Judith Miller’s Blame-Shifting Memoir
By an Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
April 08, 2015 "ICH"
- U.S. intelligence veterans recall the real story of how New York Times
reporter Judith Miller disgraced herself and her profession by helping to
mislead Americans into the disastrous war in Iraq. They challenge the slick,
self-aggrandizing rewrite of history in her new memoir.
MEMORANDUM FOR: Americans
Malnourished on the Truth About Iraq
FROM: Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: A New
“Miller’s Tale” (with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer)
On April 3, former New York Times journalist Judith Miller
published
an article in the Wall
Street Journal entitled “The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths: Officials Didn’t Lie,
and I Wasn’t Fed a Line.” If this sounds a bit defensive, Miller has tons to be
defensive about.
In the article, Miller claims, “false narratives [about what
she did as a New York Times reporter] deserve, at last, to be retired.” The
article appears to be the initial salvo in a major attempt at
self-rehabilitation and, coincidentally, comes just as her new book, The
Story: A Reporter’s Journey, is to be published today.
In reviewing Miller’s book, her “mainstream media” friends are
not likely to mention the stunning conclusion reached recently by the Nobel
Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and
other respected groups that the Iraq War, for which she was lead drum majorette,
killed one million people. One might think that, in such circumstances – and
with bedlam reigning in Iraq and the wider neighborhood – a decent respect for
the opinions of mankind, so to speak, might prompt Miller to keep her head down
for a while more.
In all candor, after more than a dozen years, we are tired of
exposing the lies spread by Judith Miller and had thought we were finished. We
have not seen her new book, but we cannot in good conscience leave her WSJ
article without comment from those of us who have closely followed U.S. policy
and actions in Iraq.
Miller’s Tale in the WSJ begins with a vintage Miller-style
reductio ad absurdum: “I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.”
Since one of us, former UN inspector Scott Ritter, has historical experience and
technical expertise that just won’t quit, we asked him to draft a few paragraphs
keyed to Miller’s latest tale. He shared the following critique:
Miller’s Revisionist History
“Judith Miller did not take America to war in Iraq. Even a
journalist with an ego the size of Ms. Miller’s cannot presume to usurp the war
power authorities of the President of the United States, or even the now-dormant
Constitutional prerogatives of Congress. What she is guilty of, however, is
being a bad journalist.
“She can try to hide this fact by wrapping herself in a
collective Pulitzer Prize, or citing past achievements like authoring
best-selling books. But this is like former Secretary of State Colin Powell
trying to remind people about his past as the National Security Advisor for
President Reagan or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents
George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
“At the end of the day Mr. Powell will be judged not on his
previous achievements, but rather on his biggest failure – his appearance before
the United Nations Security Council touting an illusory Iraqi
weapons-of-mass-destruction threat as being worthy of war. In this same vein,
Judith Miller will be judged by her authoring stories for the ‘newspaper of
record’ that were questionably sourced and very often misleading. One needs only
to examine Ms. Miller’s role while embedded in U.S. Army Mobile Exploitation
Team Alpha, hunting for weapons of mass destruction during the 2003 invasion,
for this point to be illustrated.
“Miller may not have singlehandedly taken America and the
world to war, but she certainly played a pivotal role in building the public
case for the attack on Iraq based upon shoddy reporting that even her editor at
the New York Times has since discredited – including over reliance on a
single-source of easy virtue and questionable credibility – Ahmed Chalabi of the
Iraqi National Congress. The fact that she chose to keep this ‘source’ anonymous
underscores the journalistic malfeasance at play in her reporting.
“Chalabi had been discredited by the State Department and CIA
as a reliable source of information on Iraq long before Judith Miller started
using him to underpin her front-page ‘scoops’ for the New York Times. She knew
this, and yet chose to use him nonetheless, knowing that then Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld was fully as eager to don the swindlers’ magic suit of
clothes, as was the king in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. In Ms.
Miller’s tale, the fairy-tale clothes came with a WMD label and no washing
instructions.
“Ms. Miller’s self-described ‘newsworthy claims’ of pre-war
weapons of mass destruction stories often were – as we now know (and many of us
knew at the time) – handouts from the hawks in the Bush administration and
fundamentally wrong.
“Like her early reporting on Iraq, Ms. Miller’s re-working of
history to disguise her malfeasance/misfeasance as a reporter does not bear
close scrutiny. Her errors of integrity are hers and hers alone, and will
forever mar her reputation as a journalist, no matter how hard she tries to spin
the facts and revise a history that is highly inconvenient to her. Of course,
worst of all, her flaws were consequential – almost 4,500 U.S. troops and
1,000,000 Iraqis dead.”
Relying on the Mistakes of Others
In her WSJ article, Miller protests that “relying on the
mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.” It is
almost as though she is saying that if Ahmed Chalabi told her that, in Iraq, the
sun rises in the west, and she duly reported it, that would not be “the same as
lying.”
Miller appears to have worked out some kind of an
accommodation with George W. Bush and others who planned and conducted what the
post-World War II Nuremburg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime,” a
war of aggression. She takes strong issue with what she calls “the enduring,
pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence
to take the country to war.”
Does she not know, even now, that there is abundant proof that
this is exactly what took place? Has she not read the Downing Street Memorandum
based on what CIA Director George Tenet told the head of British Intelligence at
CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002; i. e., that “the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy” of making war for “regime change” in Iraq?
