Oh, Judy, maybe it was John Poindexter who told you the name

understandinglife

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Mon Oct-17-05 05:16 PM
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Oh, Judy, maybe it was John Poindexter who told you the name

Edited on Mon Oct-17-05 05:18 PM by understandinglife

You've all now read, probably more times than you want, the statement from Miller regarding who told her about someone named Victoria or was it Valerie and was it Flame or Plame ... :

Miller wrote Plame's name in the same notebook she used when taking notes of her Libby interviews in 2003, but the reporter said she did not think she had gotten the name from Libby. She said she could not recall from whom she got the name.

From Pete Yost's AP wire report entitled New Questions Arise in CIA Leak Probe:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1221194

Judith Miller's first Iraq WMD article appeared in the New York Times on August 13, 2002 entitled THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS.

By that time, her old buddy John Poindexter had been been on the job in the DoD/DARPA "Office of Information Awareness" for almost six months.

Let's review that interesting appointment by reading an excerpt from The Guardian that appeared in February, 2002:

Last Wednesday something strange happened. The American population was instructed to panic. Place themselves, that is, on a state of highest vigilance. Some cataclysmic act of terrorism would happen -- within hours. But nothing terrible happened. Something creepy did. On Thursday there was an inconspicuous news item. John M Poindexter had been appointed to head a new agency "to counter attacks on the US", such as Wednesday's no-show. It is equivalent, in British terms, to Jeffrey Archer being made chancellor of the exchequer.

The agency which Poindexter will run is called the Information Awareness Office. You want to know what that is? Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal officials with "instant" analysis on what is being written on email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage.

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He and Oliver North were found to be up to their necks in the Iran-Contra (guns for hostages) scam, which blew up in 1986. Poindexter was charged and found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and the destruction of evidence in 1990; this was overturned on appeal the following year. The case against them was that they meticulously wiped out 5,000 incriminating emails -- but forgot about the back-up tapes. Even smart guys goof sometimes.

His excuse for his behavior was brazen: "I made a very deliberate decision not to tell the president so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the president if it ever leaked out." In other words, he gave himself the right to run America's foreign policy behind the back of the commander in chief. Who the hell voted for John M Poindexter?

Link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4358017,00.html

Now, about that "old buddy" relationship between Judy and John that I alluded, above:

Nine years into her tenure at the New York Times, she participated in John Poindexter's disinformation campaign against Libya for the Reagan administration. As Bob Woodward later revealed in the Washington Post, Miller planted Poindexter's propaganda in her own writings: claiming that el-Khadaffi was being betrayed from within his own country, that he had sunk into depression, and that he had turned to drugs. Miller went on to claim Khadaffi had tried to have sex with her, but lost interest when she claimed Jewish heritage.

Khadaffi, you'll remember, was the 80's Saddam Hussein (back when Saddam Hussein was still cool). Muammar was Reagan's "Mad Dog of the Middle East," which is kinda weird when you consider that Libya is in North Africa. As you'll see at the bottom of this article, there was no event on earth that Republicans would not attach to his name for the sake of justifying what they wanted to do in the region anyway. He was our blame-sink at that time. Other Muslims have since taken his place. It's all still the same game, and Judith has been playing it since the days of skinny ties and perms.

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But Miller's entire journalistic approach was flawed. A few months after the aluminum tubes story, a former CIA analyst, who has observed Miller's professional products and relationships for years, explained to me how simple it was to manipulate the correspondent and her newspaper.

"The White House had a perfect deal with Miller," he said. "Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi. Too bad Judy didn't spend a little more time talking to those of us in the intelligence community who had information that contradicted almost everything Chalabi said."

Her long career as a propaganda outlet hardly distinguishes her, even in the 1980s. Among these examples (.pdf) you'll notice that the same story keeps being told about different people to justify the same policies:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/8/16033/61733

Given the pattern of planting information and the tendency of two people to do what they want and not bother to tell their boss(es), one might want to ask Judy and John if they had a chat with each other about Valerie Plame.

Hopefully, Mr. Fitzgerald already has and maybe, soon, Judy will tell all of us that she remembered that her John is Poindexter, if not Bolton (or maybe it's both).

Peace.