weak reed, but it's the only reed the administration has at
the moment".
Judith Miller was already talking to Ahmed Chalabi, and was willing to act as a
conduit for his grouses about not being kept in the loop by the Clinton
administration. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. Leaked New York Times
memos showed that Chalabi was Miller's principal source for stories she later did on
Iraq's fabled and in fact nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. According to Foer,
Miller also relied heavily on the neocons' intelligence-fixing outfit, the notorious
Office of Special Plans headed by [JEW] Douglas Feith. Almost all of its
"intelligence" was completely bogus.
Judith Miller was a consistent critic of Saddam's regime, but before 1998 she was
capable of making nuanced judgments about the problem it posed for the United States.
At some point after that, she apparently began to believe that she, with her
prescient expertise about WMD and radical Islam, and her hawkish and neocon sources
were right. This was when her fateful decline began. A minor scientist and sometime
college teacher such as Khidhir Hamza became "the highest ranking scientist" to
defect from Iraq.
She relayed complaints from Gucci revolutionaries like Chalabi that they had been
left out of the loop by the Clinton administration, and retailed Iraq National
Congress tall tales to her unsuspecting audience. By the late 1990s, she had laid the
ground for her subsequent path, of becoming stenographer to a motley crew of
neoconservative hawks and Iraqi expatriate wheelers and dealers
(http://slate.msn.com/id/2086110).
The aluminum tubes story (http://www.dangerouscitizen.com/Articles/1242.aspx), in
particular, which she co-wrote and which helped pave the way to war, will likely be
taught in journalism classes for years as a textbook study of flawed reporting.
In the end, Judith Miller's decline seems due more to professional ambition than
ideological conviction -- although her own beliefs clearly grew closer to the
neocons'. "While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these
hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle", Foer writes. "Because she
kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories
and great quotes, constantly expanding her access".
In the end, it seems that Judith Miller will go down in history not so much as a true
believer as a useful idiot.
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/salon62.html
Judy Miller has made a $1.2 million book deal with Simon & Schuster
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Judith_Miller
Encyclopedia Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29