Raw: Senior Democrats call for explanation of reporter's 'WMD clearance'

[Wilms]

October 17, 2005

Senior Democrats call for explanation of reporter's 'WMD clearance'

Two senior Democrats have called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to explain an apparent "top secret" clearance given to New York Times reporter Judith Miller while she was on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.

snip

A New York Times editor confirmed "Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” Before she filed her copy, it would be censored by a colonel who often read the article in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. (When reporters attended tactical meetings with battlefield commanders, they faced similar restrictions.)

snip

The congressmen's letter follows.

snip/more

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Senior_Democrats_call_for_explanation_of_1017.html

[WI_DEM]

1. Let's face it, Miller is a Bush apologist

who has been trying to protect the administration.

[DBoon]

2. Top Secret???

Is she a spook or something?

[katty]

3. Always thought she was a hand-picked plant

[DBoon]

5. She's not a journalist embedded in a military operation

She's a CIA agent embedded in a newspaper, pretending to be a journalist.

[ender]

6. i doubt that she's an actual agent...

she'd be a bit more sensitive about rolling over on anotehr agent, then...

i would guess that she's an "asset"

[AndyTiedye]

13. She Is an Agent...

...of the BFEE.

[IndianaGreen]

15. Miller was a Pentagon employee

The only way to get clearance to be embedded to a top secret unit is for Miller to become a DOD employee, contractor or civil service.

Miller cannot be a journalist and an employee of Rumsfeld at the same time. This is clearly a violation of ethics of major proportion. This is like having as TV news anchorman someone that works for the Pentagon's Public Relations Office.

Miller should be fired, or the NY Times should declare itself a propaganda tool of the US government.

[annabanana]

4. !

[cal04]

7. and threatened our officers with going to Rumsfeld or Feith

You don't even have to look to see who wrote this, Bless you Congressman Conyers for all you do!



One military officer, who says that Miller sometimes "intimidated" Army soldiers by invoking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Undersecretary Douglas Feith, was sharply critical of the note. "Essentially, she threatened them," the officer said, describing the threat as that "she would publish a negative story."
An Army officer, who regarded Miller's presence as "detrimental," said: "Judith was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat," this person said, and MET Alpha "was allowed to bend the rules."




John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking Member
Committee on the Judiciary

Ike Skelton
Ranking Member
Committee on Armed Services

[Ksec]

8. You got some splainin to do

And while yer at it please tell us how Jeff Gannon was running all over the white house at all hours of the day?

White House security under smirk is a freakin joke. Hes weakened us .

[malaise]

9. So ignore the denial right

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1856164


WASHINGTON — Officials from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon say they have no idea what New York Times reporter Judith Miller was talking about when she claimed to have been given a "security clearance" while she was embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Iraq in 2003.

[rodeodance]

10. Rummy himself signed a clearance for Judy!--what the heck is going on?

[Peace Patriot]

11. I have seen both "signed" and "signed off on." I don't know the source

but I seem to recall it was Miller herself.

What was going on? My guess: A high risk, high stakes game to bring WMDs into Iraq, to be "found" by Miller, possibly foiled by Plame/Brewster-Jennings or someone(s) connected to that WMD monitoring network. I suspect that's why Plame and BJ got outed the way they did (with the Bushites in something of a panic, contacting six reporters in one week, etc.), and why David Kelly (Brits chief WMD expert) was suicided (very likely), four days after Plame was outed.

I think there is a connection between the Plame and Kelly events, and this may be it--Kelly found out about the plot to plant WMDs in Iraq, or participated in some way in foiling it. And one of the most intriguing connections between the two events is Judith Miller, who had written a book with Kelly and to whom Kelly sent his last email, warning of the "many dark actors playing games."

If this is the plot that Treasongate was trying to cover up (an attempt to plant WMDs in Iraq0, then Rumsfeld may well be in the middle of it, as the one who empowered Miller to "hunt" for the WMDs with the troops--under his authority, in a way--WMDs that they all knew did not exist. (Were they all just HOPING she would find some? Not likely.)

As if all the lying about Iraq WMDs and 9/11 were not enough; as if all the deaths in Iraq were not enough; as if the outing of a covert CIA agent, whose specialty was WMDs, and outing her whole network and likely getting some of them killed, were not enough, they may have been intending a hoax--on us, on the world, and on the CIA (who had opposed their lies about WMDs).

Caveat: This is mostly speculation, but it does seem to point to the solution of a number of mysteries in the Plame and Kelly affairs. And it's held up well under discussion and in light of on-going revelations. I would think that WHY Treasongate happened--the maybe not so apparent reasons for outing Plame--WOULD BE within Fitzgerald's scope.

Why did they out her and her whole network? Was it just Wilson's article? Why did they do it the way they did--with precipitous actions that put the whole regime at risk? And what about this Niger business?

