I do not breathe your politics
"Comment is free but facts are sacred." (C.P. Scott)
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Washington party games
|
This one's called 'pin the tail on the elephant in the living room'.
In the whole CIA name leak affair (The Plame Name Blame Game Shame), Judy Miller was sent to jail - by the grand jury at the special prosecutor's urging - for not revealing her source for an article she never wrote. Odd? Kinda.
Odder still: she insisted her source's waiver was not given freely. He (I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff), writes to her in the letters that his waiver was free all along and she knew it.
So what's really going on? Is it someone else she was protecting by avoiding testifying? Herself? Did she go to jail to avoid going to jail? She's still blustering about it being important for the freedom of the fourth estate, but it seems to me that she did nothing that the similarly threatened Matt Cooper did, except hype it up with a jail stay in the meantime.
Or, did she go to jail to protect the elephant in the living room? That is, is she protecting not herself, nor Libby, but Karl Rove, or John Bolton (who, coincidentally, visited her while she was in prison), or someone else in the White House who she worked with while writing all those demonstrably false stories on Iraqi WMDs?
I'm sure this is coincidental, but yesterday, US auditors at the GAO ruled that the US government had broken the law by buying propaganda in mainstream news, regarding the No Child Left Behind Act.
Could Miller's crappy, Chalabi-slanted articles on Iraqi WMD have also been paid for? Personally I think her meeting with Libby was employee/boss, not journalist/politician. I'm not sure we'll ever know, but if I was a journalist, I would not want Judy Miller standing up for journalistic processes.
As an aside, the very compromised Ms Miller was the journalist who received the email Dr David Kelly wrote, warning of 'many dark actors playing games'. How painfully ironic.
posted by Michael at 10/01/2005 10:33:00 PM |