Judith Miller: Hearsted on Her Own Petard (General Judy's in the brig)

[norml]

July 18, 2005

Judith Miller: Hearsted on
Her Own Petard
General Judy's in the brig –
and justice is served
by Justin Raimondo


When William Randolph Hearst – the newspaper publisher who put the yellow in "yellow journalism" – sent the artist Frederick Remington to Cuba in the 1890s to illustrate articles on an alleged revolt against Spanish rule, Remington and his fellow journalists ran up against a slight problem: "There is no war," Remington wrote to his boss. "Request to be recalled." Hearst cabled in reply: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

Hearst's journalistic fulminations were the spark that set off the Spanish-American war and the conquest of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and they fed a spate of war hysteria that set off a convulsion of imperialism that didn't end until until America found itself bogged down in fighting a guerrilla insurgency in the Philippines that exhausted the moral and military limits of the nation and bade us step back from the abyss of Empire. If history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, then this Hearstian pattern can be fairly detected in the journalistic career of Judith Miller.

If any one source of government-generated disinformation could be pointed to as vitally important in the campaign to lie us into war with Iraq, then surely Miller – the New York Times reporter whose articles did so much to inflate the claims of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" – deserves some sort of award. Thanks to her tireless efforts, there was hardly a tall tale told by Ahmed "Hero in Error" Chalabi's U.S.-government-funded "intelligence-gathering" operation that did not make it into the New York Times, often on the front page. From the aluminum tubes that had nothing to do with nukes or other "weapons of mass destruction," to the secret biolabs in the basements of Saddam's palaces, to the string of nuke factories allegedly working overtime from one end of Iraq to the other, it all turned out to be a tissue of lies.

When the U.S. finally went into Iraq, and the search for those mythical WMD began, General Judy was in the forefront of the posse, personally accompanying the military team sent to conduct search operations – virtually "hijacking" the mission, according to one officer on the scene – and even wearing a military uniform. Her imperious manner while in Iraq with META (the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha) aroused considerable resentment, particularly on account of her brazen attempts to intimidate military personnel by threatening to go to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his deputy Douglas Feith if things did not go her way. And there is evidence that her relationship with the Pentagon was not all bluff and bluster. As reported in Editor & Publisher,

"Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon – an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it."


snip


http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6693

[Maddy McCall]

1. Recommended.

Kinda lays Judith out for all to read.

[Erika]

3. She's part of the "I've got mine" crowd and let others starve

One of the Bushies who love corporatism and wealth for the few.

[notadmblnd]

2. no wonder the little princess looked so smug

while driving off to jail.

[bluestateguy]

4. Reply

I would be willing to bet that many liberals would be willing to stand up for Miller if she were not such a ho for the Iraq war. You notice now how few if any liberals are coming to her defense.

I know this is a matter of national security and possible espionage, which could nail Karl Rove's ass to the wall, but somehow I think that many on the American Left would be willing to put that aside if she was not such a cheerleader for the Iraq War with all of her stories of non-existent WMD's. Instead, many on the Left, me included see her rotting in jail as a fair comeuppance, even if she's not there because of her fictional writings on Iraq.

We'll just spend our political capital on someone else.

[belle]

7. I did actually write a letter on her behalf, pre-jailing, at PEN's request

...you know, on general principles that the U.S. doesn't throw journalists in the clink.

now that she's in there, though, I can't say I have a whole lot of personal sympathy, and as for how I feel about the principles of the thing...well, clearly, muddy at best.

i dunno. maybe a fair karmic reward would be sending her to Abu Gharib, since she had a hand in creating it, really. just for a week or so. then she could write a "fair and balanced" report on her experience, perhaps.

[Voltaire99]

5. I enjoy Raimondo's rumblings.

And antiwar.com is proof positive that left, center and right can cooperate when our survival's at stake.

Of course, Miller's getting off light. Four months is nothing, and as Alexander Cockburn has noted, this little stint will only rehabilitate her rancid reputation by making her a First Amendment martyr.

[loudsue]

6. She's gotta be CIA - all the way.

We already know that the CIA has employees that are journalists. And Judith Miller, as CIA, would likely have had access to the fact that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent working on WMD.

If Judith Miller is so cozy with the very same guy in the DoD who is a war-obsessed PNAC'er (Rumsfeld), who had also been involved with Cheney in distributing WMD's all over the world, then she would know just who she needed to boot out of the running at the CIA to clear the way for Rummy and Dickie's operations.

Maybe Judith Miller IS the leak, likely encouraged by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove and crew.

George Bush had to know about it.

:kick::kick::kick: