Not fit to print

How Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq war lobby used New York Times reporter Judith Miller to make the case for invasion.

By James C. Moore

May 27, 2004 | When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors note published Wednesday. The editors wrote:

"We have found ... instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been ... In some cases, the information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge ... We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight."

The editors conceded what intelligence sources had told me and numerous other reporters: that Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House and had set up a situation with Iraqi exiles where all of the influential institutions were shouting into the same garbage can, hearing the same echo. "Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one."

The reporter on many of the flawed stories at issue was Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and authority on the Middle East. The Times, insisting that the problem did not lie with any individual journalist, did not mention her name. The paper was presumably trying to take the high road by defending its reporter, but the omission seems peculiar. While her editors must share a large portion of the blame, the pieces ran under Miller's byline. It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources, and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she was told.

And of all Miller's unreliable sources, the most unreliable was Ahmed Chalabi -- whose little neocon-funded kingdom came crashing down last week when Iraqi forces smashed down his door after U.S. officials feared he was sending secrets to Iran.

Even before the latest suspicions about Chalabi, a reporter trying to convince an editor that the smooth-talking exile was a credible source would have a difficult case to make. First, he was a convicted criminal. While living in exile from Iraq, Chalabi was accused of embezzling millions from his Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan. Leaving the country in the trunk of a car reportedly driven by Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, Chalabi was convicted in absentia and still faces 22 years in prison, if he ever returns. Evidence presented in the trial indicated Chalabi's future outside of Jordan was secured by $70 million he stole from his depositors. Chalabi maintains his innocence and has suggested his prosecution was political because he was involved in efforts to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.

Even more damning, Chalabi was a player, an interested party with his own virulently pro-war agenda -- a fact that alone should have raised editorial suspicions about any claims he might make that would pave the way to war. He was also a highly controversial figure, the subject of bitter intra-administration battling. He was the darling of Richard Perle and his fellow neocon hawks, including such ardent advocates of the war as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, but was viewed with deep suspicion by both the State Department and the CIA. State in particular had turned its back on Chalabi after his London-based Iraqi National Congress spent $5 million and an audit was unable to account for most of its expenditure.

One might have hoped that American journalists would have been at least as skeptical as the State Department before they burned their reputations on Chalabi's pyre of lies. But even the most seasoned of correspondents and the most august of publications, including the Times and the Washington Post, appear to have been as deftly used by Chalabi as were the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Bush administration.

Miller, however, is the only journalist whose reliance on Chalabi became a matter of public debate. An e-mail exchange between the Times' Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns, and Miller was published in the Washington Post. In the exchange, Miller said Chalabi "had provided most of the front page exclusives for our paper" and that she had been "reporting on him for over ten years." Miller later told the New York Review of Books that she had exaggerated her claims to Burns in order to make a point. However, in an earlier interview with me, Miller did not discount the value of Chalabi's insight.

"Of course, I talked with Chalabi," she said. "I wouldn't have been doing my job if I didn't. But he was just one of many sources I used while I was in Iraq."

Miller refused to say who some of those other sources were, claiming their identities were sacrosanct. Nonetheless, her reportage appeared to reflect Chalabi's intelligence gathering and his political cant. At his behest, she interviewed defectors from Hussein's regime, who claimed without substantiation that there was still a clandestine WMD program operating inside Iraq. U.S. investigators now believe that Chalabi sent these same Iraqi expatriates to at least eight Western spy agencies as part of a scheme to persuade them to overthrow Saddam. An unknown number of them appear to have stopped along the way to speak with Miller.

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