Isn’t this interesting …
“Miller had published no article at all. Apparently, another witness gave up Miller's name to the prosecutor under questioning. Who that witness might be and under what circumstances he cited Miller is unknown. (
In the run-up to the war, Miller's articles on WMD were crucial in creating a political atmosphere favorable to the administration's case. But her articles were later revealed to be false, based on disinformation, and the Times published a long apology. )" {emphasis added}
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http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/07/14/plame/index.htmlSuddenly, a thought occurred to me… what if Miller had NO real source for all her articles (which were later revealed as being based on disinformation) and were simply conjured by Miller's own vivid imagination? Might she have chosen to go to jail and be hailed as a “defender of the First Amendment” until the grand jury is dissolved, rather than face the consequences of being discovered a complete fraud?
Miller, more than any other reporter, showcased the WMD speculations and intelligence findings by the Bush administration and the Iraqi defector/dissidents. Our WMD expectations, such as they were, grew largely out of Miller's stories.
To be sure, Miller never asserted that Iraq had an illegal WMD program or a stockpile of banned weapons. Far from it: Every time she writes about WMDs, she always constructs a semantic trapdoor allowing her to pop out the other side and proclaim, It's the sources talking, not me! But thanks to the reporting of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, we now know Miller was a true believer who grew fat on WMD tips from her sources inside Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress organization, and that once in-country she threw a bit and saddle on the WMD detectives and rode them like Julie Krone from one end of Iraq to the other to investigate those tips.
That none of the official tips or the ones provided by Miller revealed WMDs indicates that 1) the Iraqis perfectly expunged every site Miller ever mentioned in her reporting prior to the U.S. invasion; or 2) her sources were full of bunk. Either way, if Miller got taken by her coveted sources, so did the reading public, and the Times owes its readers a review of Miller's many credulous pieces. Thanks to the power of the Nexis Wayback Machine, we can give the Times a few tips on which Miller stories need revision, redaction, or retraction.
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2086110/I realize this is TOTAL conjecture on my part and might not have any basis in truth or fact, but I am curious to see if others see any validity to my hypothesis?