http://www.counterpunch.com/All the News That's Fit to Buy
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Did the White House slip Judy Miller money under the table to hype Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? I'm quite sure it didn't and the only money Miller took was her regular Times paycheck.
But this doesn't mean that We The Taxpayers weren't ultimately footing the bill for Miller's propaganda. We were, since Miller's stories mostly came from the defectors proffered her by Ahmad Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, which even as late as the spring of 2004 was getting $350,000 a month from the CIA, said payments made in part for the INC to produce "intelligence" from inside Iraq.
It also doesn't mean that when she was pouring her nonsense into the NYT's news columns Judy Miller (or her editors) didn't know that the INC's defectors were linked to the CIA by a money trail. This same trail was laid out in considerable detail in Out of the Ashes, written by my brothers, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, and published in 1999.
In this fine book, closely studied (and frequently pillaged without acknowledgement) by journalists covering Iraq the authors described how Chalabi's group was funded by the CIA, with huge amounts of money $23 million in the first year alone - invested in an anti-Saddam propaganda campaign, subcontracted by the Agency to John Rendon, a Washington pr operator with good CIA connexions.
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the last paragrape:
"Robeson never recovered from the drugging and the follow-up treatments from CIA-linked doctors and shrinks. He died in 1977."
once Judy went along she had to keep going along - like, you know, trying to leave the mafia can get you dead.