It was past 02:00AM local time for previous quick answer, here upon deeper thought, some of my ideas:

1. Hair Is on Fire - Inaction by WH, Tenet - reason for my thought OBL pre-emptive attack
   
2. Israeli joy in NJ video taping WTC - Mossad agents
   
3. Chertoff himself and as prosecutor releasing Israeli agents
   
4. Permission by WH to allow Bin Laden family to escape from U.S.
   
5. Inaction by Norad, FAA and U.S. Air Force to intercept at least one airplane
   
6. Israeli propaganda, especially Likud

As the devastating Times article, and her own first-person account, make clear, Miller should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism -- and her own paper. And her editor, who has not taken responsibility, should apologize to both readers and "armchair critics."

By Greg Mitchell

(October 15, 2005) -- It's not enough that Judith Miller, we learned Saturday, is taking some time off and "hopes" to return to the New York Times newsroom. As the newspaper's devastating account of her Plame games -- and her own first-person sidebar -- make clear, she should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism, and her own newspaper. And Bill Keller, executive editor, who let her get away with it, owes readers, at the minimum, an apology instead of merely hailing his paper's long-delayed analysis and saying that readers can make of it what they will.

He should also apologize to all the "armchair critics" and "vultures" he denounced this week for spreading unfounded stories and "myths" about what Miller and the newspaper had been up to. If anything, this sad and outrageous story is worse than most expected.

Let's put aside for the moment Miller exhibiting the same selective memory favored by her former friends and sources in the White House, in claiming that for the life of her she cannot recall how the name of "Valerie Flame" got into the reporter's notebook she took to her interview with Libby; how she learned about the CIA operative from other sources (whom she can't name or even recall when it happened).  

The first question raised by the Times' Judy-Culpa and by Judy Miller's own account is: Who told Judy about Valerie Plame (or "Flame" as the name appears in Judy's notes)? According to these two pieces, the name was immaculately conceived. "As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from," Miller writes.

When the Plame case broke open in July 2003, these notes were presumably no more than a few weeks old. But who had revealed Plame's name was not seared on Miller's mind?

This is as believable as Woodward and Bernstein not recalling who Deep Throat was. It also means that Judy went to jail to protect a source she can't recall.

Update: Not Since Geraldo Cracked Open that Vault...

Now that I have spent a few hours absorbing this latest installment in the ongoing soap opera "Desperate Editors," I can safely say that not since Geraldo cracked open Al Capone's vault has there been a bigger anticlimax or a bigger sham. After all, the question everybody has been asking is: who was the source who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Judy Miller?

And the answer? She can't remember.

"The fundamental intellectual assumptions that have guided our Intelligence Community's approach to managing national security information for half a century may be in some respects crucially flawed," he writes.

Along the way, he challenges some longstanding practices that are so deeply-rooted that no one normally thinks to question them, such as the application of the "need to know" standard for sharing information.

"It may not be true," Sen. Shelby proposes radically, "that information-holders -- the traditional arbiters of who can see 'their' data -- are the entities best placed to determine whether outsiders have any 'need to know' data in their possession. Analysts who seek access to information, it turns out, may well be the participants best equipped to determine what their particular expertise and contextual understanding can bring to the analysis of certain types of data."

But information sharing is not exactly the solution either, "inasmuch as 'sharing' connotes ownership by the party that decides to share it, an idea that is antithetical to truly empowering analysts to connect all the right 'dots'."

Discussion yesterday :: read on »»

Having now waded through The Times's articles on Judy Miller, one new fact struck me as particularly bizarre -- Miller, by her own admission, was cleared to see secret information as part of her assignment as an "embedded" reporter in Iraq.  

I had no idea journalists could receive security clearances -- and I had no idea that the mainstream media would allow their reporters to have such clearances. After all, one of the most important obligations of a person receiving security clearances is not to reveal that information at any time, while one of the most important obligations of a reporter is precisely to reveal information the public has a need and right to know.

Can someone explain why this glaring conflict of interest is acceptable?

Some expert comments - read on »»

  «« click on pic for TIMEline

The critics
Bill Vann (WSWs) suggested that Miller's listing as a speaker for the Middle East Forum, a right-wing lobbying group, could be a violation of Times ethics guidelines, which barred reporters from participating in groups that seek to shape public policy.

Soon after, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported on a conflict within the Times staff. Quoting an irate e-mail from Baghdad bureau chief John Burns concerning a Chalabi story that he had assigned to another reporter, Kurtz included some of Miller's response, shedding even more light on how dubious her sources might have been: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years. . . . He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." More troubling still, it turned out, the army unit in which she was embedded was "using Chalabi's Intel and document network for its own WMD work." [6]  

No accountability--not then, not now
As Vice President Dick Cheney candidly admitted during the first Gulf War, when he served as defense secretary, "I do not look on the press as an asset. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed." [17]  During the second Gulf conflict, more than 600 reporters were "managed" as "embeds," agreeing to sign contracts with the military limiting when and what they could report. Each was able to provide a small slice of the war almost instantaneously; access was good, and the general feeling was that it worked well for both sides. [18]  But were they able to draw the line between propaganda and journalism?

Daniel Pipes - Middle East Forum - Judith Miller
The article having leapt from The Times' front page, my dissection of it below will not be the first. Any reading of the piece should perhaps occur in light of Miller's relationship with the Middle East Forum, run by the controversial Daniel Pipes, who has been in the news of late as a Bush nominee to the congressionally chartered U.S. Institute of Peace. A non-profit, the forum was founded in 1994.

The links of Judith Miller with the Pentagon are not new. In 1986, she wrote numerous articles on Libya, thus contributing to a massive disinformation campaign on Khadafi which was coordinated by Admiral John Poindexter. Bob Woodward has written a major article in the Washington Post on this strategy.

When John Poindexter And Oliver North took the stand in the Iran-Contra hearings, they kept the lid on a Presidential scandal far more serious than today's. [Monica Lewinski scandal - Ed.]

Poindexter :: TIA Darpa Project - Resignation Letter 2002

"The role of a good reporter is like that of an intelligence analyst who digs for the truth, and not of a stenographer who simply reports what he/she hears without verification."

Miller was essentially the megaphone for disseminating Bush administration's `intelligence' and in promoting its agenda on Iraq. Indeed, she wrote the first article, entitled «Threats and Responses : The Iraqis ; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts», on Saddam Hussein's WMD programme, mentioning "aluminium tubes" that could be used for nuclear weapons. That was on September 7, just a few days after Vice-President Cheney delivered the first speech in which he presented Iraq as Washington's next target.[10] [Interestingly, the forged documents on Niger uranium mystery first surfaced in Italy, via an Italian journalist who works for the Berlusconi-owned Panorama magazine.[11] Was Berlusconi asked to help Bush and Blair "fix" the intelligence to start war in Iraq, and the forged Niger documents were his government's contribution? [12]]

Miller's links with the Pentagon are not new. In 1986, she wrote numerous articles on Libya, thus contributing to a massive disinformation campaign on Muammar Gaddafi which was coordinated by Admiral John Poindexter.[13] During the first U.S.-led war in the Persian Gulf, Miller co-wrote a book with Laurie Mylroie, titled Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf. Miller and Mylroie have both been clients of Eleana Benador, whose PR firm has represented many leading pro-war figures that have appeared prominently on television and in other public venues. She has also worked closely and uncritically with Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, in developing her reports on Iraq.