It's Miller Time

As suggested by an anonymous contributor below, I mousied over to Arianna's very latest latest and read this about the incarcerated New York Times' Judith Miller's unusual reporting during the invasion of Iraq. Miller, to the uninitiated, is the journalist whose WMD coverage contributed to the White House's case for war.

Take her involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagon’s Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting down Saddam’s WMD. As extensively reported by both (the Washington Post's Howard) Kurtz and New York Magazine’s Franklin Foer, Miller’s time with the unit was highly unusual.

First, there was the fact that she landed the plumb assignment in the first place. It would give her first dibs on the biggest story of the war… the hoped-for reveal of Saddam’s much-touted WMD (with much of the touting done by Miller herself and her special sources). Was this the reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting?

Foer cites military and New York Times sources as saying that Miller’s assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a “Judith Miller team.” Another officer said that Miller “came in with a plan. She was leading them… She ended up almost hijacking the mission.” A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.”

If this is true, it explains why Miller is sitting in jail protecting her sources, while Time Magazine's Matt Cooper is out free along with the syndicated columnist who actually broke the Valerie Plame story, thereby outing her as a CIA operative, Bob Novak.

I still hate that sleaze bucket.

More Plame-outs here.

Comments

[MoDuv]

Huffington's pieces are merely respun material she picks up piecemeal from others.

For readers keenly interested in the actual mechanics of the machinations behind the Joe Wilson/anti-WMD types targeting op, check out a real Bush resistance partisan journalist's snakes 'n ladders account of how even Rove is being used as a smokescreen, the true scoundrels behind the scenes being Cheney/Perle/Chalabi et al.:

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6677

The Writer is Justin Raimondo:

"...This isn't about Rove.

It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.

The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect themselves, "laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller, one of their favorite conduits) and Bush operatives – Rove...."

[Maz]

Toni,

Say, a pimp hung around a Greyhound bus depot preying on runaway
teens. Say, the pimp "recruited" some as prostitutes by using a combo money, food, shelter, "affection" - and free drugs as an inducement.

Say, he obtained his addictive crack from a dope dealer under surveillance by a narc squad; and say, "our" dope dealer was busted in the very act of selling the pimp the crack used to enslaved the runaways he was prostituting.

If the dealer - and only the dealer - was arrested, while the pimp was left free to continue to ply his "trade," it would, I imagine, make a few eyebrows cock. For "pimp" read Bob Novak in
his pivotal role in the outting of the CIA secret agent Valerie Plame.

-Maz

[Adam Daifallah]

Huffington's dispatches on Miller are long on gossip and innuendo and short on facts.

In 2003 I spent some time with MET Alpha in Iraq when Judy was on a break in the US. I found the MET Alpha guys to be paragons of professionalism. They worked hard hunting for weapons and did so to the best of their ability. They may not have found stockpiles but they did recover artifacts stolen by Saddam Hussein's intelligence service and a lot of intelligence documents.

Those supplying the anonymous quotes about Miller's influence on MET Alpha are just jealous. Who cares if she was embedded with them because of her past reporting on weapons? Put the accuracy of her reporting aside -- she was clearly an expert on that subject. It was her beat.

Sure, she may have had info that was of use to the unit, but again, who cares? What was she supposed to do? Keep it to herself and not help them, thus lessening her chances of getting a great scoop for herself?

I also saw no evidence of any inappropriate relationships between her and any of the unit's members. Of course they were friends - if you spent that much time with a small group of people in a war-torn country you would be too. She was also not the only reporter with access to the unit. I know of at least two others who spent time with them -- myself, and David Kay, who was then a consultant for NBC News and who later went on to be the Chief Weapons Inspector.

I find the sniping at Miller unfortunate and, frankly, sad. I also find it highly distasteful that all this is going on while she is unable to defend herself. Recall that JUDY IS IN PRISON. If this is the kind of thanks a journalist who chooses to go to jail to protect press freedoms gets, remind me never to do it.

The only reason people are going after her is because she is an independent-minded reporter and not your typical left-wing poster child. If this were happening to anyone else Huffington and Zerb would show nothing but support.