-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Special Report - Judith Miller Exonerates Bush
Officials - October 16, 2005
Date: 17 Oct 2005 02:14:50 -0000
From: Accuracy In Media
Reply-To: news@list.aim.org
To: apfn@apfn.org
Judith Miller Exonerates Bush Officials
By Cliff Kincaid | October 16, 2005
The media, of course, are not interested in probing Wilson and
Plame, only the Bush administration.
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.
==================
LEAKAGE:
http://www.apfn.org/APFN/LEAKGATE.HTM
Wilson, Plame, Cooper... Don't Forget the Back Story!
* Listen to the MP3 Audio - Segment 3 (9.30 MB) 10/11/05
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/media/2005-10-11-Charles-03.mp3
IS CHENEY GOING TO BE INDICTED?...BUSH HAD TO KNOW!!!!
Guest: Jane Hamsher
http://firedoglake.blogspot.com knows more than most about
why.
AUDIO: APROX 45 MINUTES.... OF WOW! WOW!!
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/media/2005-10-13-Charles-03.mp3
