Many journalists have warned, perhaps because she has won a Pulitzer prize, she has become protected for editor's criticism. I always wonder how the beheading of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearle in Pakistan effected the American journalists working in the Mideast. Judith Miller is politically active in Aspen Institute and Middle East Forum, a right-wing organization.

"The Source of the Trouble"

From her first day at the Times, Miller's life and work have been hard to separate, which for a reporter is both a strength and a weakness. "She's a passionate person--she gets caught up in her sources passionately," one of her Times colleagues told me. Friends from her earliest days in Washington noted that she didn't surround herself with people her own age. She sought out the best and brightest at the city's highest levels, dating Larry Sterne, the Washington Post's foreign editor, and hanging out with the defense gurus Richard Perle and Walter Slocum. "These people were powerful. But they were also interesting, and Judy liked talking to them. She is curious and enthusiastic," says one friend from this period.

And she got caught up in her coverage of the Middle East. It was a passion she acknowledged in the introduction to her 1996 book on Islam, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: "While I have tried to keep an open mind about traditions and cultures that differ from my own, I make no apology for the fact that as a Western woman and an American, I believe firmly in the inherent dignity of the individual and the value of human rights and legal equality for all. In this commitment, I, too, am unapologetically militant."

  «« click on pic to Barnard U. article
From left: Judith Miller, Susan Band Horwitz,
Judith Shapiro, and Martha Nussbaum

Miller started at the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 1977, part of a new breed of hungry young hires, prodded in part by the sting of the Times losing the Watergate story to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. She and Steven Rattner, her boyfriend, also a Times reporter, became close friends of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the son of the then-publisher of the Times, whose first job at the Times, starting in 1978, was also as a reporter of the Washington bureau. For several summers, Miller and Rattner shared a weekend house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Sulzberger and his wife, Gail. (Sulzberger would become publisher of the Times  in 1992 in his own right.)

In 1983, the Times  put her Middle East experience to use by installing her as its Cairo bureau chief, the first woman in that position. The bureau was responsible for covering the Arab world, allowing her to range from Tripoli to Damascus.

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SourceWatch -- Judith Miller

The links of Judith Miller with the Pentagon are not new. In 1986, she wrote numerous articles on Libya, thus contributing to a massive disinformation campaign on Gaddafi which was coordinated by Admiral John Poindexter. Bob Woodward has written a major article in the Washington Post on this strategy.