Discuss those experiences and much more all chronicled in her new more of the story, a reporters journey. The book covers the full span of judys long accomplished career in journalism nearly three decades of which are with the New York Times. She joined the papers Washington Bureau in 1977 as and spent the mid 1980s abroad and Carolyn Parrish returned to washington to serve as an editor. Stories about Osama Bin Laden and al qaeda that she and a small team of others did in 2,001 four command immediately after the 911 attacks one of Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Going right up to the iraq war in the months after the 2,003 invasion judy wrote a number of highprofile articles about an audible that later turned out to be based on information. She came under fire by many critics outside and inside the times reporting. In 2004 and five she ended up embroiled in further controversy this time over the plane case which children nearly three months the defending reporters right to protect sources and refusing to testify before grand jury. In late 2,005 judy left the times. In 2008 she joined fox news is a commentator and is also now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute make intruding editor of the institutes magazine and the theater reporter the tablet magazine. That i get that right . The other critic. The story is judys gift book. Others of dont with biological weapons the first gulf war holocaust. Judy is just embarking we are talking in the office. She happens to pick such lighthearted. Lighthearted. Lighthearted subjects. Judy story or stories really raise important questions about the practice of journalism relationships between reporters and sources between reporters and editors, especially when classified are highly Sensitive Information is involved in decisions about whether to take a nation to war are at stake. So there. So theres certainly a lot to discuss ceiling. Judy will be in conversation with an old friend of mine and of judys and a talented Foreign Correspondent and Foreign Editor during his 20 years with the washington post. He went on to lead the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund the American Council on germany commanders and recently became a senior fellow the brookings and served as a senior advisor. Ladies ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming judy miller. [applauding] quakes thank you very much for that kind introduction. It is a pleasure to be in the company of good friends and to mark the occasion of judys latest book. I thought start out with just some softball questions about how you got into journalism because im sure well have plenty of time going to the audience to talk about some of the more controversial aspects. I suppose everybody behind every journalist there is a series of mentors or inspirational people. I understand you started in journalism with the progressive publication out of Madison Wisconsin at the height of the protests against vietnam, larry stern was a close friend and editor. Tell me a little bit about that early phase of your career. Well, back then i was a graduate student who had decided that i was never going to be an economist because it was too boring for me. And since i hated the sight of blood i could not see a doctor. I i thought journalism was an interesting way to spend ones life. But i started doing freelance stories. Princetons Woodrow Wilson school, was a graduate student. I started out started out in israel got really helped. The arabisraeli conflict. In those days people forgot we had to go to cyprus because there was no direct connection between israel and any arab country. Lewis our personal went to egypt. People told me there would be a war. Was not reading that in the american papers. I went to jordan. I try to interview him with a tape recorder and did not know how it worked. He won. New line of starting it for me and that became the beginning of the very longstanding and i admired him enormously. And then routed syria. I came back to preston and decided i really did not want to do economics. I wanted to be a journalist. A journalist. Woodward and bernstein were the heroes of the day. I came i came to washington to try to get a job and found a progressive. In early mentor of mine was i have stone. He was nothing if not skeptical. He was mr. Skepticism. And just remembered probably would say every day everyday when i go to hell was some problem or challenge that only the government can solve he would say, just remember, they will all live it doesnt matter. They all lie and they always will. The only thing you can you can depend on is what they put in their documents sometimes. He would go through them religiously. He was a great source of inspiration. So when i got to the times was hired at the New York Times because of affirmative action. The women of the women of the New York Times three years earlier had sued the paper for sexual discrimination. I have to tell you the case was rocksolid. There were no women columnists no women. On and on. There were three women out of 35 people. And all of a sudden people like me began being hired. It was my it was my good fortune to come along at the right time but i always wanted to go back to the middle east and write about them at least. In 1982 i was center. Another mentor and inspiration along with bill safire conservative columnist with whom i adamantly disagreed. We agreed on only one thing the importance of journalism to keeping americans informed. On that we agreed. That is something we share. Since that was your first big foreign assignment how did that change your perspective as a person your views about the middle east and also the way to cover it is a journalist. I think what i have discovered when i was a student was not the story often times wasnt a major story that everybody was writing about. It was about in israel this group called duchenne benin the first group of people to form illegal settlements. And yet i think i wrote one of the first early