Miller's reporting on this subject, as with so many other subjects involving the claims of the hawks and neocons, was embarrassingly bad. Since Bolton had so many detractors in the intelligence community, it would have been easy for a good reporter to double-check his claims and to discover with what suspicion they were viewed by the professionals. (Bolton is merely a bad-tempered lawyer who did political work for the Republican Party, including helping Bush-Cheney stop the Florida recount in 2000, and has no special knowledge of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs, much less of the Middle East.) That Miller neglected to seek out the whole story but rather contented herself with serving as a stenographer for figures such as Bolton and Iraqi fraudster Ahmad Chalabi suggests either a conviction on her part of an ideological sort, or an excessive trust in her sources -- probably both.

Miller was not always a dupe of far-right-wing hawks. After the Gulf War, she responded on CNN to a 1993 speech by Saddam Hussein in which he claimed that Iraq was stronger and wiser since the 1991 war. On Jan. 8, 1993, Miller told anchor Donna Kelley, "I don't think that the allied forces at this stage face any real threat from Saddam Hussein. He has suffered a real body blow through the Gulf War. His nuclear capability, for the moment, has been eradicated. The U.N. has destroyed thousands of chemical munitions. They continue searching for biological and other weapons of mass destruction. I think a lot of this is just bravado. This is the mother of all rhetoric, that's Saddam Hussein, and I don't think anyone believes it, inside Iraq or outside of the area." Miller's description of the state of Iraq's weapons programs in 1993 was entirely accurate, though the biological program was not completely shut down by Hussein Kamel, head of Iraq's WMD program (and Saddam's son in law), until 1995. In this interview she was still functioning as a balanced news reporter who did not allow her obvious hatred for Saddam to interfere with her analytical judgment about the sort of threat he posed.

But by the late 1990s, Miller had emerged as a hawk on the Iraq issue again. The heating up of the conflict had been provoked by the replacement of Rolf Ekeus as head of the United Nations weapons inspection team, UNSCOM, with Australian Richard Butler, who made a series of wild allegations against Iraq with little or no evidence. He demanded access to Saddam's presidential palaces in early 1998, which Saddam at that time refused. Saddam, a germophobe, is later alleged to have told his U.S. captors that he feared the U.N. inspectors would make his palaces "dirty." No unconventional weapons were discovered in them. Miller commented on the crisis on CNN & Co. on Jan. 28, 1998, saying, "Well, I think the Israelis are busy buying gas masks after Richard Butler made his remarks about Saddam Hussein possibly having enough biological agents to blow Tel Aviv and other cities off the map." Miller was uninterested in the dissenters among the weapons inspectors who deeply disagreed with Butler. She admitted that it was not clear what the U.S. options were after an airstrike. But then in another interview on Jan. 29, 1998, Miller said on MSNBC's "News at Issue" that an airstrike against Iraq might force Saddam to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions.

In mid-August of 1998, at a time when some observers suspected that the Clinton administration might engage Iraq militarily to take the focus in Washington off the Lewinsky scandal, Miller dropped a new bombshell. She published an article in the New York Times based on an interview with Khidhir Hamza, who claimed to be "the highest ranking scientist ever to defect from Iraq," and who had come to the U.S. in 1994. Hamza asserted that Iraq continued to have a viable nuclear weapons program and that only half of it had been destroyed by the Gulf War. One of Hamza's critics, Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri, maintains that Hamza had only been given the lead position in the Iraqi nuclear program for six months in 1987, but was soon dismissed for petty embezzlement. He left the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989, became a college lecturer and businessman, then went to Libya in 1994. Khadduri says that Hamza established links to the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi and began publishing articles in the British press on Iraq's alleged nuclear program in 1995. He alleges that the Times on Sunday sent documents provided by Hamza to the International Atomic Energy Commission, which declared them false, but that the newspaper published Hamza's pieces anyway. Coming to the United States, Hamza was picked up by Benador Associates, a public relations firm and speakers' bureau closely associated with neoconservatives and their causes, including support for the expansionist Likud Party in Israel.

Miller gave an interview with National Public Radio about her piece on Hamza, on Aug. 17, 1998, with Linda Wertheimer. Miller gushed, "In fact, Linda, I think what struck my colleague and I when we were listening to Dr. Hamza talk, was Saddam Hussein's determination at all costs to have a nuclear bomb." She reported that the Gulf War bombings of Iraq's nuclear sites only hit about half of them, according to Hamza. In fact, Iraq's nuclear facilities were found and ordered destroyed after the war by the United Nations inspectors, and they were extremely thorough, as inspector and former U.S. Marine Scott Ritter insisted. When Wertheimer asked if Hamza was credible, Miller said, "Yes. We were able to speak to people, intelligence officials, administration officials, nuclear experts, a great variety of people, all of whom found Dr. Hamza very credible."

In fact, the story that Hamza was telling was extremely controversial and was controverted by knowledgeable persons. Either Miller was lying when she reported unanimity in the judgment of Hamza's credibility, or she only talked to a handful of hawks. Wertheimer adds, "I gather that the CIA almost missed him. The story of his defection and his attempts to find a safe haven in the United States reads sort of like a cross between a thriller and a farce." The transcript reports "LAUGHTER." Of course, the reason that the CIA "almost missed him" was that he was a minor bit player who had not been involved in the Iraqi nuclear program at all since 1989 and had no new information aside from baldfaced lies. (In 2001 Scribner published Hamza's mendacious book, which described him as "Saddam's Bombmaker," and thereafter he became a constant presence on American television news, flacked by Benador, purveying his lurid and completely false tales of an Iraq near to having a nuclear bomb.

Already by 1998, Miller was reporting Iraqi National Congress propaganda, purveying an image of Iraq completely different from that she gave in 1993, when she admitted that the country's weapons of mass destruction programs had been dismantled. On Dec. 29, 1998, she commented to Diane Dimond of CNBC's "Upfront Tonight" about the Clinton administration's bombing of Iraq and the $100 million that the U.S. Congress had appropriated to support the Iraqi expatriates who were attempting to overthrow Saddam. She complained, "But I did notice that just before the bombing, Ahmed Chalabi, who was one of the leaders of the opposition, told me that he only had about four hours notice. The administration called him and said, 'Oh, by the way, we're going to start bombing in a few hours.' This doesn't leave the opposition with a lot of time to prepare a kind of internal action, if it has the ability to do that. And we're not sure if the Iraqi opposition could stage a coup or start a rebellion at this point. It may be a weak reed, but it's the only reed the administration has at the moment."

Miller was already talking to Chalabi, and was willing to act as a conduit for his grouses about not being kept in the loop by the Clinton administration. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. Leaked New York Times memos showed that Chalabi was Miller's principal source for stories she later did on Iraq's fabled and in fact nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. According to Foer, Miller also relied heavily on the neocons' intelligence-fixing outfit, the notorious Office of Special Plans headed by Douglas Feith. Almost all of its "intelligence" was completely bogus.

Miller was a consistent critic of Saddam's regime, but before 1998 she was capable of making nuanced judgments about the problem it posed for the United States. At some point after that, she apparently began to believe that she, with her prescient expertise about WMD and radical Islam, and her hawkish and neocon sources were right. This was when her fateful decline began. A minor scientist and sometime college teacher such as Khidhir Hamza became "the highest ranking scientist" to defect from Iraq. She relayed complaints from Gucci revolutionaries like Chalabi that they had been left out of the loop by the Clinton administration, and retailed Iraq National Congress tall tales to her unsuspecting audience. By the late 1990s, she had laid the ground for her subsequent path, of becoming stenographer to a motley crew of neoconservative hawks and Iraqi expatriate wheelers and dealers. The aluminum tubes story, in particular, which she co-wrote and which helped pave the way to war, will likely be taught in journalism classes for years as a textbook study of flawed reporting.

In the end, Miller's decline seems due more to professional ambition than ideological conviction -- although her own beliefs clearly grew closer to the neocons'. "While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle," Foer writes. "Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access."

In the end, it seems that Miller will go down in history not so much as a true believer as a useful idiot.

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