Judith Miller
BA, Barnard College* 
MPA, Princeton University
We have badged Judith Miller a “Disgrace to [Her] Profession,” but that’s only correct if her profession is defined as “journalist.” If, however, you choose to define her profession as “right-wing flack,” then she’s doing a heck of a job.
The young Miller, already known for her raging career hunger and turbocharged story pursuit, was hired by the Washington bureau of the august New York Times in the late 1970s to help the Gray Lady compete with the Washington Post, then fresh from its Watergate triumph. Over the decades Miller proved to be a hardworking reporter, covering a number of beats (often returning to the Middle East and terrorism), cultivating many sources, and giving her bosses what they wanted. That included a Pulitzer, shared with colleagues, for a January 2001 series on al-Qaeda. Her reporting put her in contact with many of the neocon types who infested the George W. Bush administration. This came in handy after September 11, 2001: Miller had great access to the schemers who, even before bin Laden struck the United States, were planning to invade Iraq. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, of course, but the attack gave the Bushies nearly all the cover they needed.
And, almost single-handedly, Judy Miller gave them the rest. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Times front page was home to many a Miller scoop about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Her info, much of which turned out to be false, often came directly from the neocons or their pet Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi; her stories were among the most powerful weapons of mass deception in the administration’s propaganda arsenal. Many Americans were convinced that somehow getting rid of Saddam would… well, who knows what it was supposed to accomplish. But 9/11! Plus oil! Whatever. The crowning moment of the Miller-neocon operation went like this:
1. Vice President DICK CHENEY’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby (Yale BA, Columbia JD), slips Miller and Times reporter Michael Gordon the factoid that a shipment of aluminum tubes was seized on its way to Iraq. The tubes are supposedly used in the enrichment of nuclear materials; Saddam needs them for the nuclear weapons he’s absolutely definitely building.
2. On Sunday, September 8, 2002, the tale is presented in the form of a Miller-Gordon scoop on the front page of the Times with the headline “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.”
3. Now the genius part. On the same day the story appears, top members of the administration—CHENEY, DONALD RUMSFELD, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice—fan out to the Sunday talk shows and cite the story to justify the invasion of Iraq.
As the New York Review of Books said, the tubes became “a key prop in the administration’s case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it.” Six months later: the Iraq invasion. Mission accomplished, Judy!*
That war, as you surely know, was a moronic, pointless, and utterly misbegotten disaster from which the world may never recover. As we said, most of Chalabi’s and the neocons’ “intelligence” about Saddam’s WMDs was false. Ergo, since these were Miller’s prime sources, most of her reporting was inaccurate. One salient example: The aluminum tubes were not for building nukes.
Because Miller was a scoop machine and had highly placed, albeit dishonest, sources, the Times was reluctant to reassign her to the mass transit beat, or business, or obituaries. But in May 2004, shortly after the Bush administration tossed Chalabi overboard, the paper went so far as to admit that some of its reporting had relied too heavily on him and other liars. It refrained from dissing any of its reporters, but finally, in October 2005, the Times public editor all but admitted that a lot of Miller’s work had been “inaccurate.” Shortly afterward, she exited the paper.* Since then she’s practically made a career of arguing, counterfactually, that history has proved she was right and her critics wrong.* Who employs her now? One guess. Go on. Try. You’ll never g—Oh. Yeah. Right. Fox News.
A final note. In November 2015, after ISIS terrorists killed 130 innocent people in Paris, Miller took to Twitter. She didn’t apologize for her role in creating the conditions that led to the attack; that’s not her way. Instead, she wrote: “Now maybe the whining adolescents at our universities can concentrate on something other than their need for ‘safe spaces’…”
We wonder what the students of Barnard and Princeton have to say about this esteemed alumna who, upon learning of the massacre, criticized them.