Cheney's Plamegate

One factor driving the Vice President to push new chaos operations in the Persian Gulf is the growing expectation that Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is close to handing down indictments in the Valerie Plame leak probe.

The Oct. 11 grand jury appearance by New York Times reporter Judith Miller has shifted the focus of attention to Cheney's office. Miller's hour-long testimony, according to news accounts, focussed on a third meeting that she had with Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June 2003—a month prior to the publication of Valerie Plame's name in a Robert Novak syndicated column. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, was "outed" by Novak as a CIA officer. Novak reported that he had been given Plame's name by two "senior administration officials," now widely believed to be Libby and President Bush's chief political counsel Karl Rove.

However, Fitzgerald's probe, from the outset, has centered on an obscure but powerful White House unit, the White House Iraq Group, which was constituted in July-August 2002, to coordinate all Bush-Cheney Administration efforts to win support for an Iraq invasion. Rove and Libby, along with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley, White House Counsellor Karen Hughes, and a half-dozen other White House and NSC senior staffers were all part of the WHIG.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller functioned as an asset of the WHIG, publishing a series of stories, based on disinformation provided by alleged Iraqi "defectors" who were provided to Miller by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC). Those stories were, in turn, promoted by Cheney, Rice, et al. as justification for going to war to unseat Saddam Hussein.

Miller spent 85 days in jail, on contempt charges, after she refused to appear before the Fitzgerald grand jury. Recently, Miller agreed to testify about her meetings with Libby, and was freed. While the media has hyped a soap opera tale about missed signals between Miller and Libby's lawyers over the issue of whether the Veep's chief of staff had given Miller a legitimate waiver of confidentiality to testify, the real issue is that Miller did not want to be interrogated on her role with the WHIG. Under the agreement reached between her attorney, Floyd Abrams, and Fitzgerald, her testimony was limited to her conversations with Libby. The New York Times publishers and editors, according to Washington sources, are smarting from the whole Miller-Libby affair, because the self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" appears to have served, through Miller, as an outlet for White House and Pentagon neo-con disinformation, to draw the United States into a disastrous war.