More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the
lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now,
a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the
aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a
lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own
first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush
administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S.
military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of
the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence:
“During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see
secret information as part of my assignment ‘embedded’ with a special
military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” And, according to the
same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8,
2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “I
might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to
discuss with editors some of the more sensitive
information about Iraq.”
Let’s replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the
invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for
WMDs in Iraq, she’s given “clearance” by the Pentagon “to see
secret information” -- which she “was not permitted to discuss” with Times
editors.
There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an
intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she’s supposed to
be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the
New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.
Notably, the front-page story about Miller in the Times on Sunday
bypassed Miller’s “clearance” status and merely reported: “In the
spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war in Iraq, where
she had been embedded with an American military team searching
unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons.”
In effect, during the propaganda buildup for the invasion of Iraq,
while Miller was the paper’s lead reporter on weapons of mass
destruction, the New York Times news department served as a key asset of
the warfare state.
“WMD -- I got it totally wrong,” the Times quoted Miller as saying in
a Friday interview. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who
covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are
wrong.”
But analysts, experts and journalists were not “all wrong.” Some very
experienced weapons inspectors -- including Mohamed ElBaradei, Hans Blix
and Scott Ritter -- challenged key assertions from the White
House. Well before the invasion, many other analysts also disputed various
aspects of the U.S. government’s claims about WMDs in Iraq. (For examples,
see archived news releases put out by my colleagues at the Institute for
Public Accuracy in 2002 and
early 2003.) Meanwhile journalists at some British newspapers,
including the Independent and the Guardian, raised tough questions that
were virtually ignored by mainstream U.S. reporters in the
Washington press corps.
Reporters select sources -- and the unnamed ones that Miller chose to
rely on, like the Pentagon’s pet Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, were
predictably eager to spin tales about WMDs in order to fuel momentum for
an invasion. Yet the official line at the New York Times has been that its
news department was fooled with the rest of the media best.
On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq -- the
Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two top editors,
including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece contended that the
Times, along with policy makers in Washington, were victims rather than
perpetrators: “Administration officials now acknowledge that
they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did
many news organizations -- in particular, this one.”
But the Times did not “fall for misinformation” as much as jump for
it. The newspaper eagerly helped the administration portray
deceptions as facts.
The carnage set loose by those deceptions is continuing every day.
But the Times’ extensive Sunday coverage of its own machinations,
with Judith Miller at the center of the intrigue, had nothing to say about
the human consequences in Iraq.
In elite medialand, the careers of journalists at the New York Times
loom large. In contrast, the lives of American soldiers -- and
especially the lives of Iraqis -- are more like abstractions while the
breathless accounts of press palace intrigues unfold.
The apex of the Times hierarchy has provided no indication of
personal remorse or institutional accountability. And the next time
agenda-setting for U.S. military action -- against Iran or Syria or
wherever -- shifts into high gear, it’s very unlikely that the New York
Times or other top-tier U.S. media outlets will present major roadblocks.
On June 14, 2003, shortly before he was promoted to the job of
executive editor at the New York Times, the newspaper published an essay
by Bill Keller that explained why the U.S. government should strive to
improve the quality of its intelligence. “The truth is that the
information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of
war and peace shows signs of being corrupted,” he wrote. “To my mind, this
is a worrisome problem, but not because it
invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the
wars we still face.”
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Norman Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com