Reply #77: Continued from the above post

[Samantha]

The article I mentioned in my last post is riveting (see link above):

"There’s an important difference in reportorial style between Miller and her colleagues. Risen and Bergman are diggers, excavating documents and sources hidden deep in the bureaucracy. Miller, on the other hand, relies on her well-placed, carefully tended-to connections to nab her stories. In February, on the public-radio show “The Connection,” she said, “My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times, as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments, who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction.”

This paragraph supports the claim she did not do her own independent research to buttress the assertions made in the stories she wrote. For purposes of obeying the copyright rules, I have to limit what I post here, BUT LOOK AT THIS:

"Her Iraq coverage didn’t just depend on Chalabi. It also relied heavily on his patrons in the Pentagon. Some of these sources, like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, would occasionally talk to her on the record. She relied especially heavily on the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit established beneath Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. The office was charged with uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein that the CIA might have missed. In particular, Miller is said to have depended on a controversial neocon in Feith’s office named Michael Maloof. At one point, in December 2001, Maloof’s security clearance was revoked. In April, Risen reported in the Times, “Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies.” While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle. Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access." (All bolded emphasis added)

Your comments?