New York- I don’t ordinarily post the work of others here on TWD (unless they happen to be close friends) but I am thoroughly impressed by this interview by Jon Stewart of the disgraced former NYT reporter Judith Miller. It is as if in his final leg of The Daily Show, he treading into an area where professional American television journalists fear to and have feared to for years now.
His interview with Miller is both sharp and devastating. She refuses to admit that she bears any direct responsibility for anything having to do with disseminating White House or Pentagon propaganda that led to the war in Iraq. If one looks at the long view, this then led to the emergence of the angry man of Camp Bucca, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. You can draw a line from events in 2002 all the way to the present. The forcible dismantlement of the Ba’athist security state in Iraq in March and April 2003 led to one of the most ominous security vacuums on our planet.
I remember on the early morning of September 11, 2011 as journalists gathered in lower Manhattan for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I had Miller in my group as we were escorted to the stands from where we would watch the Bushes and Obamas awkwardly stand side by side. I wished Miller, her former colleague Thomas Friedman who said the invasion of Iraq was “unquestionably worth doing,” and other like-minded travelers would atone for what they had written and bear responsibility. I also felt and still feel that they should be stripped of their influential perches in our media landscape beset by ethical frailty and beset by intellectual dishonesty. The Iraq war was unquestionably a failure.
Stewart’s questioning of Miller is righteous in the best sense of that term. Watch below.