More on Judith Miller's possible link to USA Office of Strategic Influence

[tedzbear]

The Agonist: Front Page Weirder and Weirder
The whole Judy Miller, Plame scandal, Fitzgerald investigation gets freakier by the day.
My only comment is that if Miller indeed did wear a uniform and did have a security clearance from the Pentagon we have crossed the line between news and propaganda in a way that does not bode well for the future of our press and republic. And if so, Miller is not a journalist: she's a propagandist and never to be read or respected again.
By Sean Paul in Diaries on Sat Jul 16th, 2005 at 10:04:35 AM PDT


I posted this previously:
Rumsfeld's Office of Strategic Influence carries out "what defense planners call 'information warfare'--disinformation and propaganda against foreign enemies AS WELL AS domestic critics who do not support presidential policies.
<snip>
Deception operations include managing (and restricting) public information, controlling news sources, and manipulating public opinion.
<snip>
Typical information-warfare operations range from the trivial to major projects like inventing pretexts for war."
---Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire

This makes me believe that Ms. Miller is protecting HERSELF and the OSI.

[dooner]

1. do you have a link/url for this story?

[enough]

2. The question of Miller's security clearance is interesting.

Here's the link to the diary mentioned in the original post:

http://www.agonist.org/story/2005/7/16/10435/5572

It harks back (with a link) to that wierd story that was reported early in the Iraq invasion, where Miller was in Iraq actually attempting to influence what was being done there IN THE FIELD, and claiming to have Pentagon "clearance."

snip>

Here's an old nugget:

"She ended up almost hijacking the mission" of the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (META), which was charged with examining potential Iraqi weapon sites after the war.

Am I the only one who thinks it highly improper that Judy Miller would be doing such a thing? Or ANYONE in the media for that matter? What is a person like this doing even being in the media? Stuff like this makes Armstrong Williams pathetic in comparison.

And this:

Team leader Navy Cdr. David Beckett of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in a brief phone conversation, sarcastically dismissed the idea of her "supposedly having some sort of clearance." However, Colonel McPhee, the overall task force commander, is known to have said that Miller was "cleared at the secret level." Regardless, it was generally believed and commonly said in the field that Miller was cleared for information classified "secret." Either she pulled off a hoax, or a very unusual clearance for a journalist was granted by some Pentagon authority.

Now the question here is not did she or did she not have a 'secret' clearance. The proper question should be why anyone thought that she might have a clearance. What is someone from the press doing with a secret clearance? I can't think of any positive reason for someone to have a secret clearance but my conspiracy/bullshit detector can think of lots of nefarious reasons.

snip>

[Just Me]

4. Which is precisely why I consider her a co-conspirator, NOT a journalist,

,...seeking to protect journalistic principles. She was in on the WMD scam -- covering-up the truth by targeting Wilson and outing Plame and her whole WMD network.

[Skittles]

18. LOL, the people admiring her "principles"

OMG - the WOMAN is a REPUBLICAN WHORE

[Old and In the Way]

22. She most definitely is in on it......

She's made a career carrying the water of the neo-cons. And she is right in the middle of this Plame treason.

[leftchick]

3. Here is a very tidy connection: Laurie Mylroie/Pentagon/Miller

Ya got me googling on that post....

~snip~

"None of which was out of the ordinary, except for this: Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America." (Peter Bergen ‘Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist’ Washington Monthly http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html December 2003).

....Did you catch that??? Mylroie was an actual PENTAGON CONSULTANT!!!
She also is very tight with Miller and co-authored a whacko book with her!

I think you are on to something here...

[Ugnmoose]

5. Watch what Fitz does with her

I think you are going to see her called as a witness in the case. She will refuse again to testify or to reveal sources and she will be slapped with criminal contempt, which is a much more serious offense and carries alot more jail time. Judy is gonna pay and yes I do believe that her role in this is much deeper than a journalist who happened to receive some leaked information. BTW, if I were the N.Y. Times I would be doing my own investigation, because if it turns out that old Judy was a national security plant, the Times is gonna be in very very deep doo doo.

[leftchick]

7. exactly

It is hard to imagine the NYT has not figured out her real job by now. I wonder if the criminal contempt charge will finally make here squeal?

[zalinda]

6. Does anyone of influence have this info? n/t

[TreasonousBastard]

8. Here's some good background on Ms. MIller...

and what she was up to...

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html

read the whole thing-- Miller was ambitious, tenacious, and vicious. She wasn't ever working for anyone but herself.

A lot of what's happening now is payback time.

[hootinholler]

11. There's some amazing stuff in that article, must read!

It's very information dense.

Here's a gem:

During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a
series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and
capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on
information provided by Chalabi and his allies almost all of which
have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

-also-

Her Iraq coverage didn’t just depend on Chalabi. It also relied
heavily on his patrons in the Pentagon. Some of these sources, like
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, would occasionally talk to her on
the record. She relied especially heavily on the Office of Special
Plans, an intelligence unit established beneath Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas Feith. The office was charged with uncovering evidence
of Al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein that the CIA might have missed. In
particular, Miller is said to have depended on a controversial neocon
in Feith’s office named Michael Maloof. At one point, in December
2001, Maloof’s security clearance was revoked. In April, Risen
reported in the Times, Several intelligence professionals say he
came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked
classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that
Mr. Maloof denies.

-Hoot

[Joanne98]

15. Article By Mother Jones, "The Lie Factory". Maloof's in there.....

The Lie Factory

Mother Jones
January 26, 2004
BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & JASON VEST
Mother Jones, January/February 2004

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story for how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and tne air is filled with swarms

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews-some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity-exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mideast/iraq/1448.html

And David Wurmser...Wasn't his wife a spy?

David Wurmser
From SourceWatch
David Wurmser replaced Eric Edelman as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs in the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney in early September 2003, after Edelman was named Ambassador to Turkey. <1> (http://www.world-crisis.com/analysis_more/86_0_15_0_M/) <2> (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/24997.htm)

Wurmser, a neo-conservative, previously served as a "special assistant" to John R. Bolton at the State Department<3> (http://www.hargravepublishing.com/IraqWar.htm) and was a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) <4> (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/wurmser_d/wurmser-d.php).

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Wurmser

[lovuian]

9. I agree !!! It would be interesting if she got paychecks from

OSC or CIA... Maybe Tenet knew who she worked for!!!

[kenny blankenship]

10. Most spies don't do it for the money; they have an agenda ·n/t

[Joanne98]

12. What would Miller's agenda be?

[TreasonousBastard]

16. Read the article I linked to above...

it looks more like blind ambition more than anything else.

[EVDebs]

20. FBIs Robert Hanssen was Opus Dei but now the FBI and CIA

have a Mormon hiring preference...Time Magazine ('Mormon's Inc.' coverstory) sometime back around April or May 1997 I think is where I saw it.

[Alpharetta]

13. No bashing her. SUPPORT THE TROOPS.

No bashing her. Because if she worked for the Pentagon and wore a uniform, ya gotta SUPPORT THE TROOPS. :eyes:

(edited to add smiley)

[Cocoa]

14. she used the troops to try to avoid jail

she submitted testimonials from troops in Iraq when pleading for home confinemant, I guess the judge didn't buy it.

[annabanana]

17. Well, this makes more sense

than she's protecting someone who's already been fingered....

dot => dot => dot => (connecting)

(recommended)

[EVDebs]

19. CNN and PsyOps set the precedent for expanded domestic ops

back in 2000 www.counterpunch.org/cnnpsyops.html

but since the creation of the CIA Operation Mockingbird this stuff has been tolerated. No longer.

[lovuian]

21. Kick

:kick: