Pretty good article on Rove/Plame that focuses more on why Fitzgerald has been pursuing this case so vigorously and why both judges have been willing to jail Miller.
Bastille Day
July 14, 2005
Those Eight Black Pages
What's the Real Story on Karl Rove?
By JUDE WANNISKI
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All of this led me to believe there had to be more to this story than the surface noise, or Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would not have spent two years of his life trying to get to the bottom of things -- when it never seemed clear that Ms. Plame was a covert agent, traveling openly back and forth to her desk at Langley. It's now clear that there may be something VERY big going on here to explain all this time, money and effort. We don't know what it is, but it is in the hands of the prosecution and the federal courts, summarized in eight pages that Lawrence O'Donnell could write on July 7, on Ariana Huffington's website, "The One Very Good Reason Karl Rove Might Be Indicted." The headline is shocking in itself, coming from O`Donnell, a respected journalist, a man I`ve known since he served as chief of staff to the late Sen. Pat Moynihan in the 1980s.
In his July 7 blog, the "one good reason" he cites involves eight blank pages in a February decision by Circuit Court Judge David Tetel who joined his colleagues in ordering Cooper and Miller to reveal their sources. Tetel had earlier indicated he would dissent because the matter did not seem to be a danger to national security, but after looking at the evidence presented by the prosecution he decided they had to testify because, as O`Donnell puts it, "he found that the press privilege had to give way to the gravity of the suspected crime." He also notes: "All the judges who have seen the prosecutors secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment."
I certainly have no idea what`s in those eight blank pages, but I do know the Plame case involved President Bush`s assertion in his State of the Union Address prior to the decision to invade Iraq that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to buy "yellowcake," clear proof that he was still attempting to reconstitute a nuclear arsenal. It turns out that before the President made this assertion to the nation, members of his team, including CIA Director George Tenet, knew the documents supposedly proving Iraq's interest in yellowcake had been forged, and they also knew Joseph Wilson had returned from Niger months before the State of the Union address with a report that the information was false.
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Judith Miller`s willingness to go to jail for at least four months is another matter. We do know there was no journalist in America more responsible for promoting the idea that Saddam was hiding chemical and biological weapons. She`d written a book about it and it has subsequently been revealed that her primary source in the months before and after the war was Ahmed Chalabi. Now a member of the new National Assembly in Iraq, Chalabi is supposedly "out of favor" with the Bush administration on CIA reports that he was revealing classified information to Iran, but that is clearly a charade and Chalabi remains as close to the neo-cons as he ever was. His connections go back to his days as a fellow classmate at the University of Chicago with Paul Wolfowitz, now World Bank president, and the chief architect of the war. In 2003, Miller would have no reason to get a phone call from anyone in the White House about the Plame affair, but because she was a trusted advocate for the war among the neo-cons, she might have gotten the leak from another administration source who would not give her the clearance Miller got because it might blow the whole business sky high.
(...)
http://www.counterpunch.org/wanniski07142005.html
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