1. Anonymous says:

    Mkes me wonder, with all this talk about Aspen trees and sweaty men swapping nat’l secrets just when Valerie’s name entered the Iran nuclear discussion. I mean, after all, she was in the way.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Revisiting Scooters letter:

    Is it possible that â€aspens†are a reference to Hezbollah, Syria and Iran? West of Iraq, Lebanon and/or Israel could be â€out west, where you vacationâ€. Judy was at one point a correspondent in Beirut.

  3. Anonymous says:

    emptywheel

    Terrific diary, and as always, more questions about Judy than answers. Sure makes you wonder if she was dishing about Valerie Flame early on, and whose agenda she and Libby are really following.

    mainsailset

    I’ll bet Plame’s whole unit stood in the way of the Neocons’ Iran project.

    OT, this just in from YouTube (AP): footage from Malaysia of Condoleezza Rice playing, among other selections, a Brahms Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Dr. Rice play. The duet with the local politician/violinist was under-rehearsed (he’s awful and he’s hard to follow).

    A terrible PR move for Condi, which proves (at least) she doesn’t take advice from Karl Rove. In this world of viral video, it will only be a matter of hours before this footage is cross-cut with images of conflict.

  4. Anonymous says:

    It’s weird to see balanced thinking coming from Judy Miller. Still, she (and the neocons) didn’t seem aware of the level of impending disaster in Iraq–so extensive as to take future pre-emptive invasions off the table (at least, it seems to me).

    it makes me wonder if the neocons were so convinced in summer 2003 of success in Iraq that they were already developing plans and intel to deal with Iran. How badly did the reality of Iraq screw up those plans?

    As a Plame Affair side note: weren’t there court proceedings last month in the Libby case? Were no records filed? Also, in the civil suit, does anyone know how quickly things should move (or get thrown out)? I don’t have any idea when the initial judge rulings should be expected.

  5. Anonymous says:

    e’wheel

    diggin’ away. mining the data.

    keep up the good work. you and eriposte are probably the only two left in the game who can.

  6. Anonymous says:

    I’m coming late to this, but: that is one of the few interesting bits in Bamford’s overall annoying article, and even that is probably botched. Surely he is not meaning to suggest, as the text does, that Franklin passed along certain secret information regarding Miller.

    The article is annoying because it mostly just piggybacks on the reporting of others and what it does add is mostly an unpersuasive set of causal connections concerning U.S. Iran policy and consequently a rather misleading picture of what’s going on. It also misses some important implications of its own reporting. Compare it to Laura Rozen’s much better article which covers similar ground better and without the unpersuasive parts. The idea that covert efforts in Feith’s office somehow caused Rumsfield’s approval of a plan for preemptive or preventive attack on Iran is unshown, and even more important, the idea that the approval of such a plan – significant though it is – amounts to the Pentagon moving the country closer to war with Iran is ridiculous. If anything, it is probably an effect, unless the idea is that Rumsfield was acting entirely autonomously.

    Bamford doesn’t seem to realize that Ledeen’s claim, with regard to the Rome meeting, that

    Every element of the American government knew this was going to happen in advance

    is an obvious effort to address the sorts of congressional and possibly legal problems the meeting might raise for the participants and instigators, as Rozen’s article suggests. Similarly, I suspect Rumsfield’s downplaying of the significance of the meeting was not a meaningful contradiction of Ledeen’s claim that the meeting produced significance intelligence, but rather just covering his ass for such unsavory, possibly illegal Pentagon freelancing.

    I do have one question. Bamford says

    Only two months earlier, Pollari had informed the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from West Africa—a key piece of false intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

    Unless this is a mistake, I presume this is a reference to the first intelligence reporting on the Niger story in October 2001 or so. Is it well known that it was Pollari himself who gave that info to the Bush administration?

    I also was under the impression that the allegations against Chalabi are of uncertain status. I will say that Suskind’s new book makes the publication of those allegations, if not the allegations themselves, sound like a parting shot at the neocons from Tenet on his way out of office. It doesn’t come out and say so, but it sure hints at it, if I am reading right.

  7. Anonymous says:

    I don’t think anyone’s paying attention anymore down here, but one other thing I meant to mention, regarding the Aspens thing. Between evoking the title (or dek) – â€Out West†– of Judy’s weird 2005 piece on Nevada, the awful devastation from (nuclear) wmd hanging over our collective heads, and the importance of counterproliferation, and evoking the Aspen conference on grand strategy in the Middle East and Judy’s own contribution on the challenge and importance of countering proliferation after Iraq, Libby was, in my view, probably trying to remind Miller (evocatively) that they were on the same side in a really really important battle that far transcended the pettiness of the Plame thing. But the intriguing thing this reminded me of is the oddity of how Miller ends her October 16, 2005 piece on her role in the investigation, how she responded to Fitzgerald’s question about the aspens with her story of encountering Libby shortly after the Aspen conference in August 2003 in Jackson Hole. She tells the story in the piece, but it seems awfully short, ending with Libby identifying himself to Miller, who didn’t recognize him in jeans, cowboy hat and sunglasses. But what happened next? Was that it? Did they have an actual conversation? Did it touch on the Wilsons? My guess is that the story went on, and was interesting and relevant. We’ll see soon enough, I suspect.