Judy, you ignorant slut

With great thanks to oyster over at Right Hand Thief, and especially to Grand Moff Texan who put together the marvelously-researched post, here's an incredible insight on the mysterious NY Times reporter, Judith Miller. Notwithstanding her courageous acceptance of a prison sentence to defend the confidentiality of her sources, Miller is also quite possibly the one journalist most responsible for promoting the false notion of a WMD threat in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

It turns out, however, that Judith Miller has been a propagandist going all the way back to the Reagan administration, and appears to be...well, er, "indecorously close to highly placed male sources":

Judith Miller has been and probably still is an informal asset not of our government but of an American political faction. From North Africa to the Mesopotamian, she has provided copy to support imperial adventures. ...

She is attracted more to the power the men in her orbit have than to the men themselves; her first words upon entering a room are often "Okay, who’s important here?" ...

Regarded by her peers as a dogged, talented journalist, she received more ambivalent reviews for her after-hours work. Fellow female correspondents in Beirut had a very rough nickname for Judy - "Egregious Cunt" - which some of them abbreviated (E.C.) and had silk-screened onto T-shirts.
...
Judy's living accommodations in those far-flung outposts were ripe topics of conversation. Her bedroom in Cairo, for instance, had white shag carpeting and bedspread and curtains in an electric- blue-and-orange design. When a fellow correspondent took over her apartment in Beirut, it was discovered that although the place was to be let furnished, there were no sheets available. When news of this reached the city's press community, one unkind journalist commented, "She didn't want anyone to see her notes."

Miller, it seems, was a dupe for Chalabi and the Bush administration. Chalabi fed his Curveball lies to anyone who would listen, with the result that Miller ended up confirming his fabrications with administration officials who bought his lies to the tune of well over $300,000 a month.

It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources, and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she was told. ...

Of all Miller's unreliable sources, the most unreliable was Ahmed Chalabi. ...

At his behest, she interviewed defectors from Hussein's regime, who claimed without substantiation that there was still a clandestine WMD program operating inside Iraq. U.S. investigators now believe that Chalabi sent these same Iraqi expatriates to at least eight Western spy agencies as part of a scheme to persuade them to overthrow Saddam. An unknown number of them appear to have stopped along the way to speak with Miller.