November 11, 2005
The deal announced by the New York Times Thursday granting
a severance package to its senior correspondent Judith Miller
and acceding to various conditions demanded by her lawyers represents
one more tawdry episode in the newspaper's deception of its
readers on the war in Iraq.
Both sides agreed to keep silent on the size of Miller's
golden parachute, but it is rumored to be in the high six figures.
One of the conditions of the settlement was reflected in the
pages of Thursday's Times in the form of letter published
on the newspaper's editorial page under the headline "Judith
Miller's farewell." It consists of a self-serving and
evasive defense of her record.
Miller wraps herself in the flag of the First Amendment, presenting
herself as a martyr in the struggle to defend freedom of the press
and the "right as a journalist to protect a confidential
source."
This is an important principle, and one cannot always pick
and choose the issue over which it must be defended.
It is one thing, however, to resist government coercion to
reveal the identity of a whistle-blower who has exposed official
malfeasance or to protect one who has risked his or her job in
order to provide the public with needed insight into affairs of
state that have otherwise remained hidden. It is quite another
to shield one of the most powerful men in Washington from prosecution
for criminal acts.
It is by no means clear who or what Miller was protecting in
her decision to go to jail for 85 days rather than answer questions
from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on her discussions
with vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, who now
faces criminal perjury and obstruction of justice charges.
The issue at stake - the deliberate leaking of the identity
of CIA operative Valerie Plame by Libby and others - was a
government attempt to punish a genuine whistleblower, her husband,
Joseph Wilson, who revealed that the administration had deliberately
lied about Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Niger.
During the period of the buildup to the Iraq war and the invasion's
immediate aftermath, Miller's articles in the Times
served as a conduit for government misinformation and lies that
were fed to the public about Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction."
The administration set out deliberately to terrorize the American
people with these non-existent weapons in order to compel acceptance
of a "pre-emptive" war of aggression.
Because of the Times's widely perceived status
as "paper of record," and even more so because of its
erstwhile reputation as a voice of establishment liberalism, Miller's
articles carried considerable weight, and were eagerly picked
up both by the administration and the mass media throughout the
country.
This was an enterprise in which she and Libby were ideological
soul mates and political partners. Her relationship with him and
other right-wing figures in the Bush administration had nothing
to do with the independent and even adversarial role that the
so-called Fourth Estate is supposed to play vis-a-vis top
government officials.
For years, Miller had functioned as kind of an in-house representative
of a definite political tendency that enjoyed barely concealed
support from the Times publishers and editors. This trend,
referred to widely as neo-conservatism, involved a confluence
of interests between right-wing American militarism and the Israeli
Likud bloc's right-wing Zionism in promoting a war with Iraq
and a broader campaign to impose Washington's hegemony over
the Middle East.
Her specialization - as she spells out on her new web site,
judithmiller.org - was "the Middle East, Islam, terrorism,
biological and chemical weapons and other national security topics."
Her intimate relations with the Republican right apparently
go back a long ways. In a profile of Miller, Washington Post
reporter Lynne Duke quotes former Times correspondent
Adam Clymer about an incident during the 1988 presidential campaign,
in which Miller, then deputy Washington bureau chief, called him
to demand that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis
be kept out of the Times.
Duke writes: "The story was too soft, she complained - and
said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President
George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he
was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen
the story or been told about it before publication." The
Post quotes Clymer as saying, "She had gotten too
close to her sources."
Miller claims in her letter to the Times that the principal
reason for her leaving the paper is "because over the last
few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times
reporter never wants to be." She adds that, even before
going to jail, she "had become a lightning rod for public
fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country
toward war," while acknowledging that "several articles
I wrote or co-wrote were based on faulty intelligence."
The readers of this letter are clearly meant to assume only
the purest motives on the part of both the Bush administration
and herself, and, presumably, that she was unjustly scapegoated
as a target for "public fury." In her rendition, it
was merely a matter of the government's "intelligence
failures" and her own articles based on "faulty intelligence."
But this was not a question of failure. On the contrary, together,
she and the government enjoyed a brief bit of success in promoting
an unprovoked war based upon lies. Intelligence was fabricated
for this purpose, and she herself played a significant role in
the process.
As it emerged in the aftermath of the invasion, Miller's
Times "exclusives" were based largely on information
provided by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader and convicted
embezzler who cemented close ties to the right-wing "cabal"
centered in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and Vice President
Dick Cheney's office. His supposed evidence was widely mistrusted
by US intelligence agencies, which saw him spreading false stories
in an attempt to promote a US invasion that he hoped would land
him in power.
The intimate collaboration between Miller and the government
in this venture became even more evident after she was dispatched
to Iraq as an "embedded" reporter with the military
unit tasked with the vain hunt for the Saddam Hussein regime's
WMD.
