Posted on 10/17/2005 1:30:57 PM PDT by CyberAnt
Special Report: Judith Miller Exonerates Bush Officials
The true facts in the CIA-leak case are now becoming astonishingly clear. New York Times reporter Judith Miller's testimony, as she describes it in the Sunday edition of her paper, proves that the wrong people are under investigation. It's not really a story about Bush officials Lewis Libby and Karl Rove and their conversations with the press. Rather, it's a story about a CIA bureaucracy working to undermine the Bush administration through the media and cover up for its own mistakes.
It's now obvious that Bush officials are spending time before a grand jury and big money on lawyers for the alleged "crime" of trying to use the press to get out their side of the story. They trusted the press and got burned. Now, if the media have their way, these officials may be further punished by being indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. This would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
The case has been a revealing and disappointing look into how Bush administration officials tried to work with various reporters, in order to counteract false accusations about the administration's Iraq policy that had appeared in the press. In the end, they failed. It's a failure that demonstrates the folly of trying to curry favor with the liberal press.
Journalists, by contrast, may come out of this drama with special rights. Senator Arlen Specter's Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday on a proposed federal media "shield law" to protect some journalists from disclosing sources to a grand jury. Miller will be the star witness. Accuracy in Media has been denied the opportunity to testify in person against the bill because of opposition from Democratic congressional staffers.
In the same way that Democrats still call the shots on Capitol Hill, despite a Republican Senate majority, the Times and other liberal media forced the Bush administration to agree to their demands for an investigation in the CIA leak case. Fitzgerald was appointed by the Bush Justice Department and administration officials have been cooperating from the start. By contrast, the Times and Miller, who just recently left jail to testify before the grand jury in the case, had been obstructing the investigation. All Miller had to do to avoid jail was to tell the truth. She now has done so, and her account of what she told the grand jury under oath turns the media version of this bizarre case completely upside down.
Most of the coverage had created the impression that the administration was out to damage or destroy an administration opponent, Joseph Wilson, by illegally identifying the identity of his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame. Her name originally appeared in a Robert Novak column citing administration officials.
But Miller's account indicates that she was in contact with Libby after Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist at the paper, published a claim that Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate an Iraq-uranium link "at the behest" of Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Libby knew that was false and wanted to get the truth out. But there was much more to it than that. Libby was upset about the CIA's role in sending Wilson on the trip.
Libby was frustrated and angry, Miller testified, about "selective leaking" by the CIA and other agencies to "distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments." Miller says Libby believed the "selective leaks" from the CIA were an attempt to "shift blame to the White House" and were part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq.
This is the real story of the CIA leak case. We have one or more intelligence agencies planting false stories with the press in order to damage the Bush administration. They wanted to divert attention from the fact that the CIA had gotten the facts wrong about Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Taking issue with the President's charge in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa, Wilson had written a column for the Times doubting that such a transaction had taken place. On other occasions Wilson said he even doubted the claim that Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger. Miller says that Libby told her that the Wilson essay "was inaccurate." Miller adds, "Mr. Libby then proceeded through a lengthy and sharp critique of Mr. Wilson and what Mr. Libby viewed as the CIA's backpedaling on the intelligence leading to war. According to my notes, he began with a chronology of what he described as credible evidence of Iraq's efforts to procure uranium. As I told Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Mr. Libby alluded to the existence of two intelligence reports about Iraq's uranium procurement efforts. One report dated from February 2002. The other indicated that Iraq was seeking a broad trade relationship with Niger in 1999, a relationship that he said Niger officials had interpreted as an effort by Iraq to obtain uranium."
What's more, Miller says, "My notes indicate that Mr. Libby told me the report on the 1999 delegation had been attributed to Joe Wilson."
In other words, Wilson was denying something that he had actually confirmed. In fact, there had been an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium from Africa. No wonder Libby was upset with Wilson's article in the Times and the CIA's role in arranging his trip. Libby had every reason to believe there was a campaign underway to undermine the Bush administration and he must have been desperate to counter it. So desperate that he would talk to Judith Miller and other reporters. That was a big mistake.
In terms of more evidence of an Iraq-uranium link, Miller says that Libby "also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002, which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium."
The situation was that the administration had evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa, based on Wilson and other sources, and yet Wilson was using the Times and other outlets to deny it. Libby, Rove and other administration officials had every reason to conclude that Wilson was part of an effort by some in the CIA to deliberately undermine the Bush administration's Iraq policy. But other than Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, we still don't know the names of those CIA officials. They can apparently operate under the cover of anonymity, legal or otherwise. They are media "sources," now on the verge of getting more protection from the Senate under a media shield law.
Under these circumstances, it was natural, as Miller recounts, for the conversation to turn to Wilson's wife, a CIA employee who recommended him for that Africa trip. Miller says the following about Fitzgerald's line of questioning: "Mr. Fitzgerald asked me whether Mr. Libby had mentioned nepotism. I said no."
This is important because Plame's role in recommending him for the Africa trip, as documented by the Senate Intelligence Committee, possibly violated federal nepotism laws. According to Miller, Libby apparently didn't offer an opinion on that. But that gets to the heart of what was going on in the CIA. Who in the CIA was orchestrating the Wilson affair to damage the Bush administration? Is Fitzgerald investigating that?
If not, a major miscarriage of justice is underway. The media, of course, are not interested in probing Wilson and Plame, only the Bush administration. The name of the game was and still is to "get" the administration through concocted scandals. This one involved an alleged effort to smear Wilson, whose wild and reckless charges should never have been published by the Times in the first place, by going after his wife. It's also probably the case that Plame and other CIA officials are trusted "sources" for the press. So why would reporters want to scrutinize them?
It's been repeated endlessly by Miller's defenders that Miller was ordered to testify about the case but never wrote a story about it. She should have. Her story exonerates the Bush administration and it should put the focus where it belongs - on Wilson, his wife and the duplicitous bureaucrats in the CIA.
The media are now clamoring for indictments of Bush officials, with CBS Evening News anchorman Bob Schieffer saying that it would look foolish for Fitzgerald to essentially drop the case after investigating the matter for so long. This kind of media pressure may be difficult to resist. But Fitzgerald should live up to his reputation and be independent enough to understand that he, too, has been manipulated by the media in this affair and that indictments of Bush administration officials would only serve to distract attention from the real problem - an out-of-control CIA.
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Cliff Kincaid is Editor of the AIM Report.
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
The last sentence says it all: "... a failure that demonstrates the folly of trying to curry favor with the liberal press."
This is what Rush says all the time. Trying to please the media never works.
While I believe that this report is probably true, I'm hoping to see a second source before I start celebrating ANOTHER MSM FUBAR.
Of course WE figured it out .. but the liberals need a little more convincing that we're on to their scheme.
And .. that scheme was hatched (I believe) by Hillary (and her political hacks). Hillary knows Valerie Wilson very well (they do fund raisers for the Clintons). Hillary suggests to Valerie that Wilson be sent to Niger to investigate this false premis that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Even though it was Blair who brought the charge, Bill Clinton warns Blair that if he continues to stand with Bush - Blair will lose his election. A few days later the Wilson story breaks. This was supposedly to stop the war by discrediting Bush and Blair.
IT DIDN'T WORK!! And .. in case anybody is paying attention, both the UK and Australia leaders (the biggest supporters of the WAR) were both re-elected along with Bush.
Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role WaPo - 7/10/2004
and
Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - 7/7/2004 (pdf file) - particularly the section on Niger beginning page 36.
I'd be very cautious celebrating any possible good outcome from an employee of the NYT...Miller is a very hard person to figure out. She went to jail for 80+ days supposedly protecting a source - then she forgets who that source was (couldn't recall who told her about Plame?).
I'll start believing in Ms. Miller's patriotism when I see the article written by her telling the entire story of the Wilsons and the CIA deliberately giving the Bush admin. bad intelligence in order to discredit the Iraq war...
Ms. Miller is being a little too sneaky for me to be comfortable with her.
Since Cooper got involved as a "corraborator" it leads back to Hillary and her best friend and media advisor, Mandy Grunwald. (Cooper is married to Grunwald).
Forgot about that... again, not a good idea to put ANY trust in a member of the MSM.
Gee .. thanks for those links!
Rush was saying this morning that Wilson was whining to the press about it being Cheney who sent him - and Libby knew that was not true - and was the reason Libby had tried to correct the story.
Also .. Wilson claimed he wrote a report and gave it to Cheney - and Libby knew that was not true.
The biggest liar in all of this has been Wilson!
Has any REAL journalist looked into the Niger document story? I hear stories about them being forged, but has this ever been verified by anyone with any integrity?
It sounds like Miller went to jail in order to avoid exonerating the Bush administration.
Joe Wilson's Perfidia-- Joe took the Islamicists' side when he said that the President lied. Since the Times spread Joe's tale, please put them in jail. And, certainly, Joe should be fried.
We don't really know if that's true or not. She could have had a number of reasons for going to jail.
For instance, one freeper said yesterday that she stayed safe in jail until an inquiry ended into the affair in which she leaked to Islamic terrorists the fact that Fitzgerald was about to raid their offices. I don't know if that's true, but it's one possibility. Another possibility is that it wasn't Libby she was shielding at all, but someone else. Who knows? In any case, she does not appear to have come out of this as a heroine to the left. They all hate her.
NOBODY likes a sneak. She went to jail rather than exonerate the Bush admin.? What was her angle? Is this really all for a book deal?
"It sounds like Miller went to jail in order to avoid exonerating the Bush administration."
My personal belief is that she went to jail to protect Hillary. And .. now that Miller is saying she can't remember who gave her the name .. I'm still convinced it was Hillary who told her about Valerie, and their little scheme to send Wilson to Niger in order to discredit Bush.
If this had worked, Bush and Blair would have lost their elections and the democrats would have brought the troops home.
THANK YOU ALMIGHTY GOD THAT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I'm waiting for another source as well. If I took just this to the liberals I fight with, they'll just see GOP, and dismiss the entire story.
Bush ought to hold a press conference and announce that "realizing that trying to work with the media bias against this white house, I hereby revoke ALL press passes and will hold interviews with FOXs Brit Hume, Shaun Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Free Republics Jim RObinson! Please hand in your press passes on your way out and don't let the door hit you in the A#%^~
I honestly don't know. If you read that report about her and the NY Times from Editor & Publisher yesterday, you have to think that there's a lot of things going on that we just don't know about.
I think she put in all that jail time most likely because she feared that if she told the real truth about whatever she's hiding, she'd put in even more jail time, and if she lied she risked getting caught.
Another theory is that everyone at the Times hated her because of her MSM reports and because she had taken the government oath to keep any secrets she learned. Then maybe she thought she'd try to become a super leftist hero by going to jail to protect her sources. Only that hasn't worked. But who knows who she was protecting?
The whole thing is pretty murky at this point.
The CIA and the State Department need major housecleaning. Unfortunately, President Bush has not seen the need to expell the leftist, liberals, and losers from these federal bureaucracies. At a minimum, he should have started a different hiring/promotion process that attracts and keeps American patriots.
The damage the damned press has done to this country is unimaginable. Undermining our president in a time of war, supporting all the leftist in this country. Biased and out right lying to the public to sway their opinions. Enough is enough.
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