Judith Miller, the correspondent whose mistaken reporting on Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program routinely decorated the front page of the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq war, has launched a staunch defense of her work in a newspaper essay published Friday and in a forthcoming book.  The essay, published in the Wall Street Journal, describes Miller’s frustration at the “enduring, pernicious accusation that the [George W] Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war”.  Miller writes that both she and the Bush team acted in good faith out of an honest belief that Hussein had a functioning WMD program based on faulty intelligence and misleading sourcing. US soldiers who began to search the country after the March 2003 invasion of Baghdad discovered that no such program existed.  “No senior official spoon-fed me a line about WMD,” Miller writes in the Journal. “... The CIA repeatedly assured President Bush that Saddam Hussein still had WMD. Foreign intelligence agencies, even those whose nations opposed war, shared this view. And so did Congress.”  In arguing that Bush was a victim of faulty intelligence analysis, Miller ignores extensive reporting showing that the Bush administration was making plans for an Iraq invasion before the advent of intelligence used to justify it.  Declassified memos show that on the day of the September 11 attacks, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked aides to evaluate a plan to “hit SH @ same time” as Osama bin Laden. By November 2001, Rumsfeld was producing page-long outlines on the Iraq invasion with bullet points including “How start?” Bush began meetings in December 2001 with US army general Tommy R Franks and others to begin planning the war, according to the book Plan of Attack by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. As the war drew closer, other analysis suggests, the administration cherry-picked intelligence to suit a goal that was already in place: take Saddam out.  Many others involved in the sale of the war to the public have since apologized or expressed regret for their role. Former secretary of state Colin Powell, who pushed the flawed intelligence in a February 2003 speech before the United Nations, called the outing a permanent “blot” on his record and said it was “terrible” and “devastating” to realize his presentation of charts and satellite images and intelligence reports added up to a lie. The New York Times itself published a mea culpa for publishing Miller’s reporting as it did.  Miller’s front-page pieces included one, co-bylined with Michael R Gordon, that described a quest by Hussein to acquire aluminum tubes and ran under the headline “U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” It later emerged that Hussein was not seeking the tubes and they likely would not have been useful as “A-bomb parts”. The article referred to anonymous administration officials saying: “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”  Miller left the Times in 2005 and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  “There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them,” Miller writes. “The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong.”  But the “stubborn myths” that remain about the Iraq war, she concludes, are not the ones that lured the US to invade. They are the ones that continue to hang over her reputation.
Former New York Times reporter pens Wall Street Journal essay standing by articles she wrote before Iraq war verifying Saddam Hussein’s WMD program