Judy Miller by Richard Sale

The Jon Stewart Show is the favorite of all the shows my wife and I watch. Stewart’s view of life: his determination to reverence the facts, his intense desire to be free of cant or popular falsehoods,  his determination to be free of fad, his suspicion of the fashionable and the current, his determination to be truthful, no matter what the cost, make him a special delight for us.

Could anyone have deflated the pompous idiocy of the White House Correspondents Dinner with more deftness, or more skin peeling sarcasm than Stewart?  When you have CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer standing there in his tux, facing the TV cameras, saying, “I can’t believe that I am standing here with Jane Fonda," one makes the effort to suppress the urge to puke. (My language is vulgar, I realize, but then, so is Wolfie.)

I know Judith Miller, the disgraced The New York Times journalist. I knew her socially in the 1970s when she was dating Larry Stern, an editor at The Washington Post. We made friends there. Judy is very good looking, a virtue she is very aware of, and which she uses to great effect.  Men adored her. We used to have lunch and trade tid-bits but we were simply friends. She was a very hard worker, very ambitious and productive, and I always respected her until the advent of the 2003 war when she like Hillary Clinton,  were fed, spoonful by spoonful, the bigoted second hand nonsense originating in the white House --- the allegation that Saddam Hussein was developing WMD.  He wasn’t, and had not been since May of 1991, and the “intelligence community” knew it.

The ideal of the journalists with whom I have worked and have respected, is the reverence for facts, especially inconvenient facts.  All of us have tendencies, habits, deep rooted beliefs that, if not corrected prevent us from calmly and critically evaluating the information our sources give us. Reporters are a bit like bees that alight on different blossoms until we can come up with a mixture of truthful facts to be used in a story.

Miller seems to have forgotten that “intelligence” gathered under political auspices ceases to be “intelligence.” No political group, if sincere, can boast of its dispassionate detachment. The truth is that politics disfigures any attempt to get at the truth foils any dispassionate analyses. The aim of a political group is to enact its goals, but if it shoulders aside inconvenient facts, then you get calamitous disasters that no one had the courage to own up to afterward.

 I knew that there was no WMD in Iraq in 2003. I was by no means alone in the possession of that knowledge. At the time, I was working as the Terrorism Correspondent at UPI when the invasion occurred. Suddenly, Saddam was busily trying to nuke the world, plus he had welcomed Al Qaeda into his country, in spite of the fact that the Baathist leadership was secular, and the allegation was soon discredited. Judith seems have oblivious or willfully ignorant of the fact that the neocons, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas  Feith, Jim Woolsey, David Wurmser, Dick Cheney, etc, wanted a war with Iraq and that bringing about that war, was the goal of U.S. policy in the Middle East. By early 2002, I was aware that the U.S. military was withdrawing assets from Afghanistan and sending them to the Middle East for use in Iraq. Miller’s most fatuous term, one that she used over and over again in her interview with Stewart was “the intelligence community.  The intelligence community, she said, was the source of her mistakes in analyzing the Iraq conflict. She claims that told the intelligence community told her this, or told her that, and she had no choice but to repeat what she was told.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as “the intelligence community.” Or rather, that community is not a single entity; it is vast. There is the CIA, the DIA, the armed forces, NSA, all of whom have information, and one has to hunt like a hawk hovering over a field until you found the site where you could safely land.  Once there, you listen, you listen, and you listen, but above all, you compare versions -- the discrepancies between one version and another,  a different emphasis, and you absorb that do that without self-serving willfulness, or an impatience reach a conclusion because you want to duck the effort required to truthfully master the facts. If I knew that there was no WMD, which didn’t she?

Clearly, there were two camps when it came to WMD., those who believed that Saddam had them, and those that did not.  The people who believed in the myth of WMD were dogmatically impervious to logic or evidence. They were belligerent in their certainty. The head and founder  of Statfor, George Friedman, invited me to a lunch in New York just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to discuss his hiring of me for his organization. He had heard good things about me, he said. At one point, he asked about WMD: did I not believe that that Saddam had WMD? Friedman was certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Saddam has them. What did I think? I said bluntly, no, Saddam didn’t any WMD, and laid out my evidence. Suddenly I was disinvited to the lunch Friedman had set up. Since then, anything Friedman has written, I regard with suspicion.

Chalabi

In the interview with Stewart, Miller mentioned a man named Ahmad Chalabi, as the principle source on Iraq, the man who had led her judgment astray.  Miller bragged that she had been covering Iraq since 1978, and yet she chose to listen to Chalabi on the subject of WMD , a sorry choice that ended her journalism career in disgrace, fired from The New York Times after 28 years.

