Posted on 10/25/2005 9:26:05 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
TIMES TRASHFEST
IN the past few days, writers and editors of The New York Times have taken turns trashing the talent, integrity, skills and character of their colleague, Judith Miller — a reporter who had just spent nearly three months in jail defending the paper's journalistic rights against a hard-charging special prosecutor whose appointment the Times had demanded two years before.
It's fair to say that nothing like this has ever happened before in the annals of American journalism. No one contemporaneously employed by a newspaper has ever been assailed by a colleague in its pages the way Maureen Dowd assailed Miller on Saturday.
Dowd had the gall to say she "liked" Miller even as she calmly dumped a bucket of slime over Miller's "tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur."
SNIP
THE issue that has ostensibly caused this unprecedented character assas sination is Miller's involvement in the public exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame. And in this case, no one at the paper is accusing Miller of making anything up — because she never published anything on the subject. Nor can anyone accuse Judith Miller of harming the reputation of an innocent —
SNIP
The outraged prose on this matter from writers outside the Times — like Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher and the just-out-of-the-nuthouse cases populating the Huffington Post on the Web — suggests that if only the Times had published nothing articles more skeptical of the WMD claims, it could have kept the war from happening.
Because, you know, the world revolves around the Times. The world spins on its axis around a liberal newspaper of declining influence . . . whose most famous and powerful staffers now think there's great merit in devouring their own.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Maybe Dowd thought Miller's incarceration was a drum roll to the release of something that would bring the Bush administration crashing down, only to find out that Miller was just actually protecting a source!
The only thing I like about Maureen Dowd is that the mention of her name here brings forth pictures of Catherine Zeta Jones.
Catfight!!!
bttt
Mrs. Miller has dared to tell the truth and she is taking a beating for it. If she would only spew some baseless venom in the direction of the White House, all would be forgiven.
She has embarrassed them. they all thought she would be instrumental in hanging Rove and she wasnt.
If you think she is being slimed wait until you see what they do to the prosecutor if he doesnt indict someone. They have already hanged Rove and Libby. If the prosecutor doesnt charge them they will hang him.
Judy Miller refused to accept the Times party line which INSISTS that Bush and Cheney FABRICATED data in order to go to war with Iraq.
It is looking more and more like the CIA actually delivered poor intelligent data that everyone from the executive branch ( both Clinton and Bush administration) and Congress ( witness the speeches made by every single Senator and Congressman from Kerry, to Gore to Waxman ) thought was evidence that Saddam had WMDs.
We need to remind ourselves that NOT ONLY Bush but also, the Senate Intelligence Committee of which John Kerry himself was a mmeber and privy to intel info, ALL believed the information the CIA gave to them.
The CIA overestimated Saddam's WMD capabilities and of course, our leaders both in the White House and in Congress interpreted intel data TAKEN TOGETHER Pessimistically.
The NY TIMES however, wants to make you and I believe that ONLY Bush, acting with malice and mis-interpreting and deliberately lying, interpreted the intel data provided by the CIA, to mean that Saddam had WMDs. The fact is, the CIA provided poor information which was interpreted in the same way by almost everyone who had access to the info.
Since Miller refused to toe the NY TIMES line ( i.e., Bush is SOLELY to blame and acted with Malice ), she is being ostracized for this.
At least thats the way I see it.
Well met, sir knight; this is a fine post you have laid before us this morning.
I recommend that folks read it all. Personally I don't share Podhoretz's sympathy for Miller -- a squamous, legless creature who typifies the Times staff even as her former peers reject her.
But disorder in the house of mine enemy -- I'll take it. For the nation, having the Times eating itself is as good as a falling out between bin Laden and Zarkawi.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Why are they trashing Miller? Is it because they think she's the one in trouble? If she had the goods on Rove and Libby they wouldn't be doing this. I say stay tuned.
It may be suggesting that Fitzgerald's Rove/Libbey gun is all smoke.
11 posted on 10/25/2005 10:42:12 AM MDT by feyler
I think she is going to indited and they want to distance themselves from her!
This is based on a left wing reality disconnect. Saw Howard Fineman this morning saying it's all about the war not being justified and the Bush administration "stopping at nothing" to trash the people who tried to expose it. That just is not reality, but they believe it.
Instead the Old Grey Whore became butt boy for Clinton in 1998 slavishly passing along Clintonista's stories of Iraqi, Chemical, Biological and Nuclear weapons and programs. In this respect the NYT is culpable for the invasion of Iraq.
IMHO: there probably would not have been an attack on Iraq but not for 9-11 and in this the NYT miscalculated the end game in their attempts to change the subject on Clinton.
As for Miller, she will become the NYT's worst nightmare.
If she had the goods on Rove and Libby they wouldn't be doing this.
