Author: catnip

Tuesday’s Washington Post throws this little tidbit out to the the starving masses anxiously awaiting manna from the Realm of the Great Fitzgerald.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff may have given New York Times reporter Judith Miller inaccurate information about where the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA, a former intelligence official said on Monday.

The possible discrepancy comes amid signs the federal prosecutor investigating who leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, will announce whether he will bring charges as early as Wednesday, people close to the case said.

Oh please, please, please let this be true!

more shameless begging on the flip side…

Ivor Tossell of the Globe and Mail thinks that once a blogger starts posting pictures of cats, their blog has jumped the shark. In defense of all cats everywhere and the people who love them, I respectfully disagree.

Apparently, “posting the cat” is the last resort of a desperate blogger who has run out of content and has nothing better to post. That’s insulting to cats and bloggers alike. We post our kitties because we worship them not because we have nothing better to do!

There’s a stereotype that goes like this: When somebody running a website has run out of useful things to say, they post a picture of their cat. When they don’t feel like writing one thousand words on their blog, there’s always the option of posting Fluffy and pretending that she’s somehow of interest to anybody. When the boiler of thought is out of steam, out wheezes a kitten.

Perhaps the stereotype was undeserved, but it stuck. In a gently self-mocking way, putting up pictures of cats has become the quintessential blogging gesture. And the cat, for its part, became the patron saint of tired websites.

Since the New York Times published its official article, The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal, about the paper’s handling of Judith Miller’s role in the Plame Affair, criticism of the paper of record has been fast, furious and flummoxed. Critics are aghast at the internal machinations undertaken in an attempt to cover for their star reporter, Judith Miller.

The NYT, already suffering from public suspicion due to Miller’s hawkish reporting echoing the Bush administration’s false claims of the presence of WMDs in Iraq, along with the ramifications of the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003, may have just sunk its credibility and integrity forever in the minds of many readers in its telling of the Miller story. In the process, it may also have taken down other media along with it.

A country in which most citizens no longer trust their government or their media to tell them the truth is a country that sits on very shaky ground. Perceptions that media organizations are biased to one political persuasion or another due to their editorial stances result in a mistrust of the reporting contained in the supposedly factual front page stories as it is. But, when it is revealed that a newspaper timidly holds back the reporting of one of the most important stories of the day in order to protect one staff journalist and allows its reporters to intentionally mislabel sources*, any remaining trust is completely shattered.

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Sometimes I think too much and parse beyond what’s probably necessary but, as far as the Plame Affair goes and because we have so little information and are waiting so patiently for Fitz to announce his results, I think this is an exercise we have to indulge in in order to stay sane.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Miller’s NYT article about her grand jury testimony – most specifically her last two paragraphs describing how, supposedly, she ran into Scooter Libby in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and how she wrote about it:

That’s odd and here’s why…

In Saturday’s NYT article by Judy Miller in which she described her grand jury testimony, Miller revealed that her notes included references to “Valerie Flame” and “Victoria Wilson”. That peaked my interest as I wondered who else might have been provided with an inaccurate name in the case of Valerie Plame (if, indeed, it is inaccurate).

A Google search shows that, in 2003, numerous articles and blog posts referred to “Victoria Plame”. Some of these refer to that version of the name being used in an October, 2003 Newsweek article The Plame Game by Howard Fineman. It appears that the original article has now been revised.

An October 5, 2003 post at Whiskey Bar quotes the Fineman article:

I’ll stipulate that it is a felony to disclose the name of an undercover CIA operative who has been posted overseas in recent years. That’s what the statute says. But the now infamous outing of Victoria Plame isn’t primarily an issue of law. It’s about a lot of other things, like: the ongoing war between the CIA and the vice president’s office.

The Wayback Machine provides this cached version of the original Newsweek story.

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