I suspect that the Niger forgeries/SOTU speech and all that were Part One of "getting" the CIA, and Part Two was the nukes or nuke material planted in Iraq for Miller to "find." The denouement was supposed to be the Bushites/Blairites vindicated, and the CIA made fools of. But the CIA got onto them, and foiled them. Tony Blair found out that Kelly knew about it. (Hutton report, Chap. 3, item #60--the "uncomfortable things" that Kelly "could say" 7/7/03.) Thence, to the Bushites' rushed and seemingly panicky behavior in the week of July 7-14, outing Plame, and, after Kelly was killed and his computers searched, outing of BJ as well.

Any of this--and anything connected to WHY--would be legitimate issues for Fitzgerald. How can he understand the Bushites' outing of Plame and BJ if he doesn't know why they would take such risks?

Also, putting the whole WMD-planting theory aside, what was the context of their efforts to silence critics? What were they seeking to cover up, and punishing people to shut them up about, if not all the lies about Iraq WMDs? The Plame/BJ outing is inexplicable without that context--the context of lies and propaganda and secrecy and manipulating the news media.

I don't see how Fitzgerald could avoid that context, even if it stopped at Rove (which it clearly doesn't).

[librechik]

12. they're denying it

and i never did believe that story.

I'll bet she got private, personal reassurances that are about to prove as valuable as the vapor they were printed on.

I'd love to see her embed contract, but apparently that too is classified.

What made Judy so special that her contract is secret? Would Armstrong Williams be able to tell me?

[IndianaGreen]

14. More from New York Magazine story on Miller

When Colonel Richard McPhee ordered MET Alpha to pull back from a search mission and regroup in the town of Talil, Miller disagreed vehemently with the decision—and let her opinions be loudly known. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reprinted a note in which she told public-affairs officers that she would write negatively about his decision if McPhee didn’t back down. What’s more, Kurtz reported that Miller complained to her friend Major General David Petraeus. Even though McPhee’s unit fell outside the general’s line of command, Petraeus’s rank gave his recommendation serious heft. According to Kurtz, in an account that was later denied, “McPhee rescinded his withdrawal order after Petraeus advised him to do so.”

<snip>

As MET Alpha began its work in April, Miller sent home a blockbuster about an Iraqi scientist in her unit’s custody. According to Miller, the scientist had told the unit that Iraq had destroyed chemical- and biological-warfare equipment on the eve of the war. And—here’s the real coup—the scientist had led the squad to buried ingredients for chemical-weapons production. Although she told readers that her unit prevented her from naming these precursor elements or the scientist, the military did permit Miller to view him from a distance. “Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried,” she wrote. And on PBS’s NewsHour, she was even more emphatic: “What they found is a silver bullet in the form of a person.”

But these scoops, like the story about the scientist, tended to melt quickly in the Iraqi desert. And very soon into the postwar era, the costs of her embedding agreement and her passion for the story became clear. Even though she had more access to MET Alpha, the best seat in the house, she was the only major reporter on the WMD beat to miss the story so completely. MET Alpha was a bumbling unit; and even if it hadn’t been bumbling, it wouldn’t have made a difference—there were no WMDs. The Post’s Gellman, on the other hand, hadn’t embedded with a unit, and didn’t negotiate any access agreements. What’s more, he had the intellectual honesty to repudiate some of his own earlier reporting. He came away from Iraq with a stark, honest story: “Odyssey of Frustration: In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners.”

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index3.html

[VegasWolf]

16. This story just keeps getting better and better every day and in

every way!!!

:popcorn:

[IndianaGreen]

17. Well, shit... how about sharing the popcorn?

It is going to be a very entertaining Fall and Winter. You do know the Wilsons are planning to sure in civil court whoever gets indicted, don't you?

:popcorn:

[wordpix]

18. I just hope Wilson-Plame will sue BushCo not the American people

who actually voted for Gore, not Bush in the first place.

[Straight Shooter]

19. Sue them for everything they've got

Welcome to DU, wordpix :hi:

[newyawker99]

23. Hi wordpix!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[lovuian]

20. To get clearance she had to be an employee!!!

thats going to be the biggest revelation!!! Miller was on many payrolls just like Chalibi!!!

[Mojorabbit]

21. Does anyone know

"In the early eighties, she shared a Georgetown house with her boyfriend, Wisconsin congressman Les Aspin—a rising star in the Democratic Party, who went on to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of Defense."
Where Les Aspin is now. When I read that I thought of the Aspens turning.

[Solly Mack]

22. There exist provisional clearances that last 90 days

it's what they issue while they are investigating for your permanent clearance...

once the 90 days lapse and there is no need to issue a permanent one, the matter just dies....and the paperwork.