Reply #4: Officials unaware of reporter's special status [View All]

[highplainsdem]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9730308/


Officials unaware of reporter's special status
NY Times' Miller wrote she had 'security clearance' for Iraq WMD reporting


By Jim Miklaszewski
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 4:01 p.m. ET Oct. 17, 2005


WASHINGTON — Officials from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon say they have no idea what New York Times reporter Judith Miller was talking about when she claimed to have been given a "security clearance" while she was embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Iraq in 2003.

In a first-person account of her recent testimony before a federal grand jury, published in the newspaper on Sunday, Miller wrote the Pentagon had given her "clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons."

According to the officials, they know of no instance or circumstance when a reporter has been, or would be, granted a security clearance and believed she would not have been given one when she was embedded with the unit that was tasked with finding Iraqi WMDs immediately after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials say they are continuing to check whether Miller had been granted a security clearance of any kind.

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