item 1: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39280-2003May25?language=printerwashingtonpost.com
Intra-Times Battle Over Iraqi Weapons
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 26, 2003; Page C01
A dustup between two New York Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein.
An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?
The Chalabi connection surfaced when John Burns, the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning Baghdad bureau chief, scolded Miller over her May 1 story on the Iraqi without clearing it with him.
------------snip--------------
Miller replied to Burns: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him.
He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."(salin's note - the underline is my emphasis)
-------read the whole article.
A related article on this point appeared in Slate
http://slate.msn.com/id/2083736/item 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28385-2003Jun24?language=printerwashingtonpost.com
Embedded Reporter's Role In Army Unit's Actions Questioned by Military
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 25, 2003; Page C01
New York Times reporter Judith Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials, prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a "rogue operation."
More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say.
------------snip-------------
In April, Miller wrote a letter objecting to an Army commander's order to withdraw the unit, Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, from the field. She said this would be a "waste" of time and suggested that she would write about it unfavorably in the Times. After Miller took up the matter with a two-star general, the pullback order was dropped.
------------snip-------------
One military officer, who says that Miller sometimes "intimidated" Army soldiers by invoking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Undersecretary Douglas Feith, was sharply critical of the note. "Essentially, she threatened them," the officer said, describing the threat as that "she would publish a negative story."
An Army officer, who regarded Miller's presence as "detrimental," said: "Judith was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat," this person said, and MET Alpha "was allowed to bend the rules."
----- much more in the full article.
Salin's note: somewhere along the line Ms. Miller crossed the line that journalists are wont to do - from objectively reporting the news to actually working towards creating the news. Odd that the Jason Blair story blew up at about the same time - and IT got the coverage - while this was a mere footnote.
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