Judy’s Silver Bullet

Puttering around I came upon this paper (pdf) that Judy Miller delivered to the Aspen Institute’s 2003 symposium called “In Search Of An American Grand Strategy For The Middle East” just days before she accidentally met up with Rootin-Tootin’ Scooter in Jackson Hole. It’s not particularly revealing — not even one mention of the roots or the turning. It’s only notable for its almost embarrassing incoherence, in which she tries to strike a neutral analytical pose but can’t seem to help slipping in her belief that those darned weapons just must have existed! Even as she pretends to be skeptical of the Bush Doctrine she says that our mission in Iraq has been successful because we’ve managed to scare the Mid East and Europe into doing our bidding.(The Tom Friedman “Our Guy’s Crazier Than Your Guy” theory.)

Despite the superficially balanced tone, she gives her little neocon self away in numerous small ways. For instance:

Absent profound reform, the nation’s six intelligence agencies, as currently structured and staffed, are unlikely to be able to detect such sophisticated, deeply hidden WMD programs. Given its record on the former Soviet Union, India, Pakistan, and Iraq, relying mainly on the CIA for good WMD intelligence seems ill-advised.

No matter how wrong the CIA eve was, they were never as wrong as Judy’s neocon pals who are now operating faith-based intelligence agencies under hacks and war criminals. But that’s another story.

One thing is clear, though. Relying on Judy for good journalism is definitely ill-advised:

The military should also continue the policy of embedding journalists with weapons hunting units and urge international organizations to do the same. For the U.S., the presence of journalists would help avoid charges of having planted incriminating evidence against a proliferator. It would also help keep such units and international agencies honest. Yes, the embedding experiment was problematic in many ways, but it was important in building Administration credibility and public support for such capabilities.

Clearly it’s journalists’ jobs to build Adminstration credibility and public support, so this is obviously a good idea. And lord knows that Judy has fulfilled her duty on that count. But Judy Miller seems to have some sort of conginitive dysfuntion about her own reporting. When Judy was embedded, “keeping the unit honest” was hardly her highest priority:

In “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert” (Page One, April 21) Miller disclosed that she agreed to 1) embargo her story for three days; 2) permit military officials to review her story prior to publication; 3) not name the found chemicals; and 4) to refrain from identifying or interviewing the Iraqi scientist who led Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha to sites where he maintained Iraqis had buried chemical precursors to banned chemical weapons. Although Miller didn’t talk to the scientist, the military allowed her to view him from afar. She writes, “Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried.”

According to MET Alpha, the scientist also said Iraq had sent unconventional weapons technology to Syria, had cooperated with al-Qaida, had recently focused its WMD efforts on research and development, and had destroyed WMD equipment just days before the U.S. invasion.

The next day on the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Miller described the unnamed Iraqi scientist as not just the “smoking gun” in the WMD investigation, but the “silver bullet … who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand, and who has led MET Team Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions. …”

But Miller’s silver bullet tarnished overnight. The next day in the Times, she reported the military’s new “paradigm shift” from finding WMD to locating the people behind them. Then Miller abandoned the remarkable findings of her April 21 scoop. The silver bulleted “Iraqi scientist” and his “precursor chemicals” vanished from her reporting after her April 23 dispatch. (She reprised some of his allegations and described how he made contact with American forces.) By May 7 she was writing about MET Alpha’s search not for WMD but for an ancient copy of the Talmud! The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman reported May 11 that the leaders of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha is a part, had found nothing and were leaving Iraq. At a May 13 Pentagon press briefing, 101st Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus downgraded to “theory” status the allegations the Iraqi scientist allegedly made to MET Alpha about destroyed WMD.

Judith Miller’s writing and thinking is illogical and internally inconsistent. Her testimony before the GJ was too. (As a reader pointed out to me, why did she agree to refer to Libby as a “Hill Staffer” if she wasn’t writing a story?) She has almost no self-awareness.

How on earth does someone this vapid become an “expert” on national security issues for the New York Times?

Update: Christorpher Dickey writes a very illuminating analysis of Judy’s writing and the state of modern journalism, here:

Judith Miller takes good notes, but she doesn’t always know where they come from. That was one of the first lessons I learned about her when we were both based in Cairo 20 years ago, she for The New York Times and I for The Washington Post.

[…]

For some reason none of us had a tape recorder, so on the flight back to Casablanca we compared our notes from the one interview we’d had with a Moroccan general a few hours before. We wanted to be sure the phrases we’d scribbled down were accurate. But there was a problem. Judy had many more quotes in her notebook than I and another reporter had in ours. And Judy’s were much better. Then I realized why. I’d done a lot more homework on that particular story than she did, and I was asking much more detailed questions. She’d written them down, and now she thought they came from the general, but many of the quotes actually were from … me.

[…]

Judy’s great talent as a reporter is in gaining access. Full stop. She doesn’t always know what she has when she’s got it, and she isn’t always good at analyzing what she’s heard when she hears it. Indeed, that may be one reason so many very high level sources—kings, princes, dictators, presidents, politicians—have enjoyed confiding, through her, so many supposed scoops and secrets published in The New York Times.

All those who fret about the damage done to journalism and freedom of the press done by Fitzgrald’s investigation ought to ask themselves whether that ship didn’t sail some time ago. And they should ask how much Judy’s kind of reporting has contributed to it:

The righteous response is that such stories should not be made public until we can report them from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s what Craig Pyes believes, and one of many reasons he wrote a scathing memo to the Times editors back in 2000, when he was forced to team up with Judy on a reporting project about Al Qaeda that eventually won a Pulitzer. “I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller,” he wrote in the memo, which recently leaked to The Washington Post. “I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her … She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies.” Worse still, she had “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

That was in 2000.

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