With regard to the Plame/Wilson marriage, and Wilson's trip to Niger, Miller writes that one day in July 2003 she stepped into the office of Jill Abramson, at this point the chief of the NYT's Washington Bureau, and told her (these are words from the memoir's paraphrase, not the actual words of the conversation), that "Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and had apparently helped send her husband on the trip to Africa before the war to investigate the uranium charge. If true, I said, the CIA was possibly guilty of nepotism and of covering up intelligence that disputed its prewar WMD claims. If the source was wrong ... the White House might be trying to smear them. Either way, I told Abramson the tip needed pursuing."
Three points, then apparently intrigued her:
1. Guilty of nepotism? Probably the least of it -- the notion that Wilson (a former ambassador -- there were good reasons for giving him the assignment regardless of his marriage) benefitted from Plame's intercession with her superiors.
2. CIA coverup? Presumably this means that the CIA didn't want to abandon the claim that there was a yellowcake uranium deal between Niger and Iraq, so it had to discredit the Ambassador's flat contrary assertions after his fact finding trip, which is why it persuaded somebody in the administration to push the story that the trip was a nepotistic boondoogle.
3. The third possibility -- the CIA generally did believe Wilson, and had abandoned the notion that the war was necessary to disrupt a yellowcake trade, and in response somebody in the White House invented the whole idea that Plame was CIA in order to smear the agency as it became, from the WH point of view, unreliable.
Before long, the third of these possibilities would be out of the running, It was true that Plame was a CIA agent -- and she very publicly ceased to be a CIA agent once her cover was blown. It wasn't blown by Miller, who never wrote a story on this. It was blown by columnist Robert Novak.
A special prosecutor was in time appointed to look into the leak. That special prosecutor heard that Miller knew something about it and demanded her notes. She refused, and eventually went to prison. She stayed there until the guy who HAD been telling these stories to her and Novak and others, Scooter Libby, acknowledged what he had been doing and very publicly told her that he was waving his reporter-source confidentiality and she should testify.
In this she stood on principle, albeit a principle rejected by SCOTUS in Branzburg v. Hayes (1972). But a principle. And she is, I submit, entitled to our respect.
Which we may withhold from the late Robert Novak, pictured above.
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