That Awful Power: How Judy Miller Screwed Us All

[otohara]

By James Moore

Okay. I couldn't stand it any longer. When I saw the quote today from a New York Times spokesperson about Judy Miller, I blew coffee through my nose. "Judy is an intrepid, principled, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has provided our readers with thorough and comprehensive reporting throughout her career." I am submitting the lengthy piece below to prove precisely otherwise. I don't care how many awards Judy Miller has, she is a miserable failure who has irreparably harmed her country with bad journalism and by allowing her own personal beliefs to infect her reportage. Below is but one example. This is an edited excerpt from a book I wrote, which no one ever read, called "Bush's War for Re-election." And I am not trying to sell a damn book. I don't care if anyone ever buys it. But I do want people to know what this woman did:

"If you don't want to work, become a reporter.
That awful power, the public opinion of the
nation, was created by a horde of self-complacent
simpletons, who failed at ditch digging and shoe
making, and fetched up in journalism on their
way to the poorhouse."

Mark Twain
Connecticut Evening Dinner Club, 1881

Judith Miller of the New York Times, stood at a distance. A man in "non-descript clothing," wearing a blue baseball cap, emerged from a military vehicle, and walked into the Iraqi desert. As he pointed to the ground in several locations, the man was watched by American soldiers of the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (MET Alpha.) According to Miller, the unnamed individual was an Iraqi scientist with more than a decade of experience in Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs. Supposedly, he was showing the U.S. troops where he had buried deadly compounds and other agents.

Three days later, Miller, in a front page story for the U.S.' most influential newspaper, wrote a fourteen hundred word story entitled; "AFTEREFFECTS: PROHIBITED WEAPONS; Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." In her lead paragraph, Miller said that she and the MET Alpha team members had discovered the proof of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a Bush Administration argument for invading Iraq.

lenghty but worth it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/jim-moore/that-awful-power-how-jud_4986.html

[Jack Rabbit]

1. I repeat what I said on the other thread

Those responsible for propagating the lies that led to Bush's invasion of Iraq should be prosecuted for war crimes. That would mostly involve people in the executive branch of the Bush regime. However, perhaps no American from the private sector would be more likely to be tried for war crimes than Judy Miller.

The question is whether Ms. Miller was duped by Ahmed Chalabi, or whether she knew or have reason to know that she was being fed a lot of steer manure before she ran with it on the front pages of The New York Times. Talking to Chalabi and then getting confirmation of his story from some neoconservative hack at the Pentagon hardly sounds like independent verification. Of course, I don't have three Pulitzer Prizes, so I wouldn't be expected to know better.

[Skittles]

3. Judy wasn't duped by anyone

she is a g.d. bush whore

[Jack Rabbit]

4. Even the Devil is entitled to a defense

:evilgrin:

[bloom]

11. Mid East Forum- JM promoted as "capable of speaking on "Militant Islam"...

Sounds like she's been part of the disinformation crowd for awhile...

---

"...Pipes and his Middle East Forum have been accused of being Zionist, and blatantly anti-Muslim. As far back as 1990, writing in The National Review, he expressed fears over what he described as a "Muslim influx" into western cultures.

"West European societies," he argued, "are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."

A former employee of the state and defense departments, Pipes was nominated by President Bush to serve on the United States Institute of Peace. The choice of Pipes was subject to senate confirmation, and the Washington Post, whose editorial pages had supported much of the Bush policy regarding Iraq, immediately, editorialized against Pipes. The paper urged the president to withdraw Pipes' name, or for senators to block the nomination. Not surprisingly, Pipes has close relationships with Douglas Feith, an undersecretary at the Department of Defense, right wing conservative U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, and neo-conservative thought leader Richard Perle.

