Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Judy’s Silver Bullet

Puttering around I came upon this paper (pdf) that Judy Miller delivered to the Aspen Institute’s 2003 symposium called “In Search Of An American Grand Strategy For The Middle East” just days before she accidentally met up with Rootin-Tootin’ Scooter in Jackson Hole. It’s not particularly revealing — not even one mention of the roots or the turning. It’s only notable for its almost embarrassing incoherence, in which she tries to strike a neutral analytical pose but can’t seem to help slipping in her belief that those darned weapons just must have existed! Even as she pretends to be skeptical of the Bush Doctrine she says that our mission in Iraq has been successful because we’ve managed to scare the Mid East and Europe into doing our bidding.(The Tom Friedman “Our Guy’s Crazier Than Your Guy” theory.)

Despite the superficially balanced tone, she gives her little neocon self away in numerous small ways. For instance:

Absent profound reform, the nation’s six intelligence agencies, as currently structured and staffed, are unlikely to be able to detect such sophisticated, deeply hidden WMD programs. Given its record on the former Soviet Union, India, Pakistan, and Iraq, relying mainly on the CIA for good WMD intelligence seems ill-advised.

No matter how wrong the CIA eve was, they were never as wrong as Judy’s neocon pals who are now operating faith-based intelligence agencies under hacks and war criminals. But that’s another story.

One thing is clear, though. Relying on Judy for good journalism is definitely ill-advised:

The military should also continue the policy of embedding journalists with weapons hunting units and urge international organizations to do the same. For the U.S., the presence of journalists would help avoid charges of having planted incriminating evidence against a proliferator. It would also help keep such units and international agencies honest. Yes, the embedding experiment was problematic in many ways, but it was important in building Administration credibility and public support for such capabilities.

Clearly it’s journalists’ jobs to build Adminstration credibility and public support, so this is obviously a good idea. And lord knows that Judy has fulfilled her duty on that count. But Judy Miller seems to have some sort of conginitive dysfuntion about her own reporting. When Judy was embedded, “keeping the unit honest” was hardly her highest priority:

In “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert” (Page One, April 21) Miller disclosed that she agreed to 1) embargo her story for three days; 2) permit military officials to review her story prior to publication; 3) not name the found chemicals; and 4) to refrain from identifying or interviewing the Iraqi scientist who led Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha to sites where he maintained Iraqis had buried chemical precursors to banned chemical weapons. Although Miller didn’t talk to the scientist, the military allowed her to view him from afar. She writes, “Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried.”

According to MET Alpha, the scientist also said Iraq had sent unconventional weapons technology to Syria, had cooperated with al-Qaida, had recently focused its WMD efforts on research and development, and had destroyed WMD equipment just days before the U.S. invasion.

The next day on the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Miller described the unnamed Iraqi scientist as not just the “smoking gun” in the WMD investigation, but the “silver bullet … who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand, and who has led MET Team Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions. …”

But Miller’s silver bullet tarnished overnight. The next day in the Times, she reported the military’s new “paradigm shift” from finding WMD to locating the people behind them. Then Miller abandoned the remarkable findings of her April 21 scoop. The silver bulleted “Iraqi scientist” and his “precursor chemicals” vanished from her reporting after her April 23 dispatch. (She reprised some of his allegations and described how he made contact with American forces.) By May 7 she was writing about MET Alpha’s search not for WMD but for an ancient copy of the Talmud! The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman reported May 11 that the leaders of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha is a part, had found nothing and were leaving Iraq. At a May 13 Pentagon press briefing, 101st Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus downgraded to “theory” status the allegations the Iraqi scientist allegedly made to MET Alpha about destroyed WMD.

Judith Miller’s writing and thinking is illogical and internally inconsistent. Her testimony before the GJ was too. (As a reader pointed out to me, why did she agree to refer to Libby as a “Hill Staffer” if she wasn’t writing a story?) She has almost no self-awareness.

How on earth does someone this vapid become an “expert” on national security issues for the New York Times?

Update: Christorpher Dickey writes a very illuminating analysis of Judy’s writing and the state of modern journalism, here:

Judith Miller takes good notes, but she doesn’t always know where they come from. That was one of the first lessons I learned about her when we were both based in Cairo 20 years ago, she for The New York Times and I for The Washington Post.

