INFAMOUS JUDY MILLER JOINS FOX

Judy Miller once worked for the NY Times as a prominent reporter known for her access to top government officials. Miller's coverage of events prior to the War in Iraq and especially her presentation of events regarding Iraq's alleged WMDs were largely proven to be false and, she was widely charged with being a shill for the Bush administration. Eventually, the Times apologized for its reporting during that period. She was soon after released by the Times, and it was widely believed at the time that she was fired. The likely reason: war fever had subsided and cooler heads reviewing her work concluded that she was both journalistically and ethically challenged and was at least partly responsible for ginning up the Iraq war which the public had turned against. Her successful modus operandi:cultivate top-ranking sources, write just enough of what they wanted to publicize so as to keep the "journalist-source" relationship going, and submit scoops and front-page material to please and enrich the Times' editors and publishers. Everyone was happy...the source got its position publicized, the paper increased circulation, and Judy Miller enriched herself. However, the public and the nation were ill served, by these relationships, but who cared? These methods kept her employed at the Times from 1977 to 2005. Unfortunately, her false stories occurring when they did helped to initiate a disastrous war.

Miller was famously jailed for 85 days for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury regarding the Plame affair. While in prison she falsely claimed she could not reveal the sources related to the Plame outing, when she was knowingly in possession of a release from Lewis Scooter Libby the focus of the investigation all the time she was incarcerated. She eventually testified and was released. Why she literally jailed herself all that time remains unexplained.

I haven't heard this term used about her, but I would classify her as a practitioner of "yellow journalism". It seems the vaunted NY Times did not know or care about the short-comings of her stories which were to a large extent a form of Bush administration propaganda. (When I was in school, Yellow Journalism was a serious charge. Miller and the NYT of that period could fit the charge. Wikipedia defines it as:journalism that downplays legitimate news in favor of eye-catching headlines that sell more newspapers. It may feature exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists.)

So her re-appearance from semi-retirement on Fox is not earth-shattering. There she will join other similalry challenged such as Riley, Hannity, and the other blatant propagandists for the reactionary right. So what else is new? Judy Miller actually belongs at FOX.

I append here a brief history of Judy Miller's writings during the lead-up to the Iraq war for those who like to have their memory tweaked by way of a few of the stories that "did not come out as she expected" as her new boss at FOX stated recently.

Shortly after 9-11 she learned of an impending search by the FBI of an Islamic Charities group called Holy Land Foundation..in her eagerness for a scoop she telephoned the group before the search actually took place and blew the cover off the operation. She was not sanctioned by her employer or prosecuted for this.

Miller broke the story in the NYT about those infamous metal tubes which were bound for Iraq, and which her unnamed high-level sources claimed were planned to be used for nuclear centrifuges (needed to concentrate nuclear materials to bomb grade) and further claimed that the tubes provided evidence that Iraq had stepped up its bomb making plans. The story helped plant the idea in the public mind that Iraq was embarked on worldwide hunt for materials to make an atom bomb. The information regarding the tubes was false but the Times article was widely circulated and glibly quoted by Bush officials Rice,Powell, Rumsfeld as a partial basis for dislodging Sadam Hussein from power and going to war. It generated the oft quoted statement by Condi Rice about the first sign of a smoking gun to be a "mushroom cloud." As well, this story triggered a 'feeding frenzy' directed at finding evidence of Iraq's sources of nuclear material and led to another scandal-- the false claim regarding Iraq's purchase of 'yellow cake' uranium ore in Niger. This claim by the Bush administration led to the Wilson-Plame affair (See below).
While embedded in a military unit during the early period of the Iraq war, Miller used second-hand information to falsely declare that WMD had been found in Iraq. This was widely reported and helped stiffen support for the war.

Miller authored another piece about a mysterious Iraqi scientist (she termed a 'silver bullet') who worked on the biological and nuclear weapons programs. This revelation also proved to be false.

By this time, with American and allied forces ranging widely over the countryside with no evidence of weapons programs revealed, the suspicion arose that perhaps it was true, Iraq had no program to make atom bombs, and the actual existence of WMD in Iraq, the causus belli, might have been over-played by the Bush administration. As a consequence, the search now turned to more easily hidden biological weapons...these were also WMD and would serve the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine just as well. But still no bio-weapons labs could be located. It was about his time Miller posted a story regarding 'mobile weapons labs' (which would neatly explain why our forces could not find WMD anyplace in Iraq...they were on wheels and being moved around to escape inspection or perhaps were driven over the Iraq-Syria border). This story also proved to be false.For a full expose of Miller's journalistic peccadillos at this period see:http://www.slate.com/id/2086110/

Miller's involvement in the Plame Affair (CIA leak case) was never completely revealed. Valerie Plame a CIA agent who's husband former ambassador Joe Wilson wrote a piece in the NYT just before the war entitled: "What I didn't find in Africa". In it Wilson who had been in the Clinton administration, documented that there was no credible evidence that Iraq had been seeking 'yellow cake" (See: Yellow cake forgery). Yellow cake is an uranium oxide mineral (actually a leachate of several Uranium oxides from which enriched uranium can be extracted). It is found and mined in Niger, Africa. The supposed fact that Iraq had been seeking yelowcake (from which enriched uranium could be readily extracted--using those aluminum tubes!)had been a central tenet in the Bush Administration's justification for war with Iraq. Just two days after Wilson's article was published,that Judy Miller met with Irve Lewis "Scooter" Libby a member of the Cheney inner circle. They discussed Valeri Plame. Soon afterward Mrs Wilson's identify as a CIA agent was exposed in a column by Robert Novak (:Mission to Niger July 14, 2003) Miller never wrote the story about Valerie Plame, perhaps it was even too far out for her to pursue. Miller appears to have been involved only in that her earlier stories were in part the basis for the interest in Niger-Iraq relationship. It was later revealed that it was Rchard Armitage and Karl Rove who were Novak's sources in the Bush Administration. Novak claimed that Armitage freely offered the information and indicated it would be useful to his investigative "Evans and Novak" style column. However, the revelations around the investigation of Plame's 'outing' does give an insight into how Miller used her access to high-level officials to obtain information for her stories and the questionable ethics of the close ties and relationships between journalist and information source.

In 2004 a Times editorial acknowledged that many of its stories had relied too heavily on Ahmed Chalabi an infamous Iraqi exile bent on regime change who even the White House had finally abandoned because he had been exposed as lacking trustworthiness. Later it was revealed that ten of the twelve stories the Times apologised for were written by Miller.

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