. . . . that the Iraqi oil law is about more than what you described as national reconciliation?

The oil law, which would set up a system for managing and developing Iraq’s oil resources and would have a companion revenue-sharing law that would apportion oil income among the various groups, had been considered the most likely to be passed before the September report to Congress. But by the time the Iraqis return to Parliament in September, it is highly unlikely that they could meet the midmonth deadline in the United States.

“The fact is that the political blocs haven’t reached an agreement,” said Ayad al-Samarrai, one of the leaders of Tawafiq, the largest of the Sunni Arab blocs in Parliament. “What the government is doing can be described as dodging — the governmental bodies have not agreed among themselves,” he said, referring to differences within the Iraqi leadership, which includes Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, about aspects of the law.

However, there is a growing sense among a number of Iraqi leaders that all of the measures that constitute reconciliation should be handled as a package so that tradeoffs can be made among the political groups. “The Kurds want to approve a certain group of laws, like a national revenue-sharing law” and other provisions, said Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite member of Parliament.

The Sunni Arabs are also interested in addressing the laws as a package, Mr. Samarrai said. “Today we made a suggestion to invite the political blocs to discuss this with the presidency,” he said. They would discuss several laws as a political package and make a deal on all of them once. They include the oil and revenue sharing measure, a new “de-Baathification” law widening access to government jobs to members of Saddam Hussein’s former ruling party, which was dominated by Sunni Arabs, and a law scheduling provincial elections to choose representative governments so that Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds would be equitably represented.

Rather strangely, your article makes no reference to the fact that the law mandates the denationalization of the industry and the profitable, virtually unregulated, participation of transnationals through production sharing agreements. Nor does the article make mention of the opposition of the unions that represent the people who work within it.

Another rather peculiar omission, don't you think? Neglecting to mention the opinion of the people that actually work in the industry? Do you honestly not know these things, or did the editor back in New York slash it out? After all, Bill can be so prissy about these things.

I also couldn't understand why the Shia, the Sunnis and the Kurds are having such difficulty reaching an agreement if the bill is designed to promote reconciliation. Anyway, as you can tell, I am having a lot of difficulty making sense of out of your story. I know that you have dinner plans with Judith and Michael at eight, so maybe you can call or e-mail after you get home, and provide some much needed insight.

Labels: Judith Miller, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, New York Times, Occupation of Iraq

After all that embarrassment, after all those legal fees, after all that internal turmoil, you'd think that the New York Times would have learned its lesson. You'd think that it finally understood that it would have to repudiate Judith Miller's stenography, her willingness to exploit the prestige of the Times for the benefit of her neo-conservative friends and her abrasive self-righteousness in order to preserve its remaining credibility. And, most importantly, you'd think that the Times recognized that it must never, never again cloak disinformation in the guise of journalism in order to assist our leaders in their efforts to lead the country into war.

All quite reasonable assumptions, and all of them quite wrong. As with the war with Iraq, the Times has reported for duty. On Wednesday, readers stumbled upon a story with the following headline:

Atomic Agency Sees Possible Link of Military to Iran Nuclear Work

Channelling Miller, no doubt in the early morning hours, reporters Elaine Scolino and William J. Broad publish a story rife with sinuendo, but sparse on identifiable, attributable sources. Sinuendo is the technique of encouraging people to believe that something is true in the absence of evidence, while avoiding exposure for defamation, with the most skilled practicioners of the art employed by tabloids. In this instance, Scolino and Broad have the objective of persuading readers, with whatever remains of the Times prestige, that Iran does, in fact, have a program for developing nuclear weapons.

Operative terms common to the use of sinuendo have been highlighted:

The International Atomic Energy Agency says it has evidence that suggests links between Iran's ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles, according to a report from the agency that was released to member countries on Tuesday.

The four-page report, which officials say was based at least in part on intelligence provided by the United States, refers to a secretive Iranian entity called the Green Salt Project, which worked on uranium processing, high explosives and a missile warhead design.

