Judith who?

Judith Miller, who — once upon a time — was a journalist, has called upon her extensive background in covering Middle Eastern affairs (she still claims “I was fucking right” to publicize false claims that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” — giving creedence to the Bush Administration’s war against Iraq, and against the world economy) to write about Mexico.   As with her writing about Iraq, she’s not about to let facts get in the way of a good story, as  Ganchoblog notes: 

Ms. Miller won a Pulitzer Prize at one time, but it wasn’t for fiction.  But, when it comes to Mexico, it seems foreign reporters (especially those that aren’t anywhere near the country) take their facts not from any knowledge of the country just south of their own, but from parts of the world having nothing much to do with the region. 

Miller’s supposed expertise is middle eastern politics.  She is not the first middle east correspondent to try to make analogies between Mexico’s “drug war” and the U.S. interventions in central Asia.  The A.P.s Mark Stevenson — who I admit has improved after a couple of years in Mexico — came here from a career as a war correspondent in the middle east, but had some Latin American experience, cheerleading for the conservatives and reaçctionaries in Haiti and Guatemala.  His early reporting in Mexico suffered from a sense that he was writing about a desert war in a far away country, not a anti-crime (and possibly anti-dissident) police operation next door to the United States.   Not to say there aren’t some very good reporters for the foreign press.  Just not many from the so-called “mainstream press.”  And not from disgraced Times reporters getting a stipend from some right-wing “think tank”.