about British WMD expert David Kelly, just after his death near his home in England, under highly suspicious circumstances, three days after the outing of Valerie Plame. (Novak outed Plame on 7/14/03. Kelly died on 7/17/03.) Here is Miller's article:
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/scibaneprolif.html"Scientist was bane of proliferators" - Judith miller 7/21/03, NYT
Kelly had the Blairites all in a tither over his whisteblowing to the BBC on their exaggerations about Iraq WMDs (the "sexing up" of the intel docs). In the middle of the controversy, he was found dead, under a tree, out in the rain, near his home, with a slit wrist and a bottle of painkillers nearby. He had reportedly lain there and bled to death all night. (You have to wonder where Brit intel surveillance was, when this happened. The official story is suicide, but there are gaping holes in that story, and the official "Lord Hutton" inquiry ignored dissenting eyewitnesses and experts.)
Kelly had supported the invasion of Iraq, but something happened in summer 2003 to change his viewpoint, and though he had been party to the Brit intel docs (had tried to get the wording more accurate, but went along with it), he began whistleblowing to the BBC about the exaggerations after the invasion.
One of Kelly's last emails was to...guess who? Judith Miller--the email in which he warned of "many dark actors playing games." Miller had cultivated a relationship with Kelly and had used him as a major source in her book, "Germs." In writing the news article about his death, she failed to disclose her close connection to him, and failed to mention his last email.
I have not seen the original NYT publication, so I am not 100% certain that she failed to disclose her connections to Kelly, but it's looking fairly certain that she didn't. See:
"More about Judith Miller" (re: Miller/Plame/David Kelly)
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/3/17138/30618But, more than this, I think she may have put words into a dead man's mouth, to justify her own activities and views on WMDs.
Notice the wording and quotation marks (or lack thereof) in paragraphs 16 and 17:
"After visiting Baghdad after the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, Dr. Kelly told associates that he believed that Mr. Hussein operated advanced chemical and biological research and development programs, and probably had chemical weapons.
"He said it was conceivable that deadly weapons and other material were still buried in Iraq, but he was critical of the way in which American armed forces had gone about hunting for them, and expressed the fear that material might have been looted, hidden or carried away. "It may be virtually impossible to construct through traditional forensics what Iraq had done," he once said.
Notice, in particular, the phrase (Dr. Kelly) "told associates." Why doesn't she name these associates, or cite her source? Was she talking about herself, but failing to disclose this to the readers?
Also notice the use of an old quote, out of the post-invasion time-frame which she slips in, at the end of the second paragraph (para 17), in quotes, with the tag "he once said." It seems to confirm the unquoted statements above it, but we are given no context or timeframe for the sentence that is in quotes, that he "once said." (Kelly had been a WMD expert involved in Iraq WMD issues for decades.)
I was particularly struck by her claim that he criticized "the way in which American armed forces had gone about hunting for them" (WMDs). That was a particular shtick of Miller herself. In fact, she ran around in Iraq with the US troops who were looking for WMDs after the invasion, egging them on, criticizing them for not looking hard enough, and threatening them with her insider Pentagon connections (and became a great annoyance to the commanders in the field). Bush's and Blair's reputations, and her own reputation--and the whole justification for the war (which she had propagandized for on the front pages of the NYT)--was riding on a find of WMDs in Iraq. And the outcome of that search was still in question in July 2003, when Kelly was found dead and when Plame and her covert network of CIA eyes and ears on WMDs around the world was outed by the Bush regime.
Finally, the TONE and content of these purported statements of David Kelly seem very out of sync with his viewpoint at the time of his death, when he was risking his career (and, as it turns out, his life) in order to alert the public to the lies that the Blairites had told. His purported criticism of U.S. troops seems particularly out of tune.
Was Miller making these quotes up--after his death (when, of course, he couldn't cry foul)--in order to justify her own activities? Was she using earlier quotes, from before his change of heart in early summer, to make it appear that, in July--when he was getting into all kinds of trouble for whistleblowing--he still supported this phony excuse for the war? (She places the first unquoted statement after the fall of Saddam, which would be May or June. I don't know exactly when Kelly visited Iraq--but he did do so in that period.) In any case, the impression she gives--and this kind of writing is all about impressions--does not fit with the whistleblower, who had the Blair government in a flurry to shut him up (--in my opinion, not so much because of what he said, but of what he might say next, what he might have known).
In the swiftly moving world of events in spring-summer 2003, it's possible that David Kelly said these things "to associates" and THEN something happened to change his viewpoint. But I am still struck by the lack of quotation marks, lack of cited sources, the self-serving nature of the remarks (self-serving to Miller), and the "he once said" addition. This looks like cooked up reporting to me, and needs investigation. I am also struck by her failure to mention her connections to Kelly and most especially her not mentioning the "dark actors playing games" email. She was WITHHOLDING this important item from the public. (The email was later disclosed by Kelly's family.)
Miller is now suspected of laundering Valerie Plame's identity to other reporters, to protect the source of the information (undoubtedly Cheney, Libby and/or Rove) from prosecution for the serious crime of outing a CIA agent. She has been jailed for not disclosing her source. (She didn't use the information herself, but may have passed it to others.) Whatever her level of participation or guilt, she was an actor of some sort in the destruction of the CIA's WMD information-gathering project (a 20+ year project involving many agents and contacts--many of whose lives were put in danger by the outing). And here, with a little digging, we find her ALSO connected, however peripherally, to what appears to be another, harsher outing.
The Blairites hunted Kelly down, interrogated him in a "safe house," outed him to the press, as the source of the BBC stories, without warning him, forced him to partially recant before a Parliamentary committee, and then apparently let him go home without surveillance or protection.
"Many dark actors playing games," indeed.
Hutton used all this hell that the Blairites put Kelly through to support the suicide story. But Kelly was a tough bird--a quiet, but very feisty guy, who had stood up to Saddam Hussein and to the Russians. A wimpy wrist-slashing doesn't fit his character (or his sex) at all. In the several emails he wrote just before he died, he's looking forward to his daughter's wedding, and returning to Iraq, and he thinks the controversy will all blow over in a week. Combined with the many anomalies at the death scene, I'm pretty well convinced that he did not kill himself.
I have my thoughts as to why David Kelly might have been assassinated. (I suspect he may have stumbled upon, or even foiled, a plot to plant WMDs in Iraq.) And I have my thoughts about why Valerie Plame and her WMD network were disabled, and why I think Rovian revenge is a cover story. (--also possibly related to a plot to plant WMDs in Iraq, and to other Bush Cartel WMD activities and arms profiteering).
See
"Plame...the tip of the iceberg..." (Plame maybe investigating Cheney arms deals when they busted her CIA weapons op)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2178477#2180220Joseph Wilson recently said that his wife and Judith Miller were "collateral damage" in the Bush regime war on dissent. He has said nothing that supports any of my suspicions. Still, I think it's damn curious to have this so-called journalist skirting the edges of two simultaneous events that had the result of crippling the WMD expertise available to these two governments, at a time when that expertise was, and is, so badly needed.
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