You don’t suppose the principal reason President Bush named Bonkers Bolton to be our Ambassador to the United Nations – even though the Senate declined to confirm him – was so Bolton could claim "diplomatic immunity" when the Feds come to arrest him?
For what crime? Well, perhaps Judith Miller of the New York Times – an alleged Bolton confidant and currently an "embedded" jailbird – knows.
Recall that, in early 2002, the Honorable Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger by the Central Intelligence Agency – apparently at the suggestion of Wilson’s wife, who had long been a CIA covert operative working on such issues – in response to inquiries from Vice President Cheney as to whether Iraq had recently been seeking to purchase uranium from Niger.
Wilson conducted the requested investigation and made an oral report to his CIA patrons upon his return. Wilson found no credible evidence that Iraq had made any such effort.
As it happens, all uranium mines in Niger are subject to a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. When the documents that Cheney had obtained in early 2002 that purported to show that such an effort had been made were belatedly shown to the IAEA in late 2002, the IAEA determined within a matter of hours that they were "crude forgeries."
Nevertheless, in his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush baldly stated: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
We now know that the CIA had strenuously objected when Bush’s speechwriters originally had him saying "We" have learned that Saddam recently tried to buy yellowcake in Niger. After all, CIA envoy Joe Wilson had reported that Saddam hadn’t.
However, CIA Director George Tenet objected less strenuously when the speechwriters changed "We" to "the Brits." After all, as the Downing Street Memos have revealed, by the time of the President’s speech, the Brits had known for at least six-months that the Bush-Cheney White House was fixing the intelligence to justify the upcoming war of aggression.
In fact, the Brits had been doing quite a bit of fixing of intelligence, themselves.
Recall "Blair’s Dossier" of September 24, 2002, included this zinger; "There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Shortly after the invasion, Wilson told a New York Times columnist – not Judith Miller, who was still "embedded" in the futile post-war search for the weapons of mass destruction whose undoubted existence had been the primary rationale for the Bush-Blair preemptive war – that high-level officials of the Bush-Cheney administration must have known the Niger accusation was baseless for more than a year before the invasion.
So, the White House Iraq Group, which had been set up in 2002 to plug authentic leaks about the upcoming war – and perhaps create a few false "leaks" of their own – apparently swung into action even before Wilson formally published his accusations in the New York Times on July 6, 2003.
They and their media sycophants attempted to make Wilson and his CIA covert-agent wife the issue, rather than the revelation that the White House [and perhaps their media sycophants] had knowingly made false statements to us.
For the past two years, we have assumed that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has focused solely on the crime of "Secret-NoForn" information about Wilson’s wife being provided to various media types, who then blabbed it to us in newspaper and magazine articles and/or on TV.
But Judith Miller didn’t blab it to us, either on the front page of the New York Times or on TV.
So, why is Judy-baby in jail, when those who did blab aren’t?
Well, in a recent copyrighted article in the Huffington Post, James Moore reported what a former CIA analyst, who has observed Miller’s professional products and relationships for years, had to say.
“The White House Iraq Group 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.”
Of course, it’s possible that Judy-baby wasn’t being "used." Maybe she was a co-conspirator. Maybe that’s why she’d rather spend a few months in jail than "sing" before a Grand Jury.
