Two Tense Weeks
After reading my post about the WHIG group from last night, conservative journalist Robert George wrote in to give me a heads up about a post he wrote earlier (and cross posted on the Huffington Post) about "those two tense weeks in July" on both sides of the atlantic. This was the same period, you'll remember, in which the "sexed up" British dossier came to a head and resulted in the suicide of one of the major players in that saga.
Judy Miller, the Zelig of Iraq lies, was right in the middle of that too.
George wrote:
"... if we go back to our timeline tracking the furious developments that were going on in both the U.S. and the U.K., we note that July 12, 2003, was the one of the two days not really accounted for in previous news stories. In between the first and second times Miller and Libby spoke, the following things occurred:
* On July 9, in the UK, Blair’s government has orchestrated the outing of scientist David Kelly as the source of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan’s explosive report that the Blair government “sexed-up” its Iraq intelligence dossier. In the U.S., Robert Novak talks with Karl Rove (Wilson’s op-ed had appeared three days before).
* On July 11, George Tenet releases a statement asserting that the “16 words” about yellowcake uranium shouldn’t have been in the president’s State of the Union address. The same day, Karl Rove talks to Matt Cooper about, among other things, Joseph Wilson and his wife.
[...]
Why was Miller behind bars for three months concerning sources to a story which that she never wrote about?
The answer is obvious: Judith Miller emerged as a central figure because she MADE herself a central figure and, arguably, BECAUSE she didn't "writ[e] a story about the case." This is the Judith Miller who, four days later, wrote words of encouragement to British scientist David Kelly: “David, I heard from another member of your fan club that things went well for you today. Hope it's true, J.”
These don't seem like the words of a disinterested journalist. These are the words of someone who has some sort of interest in how a witness performs in a parliamentary hearing.
How is it that – two years later and after Judith Miller has spent 90 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with a criminal investigation – not one media organization has deemed it important to wonder: Who is the other “member of [Kelly’s] fan club”? Is it Scooter Libby? Is it John Bolton (who visited Miller in jail and we know was questioned by the State Department Inspector General the same day Kelly’s body was found)? Is it someone else? If it is indeed an American, exactly what is that person's interest in a British Parliamentary inquiry?
Judith Miller is the missing link between two different investigations. She’s not a mere reporter. How do we know? Because, she has “reported” none of this.
Read the whole post because he's going to be doing a follow-up shortly.
Judith Miller wrote that e-mail and Kelly responded the next afternoon with:
"I will wait til the end of the week before judging -- many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time."
He killed himself that same day.
The thing to keep in mind is that all these things were connected. For instance, the White House propaganda operation had been closely involved with Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's communication guru.From a September, 2002 article that discusses another White House propaganda operation called the Office of Global Communications:
Now Campbell is also a member of the Band [an early version of the Office of Global Communications] and is working in tandem with the White House. When Prime Minister Tony Blair meets with Parliament next week, for example, he will release a "white paper"—the detailed argument—that backs up George W. Bush.
That white-paper turned out to be the "sexed-up" dossier, the veracity of which was being questioned all over the papers in Britain during the same period that Joe Wilson was making waves about the Niger yellowcake claims here in the states. The wheels seemed to be coming off the cart.
The two countries had been working closely together since the very beginning to con their respective citizens into supporting the war:
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an "information warrior") proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their "liberation" from Iraqi troops in 1991. The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting "the plight of women in Afghanistan." CIC's Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign "the best thing we've done."
Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign "was not about something they did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women."
The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: "Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish." Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blaire told the London media, "In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out."
Misleading via Innuendo Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the "anthrax scare" to promote the administration's pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.
In both the US and the UK, "intelligence sources" provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.
It wasn't until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was "increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House "paper" instead of as a more prominent White House "announcement." As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. "If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around."
In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, "We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long."
The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an "armed conflict" and to always reference the Iraqi government as the "regime." Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of "guidance" terms to be used in all official statements. London's 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington's Office of Global Communications.
[...]
The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications, staffed by Tucker Eskew, Dan Bartllett, Jeff Jones, Peter Reid.
The OGC works closely with the White House Iraq Group, which consists of Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Jim Wilkinson, Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Nicholas Callo.
There was an elaborate propaganda machine ginned up in both the US and the UK to sell the Iraq war. During those "two tense weeks in July" a lot of information about that was seeping out in the press in both countries. It threatened to overwhelm the administration.
They were able to calm the waters, slow the story down, stonewall any Justice Dept investigation for months:
The Financial Times writes, “While allowing the official investigation into the leak to progress, the White House has done an extraordinarily effective job of suffocating the story,” refusing to provide the press with the type of updates that the Clinton administration regularly made available during the Whitewater investigation. “We have let the earth-movers roll in over this one,” one senior White House official told the Times on the condition of anonymity.
The problem was that somehow (another story yet untold) Ashcroft stepped on his manhood and had to appoint a special prosecutor. (And perhaps after their experiences in the 90's the GOP made the mistake of thinking that all prosecutors could be trusted to be Republican partisans.) Patrick Fitzgerald does not seem to be a political climber.
I don't know that this grand jury investigation could go to the heart of the WHIG and the rest of the US/UK British propaganda effort at this point. Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller for her notes about anything pertaining to Iraq and uranium, so it's possible. If people are indicted the whole thing could explode. As Judy has shown, jail time tends to make one's priorities very clear.
Regardless of the criminal aspects of this, I would hope that the press, burned and still smoking over the WMD lies and the manipulation by their own compatriot the Blessed Virgin of the First Amendment, would at least start to look into this story and expose it. This stuff has been hiding in plain sight.
This sounds like tin-foil hat conspiracy crapola, but it isn't. There was a concerted, organized propaganda campaign out of Downing Street and the White House to sell the Iraq war. It wasn't bad intelligence. It wasn't even "sexed-up" intelligence. It was lies and propaganda, pure and simple. When Dr Kelly and Joseph Wilson pulled back the curtain in the spring of 2003, the powers that be on both sides of the atlantic played the hardest of hardball.
Update: I notice that Victoria Toensing is rolling out the inevitable slime and defend. On Hardball, she breathlessly characterized Patrick Fitzgerald with, "He's lost it! He's gone over the edge!" Wilson, of course, came in for a "Why would they (CIA) pick this idiot?"
Her coup de grace was that the press hates Bush so they focused on the silly CIA stuff instead of the real issue, which is ... nepotism.
Man, do these Republicans have brass, or what?
Update II: To clarify, we do know why Fitzgerald was appointed. However, the circumstances, like so many other things in this case, have not been fully reported in the mainstream media. See this post at Needlenose for the full enchilada.