Who is Chalabi and why was he so nefarious?

On October 17, 1992, Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, put his worst foot forward. On that date, the Iraq dictator massed his farces a few miles north of the border of Kuwait.   President Clinton deployed 36,000 U.S troops to Kuwait backed up by a U.S. aircraft carrier armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles.   President Clinton, in a fury, had his finger on the trigger, and Saddam reluctantly stepped back. On October 27, more than four thousand guests from Israel, Jordan, and neighboring countries met under the blazing desert sun at Arava. President Clinton was launching a huge propaganda effort involving the CIA, DOD and other agencies in the U.S. government to support keeping pressure on Saddam.  According to a CIA source I interviewed, “There had never been an umbrella opposition organization before this.” He stressed that “the original impetus for the effort was not to  plan a coup at all. We wanted to bring credible people to speak out against Saddam to dramatize and publicize his abuses.”

One of the stars of this new anti-Saddam effort was one Ahmed Chalabi. He was known as brilliant, charming, engaging, and a liar by habit.  On May 11, 199l, CIA official Whitney Bruner left the US. Embassy in London to meet with Chalabi at his palatial flat there.  Chalabi had an unsavory past: he had headed the Petya Bank in Amman, Jordan’s third largest bank, until after Jordanian officials seized the bank because of questionable currency transactions, and he fled. After a time, Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for embezzling $60 million from the bank, according to former CENTCOM commander, Gen. Anthony Zinni.  Zinni told me “There were outstanding warrants for Chalabi in Lebanon,” for other dubious financial dealings.” Former CIA officials then told me that Chalabi was an Iranian agent, and that his bank in Jordan had “helped advance Iranian interests.” When Frank Anderson of the CIA was asked why they had tolerated Chalabi, since he was a proven crook, Anderson said lamely that Chalabi was “an excellent day-to-day administrator.”

But why would Judith Miller not know this? Why didn’t the “intelligence community” tell her what I was being told. Why did she not question or cross-examine.  Was there not competing information and versions that she should have considered? 

According to Tom Twetten, former the CIA’s former deputy of operations,  Chalabi headed an Iraqi opposition group called the INC, which was a creation of the CIA. In 1992, there were over twenty anti-Saddam groups in Vienna, and he said that Chalabi was soon hooked up to a PR firm called The Rendon Group, based in Washington. CIA officials told me that the INC had been absolutely clueless, until Rendon organized them.

Who is Rendon, you ask?

Rendon was John Walter Rendon, who then lived in a multimillion dollar home in the Kalorama area of Washington, D.C. close to the home of soon to be Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey, and worked on the presidential campaign of George McGovern in 1972.  He began consulting on foreign affairs after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Within six years, he had founded his own company with headquarters at DuPont Circle plus to other offices in Boston and London.  Rendon’s wife, Sandra Libby, was the sister of “Scooter Libby, the former indicted White House aide. In the late 1990s, after falling out with the CIA, Rendon “maneuvered to become a favorite tool of the administration of George W. Bush, obtaining some thirty-five Pentagon contracts, worth many millions of dollars, between 2000-2004, said CIA officials I talked to.

Bruner told me that the Rendon Group got the INC job because of what they had done in Panama, during the December 1999 invasion, producing propaganda to help oust Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega, a former $700,000 a year CIA employee. Rendon, who was a very slick business man, saw in Chalabi an unprincipled character like himself ,and according to Bruner,  from day one, Chalabi had made very clear that his basic interest had been “to drag us into a war with Iraq.” Ned Walker, former assistant secretary of State for the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, agreed,, telling me. “There is no doubt that Chalabi’s chief aim was to involve us in some low-intensity conflict with Iraq that would end in all-out war.”

And yet Miller used Chalabi as a source and seemed betrayed when she found the man wasn’t reliable. Had she taken leave of her senses? Didn’t she read?

From the beginning, the CIA knew that Chalabi’s INC has been penetrated by Iranian agents. “No one was concerned about the Iraqi penetration by Iran,” one former CIA official told me.  “We wanted Saddam to know that we were doing these things. It was basically a Rendon-type PR exercise – a sort of covert op done in public,” he said. Only the amount being spent on the operation was secret. The point was to raise the profile of the exiles, not to plan a coup to oust Saddam. “Chalabi was kept away from anything classified,” he said.