This bears repeating. Certainly the NY Times would not be trashing the "star witness for the prosecution" in an upcoming trial of Rove or Libby. Something else is going on here. It will be fun to see all the disappointed Kos kids and DUmmies.
thank you....
"her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur." - Maureen Dowd
At least Miller works hard. All Dowd has is the hauteur.
Thank you!
I have to say that I believed that Saddam had such weapons, and I spent much of the time leading up to the Iraqi phase of the war in an HQ where I had access not only to CIA and DIA assessments but on the raw intelligence which underlay them. I can't go into detail about what it all was, but it was very broad-based and utterly convincing.
My tentative conclusion is that Saddam or his generals mounted the second largest deception plan in history (after Operation Fortitude in 1944) in order to create the impression he had WMDs, particularly chemical agents.
Why? I don't know. Maybe Saddam thought that it would scare us off an attack. Maybe Saddam thought he had the arms too, and his generals and/or sons were deceiving him.
I can say categorically that if anyone in the intelligence community believed that Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical weapons and active laboratories working nuclear and biological arms, that person did not write or disseminate his opinions.
CIA National Intelligence Estimates are normally so weasel-worded to be utterly effing useless. Only when they are certain do they take any position at all. The position they took has been widely reported.
We were had, all up and down the line.
That said, the war was, and is, not about WMDs in stockpiles. (WMDs were one of nine (IIRC) issues of concern to us -- the asshat, Saddam, was firiong at our recon planes daily).
Iraq was different. France has WMDs. So does Israel, South Africa, Russia, Pakistan, England and China, and nobody is talking about invading those places even though some are allies and some not. The missing ingredient in those nations that are not trusted with WMDs is adult leadership. Even a nation that longs for a new Napoleon, or a dictatorship half-full of crazies (Pak) or a brutal oligharchy hooked on the crack of slave labour (China) has the sense to give grown-ups the keys to the magic toybox.
So we wrestled the keys away and found out most of the toys were gone. It doesn't matter, Saddam stil has to sit in the corner till his people do him justice, which I presume to be hanging, although it's their call.
Twenty-five million people are free of an appalling, odious dictatorship, and in the ozone generated by all that neon, it was a mistake. To the people of the Times, all those weeping women digging with their hands in the sand of the mass graves for lost sons and husbands, well they don't count: why, they're not our kind, don't you know.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
This is an excellent demonstration of the bias of the idiots at the New York Times. Not that further demonstrations are necessary. They are outraged that Miller is unwilling to become an instrument in bringing down Bush. Why was Wilson's article published in the first place? Why did the Times demand the appointment of a special prosecutor? Why did Miller's editor, Abramson, tell Miller not to investigate the Plame/Wilson connection?
> Catfight!!!
MROW!
PFFTHT!
He gives an impassioned defense of Judith Miller and on the previous articles she wrote about WMD, that defense is great.
But, in the case of the going to jail to protect a source she deserves no defense at all.
Her source gave her the waiver to talk to the grand jury, no where did I read that her source gave her the right to publish his name.
Grand jury proceedings are secret and Judith Miller and Matt Cooper both publicized the names of their sources after saying how they had to protect those very sources. They did not have to release those source names to the public because their testimony was secret.
Would you be a source in the future to either one of those reporters?
Who is Robert Novak's source? He either talked to Fitzgerald or testified and yet we still do not know who talked to him.
Miller and Cooper burned their sources after promising to protect them.
I don't know. It might be wishful thinking to believe that the chatter on this is because there won't be indictments (and the libs want to try to pile on to get as much of an appearance of guilt as possible) or that Miller or Cooper will be indicted (not likely because she wasn't the focus). But I just don't see how Fitz can justify an indictment on (we are presuming) flimsy memory in a case with no underlying crime.
My guess is Miller and someone from the CIA is in trouble here. A New York Times reporter would never go to jail to protect a republican source. President Bush had Karl Rove with him yesterday and I don't see them worried about it.
I believe that Judith Miller may have told The New York Times everything and they didn't like it.
Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?
The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.
Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication. “Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.' He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
The interesting part is that more respected people, such as Joe diGenova also believe it was a CIA plot.
No loyalty among thieves.
When I read that, I couldn't help thinking how very much Dowdy wanted to use the word "hauteur." It works on so many levels. It may or may not apply to Miller.
Saddam did have chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver them. He used them several times in the past, once to gas a whole city full of his own people.
He also had a nuclear plant earlier, courtesy of Chirac and the French, which the Israelis thankfully bombed.
He was trying to assemble more nuclear materials, although evidently he hadn't gotten as far as the CIA thought, or said they thought.
We still don't know how many MSDs the Russians took with them out the back door, into Syria or other parts further east.
But the one point Podhoretz neglects to make in this otherwise excellent article is that there were four or five other NY Times reporters who repeatedly wrote stories about Saddam's WMDs during the clinton years, and that the Sacred Editorial Board editorialized in favor of Clinton's bombing campaigns in Iraq for precisely that reason.