The combination suggests a "military-nuclear dimension," the report said, that if true would undercut Iran's claims that its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electrical power.

Upon close reading, there isn't much there, is there? ". . . evidence that suggests links . . . combination suggests a "military-nuclear dimension" . . . that if true would undermine Iran's claims . . ." Say, what? It took me about 2 or 3 minutes to stop my head from spinning like Max Headroom after encountering these passages.

And, surprise, surprise, "officials" say that the report was ". . based at least in part on intelligence provided by the United States . . . " But, only "in part", of course, because it was essential that Scolino and Broad imply that the US information, which might raise suspicions among the well-informed in light of the Iraqi WMD debacle and the Niger forgery, be supplemented or corroborated by other, more presumably reliable sources.

Naturally, there's more:

More broadly, the report states that the country has not been fully cooperative on all of the outstanding nuclear issues that the agency has questioned for years, and that formed the basis of a resolution by the agency's board last fall that Iran was not complying with its international obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The Green Salt Project derives its name from uranium tetrafluoride, also known as Green Salt, which is an intermediate product in the conversion of uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride — a toxic gas that can undergo enrichment or purification into fuel for nuclear reactors or bombs.

The report suggests that the fuel project, the high explosives tests and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle "appear to have administrative interconnections."

It would seem to be the first time the agency has publicly suggested that the fuel production — which Iran has said is purely for civilian purposes — was linked to its military programs.

My personal favorite here is the combined use of suggest and appear in the same sentence: ". . The report suggests that the fuel project, the high explosives tests and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle "appear to have administrative interconnections." Can someone explain what this actually means? Indeed, the pervasive invocation of the word "suggest" or "suggests", well, it "suggests" that reporters at the Times are badly in need of a thesaurus.

Beyond close textual analysis, it is also essential to understand the means by which the IAEA report itself provides subconscious credibility to such amorphous information, inducing the reader to leap the numerous high hurdles of "suggest" and "appear" liberally sprinkled throughout the article, so as to believe that Iran must have a nuclear weapons program. Or, at least, legitimize the claims of the Bush administration to this effect:

While the Bush administration has long argued that Iran was using its civilian program to hide ambitions to build a nuclear weapon, the agency has always steered clear of that accusation. With the report, it has for the first time provided evidence directly suggesting that at least some of Iran's activities point to a military project.

Wow! ". . evidence directly suggesting . . " They must teach this vocabulary only in advanced courses in the most highly regarded journalism schools. I will leave it to commenters to excavate other nuggets of sinuendo from the article. One, however, must be addressed. The reference to a document in Iran's possession that describes procedures that can only be used for nuclear weapons has been known by the IAEA since 1987. Strangely enough, Scolino and Broad substitute the vague, antiseptic term ". . in the past . . ", without referencing the date. If, however, you are trying to persuade the public to launch another pre-emptive war, after the first one has been discredited, it pays to be as vague as possible.

Labels: Judith Miller, Mainstream Media, New York Times, War with Iran

UPDATE: Norman Soloman gets it:

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons." And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."

And,

On June 14, 2003, shortly before he was promoted to the job of executive editor at the New York Times, the newspaper published an essay by Bill Keller that explained why the U.S. government should strive to improve the quality of its intelligence. "The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted," he wrote. "To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face."

Soloman is leading us to the river's edge, where we cannot evade the alarming question: To what extent were Miller's activities affirmatively sanctioned by NYT management, as opposed to being the consequence of passive acquiescence? It is becoming more and more implausible that Miller was acting so brazenly on behalf of the White House Iraq Group without an unequivocal signal from the highest levels of the company. So long as the media and media pundits implicitly protect the NYT by defining this story as one involving an out of control journalist with a personal agenda, we will never find out what really occurred.