WMD Debates

In the 1990s, the CIA’s Directorate of operations had concluded that “Iraq had has no WMD. It has produced none since Operation Desert Storm,” (1991.)  That declaration has never been refuted. Of course, people who are assigned duties, don’t let a conclusion like that alone.  Unfortunately, those who had the best knowledge and the soundest knowledge of WMD were being edged to the margins of the issue. To the great and lasting discredit of the CIA, a rash and fractious manner began to prevail. A new species of dogma had arrived. “It was the WMD analysts the CIA got it completely wrong,” said a former agency operative. “There was a sort of momentum that built up.” He blamed a female agency analyst who “ferociously ignored anything that challenged her pet assumptions and unwarranted conclusions.”

The data from UN weapon inspectors inside Iraq was being misinterpreted, and suddenly what had been questions had now become answers. One UN inspector, Scott Ritter, saw an emerging tendency to the part of analysts to assume, for example, that “an unaccounted for VX nerve gas program (had actually become) an active program, and a potential to manufacture powered anthrax had become a de facto capability. At one point when Ritter had written a paper theorizing that if the Iraq has hidden some WMD materials, what was the quantity likely to be? Ritter’s document was a mass of supposition and hypothetical’s, not facts. When the CIA returned his document to him, the agency had rewritten it, and what Ritter had posed as questions, had been changed to flat statements of fact. The tension between Ritter and the agency would signal the outbreak of a vicious intestinal war that would rage without intermission until the 2003 war.

But in spite of so much sand being thrown about, there was nothing that reversed the earlier CIA’s estimate that “Iraq had has no WMD. It has produced none since Operation Desert Storm.” When Iraqi General Hussain Kamel defected, a CIA operator came out of the debriefing saying, “Saddam had destroyed all of his WMD in 1991. For one thing his economy was in bad shape, and one of the reasons he destroyed his stockpile was to be spared the expense of having to maintain them and moving them around.” That was what he told me.

Gen. Zinni, CENTCOM commander told me that “Saddam did have some VX shells and chemical weapons he gave to the sheiks who buried them in the desert” and they had been degraded and declared unusable.

That the issue of WMD  no longer mattered could be seen in the bombing of Iraq by the United States in 1999. Called “Operation Desert Fox,” it involved 650 bombers ad missile assaults against fewer than 100 targets during a seventy-hour period. The target list gave the lie to the assertion that the assault was directed at WMD. Only 13 targets hit were associated with Iraq’s supposed production of WMD  including biological, chemical and ballistic missiles. By contrast, 35 targets were destroyed because they were part of Saddam’s air defense system.

Gen. Zinni told me that “if Saddam had any WMD, it was only tactical stuff, old Soviet artillery rounds, and those things tend to degrade quickly.”

The real targets of the assault were Saddam’s inner circle.  For example, forty-nine of one hundred targets hit six palace strongholds including units of the secret police, Republican Guard, and transport organizations. Special barracks and units in  and around Baghdad or outlying provinces were hit. A key point: not a single bomb was dropped on the Iraqi Army, Gen. Zinni told me. Another key point: the Clinton refused to occupy Iraq.

So by the close of the decade, Saddam Hussein was a despised derided diminished figure, no longer a menace, merely a manageable nuisance.

A Skull with a Rampart of Brass 

The French writer Bruyere once said that, “There are some occasions in life when truth and simplicity are the best stratagem in the world.” Not so for the Bush administration. What they admired was what Saul Bellow called “the savage strength of the many.”  What drove their Middle East policies was an “eternal naïveté,” a fruitless attempt to set up American democracy in total ignorance of the history, wishes ad aspirations of the inhabitants of the region. Bush’[s mind was narrow and intolerant, and his vision of reordering of the Middle East. 

How could Miller, who boasted that she had covered Iraq since 1978, miss all this evidence, be oblivious to the meaning of Operation Desert Fox, or Clinton’s decision not to occupy. 

Bush reversed all this.  He was a very limited intellect, and since he knew nothing about the Middle East,  he presented to people like Dick Cheney and associates, merely a blank sheet to write on. 

But what about Miller? Apparently, she felt that belonging to the right group – the neocons -- implied the possession of every sort of virtue. It is my opinion that Judy was always alert to seize every advantage before it escaped her. Everything tempted her. She was always anxious for self-advancement by any means. One may blame her for her greed and ambition, her determination to turn things t her profit, but are common flaws. 

