New Revelations Highlight Miller Ink Stain at 'NY Times'

By: William E. Jackson Jr. This past Monday, The New York Times published "U.S. and Iraq Spar Over Who Should Run Corruption Inquiry Into Oil-for-Food Program," a jointly-authored piece by Susan Sachs and Judith Miller. Sandwiched into the story was the observation that, beyond the political question of who should run such an explosive investigation, there was the practical question of access to thousands of documents that remain in the hands of individual Governing Council members "like Ahmad Chalabi ... a former exile who returned with the strong backing of many Bush administration officials."

Was this an attempt by Judith Miller to distance herself from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader with whom she had such a close working relationship during the long period of her misreporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? For Chalabi had been not only the favorite of the Pentagon to govern Iraq; he was Miller's as well.

That day, the Times also reported Secretary of State Colin Powell's confession on "Meet the Press" the previous day, near the close of a staff-interrupted interview with Tim Russert, that he and the CIA had been fooled by intelligence sources who provided wrong and "deliberately misleading" information about Iraqi WMD -- such as presented to the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. Not included in the paper's brief account was any mention of the fact that the Times itself had been a conduit for such bogus information through Miller's reporting at home and abroad, which heavily relied upon INC defectors either offered by Chalabi or the Bush administration.

Jack Shafer in Slate subsequently argued that Powell has been more accountable than the paper of record: "Note to Bill Keller: Colin Powell Admits He Was Misled About WMD. Why Can't the Times?" Chalabi and his "heroes in error" had played Miller and The Times for "suckers," as I observed in a March 10 column here.

Enter Knight Ridder

Also this past Monday, Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, a member of the team that had first reported the Pentagon was paying the INC hundreds of thousand dollars per year for intelligence, filed a story titled: "White House Released Claims of Defector Deemed Unreliable by CIA."

It constituted further proof that at the highest levels public and Congressional support had been manufactured for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by publicizing the claims of Iraqi defectors, in this case after the defector was "fluttered" in a lie detector test and had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The defector, Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the Iraqi Survey Group later took the man -- a Kurd, incidentally -- back to Iraq, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with conventional weapons. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons.

The White House had used this defector's claims in a background paper, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance"-- nine months after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as unreliable. Released on Sept. 12, 2002, in conjunction with a speech the president delivered at the UN, it was billed as the first major compendium of "specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions over the past decade." The paper is still available on the White House Web site.

The lead footnote in the propagandistic document just happened to reference a Dec. 20, 2001, front-page article in the Times by, guess who, Judith Miller ("Secret Sites: Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms") that was based on an interview with the defector in Bangkok, Thailand, days after he was turned over to the U.S.

She described a civil engineer who worked on renovating secret biological, chemical and nuclear weapons facilities. "Mr. Saeed's account gives new clues about the types and possible locations of illegal laboratories, facilities and storage sites that American officials and international inspectors have long suspected Iraq of trying to hide," Miller wrote. Yet, CIA and DIA experts had already dismissed the proffered defector as unreliable, based on the showing of deception in a CIA-administered polygraph. Intelligence officials had debriefed him before he was made available to the Times.

Who Is to Blame?

The Knight Ridder revelations raise, once again, the nettlesome issue of where the U.S. government left off and the Times began, or vice versa, in making the case for Iraqi possession of WMD. There remains the more disturbing question of whether a Times reporter served as a cat's paw for the neo-con policymakers in Washington with whom she had close ties.

Yesterday, the Times scored a scoop of its own in Richard Oppel's "U.S. to Halt Payments to Iraqi Group Headed by a Onetime Pentagon Favorite." Noting that Ahmad Chalabi had played a crucial role in persuading the Bush administration that Hussein had to be removed from power, Oppel wrote that the INC leader had since become a lightning rod for critics of the administration "who say the United States relied on him too heavily for prewar intelligence that has since proved faulty. ... Internal reviews by the United States government have found that much of the information provided ... before American forces invaded Iraq last year was useless, misleading or even fabricated."

The irony of this scoop appearing in the Times seems to have escaped the newspaper's editors.

There are investigations underway into allegations of corruption on the part of the INC. And it has been reported that Chalabi angered Washington by refusing to hand over Iraqi intelligence files that its militia seized after the Pentagon allowed it into Baghdad shortly after the city fell.

A struggle has been raging within the administration over Chalabi's post-invasion role, with his champions in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office; and his detractors in the uniformed military, the CIA and the State Department.

Who at the Times protects Miller from the consequences that should have flowed from the highly irresponsible reporting she did on WMD in 2002-2003? At several national newspapers, not to mention the Times itself in the Jayson Blair case, severe penalties have been imposed on bad journalists for reporting untruths. However, they were not involved in the glaring conflicts of interest -- among other negatives -- that characterized Miller's performance.

An industrious star reporter holding onto her job is one thing. But just what is the problem that keeps executive editor Keller from ordering a lengthy editors' note correcting what she wrote based on tainted sources in the pages of the Times? She was up to her eyeballs in hyping disinformation resulting from a highly suspect intelligence operation run by a foreign exile group, which had penetrated the office of Cheney, and which actively suborned the entry of the United States into a misguided, and destructive, invasion of Iraq.