Judy Miller and the neocons

[existentialist]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/14/neocon/index.html



Judy Miller and the neocons

Arrogance, poor editing, and getting too close to her sources -- not ideology -- led to her fall.

By Juan Cole

Oct. 14, 2005 | New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified again on Wednesday before a grand jury regarding allegations that Irving 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.

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. Questions have swirled about her relationship with the small coterie of neoconservatives, including 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 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, Scooter Libby."

. . .

Miller's reporting on this subject, as with so many other subjects involving the claims of the hawks and neocons, was embarrassingly bad. Since Bolton had so many detractors in the intelligence community, it would have been easy for a good reporter to double-check his claims 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.) 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.

. . .

In the end, it seems that Miller will go down in history not so much as a true believer as a useful idiot.

[Garbo 2004]

1. Judy said her job is not to check facts but to report what she's told.

She's a megaphone, not a journalist. And she's still proud of her "reporting." Remember after her Iraq WMD "scoops" were shown to be pure bunk, disinformation and propaganda she still publicly declared "I was fucking right." Not a "useful idiot" but a willing disinformation agent and propagandist.

[existentialist]

2. Your perspective may be the better one

But I think think Juan Cole's article is worth reading in full.

[punpirate]

3. Since it's subscription...

... does Cole mention Laurie Mylroie? All along, I think her association with Mylroie (in the course of writing a book together about Iraq) really turned her to the dark side. Based on that, and on much of her reporting, I think, from what you've snipped of it, Cole might be discounting the influence of ideology on her so-called reporting.

[existentialist]

5. Laurie Mylroie

No mention in the Cole article.

Cole is not to Judith Miller. He acknowledges that she was in bed with the neocons, and that they used her to broadcast their propaganda which she accepted uncritically and without checking even when many of the untrue allegations she made could have been easily checked.

You are correct however, that he distinguishes her from the neoconservatives, largely because he describes her as being too liberal on domestic issues to fit into the classification.


So please give us the scoop as you see it.

[punpirate]

8. Mylroie, when at Harvard...

... was considered an expert on Iraq, and for a number of years, she was an apologist for Hussein:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html

At around the time that Hussein invaded Kuwait, she had a sudden conversion about him and wrote a book--with Judith Miller--which described all of Hussein's evils, etc. and his weapons of mass destruction. This is where, I think, Miller gets her reputation as being an "expert" on WMD.

Around 1993 or 1994, Mylroie had become the darling of the right for writing another book which asserted that Iraq was the seat of all international terrorism. Although the scholarship in that book was awful, and Mylroie's contention depended upon the assertion of theories that were widely disputed in the intelligence field (for good reason), she kept up hammering on the unlikely and the impossible. That, of course, got her a job at the American Enterprise Institute, where she continued to say the same thing.

This is part and parcel of the modus operandi of the far right--dubious scholarship as justification for their policy recommendations. A lot of people have forgotten that the far right latched onto a book in 1980 called The Network of Terror, which was written by Michael Ledeen, and asserted that Moscow was the seat of all international terror. This motivated the far right to impress on all the Reaganites the "evil empire" routine.

In some instances, this got positively silly. Someone gave William Casey the book during the Reagan campaign, and he was so taken with it that when he took up the reins at the CIA, he ordered his staff to check into the "facts" in the book. Was very easy for the CIA to do. Ledeen has based his arguments almost entirely on reports in European news sources. The CIA looked at the book and said, uh,oh. It was entirely based on black propaganda they'd had slipped into the foreign press to discredit the Soviets. None of it was true. They dutifully reported that to Casey. Casey didn't believe his own CIA. So, Mel Goodwin, who at the time ran the Soviet Political Affairs desk at the agency, said, "Casey's an old OSS guy, why don't we have some Operations guys tell him--maybe he'll believe them." They sent in Operations people--the real feet-on-the-ground spooks--and Casey didn't believe them, either.

There's a pattern here--the neo-cons believe in the importance of the concept of the "necessary lie." Ledeen's and Mylroie's books make the large and wild statements, so-and-so is responsible for all global terrorism, therefore, we have to do something about them. We're good and they're bad.

Now, if either of them had been even close to correct, global terrorism would have collapsed when the Soviet Union fell, and then, again, when Iraq was attacked. In neither case did that happen.