Other flaws more damning. Judy apparently had no capacity to frame alternative theories, no capacity to debate differing interpretations, no moral courage to resist what the people in power were telling her. You have to ask, was her mind so coffined by narrow, intolerant dogma that any competing knowledge or theories or judgments on WMD were brusquely discarded? Did her sense of belonging to the “in crowd” warp any capacity for self-examination and correction? Was she an addict of the pleasure of having her work highly applauded by the “in crowd whether it was factual or not? How could she not KNOW the truth of the WMD allegation?

Yet the most repellant, the most shocking feature of Miller’s interview with Stewart was Miller’s sense of still remaining invulnerable.  Chalabi had misled her.  She had the innocence of a freshly laid egg. She meant well. 

Ugh.

Comments

[turcopolier]

All

I have never found her to be attractive, but then, I have known some really good looking women. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

"It is the goat that ought like the grass." as the Persian saying goes.

Or as the French say: "Chacun a son gout."

[William R. Cumming]

Sorry Richard but on October 17th, 1992, Bill Clinton not yet President and his finger elsewhere than on a trigger.

[Richard Sale]

Thanks for catching a real stupidity. The year was 1998.

[Richard Sale]

The year was 1998.

[The Beaver]

WRC

Me thinks It was October 17 1998, a couple of week before the Iraq Liberation Act and 2 months before Operation Desert Fox ( with the Brits as allies)

[Laguerre]

OK, Judith Miller is discredited. But she has many successors, who are ready to do the same thing. Elizabeth Sly, for example.

[AndrewW]

“Nobody is driven in to war by ignorance, and no one who thinks he will gain anything from it is deterred by fear.” - Hermocrates of Syracuse

I'm not inclined to believe the self-serving rationalizations of ambitious individuals. People like Judith Miller don't have a problem with the original decision to invade Iraq. They just don't like how it turned out and wish to avoid any responsibility for the fallout their actions have wrought.

Oh well. Just another day in a collapsing empire.

[Allen Thomson]

An excellent article, which I will save. But could I suggest a bit of copy editing? That's a pain, but it does help.

[bth]

For what she did to my family. For what she did to my country. Damn her. She knew what she was doing and she did it anyway.

[Laguerre]

A woman should not be judged on her appearance. That should be left to women,who judge their own.

[Haralambos]

Richard and anyone knowledgeable,
Thank you for this. I was struck by this interview and the comments: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13754

In the comments, several folks contend that the US knew there were no WMDs and that is why they could go in without the risk of triggering them or hitting sites with them thereby exposing the region to the various types of fallout. I had not entertained that thought back in the day as I wondered what we were risking with all the bombing. My thoughts at the time included one that we were unleashing terror with Shock and Awe, almost a perfect translation for Aristotle's definition of the effect tragedy in the spectacle of the Greek theater of the day.

[walrus]

Thank you for your penetrating essay Mr. Sale. My Father, an old intelligence hand, observed that he hoped that the U.S. had better (secret) evidence than what they presented to the world before the invasion because it certainly didn't convince him.

As for Judith Miller, I suspect you are being too kind to her. She had the tools, intelligence and experience to produce a credible analysis yet she chose, as Col. Boyd is quoted on another thread, to choose the the path to fame, rather than truth, at the crossroads.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Richard Sale:

Was is the path of fame that she chose or was it partisanship for a policy that was intended to advance the interests of the State of Israel?

Do you know?

[turcopolier]

bth

Some here do not know that you lost a son in Iraq. Miller is unique among the neocons in that she paid for her crimes against the American people and humanity. her writing partner, Michael Gordon, still prospers at the NY Times. James Wolsey, Bolton, Frum, Ledeen, Wolfowitz and many, many more are doing very well and are signed up in depth as ME advisers to all the major 2016 campaigns. I may support Bernie Sanders. pl

[MRW]

Seems impossible that Miller would have missed this Steve Hedges article from the Chicago Tribune in 2002:
"U.S. pays PR guru to make its points"
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-05-12/news/0205120237_1_pentagon-work-rendon-group-office-of-strategic-influence

Or John MacArthur's book, "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," which I read in the mid-90s, and which knocked my socks off. It as a devastating read. Upon checking for the full name on Amazon, I see that MacArthur reissued the book in 2004 with a new preface on the 2nd Iraq War. How could she not know what was going on?
http://www.amazon.com/Second-Front-Censorship-Propaganda-1991/dp/0520242319
A review for the first book listed on Amazon is "Nothing less than an indictment of the American news media for dereliction of duty under fire." -- New York Newsday. And that referred to Operation Desert Storm (1990-1991).