The Middle East Forum also offers expert speakers on its Web site. Among them are people like Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus of Princeton, who gave a speech for MEF, which was entitled, "Today, America's Interests are Oil and Israel." Lewis, who achieved international acclaim as a scholar of Middle East history, was described by Judy Miller as a mentor during her days at Princeton University's graduate school, which may explain how she ended up being associated with the Mid East Forum. Under a heading on the MEF Web site, entitled, "List of Experts on Islam, Islamism, and the Middle East," for as long as two years, the organization promoted Judith Miller as someone capable of speaking on, "Militant Islam, Biological Warfare." When her reporting from Iraq began to draw fevered criticisms, Miller's name was pulled down from the site's links.


....As a minimum, the level of connection included the promotion of Judith Miller's books, which several critics have interpreted as anti-Muslim. Daniel Pipes confirmed that the Middle East Forum held a launch party for the release of her 1996 book, God Has Ninety-Nine Names, (Simon and Schuster.) Apparently, she also appeared at a 2001 MEF forum regarding another one of her books. God Has Ninety-Nine Names was also excerpted in the organization's publication, The Middle East Quarterly."

[pretzel4gore]

2. miller is a hideous pustule

a veritable tapeworm, just sukking life outta the truth, killing it slowly and methodically, working inside, safely, with them suckers greedily drinking in the lifeblood, turning it into miller's putrid crap, and miller licking her bloody lips in satisfaction....

[reprehensor]

5. How Judy Miller Screwed Us All

That Awful Power: How Judy Miller Screwed Us All

By James Moore
Source: The Huffington Post

Okay. I couldn't stand it any longer. When I saw the quote today from a New York Times spokesperson about Judy Miller, I blew coffee through my nose. "Judy is an intrepid, principled, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has provided our readers with thorough and comprehensive reporting throughout her career." I am submitting the lengthy piece below to prove precisely otherwise. I don't care how many awards Judy Miller has, she is a miserable failure who has irreparably harmed her country with bad journalism and by allowing her own personal beliefs to infect her reportage. Below is but one example. This is an edited excerpt from a book I wrote, which no one ever read, called "Bush's War for Re-election." And I am not trying to sell a damn book. I don't care if anyone ever buys it. But I do want people to know what this woman did:

"If you don't want to work, become a reporter.
That awful power, the public opinion of the
nation, was created by a horde of self-complacent
simpletons, who failed at ditch digging and shoe
making, and fetched up in journalism on their
way to the poorhouse."

Mark Twain
Connecticut Evening Dinner Club, 1881

Judith Miller of the New York Times, stood at a distance. A man in "non-descript clothing," wearing a blue baseball cap, emerged from a military vehicle, and walked into the Iraqi desert. As he pointed to the ground in several locations, the man was watched by American soldiers of the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (MET Alpha.) According to Miller, the unnamed individual was an Iraqi scientist with more than a decade of experience in Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs. Supposedly, he was showing the U.S. troops where he had buried deadly compounds and other agents.

Three days later, Miller, in a front page story for the U.S.' most influential newspaper, wrote a fourteen hundred word story entitled; "AFTEREFFECTS: PROHIBITED WEAPONS; Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." In her lead paragraph, Miller said that she and the MET Alpha team members had discovered the proof of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a Bush Administration argument for invading Iraq.

continued at link

[wli]

6. ugh, a Pulitzer in 2001?

That's odd, I don't see her on the 2001 list of prize winners.

[DELUSIONAL]

10. you are correct -- her name is not listed for 2001

Here's the list for 2001 -- I also check the years 1999-2004 no Judith Miller is listed. Unless Judith Miller's name is also "Staff" as in "The New York Times Staff".