[…]

For some reason none of us had a tape recorder, so on the flight back to Casablanca we compared our notes from the one interview we’d had with a Moroccan general a few hours before. We wanted to be sure the phrases we’d scribbled down were accurate. But there was a problem. Judy had many more quotes in her notebook than I and another reporter had in ours. And Judy’s were much better. Then I realized why. I’d done a lot more homework on that particular story than she did, and I was asking much more detailed questions. She’d written them down, and now she thought they came from the general, but many of the quotes actually were from … me.

[…]

Judy’s great talent as a reporter is in gaining access. Full stop. She doesn’t always know what she has when she’s got it, and she isn’t always good at analyzing what she’s heard when she hears it. Indeed, that may be one reason so many very high level sources—kings, princes, dictators, presidents, politicians—have enjoyed confiding, through her, so many supposed scoops and secrets published in The New York Times.

All those who fret about the damage done to journalism and freedom of the press done by Fitzgrald’s investigation ought to ask themselves whether that ship didn’t sail some time ago. And they should ask how much Judy’s kind of reporting has contributed to it:

The righteous response is that such stories should not be made public until we can report them from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s what Craig Pyes believes, and one of many reasons he wrote a scathing memo to the Times editors back in 2000, when he was forced to team up with Judy on a reporting project about Al Qaeda that eventually won a Pulitzer. “I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller,” he wrote in the memo, which recently leaked to The Washington Post. “I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her … She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies.” Worse still, she had “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

That was in 2000.

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Vice President Corleone

Apropros of my earlier post about how the right and left view the CIA, I see (via Jeanne D’Arc) that the Senate is going to water down the anti-torture legislation to exempt the CIA.

Marty Lederer at Balkinization:

It’s increasingly clear that the strategy of McCain’s opponents — the Vice President and his congressional supporters — will be to amend the McCain Amendment in the Conference Committee so as to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. The Senate delegation to the Conference Committee presumably will include three of the nine Republicans who voted against the McCain Amendment — Ted Stevens, Thad Cochran and Kit Bond. A recent Congressional Quarterly article, reprinted here, reports Stevens — who would “lead the Senate’s conferees” — as saying that “he can support McCain’s language if it’s augmented with guidance that enables certain classified interrogations to proceed under different terms.” “‘I’m talking about people who aren’t in uniform, may or may not be citizens of the United States, but are working for us in very difficult circumstances,’ Stevens said. ‘And sometimes interrogation and intimidation is part of the system.'”

What this barely veiled statement means is that Senator Stevens will support inclusion of the McCain Amendment in the final bill only once it has been “augmented” to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. (Stevens’s reference to persons who “may not be citizens of the United States, but are working for us” suggests that he also intends to include a carve-out for foreign nationals acting as agents of the CIA, such as the team of the CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary squads code-named Scorpions.) If Stevens (read: Cheney) is successful in this endeavor, and if the Congress enacts the Amendment as so limited, it will be a major step backwards from where the law currently stands. This can’t be overemphasized: If Stevens is successful at adding his seemingly innocuous “augment[ation],” it would make the law worse than it currently is.

This is Cheney’s baby all the way. Does anyone harbor even the tiniest doubt that Cheney would put out a political hit on a CIA operative to punish her husband? He’s a thug through and through.

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Place Yer Bets

And now for something completely different.

Atrios reports that the rumor that there are rumors that Cheney might resign are true. Got that?

Well let’s just say Cheney does resign (be still my beating heart!). Who do you think Bush would choose to replace him?

Now unfortunately, the link Atrios chose mentions my first choice, Condoleeza Rice. So for those of us who say Condi as the new Veep, I don’t want you to be left out of all the fun and games. Here’s a question for youse (as we used to say back in Jersey):

If Condi becomes the Veep, how many hours/weeks/months/hours will it take for Bush to resign, Condi to become president, and all the Democratic hopes for a weak opponent in 2008 to be dashed?

Those who guess right will get Tristero Horn t-shirts emailed to them, once I make them up. I’m outta her for the night.

The Certainty Principle

I’m sorry to bring up a subject that makes some of the most trenchant and intelligent commentators around here groan, but I do think there is an important issue at stake. I’ve expanded and clarified my own thought as well, so while we await the Plame verdicts, if any (I’m reverse jinxing here!), please once again, lend an eyeball or two.

Matt Yglesias has tried to clarify his position regarding Bush/Iraq. I can’t help but think that the discussions engendered by this post and this post may have had something to do with Matt’s clarification. What follows is the comment that I left on Matt’s message board in response (I’ve edited it slightly):

Matt, Tristero here. Thank you for addressing this issue again. Unfortunately, you really seem to miss the point of those who are criticizing you, like myself. Please hear me out:

The mistake you made, along with all the liberal hawks, was that by accepting [pro war Iraqi refugee] Makiya’s odds [of 5%] as more or less reasonable, you rhetorically opened a door to discussion. It was permitting that door to open that was the error.

From the point of view of a speech to the troops, 5% looks immoral. From the point of view of a country traumatized by 911, the Bush administration calculated that 5% might very well be a risk well worth taking, if it could prevent more attacks. Having accepted the proposition that there was a small but real chance of success, all those American myths about risk taking and doing good kick in, which made Bush/Iraq an easier sell than it should have been.

But the truth is that Makiya was a hopeless optimist. The goals of Bush/Iraq were impossible to achieve. Only in an abstruse, technically mathematical sense was there a probability of success. Why was Bush/Iraq utterly impossible?

Because nothing is certain. Again, please hear me out:

The success of Bush/Iraq depended, with absolute certainty, that just about everything the neocons predicted would, in fact actually, happen. An unbiased study of the full range of opinions and research on foreign affairs -one not skewed to the right and the far right, one not skewed towards naive optimism – would make it abundantly clear that at best, less than 1/3 of the neocons’ predictions about the course of the war could ever possibly come true. That fact, based on a genuine understanding of uncertainty,exponentially increased the odds that the alternative scenario, an unmitigated disaster, would occur.

The actual odds of success were closer to .00000000000000005% than 5%. That was patently obvious to anyone who was doing research that wasn’t biased.

But part of the marketing of the “new product” was to turn the notion of doubt on its head. We, who knew how utterly beyond reason a successful outcome was – because we understood the full extent of the sheer improbability of Perle/Wolfowitz’s scenarios, which depended on a near-absolute certain unfolding of events – were accused of not taking into account how uncertain things are in the real world!

Bush/Iraq should never have been taken seriously, anymore than Curtis Lemay’s suggestion to use nuclear bombs in Vietnam or during the Missile Crisis should have been taken seriously. The problem was that not only did Bush take Wolfowitz seriously. So did the media and the liberal hawks. Had they been laughed off the stage – as those opposed to the gutting of Social Security have laughed Bush off the stage – the chances of a Bush/Iraq war would have fallen close to zero.

But the idea was taken seriously by people far more influential than you. And that gave them the opening to make their fallacious case. What disturbs me is that you don’t seem to recognize what the mistake was:

Not all arguments are worth the status of intellectual consideration. Bush/Iraq was one of them, even though a former John Hopkins professor like Wolfowitz and the president of the United States thought otherwise.

Bush/Iraq was no more realistic than the arguments for a UFO behind the Hale/Bopp comet and it should have been treated accordingly. Again, not recognizing that immediately was your mistake and that is what you need to come to grips with. Not the morality of the war, but the extent to which you and so many of your colleagues were bamboozled and provided Bush with an opening to tap into American mythologies.

You Always Know What America Stands For When Bush Is President.

Richard Clarke:

Imagine if, in advance of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of trucks had been waiting with water and ice and medicine and other supplies. Imagine if 4,000 National Guardsmen and an equal number of emergency aid workers from around the country had been moved into place, and five million meals had been ready to serve. Imagine if scores of mobile satellite-communications stations had been prepared to move in instantly, ensuring that rescuers could talk to one another. Imagine if all this had been managed by a federal-and-state task force that not only directed the government response but also helped coordinate the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other outside groups.

Actually, this requires no imagination: it is exactly what the Bush administration did a year ago when Florida braced for Hurricane Frances. Of course the circumstances then were very special: it was two months before the presidential election, and Florida’s twenty-seven electoral votes were hanging in the balance. It is hardly surprising that Washington ensured the success of “the largest response to a natural disaster we’ve ever had in this country.” The president himself passed out water bottles to Floridians driven from their homes.

From The Atlantic, but you’ll have to be either a subscriber or buy the issue to read the whole thing. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Judy’s War, And Packer’s

Two more US soldiers killed in Iraq, this time near Rutba, a town I guarantee you neither soldier nor their families ever heard of before they arrived in Baghdad.

For all I know, Rutba’s a beautiful spot, a land of milk and honey. But it sounds like an awful place for a poor American kid to fight and die in pursuit of a misrepresented, misbegotten illusion.

