Judith Miller: The 'Classified' Angle

By: William E. Jackson, Jr. Editor's note: One of the most damning admissions in Sunday?s New York Times article on Judith Miller?s role in the Plame scandal is Executive Editor Bill Keller?s statement that even after he ordered her to stop covering issues related to WMDs and Iraq, she kept sneaking her way (somehow beyond his control) back on her old beat. On Sept. 23, 2003, William E. Jackson Jr., wrote one of several prescient columns that have appeared under his byline on the Miller/Plame case in the past few years. It details how she, indeed, continued to operate in the supposedly forbidden fields after Keller?s alleged order to cease-and-desist.

But it also explores an area receiving a good deal of attention in the wake of the Times? Sunday study: Miller?s claim of receiving special security clearance from the military during her time as an "embed" and weapons-hunter in Iraq. It is newly relevant now, with federal prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald expressing strong interest in whether I. Lewis Libby, aide to Vice President Cheney, may have revealed classified information in one of his meetings with Miller. In her first-person account of her testimony in the Sunday Times, Miller said she was asked if she had discussed classified information with Libby. "I said I believed so, but could not be sure," Miller wrote.

Here is a somewhat shorter version of Jackson's Sept. 23, 2003, column:

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A New York Times story on Sept. 16, "Senior U.S. Official to Level Weapons Charges Against Syria," was the most important to appear in the past two months under the sole byline of Judith Miller. But her latest story subjected her reporting to new criticism, as it appeared that she was, once again, the "drop" of choice for a politically-motivated leaker.

There was no follow-up by Miller in the Times the next day. Rather, in an apparent attempt to balance her report, the Times Web site on Sept. 17 ran a longer International Herald Tribune story on Congressional testimony under the heading: "Despite Concerns About Syria, Powell Aide Opposes Sanctions." It revealed that "individuals who sought to publicize these criticisms (of Syria) had provided an advance copy to The New York Times."

Did Miller break credible hard news -- or only flack for hawks in the government (i.e. Under Secretary of State John Bolton), an all-too-familiar role for her over the last two years as she wrote a batch of stories supporting allegations that Iraq was developing and producing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons?

Months later, it is still a mystery as to what convinced both the Bush Administration and The Times (one cannot be sure which is the chicken and which is the egg regarding the WMD hysteria) that Saddam was still loaded with such weapons on the eve of the war.

When I interviewed military officials and journalists located in Iraq regarding the conduct of Miller during her latest quest for WMD, they did not mince words: "Nobody could stand her." She had an "imperious manner." "She's lucky we didn't shoot her." "She wore a uniform." "She had an exclusive deal with the Pentagon" -- which undoubtedly caused resentment all around.

There would seem to have been no better-qualified American reporter than Miller to follow the hunt for WMD in Iraq. However, Miller's journalistic product, and not just her personality and methods, became the most criticized of the war (with the exception of Geraldo Rivera) and the succeeding occupation.

There is some irony in New York Times' Baghdad correspondent John Burns' pronouncement (E&P Online, Sept. 15) that "there is corruption in our business," when he then proceeds to illustrate the underreporting of Hussein's crimes against Iraqis before the war but fails to comment on the over-reporting of administration falsehoods and half-truths in hyping the WMD threat posed by Iraq -- by his own newspaper.

The real problem: Miller had a virtual monopoly in reporting on WMD in "the newspaper of record." Here we get to the most disturbing thought of all. Did Times' editors under Howell Raines make a conscious decision to have one of their stars regularly report the administration line on WMD in Iraq, without serious challenge other than by Times columnists and editorials? [In other words, "flood the zone."]

And did that reporter, believing in the same foreign policy agenda, use her stories to make more credible to the public the claims pertaining to the WMD threat, in cahoots with some Pentagon sources? This question has to be asked, given the long run in the Times' news pages of Miller's hyped accounts. She was not a passive recipient of leaks.

When Did Miller Fall Out of Bed?

After months of enjoying "embedded" status (and then some), Miller unexpectedly returned to Baghdad via Kuwait in the middle of the night in early June, military officials and journalists told me, but was denied permission to rejoin the weapons-hunting teams and was put on the next plane out.

According to a public affairs officer (PAO) on the scene, she sought an embed arrangement different from the "terms of accreditation to report" which she had originally signed. Most of her contacts had been replaced by new people from David Kay's Iraqi Survey Group (ISG). Col. Richard McPhee, commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force in Iraq, whose teams had been looking for evidence of WMDs in the spring, refused an interview with her.

Howard Kurtz's various revelations undoubtedly have impacted negatively on her already strained relations with the U.S. military in Iraq. "General Judith Miller" -- as Jack Shafer has dubbed her -- was accused by a half dozen officers of intimidating soldiers searching for WMD. An Army officer told Kurtz: "Judith was always issuing threats of either going to The New York Times or to the Secretary of Defense." Another charged: "She ended up almost hijacking the mission" of the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (META), which was charged with examining potential Iraqi weapon sites after the war.

Based on several negative comments by military personnel to me, it is unlikely that Miller will again be given such unique access to those in the hunt, or that they will even talk to her. An e-mail message to me from her PAO sergeant escort regarding a three-week trip with META in April stated: "She did not have a SECRET clearance." She was "high maintenance and came to the field badly prepared. The problem I had with her was that whenever other members of the press showed up, which they did as embeds from other units or as unilaterals, she would insist that I get rid of them and that the 75th's story was her story, exclusively. She didn't seem to have any idea that the Army needed as much coverage of the 75th's mission as possible and that excluding everyone else was detrimental to the credibility of what the 75th was trying to accomplish.

"Never mind that we didn't find a damn thing ... She could not understand why Michael Gordon, covering the war at ground force headquarters, could have his stuff read and cleared at any time of the day or night while she had to wait. She would talk about the 'news cycle' and how important it was, and threaten me or my boss with the wrath of the NYT or her buddies up at DoD."

Team leader Navy Cdr. David Beckett of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in a brief phone conversation, sarcastically dismissed the idea of her "supposedly having some sort of clearance." However, Colonel McPhee, the overall task force commander, is known to have said that Miller was "cleared at the secret level." Regardless, it was generally believed and commonly said in the field that Miller was cleared for information classified "secret." Either she pulled off a hoax, or a very unusual clearance for a journalist was granted by some Pentagon authority.

Barton Gellman of the Washington Post spent one day on the scene with Miller, accompanying a nuclear survey team at the Tuwaitha site at the beginning of May. Some of the soldiers asked whether Gellman had a "secret" clearance, "as Judy did."

"I said I had no such clearance, but did have the commander's permission to be there," Gellman told me. "The team leader, Navy Cdr. Beckett, did talk to me" but Gellman was asked to step away from a conversation about a classified matter. "I heard Judy tell him, 'I'm cleared for that, but he isn't.'"