The book covers the long accomplished career in journalism nearly three decades of which was listed in the New York Times. She joined the papers Washington Bureau in 1977 and spent the 80s arrived in cairo and paris. Returning to washington to serve as a correspondent. Osama bin laden and al qaeda and others in 2001 and before and immediately after the 9 11 attack when the Pulitzer Prize for the financial journalism. During the runup to the iraq war after the 2003 invasion they wrote a number of articles about the wmd efforts and the articles later turned out to be based on wrong information. They were both inside and outside of the times in the reporting and in 2004 and 2005 she ended up with further controversy this time over the plain case with the rights to protect sources and refusing to testify before the grand jury. In late 2005. In 2008 she joined the commentator and also is now an adjunct fellow and a contributing editor at the institutes magazine journal [inaudible] everybodys a critic. [laughter] connect the story is where others have dealt with biological weapons and the first gulf war. She was just embarking and happens to take such. Judys story or stories on the practice of journalism between reporters and sources and editors and especially when classified or highly Sensitive Information is involved and that decisions about whether to take a nation to war are at stake. So certainly it is a lot to discuss. Judy will be in the conversations within old friend of mine who is a talented correspondent and editor after 20 years in the Washington Post and went on to lead the Transatlantic Center of the Marshall Fund in the council on germany. 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 close friend and editor. Tell me a little bit about that early phase of your career. Back then i was a graduate student who had decided i was never going to be an economist because it was too boring even for me. Since i hated the sight of blood i couldnt be a dr. I thought journalism would be an interesting way to spend ones life. I had no idea how interesting it would be. But i started doing freelance stories at Woodrow Wilson school where i was graduate student. Sent me to the middle east for summer where many universities did. Where in the middle east . I went started out in israel and i got really hooked with the arabisraeli conflict. In those days, if, people forget we had to go to cyprus because there was no direct connection between israel and any arab country. So i flew to cyprus. I went to egypt. People told me there was going to be a war. This is 72. I wasnt reading that in the american papers. I was interested in that. Went to jordan. Met king hussein first time an interviewed him with tape recorder and didnt know how it worked and ended up starting it for me. That became beginning of a very longstanding friendship and i admired him enormously. And, beirut and syria and came back to princeton and decided i really didnt want to do economics. I wanted to be a journalist and woodward and bernstein were still kind of the heroes of the day. I came to washington try to get a job and found the progressive. A mentor of mine, early mentor was i. F. Stone. Izzy was nothing if kept call. He was mr. Skepticism. Would go to him with a problem or National Security challenge only government could solve, just remember they all lie, doesnt matter republican democrats, independents and they all lie and always will and only thing you can depend on what they put in their documents sometimes he said. He would go through them religiously. He was a great source of inspiration. So when i got to the times, i was hired at the New York Times because of affirmative action. The women of the New York Times three years earlier sued the paper and for sexual discrimination. I had to tell you their case was rock solid. There were no columnists. In there were no women, on and on. There were no women. Three women out 35 people in the Washington Bureau. All of sudden people like me began being hired. And, 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 the middle east and in 1982 Abe Rosenthal sent me there, another mentor and inspiration all long with bill sapphire conservative columnist who i adamantly disagreed. We agreed on only one thing, which was the importance of journalism to keeping americans informed. On that we agreed. Something we share. Right. Since that was your first big foreign assignment, how did that change you your perspective as a person, your views about the middle east and also about the way to cover it as a journalist . I think, i had what i had discovered, when i was a student was that the story often times wasnt the major story that everybody was writing about. It was about, in israel this group were the first group of people to form illegal settlers, 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 rule of law. And i saw great peril in this approach and wrote that. Then, when i got to egypt full time the first big story i had was not in egypt, it was in beirut. In 1983 when the marine compound was blown up and thats when i encountered terrorism for the first time in my life and i you know beirut being beirut rather than have a nice cordoned, with an area that had been a bomb site roped off, it was utter chaos. I had flown to israel because lebanon was closed. They had closed all of the borders. They closed the airport but i flew to israel and persuade adleb niece friend who went back and forth to take me with him. I just got there at dawn as they were digging out american bodies from the rubble. And that was the first time i understood what we were up against. No one we he all heard the story of smiling shiite driver in yellow mercedes who smiled as he drove through the compound doors. We didnt understand what that was all about. It would be a long time before we understood what