Judith Miller

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New York Times reporter Judith Miller has played a key role in promoting both U.S. wars against Iraq.

Miller to Testify
After serving 85 days in federal detention, Miller has finally agreed to testify for Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald before a grand jury Friday, September 30, 2005, "about her conversations in July 2003 with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby," once again throwing a "damaging spotlight" on the White House, "whose credibility has been undermined" in the criminal probe into the leak which outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, the Associated Press reported.

Miller and Valerie Plame

In August 2004, Miller was subpoenaed by a Washington grand jury investigating the leaking to Robert Novak and other journalists that Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was an undercover CIA officer. [1]

In October 2004, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan found Miller in contempt for refusing to provide evidence to a grand jury on who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to the Robert Novak last year. Hogan sentenced Miller to 18 months imprisonment but she remained free until an appeal was heard. Her appeal to the Supreme Court was unsuccessful. Miller was researching a story on Plame but in the end did not write a story on her role as a CIA agent.

In July 2005, after Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper agreed to testify about his sources, Miller was jailed for the duration of the grand jury investigation. [2]

Miller and Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald - Part 1

On April 6, 2004, Josh Marshall reported how U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago "had quite aggressively investigated another Bush White House leak in late 2001 and early 2002. Fitzgerald had been investigating three Islamic charities accused of supporting terrorism -- the Holy Land Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and the Benevolence International Foundation. But just before his investigators could swoop in with warrants [December 14, 2001], two of the charities in question got wind of what was coming and, apparently, were able to destroy a good deal of evidence.

"What tipped them off were calls from two reporters at the New York Times who'd been leaked information about the investigation by folks at the White House.

"One of those two reporters was Judy Miller." The other was New York Times reporter Philip Shenon. [3]

Marshall's point in April 2004 wasn't that "the White House did something else wrong," in fact, he wrote, he was "told that in this case the White House really hadn't done anything improper at all."

However, "Fitzgerald was pissed and apparently went after them very aggressively -- and this for a case in which," he was told, "there really wasn't much to go after," which "might be something to keep in mind when figuring how the Plame investigation might play out." [4]

Miller and the Gulf Wars

During the first U.S.-led war in the Persian Gulf, Miller co-wrote a book with Laurie Mylroie, titled Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.

Miller and Mylroie have both been clients of Eleana Benador, whose PR firm has represented many leading pro-war figures that have appeared prominently on television and in other public venues. She has also worked closely and uncritically with Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, in developing her reports on Iraq. In a May 2003 e-mail message, Miller stated that Chalabi "has provided most of the front page exclusives on [alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction] to our paper."

Miller played an important role in promoting the presidential team's agenda on Iraq. Indeed, she wrote the first article, entitled «Threats and Responses : The Iraqis ; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts», on Saddam Hussein's WMD programme, mentioning "aluminium tubes" which could be used for nuclear weapons. That was on September 7, less than two weeks after Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered the first speech in which he presented Iraq as Washington's next target. [5]. It is therefore possible to think that she played a role in the public relations campaign that was led by the Bush administration on Iraq, directed by Andrew Card.

In June 2003, Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz noted that "Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials, prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a 'rogue operation.' More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say. Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a 'Judith Miller team,' in the words of one officer close to the situation." [6]

The links of Judith Miller with the Pentagon are not new. In 1986, she wrote numerous articles on Libya, thus contributing to a massive disinformation campaign on Khadafi which was coordinated by Admiral John Poindexter. Bob Woodward has written a major article in the Washington Post on this strategy.

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