PUBLIC SERVICE -- The Oregonian

BREAKING NEWS REPORTING -- The Miami Herald Staff

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING -- David Willman of the Los Angeles Times

EXPLANATORY REPORTING -- Chicago Tribune Staff

BEAT REPORTING -- David Cay Johnston of The New York Times

NATIONAL REPORTING -- The New York Times Staff

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING -- Ian Johnson of The Wall Street Journal

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING -- Paul Salopek of the Chicago Tribune

FEATURE WRITING -- Tom Hallman, Jr. of The Oregonian

COMMENTARY -- Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal

CRITICISM -- Gail Caldwell of The Boston Globe

EDITORIAL WRITING -- David Moats of the Rutland (Vt.) Herald

EDITORIAL CARTOONING -- Ann Telnaes of Tribune Media Services

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY -- Alan Diaz of the Associated Press

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY -- Matt Rainey of The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J.

http://www.pulitzer.org/2001/2001.html

[EVDebs]

7. You meant "Bulshitzer Prize winning journalist", didn't you ?

[reprehensor]

8. Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything or Don't We?

Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything or Don't We?

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet. Posted July 29, 2005.

snip

This version of events has divided the Times into two camps: those who want to learn everything about this story, and those who want to learn everything as long as it doesn't downgrade the heroic status of their "colleague" Judy Miller. And then there are the schizophrenics. Frank Rich is spending his summer in the second camp, while at the same time writing some of the most powerful and brilliant stuff about the scandal: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit...is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped up grounds... That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war."

But this unmasking -- if it is to be complete -- has to include Judy Miller and the part she played in the mess in Iraq. Of course, the division over Miller is nothing new... it predates her transformation into media martyr by many months. For an early look at this rift, check out Howard Kurtz' May 2003 reporting on the way Miller ferociously fought to keep Ahmad Chalabi, her top source on WMD, to herself and the anger it caused at the paper. And also the paper's extraordinary mea culpa from May 2004, in which its editors admitted that the Times' reporting on Iraq "was not as rigorous as it should have been" -- yet steadfastly refused to even mention the less-than-rigorous reporter whose byline appeared on 4 of the 6 stories the editors singled out as being particularly egregious. "It looks," the Times' public admission concluded, "as if we, along with the administration, were taken in." And yet just two months earlier, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller called Miller, who was one of the main reporters "taken in," a "smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter." Nothing about her less than "rigorous" reporting. Nothing about her reliance on Chalabi being less than "well-sourced."

Any discussion of Miller's actions in the Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal must not leave out the key role she played in cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq and in hyping the WMD threat. Re-reading some of her pre-war reporting today, it's hard not to be disgusted by how inaccurate and pumped up it turned out to be. For chapter and verse, check out Slate's Jack Shafer . For the money quote on her mindset, look to her April 2003 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where, following up on her blockbuster front page story about an Iraqi scientist and his claims that Iraq had destroyed all its WMD just before the war started, Miller said the scientist was more than a "smoking gun," he was the "silver bullet" in the hunt for WMD. The "silver bullet" later turned out to be another blank -- and the scientist turned out to be a military intelligence official.

Amazingly, however, even as her reporting has been debunked -- and her sources discredited -- Miller has steadfastly refused to apologize for her role in misleading the public in the lead up to the war. Indeed, in an interview with the author of Bush's Brain , James Moore, she, in the words of Moore, "remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions," telling him: "I was proved fucking right."

snip

[GeorgeBushytail]

9. Iran is giving Miller its Wet Dream Medal

For her instrumental help in getting America to spend thousands of lives and 100's of billions of dollars knocking off its enemy - Sadam.

Iran won the Iraq War!

[EVDebs]

12. You nailed it. Pat Lang of DIA has said 'this was good work'

and I apppreciate good work

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224916,00.html

Patrick Lang, former director of the DIA's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. "They (the Iranians) knew exactly what we were up to," he said.

He described it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history."

"I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.

So, my DU friends, does this make Judith Miller an Iranian spy or just another neocon dupe in a long line of simpletons ?

[Demit]

13. "I just don't hang out a lot with journalists. I'm not a part of

that club." Miller's quote near the end of this blog is very telling. Yes, more and more people are beginning to understand what club you do belong to, Judy, and what a cheerleader you've been for it.

[Catfight]

14. She's a disgrace. nt