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Judy the Source
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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There is a bit of discussion about Judith Miller’s security clearance. In her Sunday piece she writes:
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.
We know her article has been checked by her lawyer before it went public. It is not just like her notebook seems to indicate that she had a clearance, she had one.
The Pentagon issued a non-denial denial:
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he was unaware of Miller having a security clearance. He said security clearances are covered by privacy laws, so he couldn’t talk about it.
Other reporters with embedded stints in Iraq did not need Secret clearances. They signed some confidential clauses and agreed to time-limited military censorship.
Secret clearances do not fall from the sky and they can not be ordered from above. Dozens of pages of forms have to be filled out by dedicated buerocrats, facts get checked and double-checked. As of May 2004 the U.S. had a total backlog of some 360,000 clearance requests. Companies did buy other companies just to get personal with clearances.
If Miller had a Secret clearance as I believe she had, someone high up must have pushed for it to be done in record time. Why would someone do this?
Reader Pat has this:
I believe she was brought in – or put in – as a source and as a conduit.
Let me explain why I think Pat is right, why Miller was a "source".
Before the war Iraqi exiles were motivated and induced to find information about WMDs. Some things were found, some things recycled and some things were made up. Chalabi and his gang came up with something.
They pushed something through various channels. Something reached Judy and she published it in the prestigious NYT. At the same time something went to the British MI-6 which shared it with the CIA. The CIA checked the British something and found a soft single sourced confirmation in the NYT. Rewritten and with some professional caveats something was reported to Douglas Feith’s OSD and to Cheney’s whigs where it was rewritten again and amplified.
Various "former hill staffers" leaked the modified something to one Judith Miller who wrote another Page 1 piece to explain that a high positioned second source had confirmed her original report about something. The Iraqi exiles picked up on this report and restarted the circle with a modified something or something else.
Whispering campaigns – not one, multiple of these – each launched in multiple places and traveling multiple paths. Each with different bits of information and each, at one point or another, confirmed and reconfirmed on the front page of the "paper of the record".
This was self fulfilling prophecy, group-think and a positive feedback cycle that always led to confirmed information. After a while, all involved in this process did believe to some degree that Iraq had WMDs.
But now it was March/April 2003. The war was over. Rumsfeld had promised WMDs North, South, East and West. He had to show something, but the reports from the ground were negative. More and more questions were raised, but the troops, these idiots, could not find some thing or another.
Rumsfeld, near panic, decided to send THE expert. Someone who had written a Pulitzer prized book, GERMS, about bioweapons. Someone who had published myriads of detailed, confirmed and double-sourced articles on WMD in Iraq in the world’s leading newspaper paper. Someone who knew these weapons and where they could be found. Miller was asked to help.
Judith, her publisher and/or her editor made a deal with the DoD. In order for her to help the military as a source and as an expert, they would get the exclusive on anything that would be found. A lot of Pulitzers would be made, a lot of copies would sell and the stock quotes would roar.
But for Judy to be able to help, to apply her knowledge, she would need detailed information throughout the mission. She would not be embedded, but "embedded" as a coverup for her expert mission. On Rumsfeld’s order a Secret clearance was rushed through. The NYT management agreed to very restricted reporting rules. Judy went to Iraq and applied her knowledge.
On the ground she wear military clothes. She was not only "embedded", she was part of MET Alpha and its mission and she would never give up. When the troops were sure something could not be found, Judy objected their withdrawal. She knew something was there.
A few weeks later Wilson published his j’ accuse. Miller, like the other WMD believers, did respond and plamegate unfolded.
It was personal. The "attack" by Wilson was an attack on their already endangered believe system. They had to fight back. They were just stupid.
Unfortunately stupidity kills.
Invite
I dug out my old fencing notes last night, to remember
when our coach first taught us all the basics of attack,
lunge, parry, beat, press and coupé.
And I remember that smug look on my face as I deftly
wove my foil around my sparring opponent’s, striking
in any of the 22 ways our coach had just taught to us,
rather like the look on Dan Rather’s face as he beheld
that Rove’d-up Air National Guard record of GW Bush’s.
And finally, I recall that look of triomphe prématuré on
my face, after our coach asked me to be his spar, and
I deftly wove my foil up and handovered it around his,
dropping into a swift attack and lunge.
One problem, perhaps … his foil tip was already firmly
embedded in my tunic, centered over my heart. Touché!
You can suck on all the sky-blue Fitzpop’s you want,
you ain’t gonna find no Rove-Cheney chew toy in no
Cracker Jack box, you crackers. Libby, if you’re lucky.
Government is all about plausible deniability, unless
you have a black evening dress with spuz stains on it,
and don’t have the sack to smoke it at some stop light.
Layers upon layers upon layers, like an onion of gold.
Then I invite you to imagine the next three years, after
an England-pawn is put away, when King George is free
again to roam the global boards, war crimes forgotten,
torture and beatings dismissed, and WMD’s? Well, that
was that Trotskyite Wilson and his wife’s subterfuge.
Bolton – in. Negroponte – in. Gonzales – in. Roberts – in.
Leventhal, Wolfowitz, Fleischer, Kristol – rabid Zionists
free to roam the halls of American power, planning war.
The low-hanging fruit spanked and chastized, while the
secret cabals drink up at the fire hose of Fed war deficit.
Only this time, everyone will know the Rove back-story,
and everyone will know they’re powerless to prevent it,
and it’s still three years until Condi runs for President,
in a nation by then so subdued, she’ll run unopposed.
Reads like Kristall Nacht, all over again, doesn’t it?
Only this time, we’re the Juden, every poor sot of US.
Posted by: tante aime | Oct 19 2005 2:39 utc | 7
I’m very happy to see that “congealing conventional wisdom”
(I wonder if you can bottle that stuff) now takes it for granted that Miller and the Times connection were an integral part of the Whig-ish groundwork for “fixing the intelligence around” the pre-ordained policy of war against Iraq. That proposition, once articulated, becomes almost self-evident, and even the radical empiricists will have no difficulty in verifying it on the basis of mountains of probatory evidence. This will continue to be the case independently of Fitzgerald’s indictments or lack thereof.
That the Times must be read cum grano salis when matters touching the state of Israel are at issue is a well-worn commonplace that seldom gave pause to its sophisticated readers or diminished its value as the newspaper of record. Indeed, in such cases as Bill Safire the close friendship with Israeli movers-and-shakers has been openly vaunted, and this rendered the task of compensating for the paper’s pro-Israeli bias relatively easy.
The Miller case and, more generally, the paper’s recent role as little more than an instrument of propaganda at the service of shadowy intelligence agencies raise more disturbing issues, and, I would say, more interesting ones from a strictly psychological or moral perspective. It is one thing to believe that the NYTimes editorial staff and publishers were so congenitally credulous of the Israeli approved line on Middle Eastern affairs that they were easy marks for a cynical campaign of disinformation, but quite another to believe that key elements of that editorial leadership were witting participants in that project. Charity would move one to accept the former hypothesis, but growing evidence of the type noted by, say, Josh Marshall, seems to support the latter, sadder alternative:
But in this case it certainly seems as though the tacit bargain between Miller and Libby was that Libby would provide Miller with information in exchange for her assistance in deceiving her readers.
The long public history of the Times’ intimate but strained relations with U.S. intelligence agencies is well documented (reticence before the Bay of Pigs, the Pentagon Papers, etc.) but we know little of the parallel private history of the exchanges between these interfacing institutions, and still less about input and vetoes posed by the unmentionable state’s even more unmentionable intelligence services. We do, however, have some rather weighty circumstantial evidence: 150,000 or more U.S. troops engaged, not surely by pure chance, in an unpopular war in Iraq.
The motivations which carried Ms. Miller and her bosses forward along their headlong trajectory toward “someone’s” desired goal are worthy of a novel. Was it “blind ambition” and lust for personal and institutional affirmation at the service of unknown manipulators, or were the participants indeed “Bush’s willing executioners”, actively engaging in deliberate deception at the service of a “higher” goal. In either case, it is striking that the analogy between this pattern of conduct and that imputed to American communists during the McCarthy era has been so little noted. Americans apparently believe that only leftists are capable of treason.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 19 2005 6:23 utc | 18
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