Blood Feud

With the Washington Post reporting that Fitzgerald’s investigation is focusing on Dick Cheney’s long running feud with the CIA, I thought I would reprise this post of mine from a few months back:

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Plame affair has brought up an interesting political contradiction: the right is now openly contemptuous of the CIA while the left is a vocal supporter. I think it’s probably a good idea to clarify that bit so we don’t get confused. The fact is that both sides have always been simultaneously vocal supporters and openly contemptuous of the CIA, but for entirely different reasons.

I usually don’t speak for “the left” but for the purpose of this discussion I will use my views as a proxy for the lefty argument. I’m not generally a big fan of secretive government departments with no accountability. I always worry that they are up to things not sanctioned by the people and it has often turned out that they are. I have long been skeptical of the CIA because of the CIA’s history of bad acts around the world that were not sanctioned or even known by more than a few people and were often, in hindsight, wrong — like rendition, for instance. I don’t believe that we should have a secret foreign policy operation that doesn’t answer to the people. They tend to do bad shit that leaves the people holding the bag.

But I didn’t just fall out of the back of Arnold’s hummer, so I understand that a nation needs intelligence to protect itself and understand the world. I also understand that the way we obtain that information must be kept secret in order to protect the lives of those who are involved in getting it. I have never objected to the idea that we have spies around the world gathering information about what our enemies are up to. I also think that intelligence should, as much as possible, be objective and apolitical. Otherwise, we cannot accurately assess real threats. If the CIA (and the other intelligence agencies) only make objective analyses, the buck will stop at the president, where it always properly should.

Therefore, I see this Plame affair — and the larger matter of the pre-war WMD threat assessment — as a matter of compromised intelligence and an extension of the 30 year war the right has waged against what it thinks is the CIA’s tepid threat analysis. Never mind that the right’s hysterical analyses have always turned out to have been completely wrong.

But then accuracy was never the point because the right takes the opposite approach to the CIA’s proper role. They have always been entirely in favor of the CIA working on behalf of any president who wanted to topple a left wing dictator or stage a coup without congressional knowledge. This is, in their view, the proper role of the CIA — to covertly advance foreign policy on behalf of an executive (of whom they approve) and basically do illegal and immoral dirty work. But they have never valued the intelligence and analysis the CIA produced since it often challenged their preconcieved beliefs and as a result didn’t validate their knee jerk impulse to invade, bomb, obliterate, topple somebody for reasons of ideology or geopolitical power. The CIA’s intelligence often backed up the success of the containment policy that kept us from a major bloody hot war with the commies — and for that they will never be trusted.(See Team B, and the Committee on the Present Danger parts I and II.)

Therefore, the right sees the Plame affair as another example of an inappropriately “independent” CIA refusing to accede to its boss’s wishes. They believe that the CIA exists to provide the president with the documentation he needs to advance his foreign policy goals — and if that includes lying to precipitate a war he feels is needed, then their job is to acquiesce. When you cut away the verbiage, what the right really believes is that the US is justified in invading and occupying any country it likes — it’s just some sissified, cowardly rule ‘o law that prevents us from doing it. The CIA’s job is to smooth the way for the president to do what he wants by keeping the citizen rubes and the allies in line with phony proof that we are following international and domestic laws. (This would be the Straussian method of governance — too bad the wise ones who are running the world while keeping the rest of us entertained with religion and bread and circuses are so fucking lame.)

Back in the day, they used to just admit that they were engaging in Realpolitik, and as disgusting as that is, at least it was more honest than the current crop of neocons who insist that they are righteous and good by advancing democracy and vanquishing evil using undemocratic, illegal means. It makes me miss Kissinger. At least he didn’t sing kumbaya while he was fucking over the wogs.

I have no idea where people who don’t pay much attention to the political scene would come down on this. It may be that they think the government should have a branch that does illegal dirty work. But I suspect they would also think that the president should not be allowed to run a secret foreign policy or stage wars for inscrutable reasons. Indeed, I think most people would find it repugnant if they knew that there are people in government who think the president of the United States has a right to lie to them in order to commit their blood and treasure to a cause or plan that has nothing to do with the one that is stated.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened with Iraq. The right’s greatest challenge now is to get the public to believe that they were lied to for their own good.