ORIGINAL POST: As people familiar with my posts here know, I’m not one to chase the news cycle. I have this naive belief that we should discuss important social and philosophical aspects of our politics discarded by our fascination with breaking news and the media’s manipulative way of presenting it. And, anyway, there’s no way that I would even try to keep up with Eli over at Left i. I have, however, made an exception in regard to the involvement of Judith Miller and the NYT in the disclosure of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife as a covert CIA operative.

Why? For this reason: Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is revealing the media’s collaboration with the Bush White House in promoting the expansionist goals of American foreign policy, most tragically as demonstrated by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Through Judith Miller, the NYT, as an institution with unprecendented credibility, played an essential role in legitimizing the war on security grounds. Perhaps, this is not so remarkable. As Sam Smith of the Progressive Review observed several years ago:

Carl Bernstein, in a [1977] article in Rolling Stone, estimated that 400 American journalists had been tied to the CIA at one point or another, including such well known media figures as the Alsop brothers, C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, and Philip Graham of the Washington Post. Later the New York Times reported that the CIA had owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and periodicals, mostly overseas. And, says NameBase Newslines, at least 22 American news organizations employed CIA assets, and "nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, 'Oh, sure, all the time.'" . . . In 1996, the Council on Foreign Relations suggested that the CIA be allowed once more to use journalists and clergy as cover for its operations. As NameBase Newslines points out, "For 70 years, [the CFR has] rarely recommended anything that has not become policy."

Part of the distant past? Think again. Late last year, the Los Angeles Times reported about an incident in which CNN uncritically broadcast false information related to the impending assault upon Falluja provided by the Pentagon, noting:

The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But officials say that much of OSI's mission — using information as a tool of war — has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government. Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States.

On September 7, 2002, Miller, along with Michael Gordon, published the now infamous article about Saddam Hussein attempting to obtain aluminum tubes and centrifuges for use to enrich uranium as part of a nuclear weapons development program:

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.

In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.

The article serendipitously appeared within a two day period of television appearances by Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, in which they all emphasized the purported nuclear threat presented by Iraq’s Baathist regime. Cheney specifically referenced the article during an appearance on Meet the Press, a classic instance of manufacturing your own corroboration. The story, like others authored by Miller and Gordon about the peril presented by Iraq in 2002 and 20o3, has been discredited by the emergence of specific evidence to the contrary as well as the failure to find WMDs in Iraq.

Of course, it seems unfair to characterize Miller as a neo-conservative intelligence asset operating in the margins between governance and journalism based upon these stories alone. But, over the weekend, a number of interesting pieces of a possible puzzle came to light that make the prospect more plausible. First, Juan Cole made this observation about Miller in a Salon.com article posted on Friday:

Miller was a consistent critic of Saddam's regime, but before 1998 she was capable of making nuanced judgments about the problem it posed for the United States. At some point after that, she apparently began to believe that she, with her prescient expertise about WMD and radical Islam, and her hawkish and neocon sources were right. This was when her fateful decline began. A minor scientist and sometime college teacher such as Khidhir Hamza became "the highest ranking scientist" to defect from Iraq. She relayed complaints from Gucci revolutionaries like Chalabi that they had been left out of the loop by the Clinton administration, and retailed Iraq National Congress tall tales to her unsuspecting audience. By the late 1990s, she had laid the ground for her subsequent path, of becoming stenographer to a motley crew of neoconservative hawks and Iraqi expatriate wheelers and dealers. The aluminum tubes story, in particular, which she co-wrote and which helped pave the way to war, will likely be taught in journalism classes for years as a textbook study of flawed reporting.

Cole ultimately concludes that she was a “useful idiot” instead of a “true believer”, but could there be more? Let’s now turn to the two articles about Judith Miller’s involvement in the Fitzgerald investigation published by the NYT yesterday. One, published by a team of NYT reporters, Don Van Natta, Jr, Adam Liptak and Clifford J. Levy, is entitled, The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal, and the other is Miller’s description of her testimony before the federal grand jury. They are fascinating, especially in light of what we already know about the involvement of the intelligence community with the media, causing one to reasonably wonder whether Miller was serving as an operative on behalf of the Office of the Vice President, through Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, and the White House Iraq Group.

