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Late to the dance

Richard Clarke: "Hands up if youre the CIA leak! AH gotcha!, I didnt say "simon says". BUSTED!

So tonight I’m listening to Hugh Hewitt when a caller references a book that the now famous New York Times Reporter Judy Miller wrote in 2002. What’s it called? It’s called

Germs: Biological Weapons and Americas Secret War.

“Well, that’s interesting” I said to myself. I did not know that she wrote a book on Weapons of Mass Destruction. So I picked it up and read it this evening.

Here are some tidbits:

Author Judy Miller: She was one of the people who received one of the “anthrax letters”. If I knew it, I forgot it.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby: Worked in the White House and worked in biological warfare issues with various officials in the preparation for the Kuwait war.

Richard Clarke: Yeah, that Richard Clarke. A major referenced source for this book. This makes my antenna twitch...A Reporter with an Ex-CIA guy who was a source on another book and a reporter who just happens to be looking into a guy who just happens to have a CIA agent as a wife. Mighty cozy those quaint little georgetown neighborhoods are, arent they? Maybe this is what Libby was talking about in the famous "aspens" letter. An illusion to the idea that everyone knows everyone else? maybe...

Saddam Hussein: Oh yeah, tons of stuff. You get a much clearer impression of all of the major players of the last 5 years in how and why they were reacting to Saddam the way they did after 9/11.

General Anthony “I Hate Bush” Zinni: In 1998, sees an eminent biological threat from Iraq that could not wait to be dealt with any longer, and had all his troops take the anthrax shots( remember that controversy? I do!). Well, how times have changed, haven’t they, General Zinni?

Project BACUS: A project to determine if using off the shelf and commonly found materials it was possible to create a biological weapons lab on short notice that could also produce weaponized biological materials that would be effective if they were deployed. Guess what? It worked. That should keep you up at night.

The left wants to keep the attention on the famous Nigerian “yellowcake” statements and tie all Weapons of Mass Destruction to just nuclear weapons, but this book makes a clear and cogent case for exactly why the Clinton and Bush administrations were rightfully worried about Saddam Hussein in the days after 9/11. We all forget about the “Anthrax attacks” and we discount them as a poor prank by a disgruntled lab worker, but the book is written in the timeframe when it was less than clear if it was just a one off problem or the beginning of a wide scale attack.

But you knew that anyway, didn’t you?

But here’s what I really want to say about this. If you read this book, which is excellently sourced with very good footnotes and cross-referenced to other materials, you know that Ms. Miller indeed knows a great many people who work in around intelligence, weapons of mass destruction and in the civil service that stays around no matter the administration. So, if she doesn’t know the person directly, then she knows the people they work closely with. Close enough I would gather to get a question answered in a few minutes.

That being the case, how is it possible that with all the people she knew in Washington, in the White House, in the CIA in the military, that she didn’t know that Ambassador Wilson’s wife was in the CIA as well? It would not take very long to play a game of “six degrees of separation” with the people she has outlined in the book to come up with a direct link to Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson.

Could Richard Clarke be the source she is really protecting and the whole Libby/Rove connection simply a smokescreen to cover another trail that would lead to a far more damaging connection? That is, a rogue CIA organization that wishes to protect its power and cover up its large scale mistakes in regards to Iraq and the middle east?

Remember, this organization is made up of the same set of guys who failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, and now here they were in 2002 with the country in the midst of the worst attack since Pearl Harbor without any clear answers as to "why". Oh, and it was Richard Clarke who was the one who supposedly lead the anti-terror teams during the 1990's. Now, don't go and give yourself a sprained arm giving yourself a pat on the back for that job, Mr. Clarke...

In addition, Joseph Wilson it must be remembered, was making the case that people like Miller were inventing facts or even over representing the dangers that were posed by Saddam. Its clear when you read this book that Judy Miller must’ve taken that idea as a direct attack on her reputation as a reporter.

So I ask you, based on this and other areas that Judy Miller reported and worked in for over 10 years, the extensive research into Weapons of Mass Destruction in the G.H.W. Bush, Clinton and the G.W. Bush administrations, how is it possible or even feasible for her to have not known who Valerie Plame was, given that her husband walked quiet literally through her crosshairs on the Niger case?

Remember, the question that got this whole thing going was “ who was the dumbass that sent that hack Joe Wilson to Niger to do any sort of research”. Joseph Wilson said it was Cheney who sent him. Cheney said he had no idea who it was who sent him, and the race was on to find out who would send Joe Wilson. How could Judy Miller have missed the detail of Wilson’s wife and her job and still called herself a reporter?

Ok, get to it. Go buy her book and see for yourself.

UPDATE: Oh sure, its easy to say Varifrank is nuts in regards to the CIA and the Bush administration, but is it so easy to say it when Victoria Tensing says it too? H/T Radioblogger.

Posted @ October 19, 2005 10:11 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: AST at October 22, 2005 02:39 AM