Last night at UC Berkeley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller discussed journalism and democracy with investigative reporter Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino in The Insider). In a few weeks, Miller may be behind bars for refusing to reveal confidential sources relating to another reporter's disclosure of a CIA operative's name. Before becoming a possible martyr for the First Amendment though, Miller was known for penning articles in the New York Times supporting claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Whether Miller was tricked by her sources (including members of the Bush administration) or, worse, in cahoots with them is still not clear to her many critics. From Bonnie Powell's coverage of the Berkeley event:
Miller argues that if she was duped by her unnamed sources, so was the Bush administration — and she's not apologizing for believing there were WMDs in Iraq until the president does. "I think I was given information by people who believed the information they were giving the president," she told Bergman. "When the president asked, you know, 'What about this WMD case? Are we sure about this?' [then-CIA director] George Tenet said to him, 'Mr. President, this is a slam dunk.' The people I talked to certainly thought that." Other WMD believers, she said, included the entire U.S. intelligence community as well as French, English, and Israeli agencies. The debate, she claimed, was not over whether Saddam had WMDs, but whether it was worth going to war over them…
Ultimately, Miller said, she "wrote the best assessment that I could based on the information that I had." She attempted to tie the controversy over her WMD reporting to her current struggle by saying that she had heard after the fact — after she returned from being embedded with an infantry division in Iraq — that there had been people who had reservations about the WMD intelligence she was receiving.
"I wish they had come forward at the time to express those reservations," she said. "To me, this case that I am now involved in emphasizes the importance of getting as many people as possible to come forward with a dissenting view, or allegations of wrongdoing."
