Gray Lady Down (33 page)

The
Times’
most egregious attack on the tools used to fight terrorism came in its reporting on the USA Patriot Act, especially its campaign against renewal of the act in 2004. Signed into law in October 2001, the Patriot Act’s most important provision was bring down “the Wall” that had prevented domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies from communicating with each other. The act also enhanced the Treasury Department’s ability to disrupt terrorist financing networks, and modestly increased the attorney general’s power to detain and deport suspected terrorist aliens. The Patriot Act was important in cases such as the Lackawanna Six, the Virginia Jihad and the Brooklyn Bridge plot; and it helped in apprehending the murderers of Daniel Pearl. (Since then, it’s been important in almost all other terror investigations and prosecutions.) According to some counterterrorism specialists, had the Patriot Act been in place prior to 9/11, the attacks might have been prevented. The FBI and CIA could have been in contact about the two hijackers who the CIA believed were in the country; the FBI could have looked at the contents of the “twentieth
hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui’s incriminating laptop; and investigators might have discovered that seven of the nineteen hijackers had used public access computers to purchase airline tickets.

Yet the
Times
was almost violently opposed to the Patriot Act, preferring to see terror as a law enforcement issue rather than an act of war requiring wartime powers for the government. The editorial board ran almost a dozen attacks on the legislation, including “The War at Home” in April 2003, which claimed that “the Bush administration has slashed away at core constitutional protections in the name of fighting terrorism.” An editorial in August, “An Unpatriotic Act,” declared that “many people, both liberals and conservatives alike, consider [the Patriot Act] a dangerous assault on civil liberties.”

As the fight for renewal of the Patriot Act was beginning in late 2003, the
Washington Post
reported that many senators, including Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein, agreed with Attorney General John Ashcroft that it did not assault civil liberties. (Feinstein said she had never seen a single abuse of the act.) The
Post
quoted Senator Joe Biden as saying that criticism of the act was “ill-informed and overblown.” But the
Times,
downplaying or ignoring such assessments, published several feature stories giving the impression that gumshoes were lurking in community libraries waiting to uncover what seditious books or websites innocent individuals were reading. In a
Times Book Review
roundup of eight books connected to how 9/11 affected civil liberties, Ethan Bronner, the
Times
deputy foreign editor, said, “The message from all these books can be summed up in five simple words: Be worried. Be very worried.”

The fiercest editorial attack by the
Times
came right on the eve of the renewal vote in October 2004. Headlined “A Very Bad Deal,” it acknowledged that most Americans would willingly trade minor infringements of civil liberties for well-planned and well-executed operations that would make us safer, but claimed that “instead we got a mounting pile of bungled operations, ranging from the merely inept to the scandalously abusive, and military prisons filled with Afghans, Iraqis and other Muslims who have
committed no real offenses.” The editorial asserted that terror investigators had come back “with a motley crew of hapless innocents, and people who had said and done stupid things but were hardly a threat to the nation’s security,” that investigators had acted more like Keystone Kops than intelligence operatives, and that cases like the Lackawanna Six were “thin.” But that case, in fact, had put away a potentially dangerous sleeper cell and led to the assassination of the group’s al-Qaeda-connected recruiter/guide. In July 2004, the Department of Justice issued a report outlining dozens of successful investigations where the Patriot Act played a critical role; the DOJ claimed that it had charged 310 defendants with terrorism-related crimes and that 179 of them had already been convicted. This report had been available to the
Times
editorial board for three months before it ran “A Very Bad Deal.”

The
Times
attacked the Patriot Act partly through ad hominem broadsides at its symbolic figurehead, John Ashcroft. In a column headlined “A Travesty of Justice,” Paul Krugman called Ashcroft “the worst Attorney General ever.” His fellow columnist Frank Rich made a similar gratuitous swipe, calling Ashcroft “The Best Goebbels of Them All.” Wrote Rich, “While FDR once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of fear itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.”

The
Times’
ideological and partisan opposition to the Patriot Act drove it into solidarity with the likes of Lynne Stewart, the radical lawyer who passed notes from her client Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. the “Blind Sheik,” to his followers in al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian terrorist organization that massacred dozens of tourists at Luxor in 1997. When Stewart was convicted of providing support for terrorism, Sabrina Tavernise wrote what amounted to a valentine to her, praising her “legendary compassion.” Tavernise recounted how Larry Davis, who shot six New York police officers in 1986, was acquitted after Stewart painted the entire NYPD as racist. Not reported was Stewart’s legendary belief in revolutionary violence, or the fact that the
Washington Post
once quoted her as saying, “There is death in history, and it’s
not all rosebuds and memorial services. Mao, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh understood this.”

After receiving a wrist slap of a sentence, Stewart was glib outside the courthouse, claiming to have won a “great victory against an overarching government.” She believed that an appeal might return her to the bar, and declared that she would do the same “all over again.” As for the twenty-eight-month sentence? She could do that time “standing on her head.” The
Times
report of her sentencing closed with an image of Stewart greeting well-wishers “as if she were Gandhi—touching them in the crowd.”

Stewart’s arrogance backfired, however, as perhaps did the
Times’
glorification of her. In July 2010, a federal judge said the comments she made outside the courthouse showed “a lack of remorse” and extended her sentence to 120 months.

T
he trust that the
New York Times
put in Judith Miller as its main reporter on the vexing issue of Saddam Hussein’s development and possession of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not at all surprising. Boasting an impressive resumé, Miller had the credentials and, more important, the connections to beat back competition from the
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
in the fierce struggle to break big news leading up to the war.