Does she not know, even at this late date, that the
“intelligence” served up to “justify” attacking Iraq was NOT “mistaken,” but
outright fraud, in which Bush had the full cooperation of Tenet and his deputy
John McLaughlin? Is she unaware that the Assistant Secretary of State for
Intelligence at the time, Carl Ford, has said, on the record, that Tenet and
McLaughlin were “not just wrong, they lied … they should have been shot” for
their lies about WMD? (See Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and
the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.)
Blame Blix
Miller’s tale about Hans Blix in her WSJ article shows she has
lost none of her edge for disingenuousness: “One could argue … that Hans Blix,
the former chief of the international inspectors, bears some responsibility,”
writes Miller. She cherry-picks what Blix said in January 2003 about “many
proscribed weapons and items,” including 1,000 tons of chemical agent, were
still “not accounted for.”
Yes, Blix
said that on Jan. 27, 2003.
But Blix also included this that same day in his written
report to his UN superiors,
something the New York Times, for some reason, did not include in its report:
“Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with
UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been
provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has
been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of
our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services
for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been
workable.
“Our inspections have included universities, military bases,
presidential sites and private residences. Inspections have also taken place on
Fridays, the Muslim day of rest, on Christmas day and New Years day. These
inspections have been conducted in the same manner as all other inspections.”
[See “Steve M.” writing (appropriately) for “Crooks and Liars” as he
corrected the record.]
Yes, there was some resistance by Iraq up to that point. Blix
said so. However, on Jan. 30, 2003, Blix made it abundantly clear, in
an interview published in
The New York Times, that nothing he’d seen at the time justified war. (The
byline was Judith Miller and Julia Preston.)
The Miller-Preston report said: “Mr. Blix said he continued to
endorse disarmament through peaceful means. ‘I think it would be terrible if
this comes to an end by armed force, and I wish for this process of disarmament
through the peaceful avenue of inspections,’ he said. …
“Mr. Blix took issue with what he said were Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell’s claims that the inspectors had found that Iraqi officials were
hiding and moving illicit materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their
discovery. He said that the inspectors had reported no such incidents. …
“He further disputed the Bush administration’s allegations
that his inspection agency might have been penetrated by Iraqi agents, and that
sensitive information might have been leaked to Baghdad, compromising the
inspections. Finally, he said, he had seen no persuasive indications of Iraqi
ties to Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush also mentioned in his speech. ‘There are other
states where there appear to be stronger links,’ such as Afghanistan, Mr. Blix
said, noting that he had no intelligence reports on this issue.”
Although she co-authored that New York Times report of Jan.
30, 2003, Judith Miller remembers what seems convenient to remember. Her acumen
at cherry picking may be an occupational hazard occasioned by spending too much
time with Chalabi, Rumsfeld and other professional Pentagon pickers.
Moreover, Blix’s February 2003
report showed that, for the
most part, Iraq was cooperating and the process was working well:
“Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400
inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without
notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen
convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were
coming. …
“The inspections have taken place throughout Iraq at
industrial sites, ammunition depots, research centres, universities,
presidential sites, mobile laboratories, private houses, missile production
facilities, military camps and agricultural sites. …
“In my 27 January update to the Council, I said that it seemed
from our experience that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on
process, most importantly prompt access to all sites and assistance to UNMOVIC
in the establishment of the necessary infrastructure. This impression remains,
and we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including
those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential
sites and private residences. …
“The presentation of intelligence information by the US
Secretary of State suggested that Iraq had prepared for inspections by cleaning
up sites and removing evidence of proscribed weapons programmes.
“I would like to comment only on one case, which we are
familiar with, namely, the trucks identified by analysts as being for chemical
decontamination at a munitions depot. This was a declared site, and it was
certainly one of the sites Iraq would have expected us to inspect.
“We have noted that the two satellite images of the site were
taken several weeks apart. The reported movement of munitions at the site could
just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed
munitions in anticipation of imminent inspection.”
Blix made it clear that he needed more time, but the Bush
administration had other plans. In other words, the war wasn’t Blix’s fault, as
Judy Miller suggests. The fault lay elsewhere.
When Blix retired at the end of June 2004, he politely
suggested to the “prestigious” Council on Foreign Relations in New York the
possibility that Baghdad had actually destroyed its weapons of mass destruction
after the first Gulf War in 1991 (as Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel,
who had been in charge of the WMD and rocket programs assured his debriefers
when he defected in 1995). Blix then allowed himself an undiplomatic jibe:
“It is sort of fascinating that you can have 100 per cent
certainty about weapons of mass destruction and zero certainty of about where
they are.”
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney, former Technical Director, National Security
Agency (ret.)
Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA
Daniel Ellsberg, former State and Defense Department official,
associate VIPS
Frank Grevil, former Maj., Army Intelligence, Denmark,
associate VIPS
Katharine Gun, former analyst, GCHQ (the NSA equivalent in the
UK), associate VIPS
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service
Officer, Afghanistan, associate VIPS
Brady Kiesling, former Political Counseler, U.S. Embassy,
Athens, resigned in protest before the attack on Iraq, associate VIPS.
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at
Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq,
2001-2003.
Annie Machon, former officer, MI5 (the CIA equivalent in the
UK), associate VIPS
David MacMichael, former Capt., USMC & senior analyst,
National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former Capt., Army Infantry/Intelligence & CIA
presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer
for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, Maj., former U.S. Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former Maj., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector,
Iraq
Coleen Rowley, Division Council & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Greg Thielmann, former Office Director for Strategic,
Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research
Peter Van Buren, former diplomat, Department of State,
associate VIPS
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.) & US diplomat (resigned in
March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq)