"... an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists." -- The Judy Miller legacy

[understandinglife]

Almost two years ago, Alexander Cockburn published an essay entitled "Judy Miller's War."

Much has happened in those two years, but one thing was abundantly obvious even before August of 2003 -- Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and others had all lied to the American people, the Congress, the UN and our allies. And, Judy Miller and the New York Times participated in the deception, big time.

Today, Bush's propagandist-in-chief is in jail. Though the real reason why is probably going to be revealed to be yet another Judy-scam -- using the 1st when what she should be doing is claiming the 5th.

Her colleagues increasingly are acknowledging what Cockburn cogently described two years ago.

Let's compare two articles; Cockburn's on August 13, 2003 with Moore's published yesterday, August 3, 2005.

And, let us also realize how many more American and allied soldiers have been killed or injured; how many more Iraqi citizens have been killed, injured, terrorized and tortured; how much more destruction of Iraq has transpired; and, how many, many, many more lies Bush and the neoconsters have told all of us in the intervening two years.

Judy Miller's War
by Alexander Cockburn

August 13, 2003

Lay all Judith Miller's New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists.

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We don't have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller's major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam's palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive towards invasion.

What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing.

And what does Miller's performance make the New York Times? .....

More at the link:

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08182003.html

Judy and the Little Tubes of Terror

by James Moore

August 3, 2005

In the Washington Post this week, Richard Cohen has insisted that the current fury over Judy Miller is bad for journalism. He is as wrong as the guy who thought New Coke was a good idea. Journalism, like every craft and profession, needs to purge itself from time to time of diseased tissue. The failure of Miller and the mainstream media in general during the run up to the Iraqi invasion is certainly the perfect moment for introspection and rethinking over how reporters do their jobs. Miller was quoted as saying that it wasn't her job to analyze what the government is saying or doing; it was her responsibility to simply report it. Below is a narrative of how she did just that. And it proves why she is wrong. I don't know what she is protecting by going to jail. Probably information that exposes her and the people she has worked with on all of her inaccurate stories.

The Valerie Plame investigation exists today because Americans were lied to about Iraq and reporters, either unwittingly or by design, were complicit in that lie. And it is as important to look at that time period as it is to examine the outing of an undercover spy. The two are inseparable.

____________________________________________________


The timing was a thing of pure political beauty. President George W. Bush was only a few days away from speaking to the United Nations’ General Assembly about Iraq’s renewed efforts to acquire banned weaponry. And, in a month, the president was going to Congress to seek a resolution approving of a war against Iraq. A Sunday morning story, September 8, 2002, in the New York Times made the U.N. speech and the congressional debate much easier for the White House. Under the headline, “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” a 3603 word story by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller ....

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The White House had mixed up journalists’ ambitions with misleading intelligence and brewed up a myth that yielded a powerful national belief in its illusion. A political Sasquatch, the aluminum tubes story was the first to begin banging the drums of conflict. The truth, finally, was tortured until it was no longer recognizable.

And the sons and daughters of America were sent marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told lie.

Much, much more at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/jim-moore/judy-and-the-litt_5117.html

September 13, 2003 was more than a year before November 2, 2004 -- and we still have members of the Democratic Party, as well as reasonable members of the Republican Party, both supportive of Bush's illegal war on Iraq and unwilling to demand the resignation of Bush, Cheney and all the other criminals in Bush's administration.

They are criminals - they lied to us, they lied to the Congress and they launched an illegal war. Oh, and then we have the torture thing and ....... THEY ARE CRIMINALS.

The evidence is not 'circumstantial'; it's staring us straight in the face and has been since the spring of 2003.

How much longer are we going to tolerate the continuing lies, the continuing dereliction of duty by our representatives in Congress, and the continuing illegal occupation of Iraq?

How much longer?

