Not fit to print

According to Todd Gitlin of Columbia University's school of journalism, a reporter in that position needs to ladle on an extra helping of doubt. "Independent corroboration is very hard to come by. Since she's been around, if you're aware that such echo-chamber effects are plausible, what do you do? I think you write with much greater skepticism, at times. I think you don't write at all unless you can make a stronger case when you are aware that people are playing you and spinning you for their purposes."

More than skepticism, though, Gitlin believes that news organizations have a responsibility to explain possible motivations for whoever is leaking the information to reporters. This can be done without identifying the source, he insists, and the Times, as well as a few other papers, is supposedly in the midst of adopting this protocol.

Miller's centrifuge story, although the most influential, was not the most egregious of her pieces. A story titled "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert" was based on a source she never met or even interviewed. For that story, Miller watched a man in a baseball cap from a distance, who pointed at the desert floor, and used that as a basis for filing a piece that confirmed the U.S. had discovered "precursors to weapons of mass destruction." According to her sources in the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha of the U.S. Army, this unnamed scientist from Hussein's WMD program had told them the "building blocks" of WMD were buried in that spot. Miller explained to me several months later that she had seen a letter from the man, written in Arabic and translated for her, that gave his claims credence.

"I have a photograph of him," she explained. "I know who he is. There's no way I would have gone forward with such a story without knowing who my source was, even if I got it from guys in my unit. You know, maybe it turns out that he was lying or ill-informed or cannot be independently verified."

The next day she was on national television, including PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," proclaiming that what had been discovered was "more than a smoking gun" and was a "silver bullet in the form of an Iraqi scientist." In an interview with Ray Suarez, Miller began using the plural "scientists" and implied there was more than one source. She gave the Bush administration credit for creating a "political atmosphere where these scientists can come forward." The story was trumpeted by conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and, once it was zapped off to regional newspapers via the Times wire service, it acquired even more dramatic purchase. "Illegal Material Spotted," the Rocky Mountain News blared with a subhead that distorted even more: "Iraqi Scientist Leads U.S. Team to Illicit Weapons Location." "Outlawed Material Destroyed by the Iraqis Before the War" was the headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Unfortunately, none of it was true.

In its editors note, the Times admitted Miller's "informant also claimed that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to Syria and had been cooperating with Al Qaeda -- two claims that were then, and remain, highly controversial. But the tone of the article suggested that this Iraqi 'scientist' -- who in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence -- had provided the justification the Americans had been seeking for the invasion. The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims."

Miller, who knew all of this already at the time I interviewed her, remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions.

"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."

Even though the Times has been, by its own admission, deluged with e-mails and letters criticizing Judith Miller and the paper's coverage of WMD, management has consistently defended her and refused to make statements about her work in impartial public forums. The only time there has been any hint that Miller's journalism was being deconstructed by editors was in a note posted on an obscure blog run by the paper's new ombudsman, Daniel Okrent. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote that a "fair amount of the mail on this subject seemed to me to come from people who had not actually read the coverage, but had heard about it on the cyber-grapevine." Keller, who was not executive editor at the time Miller was filing her questionable dispatches, said, "I did not see a prima facie case for recanting or repudiating the stories. The brief against the coverage was that it was insufficiently skeptical, but that is an easier claim to make in hindsight than in context." Rather than scrutinize his correspondent's work, Keller chose to base his assessment of Miller's WMD work on her past performances. Describing her as "smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless," Keller dismissed criticisms that her work was fatally flawed.

Until this week, the Times blamed everyone other than its own editors and reporters for its lapsed journalism. As late as May 21, in an editorial on the disgraced Chalabi titled "Friends Like This," the paper contradicted its own behavior and amplified its hypocrisies by an order of magnitude. "There's little to recommend Mr. Chalabi as a politician, or certainly as an informer. But he can't be made a scapegoat. The Bush administration should have known what it was doing when it gave enormous credence to a questionable character whose own self-interest was totally invested in getting the Americans to invade Iraq."

All true -- but the paper failed to point out that much of its reporting was dependent on Chalabi and Iraqi defectors provided through the exiled Iraqi National Congress, the same operation that was getting the Bush White House to gobble up its lies and distortions. Why weren't Times editors as intellectually disciplined on the subject of Chalabi when Miller and other reporters were trotting in with stories based on spurious allegations from the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi's merry band of defectors?

The fact that Chalabi was able to feed disinformation to America's most widely recognized publication and have it go relatively unchallenged as the electorate was whipped into a get-Saddam frenzy ought to be keeping Times editors awake all night. Nobody wanted a war against Iraq more than Ahmed Chalabi -- and the biggest paper in the U.S. gave it to him almost as willingly as the White House did.

The failures of Miller and the Times' reporting on Iraq are far greater sins than those of the paper's disgraced Jayson Blair. While the newspaper's management cast Blair into outer darkness after his deceptions, Miller and other reporters who contributed to sending America into a war have been shielded from full scrutiny. The Times plays an unequaled role in the national discourse, and when it publishes a front-page piece about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, that story very quickly runs away from home to live on its own. The day after Miller's tubes narrative showed up, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News went on national TV to proclaim, "They were the kind of tubes that could only be used in a centrifuge to make nuclear fuel." Norah O'Donnell had already told the network's viewers the day before of the "alarming disclosure," and the New York Times wire service distributed Miller's report to dozens of papers across the landscape. Invariably, they gave it prominence. Sadly, the sons and daughters of America were sent marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told and widely disseminated lie.

Of course, Judy Miller and the Times are not the only journalists to be taken by Ahmed Chalabi. Jim Hoagland, a columnist at the Washington Post, has also written of his long association with the exile. But no one was so fooled as Miller and her paper.

Russ Baker, who has written critically of Miller for the Nation, places profound blame at the feet of the reporter and her paper. "I am convinced there would not have been a war without Judy Miller," he said.

The introspection and analysis of America's rush to war with Iraq have turned into a race among the ruins. Few people doubt any longer that the agencies of the U.S. government did not properly perform. No institution, however, either public or private, has violated the trust of its vast constituency as profoundly as the New York Times.

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