You have more of a stomach than I have. I couldn't even watch her on The Daily Show. I wasn't about to give her a hit in addition to listening to tripe to sell her book.

[Larry Kart]

It's been brought up before, but perhaps not often enough: One key factor in Miller's dire journalistic behavior back then and in the Times' editorial hierarchy permitting/encouraging what Miller and Michael Gordon were doing was how frightened the Times was of being left behind at the station, so to speak, by the New Dominant Reality of the Bush administration. As Karl Rove has explained, stoking and exploiting this fear on the part of Times that it would be labeled once and for all as a debased liberal organ in a world were liberalism was on the run was definitively on the run was a carefully calculated strategy on the part of the administration; and Times editor Bill Keller went belly up for it, as did publisher Arthur Sulzberger, whose window into this brave new neo-con world was his good friend Tom Friedman. These guys just didn't want to be run over by what they believed was the juggernaut of History, especially when they saw a place for themselves alongside the driver's seat -- it's about as simple and ugly as that.

[MRW]

One of my all-time favorite books (not for the faint-hearted) is Robert Bechtold Heilman's "Tragedy and Melodrama."

In it Heilman describes the difference between the melodramatic and tragic casts-of mind, which he says defines a society or civilization. He says these perspectives define a man's thinking as well as the society at large.

Twenty years before George W Bush, he described the melodramatic cast-of-mind as one in which the [main character] perceives himself as completely whole, wholly good, and that everything that happens to him (or it) comes from without, whether that is good or evil. The melodramatic cast-of-mind sees the world as us against them, good vs evil, either for us or against us. A melodramatic society--this is not a pejorative, but descriptive, which Heiman takes 150 pages to explore---is young, unsophisticated, incapable of greatness in its decisions or undertakings, and its literature reflects that. Comedy is a melodramatic form as well, one that makes us laugh. Present day Israel embraces the melodramatic cast-of-mind.

The tragic cast-of-mind requires the attainment of self-knowledge, self-awareness, and eventual responsibility for one's actions. Always. Hellman laments in the early part of his book the common misuse of the word "tragedy" to describe catastrophic accidents or disastrous natural events: 'Tragedy on Highway 40', or 'Tragic Indian Earthquake Kills All Village Children'. He says it couldn't have been a tragedy because we have no way of knowing if the guy who died in the car accident was aware of what he did that led to his demise. Ditto the natural event no one saw coming. But the best part of this book is his description of how a society cannot accept tragic literature from its writers until it has matured and become advanced. It cannot become a great civilization without self-realization and responsibility. I don't do Heilman's arguments justice here. He makes a comment somewhere in the book that the day we can accept a Broadway play in which a Nazi guard becomes a sympathetic main character (a tragic character) will be the day we will have advanced as a society.

[Alī Bābā]

Mr. Sale, LTG Tom McInerney (USAF ret) when asked why Iraq back in early-November 2001? He said "Unfinished conventional military business"...

It had zero to do with WMDs..

Mr.Sale, ask Tom why he and Brit Hume did the Fox News program " Target Iraq" using 1992 weapons storage locations?

[MRW]

Sanders hired the brilliant Stephanie Kelton as Chief Economist for the Senate Finance Committee this past January. If he wins, and she goes with him into a position that has real teeth, the US will change overnight, and I am not being hyperbolic. To know who she is search for her talks on youtube. Effing brilliant, logical, and able to reduce complex macro- and micro-economic principles to simple analogies Joe Q Public can understand.

[MRW]

"Some here do not know that you lost a son in Iraq."

What a heartbreak, bth. What an unfillable hole has been driven through your life.

[turcopolier]

All

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2014/06/drinking-the-koolaid-w-patrick-lang.html

pl

[Jack]

Mr. Sale

It should be repeated many times that our mainstream media would put the Soviets Pravda to shame in the quality of their deceit. It also should not be forgotten that the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent destabilization of Iraq that has led to ISIS was a bipartisan project. The current sole Democrat in the presidential nomination stakes was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion. Obama has continued that tradition. And every Republican candidate will do the same.

It's easy point fingers at neocons, likudniks, or other groups but the reality is that the majority of Americans were in on the project. Let's face it we want to believe fantasies and our hubris knows no bounds.

[Ex-PFC Chuck]

Couldn't agree more re Stephanie Kelton. And the whole Econ Dept. at UMKC, for that matter..

[Ishmael Zechariah]

bth,

My deepest condolences. I know words can do nothing for such a loss.

Ishmael Zechariah