pieces for the progressive before i even joined the times about the importance of people who felt that the land was more important than the walk. And i saw great peril in this approach and wrote that then when i got to egypt fulltime the first big story i had was not in egypt it was in beirut in 1983 when the marine compound was blown up. That is when i counterterrorism for the first time in my life. And i beirut. Beirut rather than have a nice area that had been a bomb site roped off it was over chaos and i flaunted israel because lebanon was closed. In a closed all the borders will close the airport tall but but i flew to israel and persuade the lebanese friend who went back and forth to take me with him. I got there just as don as they were digging out american bodies the rubble. And that was the first time i understood what we were up against. No one we offered the story of the smiling shiite driver in a yellow mercedes that smiled as he drove to the compound doors. We did not understand what that was about. It will be a long time before we understood what she had is believed about the afterlife and how important it would be to do something memorable an important. So my interest in islamic militancy began which directed the rest of my reporting for the next 20 years clicks if i recall correctly i think the suicide bomber was guided from tehran. Tehran absolutely. Those early days of has blah clicks has blah was just being formed. There was a lot of misinformation and a lot of us wrote stories that turned out to be partly true not true. It was very hard to figure out what was going on in that very chaotic time but i but i knew as i was standing on that day in the rubble that this was not going to stop with their. Lo and lo and behold two months later i was standing in another rubble of the American Embassy in kuwait. Fortunately nobody was killed because the area where the suicide bomber had come through was a place where the chancery were people stopped working. There was. They were usually lucky that more americans were killed there but i but i would see it again and again and again and different groups that we tended to lump together with one term islamic fundamentalists david all different. They were motivated by some of the same things but all politics are local. So we had to go to each country to figure out what motivated that particular group. So in your report you found that the causes were different for this kind of suicidal maniacal kind of Islamic Jihad . The goal was the same to establish the caliphate for the restoration of islamic rule. The method, the grievances the method of organization, the way emo is different everywhere. For example,. For example people always said that israel was a really important factor. Well, it was if you are in the west bank or gaza or an area in a refugee camp. But if i went to morocco and algeria they really didnt care about israel. It was just not a factor in what they wanted to do. And and so i began to be enormously wary about these broad generalizations which led to my book i got has 99 names. I always love that about islam. There are actually 100, but one is unknown. Once again it was the broad generalization that frightened me except there was one thing that the critics and the people who worried about a got right. Do not think this will stand middle east. This will not be confined in the middle east they were right about that place mustve been particularly difficult as a woman reporter, a woman reporter western western woman reporter covering the middle east. Were there hidden advantages . There were many hidden advantages. Not only did i i get my job through affirmative action, but in those days when you were at risk only because you are tall but women werent kidnapped and more killed. It was arab chivalry islamic chivalry. They did not do to us what they did to some of you. And there was also kind of what i called the saudi us c syndrome where you would go in saudi arabia where women could not drive plan to sit in the back of the bus. I did that. Its not fun because the back of the bus is not airconditioned and 120 degrees. I cant really work with men we all know the conditions now. But i i was an honorary man for the time that i was there. And the saudi trained american trained saudi officials would bend over backwards to show how enlightened and western they were. I had extraordinary access because i was a woman. So this gender thing plays both ways. Always a generalization that tends to be wrong. What interested you can weapons of mass distraction . Wrote about biological warfare. The happy subject. [laughter] you seem to be drawn to grisly ways of dying. And you know it it was so crazy because i have been so blessed. My life was really lucky. I had a i had a wealthy want talented father, brother who is a great musician grew up comfortable. But i grew up part of the time in las vegas where my father own nightclubs and ran nightclubs. I did i did not realize until the time 70 back to las vegas after 2,001 to look at what we were using the Nevada Test Site and to write a series of articles. I did not realize that i have actually and that is what i remember this. I have actually grown up during the time there for about four years of openair testing. And i remembered seeing one of the tests. Tests. I mean, las vegas remember, is only 60 miles away from the site where we did most of our aboveground testing. Most of our underground testing. And i remember a a bomb very much being a part of my childhood my resources in the book. I begged my mother to take us to jcpenney which had just donated a set of clothing that was going to be used in the apple bombing the pentagon wanted to see what would happen to manikins who were dressed up in regular clothes inside the houses they built which you can still see today if you go out the Nevada Test Site. I have chores which i highly recommend. And you saw, you know, they detonated a bomb and you saw the manikins. Some of the manikins are gone but they have