A longtime foreign correspondent for the
Times,
Miller had won the national security beat by doing time in the Middle East. She had written a book about Saddam Hussein and another on
biological weapons. No other journalist had comparable authority on the subject of the possibility of Iraq possessing WMDs. Miller had also written about the threat of Islamic terrorism in depth; in January 2001 she produced several articles about al-Qaeda as part of a series that won her the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Flashing her legendary chutzpah, she had traveled to Taliban-dominated Afghanistan and demanded to visit a jihadi camp, before being turned away and eventually expelled from the country.

Miller was known as a deeply networked member of the New York-Washington media elite, whose sources were often personal friends, and in some cases romantic interests. Her work on al-Qaeda and on unconventional weapons of mass destruction had earned her contacts deep inside the Bush administration’s national security wing, particularly among the “neoconservatives” who had come to the forefront of post-9/11 strategy and led the way in crafting the case, and the strategy, for war in Iraq. According to reports originating in the
Times
newsroom, Howell Raines reportedly told her to go off and win “another Pulitzer.”

Just before the war began and just after, Miller produced a series of ominous scoops relying heavily on anonymous sources. In one piece, she described a defector who alleged that Saddam had recently renovated storage facilities for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In another, she told of Saddam’s bid to gain a lethal strain of smallpox, as well as antidotes to VX gas and sarin that could facilitate ongoing experimentation with those substances.

Miller’s most important story was headlined “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” Written along with Michael Gordon, a military correspondent, it described the interception of thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes, which U.S. experts had determined could have only one purpose: as casings for rotors to be used in enriching weapons-grade uranium toward the production of an atomic bomb. The bid to procure such tubes, Miller and Gordon said, showed that a decade after Saddam claimed to have given up the quest for nuclear weapons, he had resumed it, “embarking on a worldwide hunt” for nuclear materials. And administration “hard-liners” were justly worried
that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ . . . may be a mushroom cloud.”

The piece was immediately used by administration officials to lobby for military action. Vice President Dick Cheney recycled Miller and Gordon’s assertions about the aluminum tubes on
Meet the Press,
while Condoleezza Rice warned on CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The symmetry between Miller’s rhetoric and the administration’s was striking.

Although the baying of the dogs of war temporarily drowned out the complaints of
Times
reporters angry that the Gray Lady appeared to have volunteered for combat, the critique of the paper’s star reporter continued to build in the early days of military action. Some reporters and editors thought Miller had uncritically bought the policy line of her sources in the upper reaches of the administration, and that her reporting was turning the
Times
into a conduit for the administration’s “propaganda.” Why had the paper not paid heed to knowledgeable colleagues who had reservations about Miller’s reporting, especially those in the Washington bureau, as well as experts who had begun to doubt the existence of WMDs? According to an account in the
Los Angeles Times,
editors who delayed the publication of one Miller report claiming that there were a thousand WMD sites in Iraq were lectured by the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, who reminded them that Miller had a Pulitzer Prize, “and your job is to get her stories into the paper.” According to an account in
New York
magazine, Howell Raines told a close friend that he wanted to prove he could do straight coverage of the Iraqi WMD story, and a former
Times
editor said that after Bill Kristol characterized the paper as part of an “axis of appeasement,” Raines wanted to “demonstrate that he was fair-minded about the Bush administration.”

During the late spring of 2003, various news organizations such as
Time
and the
Washington Post
began to write critically of the government’s claims about WMDs. The
Wall Street Journal
wrote about the pressure mounting in Washington for an investigation into how prewar intelligence had run so far off the rails. In the
New Yorker,
Seymour Hersh, relying on mostly anonymous government sources, described how a special unit set up in the
Pentagon had disposed of intelligence that didn’t live up to their ideological expectations.

At first, the
Times
ignored these second-guessings. But a lengthy
New York Review of Books
piece in February 2004 by Michael Massing criticized the performance of the
Times
in the run-up to the war as “especially deficient.” Massing continued, “While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it more often deferred to them. Compared to other major papers, the
Times
placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.” The overreliance on the defector Ahmad Chalabi was particularly problematic. Before the war, Massing reported, there had been a loud debate about Chalabi within intelligence circles. But it took the
Times
months to examine the matter. Massing was told by a “senior editor” at the
Times
that this was because “some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically about him.”

Massing’s piece opened the floodgates to frustration with the
Times
and fed into a growing leftist campaign to accuse the media of “selling a war to the American public based on lies,” as Arianna Huffington would later write. Some went so far as to accuse the
Times
of having disinterred the yellow journalism of the Hearst press during the run-up to the Spanish-American War. And most fingers pointed directly at Judy Miller. In
New York
magazine, Kurt Andersen explained that “because her vivid, terrifying pieces appeared in the liberal
Times,
she arguably bears more responsibility than any other American outside government for nudging public opinion in favor of war.”

Bill Keller said that, in hindsight, he wished he had dealt with the controversy over WMD reporting as soon as he took over in June 2003. But he feared that retracing the paper’s steps in an internal investigation would become “a crippling distraction” if he moved too fast. Instead, he ordered Miller off the national security beat—although, as he later said, she kept “drifting” back, continuing to bigfoot editors to publish her reports on this subject. And he assigned some top reporters to do a postmortem, to find where Miller’s reporting had gone off-track. The
Times
published
its findings on May 27, 2004, in a formal editor’s note on page A10. “We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves,” the note said. And in closing: “It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in.”