WATCH IT; SPREAD IT http://www.bushflash.com/right.html

Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - How ever long it takes, the day must come when tens of millions of caring individuals peacefully but persistently defy the dictator, deny the corporatists their cash flow, and halt the evil being done in Iraq and in all the other places the Bu$h neoconster regime is destroying civilization and the environment in the name of "America."

[dchill]

1. Judy Miller is slime.

Her actions have been carefully planned and coordinated with BushCo dis-info for several years. Like the man said, "She knew what she was doing."

How wrong is it to hope for bad (legal, but bad) things to happen to her? Or Cheney, Bush, Rice, Bolton, Powell - all the TRAITORS, who KNEW that they were selling fiction as fact.

Have I mentioned how much I hate these people?

[Swede]

2. She is a sock puppet for the Neocons pnac plan.

Let her rot.

[dchill]

4. Yes, let her rot...

But I hate to think of her there all alone...

[kwvining]

7. She may be there for a while

I hear the prosecutor sees thru all this 'reporter shield' bullshit, and may indict her for obstruction of justice. She may have to do five years.

[dchill]

10. five years?

I call that agood start.

[rodeodance]

5. and she will laugh all the way to the bank-with her new book.

[understandinglife]

9. Arianna Huffington has an interesting insight on that 'book deal' ...

Unsolicited advice to Alice Mayhew, Judy Miller's legendary editor at Simon and Schuster (if she's the one negotiating with Bennett): Hold your horses or, if you can't, keep the advance very low. A reporter going to jail to protect her own ass and not a source smells like remainder to me.

Link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/the-judy-file_4933.html

;) :hi:


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

3. “scientists who disagreed with the White House were effectively silenced"

If one wonders why we need the Truth Telling Coalition, just read this paragraph from James Moore's extensive report:

“The scientists who disagreed with the White House were effectively silenced,” Gellman said. “The intelligence types were told to keep their mouths shut all the way up to the end. I heard from a lot of people that they weren’t authorized to talk and they weren’t going to, even though there was strong disagreement with the White House over what these tubes were for.”

Thus, the need for what Ray McGovern and his colleagues are urging patriotic employees of our government to do is obvious and as urgently needed today as it was from the time Bush and Cheney entered the White House until Bush commanded our Armed Forces to invade and occupy Iraq:

Preempting Cheney

by Ray McGovern

August 3, 2005

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A Leak in Time ...

You readers out there in the intelligence and policy communities may wish to take those who told Linzer about the NIE as your model. Between multiple sources in London and in Washington finally willing to see it as their patriotic duty to speak out to prevent war, we have a new, very hopeful, truth-driven process going less than a year after the Truth Telling Coalition gave it fresh impetus. This disclosure will make it more difficult for the Bush administration and/or Israel to launch war on Iran. Timing makes all the difference.

Link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4251697

Beware of a tidal wave of lies about Iran as we struggle not to drown in the ocean of lies about Iraq.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccmplished.us

[kwvining]

6. The buzzflash link is dynamite

I am going to spend the day posting that all over the Internet. Devastating, to say the least.

[understandinglife]

8. "... managing the public's expectation that we would find WMDs."

What Judy Miller did as an embed in Iraq, Part I
by emptywheel

August 4, 2005

A lot of people have been scrutinizing Judy Miller's behavior lately and questioning her ethics as a journalist. I'm going to take a slightly different approach, and do a series of posts looking closely at how this behavior relates to the stories she was reporting while she was embedded. Because whether or not Judy was involved in the Plame Affair, she certainly was involved in a parallel pursuit, managing the public's expectation that we would find WMDs.

Judy embedded with a group that was poorly-prepared to hunt down WMDs -- but was given the central role in the first days of the war nevertheless. While there, she engaged in a pattern -- announcing a big find, then quietly rescinding that claim shortly thereafter. She also used her influence ... to shift the unit's focus away from examining suspected WMD sites to finding Iraqi officials, most supplied by Ahmed Chalabi, who offered convenient excuses for the absence of WMDs. Meanwhile, over the course of her embed, Judy set the foundation -- and created excuses -- for the Bush Administration's "surprise" realization that they might not find WMDs in Iraq.