As for the Miller article, one cannot avoid reading it subjectively, and I encourage readers of this blog entry to take advantage of the link here and do so. Miller is careful, certainly much more so than she was in any of the articles that she wrote about WMDs, but she cannot avoid suggesting a starstruck quality when it comes to Libby. In a blunt, compelling column, Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher insists that Miller should be fired for crimes against journalism, but his column is equally valuable for its brief vivisection of the Miller/Libby relationship. He emphasizes, quite rightly, the peculiarity of Miller describing Libby as “a good faith source who was usually straight with me.” Even the most ardent Bush partisans would be embarassed to describe the administration this way. He additionally condemns Miller’s willingness to grant Libby’s request that his anonymity be preserved by describing him as a “former Hill staffer” as opposed to “a senior administration official”.

Space limitations and time constraints apparently prevented Mitchell from engaging in a closer textual reading, so let’s try to do a little ourselves. Miller’s recollection of the first meeting is most telling, as she recalled:

(1) [his] frustration and anger about what he called "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. The selective leaks trying to shift blame to the White House, he told me, were part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq

(2) that [he] was angry about reports suggesting that senior administration officials, including Mr. Cheney, had embraced skimpy intelligence about Iraq's alleged efforts to buy uranium in Africa while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Such reports, he said, according to my notes, were "highly distorted."

Nowhere does Miller indicate that she challenged Libby on either of these contentious assertions, and this lack of independent thought and inquiry flows through the remainder of her description of her encounters with Libby, which read like the rememberances of an acolyte in the Catholic Church.

So, with Libby, Miller conducted herself as something other than a journalist. And, curiously enough, she did at the NYT as well, except that, whereas she was submissive with Libby, she was domineering with her peers, and even her superiors, which the other article establishes beyond doubt:

In the year after Mr. Engelberg left the paper in 2002, though, Ms. Miller operated with a degree of autonomy rare at The Times. Douglas Frantz, who succeeded Mr. Engelberg as the investigative editor, said that Ms. Miller once called herself "Miss Run Amok." "I said, 'What does that mean?' " said Mr. Frantz, who was recently appointed managing editor at The Los Angeles Times. "And she said, 'I can do whatever I want.' "

And,

On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair. Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."

Most damning, however, is the extent to which the NYT warped its news coverage to protect her:

Even after reporters learned it from outside sources, The Times did not publish Mr. Libby's name, though other news organizations already had. The Times did not tell its readers that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source until Sept. 30, in an article about Ms. Miller's release from jail.

Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.

Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said.

In August, Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, two other Washington reporters, sent a memo to the Washington bureau chief, Mr. Taubman, listing ideas for coverage of the case. Mr. Taubman said Mr. Keller did not want them pursued because of the risk of provoking Mr. Fitzgerald or exposing Mr. Libby while Ms. Miller was in jail.

This is unprecedented, and strongly suggests two interrelated possibilities. One, that Miller and the NYT were criminally implicated in the exposure of Valerie Plame and, second, that Miller was a highly cultivated, extremely valuable intelligence asset.

Such a conclusion is additionally supported by the willingness of NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger, and Executive Editor Bill Keller, to allow Miller to doggedly refuse to testify without displaying any curiosity as to the actual facts:

But Mr. Sulzberger and the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller's conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller's notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the "Valerie Flame" notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday. Interviews show that the paper's leaders, in taking what they considered to be a principled stand, ultimately left the major decisions in the case up to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control. "This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said.

