Judith Miller

Judith Miller (born 2 January 1948) is a controversial American journalist best known for her stint at the New York Times where in the lead-up to the Iraq war she published several frontpage stories that played a key role in selling the war. Along with the Australian, Paul Moran, she served as a conduit for Iraqi National Congress propaganda. Her career at the paper ended in disgrace after she was revealed to be involved in the Bush administration's campaign against CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a staunch critic of the war. She has since turned into a frequent contributor to Fox News, joined the neoconservative Manhattan Institute as a fellow, and as of 29 December 2010, signed on as a contributing writer to the conservative magazine Newsmax.

INC Connections

According to James Bamford:

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat."

Affiliations

• New York Times
• Iraqi National Congress - Miller liaised closely with the outfit and used it as a source for 10 of her frontpage stories.
• Fox News – Analyst
• Manhattan Institute - Adjunct Fellow
• Herzliya Conference (2008) - participated in a round table discussion entitled "The Challenge of Radical Islam".