On this, the 100th birthday of George Orwell
The NY Times has yet another scandal about their journalistic ethics, this time over an embedded reporter in Iraq who virtually took command of a military unit and turned it ‘rogue’. So much for journalistic integrity and being objective, eh?
“New York Times reporter Judith Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials, prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a “rogue operation.”
More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi’s headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say.
Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a “Judith Miller team,” in the words of one officer close to the situation.
“This was totally out of their lane, getting involved with human intelligence,” said one military officer who, like several others interviewed, declined to be named because he is not an authorized spokesman. But, the officer said of Miller, “this woman came in with a plan. She was leading them… She ended up almost hijacking the mission.”