pictures of what was left and it was actually and absolutely horrific scene. The atomic testing the Atomic Testing Museum in las vegas actually lets you sit on the bench for our soldiers did and feel the rumble of the earth. They they have recreated that and what the sky looked like. All of a sudden it came back to me and i realized where i realized where my interest in weapons of mass destruction that come from undermine the fact that we were systematically lied to. I was part of the reason. I knew i knew a lot of what we were told was not right. Hence some of my early pieces were very skeptical of National Security justifications the weapons we were developing, neutron bomb things like that. If you connected to your interest in the middle east are start asking yourself what would happen if suicidal religious fanatics get his or her hands on weapons of mass distraction . That is when it occurred to me. Then in 1991 when i got i got trapped in saudi arabia i was not chosen to be part of the team that covered the war was interviewing prominent saudis when the war broke out and they closed their airspace. I was trapped there for three months. The men sent all of their wives and families to a place that saddam would never bomb. I finally had a chance to really talk to saudis and unguarded moment where they felt vulnerable. I knew that if saddam one they were in big trouble. It gave me an insight into saudi arabia i had never had before. I remember one of them telling me about this mad saudi named Osama Bin Laden very wealthy family who was running around with his charts and graphs showing how we did not need the infidels. We we didnt need these people. Get them out of here. They are soiling our holy land command we can fight this war ourselves. And then i encountered him by reputation again afghanistan when i went in as a guest of the taliban to see what life under the taliban was like. And that would have been when . Clicks 1991 was the war and i want to taliban afghanistan in 2,000 before 2,001. And it was in afghanistan that bin laden and others the mujahedin have been trained. By him. By American Special forces. I dont know if we trained his group group, but we trained mujahedin like, and i remember having an argument with a great friend of mine who wanted to be here, she is traveling today a superb diplomat, ambassador francis kirk have been given a tour of the taliban sorry, the mujahedin that the cia was Training Command she said boy, these are my kind of holy warriors. Herne are saying you know i am just really nervous about the notion of any holy warrior because they tend to forget that all the virtue and wisdom are not other side, this could be problematic for us and i had encountered them in egypt because they were blowing up government ministries and government officials there. So i knew how this translated command i was always worried about it. And ive badgered the times and letting me do this series on this guy al qaeda with my good friend and colleague, former colleague jeff kerr. We did the first piece for the New York Times. I think he was in 1997 im not sure about Osama Bin Laden becoming more than a financier but an operator after. Right. That whole phenomenon of blowback was very impressively reported. Wonderful book. Well, then there was a time when he was actually consider the socalled friend of the United States. Were you covering him in those days the early 80s . Donald rumsfeld went to baghdad and asked how we could help in terms of the fighting. Saddam was then touted as a socialist secular bulwark against the spread of islamic fundamentalism. Absolutely. What did you think in those days . My first trip was in 1976 or 1977 when saddam was there but had not quite it was consolidating power. And as much and as much as i was suspicious of islamic militants, i really did not like saddam because every writer was under pressure or in jail. Any dissident, any artist. I mean, even people who had galleries were terrified of omaha brought. It would come in contact with a wanted. It was a nightmare from the beginning. And each time i went back command i went about 20 times because i have the misfortune of covering the iraniraq war while was in egypt. It just got worse and worse. And then functions went on. People, children begin to starve. It was an absolute mess. One of the first series another series of articles i worked on with the inimitable bill broad was a great science reporter for the New York Times is coauthor of my next book germs and biological weapons looked at the biological Weapons Program and weirdly enough that was the program that he had the longest. It wasnt the nukes. We we did not realize that he destroyed them after israel had bombed his reactor but that they never were able to rebuild the program. But the biology is very important him. So bill and so bill and i got to work with International Inspectors who had come back from iraq, they were telling us about the program which resulted in another interesting investigation. But after watching saddam for so many years he couldve told me the sun rose in the east and set in the west and i would not have believed it. He was a monster, just the human rights grounds alone. I could not figure out why the United States was embracing clicks what been led you must attract his efforts to acquire weapons of mass instruction, particularly in covering the iraniraq war was already using chemical weapons than and eventually against his own people. Our under that he was using insecticide against the bases you were coming across the marshes in the south and south and then finally against his own people, the kurds in the north. Yeah. Which is another massacre i covered. Clicks tell us a little bit about that. Documented that very well. A great great man for helping to get the iraqi official government documents of that massacre as the iraqis were kind of like the germans. They took exquisite records of everything. So they have these they were proud of what they called on file thei