Buzzards Circling

Greg at The Talent Show and Josh Marshall join me in musing about this latest revelation about the President in the Plame case. Josh mentions that the President has been interviewed (though not under oath) in this case; did he say he knew Rove was involved, as it appears he knew almost from the beginning? With another White House aide reportedly flipping, and Bush not exactly being a paragon of subtlety, odds are that someone cooperating with the prosecutor knows what Bush actually said in October of 2003 behind closed doors. Since both of the alleged flippers are directly out of Dick Cheney's office, it's more plausible that they would give up Libby or Cheney himself.

Indeed, the NY Daily News, who seems to have the best sources in the media on this, seems to very definitely finger Cheney and his creation, the WHIGs.

It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.

So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News [...]

"There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.

"People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.

"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

Miller's stories on Iraq prior to the war have already been discredited (despite her claim that she was "proved fucking right,"). It's clear she got much of her information from Ahmad Chalabi, whose ties to the neocons are manifold:

The (NY Times) editors conceded what intelligence sources had told me and numerous other reporters: that Chalabi was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House and had set up a situation with Iraqi exiles where all of the influential institutions were shouting into the same garbage can, hearing the same echo. "Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one."

The White House Iraq Group was not only a conduit for that bad information, but once the information was challenged, it was a conduit for slandering the challengers. Miller talked to Libby because she was part of the group. Even if she doesn't write a story, she's in newsrooms, backrooms and barrooms, spreading the info around to get other writers off the trail. It's becoming more and more disturbing to uncover more of Miller's background as a political operative rather than a journalist. She's sitting in on interrogations?

You may have seen an odd story making the rounds tonight, that Miller may be called as a witness in a federal case in Chicago against a Palestinian-born car dealer accused of funneling money to Hamas to finance terrorism. (In a weird twist, the case is being prosecuted by U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the same one who successfully sought her 85-day jailing in the Plame case.) That's because Muhammad Salah claims that Israel forcibly coerced a confession from him in 1993, and because Miller witnessed part of that interrogation.

It's bizarre and pretty much unheard of for a journalist to witness an interrogation -- just like it's equally odd and even more rare for a reporter to receive a security clearance from the Pentagon. But Miller has talked very openly about watching the questioning of Salah, who she says was not mistreated. She talked about it on "60 Minutes" with Steve Croft, she wrote about it in her book, "God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East," and has answered questions from Chicago reporters about it.

But there was one place that Judith Miller did not talk about witnessing Salah's interrogation.

That would be in the New York Times -- even though she published a story about Salah's alleged ties to funding terrorism on Feb. 17, 1993, just six short days after watching the questioning of the prisoner.

Her employment at the New York Times appears to be little more than a non-official cover. That's about all I can gather.

With each passing day, the White House must be shitting enough bricks to build a Washington-area pyramid.