Sunday, October 16, 2005

Miller's Self-Infatuation Ruins a Perfectly Good Conspiracy


It seems to me that everyone is missing the point on this Judith Miller Plame identity leak thingy. Well, almost everyone.
It is extremely rare for me to find common ground with right wing whack jobs like John Hinderaker, but I think he’s onto something here. It’s funny that the common ground betwixt lefties like myself and righties like Hinderaker is always on the outskirts of ConspiracyTheoryville.
Hinderaker’s take – and this is something that I’ve been saying for a while – is that the real issue with Miller stems from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s previous investigation of her in which she was accused of leaking news of an impending FBI raid on a Muslim charity suspected of funneling money to terrorists.
The silence of the supposedly liberal Main$tream media on this very, very important point seems to me like proof of the theory’s veracity.
For those of you not up to speed on this aspect of the Miller saga, here’s the upshot: In December of 2001, Miller received a tip that that the FBI was about to raid the offices of an Islamic charity organization called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The FBI believed HLF was knowingly channeling donations to Hamas and possibly other terrorists. On December 3, one day before the scheduled raid, Miller called HLF offices to ask them how they felt about the government’s decision to freeze their assets. According to Fitzgerald, she also warned them about the impending raid, which gave them time to destroy crucial evidence.
Miller’s cover story prior to her release from prison was that she was waiting for Scooter Libby to waive the confidentiality agreement he had with her, something he had already done way back in July. We know that Miller’s lawyer, Bob Bennett, spent ten days prior to her release negotiating with Fitzgerald. What were they negotiating if Libby had already given his waiver? Could it be that Bennett was trying to convince Fitzgerald to restrict the grand jury questioning to the Plame investigation only?
Fitzgerald met recently with Judge Thomas Hogan, probably to request an extension of the grand jury, whose term expires on October 28. Maybe Fitzgerald is trying to buy a little extra time in order to find a connection between the two investigations. Surely such a connection exists.
Let’s take a look at Miller's post-9/11 reporting, shall we? First, she protects a Muslim charity/terrorist front organization just three months after the Sept. 11 attacks. Then, she sounds the war bugle with a series of articles riddled with qualifiers like “if verified” and “some officials believe,” while sidling up to power starved frauds like Ahmed Chalabi and obscure defectors like Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri (not to mention a host of anonymous ‘sources’). Next, she shamelessly promotes her new book on the anthrax threat with a series of ‘news’ articles, including the envelope of white powder she herself received (which turned out to be harmless). Later, after the war she wanted so badly finally comes, she gets herself ‘embedded’ with an army unit that quickly gains notoriety as the “Miller Unit,” as it gallivants all over Iraq in a futile search for the very WMDs that Hans Blix, et al already said didn’t exist. Shortly after returning from this rogue operation, she takes her revenge on Joe Wilson by helping to leak his wife’s covert identity. (Incidentally, Miller's shady reporting goes way back.)
Somesink smells fishy in Denmark! If, like me, you have little difficulty believing in things like Operation Mockingbird, then this Judith Miller Plame identity leak thingy becomes easier to understand. The only reason we even know about it is that, like Narcissus, Miller became infatuated with her own image. I can’t wait until she drowns in the reflecting pool.

1 comment:

Jolly Roger said...

I gotta tell you-I was sorry to see her get sprung from jail.

Now the El Shrubbo shill wants to recast herself as a champion of free speech. It's really too bad for her that she is so damn sleazy that even her coworkers want no part of her or her "cause."