Judith Miller and the New York Times published front-page stories claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, relying heavily on Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress — a source the CIA had discredited. The Pentagon fed information directly to Miller despite CIA disagreements. The Times later acknowledged their coverage 'was not as rigorous as it should have been.' Reporter James Risen said the paper wanted 'stories about WMDs' not 'skeptical stories.' Miller was forced to resign in 2005. No WMDs were ever found. The Iraq War killed over 200,000 Iraqis.
“The New York Times and other major outlets are uncritically amplifying government claims about Iraqi WMDs. These stories are being planted by Pentagon sources who have a vested interest in going to war.”
What they said vs. what the evidence shows
“I was accurately conveying wrong information. My job was to write about what the intelligence community believed. I got it right — they got it wrong.”
— Judith Miller / New York Times · Apr 2015
SourceFrom “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
The New York Times, America's newspaper of record, published dozens of front-page stories claiming Iraq possessed active weapons of mass destruction programs. These articles, written primarily by reporter Judith Miller between 2001 and 2003, relied heavily on sources with direct financial and political incentives to push the United States toward war. When the invasion came in 2003, no weapons were found.
Miller's reporting leaned overwhelmingly on Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, a exile group seeking U.S. military intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The CIA had already flagged Chalabi as unreliable and potentially a foreign agent. The Pentagon, however, cultivated Miller as a source directly, feeding her classified information that contradicted the intelligence community's more cautious assessments. Internal memos and later reporting revealed that officials deliberately bypassed established intelligence channels to place stories they wanted told into the nation's most influential newspaper.
When colleagues raised doubts about Miller's sources, they were largely ignored. James Risen, a fellow New York Times reporter, later said the paper wanted "stories about WMDs" rather than "skeptical stories." The institutional pressure created a one-directional information flow: administration officials provided Miller with alarming claims, she published them prominently, politicians then cited those Times articles as independent confirmation of the threat. The circular reinforcement worked.
The Times eventually acknowledged the problem. In 2004, the paper published an editor's note admitting that coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been" and that reporters had "too readily accepted Iraqi defectors' claims." This was diplomatic language for a fundamental journalistic failure. Miller was forced to resign in 2005, though the damage to American foreign policy—and American credibility—was already catastrophic.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
The consequences were concrete. The Iraq War killed over 200,000 Iraqis by some estimates, displaced millions more, destabilized an entire region, and cost nearly $2 trillion in American resources. The war's true architects—from Pentagon officials to administration spokespeople—faced no meaningful accountability. Miller retained her reputation in establishment circles and later found work at Fox News.
What makes this case significant is not merely that the Times got a story wrong. Major news organizations have made mistakes throughout history. What matters is how this mistake happened: through a systematic failure of skepticism, a preference for official sources over contrary evidence, institutional pressure to confirm preferred narratives, and the weaponization of journalism by government officials.
The American public entered a major war partly because the country's most trusted newspaper failed to interrogate powerful sources sufficiently. Readers assumed Times editors had done the rigorous fact-checking they promised. They hadn't. Twenty years later, this gap between institutional reputation and actual performance remains unresolved. The Times did not investigate why it failed so thoroughly, nor did the industry grapple honestly with the systemic incentives that made such failure likely.
This is why the case still matters. If the Times can be systematically misled into promoting a war that kills hundreds of thousands, what prevents similar failures today? The mechanisms that amplified false WMD claims remain largely unchanged. Institutional credibility continues to outpace actual verification. And the public must still ask, with every major claim: who benefits from this story being believed?
Beat the odds
This had a 0.1% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~100Network
Secret kept
2.1 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
