Miller Apologizes for Flawed WMD Stories, With Key Caveat

By: William E. Jackson, Jr. Choosing the BBC as the outlet, Judith Miller has apologized to the readers of The New York Times because her stories about WMD and Iraq turned out to be wrong. She made the "apology" during an exclusive interview for BBC Newsnight on November 30.

She said: "I am obviously deeply chagrined that I ever write anything that turns out to be incorrect. I'm deeply sorry that the stories were wrong."

However, as in the past, there was a big caveat. She defended her journalism, saying she was right to publish the stories and had done everything she could to verify the facts. Following the Bush White House, she put the monkey on the CIA's back: "I'm deeply sorry our intelligence community got it wrong. I am deeply sorry that the President was given a national intelligence estimate (NIE) which concluded that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and an active nuclear weapons program."

The ex-Times reporter also voiced concerns about the implications of the failure of intelligence for the wider, so-called War on Terror: "I think it's a terrible failure, it's a shocking failure, it's a deeply troubling failure, because if we didn't know about Iraq, what do we really know about the programs of Iran or North Korea or Syria or what al-Qaeda is up to?"