Judith Miller (born January 2, 1948) is an American journalist and commentator who is known for writing about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, but her writings were later discovered to have been based on fabricated intelligence. She worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Times before joining Fox News in 2008.
Miller co-wrote a book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, which became a top New York Times best seller shortly after she was a victim of a hoax anthrax letter at the time of the 2001 anthrax attacks.Judith Miller (Oct. 14, 2001), "A NATION CHALLENGED: THE LETTER; Fear Hits Newsroom In a Cloud of Powder , The New York Times.
The New York Times determined that several stories she wrote about Iraq were inaccurate, and she was forced to resign from the paper in 2005. According to commentator Ken Silverstein, Miller's Iraq reporting "effectively ended her career as a respectable journalist".Ken Silverstein (Aug. 15, 2013), Anatomy of an Al Qaeda “Conference Call” , Harper's. Miller defended her reporting, stating "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." She published a memoir, The Story: A Reporter's Journey, in April 2015.
Miller was involved in the Plame Affair, where Valerie Plame was outed as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spy by Richard Armitage after Plame’s husband published a New York Times op-ed casting doubts on claims that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium from Africa. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal that her source in the Plame Affair was Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Later, she contributed to the conservative Fox News Channel and Newsmax, and was a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.Alex Pareene (Dec. 30, 2010) "Judith Miller: From the Times to the nuts", Salon.
Early life and education Miller was born in New York City. Her Russian-born father, Bill Miller, was Jewish. He owned the Riviera night club in New Jersey and later, he operated several casinos in Las Vegas. Bill Miller was known for booking iconic Las Vegas performers. His biggest success was getting Elvis Presley to return to Las Vegas after initially being an unsuccessful booking. Her mother was a "pretty Irish Catholic showgirl."
Miller attended Ohio State University, where she was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1969 and received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. Early in her career at The New York Times bureau in Washington, D.C. she dated one of the newspaper's other reporters (and future investment banker) Steven Rattner. In 1993, she married Jason Epstein, an editor and publisher.
Judith Miller is the half-sister of Jimmy Miller who was a record producer for many classic rock bands of the 1960s through to the 1990s including the Rolling Stones, Traffic and Blind Faith.Jimmy Miller
Career
During Miller's tenure at The New York Times, she was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for its 2001 coverage of global terrorism before and after the September11 attacks. She and James Risen received the award and one of the cited articles appeared under her byline. With reprints of ten 2001 works.
Her writing during this period was criticized by Middle East scholar Edward Said for evincing an anti-Islamic bias. In his book Covering Islam, Said stated that Miller's book God Has Ninety-Nine Names "is like a textbook of the inadequacies and distortions of media coverage of Islam." He criticized her poor grasp of Arabic, saying that "nearly every time she tries to impress us with her ability to say a phrase or two in Arabic she unerringly gets it wrong... They are the crude mistakes committed by a foreigner who neither has care nor... respect for her subject." He concluded Miller fears and dislikes Lebanon, hates Syria, laughs at Libya, dismisses Sudan, feels sorry for and a little alarmed by Egypt and is repulsed by Saudi Arabia. She hasn't bothered to learn the language and is relentlessly only concerned with the dangers of Islamic militancy, which, I would hazard a guess, accounts for less than 5percent of the billion-strong Islamic world.
Anthrax hoax victim On October12, 2001, Miller opened an anthrax hoax letter mailed to her New York Times office. The 2001 anthrax attacks had begun occurring in the wake of the September11 attacks in 2001, with anthrax-laced letters sent to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and the New York Post, all in New York City, as well as the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, Florida. Two additional letters (with a higher grade of anthrax) were sent on October9, 2001, to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in Washington.
Miller was the only major U.S. reporter, and The New York Times was the only major U.S. media organization, to be the target of a fake anthrax letter in the fall of 2001. Miller had reported extensively on the subject of biological threats and had co-authored, with Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, a book on bio-terrorism, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, which was published on October2, 2001. Miller co-authored an article on Pentagon plans to develop a more potent version of weaponized anthrax, "U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits", published in The New York Times on September4, 2001, weeks before the first anthrax mailings.Miller, Judith "U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits" , The New York Times, September 4, 2001.