The only things that have changed since then is that the president is now a Republican and Saddam managed to ease his WMDs out the back door.
Another factor in this is Maureen Dowd's personal history. She is very, very jealous of Miller because of her own frustrated sex life. Dowd fought earlier with A. M. Rosenthal, who told the editor back then (who was having an affair with Dowd) that he should fire Dowd because her columns were putting the NYT to shame. Instead, Rosenthal was fired for criticizing Dowd. That little episode must make Maureen imagine that she can get anyone fired just for the asking. The evidence suggests that she is right.
<<<<
Who produced the fake Niger papers?
>>>>>
We now know the answer to this one.
Apparently, an Italian Agent working for the French government did that. His name is Rocco Martino and the details are published by the London Telegraph.
See here :
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml
I fully expect that Dowd will get what's coming to her eventually.
The NYT are disgusting liars in their own right. They are trying to pretend that Judith Miller and the so-called liars in the Bush admin were the only people in the world who believed that Iraq had WMD's, and that the whole case for war hinged upon the Niger yellow-cake story. It's a flat-out lie. I've long known that that the NYT editorial board were morons; now I know they are also unprincipled scum.
Has this story gotten any play in the American press? Has it been on the front page of the NYT? Has it been mentioned on the CBS Evening News?
Yep, and you now have to pay NYT for the "privilege" of reading that harlot.
Jacqueline, (Wilson's second wife), was a French diplomat and may have provided the connections for Wilson to see the forged documents that were supplied by the French through the Italians. It has been reported that she was a "cultural counselor" for the French Embassy, which some say is code for she was doing undercover work.
In other words it is possible that Wilson knew that the docs were forged because he was privy to the information that French wanted to discredit the British info on Saddam shopping for yellowcake and that Wilson's objective was the same. The French just happen to manage the yellowcake production in Niger.
IOW, he didn't lie in his first statement...he saw the documents.
And Fedora has contributed this:
French intelligence soon began a campaign to discredit the US case for war against Iraq. In 1999, French intelligence had begun investigating the security of uranium supplies in Niger, where uranium production was controlled by a consortium led by the French mining company COGEMA, a division of the French state-owned nuclear energy firm AREVA. At that time, Italian businessman Rocco Martino provided French intelligence with genuine documents revealing that Iraq was planning to expand trade with Niger. French intelligence took an interest in the documents and asked Martino to provide more information. In 2000 he used a contact in the Niger embassy in Rome to provide French intelligence with documents purporting that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. These documents were later exposed as forgeries;
< snip >
Since it is now also known that French intelligence was trying to push Martino’s forgeries on US and British intelligence, as simultaneously the Democratic National Committee was planning to discredit President Bush’s Iraq policy by accusing his administration of manufacturing evidence against Hussein’s regime, heightened suspicion is cast on Wilson’s use of the Niger investigation to discredit the Bush administration’s case for war.
What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa
Wuli also just posted a timeline thread asking the question about how Joe Wilson saw the documents before they were turned over to the CIA and other questions. It also validates the theory that he saw them in advance:
Joe Wilson's Lies, A Timeline - Who Forged the Documents?
Then if you connect the dots between the article,Was the Joe Wilson Valerie Plame Affair a CIA Plot?and the article New York Times: CIA Leaked Plame's Name, you come away with all the makings of French/CIA coup attempt. George Tenet was Novak's first source, he was the administration official that was described as "no partisan gunslinger" by Novak.
It also validates the article by Seymour Hersch (who we normally dismiss as a leftie moonbat):
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.
“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.'
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
The stranger that approached Novak? Larry Johnson, Ex-CIA. And if my theory is correct, Vincent Cannistraro, another ex-CIA agent, who is a security consultant to the Vatican in Rome, engineered the break-in at the Niger Embassy there, where the letterhead and seals were stolen for the forgeries.
I just hope Fitzgerald is following the path. The final nail...it was kind of funny that I have been "warned" that I should not pursue this research by someone in a private freepmail. Too bad...I ain't skeered... : )
Fascinating.
I'm sure others have said it, but this explanation also explains why so many leaks have occured to the press.
Nobody in the Whitehouse would dare, or need to leak now.
see post #42
See post 42.
Who on here would try and persuade you from following a lead? Do they know something you don't know and don't want you to find out? How intriguing.......
You have excellent eyesight.
We know that Cooper has been questioned about the plame/Rove leak before the GJ. Cooper is married to Mandy Grunwald, who worked for Hillary.
We know Tenet of the CIA was hired by Bill, before Porter Goss got his job.
One story is about Plame/Rove, the other is Able Danger. What family name do we see connected to both stories?????
Outstanding collection of info, thank you. Have to read later.
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