This idea that it was a blood feud between the neocons and the CIA ha been out there from the beginning. And it lent credence to the charge that Plame’s status was leaked on purpose. It makes perfect sense that Fitz would follow that trail.

The thing to remember is that the neocons have always been wrong about everything.

…from the Soviet threat to China to rogue states to Iraq, the neocons and hardliners were wrong each and every time. And they weren’t just wrong on some details, they massively, abundently wrong about everything. Korb discusses one particular fact in his piece that I think illuminates their rather insane view about terrorism:

In 1981, after the publication of Clare Sterling’s book, “The Terror Network,” which argued that global terrorists were actually pawns of the Soviets, leading hard-liners asked the CIA to look into the relationship between Soviets and terrorist organizations. The agency concluded that although there was evidence that the Soviets had assisted groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization with weapons and training, there was no evidence that the Soviets encouraged or approved these groups’ terrorist acts. However, hard-liners like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, CIA Chief William Casey and Policy Planning Director Wolfowitz rejected the draft as a naive, exculpatory brief and had the draft retooled to assert that the Soviets were heavily involved in supporting “revolutionary violence worldwide.”

Since they never adjust to changing circumstances or admit any new evidence that doesn’t fit their preconcieved notions, this was still the framework they were working from when bin Laden came on the scene. It’s why the neocon nutcase Laurie Mylroie was able to convince people in the highest reaches of the Republican intelligensia that Saddam had something to do with bin Laden, even though there was never a scintilla of evidence to back it up. They simply could not,and cannot to this day, come to grips with the fact that their view of how terrorism works — through “rogue states” and totalitarian sponsorship — is simply wrong.

When Clare Sterling’s book came out CIA director William Casey was said to have told his people, “read Claire Sterling’s book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards who I pay $50,000 a year.” Wolfowitz and Feith are said to have told their staff in the Pentagon to read Laurie Mylroie’s book about Saddam and al Qaeda. Richard Clarke, in “Against All Enemies” quotes Wolfowitz as saying: “You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”

This, then, is simply how they think. It’s as Rob Cordry says, “the facts are biased.” (That’s the state of mind that led neocon Judith Miller to make her bizarre incomprehensible comment “I was proved fucking right!”) They truly believe that even though they have been completely wrong about everything for the past thirty years that it just can’t be so.

And no matter what, in their minds the the CIA is always trying to screw them.

So the political environment in which Valerie Plame was outed was virtually hallucinogenic. There may have really been some part of certain members of the Bush administration’s dysfunctional lizard brains that really thought in July of 2003 that the CIA had been trying to set them up and used Joe Wilson to do it.

But it’s not July of 2003 now, is it? It’s two years later and we know for a fact that the analysts, including Wilson, who said the Niger deal was bullshit were right and we know that the analysts who doubted the evidence about Saddam’s WMD were right too.

Not that this will stop the Team B neocons from insisting that “they were proved fucking right.” They really are delusional and they always have been.

This blood feud between the Team B neocons and the CIA has been getting this country into trouble for 30 years, culminating in the epic strategic blunder of Iraq. It’s time it is stopped.

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Embed Wrangler

Atrios is wondering who got Judy her security clearance. Josh Marshall reports that Jim Micklaszewski says nobody at DOD, DIA or CIA knows anything about it.

Have they called Jim Wilkinson? He is, after all, the guy who was in charge of managing the embeds. From a very handy little rundown on Wilkinson from marureen Farrell, we see this:

“It was a very well-designed, well-executed effort to control the information,” New York magazine’s Michael Wolff explained. “Wilkinson was, I think, instrumental. He certainly represented himself as the brains of the operation.”

He was also a central player in the Iraq war propaganda operation serving as a member of the Office of Global Communication and the White House Iraq Group. If there was anyone who would have been charged with getting a special “off the books” special security clearance it would have been him. He had his own special pipeline to the White House and the DOD:

“In the early hours of April 2, correspondents in Doha were summoned from their beds to Centcom, the military and media nerve center for the war,” The Guardian explained. “Jim Wilkinson, the White House’s top figure there, had stayed up all night. ‘We had a situation where there was a lot of hot news,’ he [recalled] “The president had been briefed, as had the secretary of defense.”