Sulzberger’s explanation is, of course, preposterous, given that he was ignorantly allowing one journalist to assume a high level of risk for a large media enterprise with extraordinary brand identification, and reminds me of a maxim that I vaguely recall from somewhere like one of Le Carre’s George Smiley novels, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or possibly, Dr. Who, something to the effect that when a person, or, in this instance, an entire institution, acts out of character and openly contrary to their interests, we must pay “careful attention”. It is certainly warranted here, and we may yet discover that the relationship between the NYT, Judith Miller, Lewis Libby and the Office of the Vice President is even more unseemly than we could ever imagine.

Labels: Iraq War, Judith Miller, Mainstream Media, New York Times

UPDATE: From Raw Story, through pontificator at Daily Kos:

Conversations with nearly a dozen Times reporters revealed a scarred landscape of discontent. Few reporters were willing to go on the record, but none who spoke with RAW STORY said they supported Miller. Many voiced worries that the paper’s editor, Bill Keller, was sacrificing his own integrity to protect her. . . . . Miller, who joined the Times Washington bureau in 1977, spent 85 days in jail after refusing to reveal who told her the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Since her release, reporters say, she has not been cooperative with the paper’s investigation into her role in events surrounding the case. Two reporters allege there have been newsroom outbursts between Keller and Miller over her refusal to talk to the paper’s own reporters.

Need it be said that this is behaviour entirely consistent with someone facing the prospect of a criminal indictment, or, similarly, someone who is cooperating with Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald under duress, having been instructed to remain publicly silent under threat of indictment? Such a development is also indirectly suggested by the announcement of Times Public Editor Brian Calame that he would soon be writing about the controversy, having been given assurances that, "A representative of Ms. Miller has indicated that she will talk to me at some point."

ORIGINAL POST: Judith Miller has testified for the second time in front of the federal grand jury at the request of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about her early summer 2003 encounters with the chief of staff for the Vice President, Lewis Libby. It is an extremely ominous development for both Miller and her employer, the New York Times. As Swopa over at Needlenose observed about Fitzgerald, citing this excerpt from an August 15, 2005 Los Angeles Times article:

Although some prosecutors use grand juries to rubber stamp charges based on testimony from government witnesses, such as FBI agents, Fitzgerald views the grand jury process as a wide-ranging search for facts, an effect of which is to reveal people who have been less than truthful. The Plame investigation has involved dozens of witnesses.

"Pat definitely uses it as an inquisitorial body," said Joshua Berman, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Fitzgerald in New York and who is a partner with the law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal in Washington. "He uses the grand jury as an apparatus to seek the truth. When people are not truthful … he believes those people should be punished."

Or, as Richard Sauber, the attorney for Time journalist Matt Cooper said more concisely, "I think people are going to be charged." Fear of criminal prosecution therefore explains why the NYT is scrupulously maintaining such an embarrassing silence about Miller's role in the investigation. After Miller's highly publicized initial appearance before the grand jury on September 30th, she subsequently discovered notes of another meeting with Libby on June 23, 2003. In an article published about a week ago, Reuters laid it all out, leaving little to the imagination:

Last Friday, after spending 85 days in jail, Miller testified before the grand jury about two conversations she had with Libby in July 2003 and turned over redacted notes.

She testified about a meeting with Libby on July 8, 2003 at the St. Regis Hotel and a later conversation by telephone on July 12, 2003, sources said.

But after she testified, Miller discovered that she had additional notes from the June 2003 conversation with Libby.

Put bluntly, Miller perjured herself by refusing to disclose her earlier conversation with Libby in June. Unless, of course, Fitzgerald improbably refused to ask if there had been any other meetings related to the subject of his investigation, which, given his willingness to incarcerate her for her testimony, is improbable, if not absurd. Furthermore, she, and/or the NYT, refused to produce these records in response to subpoenas issued compelling her grand jury testimony, as noted by Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher:

--Is the Times' reluctance to report fully on this case the result of being in a bit of hot water itself with the prosecutor? You'll recall that the prosecutor long ago subpoenaed the paper for any notes related to the probe and the Times replied that it had nothing —- or anything it did have belonged to its reporters (company policy, it said). Fitzgerald never seemed to challenge that. If Miller turned over the notes herself, is the Times still claiming the rule still stands?

