Judith Miller Popular Books

Judith Miller Biography & Facts

Judith Miller (born January 2, 1948) is an American journalist and commentator known for writing on the alleged existence Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, whose writings were later discovered to have been based on fabricated intelligence. She worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Times before joining Fox News in 2008. Miller co-wrote a book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, which became a top New York Times best seller shortly after she became a victim of a hoax anthrax letter at the time of the 2001 anthrax attacks. The New York Times determined that several stories she wrote about Iraq were inaccurate, and she was forced to resign from the paper in 2005. According to commentator Ken Silverstein, Miller's Iraq reporting "effectively ended her career as a respectable journalist". Miller defended her reporting, stating "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." She published a memoir, The Story: A Reporter's Journey, in April 2015. Miller was involved in the Plame Affair, where Valerie Plame was outed as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spy by Richard Armitage after Plame’s husband published a New York Times op-ed casting doubts on claims that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium from Africa. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal that her source in the Plame Affair was Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Later, she contributed to the conservative Fox News Channel and Newsmax, and was a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Early life and education Miller was born in New York City. Her Russian-born father, Bill Miller, was Jewish. He owned the Riviera night club in New Jersey and later operated several casinos in Las Vegas. Bill Miller was known for booking iconic Las Vegas performers. His biggest success was getting Elvis Presley to return to Las Vegas after initially being an unsuccessful booking. Her mother was a "pretty Irish Catholic showgirl." Miller attended Ohio State University, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1969 and received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. Early in her career at The New York Times bureau in Washington, D.C. she dated one of the newspaper's other reporters (and future investment banker) Steven Rattner. In 1993, she married Jason Epstein, an editor and publisher. Judith Miller is the half-sister of Jimmy Miller who was a record producer for many classic rock bands of the 1960s through to the 1990s including the Rolling Stones, Traffic and Blind Faith. Career During Miller's tenure at The New York Times, she was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for its 2001 coverage of global terrorism before and after the September 11 attacks. She and James Risen received the award and one of the cited articles appeared under her byline. Her writing during this period was criticised by Middle East scholar Edward Said for evincing an anti-Islamic bias. In his book Covering Islam Said stated that Miller's book God Has Ninety-Nine Names "is like a textbook of the inadequacies and distortions of media coverage of Islam." He criticised her poor grasp of Arabic, saying that "nearly every time she tries to impress us with her ability to say a phrase or two in Arabic she unerringly gets it wrong... They are the crude mistakes committed by a foreigner who neither has care nor... respect for her subject." He concluded Miller fears and dislikes Lebanon, hates Syria, laughs at Libya, dismisses Sudan, feels sorry for and a little alarmed by Egypt and is repulsed by Saudi Arabia. She hasn't bothered to learn the language and is relentlessly only concerned with the dangers of Islamic militancy, which, I would hazard a guess, accounts for less than 5 percent of the billion-strong Islamic world. However, Miller asserted that in the wake of the September 11 attacks she argued that militant Islamism of the type represented by Al Qaeda had peaked and was fading into insignificance. Anthrax hoax victim On October 12, 2001, Miller opened an anthrax hoax letter mailed to her New York Times office. The 2001 anthrax attacks had begun occurring in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, with anthrax-laced letters sent to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and the New York Post, all in New York City, as well as the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, Florida. Two additional letters (with a higher grade of anthrax) were sent on October 9, 2001, to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in Washington. Miller was the only major U.S. media reporter, and The New York Times was the only major U.S. media organization, to be victimized by a fake anthrax letter in the fall of 2001. Miller had reported extensively on the subject of biological threats and had co-authored, with Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, a book on bio-terrorism, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, which was published on October 2, 2001. Miller co-authored an article on Pentagon plans to develop a more potent version of weaponized anthrax, "U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits", published in The New York Times on September 4, 2001, weeks before the first anthrax mailings. Islamic charities search leak Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government was considering adding the Holy Land Foundation to a list of organizations with suspected links to terrorism and was planning to search the premises of the organization. The information about the impending raid was given to Miller by a confidential source. On December 3, 2001, Miller telephoned the Holy Land Foundation for comment, and The New York Times published an article in the late edition papers and on its website that day. The next day, the government searched HLF's offices. These occurrences led to a lawsuit brought by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with prosecutors claiming that Miller and her colleague Philip Shenon had queried this Islamic charity, and another, in ways that made them aware of the planned searches. The Iraq War At The New York Times, Miller wrote on security issues, particularly about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Many of these stories later turned out to have been based upon faulty information. (One of her stories that was not disproved reported that inspectors in Iraq "saw nothing to prompt a war.") On September 8, 2002, Miller and her Times colleague Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of "aluminum tubes" bound for Iraq. Her front-page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and.... Discover the Judith Miller popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Judith Miller books.