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like Fitzgerald had Rove by the short hairs on perjury--and likely still does. When those reports came out (re Rove about to be indicted), it was a quite imaginable and reasonable scenario that Rove got threatened with indictment--to force him to testify truthfully (re Libby perjury), and agreed to do so (because he was so very indictable). The "sources" who were feeding this story (that Rove was about to be indicted) got PART of it right, but were not privy to how Rove avoided it. (In this respect, I think it's also notable that Rove's attorney refused to make public the letter Fitzgerald sent him, which may have included conditions for his not indicting Rove).
And the key to understanding all this (what may have been going on behind the scenes) is again to be found in the court docs--that is, that Rove is not, and never was, the main perp of this crime. He was something of an errand boy. And they tried to blame it on him (Libby did). That was cover story #1: that Rove did it, in a typical Rovian political revenge hit. It's my opinion that we are now seeing cover story #2: that Cheney did it. This is where Fitzgerald is headed. And it's true, Cheney was a major actor--and the highest that Fitzgerald can perceive, given what he described, in his only press conference on this matter, as Libby "throwing dust in the eyes of the umpire." Fitzgerald can't SEE who really did it--and most important, in his own words, WHY they did it--because of all the perjury and obstruction. But he is clearly pointing to Cheney--in the docs, and now, in the testimony.
I think there is reason to believe that Cheney ALSO was a sort of errand boy--guilty as hell, but not the mastermind--that the real perp and mastermind was Rumsfeld, and that the crime was much worse than outing the CIA agents/contacts of the Brewster-Jennings WMD counter-proliferation network, putting all their lives in danger and disabling all their counter-proliferation projects. The crime was the reason WHY they outed that network--that is, the REAL reason, or the PRIMARY reason, which is still hidden, and still being covered up. I think that Rumsfeld's Pentagon "Office of Special Plans" (OSP--his own private intelligence shop, used to circumvent the honest professionals at the CIA) weren't just forging documents and cooking intelligence on WMDS in Iraq. I think they were trying to PLANT WMDs in Iraq, specifically nukes. The Niger/Iraq nuke forgeries were the set-up. The payoff was to be a "find" of the nukes in Iraq after the invasion. But something went wrong. Somebody foiled part 2 of their plan: the illicit movement of nuclear weapons or nuke materials into Iraq. This was Brewster-Jennings' job, of course--to DETECT and PREVENT the illicit movement of WMDS. (BJ was a worldwide network of deep cover agents and contacts within foreign governments--people whose motive was no doubt fear that WMDs would get into the wrong hands, through corruption within their own government and WMD projects. Plame was the head of this network--with the brass plate energy company, Brewster-Jennings, as her cover. IF the Bush Junta--perhaps through an operative like Manucher Ghorbanifar, the notorious Iran/Contra arms dealer who was present at the Rome meeting in 2001, where many suspect that the Niger forgeries were cooked up--was trying to procure and illicitly move nuke weapons or materials, the B-J network was in one of the best positions in the world to detect it, and stop it.)
So now you have Fitzgerald still trying to peel back this onion--and its layers and layers of cover up. He has gotten through the political layer of the scheme--through Rove and Libby to Cheney (head of the White House Iraq Group-WHIG--charged with "selling" the war on Iraq), but hasn't yet peeled it back to the operational layer: where the Niger forgeries came from, and what else they may have been up to--for instance, making that trumped up allegation--that Saddam had nukes--come true.
We don't know who may have gotten killed in the outing of the Brewster-Jennings network. Some were in such deep cover that even seeking info on their well-being would put them in danger. But there was one possible casualty in broad daylight: The British chief WMD expert, David Kelly, who was found dead in England, in highly suspicious circumstances, four days after Valerie Plame was outed. This whistleblower's office and computers were then searched, and, four days later, the entire Brewster-Jennings network was ADDITIONALLY outed in the newspaper, also by Novak--an act that was excessive, if the main motive was to punish Joe Wilson for his article--and an act that also added to the risk of treason charges, for all the many top Bushites who got involved in this. Why did they ADDITIONALLY out the whole network, by naming its front company in the newspapers? Something they found in David Kelly's papers? Were they panicked? Did they fear exposure of the scheme to plant nukes in Iraq--didn't know who had foiled it, didn't know where the next whistleblower and disclosure may come from, and thus outed everybody--deliberately put the lives of everyone in the network in danger, to shut them all up? Also, were they still trying to plant the nukes in Iraq (circa July 2003)? Did they eliminate the network for operational reasons? (--to try to stop repeated attempts to plant the weapons from being foiled?)
One thing (among many) that has never made sense to me was why the Bush Junta would be so worried about an ex-diplomat's article in the NYT--in a newsstream that they completely controlled in 2003. If they had left it alone, that article would have slipped into the general coma at the time--the stream of forgetfulness--that the war profiteering corporate news monopolies were so skillful at creating. And if they wanted to punish Wilson for it, there were far less risky ways of doing so, than attacking the CIA head on, in its most sacred duty of protecting its covert operatives. Their "punishment" of Wilson couldn't have been better designed to lead to their own destruction. Why take all that risk?
Another thing that has always bothered me was, why did operatives in the White House keep putting the Niger/Iraq nuke allegation back into Bush's speeches, after several agencies had proven, beyond a doubt, that it was based on forged documents? That was foolish. Rice and Cheney, for instance, could have gone on mumbling about "mushroom clouds" based on obscure sources, and, with all the other lies they and Bush were telling (based on cooked or cherry-picked intel, but not on proven falsehoods), and they could have continued to muddy up the newsstream, and proceed with their damned war. It's not as if Congress, or the lapdog press, was requiring any hard proof of Saddam's "guilt." Why the insistence on THIS allegation--the shakiest of all--in Bush's "state of the union" speech, of all places? But it begins to make sense if you see it as part 1 of the plot to plant the nukes. It was a necessary preliminary to part 2. To have the BIG MOMENT--the moment of the phony "find" of the planted nukes in Iraq--you had to have a dramatic buildup, that would result in Bush being triumphantly proved right, and the nay-sayers (CIA, State Dept.) proved wrong and discredited.
To the gist of this OP: Judith Miller's dirty connections to this dirtiest of wars. Miller was the NYT's propagandist for WMDS and for war on Iraq. She was close to the NeoCons and Chalabi (Pentagon payroll), and met clandestinely with Libby to receive leaks of national security secrets including the Plame leak. She furthermore was the point person in the "hunt" for WMDs in Iraq--she accompanied the US troops who were conducting that search, and, according to her, had an "embed" contract signed by Donald Rumsfeld to do so. She became a positive annoyance to US commanders in that operation--ordering them here and there, and accusing them of not looking hard enough. She was also close to David Kelly (used him as a major quoted source in her book "Germs" about germ warfare). And it was to Judith Miller, that David Kelly wrote his last email, on the day he died (7/17/03), in which Kelly (who had been interrogated at a "safe house," threatened with the "Official Secrets Act," outed to the news media, and sent home without protection and apparently without surveillance) expressed concern about the "many dark actors playing games." Miller failed to mention this email--and her close connections to Kelly--in the NYT news obit she wrote about Kelly several days after his death. IF WMDs had been found in Iraq, Miller would have been a major beneficiary of it. It would have been her greatest "scoop."
Anyway, if not this, then some other dark deed (or deeds) lay behind this astonishing behavior of a U.S. government outing its own agents. I don't think we are at the center of the onion, yet. And the whole thing continues to stink to high heaven, and to sting the eyes. Somebody get Patrick Fitzgerald a slice of bread!
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