Cheney´s Sock Puppet

It´s a sweet little game. Leak a story to the press, have them publish it, and then cite that story to bolster your own case. Who could I be talking about other than the lovely Judith Miller?

Take the case of staff reporter Judith Miller, who covers the atomic bomb/chemical-weapons-fear beat, and hasn't heard a scare story about Iraq that she didn't believe, especially if leaked by her White House friends. On Sept. 8, 2002, Ms. Miller and her colleague Michael Gordon helped co-launch the Bush II sales campaign for Saddam-change with a front page story about unsuccessful Iraqi efforts to purchase 81-mm aluminum tubes, allegedly destined for a revived nuclear weapons program.

Pitched to a 9/11-spooked public and a gullible, cowardly U.S. congress, the aluminum tubes plant was a big component of the "weapons of mass destruction" canard, which resulted in hasty House and Senate war authorization on Oct. 11.

Months later, when the tubes connection was thoroughly discredited (UN weapons inspectors past and present said the tubes were intended for conventional rocket production), the Times did not think it necessary to run a clarification. Nor was Ms. Miller disciplined for shoddy work; on the contrary, when the A-bomb threat had faded, the Bush administration astutely shifted the media's focus to chemical and biological weapons -- and Ms. Miller fell into line with the program.

When these non-nuclear weapons proved elusive after the fall of Baghdad, she placed herself at the service of what I call the Pentagon's pretext verification unit. In her first postwar dispatch, again deemed front-page news, she wrote about a man claiming to be an "Iraqi scientist" with knowledge about destroyed chemical weapons. The problem was, Ms. Miller didn't interview the gentleman, didn't learn his name and agreed to have her story censored by the U.S. army under the terms of her "accreditation."

Thus, the reader wasn't even told what chemicals or weapons materials the "scientist" was alleged to have known about. Readers were told that the man had to remain anonymous in order to protect him from reprisal (despite regime change). What Ms. Miller did reveal (besides her censorship contract) was that she witnessed "from a distance" a man in a baseball cap pointing "to several spots in the sand," where he claimed the awful stuff was buried. This would be laughable if it hadn't help pave the way for war and the subversion of democracy.

When officials leak a "fact" to Ms. Miller, they then can cite her subsequent stenography in the Times as corroboration of their own propaganda, as though the Times had conducted its own independent investigation. On Sept. 8, Dick Cheney cited the Times's aluminum tubes nonsense on Meet the Press to buttress his casus belli.