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April
23, 2003
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April 25,
2003
CounterPunch Diary
The
Decline and Fall of American Journalism (Part LXV): the Case
of Judy Miller
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
As a million Shi'ite pilgrims streamed toward
Karbala earlier this week, shouting "No to America, no to
Saddam, no to tyranny, no to Israel!" (slogans recorded
by a reporter for Agence France Presse) can't you just imagine
the plash of complacent 'I Told Him So's' from the lips of George
Bush Sr., on the phone to Brent Scowcroft and other members of
the old gang like Bush Sr.'s Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger,
who recently took audible pleasure in telling the BBC that "If
George Bush [Jr.] decided he was going to turn the troops loose
on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about
fifteen minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now
even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can't get
away with that sort of thing in this democracy."
Until Judith Miller's piece showed up
on the front page of the New York Times on April 21, I'd thought
the distillation of disingenuous US press coverage of the invasion
came with the images of Iraqis cheering US troops in the Baghdad
square in front of the Palestine Hotel on April 9 as they hauled
down Saddam's statue. I know the world has moved on, and now
we're wondering if Saddam is putting up his Vargas girls with
thumbtacks on some motel wall in Minsk, but let's make record
for posterity that the April 9 Baghdad demonstration was a put-up
job, a fake from start to finish.
Remember, the photos of the statue going
down, the flag on Saddam's face, the cheering Iraqis, were billed
as the images that showed It Was All Worthwhile, up there in
the pantheon with Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the raising of
the US flag on Iwo Jima and the news film of the Berlin wall
going down. Obviously, there were plenty of Iraqis in Baghdad
delighted at the realization that the Age of Saddam was drawing
to a close (though it turns out Baghdad will probably be run
by the same cops, the same bureaucrats, the same torturers, all
now Ba'ath Party members who taken Saddam's picture off their
office walls and are proclaiming their fealty to the free market).
And probably there were some Iraqis prepared to wave at Saddam's
conquerors riding in on their tanks. All the same, the clamorous
masses in the square never existed.
I've yet to see the full image reproduced
in any mainstream US newspaper, but I have seen photographs on
the web of the entire square when that statue was being pulled
down. In one small portion of the square, itself sealed off by
three US tanks, there's a knot of maybe 150 people. Close-up
photographs suggest that the active non-US participants were
associates of Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the exile group that rode
in on the back of those US tanks, the Iraqi National Congress.
(Go to www.counterpunch.org/statue.html
and see for yourself.)
So here, concocted by Pentagon or CIA
news managers, we had a "virtual" demo in front of
the Palestine Hotel, where the international press was housed.
The "event" was obviously a huge political plus for
the Bush Administration and gave Americans back home the false
tidings that their troops were being greeted as liberators. Predictably,
the US media were somewhat coy in offering the news, not long
thereafter, that US troops had shot at least ten in a crowd in
Mosul that shook their fists instead of offering flowers. Promote
a lie, and it's sometimes not long before that lie comes home
to roost.
As for the Weapons of Mass Destruction,
their non-appearance has become a huge embarrassment for both
Bush and Blair. Last Sunday's British Independent carried the
following huge frontpage banner headlines: "SO WHERE ARE
THEY, MR BLAIR? NOT ONE ILLEGAL WARHEAD. NOT ONE DRUM OF CHEMICALS.
NOT ONE INCRIMINATING DOCUMENT. NOT ONE SHRED OF EVIDENCE THAT
IRAQ HAS WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN MORE THAN A MONTH OF
WAR AND OCCUPATION."
The days passed, and each excited bellow
of discovery of WMD caches on the road north from Kuwait yielded
to disappointment. Then came Judith Miller's story in the New
York Times. The smoking gun at last! Not exactly, as we shall
see. But first a word about the reporter. If ever someone has
an institutional interest in finding WMD in Iraq it's surely
Miller, who down the years has established a corner in creaking
Tales of Terrorism, most of them bottle-fed to her by Israeli
and US intelligence.
It was Miller who served up Khidir Hamza,
the self-proclaimed nuclear bombmaker for Saddam, later exposed
as a fraud. It was Miller who last year whipped up an amazing
confection in the Times, blind-sourced from top to toe, about
a Russian biowar scientist (sounding suspiciously like Lotte
Lenya in From Russia With Love, and since deceased) ferrying
Russian smallpox to Saddam. At least the Times's headline writer
tried to keep things honest this time. "Illicit Arms Kept
Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert."
What did who say and who did the asserting?
It turns out that Miller, in bed with the entire 101st Airborne,
had been told by "American weapons experts" in a group
called MET Alpha that they have been talking to "a scientist
who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program,"
that the Iraqis destroyed chemical weapons days before the war
and that "Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons
and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that
more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda."
Now isn't that just what you'd expect
him to say? And if you were an Iraqi scientist looking for quick
passage out of Iraq to the USA, isn't that just what you would
say, in a series of unverifiable claims all fragrant to American
nostrils?
Miller does concede that the MET Alpha
group would not tell her who the scientist was, would not allow
her to question him (assuming it wasn't a "her," maybe
Lotte Lenya in a later incarnation) or do anything more than
look at him from a great distance as he stood next to what was
billed to Miller as a dump for "precursors" for chemical
weapons. (Come to think about it, it's probably a recycling facility
for used cans of Roundup).
