Judith Miller does not immediately spring to mind as a beacon of hyper-conservatism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a former New York Times contributor, gained fame with her series on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. She has since been the object of MSM scorn painting her as a duped reporter who helped that great deceiver, George W. Bush.
At least that’s what Mainstream Media and all their kissin’ cousins within the Progressive/Socialist/anti-colonialist/isolationist hordes.
Ms. Miller was forced to resign her position at the NYT, and has since been a commentator at Fox News and written for various sites. Her take on the “Iraq, WMDs, and George W. Bush” situation is worth hearing.
Describing this PragerU video:
“Did George W. Bush lie to America about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction? Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, covered the lead up to the Iraq War for The New York Times, and settles once and for all the big lie about the war in Iraq.”
“There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and some of the media’s prewar WMD stories were wrong, including some of mine. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war.”
“American, European and arms-control experts, counterterrorism agents, and analysts who studied Iraq and briefed White House officials and journalists were the same people who gave me and my fellow reporters at the New York Times accurate information for years about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s growing threat to America. In fact, eight months before 9/11, the Times published a series of articles on that threat — a series for which the Times staff, including me, won a Pulitzer Prize.
The members of the intelligence community with whom I dealt were overwhelmingly reliable, hardworking and honest. But they were also human, and, in the aftermath of 9/11, they were very wary of ever again underestimating a terrorist threat.”
And of further note, there is overwhelming evidence of the existence of WMD, as cited by C. J. Chivers at the NYT:
More Than 600 Reported Chemical Exposure in Iraq, Pentagon Acknowledges
More than 600 American service members since 2003 have reported to military medical staff members that they believe they were exposed to chemical warfare agents in Iraq, but the Pentagon failed to recognize the scope of the reported cases or offer adequate tracking and treatment to those who may have been injured, defense officials say.
The Pentagon’s disclosure abruptly changed the scale and potential costs of the United States’ encounters with abandoned chemical weapons during the occupation of Iraq, episodes the military had for more than a decade kept from view.
This previously untold chapter of the occupation became public after an investigation by The New York Times revealed last month that although troops did not find an active weapons of mass destruction program, they did encounter degraded chemical weapons from the 1980s that had been hidden in caches or used in makeshift bombs.
For a veritable cache of articles on the TRUTH of WMD in Iraq check outDispatches University.
When all is said and done, though so many of The Left cling to the “Bush lied, people died” meme, the truth is any other leader of the free world, and all other western leaders, came to the exact same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a clear and present threat and had used WMD and most likely maintained WMD in Iraq.
And Judith Miller? This journalist should be praised for doing what a journalist SHOULD do: hold everyone’s feet to the fire and uncover the truth. Not “selective truth” filtered through a progressive lens, but the facts and truth as the really are.
Well done Ms. Miller.
First published at Saving Our Future.
