Miller time again

First things first: Guy Baehr is the chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists that is giving Judy Miller a 1st Amendment prize next week. This is his email: gbaehr@spj.org. This is his official address:
Guy Baehr
Assistant Director
Journalism Resources Institute
Rutgers University of New Jersey
4 Huntington St.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071

I’ve written him to tell him that I think that the award stinks. I’d urge others to let Mr. Baehr know what this award says about the standards of professional journalists. Surely there are writers for KBR Techtalk, Haliburton’s inhouse newsletter, more deserving of the prize.

Second: although, as an old fan of closing the CIA down permanently, I have a hard time getting too lathered about betraying CIA assets in Africa – in fact, given the CIA’s record in Angola, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Tanzania, etc., etc., and I even find it wonderfully inspiriting that the rightwing is adopting the tactics of the Yippies with regard to that poisonous agency – there is no reason to be blind to what Judy Miller is, how she has operated at the NYT, and what it says about the NYT itself.

What Judy Miller is is an advocate. That in itself is not wrong. Any journalist is an advocate for something, some point of view. But there are thresholds between being an advocate and losing your integrity. The trajectory of Miller's agon reminds me the story of the disbarred lawyer who was the subject of Janet Malcolm’s book, The Crime of Sheila McGough. McGough was hired by a man accused of various business frauds. In the course of defending him, he became more than another case to McGough – she became passionately attached to his cause, much to the bewilderment of those around her. And in her passion, she allowed him to use her office as a transit point for cash transactions. Eventually, not only was the client imprisoned, but McGough was too, as an accomplice.

Usually the rap on Miller begins with her outrageously bad reporting on the WMDs. I think it should, instead, begin with her partnership with Laurie Mylroie, with whom she co-authored “Study of Revenge.” This is what Peter Bergen has said about Mylroie:

“It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".

Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.

The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."

Mylroie vision of Saddam Hussein’s evil sway doesn’t stop with the 1993 bombing:

“She has said that Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef, the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 were "the work of Bin Laden and Iraq". An investigation uncovered no connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence against al-Qaida.”

So: the NYT let a woman who has gone on record in a best seller as claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11 run the story about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. It is odd that they just didn’t turn over the front page to Paul Wolfowitz and get it done with.

If, to use the phrase of the network around Ken Starr, there were “little elves” pushing us into this stupid, misbegotten invasion, one of the little elves is certainly Miller. Her role in trying to blacken Wilson’s name did succeed in one respect: it pretty much paralyzed the NYT’s reporting on the kind of scandal that, once upon a time, the NYT was very good at. According to the NYT itself:
"Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.

Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said."

In fact, her 85 days in prison took a nice little chunk out of the news cycle in which it has usually been NYT's role to play a leading part. Taking a bullet for your side is something you do, if you are a believer. That the NYT management has been as close to Miller’s side as the House of the Romanovs was to Rasputin shows that the NYT badly needs a new editor in chief, new blood in the Washington D.C office, and constraints that make sure that star reporters with obvious agendas don't use their paper space to promote these agendas, and their institutional weight to suppress the criticism of these agendas.