The Road to the Iraq War | 7. Judy
Slow Burn
Slate Audio
4.6 • 25.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2021
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
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In the months before the invasion of Iraq, the media mostly backed the Bush administration’s narrative about weapons of mass destruction. No reporter was more influential on that beat than the New York Times' Judith Miller.
How did she get the story so wrong—and why was she the only person to take the fall?
Season 5 of Slow Burn is produced by Noreen Malone, Jayson De Leon, and Sophie Summergrad. Mixing by Merritt Jacob.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right. It says we're now recording. It says Slate's Slow Burn, eight seconds. Here we go. |
| 0:05.9 | Stephen Engelberg is the editor-in-chief of ProPublica. |
| 0:09.1 | Back in 2001, he was the investigations editor for the New York Times. |
| 0:13.9 | One of his reporters was a Times veteran named Judith Miller. |
| 0:17.5 | Maybe a couple of weeks after July 4th, 2001, Judy came to my desk and she said, |
| 0:22.7 | I've got an amazing story, we've got to go, we've got to go fast, this is really astounding stuff. |
| 0:28.0 | And I said, okay, okay, what do you got? |
| 0:31.2 | What she had did sound amazing, an intercept of a conversation between two members of Al-Qaeda. |
| 0:38.0 | And the first guy says something along the lines of, |
| 0:41.8 | it's really a shame the United States did not retaliate for the attack on the USS Cole, |
| 0:47.4 | which was an American ship that had been attacked by a sort of suicide bombing dinghy. |
| 0:53.6 | And then the second guy says, well, don't worry, |
| 0:57.2 | we're planning something so big they're going to have to retaliate. |
| 1:00.6 | Miller had been covering Islamic extremism for years. |
| 1:04.4 | It seemed like she might have a huge scoop. |
| 1:06.9 | Plans by known terrorists to launch a major attack against the United States. |
| 1:27.9 | Engleberg was interested. But first, needed to know where the story came from. So what do we know? I mean, who are these two guys? And she said, my source doesn't seem to know. Where are they? What country are they? Are they high level, low level? Are they just two guys talking, you know, in a bar? Of course, they're Al-Qaeda. |
| 1:46.3 | They're not in a bar, but I was sort of speaking metaphorically. Miller didn't have those answers, but said she'd try to find out more. She came back and said, I just can't get any more detail on this. This is what we've got. Can we write a story? And I said, Judy, I just don't see how. I said, I see paragraphs one and maybe two, but what's paragraph three, four, and five? |
| 1:46.3 | We can't see how. I said, I see paragraphs one and maybe two, but what's paragraph three, four, and five? |
| 1:47.5 | We can't do it. |
| 1:49.3 | The story never ran. |
| 1:54.1 | Two months later, Al-Qaeda hijacked four planes and killed 3,000 people. |
... |
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