Stunned, the mainstream media can't bring itself to believe that a self-styled star reporter from the most prestigious newspaper in the country faces the prospect of being indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice, and possibly, even exposing Valerie Plame's status as a covert CIA operative to Libby. The NYT could find itself separately charged with obstruction of justice if it falsely stated that it had no records responsive to Fitzgerald's subpoenas, although this seems less likely. One wonders, did anyone at the NYT naively rely upon a claim by Miller that there were no such records, or, alternatively, accept the legal parsing of counsel, related here by Mitchell, to helpfully put their signature on a declaration under penalty of perjury to this effect?

But such questions, while undoubtedly entertaining, divert us from the heart of the story. And, for that, we have to call Dr. Who, request the use of his TARDIS, and travel back to May, June and July of 2003. There are still some gaps, some unanswered questions, but here's the back of the envelope version, inspired by a revealing article by Gabriel Sherman in the New York Observer :

May 6, 2003: On the opinion page side of the NYT, Nicholas Kristof writes "Missing in Action: Truth", a column about the cooking of intelligence to support the presence of WMDs in Iraq, getting his information from Joseph Wilson behind the scenes.

May-June 2003: Judith Miller is concluding her treasure hunt for WMDs in Iraq as an embedded journalist with Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha empty handed, where, you might recall, she acted as a member of the search team, and got the commander's order to stop searching a particular area rescinded by calling a general who was a personal friend. One sees her aggression in a new light when one realizes that she was now being pressured by the lack of any WMD discoveries from inside the newspaper by Kristof.

June 2003: The news division enters the fray in light of the threat posed by Kristof's rogue operation on the opinion page side, Miller is assigned to investigate her own previous stories, so she goes to their favorite source, Libby, and talks to him on June 23, 2003. A meeting that was not disclosed by Miller to Fitzgerald until last week when she produced her notes of it.

July 6, 2003: The NYT publishes an article by Wilson, "What I Didn't Find in Africa", describing his inability to find support for the belief that Saddam Hussein attempted to obtain "yellowcake" uranium form Niger, a belief that formed the core of the Bush Administration's case for war against Iraq. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Miller's colleagues at the NYT recall that she was "livid" that the NYT had published it.

Such seemingly minor emotional details matter, because they explain Miller's subsequent behaviour in light of the air of desperation created by her inability to find WMDs in Iraq, and her increasing peril within the newspaper because of Kristof's insistence upon confronting the issue with the help of Wilson.

So, what happened on June 23, 2005? Personally, like Justin Raimondo and Arianna Huffington, I believe that Miller told Libby that Plame was a covert CIA operative, and that they conspired to give out her name to journalists like Matt Cooper and Robert Novak. As both Raimondo and Huffington have observed, Miller had written stories about WMDs and Iraq going back to the early 1990s, so she could have come across Plame's covert work in this field quite easily. And, note the following from a Daily Kos diary entry a couple of days ago:

Matthews just discussed the lastest news of the "Leak Case" with the Washington Post's Mike Allen, and NBC's Norah O'Donnel.

Mike Allen said people inside the White House are readying their legal defense, and that it will be that the Valerie Wilson information came from the press to them, not the other way around. One problem though, is that Allen said members of the State Department (including Colin Powell) have testified that the White House specifically requested the information about Valerie Wilson before there were any press accounts.

