The Nation's Russ Baker is the latest to take a crack at Judith Miller's questionable reporting in his superb 'Scoops' and Truth at the Times.
Miller responded to Baker's query about Ahmad Chalabi being an unnamed source for Miller's WMD articles, as reported recently by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz:
"Chalabi has NEVER been an unnamed source of mine," Miller told The Nation in an e-mail. "He has ALWAYS been named. Every time. This is one of several gross errors in Kurtz's story." Miller did not identify those errors. It's notable that Miller's comments about Chalabi don't jibe with what she told (Times Baghdad bureau chief) John Burns in her e-mail to him. Chalabi is named or quoted in sixteen Miller articles over the past year, mostly on political topics, but in only one of those is he mentioned, even remotely, in connection with WMDs--and then only to note that he and US military investigators might be exchanging intelligence information. If he were the New York Times's key supplier of exclusives on that subject and, as Miller claims, was not used as an unattributed source, his name should appear in those articles.
Here is Miller's original email correspondence with Burns:
I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.posted by dack