Plame & Miller
There is a lot of speculation on why Judith Miller of the New York Times is sitting in jail. She didn’t write about Valerie Plame, so why did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, insist on having her jailed for contempt when she refused to testify before the Grand Jury investigating the Plame case.
Let’s review the known facts:
Ms. Miller is the Kool-Aid Kween, the number one supporter of the Bush plan to invade Iraq, and the number one supporter of Bushevik claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction. She has an association with Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, that goes back a decade. Chalabi would be a direct conduit between Miller and Douglas Feith, the head of the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon created to provide alternative intelligence regarding Iraq, as they are old friends.
Miller being embedded with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha in Iraq can only be explained by major interference by someone like Feith, because military intelligence is not in the habit of having reporters tag along on missions.
Valerie Plame was a CIA analyst working on the WMD desk. The only people outside of the CIA who would be aware of her existence would be those senior officials in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department who would be considered “consumers” for the “product” she was working on. She would probably, occasionally, attend briefings for top officials to explain points in the reports coming from her office.
There is no way for Miller to legally discover Ms. Plame’s identity. Given that a top secret clearance would be required to attend the briefings at which Ms. Plame would be present, it is obvious that the revelation of her position was a violation of US espionage laws.
Douglas Feith has resigned “to spend more time with his family” after his deputy, Larry Franklin, was felt to have been overly enthusiastic by the FBI in his support for Israel by allegedly providing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] with too much information.
There are reports that the INC was the source of much of the bad intelligence about Iraq in the run up to the war, and that Chalabi was overly friendly with Iranian intelligence.
What you end up with a group of people for whom “the ends justify the means” and think they are better informed and more intelligent than the people who get to make decisions. These are people who think their resumés are true, for a given value of “true”.
Many, possibly most, assume that there was only one leak. Given the track record of this administration it is safer to assume that there were multiple leaks for various, mostly private, reasons.
It is very likely that Ms. Miller learned of Plame from Feith, and didn’t write about it, because Novak filed an article before she could. Ms. Miller is not known for sharing the spotlight, or for helping others without a clear vision of some benefit for her.
Members of the White House Iraq Group [Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Jim Wilkinson, and Nicholas Callo] would have been cleared for briefings by Ms. Plame, with Stephen Hadley the most probably attendee as deputy National Security Adviser.
Novak and Cooper would have received the leak from WHIG, which was created as an agitprop operation to promote the Iraq War. Logically the group created to promote the war would be the entity used to attack any reports that made the war less likely.
I would like to make it clear that everything I have written is openly available on the Internet and involved no “special sources”. The pattern has been available for anyone who took the trouble to look and has minimal skills with Google™. The problem most people have in understanding the Busheviks is assuming that there is some form of “genius” involved, when they are simply arrogant.
Andante is contemplating Ms. Miller at Collective Sigh, while Hesiod posting at American Street is annoyed at Mickey Kaus for stealing his idea about a possible Miller interview of Ms. Plame.
Sorry, Hesiod, but Ms. Plame was a career operative, and certainly wouldn’t have talked to Judith Miller. Ms. Plame would know that Ms. Miller lacked the clearance to know of her existence.
