Judy Miller refused to accept the Times party line which INSISTS that Bush and Cheney FABRICATED data in order to go to war with Iraq.
It is looking more and more like the CIA actually delivered poor intelligent data that everyone from the executive branch ( both Clinton and Bush administration) and Congress ( witness the speeches made by every single Senator and Congressman from Kerry, to Gore to Waxman ) thought was evidence that Saddam had WMDs.
We need to remind ourselves that NOT ONLY Bush but also, the Senate Intelligence Committee of which John Kerry himself was a mmeber and privy to intel info, ALL believed the information the CIA gave to them.
The CIA overestimated Saddam's WMD capabilities and of course, our leaders both in the White House and in Congress interpreted intel data TAKEN TOGETHER Pessimistically.
The NY TIMES however, wants to make you and I believe that ONLY Bush, acting with malice and mis-interpreting and deliberately lying, interpreted the intel data provided by the CIA, to mean that Saddam had WMDs. The fact is, the CIA provided poor information which was interpreted in the same way by almost everyone who had access to the info.
Since Miller refused to toe the NY TIMES line ( i.e., Bush is SOLELY to blame and acted with Malice ), she is being ostracized for this.
At least thats the way I see it.
I have to say that I believed that Saddam had such weapons, and I spent much of the time leading up to the Iraqi phase of the war in an HQ where I had access not only to CIA and DIA assessments but on the raw intelligence which underlay them. I can't go into detail about what it all was, but it was very broad-based and utterly convincing.
My tentative conclusion is that Saddam or his generals mounted the second largest deception plan in history (after Operation Fortitude in 1944) in order to create the impression he had WMDs, particularly chemical agents.
Why? I don't know. Maybe Saddam thought that it would scare us off an attack. Maybe Saddam thought he had the arms too, and his generals and/or sons were deceiving him.
I can say categorically that if anyone in the intelligence community believed that Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical weapons and active laboratories working nuclear and biological arms, that person did not write or disseminate his opinions.
CIA National Intelligence Estimates are normally so weasel-worded to be utterly effing useless. Only when they are certain do they take any position at all. The position they took has been widely reported.
We were had, all up and down the line.
That said, the war was, and is, not about WMDs in stockpiles. (WMDs were one of nine (IIRC) issues of concern to us -- the asshat, Saddam, was firiong at our recon planes daily).
Iraq was different. France has WMDs. So does Israel, South Africa, Russia, Pakistan, England and China, and nobody is talking about invading those places even though some are allies and some not. The missing ingredient in those nations that are not trusted with WMDs is adult leadership. Even a nation that longs for a new Napoleon, or a dictatorship half-full of crazies (Pak) or a brutal oligharchy hooked on the crack of slave labour (China) has the sense to give grown-ups the keys to the magic toybox.
So we wrestled the keys away and found out most of the toys were gone. It doesn't matter, Saddam stil has to sit in the corner till his people do him justice, which I presume to be hanging, although it's their call.
Twenty-five million people are free of an appalling, odious dictatorship, and in the ozone generated by all that neon, it was a mistake. To the people of the Times, all those weeping women digging with their hands in the sand of the mass graves for lost sons and husbands, well they don't count: why, they're not our kind, don't you know.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
The NYT are disgusting liars in their own right. They are trying to pretend that Judith Miller and the so-called liars in the Bush admin were the only people in the world who believed that Iraq had WMD's, and that the whole case for war hinged upon the Niger yellow-cake story. It's a flat-out lie. I've long known that that the NYT editorial board were morons; now I know they are also unprincipled scum.
You have excellent eyesight.