Judith Miller Backs Israelis In Trial Over Aid to Hamas

CHICAGO, Nov. 13 -- Former New York Times journalist Judith Miller testified Monday that she saw no evidence that a grocer had been tortured when she witnessed his interrogation by the Israelis in 1993.

"He was boasting. He was jaunty. There was no reason to believe that he had been subjected to that kind of treatment," Miller, who was then the Times' Cairo bureau chief, testified for the prosecution at Muhammad Salah's trial.

Salah, 53, and former Howard University professor Abdelhaleem Ashqar, 48, are charged in a federal racketeering indictment with providing money and fresh recruits to the Palestinian group Hamas in its campaign to topple the state of Israel.

The two men say they merely tried to help impoverished Palestinians suffering under the Israeli army's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They deny that they are Hamas members or support terrorism.

Salah was arrested in Israel in 1993 and served 4 1/2 years in Israeli prisons before his release and return to Chicago.

He claims that he was deprived of sleep, hooded and forced to sit in a tiny chair with his hands cuffed behind his back before he made a series of statements to agents of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet.

Shin Bet interrogators, using aliases and testifying before a courtroom cleared of spectators, have said that Salah's statements were voluntary.

Miller testified that she flew to Israel in 1993 after reading about Salah's arrest and contacted aides to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whom she described as a longtime friend.

Through Rabin and Shin Bet chief Yaakov Perry, she was invited to visit the West Bank interrogation center in Ramallah, provided that she would not reveal in any article she wrote that she had been there and seen Salah questioned.

She said she agreed to that condition after checking with an editor. On cross-examination, she was asked which editor had approved the visit. "I don't recall. We had a lot of editors, sir," she said.

She also said that she could not remember whether she was allowed to use a tape recorder while watching the interrogation session on television from an adjacent room. After being reminded of a 1998 radio interview in which she said she had used a tape recorder, she continued to say she could not remember.

Miller said she was taken to the interrogation center because the Israelis wanted her to write about Salah. He allegedly had already confessed that money to finance Hamas was coming out of the United States, and Israeli officials wanted to draw Americans' attention to that.

She said she was initially skeptical and believed that Salah may have been tortured into making such statements. She said she was willing to write a story only after seeing him under Israeli interrogation.

Defense attorneys repeatedly tried to portray her as biased in favor of Israel.

"Have you ever been used as a Mossad asset?" asked Salah's attorney, Michael Deutsch, referring to the Israeli intelligence service.

Miller said no.

Miller served 85 days in jail for civil contempt after refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington's CIA leak investigation. She retired from the Times in 2005 amid questions about whether she was insufficiently skeptical in her reporting about the possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.