Now, as far as Miller is concerned, I would say that she was turned in the process of writing a book with Mylroie in 1990, and certainly has kept in close touch with Mylroie over the years. I think she had a highly ideological role in all this. Her association with Mylroie is likely the root of her being a true believer of the neo-con cause--at least as regards Iraq and the larger Middle East.

There has to be a reason for her violating some basic tenets of reportorial responsibility--such as second-sourcing information--which she obviously did not do by printing Chalabi's lies without substantiation.

Just my take on it all.

Cheers.

[existentialist]

9. Cole's article states that Miller began

to take up the neocon arguments regarding the connections between Iraq and terrorism, and the neocon assertions regarding WMD in Iraq about 1993 or even 1994.

I remember it stating that immediately after the first Gulf war Miller was taking the position the Hussein had the intent but no longer the capacity to pursue WMD development.

It quoted an article by her from that period that I thought made the point.

[punpirate]

10. So, her arguments with regard to Iraq and terrorism...

... come at about the same time as the publication of Mylroie's book saying the same thing.

Maybe it's not hard evidence, but it certainly is circumstantial and perhaps less than coincidental. :)

[existentialist]

11. Thank you for the information.

Looks like we mostly agree now.

[Garbo 2004]

7. Nonsubscription link to Cole's article at Truthout:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101405L.shtml

[Up2Late]

12. Absolutely right on about Laurie Mylroie, she's the crack-pot that...

...came up with the theories that the Neo-cons used to justify the War on Iraq.

Here are some links and one from Sourcewatch, she's a complete lunatic conspiracy theorist.

This article from "The Guardian" explains much:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1254072,00.html>

In this one, she explains why every thing that "...Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke..." say about her in his book is wrong and that, "...Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him...." <http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004906>

This page has several article from were she now works, and I guess she's proud of this neo-con BS:
<http://www.benadorassociates.com/mylroie.php>

This one is almost unbelievable, but this is what she actually writes:
<http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/1709>

<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Laurie_Mylroie>

Mylroie is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank often identified with leading neocons. David Corn wrote that "what Mylroie says matters" because "she has influential admirers," most notably Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, Jr..

(clip)

Mylroie is the author of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a book published by the American Enterprise Institute in 2000. It pushes her theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. According to writer Peter Bergen, Mylroie's theory was the basis for "the belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States," which "amounted to a theological conviction within the administration, a conviction successfully sold to the American public."

According to Bergen, "Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the '93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John R. Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as 'splendid and wholly convincing.' I. Lewis Libby, now Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is thanked for his 'generous and timely assistance.' Others who merit expressions of gratitude in Myleroie's acknowledgements are Cheney's foreign-policy advisors John Hannah and David Wurmser as well as Francis Brooke, a principal Washington lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress.<1> <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4799686/>

(clip)

Bergen comments, "Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America."

Another bit of fun is, if you search her name at Amazon .com, you'll find 103 used copies of her book "The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge" starting at $0.01 cents, her book "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf" will set you back almost $1.00 ($0.95) and "Bush vs. the Beltway : The Inside Battle over War in Iraq," they have 67 copies, starting at $0.01! And they are worth every penny. :rofl:

[Garbo 2004]

6. I read the article. It's interesting. Judy cares about access, her story

line, her self made image as intrepid investigative reporter. She's a mythologizer. Inconvenient truth, facts that don't support her stories aren't sought and when they arrive are dismissed. Indeed, while arguing about her role as reporter she came out with this:

"My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction." (From an article about her reponse to the "Now They Tell Us" article that appeared in the NY Review of Books: http://slate.msn.com/id/2095394/ )

She was useful but more than an idiot. She's a true believer in her own hype, image and shoddy self-serving brand of "journalism." And not merely content to report the "news" she actively intervenes in order to become a newsmaker herself (her reporting in Iraq for example, directing the troops in search for WMD). Principled she is not and hasn't been for a very long time, if ever. And the NYT's fostered her, granted her legitimacy and let her get away with it for years. Even now.

[Skittles]

13. in other words, she is a bush whore

:puke:

[Demit]

4. More: "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. The aluminum tubes story, 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."

Love that "Gucci revolutionaries" description.