judy miller unreliable

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Ah, Christmastime.  It always makes me feel a little nostalgaic.  The smells of evergreens, oranges and cloves, the colored lights, everything shining and sparkling.  Takes me back in time to when I was a kid.  In that spirit, tonight, I thought I would unveil a new periodic feature called Retro Thursday where I highlight a classic blog post or column and discuss why I feel we owe it to ourselves to keep it fresh in our minds.

We'll kick this series off with an oldie but goodie from 2003, Slate magazine's The Times Scoop that Melted by Jack Shafer, "Cataloging the Wretched Reporting of Judith Miller".  It is a veritable Rosetta Stone not only of the distortions and lies that led us into the War in Iraq, but it's also a case study of the echo chamber that was the GOP's Mighty Wurlitzer in its prime, and therefore a cautionary tale for journalists and news-watchers everywhere. 

If reporters who live by their sources were obliged to die by their sources, New York Times reporter Judith Miller would be stinking up her family tomb right now. In the 18-month run-up to the war on Iraq, Miller grew incredibly close to numerous Iraqi sources, both named and anonymous, who gave her detailed interviews about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Yet 100 days after the fall of Baghdad, none of the sensational allegations about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons given to Miller have panned out, despite the furious crisscrossing of Iraq by U.S. weapons hunters.

(snip) 

Judith Miller finds everybody associated with the failed search theoretically culpable except Judith Miller. This rings peculiar because Miller, more than any other reporter, showcased the WMD speculations and intelligence findings by the Bush administration and the Iraqi defector/dissidents. Our WMD expectations, such as they were, grew largely out of Miller's stories.

Shafer goes on to list eleven different articles by Miller with "Back-Story", an enumeration of "Miller's Caveats", and some helpful "Suggestions for Remedial Action".  For example:

The Bush Administration Case
The Back Story: Miller and Gordon report the Bush administration's findings in "White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons," Sept. 13, 2002. According to the government, Iraq is attempting to purchase aluminum pipes to assist its nuclear weapons program as well as trying to develop mobile biological weapons laboratories. It also wants to obtain poison gas precursors. And it is trying to hide activities at plants in Fallujah and three other places where poisonous chlorine is made. The report alleges the plants have excess capacity and the Iraqis are diverting chlorine to the military.

Iraq continues to develop missiles banned under the 1991 cease-fire, according to the administration, and is doing prohibited research at its Al Rafah North complex. At the demolished Al Mamoun facility, where the Iraqis intended to make engines for long-range missiles, the Iraqis are rebuilding.

Miller Caveats: Some experts wonder if the aluminum tubes might be for rocket systems, not nuclear weapons work.

Suggested Remedial Action: A Times visit to Fallujah, Al Rafah North, Al Mamoun, and other sites alluded to is called for. Maybe the Times can find evidence that supports or discredits the administration's claim.

Shafer, by his own admission, is only able to hit a smattering of what he calls "the Miller corpus", but the column is pretty devastating, and the piece above, which Dick Cheney famously referred to on "Meet the Press" to bolster the administration's push for war, is almost certainly one of the many bogus stories which, we now know, were lovingly drizzled into Judy's overly credulous ears by BushCo and their operatives.

MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There’s a story in The New York Times this morning, this is, I don’t, and I want to attribute The Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.

Tsk.  Tsk.  Tsk. It all seems so facile and easily debunked in retrospect.  We can put all this together in a matter of minutes, so how come her editors couldn't have done some, oh, I dunno, rudimentary fact-checking before they published stories of such momentous import?

In the words of columnist Margaret Kimberly in the Chicago Defender:

Judith Miller and her bosses at the Times are all complicit in bringing hell to the people of Iraq. They aided and abetted the Bush administration’s web of lies that convinced many Americans to support making war on a helpless people. When Judith Miller reported that a confidential source provided her with proof of the existence of WMD, already spineless members of Congress turned completely to jelly. They held their fingers in the political winds and concluded that shock and awe was a great idea after all.

You can tell that Miller is an Orthodox NeoCon by her sanctimony, her tendency to attack other people for her own catastrophic failings, and her seemingly superhuman ability to withstand mega-doses of irony that would kill a normal person.  From Mother Jones magazine:

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

Let's talk about standards of journalism, shall we? Judy Miller repeatedly pushed questionable intelligence — most of which turned out to be false — on the front pages of the New York Times, influencing public debate on the question of whether or not to go to war. Because Miller was at best a careerist blinded by phenomenal access who simply didn't ask enough questions and at worst the knowing crony of a dishonest administration, the influences exerted on that debate were exactly the ones the Bush Administration, trying to make a case for an unsupportable war to an unconvinced public, wanted. Miller then went to jail, supposedly to protect the first amendment rights of journalists, while actually protecting the reputation and career of a crook of a source (but reliable for high-level leaks!) bent on destroying the reputation and career of a husband-wife team opposed to the administration's policies.

So, yeah, keeping fighting the good fight, Judy.

Amen.

Related posts:

  1. What Did Dick Give Judy to Go Pro-Torture?
  2. G.I. No: NRO’s Miller Longs for Country of Green Plastic Men
  3. Late Night: The South Carolina GOP Supper Club Presents “The Merchants of Prejudice”
  4. Late Night Presents: Harry vs. Harry in a Lightweight Bout for the Future of the Public Option
  5. Saddam Interrogation: US Still Trying to Show 9/11 Connection as Late as Mid-2004