Furthermore, she wasn't allowed to write
about the unnamed Iraqi scientist for three days, and even then
US military censors went over her copy line by line. What convenient
disclosures this Iraqi allegedly offers, tailor-made to buttress
Rumsfeld's fist-shaking at Syria and Bush and Powell's claims
that Saddam and Osama bin Laden worked hand in glove, a claim
that depended originally on an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in
The New Yorker last year. At least Goldberg talked to the man
claiming Osama/Saddam ties, although he made no effort to check
the man's "evidence," subsequently discredited by less
gullible journalists.
With Miller we sink to the level of straight
press handout. I guess Miller, who's apparently writing a sequel
to her last book, on bioterror, needs to stay on the good side
of MET Alpha. That's the problem with embedfellows. Just one
kiss is all it takes. And talking of embedfellows, I can't imagine
Laura Bush is too happy about Iraq's national library being torched,
even if the prime loss was a bunch of manuscript Korans, and
what good Christian would care about them? As the joke went around
the Pentagon after Franklin Graham held Good Friday services
in the chapel normally used by the DoD's Muslims, the scratches
Graham found in the floor were the Devil's fingernails.
An Anecdote about
Judy Miller in Earlier Days
As a useful introduction to the history
of onshore Kuwait, also as a literary curio, readers might hunt
up a slim volume called Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf, by Peter
Mansfield, ready for publication, just before Saddam's 1990 invasion,
by Hutchinson, a British subsidiary of Random House. Back in
July of 1990, Alberto Vitale, head of Random House, went to London
to attend a sales conference of the Random Century group, which
includes Hutchinson.
Hutchinson had available two books about
Iraq and Kuwait. One, Republic of Fear, by an Iraqi pseudonymously
known as Samir al-Khalil, pseudonym of Kanan Makiya, and these
days an aide to Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who said
the noise of bombs falling on Baghdad was music to his ears),
did not excite Vitale. His enthusiasm was reserved for Kuwait:
Vanguard of the Gulf, which had--aside from Mansfield's amiable
account of the emirate--the allure of a guaranteed purchase of
several thousand copies by the government of Kuwait.
Clapping executives of Random Century
on the back and counseling them to aim for more of this type
of publishing, Vitale returned to New York. Saddam forthwith
launched his invasion, thus annulling the promised bulk purchase
of the book, priced at £14.99, which now jammed the warehouse.
Belatedly Vitale's attention shifted to al-Khalil's Republic
of Fear, a savage portrait of Iraq under Saddam. U.S. rights
had been bought by University of California Press, which had
sold the paperback rights to Pantheon, ironically part of the
Random House group, for a tidy sum.
Scanning Republic of Fear, Vitale found
it excessively scholarly and lacking the color and punch that
a Judith Krantz or Jacqueline Susann might have brought to the
theme. He announced to the folks at Random Century that he was
summoning to England a fine writer who would work with al-Khalil
to produce a version of Republic of Fear more accessible to the
common man and woman. Judith Miller, a former New York Times
Middle East correspondent and then the deputy editor of the Times
media column, duly clambered off the plane at Heathrow, only
to be told by al-Khalil that he did not care to partake in this
refashioning of his work.
No problem, said Miller; she would stay
up all night and by dawn descend with the synopsis of an entirely
new work on Iraq on which they could collaborate. She went about
her business, but when dawn came al-Khalil examined the fruit
of her labors and exclaimed that this was indeed nothing but
a remake of Republic of Fear. Exclaiming in her turn that she
was not just a rewrite girl, Miller swept off.
On September 7, 1990, the Times carried
a media item headlined "Crisis in Iraq Inspires Spate of
Books." The story by Roger Cohen underneath this energetic
headline-while Miller was still deputy editor of the media page-showed
that, as a word meaning something resembling a torrent, "spate"
had come down in the world, here connoting just two books. One
was Republic of Fear and the other a quickie to be put out by
Times Books, an imprint of Random House, by none other than Judith
Miller, writing with Laurie Mylroie, a Harvard professor specializing
in Middle Eastern studies. In earlier years Mylroie was scarcely
the foe of Saddam that she later became.
To his friends al-Khalil/ Makiya confided
news of an encounter he later had with Miller, whose demeanor
was unfriendly and conversation replete with suggestions that
aside from her own influential position at The New York Times
she had powerful friends and that al-Khalil's future literary
endeavors would not necessarily flourish this side of the Atlantic.
(Miller confirmed she'd discussed a book project in London with
al-Khalil. She described him as a "friend" and said
she wouldn't discuss the content of their conversations or where
and when she might have met him later, since this could endanger
his life. For its part, Hutchinson confirms that prior to the
invasion, the emirate put down cash in part payment for the bulk
purchase of Kuwait, which one U.S. publishing informant said
at the time involved 15,000 books.)
Miller covered the invasion crisis nobly..
On October 1, 1990, for example, the Times published under her
byline a most affecting story about Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah's
speech to the U.N. General Assembly the previous Thursday. It
was of a tone surely gratifying to the Emir and to his public
relations advisers, Hill & Knowlton, who no doubt be billed
the offshore government of Kuwait for hundreds of thousands of
dollars for due diligence in persuading The New York Times to
decorate Miller's story with such subheads as "Wrapped in
Dignity, the Emir Manages to Dazzle."
Today's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
When Young Mothers Die in Combat
Chris
Floyd
Desolation Row: Bush's Barbarians Teach
by Example
Marjorie
Cohn
Tax the War Profiteers
William
Lind
The Fourth Generation of Modern War
Dave Marsh
Nina Simone: Freedom Singer
Binoy
Kampmark
Malayasia's America: the War on Iraq
David Vest
Who's Looting Whom?
Standard
Shaefer
Super Imperialism: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Andrew
Rodman
Lawn Poem
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/23
Website
of the Day
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
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