BLOG | Posted 01/30/2007 @ 11:01pm
Libby Trial: Judy Miller's Memory Mess
When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was prepping for the trial of Scooter Libby, he probably looked toward the moment when he would call former New York Times reporter Judith Miller to the stand and thought, We're just going to have to get through that day.
Miller, the controversial journalist whose prewar reporting hyped the WMD threat posed by Iraq, was called as a prosecution witness on Tuesday, and she was pummeled by Bill Jeffress, an attorney for Libby, who has been charged with making false statements to the FBI and grand jury investigating the CIA leak.
Initially, Fitzgerald briskly guided Miller through her account--a story already publicly known. On June 23, 2003, she met with Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. Libby was frustrated and angry about media accounts--some fueled by intelligence community leaks--that suggested the Bush White House had misrepresented the prewar WMD intelligence. He was particularly upset, according to Miller, about stories that had appeared regarding an unnamed ex-ambassador who had taken a trip to Niger in 2002 to investigate the allegation that Iraq had tried to buy uranium there and who had concluded the charge was unfounded. Libby told Miller the former diplomat was Joseph Wilson and said, as an aside, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. In her notes, Miller wrote that the wife was employed at the "bureau," a reference to a nonproliferation office within the CIA. She said that this was the first time she had heard anything about Wilson's wife working at the CIA. She also testified that Libby referred to Wilson's trip as a "ruse" and "irrelevancy."
She met with Libby again on July 8--two days after Wilson outed himself as the ex-ambassador in a New York Times op-ed. This time Miller and Libby rendezvoused at the dining room of the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. During the two hour discussion, according to Miller, Libby was "quietly agitated." He defended the administration's use of the prewar intelligence, claiming there had been solid intelligence to back up President George W. Bush's use of the uranium-in-Africa allegation in his 2003 State of the Union speech. Libby maintained that Wilson's reporting had supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. (That's not how Wilson saw it.) Libby again referred to Wilson's wife and said she was employed at WINPAC--the acronym for the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control, a unit of the agency's intelligence directorate. (Libby was wrong. Valerie Wilson was the operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit within the Counterproliferation Division of the agency's clandestine operations directorate.)
During this meeting, Miller testified, her pen didn't work. But she still managed to take some notes. She didn't explain how. Perhaps she scratched away with the tip of the pen.
She also testified about a third conversation with Libby. This was a July 12, 2003 phone call. The two discussed Wilson's wife, and Miller informed Libby that her paper wasn't interested in pursuing the "Plame story."
The rest of the article is at:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=161891=======================
EDIT COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST
ONLY 4 OR 5 PARAGRAPHS FROM
THE COPYRIGHTED NEWS SOURCE
PER DU RULES.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
