The next time the Society of Professional Cocksuckers gets together, maybe they should present Judy with a Fifth Amendment award — because the way things are going, she’s may need it.
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October 21, 2005
WB: The Judy Trap
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Reading Jay Rosen on the mystery of Miller’s “security clearance” and then this piece from Wampum I really get the feeling that Miller is a CIA NOC with backup through Pinch Sulzberger
Wampun:
According to Wikipedia,
“She and her boyfriend Steven Rattner, also a Times reporter, became close friends of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the son of the then-publisher of the Times, whose first job at the Times, starting in 1978, was also as a reporter of the Washington bureau. For several summers, Miller and Rattner shared a weekend house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Sulzberger and his wife, Gail.”
In late-August-early-September, 1985, Miller took an unexplained two week hiatus, which just happened to coincide with the first secret US-Israeli-Iranian discussions in Paris of the arms-for-hostages plan. A month after returning to Cairo, Miller begans writing more and more about European, particularly French, politics. In late October, Miller’s articles are dominated by France, France, France. As it turns out, Miller moved her base of operations to Paris, where she continued to cover the Middle East, while including some European coverage as well.
It is at that time that Bob Woodward revealed in a Washington Post article(1) that Miller was being used by John Poindexter to spread propaganda in the US’s new “disinformation campaign” against Libyan president Omar el-Qaddafi. In 1986, Miller published a number of pieces such as “Qaddafi Also Facing Homegrown Opposition” (April 20, 1986) and “Many Faces of Qaddafi: Showman and Survivor” (June 14, 1986) which use material provided to Miller directly from Poindexter: Miller wrote that Qadaffi was barely in control politically, that he was clinically depressed, and addicted to drugs. Miller went on to claim Qadaffi propositioned her, but backed off when he learned her father was Jewish. All of this, despite the fact that less than a year before, she’d penned a piece for the Times entitled, “Challenges to Qaddafi Discounted” (Nov 13, 1985).
…
@ b
Something along those lines seems certain, although Judy seems to be more connected to “rogue elements” than to the “official” intelligence community. Throughout the 80’s (and ever after) there was major “independent activity” directed by the National Security Council (i.e. out of the White House). Moreover, it’s unimaginable that such a high profile and well-connected asset as Judy Miller would escape the attention of the unmentionable country’s intelligence agencies, especially since those same services were also almost surely occult puppeteers of the neo-con clique that brought us the Iraq war, and were simultaneously wired into the Times administration and editorial ethos. Up until recently the actors in this masquerade could plausibly claim to see no incompatibility in their dual allegiances, but perhaps by now some of them may now be feeling like dupes, whence (in part) the spectral silence surrounding the details of Judy’s editorial backing.
Disclaimer: It’s all pure speculation: I don’t KNOW
what I’m talking about, and could be dead wrong from beginning to end.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 21 2005 15:12 utc | 2
Would a prosecuter launch a website ten days befor the Grand Jury runs out if he does NOT want to hand out indictments?
@b no of course not. Well maybe Ken Starr would, but it would be a lot juicier.
The documents establishing the office’s authority are the first ones listed, and I don’t think that is entirely a chronological organizational technique. Tomorrow night is Saturday Night, which is allright for fightin’, but also for massacres. Now we really are getting down to crunch time and if there is to be blood drawn over Fitzgerald’s true independence it is now or never. One might argue that Bush could not possibly be so politically tone-deaf as to try sacking Fitzgerald, but I think that if you actually mouth out the words you would come around to the view that sure he could. The question is will he? I think the odds are that he won’t, but I also think that Fitzgerald putting his authority front and center is a shot across the bow to the WH that they have no intention of going quietly into the night, just in case. The Bush White House believes that the Justice Department represents the Bush Administration and they cannot conceive that there might be a broader interest of the people of the United States. This puts them into dead conflict with a straight-arrow like Fitzgerald.
I think that Fitzgerald has written the text for how a special counsel investigation should be conducted in public, and his evident success in cracking mixed nuts like Miller and the insiders he has already flipped shows that he knows what he is doing behind the scenes. It is somewhat dismaying to see him adopted as Fitz and to see Fitzmas this and that, partly because he neither wants nor needs to be made into a pet, but also because this is just so serious a matter — this is no doubt just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the extent to which this crew’s recklessness has endangered the country and the world. I hope he nails the rotten lot of them, but it does not help him to become a shuttlecock (or whatever those badminton thingies are called) banged between the left and the right. We still have the right to cheer him on from the privacy of our homes, though, at least for now.
Posted by: 4-fingers | Oct 21 2005 19:45 utc | 4
4-fingers puhhhlease stop it.
The website is an efficient way of handling the international media deluge when one is merely a prosecutor w/out a huge press office attached, or part of Rupie’s echo machine. Good planning on his part.
But if he lets Bush off it’s inexcuseable cowardice. I doubt he’ll let Cheney off ‘cuz this is a move by CIA (& allied factions @State & perhaps Pentagon, or retired officers) & Soros’ Globalist faction to clean out the NeoNuts. Cheney has to go. Period end of discussion. Plan would be to allow georgie boy to remain as figurehead, but surrounded by Globalists…We’re Completely Screwed either way.
Posted by: jj | Oct 21 2005 20:17 utc | 5
Well Bush can pardon anyone he wants (ex. himself) anytime. The problem is the political damage he would receive. But with congress on his side he probably could manage that too.
I don´t see much chance of the whole stroy developing much further right now, but maybe the disarray in the WH is big enough to lead to a few more mistakes.
Could it be that Fitzgerald is actually close to the soft underbelly of “The Octopus”?
UNTANGLING THE OCTOPUS
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 21 2005 22:29 utc | 8
Political fallout from:
1) convictions of Rove, Libbey, others; testimony that Cheney and Bush himself were involved in a criminal conspiracy
2) pardons all around and replacing Fitzgerald with a lapdog
Isn’t this a no-brainer?
Posted by: JR | Oct 22 2005 0:36 utc | 10
annie i’m suffering from fatigue from searching within the labryinth of this investigation & from trying to read too much into too little – when the most terrible reality does not escape me – these people will not give up their privelege & power
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 22 2005 1:09 utc | 11
“…I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper….”
A message from Bill Keller
Posted by: GM | Oct 22 2005 1:16 utc | 12
Keller’s comment almost got my heart pumping custard, that is until I read THIS and concluded that not only is the NYT attitude to reprinting rethug agitprop hypercritical, they haven’t stopped!
This attempt to get Amerikans spewing at Syria has been reported in the passive voice in a weak attempt to leave NYT out and make it repug speak. The thing is though there is no objective analysis of what is being alleged.
Quite the reverse:
” Though the report given to Security Council members did not name the key conspirators, it emerged today that the names of five people had been excised Thursday from the final draft.
The names included Maher Assad, the brother of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and the president’s brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, the chief of military intelligence who is considered the second most powerful man in Syria.”
So the most unsubstantiated parts of these allegations which were taken out by the UN have been put back in by NYT.
I hasten to add I have no idea who blew up Harriri but more than a cursory glance should have been made in the direction of the folks that planted the last mega carbomb in Lebanon.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 22 2005 2:10 utc | 13
When Journalists Join the Cover-ups
The back story to the Judith Miller fiasco at the New York Times is the long-term erosion of skeptical journalism in the face of government pressure for greater “patriotism” from the press. In the case of Miller and the Iraq War, the barrier between reporter and government seems to have washed away almost completely. October 18, 2005
Rise of the ‘Patriotic Journalist’
To understand how the American press corps lost its way — and became an accessory to the Bush administration’s deceptive case for war in Iraq — one has to look back three decades to a different era when reporters challenged the national security elite. The counterattack against that challenge led directly to the rise of the neoconservatives and the rise of the “patriotic journalist,” personified by the likes of the New York Times Judith Miller. (Part Two of “When Journalists Join the Cover-ups.”) October 20, 2005
Posted by: Outraged | Oct 22 2005 12:38 utc | 14