Bloomberg reported that Wilkinson was subpoenaed by the Grand Jury, which I hadn’t heard before. It would be odd if he hadn’t. He was intimately involved with the Iraq war lies — and he is a known political hit man:

“Formerly a political operative, Mr. Wilkinson was put in the position of feeding, informing and calming the most motivated media army in the world in Qatar. There, inside the massive telecommunications studio assembled by the U.S. Army and the Bush administration, he earned both the enmity and admiration of various parts of the worldwide press during war in a technologically superb and informationally sparse desert press center. … ‘It was an unprofessional operation,’ said Peter Boyer of The New Yorker, who said he landed an interview with General Franks only by going around Mr. Wilkinson to the Pentagon.”

“Jim Wilkinson has gone from politics to war and back since he worked for George W. Bush in Florida during the 2000 election, and his journey is a mark of the administration’s utilitarian approach to marketing war, politics and the Presidency. ‘He’s a man who prefers to work behind the scenes,’ said the spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Jim Dyke. He’s also got as pure a Republican pedigree as you can wish, and an edge honed in the bitter partisan wars between Bill Clinton and the Republican House leadership.

“Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson’s mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the R.N.C.”

“Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 Presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have ‘invented the Internet.’ Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount: ‘We find it interesting that when Jesse Jackson has thousands of protesters in the streets, it’s O.K., but when a small number of Republicans exercise their First Amendment rights, the Democrats don’t seem to like it,’ he told the Associated Press.

In the White House he was instrumental in pushing the WMD propaganda and has the kind of history that suggests he would have been involved in trashing Joseph Wilson (with relish.) He is also one guy who would likely have been involved in getting Judith Miller some sort of double secret super security clearance that nobody else knew about.

Of course, Judy could be lying.

I have been writing about Wilkinson since June of 2003 when I read Michael Wolff’s seminal article about the Iraq war press operation. Wilkinson is the quintessential Rove machine operative.

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Tightening the Scrunchie

I don’t want to hear any more belly aching from liberal pansies about how we aren’t getting the terrorists. We are not only smokin ’em out of their caves we are ruthlessly depriving them of their perms and sun-kissed highlighting.

U.S. forces in Iraq said on Saturday that they were holding a man suspected of acting as a barber to senior al Qaeda militants and helping them change their appearance to evade capture.

The man, named as Walid Muhammad Farhan Juwar al-Zubaydi — “aka ‘The Barber,”‘ the U.S. military statement said — was arrested in Baghdad on September 24, the day before U.S. troops caught up with and killed a militant they described as the most senior al Qaeda leader in the capital, Abu Azzam.

“‘The Barber’s’ duties included altering senior al Qaeda in Iraq members’ appearances by dying hair color, altering hairstyles and changing facial hair in their efforts to evade capture,” the military said in the statement.

The vicious bastard. I hope they “render” him straight to Fantastic Sam’s and play Toby Keith over and over until he gives up bin Laden’s hair color formula.

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Miller’s Message

Kevin Drum questions the theory that Bennett didn’t come clean with Fitz about Libby being Judy’s only “meaningful” source, (or didn’t know that Libby wasn’t Judy’s only meaningful source) when they made the deal that she would only testify about her conversations with Libby. This rests on the fact that Miller now has a phantom source who told her about “Valerie Flame” but she can’t remember who it might have been. Kevin says:

This doesn’t sound right to me. First of all, surely something like this can’t happen in real life, can it? Bennett’s representations to Fitzgerald would be considered binding, wouldn’t they? If it turned out he misrepresented the evidence, Fitzgerald would no longer be bound by the original agreement. (Someone with experience in federal prosecutions should feel free to step in and tell me I’m wrong, but this sure doesn’t sound like something a judge would spend more than a few seconds ruling on.)

I think Kevin is right. But I’m not sure that the deal was ever as clear cut as Miller made it out to be. Bennett emphatically said that the deal was limited to the “Valerie Plame Matter” not that it was limited to Libby. Robert Bennett is a very savvy lawyer and he was very precise in his language.

BLITZER: Was the conversations you had with Mr. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor — was her testimony limited only to Scooter Libby’s involvement in the Valerie Plame case, assuming that’s her source as we all do? Or was it — could he ask questions before the grand jury on other individuals?

R. BENNETT: I’m not going to go into her testimony before a secret grand jury, but I will say that the subject matter that we agreed to dealt with the Valerie Plame matter.

BLITZER: So in other words, it focused on that, but talk about other individuals as well?

R. BENNETT: It focused on the Valerie Plame matter.

BLITZER: That’s all you want to say about that?

