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 ...
"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?
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