Monday, October 17, 2005

During the propaganda buildup for the invasion of Iraq, Judith Miller and the New York Times served as a key asset of the warfare state

AlterNet: Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State: "By Norman Solomon, AlterNet. Posted October 17, 2005.

During the propaganda buildup for the invasion of Iraq, Judith Miller and the New York Times served as a key asset of the warfare state.

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." ...

No comments: