You're way too kind to Judy here. I agree she was used, but she was also fairly complicit. To be given bullsh*t stories by "unnamed high ranking administration officials" that she then writes about, which in turn allows those admin officials to quote their own bullsh*t the next day on the morning talkshows as proof of WMD activity is priceless. And what she did report was inaccurate. Now, if she reported that admin officials told her 'x', but also reported that several guvmint agencies contradicted those claims, or that those claims were single source claims unverifiable by other sources, then she'd have been that much closer to having been accurate.

>Judith Miller, who you mention, didn't report anything inaccurate. She was just used by administration sources in their effort to discredit an early critic of the Iraq invasion.

Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war." Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs "spotty," she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges.

Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Miller would later claim, based only on second-hand statements from the military unit she was embedded with, that WMDs had been found in Iraq.

...

While the editorial rejected "blame on individual reporters," others noted that ten of the twelve flawed stories discussed had been written or co-written by Miller