Islamic charities search leak Shortly after the September11 attacks, the U.S. government was considering adding the Holy Land Foundation to a list of organizations with suspected links to terrorism and was planning to search the premises of the organization. The information about the impending raid was given to Miller by a confidential source. On December3, 2001, Miller telephoned the Holy Land Foundation for comment, and The New York Times published an article in the late edition papers and on its website that day. The next day, the government searched HLF's offices. These occurrences led to a lawsuit brought by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,New York Times v. Gonzales, 459 F.3d 160 (2006). with prosecutors claiming that Miller and her colleague Philip Shenon had queried this Islamic charity, and another, in ways that made them aware of the planned searches.A brief analysis of the decisions in New York Times v. Gonzales and Miller v. Unitesd States/Cooper v. United States is at: Ongoing confidential sources cases, accessed October 31, 2009.
Iraq War At The New York Times, Miller wrote on security issues, particularly about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Many of these stories later turned out to have been based upon faulty information.NYTimes Editors (May 26, 2004), "FROM THE EDITORS; The Times and Iraq" , The New York Times (One of her stories that was not disproved reported that inspectors in Iraq "saw nothing to prompt a war.")
On September8, 2002, Miller and her Times colleague Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of "aluminum tubes" bound for Iraq. Her front-page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who said that, in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and [had] embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb".Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller (Sept. 8, 2002), "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts , The New York Times Miller added that
Mr.Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.
Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story in support of their position. As summarized by The New York Review of Books, "in the following months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration's case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it." Miller later said of the controversy
[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal.Michael Massing (Feb. 26, 2004), "Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq" , The New York Review of Books
In an April21, 2003 article, Miller, ostensibly on the basis of statements from the military unit in which she was embedded, reported claims allegedly made by an Iraqi scientist that Iraq had kept biological and chemical weapons until "right before the invasion." This report was covered extensively in the press. Miller went on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and stated:
Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun. What they've found is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand, and who has led MET Alpha peopleMET Alpha: Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha. A U.S. Army unit charged with trying to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, at the time to some pretty startling conclusions."Search for Evidence: Judith Miller Reports", transcript by PBS, April 22, 2003
There was strong internal dissent amongst other Times reporters regarding publication of the inflammatory, unsourced accusations, however, and that the military were allowed to censor it before it appeared. A week after it appeared, one Times insider called Miller's piece "wacky-assed" and complained there were "real questions about it and why it was on page 1."Off the Record , New York Observer, Sridhar Pappu, April 28, 2003. Retrieved January 29, 2019.
On May26, 2003, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post reported on a Miller internal email sent to John Burns, the Times Baghdad bureau chief. In it she admitted her source regarding the alleged WMDs, according to Seymour Hersh writing for The New Yorker, was none other than Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which alleges Pentagon officials passed on to Miller, despite the Central Intelligence Agency disagreeing with its content. Her Times editor, Andrew Rosenthal, criticized Kurtz for its release.'Scoops' and Truth at the Times – What happens when Pentagon objectives and journalists' needs coincide , The Nation, Russ Baker, June 5, 2003. Retrieved January 24, 2019.
A year later, on May26, 2004, a week after the U.S. government apparently severed ties with Chalabi, a Times editorial acknowledged that some of the paper's coverage in the run-up to the war had relied too heavily on Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles, who were bent on regime change. The editorial also expressed "regret" that "information that was controversial [was] allowed to stand unchallenged." However, the editorial explicitly rejected "blame on individual reporters." "sampling of articles published by The Times about the decisions that led the United States into the war in Iraq, and especially the issue of Iraq's weapons"
On May27, 2004, the day after the Times mea culpa, James C. Moore quoted Miller in an article in Salon: