As is being discussed over at dkos, Libby sent a letter to Judy Miller in jail that is most bizarre & raises quite a few questions.
The letter courtesy of Thistime at dkos.
The whole letter is fascinating, but I want to focus on a couple of key parts.
the public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name identity with me, or knew about her before our call.
So Judy told Libby she knew all about Valerie it would appear. Now just how would she have known about her? Was it from her “reporting” on WMD’s? Was she in fact herself a source to others? Seeming more and more likely.
Then there is this bizarre (and frightening) closing –
“You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover–Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life.
- WHAT BIOLOGICAL THREATS THAT WILL NEED TO BE COVERED THIS FALL IS THE VICE PRESIDENT’S CHIEF OF STAFF REFERRING TO??? That’s worrisome and demands an explanation.
- Why on earth is he talking about aspens, clusters & where she vacations? This is truly weird. People at dkos are speculating that it’s a code, and it could very well be, but whatever it is, it’s odd.
- Come back to work… so she does work for the White House. He’s telling her to come back, not “go back” or “get back”, but “come back”. Nice freudian slip.
And what’s up with the way that whole sentence flows… Come back to work — and life.?? Kinda sends chills down ones spin. Considering this guy works for Darth Cheney.
Like it wasn’t already hurting my BRAIN enough trying to figure all of this before. Now we have ooooh, clusters of aspen roots turning together! That shit means something :o)
Sorry to sound sarcastic, but man! It must be code cuz who writes like that?
That is one creepy letter. Unctuous, yet below the surface ominous. His new name should be “Wormtongue.”
Biological threats this fall might be the potential bird flu epidemic – congress took action on this surprisingly quickly and quietly this week, although I suspect it may be too little too late. But it will need to be spun in a positive manner if the shit hits the fan: “See, we did what we could; no more could be done…”
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“You went to jail in the Summer.
[…] Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — and life.”
According to the players, the key to whether this story has real legs — and whether it will spell the end of Rove — is determining intent. And a key to that is whether there was a meeting at the White House where Rove and Scooter Libby discussed what to do with the information they had gotten from the State Department about Valerie Plame being Joe Wilson’s wife, and her involvement in his being sent on the Niger/yellowcake mission. If it can be proven that such a meeting occurred, then Rove will be in deep trouble — especially if it is established that Rove made three phone calls leaking the info about Plame and her CIA gig… one to Matt Cooper, one to Walter Pincus, and one to Robert Novak.
Aspen Institute 2003 – Judith Miller
Speculation — Karl Rove will change his statement, it has been agreed and coordinated within the network. Karl Rove to take the fall to protect the VP?
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Hmmm … cryptic!
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While the easy thing to do here — at least after years of enjoying Robert Anton Wilson — would be to make the obvious connection and conclude that the neocons are just the latest front organization of the Bavarian Illuminati, I’m going to suggest that maybe Scooter was just trying to be poetic and did about as good a job as any career bureaucrat is ever likely to do with extemporaneous poetry, that is, a bad job.
That said, I don’t think I’ll ever see a grove of aspens again without a Lovecraftian shudder. Black She-Goat of a Thousand Young, indeed.
It’s like a letter from one cultist to another.
Yeah, it really is interesting to figure that she’s their girl at the NYT. Aren’t journalists supposed to be free from such influences. But of course, she’s probably following the lead of Cokie Roberts.
IBM Selectrics didn’t have that font back in 1972.
Catnip, you comment made my day! ROTFLMAO!! 😀
Yes, and the font size on the second page is smaller than the first page. 😉
You are funny, catnip!
Have you read the rest of the letters on the NYT site (pdf file) that cover the haggling back and forth between the lawyers about whether Libby’s original waiver had been coerced or not?
It’s interesting that Cooper an Miller had the same lawyer and that apparently Cooper felt he had been released via that waiver (or was it Libby and not Rove who actually called Cooper the morning of his testimony?).
I too was curious about that line. I wonder if this is a message that ‘the group’ is turning, group meaning, as in they all turn at once, in a new direction…maybe anti Bush (hopeful thinking) new strategy or?????.
Could have many meanings, beyond that I suspect.
Okay. I wasn’t going to play secret decoder, but it is worthy of note that “west” is capitalized. West Wing?
Out West is where Cheney lives also….
I was just rereading this letter and I am even more curious as to the last paragraph, esp. the ‘Come back to work’….I see more imbeds coming up…
I really enjoyed reading this thread on dKos. It reminded me of Alternative Reality Games (ARG’s) I’ve played. The language is so strange it must be conveying code word allusions.
The interpretation I favor is: Miller went into jail because she was afraid she was about to have a “fatal accident” because she knows too much. Libby is assuring her that she is a member of the Grove and it’s safe to come out now and resume her work. It may also reference the meeting between Rove and Novak and suggest that they all have their cover stories worked out now and Fitzgerald’s grand jury won’t do any of them any harm — long term. Afterall, their buddy George will simply pardon them all if it goes that far.
If nothing else, this letter gives us a peek inside of the romantic delusions these people have about themselves — the Neocon Conspiracy is like a Grove of Aspens with hidden roots… they are all part of the same organism… Creepy!
Here’s another thought on the Aspen thing in letter, it made me think of Ivanwald,”The Cedars” which I researched in relation to the Jeff Gannon issue.
Also, I seem to recall something about an ‘Aspenwald’ either group or club or enclave, but my google search did not reveal anything at this time but seems like I read something about it in the past year when I was doing a lot of Gannon research..My recollection is that it was a group similar to the “Ivanwald” group and seemed to be located in Ca.
I did find this interesting article here, seems there was a Lloyd Aspenwald, “of Jekyll Island Club Hotel was founded in 1886 as a hunting retreat by some of the richest men in America. William K. Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Joseph Pulitzer and approximately 50 of their friends chose Jekyll because of its natural beauty and abundant wildlife.” experpted out of the following article:
Phsewwww, ok, that’s my ‘conspiracy’ contribution for the day and that’s the longest comment I ever posted.
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“… brought controversial figures to Washington, where they have met with U.S. officials either at the prayer breakfast or other venues. Among them are former Salvadoran Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who in July (2002) was found liable by a civil jury in Florida for the torture of thousands of civilians in the 1980s. He was invited to the 1984 prayer breakfast, along with Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, then the head of the Honduran armed forces. Alvarez, later linked to the CIA and a secret death squad, became an evangelical missionary …”
[Please see our article, “The Death Squads: Bringing in the Kingdom of God through Terror, Torture, and Death.”]
Great story Diane101 – you amaze me with multi-talented contribution.
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You can go here and run any “odd-sounding” phrases through an anagram engine to see if there’s a hidden message in that phrase.
“Out West” gives “Two Tues” for example, which fits in with the “October surprise” idea floated over at Kos – something might happen in two weeks from the letter’s date. Of course, it also rearranges to “Wet to us” and “We stout”…
The other really odd phrase is “Come back to work – and life.” This rearranges into about a brazillion possibilities, but the engine I’ve linked can weed them down by allowing you to specify words that must appear in the anagram. So you can tell it that “October” or “Karl” or whatever must appear in the anagram. If the remaining words don’t make sense, you can go back and change the required word to something like “war” and try again.
It’s still a big job, so I’m throwing this out there in case anyone else also feels like playing junior spy this afternoon.
Tinfoil hattily yours, KP
Judith Miller is a traitor three times: To the public, to the press she claims to work for, and the government of laws.
More prosaically: This one letter alone reveals her as an operative, not a reporter.
Whatever her part is, she is in the Plame Affair up to the eyebrows.
Thanks, Spiderleaf, for bringing this over to the pond.
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In the mystifying drama of Judith Miller and her Times, I am as clueless as the next person about what’s really going down. But it seems to me, we’re watching just that — Judy Miller’s New York Times. It’s kind of staggering, the way she has hijacked the institution by staging an “epic collision” between herself and the state.
When Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered Miller to jail, he said she was wrong to think she was upholding some great principle of a free press. The source she “alleges she is protecting” had released her from her duty to confidentiality, he said. He appears to have been right in that warning: your sacrifice doesn’t say what you think it says.
Indeed, Miller’s confounding case has so handcuffed the editorial capacity of the Times that it couldn’t manage the simple act of reporting the news that she had been freed at about 4 pm Thursday. (See Editor & Publisher.)
“Today, Sunday, there is not a single mention of Judy Miller in the entire New York Times – except a correction about a July 2003 Miller article on WMD in Iraq -“, Arianna Huffington. “Has the New York Times ceased journalistic operations?” It’s a fair question.
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and yes, “the aspens” – since when did Judy become a naturalist?
Get on this Oui!
I suggest that the reason Libby waived confidentiality for Miller was that the Bush administration is getting desperate. Miller was one of their most effective shills, writing all about the ficticious WMDs that Saddam was supposedly acquiring. I suggest that they leaned on Libby to waive his confidentiality so that Miller could go back to shilling for them and thus turn the tide of public opinion. And maybe hype up Iran as a war target.
Does anyone really believe that Libby did not think this letter would be leaked? Come on! Who’s the real intended recipient of this letter? What’s the real message?
Hello?!!
No, I don’t think so, just having a little anti-establishment fun on my part, to alleviate the pain.
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See catnip’s comment above.
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I think the Kos code discussion is a stretch, but fun to contemplate.
Really, I think the whole thing is Judy Miller’s hope that she could go to jail and things would blow over before she had to testify. Didn’t work out that way. I’m sure the book will come out in 2 years, but I’ll wait for the Movie of the Week, which I will also ignore.
The most plausible explanation I have heard is that Libby knows he’s toast, so he is just telling her to let it go becuase her staying mum won’t help anymore anyway. If that’s true, then perhaps Libby does have a sympathetic bone somewhere in his body.
Probably a metatarsal.
I’m concerned about Scooter’s siggy. What’s with the eighteenth century penmanship? And the pen…is that a friggin quill he’s using?
And his first “o” looks like an “r”. Scroter? I hesitate to ask.
Anyone here a handwriting expert?
This may explain the Biological threats part:
Bush: Military may have to help in pandemic
President wants Congress to discuss how to use armed forces
WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush said Tuesday that the possibility of an avian flu pandemic is among the reasons he wants Congress to give him the power to use the nation’s military in law enforcement roles in the United States. Read the rest
I actually thought it sounded like he was threatening her. i.e “You say one word to Fitz that doesn’t fit our story and you’re dead.”
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You can’t escape the invisible network …
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