The guy who wrote this aricle doesn't really like the far left, but it was the first thing that came up when I googled, and the article contains all the relevant facts and the right dose of skepticism, plus some interesting comentary on Miller's career.
Probably worth a read, given recent developments.
I wonder if the (perhaps) lies in Miller's book,
Germs was part of the plan to create a paper trail of lies to justify invading Iraq, and if some of the 100 million that US taxpayers gave to Challabi paid for this book.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DF05.htmLeft-wing writer John Pilger claims the 'heroic' Kelly was 'the antithesis of those , who have shown themselves to be the agents of a dangerous, rampant foreign power' (2). If this is true, why does Kelly appear to have been a close acquaintance of Judith Miller of the New York Times - the most vitriolic pro-war journalist, whose shrill articles about Saddam and his WMD have recently become the subject of ridicule?
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Germs: The Ultimate Weapon was written by Miller and two other NYT journalists, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, and published in October 2001. It is a shrill, scaremongering book on the alleged proliferation of chemical and biological weapons into the hands of terrorist groups and 'rogue states' following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among other threats to the free world, Miller and her co-authors refer to 'the poor man's hydrogen bomb, a biological or chemical weapon of mass destruction can be made in a laboratory and transported in a briefcase - yet it can silently devastate an entire population' (11).
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Miller's seeming kinship with Kelly is reflected in the way that he is depicted as something of a hero in her book, as one of those who, after the first Gulf War, opened the West's eyes to the continuing threat allegedly posed by Iraq. The book claims that at times some US and UN officials were lax in their hunt for Iraqi weapons in the early 1990s, but that Kelly argued that he and the weapons inspectors should be allowed to 'broaden itinerary' and search warehouses and other suspicious buildings as well as known weapons factories.
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Kelly and Miller would appear to have little in common. He was apparently the quiet Oxfordshire man who couldn't cope with the glare of publicity, she is the bolshy New York journalist who mixes with politicians and spies. And where he has been adopted as some kind of peacenik by anti-war activists, Miller is one of the anti-war lobby's top hate figures. The truth is that for all the dubious anti-war claims about Kelly wanting to raise questions about the war in Iraq, he and Miller appear to have had one thing in common: a belief that Iraq was a threat to the civilised world, and that it was up to the West to put Iraq back in its place.