Of course, the prospect of Libby and Rove defending themselves by asserting that they got Plame's name from Miller (who else could it have been?) would shake the NYT to its foundations, regardless of the truth of it. My sense, however, is that Kristof's May 6, 2003 column was not considered a "press account" that crossed the radar of the State Department because it was printed as opinion, not a news, rendering it relatively non-threatening, except to Miller, because it was generated by her own newspaper. And, thus the circle is squared. Allen, being a journalist, implies that the idea that another journalist provided White House staffers like Libby and Rove with Plame's name is fictional by describing it as a "legal defense", but, as I said, Raimondo and Huffington believe it to be true, and the fact that Miller concealed the June 23, 2003 meeting until the last minute, hoping that the clock would run out on Fitzgerald's investigation, gives it circumstantial credibility.

Far-fetched, you say? Put yourself in the position of Miller and Libby in the early summer of 2003. As noted, they confronted a highly pressurized situation, and immediate, aggressive action was required to discredit and intimidate Wilson. Here's the thought process that these two amoral individuals would have gone through, fairly quickly, when considering the prospects of getting caught, which is all that would have mattered to them:

(1) the press would make a big deal of the exposure of Plame for a week or so, and then the story would fade

(2) if not, the investigation would be conducted by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, and summarily concluded with no misconduct found

(3) in the extremely unlikely event that the investigation was more thorough (and, here, they probably never contemplated the prospect that the investigation would get peeled away from Ashcroft), Miller could always fall back upon a journalist's need to protect her sources to bring things to a halt

And, remember, all of them, Rove, Libby, Miller, and her enabler, her boss, Executive Editor Bill Keller, were operating at a time when the ruthless Bush team was considered omnipotent. Never in a thousand years did they believe that Ashcroft would be thrown off the case and that Fitzgerald would take on the media with his subpoenas and force Miller, Cooper and Novak to testify. This was Miller's great utility to the neo-conservatives in the Bush White House: she could participate and do the dirty work, and never contradict anyone's story, like Libby's, because she could smile sweetly and invoke the sanctity of a journalist's need to protect her sources. Or, at least, that's what they thought.

One major issue that is neglected by both the media and the blogsphere is the significance of Miller's pending 1.2 million dollar book deal with Simon and Shuster. 1.2 million dollars for a book that few people will read, that will be remaindered in less than a month? If alarm bells haven't gone off in Fitzgerald's office, they should be. Hush money, anyone? If so, it worked for about a day or so, until Fitzgerald sprang his knowledge of that June 23,2003 meeting on Miller and her attorney, Bob Bennett. "Oh gosh, I forgot all about those notes, Mr. Special Prosecutor!" But a charge of obstruction of justice doesn't require that it actually work.

So, for Miller and the NYT, the nightmare is just beginning. She will soon find herself under indictment, or considered an unindicted co-conspirator, or, perhaps, merely a perjurer, forced to settle for the best possible deal, agreeing to assist Fitzgerald as required, used to compel pleas, and if necessary, testify in court as a hostile witness, where her initial refusal to testify, her perjury and her last minute release of highly pertinent documents, her notes of the 6/23/03 meeting, will all be put to good use to convict Libby, and possibly others associated with him.

Meanwhile, as for the NYT, the extent to which the newspaper was embedded with people aligned with the neo-conservative movement, people like publisher Arthur Sulzberger, former Middle East Bureau Chief Jill Abramson, Keller, William Safire, Thomas Friedman and, of course, Miller, is going to be highlighted for the whole world to see during the course of Fitzgerald's prosecutions. All sorts of people like this will briefly wander ghostlike through the proceedings, playing cameo roles, relating legally unimportant, but embarrassing tales that will grind away the NYT's credibility. Indeed, it is already being rumored that Fitzgerald has expanded the investigation to include Vice President Cheney and the activities of the White House Iraq Group. Huffington is suggesting that not just Miller, not just Miller and Keller, but that Miller, Keller and even Sulzberger himself, will be forced to resign to avoid a mass exodus. It will accelerate the substitution of the Internet for newspapers as sources of information, with all of the contradictions that this entails.

Labels: Iraq War, Judith Miller, Mainstream Media, New York Times