Huffington has a pretty good take on the whole Rove/Plame/Miller thing...

[dave123williams]

Anyway, it kind of rang true to me:



Arianna Huffington
07.27.2005

Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/judy-miller-do-we-want-_4791.html

[Fridays Child]

1. If Arianna is right, and my guess is that she is...

...Judy Miller is shitting all over the reporters colleagues who have rushed to her defense.

[truthisfreedom]

2. and ultimately, where does that leave rove, libby, and the other players

in this grand scheme?

[izzie]

3. Why do I think Miller had an inside thing with Karl?

Did she just go with Bush's war at one time? I am sort of unsure on this reporter. I am sure I had some type of odd take on her when the war started.

[Panda1]

4. Good article. Thanks.

Arianna is scathing and accurate in her observations of Miller.
If anyone deserves to be in jail it's Judy...for her role in selling the Iraq war.

She and Bill Keller remain unapologetic; that's unacceptable.
In cahoots to sell papers and books? St. Judy.

Keller, along with Toensing, went on TV and started the Talking Point that Plame was a meaningless clerk and not undercover the weekend the story broke.


From Arianna's article
Frank Rich is spending his summer in the second camp, while at the same time writing some of the most powerful and brilliant stuff about the scandal: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit… is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped up grounds… That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war."
...
But one thing is inescapable: Miller -- intentionally or unintentionally -- worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine...


Lots of good links inside Arianna's piece.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/print.html
Not fit to print
How Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq war lobby used New York Times reporter Judith Miller to make the case for invasion.
By James C. Moore
May 27, 2004
...

[xchrom]

5. right on arianna

i haven't ever seen it spelled out quite so clearly.

[Hawkowl]

6. I don't believe it

Valerie Plame was supposed to be a NOC agent, i.e; "Not Official Cover". Meaning she didn't have a diplomatic passport and only the highest cabinet officers could even find out she worked for the CIA. I believe only the President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and CIA director (maybe the VP, Cheney? as well?) could actually get a list of these deep cover agents.

Soooo. Which one of these people is the ultimate source? There is no way a reporter gets anyone's name off such a list. If it IS possible, our entire national defense and secrecy is non-existent.

This whole line of reasoning that a reporter is the source is a red herring.

[meg]

9. Yes, indeed

a very very red herring! Thanks for the post.

[AtomicKitten]

7. I like Arianna ...

well, except for her voice, but I don't see it going down this way.

I do, however, think Ms. Miller is protecting her source in the WH like a good soldier. I don't think she should go to jail for this, but I do think she should for all her propagandizing on behalf of BushCo in the lead-up to the war. So, I'm not shedding any tears over her incarceration. She's no hero.

[meg]

8. This is the story that Rove's lawyer has been selling

A reporter told me so of course I thought the info was common knowledge. BS!!! Yes, Miller is a propagandist and evidently a thoroughly unpleasant person. But do you really think that just a friend can call up the CIA and get the sort of info necessary to out Plame?

[dave123williams]

12. It depends on who she called. She clearly had high-level admin sources.

[wishlist]

10. Sorry but this scenario doesn't fly in light of Rove & Co's lies and memo

Rove and Co have wanted people to believe that Miller or another reporter was the source and that Plame's identity was known outside of WH since that scenario seems to let them off the hook. After first failing to claim any involvement in the leak, Rove then claimed he was not leaking but could not remember which reporter told him about Mrs Wilson's CIA identity, so he couldn't get caught in absolute lie. The State Dept memo from July 2003 is the smoking gun proving that the leak originated from the administration.

Although Miller probably shared the WH antipathy against Joe Wilson and was a willing participant in the scheme to spread around Mrs Wilson's identity and cover up the leakers' identities, I don't think she had the initial proactive role in unearthing Plame's identity since the WH had more urgent and compelling reasons on their own to discredit Wilson and leak his wife's identity. It was WH operatives and not Miller with the necessary top security clearance to unearth Mrs. Wilson's identity through CIA channels.

[wli]

11. didn't this cite the PNAC shill Podhoretz?

If so, take it with a few rather large grains of salt.

[dave123williams]

13. Yeah; Podhoretz is a bum, but that doesn't mean that she didn't....

previously Butt heads with Fitzgerald...I actually de-bunked something that Podhoretz just flat lied about, and sent it to him.

His response was, at best, feeble.