Yet again the propaganda wing of the Republican Party is showing its face. Today's revelation on behalf of Judith Miller that she had a DoD security clearance is, as the E&P Staff said, "as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists..."

The issue came to the fore because Miller, in recounting her grand jury testimony, wrote about how her former classified status figured in her discussions with I. Lewis Libby. She was pressed by the prosecutor on this matter.
...
There is one enormous journalism scandal hidden in Judith Miller's Oct. 16th first person article about the (perhaps lesser) CIA leak scandal. And that is Ms. Miller's revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.

This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised. It is all the more puzzling that a reporter who as a matter of principle would sacrifice 85 days of her freedom to protect a source would so willingly agree to be officially muzzled and thereby deny potentially valuable information to the readers whose right to be informed she claims to value so highly.

BTW, she also mentioned how wrong everything she reported actually was. To think I used to argue with and get verbaly attacked by nuts who drank to much neo-con kool-aid. I'd love to say that I was right but there's about 1970 brave men and women with famlies who probably don't want to hear that right now. They probably wont like the mini-Iranian Republic of Iraq either. I told you so's aren't good enough for them.

Pat Lang has some similar thoughts and a hypothetical what if...

Judy Miller is/was part of the conspiracy that Mr Fitzgerald is investigating. That is why she is
"playing games" with him. She has to camouflage a couple of things This is just opinion on my part.

1-She was an active participant in the plot to smear the Wilsons and discredit them in the eyes of the American people. She still is. Why? I really don't know or am unwilling to give an opinion.

2-She used the NY Times as a vehicle for propagandizing the American people to whip them up for the Iraq war on the basis that Iraq was, in effect, Nazi Germany come again, and that this time the pseudo Nazis were going to provide the Jihadi nuts across the world with nuclear weapons with which to attack us at home. To obfuscate this point of performance, she went to jail for contempt hoping to emerge from this "soulless" place (down the street from my house in Alexandria and run by one of my neighbors, the sheriff) as a champion of press freedom for whom all would be forgiven.

She should be indicted along with her neocon Jacobin and Mayberry Machiavellian pals. They were all in this together.

She called me up once at the point in history at which her BS about the Iraqi WMD program was falling apart. She tried to get me to "sign up" to the idea that "it must have been true." I told her that I did not wish to participate in her fantasy life. She was disappointed. Given Wilson's experience, I have to wonder what she was trying to "set me up for."

Just my opinion.

One I share.

Posted by Geoff