Tantalizing

The Plame case is reaching the end of the beginning; indictments could come as early as today. We're getting a tantalizing series of speculative stories about who is targeted, what they've done and why it's important. Today's WaPo says Captain Pacemaker has reason to be nervous:

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney's long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.

In grand jury sessions, including with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Fitzgerald has pressed witnesses on what Cheney may have known about the effort to push back against ex-diplomat and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, including the leak of his wife's position at the CIA, Miller and others said. But Fitzgerald has focused more on the role of Cheney's top aides, including Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lawyers involved in the case said.

One former CIA official told prosecutors early in the probe about efforts by Cheney's office and his allies at the National Security Council to obtain information about Wilson's trip as long as two months before Plame was unmasked in July 2003, according to a person familiar with the account.

This was the key piece of evidence in Judith Miller's testimony to the grand jury, that she met with Libby well before Joseph Wilson went public in July 2003 about his trip to Niger. Miller's heavily lawyered story about her time in the grand jury room corroborates this:

In an interview with me on June 23, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, discussed Mr. Wilson's activities and placed blame for intelligence failures on the C.I.A. In later conversations with me, on July 8 and July 12, Mr. Libby, who is Mr. Cheney's top aide, played down the importance of Mr. Wilson's mission and questioned his performance.

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

Miller goes on to note that the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, asked extensively about whether Libby was acting on orders from Cheney, which she denies. But how credible can Miller possibly be to her readers? This is a woman who sat in jail for 85 days for what Libby describes as no good reason, waiting for a personal waiver that was already given. She was all too willing to shield Libby from view, promising to call him a "former Hill staffer" in any article she'd write about the Wilson controversy instead of a senior White House aide (which is technically true but clearly dissembling; Miller is basically asserting her willingness to lie for the VP's Chief of Staff here). Miller also claims that she "doesn't remember" how the name Valerie Flame (it was misspelled) got into her notebook, insisting that Libby never told it to her. She said "it came from another source, who I do not recall." You're a journalist, enmeshed in the biggest story of the decade, and you don't recall? Not credible.

But the most interesting piece of information from this account is Miller's claim that she had a security clearance while embedded with a group looking for WMD in Iraq. They don't just hand out security clearances to journalists, considering that those two things are in direct opposition to one another: someone with a security clearance must vow to keep classified information secret, while a journalist is duty-bound to report on items of interest to her readership. If she had a security clearance, she couldn't report on practically anything she saw over there.

In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to examine a series of documents. Though I could not identify them with certainty, I said that some seemed familiar, and that they might be excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn't think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.

By the way, the Pentagon completely denies this. So it's probably true.

I think we can at the very least suspect that Judy Miller is CIA. Her security clearance allowed her access to the most sensitive of issues regardng WMD. Her cozy relationship with major players in the Middle East (including reports of her fucking her way right through the halls of power over there) is primed to extract secrets. Speaking with White House officials could be seen as a two-way exchange of information. Remember Scooter Libby's completely bizarre personal letter to Miller, which in addition to leading the witness ("No one else has mentioned that I spoke Valerie Plame's name") had this curious ending?

You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover--Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work--and life.

As emptywheel (who's been indispensable on this story) notes, there's a conference called the Forstmann Little Aspen Conference held every year, and this year (just a week or two after the letter was sent) many neocon players, including Karl Rove and Robert Novak, attended. The aspens are connected? Is Libby trying to tell her that everybody's in this together, so don't spill the beans? Here's emptywheel's conclusion:

I'm going to hazard a guess--that Judy Miller was involved in the conspiracy to cover-up the crime of outing Plame.

If I'm right, this is important enough. It means Fitz may have evidence against Judy not just of perjury, but also obstruction of justice. It means Judy's silence was part of the plan to cover up the crime. And if Fitz can prove this, it totally shreds whatever remaining claim to respecability and honor Judy had.

Which is where we get back to the Aspen reference. At least two of the cover-up conspirators were at Aspen together the weekend after Libby wrote his letter--at an event traditionally not covered by the press. Had Judy agreed to testify immediately upon receiving Libby's letter, she would have an opportunity to be there as well. To join her cluster of conspirators.

To dream up a new story.

Miller, of course, decided to testify, and implicate Libby to an extent, but go no further, and obstruct attempts to get to the real conclusion. It may all be a moot point if this tidbit from the Daily News is true, that there's a cooperating witness in the White House:

Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.

"They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

We're going to know where this all leads in a couple of days. Fitzgerald has already signaled that he'll make the news public in DC, and not Chicago, which basically lets the media know where they hav to be. That means we're at the zero hour. I don't think the general population has any sense what is going on here, and when they open their front pages to scores of indictments in the White House, including possibly the Vice President himself, it will be a shock. That's because the media, who is completely implicated in this case (they're the leak-ees), has been relatively silent about it. For all the sturm und drang of being lied to in the Clinton years, the Beltway Establishment has been mum about being used as pawns in a vicious game of payback here. "Reporters" like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, reporters who have testified before the grand jury, speculate about the case on their shows but never once peep that they themselves are part of the story. This is an utter failure of the fourth estate to feed the public's right to know. This is the least-covered big story in Washington in years, because the Beltway Boys refuse to discern between a crime and politics as usual, and they don't want themselves to be muddied up in the aftermath. It's shameful and ridiculous.

All we can do, for now, is wait. But it won't be for long.

[UPDATE] According to The Raw Story, we have our flipper:

Individuals familiar with Fitzgerald’s case tell RAW STORY that John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton, was named as a target of Fitzgerald’s probe. They say he was told in recent weeks that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation.

Others close to the probe say that if Hannah is cooperating with the special prosecutor then he was likely going to be charged as a co-conspirator and may have cut a deal.

Hannah was mentioned in Joseph Wilson's memoir as the perfect patsy, a guy who could do the dirty work so the big boys could keep their hands clean. If he's flipped we're in for a wild ride.

Read this:

Fitzgerald may be looking at a broader conspiracy case of pre-war machinations by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and by the Pentagon’s ultra-secret Office of Net Assessment, the former operating out of Dick Cheney’s office and tasked with “selling” the war in Iraq, and the latter operating out of Defense Under Secretary for Policy, Douglas Feith’s office and tasked with creating a war to “sell,” as some describe.

To spread its message that Saddam Hussein was a nuclear threat, the White House Iraq Group relied heavily on New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who, after meeting with several of the organization’s members in August 2002, wrote an explosive story that many critics of the war believe laid the groundwork for military action against Iraq.

On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, for example, Miller wrote a story for the Times quoting anonymous officials who said aluminum tubes found in Iraq were to be used as centrifuges. Her report turned out to be wrong.

Hannah is currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for his alleged activities in an intelligence program run by the controversial Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.

According to a Newsweek article, a memo written for the Iraq National Congress (INC) raised questions regarding Cheney’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. During the lead up to the war, Newsweek asserts, the INC was providing intelligence on the now discredited Iraqi WMD program through Hannah and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.

“A June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two ‘U.S. governmental recipients’ for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, ‘defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed’; the info was then reported to, among others, ‘appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.’ The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number.”

Oh, this is ALL coming together. The roots are indeed clustered.