R. BENNETT: That’s all I can say to you.

This does not mean that it wasn’t limited to Libby, of course. There are other reasons why Bennett might not have wanted to name Libby in that interview. But it was common knowledge that Libby was the source in question and Judy, after all, had said the day before that the agreement was to “focus on that source.” Bennett could have characterized the deal that way as well.

FRANKEN: Scooter’s lawyer has said that, had you asked, you wouldn’t have had to spend any time in jail. He would have been more than willing to give you the explicit waiver you say you now accepted.

MILLER: I was not a party to those discussions. I’m going to let you refer those questions to my lawyer. I can only tell you that as soon as I received a personal assurance from the source that I was able to talk to him and talk to the source about my testimony, it was only then and as a result of the special prosecutors’ agreement to narrow the focus of the inquiry, to focus on that source, that I was able to testify.

I still think that the real problem for Judy was that the original subpoena (pdf) said:

… on August 12 and August 14, grand jury subpoenas were issued to Judith Miller, seeking documents and testimony related to conversations between her and a specified government official “occurring from on or about July 6, 2003, to on or about July 13, 2003, . . . concerning Valerie Plame Wilson (whether referred to by name or by description as the wife of Ambassador Wilson) or concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium.”

I continue to believe that Judy’s primary concern was about limiting her testimony to Plame. It was other non-Plame related conversations (with Libby or others) that pertained to the Iraq uranium claims, and perhaps even her involvement, that she did not want to be asked about. (This could be the matter of the sexed-up dossier, David Kelly’s death and the back-up claim that the questionable claim that the British had unrelated secret information about African yellowcake.)

And after looking at it again, I suspect that this passage in Judy’s mea no culpa may be a little message of her own to the powers that be — to let them know that she was a good little aspen and understood that all the roots are connected:

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.

My notes indicate that Mr. Libby told me the report on the 1999 delegation had been attributed to Joe Wilson.

Mr. Libby also told me that on the basis of these two reports and other intelligence, his office had asked the C.I.A. for more analysis and investigation of Iraq’s dealings with Niger. According to my interview notes, Mr. Libby told me that the resulting cable – based on Mr. Wilson’s fact-finding mission, as it turned out – barely made it out of the bowels of the C.I.A. He asserted that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, had never even heard of Mr. Wilson.

As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. 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.

[…]

Although I was interested primarily in my area of expertise – chemical and biological weapons – my notes show that Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the administration’s nuclear claims. His main theme echoed that of other senior officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson’s criticism, the administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities based on the regime’s history of weapons development, its use of unconventional weapons and fresh intelligence reports.

That’s the standard company line, no deviations. She devotes a great deal of space in her article to relating all of that in loving detail despite the fact that she was questioned by Fitzgerald for many hours and was before the Grand Jury twice. Some important people are undoubtedly feeling a bit relieved knowing now that Judy stayed within the lines even as Fitz came dangerously close to asking about the Big WHIG Problem.

If Scooter and Turdblossom have to go down that’s one thing — revealing the true scope of the Iraq lies is another. Doing time for the GOP has become a badge of courage and it never stops anyone from finding their way back to the halls of power and making big money if they want to. As long as everybody keeps their mouths shut about the war, the family will take care of them.

I predict that there will be no trials if Fitzgerald indicts. A public spectacle in which the possibility of someone spilling the beans about the Big WHIG Problem is much too risky. I think this will be plea bargained. I’ll bet that Rove and Scooter are looking at poncho patterns as we speak.

Update: On the other hand, if Jane’s right about Ari being the Third Man, then maybe there’s a possibility for some real fireworks. He’s not a real member of the club. He was hired from the failed Liddy Dole presidential campaign. He may not be willing to fall on his sword for this bunch.

Update II: Can someone tell me where in Miller’s article she says anything that could be construed as this:

A new account of the CIA leak scandal rocking the White House suggests top presidential aides were seriously concerned about what could be seen as a dissident faction inside the US spy agency that appeared to work even behind the back of the CIA director to debunk the notion Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

I don’t see anything that leads to a “dissident faction,” in her piece, but it does conveniently play into some on the right’s suggestion that Plame and some of her liberal spook comrades “in the bowels of the CIA” were running a rogue operation to hide all the evidence of Saddam’s WMD arsenal. (This excuse fails to acknowledge the the verified fact that there were no actual WMD found, but no matter.) I’ve assumed that it was confined to the fringe of wingnuttia, but it appears to have made it to the AP.

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