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Judith Miller

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Judith Miller (born 1948 in New York City) is a journalist for the New York Times. Since 1993, she has been married to Jason Epstein, a noted book editor formerly with Random House. A controversial figure, Miller has garnered both acclaim (a Pulitzer Prize), and criticism for her reporting on WMD claims which supported the Iraq War, and for her staunch defence of confidential sources related to the Valerie Plame scandal.

In July of 2005, Miller was sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of court by refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating a leak naming Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent. Miller had not written about Plame, but had reportedly been in possession of related evidence.

Iraq War

Miller has garnered both acclaim (including sharing a Pulitzer Prize), and criticism for relying heavily on sources friendly to the Bush administration such as Ahmed Chalabi. Miller's naïve over-reliance on anonymous high-level sources, critics say, biased her reporting and the testimony of the exiles has been called into serious doubt. It has been argued that the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened without Miller's speculative reporting.

Miller, who started at the New York Times in 1977, came under particularly heavy criticism for her reporting on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front page story quoted (unnamed) "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited (unnamed) "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."[1]

Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war." Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs "spotty," she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges.

Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Miller would later claim, in her article "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert", that Weapons of Mass Destruction had been found in Iraq. This again was widely repeated in the press with Miller going on the Jim Lehrer Newshour to proclaim it "more than a smoking gun" and a "silver bullet." Unfortunately, this story was also later found to be false.

On May 26, 2004, a week after the U.S. government apparently severed ties with Chalabi, a Times editorial acknowledged that some of that newspaper's coverage in the run-up to the war had relied too heavily on Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles bent on regime change. It also regretted that "information that was controversial [was] allowed to stand unchallenged." While the editorial rejected "blame on individual reporters," others noted that ten of the twelve flawed stories discussed had been written or co-written by Miller. [2]

Ms. Miller has reacted angrily to criticism of her pre-war reporting. In a May 27, 2004 article in Salon, published the day after the Times mea culpa, James C. Moore quoted her: "You know what," she offered angrily. "I was proved fucking right. That's what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved fucking right." This quotation was originally in relation to another Miller story, wherein she indicated that trailers found in Iraq had been proven to be mobile weapons labs. That too was later shown to be untrue.

On November 11, 2004, the Times published an obituary for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat written by Miller. Critics say it contained a number of factual errors with regard to historical context.

Miller was previously the subject of controversy when in 1986 she wrote numerous articles on Libya, thus contributing to a massive disinformation campaign on Muammar al-Qaddafi which was coordinated by Admiral John Poindexter of the Reagan administration.

In 2002, Miller shared in a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, awarded to the New York Times staff for their work profiling "the global terrorism network and the threats it posed."

 
Wikinews has related news:

On October 1, 2004, federal Judge Thomas F. Hogan found Miller in contempt of court for refusing to appear before a federal grand jury, which was investigating who had leaked to reporters the fact that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative. Miller did not write an article about the subject at the time of the leak, but others did (most notably, Robert Novak), spurring the investigation. Judge Hogan sentenced her to 18 months in jail, but stayed the sentence while her appeal proceeded. On February 15, 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld Judge Hogan's ruling. On June 27, 2005 the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

On July 6, Judge Hogan required Ms. Miller to serve her sentence at "a suitable jail within the metropolitan area of the District of Columbia." She was taken to a nearby Detention Center in nearby Alexandria, Virginia on July 7, 2005. Unless she decides to testify, or is released by order of Judge Hogan or a higher court, she will remain there until the Grand Jury session is over in October 2005. [3]

Paradoxically, in a separate case, Federal Judge Robert Sweet ruled on February 24, 2005 that Miller was not required to reveal who in the Bush government leaked word of an impending raid to her. Patrick Fitzgerald, the same prosecutor who had Miller jailed in the Plame case, had argued that Miller's calls to groups suspected of funding terrorists had tipped them off to the raid and allowed them time to destroy evidence. Fitzgerald wanted Miller's phone records to confirm the time of the tip and determine who had leaked the information to Miller in the first place. However, Judge Sweet held that because Fitzgerald could not demonstrate in advance that the phone records would provide the information he sought the prosecutor's needs were outweighed by a 'reporter's privilege' to keep sources confidential.

Journalist shield laws have been enacted in most states, but not at the federal level. However, those state laws vary widely but generally do not provide absolute protection and journalists may still be compelled to testify if they have been witness to a crime. The contradictory rulings in the two Miller cases and other federal courts, along with pressure from the media following Miller's incarceration, may lead the Supreme Court or Congress to provide clarification on this issue.

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