Rove was the source of the Plame leak... so it appears

Any reason to think that source is Rove at this point?

Nope. But, there was no reason to think that HER source was Rove to begin with; she's been much chummier with Bolton and mr. Libby over at State.

Cycloptichorn

Of course you don't care for them. You have established that. You just haven't given plausable reasons to dispute it.

The problem is that if I pour water into a vessel and it ends up on the floor you can't say the vessel is a sieve without some evidence of holes in it. The cup runneth over Tico.

Yes, we don't know why Miller sits in jail but it is improbable if not impossible for her to be the original source of the Plame sent Wilson to Niger story. She would have to get the information from someone. Space aliens.. that's it, isn't it Tico.. She must have got the information from space aliens...

yep - the administration

hahaha! we can but try, m'love. i've had renovations and new roofs going on at the neighbor's on both sides of us for nearly 2 months.

aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!! just kill me NOW !! :wink:

I'm not sure I agree, but given your demonstrated logical reasoning I'm sure that's a conclusion you're willing to run with.

hmmm, that actually works !

"i come in peace"

and then the proferred gift of a beautifully bound volume entitled "to serve man" turns out to be a cookbook.

Huffington Discusses Her 'Judy File' Sources and 'Plamegate'
Huffington Discusses Her 'Judy File' Sources and 'Plamegate'
Michael Kelley

Arianna Huffington
By Dave Astor
Editors & Publishers
Published: August 17, 2005 12:55 PM ET

NEW YORK Sources are at the heart of the Valerie Plame case. Sources are also a big part of Arianna Huffington's series of blog postings -- on HuffingtonPost.com -- about what she sees as New York Times reporter Judith Miller's less-than-heroic role in "Plamegate."

Huffington said her sources include journalists, social acquaintances of Miller's, general readers of the Huffington Post, and others. "But perhaps the most important category [of sources] is very serious, very responsible reporters within The New York Times who are worried about the paper linking itself so completely with Miller's fate," Huffington told E&P Online.

She also said "the mainstream media are having a hard time -- or are just uninterested in -- following the thread that the Miller story isn't just about the outing of Valerie Plame but about the misinformation campaign that led us into the Iraq debacle."

Plame, of course, was the undercover CIA operative outed in a Robert Novak column after Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, questioned the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq. The July 27 opening salvo in Huffington's "Judy File" series of postings summarized what some Times people think (according to Huffington) is one possible "scenario" explaining Miller's involvement in Plamegate.

"It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous Op-Ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has 'manipulate[d]' and 'twisted' intelligence 'to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,'" wrote Huffington, who also does a column syndicated by Tribune Media Services (TMS). "Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby. ... Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and [Matt] Cooper. The story gets out."

On Monday, appearing on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN, Miller's attorney, Floyd Abrams, fired back at Huffington, calling her charges that Miller may be covering up her own active involvement in the Plame scandal "preposterous." He declared that what Huffington "is concerned about, what she dislikes Judy Miller for, is not this, but earlier reporting she did on weapons of mass destruction. And because of that reporting, she refuses to give her the credit for acting out of the principle that animates her."

If the scenario Huffington wrote about has validity, why has much of the mainstream media portrayed Miller as heroic rather than compromised? And why has the Times stood by Miller, even before her jailing?

Answering the first question, Huffington told E&P Online: "The Judy-as-First Amendment-hero angle is the easy first response to the story. It's the conventional wisdom -- and the mainstream media like nothing better than going with the flow of the 'CW.' It's also the path of least resistance. ... Just hit the hot key on your computer and out pops the jailed-journalist-as-martyr story. It's much harder to swim against the current, to rethink, to reexamine, to reopen closed doors. And you risk stepping on toes -- maybe even the toes of people you socialize with."

Huffington added that this all means "a lot of distinctions aren't being drawn. For instance, as I posted yesterday, the Times' own ethical guidelines draw a clear distinction between protecting a source and granting anonymity to a source 'as cover for a personal or partisan attack.' Which, no matter what role you believe Judy Miller played, was clearly what happened in Plamegate. Then there is the distinction between safeguarding a whistleblower who helps unmask a powerful institution and safeguarding an illegal government leaker out to smear someone's reputation for political gain -- as happened in this case."

And, Huffington continued, "you really cannot separate the extent to which Miller's weapons-of-mass-destruction reporting played a part in backing the neocon agenda from the way in which her actions in the Plame affair are effectively protecting her neocon sources. The Plame scandal is not a separate issue from Miller's WMD reporting. Indeed, it occurred as part of her WMD reporting" -- which Huffington called "deeply flawed."

So why is the Times backing Miller? "That's the $64,000 question that, without exception, all my sources connected to The New York Times -- both those still at the paper and those no longer there -- are asking," replied Huffington. "The consensus is that Miller always played by different rules than other reporters. ..."

She added: "Don't forget the paper stuck with her even as her reporting on Iraq and WMD was being discredited. Indeed, when the paper ran its unprecedented editorial mea culpa in May 2004, her name was never mentioned -- even though she had penned four of the six articles that the paper was apologizing for."

Huffington did say that "if it wasn't for Plamegate, Miller's role at the paper would have been greatly diminished. But once the [Patrick] Fitzgerald investigation heated up, the Times felt it couldn't cut her loose at that point."

This Monday, the "Judy File" series also included the fascinating rumor -- still unconfirmed -- that controversial United Nations ambassador John Bolton may have visited Miller in prison.

Thanks, BBB. Good to know.

Sounds like Sulzberger is an insecure, egotistical, control freak who can't manage any complexity of thinking beyond basic either/or desigations.

Not good for the NYT.

Huffington has a personal beef with Miller and it shows. She isn't about principle in this matter and for sure would never go to jail on account of her stands for she doesn't seem to have any these days apart from self-publicity which isn't a crime.

The fact of the matter is that Miller is in jail and is supported by her organization. She clearly isn't above the law as Huffington has suggested in some other columns.

Why shouldn't journalist have some of the same privileged confidence status as do lawyers or priests? The issue surrounding Miller is far greater than the pettiness that Huffingtom has shown in most of her opinioned pieces. The matter touches the core rights of the freedom of the press. Without confidential sources, Nixon wouldn't have been exposed for the thief he was. Nor would have the Plame affair been exposed by Novak.

Then again Huffington isn't a journalist but a blogger.

Some might remember Vanessa Leggett, the freelance writer who was jailed in a federal detention center in Texas for 168 days for refusing to bow to a sweeping subpoena of confidential source materials. She received the prestigious PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award 2003. It might well be that Miller will be in line for the same award. That's one prize Huffington won't be in line for.

While privilege and First Amendment rights might render investigation more difficult, we can't sacrifice it on the altar of political convenience as much as we would like in order to resolve the Plame affair. It's great time for a federal shield law.

yep. people talk about slippery slopes and gateway drugs a lot these days.

while it would be impossible to abolish all of our rights as american citizens in one fell swoop, like many other things, erosion is less noticable. just nibble away, a little bit at a time.

if you do so while seemingly satisfying one particular group and then doing the same over and over, eventually you will have achieved the goal of complete eradication. and without much fuss, because in each phase, a particular special interest believes that they are getting what they want and it would never happen to them.

ooops. delete duplicate post.

Vanity Fair rips media role in Plame scandal coverup
'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal
By Greg Mitchell
editors and Publishers
Published: August 11, 2005 9:00 PM ET

NEW YORK In an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet online), Michael Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in the news media -- principally Time magazine and The New York Times -- who knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would have been "one of the biggest stories of the Bush years." Not only that, "they helped cover it up." You might say, he adds, they "became part of a conspiracy."

If they had burned this unworthy source and exposed his "crime," he adds, it would have been "of such consequences that it might, reasonably, have presaged the defeat of the president, might have even -- to be slightly melodramatic -- altered the course of the war in Iraq." In doing so they showed they owed their greatest allegiance to the source, not their readers.

And their source was no Deep Throat, not someone with dirt on the government -- the source "was the government."

So in the end, he concludes, "the greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt." And why did they do it? Well, "a source is a source who, unrevealed, will continue to be a source."

Even after the news first emerged last month that Rove had leaked to Cooper, the media still waited days to even ask the White House press secretary about it. It was a story, "in full view, the media just ignored."

The title of the Wolff article is "All Roads Lead to Rove."

Wolff mocks Time's Matt Cooper and Norman Pearlstine and can't seem to make heads or tails of "genuinely spooky" Robert Novak. He holds off full judgment on the Times' jailed reporter Judith Miller, while noting the "baloney" she retailed for the White House. But he pointedly notes, concerning Miller, that reporters are born "blabbermouths" and even when they don't write or print a certain story they are prone to "serve it up to everybody they know."

He closes with a frontal blast at the media, many members of which will soon be exposed, he predicts, for having "lined up for these lies" spun by the White House.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell ([email protected]) is editor of E&P.

About time! It's not only the media. The "other party" is pretty hush on this traitorous act too.

I wouldn't give .05c for the democratic party.

jeez, i know how you feel.

i've tried the republicans, the libertarians and the democrats. the libertarians just don't have any juice and the other two are all bollocksed up.

i can't stand nader, perot only gave me great material for impersonations at parties and the greens and natural law get even less space than the libertarians.

dude, where's my party ?

We ain't gonna find it during our life time. What a revolt'n development this is!