Much more at the link:

http://dailykos.com/story/2005/8/4/75821/36617

Some of the comments in these DU threads are relevant:

More on Judith Miller from Arianna Huffington -- "The Judy File"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4232678

Ms Miller and her Petard; Rove, Shreds - The Neoconster Conspiracy Exposed

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4232678


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

11. Murray Waas: There was this very, very key meeting between Judith Miller

MURRAY WAAS: Fitzgerald keeps his cards close to his vest. There was some interesting action in the last couple days before the Grand Jury. Two of Karl Rove's aides came before the Grand Jury, an assistant and another top aide. We're not sure what they said. We're not sure why they were called. But that would indicate some intensification or moving toward some kind of closure, which way is a little bit difficult to tell, but Fitzgerald does seem stymied still by the lack of testimony by Judith Miller. There was this very, very key meeting between Judith Miller and a senior official in the Bush administration on July 8. I have been able to determine from my reporting that Scooter Libby, the Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Vice President Cheney, was a source for, on at least four occasions, for Miller regarding stories about weapons of mass destruction, or recommended or put her in touch with others in the administration. There was something -- Ambassador Wilson would know the name of the group. I don't have it in front of me, but there was kind of a working group to sell the war to Congress, the media, the American people. I think it was the Iraq Working Group or something like that --

JOSEPH WILSON: Yeah, it was the White House Iraq Group. It was known by its acronym, WHIG, the WHIG Group.

MURRAY WAAS: And Libby played a key role in that, and interestingly, the same people who were selling the war to the American people, who were part of that group, were the same people who then were central to trying to discredit Ambassador Wilson and his wife. And because the two were interrelated or interconnected, they mudded information out, which we have now learned so much of it was false and just not true, telling the American people there were chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities or huge efforts taking place by Saddam to develop those capacities. Those were not true.

So Ambassador Wilson comes forward in The New York Times and on "Meet the Press" and elsewhere and gives his personal knowledge about why some of those things are not true, so that same core group in the White House then begins a very direct and concerted campaign to discredit and retaliate against Joe and Valerie. And I reported, I guess, almost a year ago or -- I'm sorry, more recently, a few months ago, that the Grand Jury, the evidence before the Grand Jury was that there was a very concerted campaign. It wasn't just casual conversations, or officials like Rove were talking to reporters about other things, and this issue just came up, that they actually had meetings and strategies and so forth about it.

Much more at the link:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/04/1357248

Nice knitting Mr Waas!

Peace

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

12. A Huffington - "The Judy File: It Depends on What Your Definition of ...

The Judy File: It Depends on What Your Definition of “Thorough and Comprehensive” Is

by Arianna Huffington

August 4, 2005

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A “thorough and comprehensive” look at Miller’s career reveals repeated examples of egregiously lousy reporting, a startling lack of objectivity, too-close-for-comfort relationships with dubious sources … and a penchant for far from thorough and comprehensive coverage.

Leaving aside her well-documented buying of Ahmed Chalabi’s fabrications and fantasies, any rundown of Miller’s failings as a journalist has to include her “heard it from someone who heard it from someone” reporting on the WMD “silver bullet” scientist who turned out to be a dud -- and a sham. James Moore, in his chapter and verse dissection of the Miller method, says of this story: “Every piece of information she delivered to the front page of the New York Times appeared to come from secondary sources… Nothing showed independent confirmation or corroboration.” Yeah, sounds pretty comprehensive to me.

But we don’t have to rely on Moore’s depiction of Miller’s handling of the story, Judy herself described it in the original article in a convoluted third person disclosure that reads like self-parody: ....

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Much more at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/the-judy-file-it-depend_5165.html

Ms Miller you have not even begun to face the music ...


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us