During this period, the Washington Post quoted military
officials as charging Miller with "hijacking" the unit,
using her close ties with top administration officials to intimidate
officers in the field. She served as a liaison between the unit
and Chalabi, while publishing more false stories claiming the
discovery of "mobile weapons laboratories" and other
supposed evidence of WMD that turned out to have no basis in fact.
Miller's collaboration with the government in this venture
was officially and formally sanctioned. As she herself wrote,
"The Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information
as part of my assignment." That is, her loyalties lay neither
with the newspaper nor its readers, but with the government and
its war aims.
In her letter, Miller also declares that she is "gratified
that Bill Keller, the Times's executive editor, has
finally clarified remarks made by him that were unsupported by
fact and personally distressing."
Keller's "clarification" was apparently a product
of the legal wrangling between Miller and the Times in
securing the deal that got her off the newspaper. It is an indication
of the sordid character of this agreement.
On October 21, under conditions of generalized outrage over
Miller's conduct within the Times's staff, Keller
had written a memo declaring: "But if I had known the details
of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more
careful in how the paper articulated its defense..."
The executive editor continued, declaring that a memo written
by another Times staff member, Dick Stevenson, "strikes
me just right: 'I think there is, or should be, a contract
between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the
paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally - but
only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her
end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself
in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards...'"
Yet, in cowardly retreat from this position, Keller writes
in a fresh email accompanying the deal to get Miller out that
the word "entanglement" in relation to Libby was "not
intended to suggest an improper relationship. I was referring
only to the series of interviews through which you and the paper
became caught up in an epic legal controversy."
This is patently false, a retreat that seems to have been extracted
from the Times editor in the paper's secret negotiations
with Miller and her lawyers. If "entanglement" meant
only interviews, than why did it affect the way in which the paper
defended Miller, and why was it followed by the reference to "legal,
ethical and journalistic standards?"
What this humiliating retraction clearly suggests is that the
Times has not only given Miller a clean bill of journalistic
health, but that it has made a binding promise never to write
anything unfavorable about her again. If this is the case, it
has effectively sealed off from the paper's readers and the
general public not only the role of Miller, but that of the Times
itself in helping to pave the way to war.
Keller became executive editor at the Times in 2003
as a result of the so-called scandal surrounding Jayson Blair,
a junior reporter who was discovered fabricating quotes and taking
material from other newspapers and wire services and presenting
them as his own reporting. The episode was the occasion for unrestrained
hysteria and institutional breast-beating, combined with an unseemly
personal vilification of Blair, whom the Times itself described
as "troubled."
Keller has written recently that it was because of the Blair
crisis that the newspaper waited a full year before admitting
that the stories it published on Iraqi WMD - the great majority
written by Miller - were based on false information.
In terms of the destruction of the Times's reputation,
Blair's conduct counts for nothing alongside of the role
played by Miller, with the newspaper's approval, now apparently
followed by a legally binding agreement to carry out a cover-up.
Miller was able to play the role she did only with the full
support of the newspaper's owners and editors. They knew
full well that the person that they assigned to a story that was
destined to pave the way to war was ideologically driven and wanted
that war.
In this, Miller and the Times only played the most prominent
role in what went on throughout the mass media, which abrogated
its essential responsibility to critically question the claims
of the government.
The claims now that the false news stories were the inadvertent
product of "faulty intelligence" are patent lies. A
decision was made within the media not to question the intelligence
and to promote war propaganda.
The World Socialist Web Site questioned the government's
story and persistently exposed the inconsistencies and fabrications
in Washington's claims about WMD. And we were not alone.
There were other critical web sites on the left that smelled a
rat and set out to expose the lie that was being foisted upon
the American people.
The Times, however, with its billions of dollars in
assets and its hundreds of reporters, rather than conduct its
own investigation, left the matter to Judith Miller, whose ideological
convictions and political connections left no doubt that she would
produce the "news" that the administration desired.
This decision flowed from the consensus within the American
ruling elite that a war to conquer Iraq and assert US control
over its vast oil reserves was necessary to promote the interests
of American capitalism. The owners and editors of the Times,
itself a major corporation, joined in this consensus, whatever
their reservations about the Bush administration's tactics
in launching the war.
Whatever deal the Times has concluded with Miller, these
issues will not be swept aside. There has been too much blood - 2,058
US soldiers are dead and over 15,000 wounded, while the Iraqi
people have suffered a bloodbath, with well over 100,000 civilians
having lost their lives.
The demand must be raised for a full and independent investigation
into how the American people were dragged into this illegal war,
including the role played by the media in making it possible.
Those responsible must be held politically and criminally responsible.
This demand must be joined with the demand for the immediate and
unconditional withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq.