FT.com / Comment & analysis - A new wrinkle in the Plame affair?

Published: August 30 2005 03:00 | Last updated: August 30 2005 03:00 An intriguing new theory has emerged in the case of Valerie Plame, the outed CIA operative. The mainstream media has focused on Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political guru, as the source of the original story identifying Plame. The alleged motive was revenge against former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. Observer now hears a new angle on the story is circulating inside the Justice Department. It involves Judith Miller, the veteran New York Times reporter currently languishing in a Virginia jail for refusing to reveal her source(s) in the Plame affair. Many have assumed that Miller - who never actually wrote a story identifying Plame as an operative - is protecting Rove and/or other administration officials. But the missing link is that Miller is not a political reporter, but rather an investigative journalist who co-wrote a book on America's secret war against biological weapons and later published controversial articles on Iraq's effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Now here's the twist: Plame herself is a CIA operative who also specialised in weapons of mass destruction and bio-terrorism. So did Miller get to know Plame while she was writing her book or even use her as a source for other WMD stories? Despite 56 days' imprisonment and a vociferous campaign to release her - Miller is staying mum."

If this is true then it is Miller who "spilled the beans" regarding Plame. That would mean that everything else is a concerted effort to disperse the fact that Plame was CIA as widely as possible and to hide the objective of that effort, the punishment of Joseph Wilson.

In other words, it is a conspiracy to "out" a covert CIA "operative" and a conspiracy to obstruct justice by failing to testify truthfully (or at all) to the Fitzgerald Grand Jury.

Miller can rot in jail for all I care and evidentially the Appeals Court who reviewed Fitzgerald's brief, the redacted for security portion especially and agreed that placing her in the slammer until she testified was vital to the security of the nation, agrees with me.

Before this is done, Watergate and Nixon will have been replaced as the most despicable act and president in American history.