jihadis believed about the after the life and how after life and how important it would be to do something memorable and important in their sense of the word. So from that, thats where my interest in islamic militancy began and that directed the rest of my reporting for the next three years actually, for the next 20 years. So if i recall correctly i think the, the suicide bomber was guided from tehran. Tehran, absolutely. It was i mean that was early days of hezbollah. Hezbollah was just being formed. And 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 period but i knew, as i was standing there that day in the rubble that this was not going to stop with beirut. And lo and behold two months later i was standing in another rubble, the American Embassy in kuwait. Fortunately nobody was killed because the area that was bombed, where the suicide bomber had come through, was a place where the chancery where people stopped working. So we were hugely lucky that more americans werent killed there. I began to see it again and again and again. Different groups that we tended to lump together with one term islamic fundamentalism but i knew they were all different. They were motivated by some same things but all politics is local. I had to go to each country to figure out what motivated that particular group. So in your reporting you found the causes were different for this kind of suicidal maniacal kind of islamic jihadism . The goal was the same to establish the caliphate or the restoration of islamic rule. The methods, the grievances, the method of organization the way the, mo was different everywhere. For example people always said israel was really important factor in this. It was if you were on the west bank or gaza or in an area, in a refugee camp the immediate surrounding areas and if i went to algeria morocco tunis. They didnt really care about israel. It was not a factor in what they wanted to do. And so, i began to be enormously wary about these broad generalizations. That led to my book, god has 99 names. I always love that about islam. 99 names. There is actually 100, but one is unknowable, known only to god but, it was broad generalizations that frightened except there was one thing that critics got right. Do not think this will stay in the middle east. This will not be confined in the middle east. They were right about that. Must have been particular difficult as a woman reporter a western woman reporter covering the middle east . Or were there hidden advantages . There were many hidden advantages. Not only did i get my job through affirmative action but, in those days, when you were at risk, not only because you were tall but women werent kidnapped. And we werent killed. It was arab chivalry. Islamic chivalry. They didnt do to us what they did to some of you. And, there was also, the kind of what i called the saudiusc syndrome. Go to saudi arabia where women couldnt drive, had to sit in the back of the bus. I did that it is not fun because the back buts isnt airconditioned at 120 degrees. Cant really work with men. We all know the conditions now but. I an honorary man for the time i was there and the saudi trained americantrained saudi officials would bend over backwards to show how enlightened and western they were and, i had extraordinary access because i was a woman. So this gender thing plays both ways. Once again always a generalization that tends to be wrong. All right. What interested you in weapons of mass destruction . You wrote about germs, biological warfare. Happy subjects, brad. You seem to be drawn to grisly ways of dying. It is so crazy. Ive been so blessed. My life was really lucky. I had a wealthy, talented father. A brother who is a great musician. Grew up comfortable, but, i grew up part of the time in las vegas where my father owned night clucks and ran nightclubs and i didnt realize until the times sent me back to las vegas after 2001 to look at what we were using the Nevada Test Site for, to write a series of articles there. I didnt realize that i had actually that is when i remembered this. I had actually grown up during the period of there, for about four years of openair testing. And i remembered seeing one of the tests. I mean, las vegas remember is only 60 miles away from the place where we did most of our aboveground testing and, most of our underground testings too. And i remember the bomb very much being apart of my childhood, my, i write about this in the book. My mother, i begged my mother to take to us jcpenney which had just donated a set of clothing that was going to be used in the apple bombings. The pentagon wanted to see what would happen to mannequins who were dressed up in regular clothes inside of the houses they built which you can still see today, if you go out to the Nevada Test Site. They have tours which i highly recommend, once a month. And you is a you know, they detonate ad bomb. And you saw the mannequins, the mannequins are gone but they have pictures what was left and it is horrific absolutely horrific scene and the Atomic Testing Museum in las vegas actually lets you sit at a bench the way our soldiers did and feel the rumble of the earth. They have recreated that and what the sky looked like. And all of sudden it of came back to me and where i realized my interest in weapons of mass destruction had come from. Never mind the fact we were systematically lied to what the effects of radiation were. I mean that was i think part of the reason i wanted to write about this, i knew a lot of what we were being told was not right. So hence, some of my early pieces for the progressive were very skeptical of National Security justifications for some of the weapons we were developing neutron bombs. Things like that. And did you connect it in those days to your interest in the middle east and sort of asking yourself what will happen if suicidal religious fanatic gets his or her hands on weapons of mass destruction . Right. Yeah, that is when that occurred to me. In 1991 when i got trapped in saudi arabia, i wasnt chosen to be part of a team that covered the war but i was interviewing prominent saudis when the war broke out and the saudis closed their airspace so i was trapped there for three months t was great to be trapped in saudi arabia for three months because the men sent all of their wives and families to mecca, which saddam would never bomb they thought. I got to hang out with them. I finally had a chance to kind of really talk to saudis an unguarded moment where they felt vulnerable, they knew if saddam won they were in big trouble. It gave me insight into saudi arabia i had before, though i had been there many times but i remember one of them telling me about this mad saudi named Osama Bin Laden from a very wealthy family running around with his charts and graphs showing how we didnt need the infidels. We didnt need these people. Get them out of here. Theyre, you know soiling our holy land. We can fight this war ourselves. And then i encountered him by reputation again in, in 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 . In 19, in mid 80s . 19891 was the war and i 1991 was the war and went to taliban afghanistan before 2000 before 2001. Afghanistan and bin laden, others where the mujahideen had been trained by American Special forces. Well, i dont know if we trained his group but we trained mujahideen like him. I remember having an argument with a great friend of mine who wanted to be here but she is traveling today. She is a superb diplomat. Ambassador francis cook. She had been given a tour of the taliban, sorry of the, of the mujahideen that the cia was training and she said boy these are my kind of holy warriors. I remember saying to her you know, im just really nervous about the notion of any holy warrior because they tend to forget that all virtue and wisdom is not on their side. This could be problematic for us. I encountered them in egypt because they were blowing up government ministries and government officials there so i knew how this translated and i was always worried about it. I badgered the times to let me do a series on this guy of al qaeda with my former colleague jeff kerth. We did the first piece in New York Times, im not sure, 1997, Osama Bin Laden bamming more than a finance ear but operator of terror. That whole phenomenon of blowback was very impressively reported in steves book ghost warrior. Wonderful book marvelous book. So then, on, for example, saddam, there was a period of time when he was actually considered a socalled friend of United States. I mean were you, were you covering him in those days . Yes. In the early 80s, i believe, Donald Rumsfeld went to baghdad and asked how we could help in terms of the fighting against iran and saddam was then touted as a socialist secular bulwark against the spread of islamic fundamentalism. Absolutely. Women were going to universities in baghdad. Right. What did you think in those days about that relationship. My first trip to iraq was in 1977 when saddam was there. He was consolidating power. And as much as i was suspicious of islamic militants i really didnt like saddam because every writer was under pressure or in jail. Any dissident any artist, even people with galleries were tear spied of the momarat they would come in and take what they wanted. Is it was a nightmare from the beginning. Each time i went back and i went 20 times to iraq because i had fortune of covering iraniraq war when i was in egypt, it got worse and worse. Sanctions went on. Children began to starve. It was an absolute mess. I, was one of the first series, another series of articles i worked on with the inimitable bill broad who was a great science reporter for the New York Times who wrote coauthor of my next book, germs, biological weapon. We looked at saddams pie logical Weapons Program and weirdly enough that was the program that he lid the longest t wasnt nukes. We didnt realize he destroyed them after israel had bombed his reactor but that they never were able to really rebuild the program but, the biology was very important to him. And so bill and i got to work with International Inspectors who had come back to rack and they were telling us about the program and resulted in another really interesting investigation. I, after watching saddam for so many years he could have told me the sun rose in the east and set in the west and i wouldnt have believed it. He was a monster just on human rights grounds alone i could not figure out why the United States was embracing him. What then led to you must have tracked his efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and particularly in covering the iraniraq war he was already using chemical weapons then. And eventually against his own people. I remember that he was, would be using insecticide against the besige coming across the marshes in the south. And finally against his own people the kurds in the north. In halabja, which was another massacre that covered. Tell us a little bit about that. Peter galbraith and others documented that very well. Great, great man for getting helping to get the iraqi official government documents of that massacre because the iraqi were kind of like the germans. They took exquisite records of everything. So they had these, they were proud of what they called, their campaign their Genocidal Campaign against the kurds and they had documented into detail, village by village, house by house. What was used where. How it was delivered. How many kills there were. It was just horrific. And, it, for me, i wrote a front page cover story based on those documents peter got me access to. The dia and Human Rights Watch were working together to translate these documents and get the word out abo