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Miller, The Fourth Estate And The Warfare State
By Norman Solomon
10/17/05 "Tom
Paine" -- --- 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.
Let’s replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for The New York Times. After the
invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it
searches for WMDs in Iraq, she’s given “clearance” by the
Pentagon “to see secret information” -- which she “was not
permitted to discuss” with Times editors.
There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an
intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she’s
supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation --
and the fact that The New York Times has tolerated it tells us a
lot about that newspaper.
Notably, the front-page story about Miller in the Times on
Sunday bypassed Miller’s “clearance” status and merely reported:
In the spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war
in Iraq, where she had been embedded with an American military
team searching unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons.
In effect, during the propaganda buildup for the invasion of
Iraq, while Miller was the paper’s lead reporter on weapons of
mass destruction, The New York Times news department served as a
key asset of the warfare state.
“WMD -- I got it totally wrong,” the Times quoted Miller as
saying in a Friday interview. “The analysts, the experts and the
journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your
sources are wrong, you are wrong.”
But analysts, experts and journalists were not “all wrong.” Some
very experienced weapons inspectors -- including Mohamed
ElBaradei, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter -- challenged key
assertions from the White House. Well before the invasion, many
other analysts also disputed various aspects of the U.S.
government’s claims about WMDs in Iraq. (For examples, see
archived news releases put out by my colleagues at the Institute
for Public Accuracy in 2002 and early 2003.) Meanwhile
journalists at some British newspapers, including The
Independent and the Guardian, raised tough questions that were
virtually ignored by mainstream U.S. reporters in the Washington
press corps.
Reporters choose sources -- and the unnamed ones that Miller
chose to rely on, like the Pentagon’s pet Iraqi exile Ahmad
Chalabi, were predictably eager to spin tales about WMDs in
order to fuel momentum for an invasion. Yet the official line at
The New York Times has been that its news department was fooled
with the rest of the media best.
On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq
-- the Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two
top editors, including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece
contended that the Times , along with policy makers in
Washington, were victims rather than perpetrators:
Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes
fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many
news organizations -- in particular, this one.
But the Times did not “fall for misinformation” as much as jump
for it. The newspaper eagerly helped the administration portray
deceptions as facts.
The carnage set loose by those deceptions is continuing every
day.
But the Times’ extensive Sunday coverage of its own
machinations, with Judith Miller at the center of the intrigue,
had nothing to say about the human consequences in Iraq.
In elite medialand, the careers of journalists at The New York
Times loom large. In contrast, the lives of American soldiers --
and especially the lives of Iraqis -- are more like abstractions
while the breathless accounts of press palace intrigues unfold.
The apex of the Times hierarchy has provided no indication of
personal remorse or institutional accountability. And the next
time agenda-setting for U.S. military action -- against Iran or
Syria or wherever -- shifts into high gear, it’s very unlikely
that The New York Times or other top-tier U.S. media outlets
will present major roadblocks.
On June 14, 2003, shortly before he was promoted to the job of
executive editor at The New York Times, the newspaper published
an essay by Bill Keller that explained why the U.S. government
should strive to improve the quality of its intelligence. “The
truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to
guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of
being corrupted,” he wrote. “To my mind, this is a worrisome
problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a
problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.”
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For
information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
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