I've heard many on the right say, "who cares about Miller, why all the fuss?" Sure, she's managed to gain more than her fifteen minutes, but her connection to current events cannot be overlooked, nor can the treatment being heaped on her by her former "friends" in the mainstream media.
Recently Miller sat down with the WaPo's Lynne Duke for a long interview covering the saga of "Miss Run Amok". The painted picture was certainly not flattering, and at times snarkish. Especially the innuendo about her personal life and professional desires.
But on page five she finally got to Miller's reportage of Saddam Hussein and AQ:
But in her reporting, there was something else on which Miller relied as much, if not more: her personal belief in the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the world.
It was personal, for she had been detained for a day by Hussein's security forces back in the 1980s, she says. And it was personal because, as she writes in her 1996 book on Islam, "God Has Ninety-Nine Names," an Iraqi source once told her "that I was on a very short list of writers who are considered the regime's 'eternal enemies.' "
Keep in mind Miller was one of a select few Americans who received a letter with white powder in 2001. It turned out to non-lethal. Ok, Miller continues:
"I had my own independent knowledge of Saddam Hussein. I was on record in 'Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf,' talking about this horrible regime and its use of chemical weapons against its own people. . . . I feared there was nothing he wouldn't do if he had access to such weapons. I was genuinely fearful of what he might do to American forces, to American installations in the Middle East and, if there was an al Qaeda link -- and I didn't know that and I never wrote that -- what he might do in the United States. My own reporting on Iraq made me fearful of Saddam Hussein."
And so fighting him, fighting his terror, became a passion. Fighting chemical and biological threats became a passion. Fighting al Qaeda became a passion.
The criticism has been that her personal contacts and ideology allowed for biased reporting and manipulation by adminstration strategists. I'm not discouting that, but check out this perspective regarding the digging prowess of other MSM reporters associated with the stories swirling around Miller. hat tip Instapundit
After all is said and done, Ms. Miller retains her passion about the threats she reported on:
"But I will make no apologies for my continuous commitment, my desire to pursue stories about threats to our country," she says emphatically, almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears.
This story is an illustration in revisionism, and is one among many that have tried to push the perception that the "real threats" were not people like Saddam, rather people like Miller and Ahmed Chalabi. It's a convenient way to gloss over past reporting failures conducted by just about every other MSM outlet from the 90s through the invasion by saying, "hey, look over there, it's Judy Miller". Case in point:
She was among the key journalists writing of the danger of Iraq's WMD in several articles that quoted Bush administration officials and made the case, now discredited, for the United States' war in Iraq. To be fair, Iraq's possession of WMD was the conventional wisdom of the pre-war period. The Washington Post was among the newspapers reporting that story.
But Miller's work stood out...
In other words, "we admit to getting it wrong, be she was wronger". As Miller has previously said (and the left has parroted in their own way from the get-go), Bush was going after Saddam regardless of whether the NYT or WaPo agreed.
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