Someone forgot to wipe his shoes when he came in from the stable:
Information attributed to Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s interview notes is incorrect, offering prosecutors a potential lead to tracking the bad information to its original source.Miller disclosed this weekend that her notes of a conversation she had with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on July 8, 2003 stated Cheney’s top aide told her that the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson worked for the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) unit.
Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, never worked for WINPAC, an analysis unit in the overt side of the CIA, and instead worked in a position in the CIA’s secret side, known as the directorate of operations, according to three people familiar with her work for the spy agency …
The revelation came as President Bush weighed in Monday by declining to say what he would do if one of his aides were indicted in the investigation, and the Pentagon looked into Miller's claim that she was granted a security clearance in 2003 while reporting with a military unit during the Iraq war.
On which note, Josh Marshall reports that, according to NBC News, no one at the Pentagon, the DIA or the CIA “knows anything about Judy Miller ever having a security clearance.” Possible explanations: Judy decided to brag on the stand, under oath, about a security clearance she didn’t actually possess; Judy’s NYT account of her testimony was a wagonload of utter crap from start to finish; or Judy had some sort of clearance, but it was rather more hush-hush than she was willing to admit for public consumption.
Digby wonders whether anyone has thought to interview the legendarily obnoxious “embed wrangler” Jim Wilkinson:
He was also a central player in the Iraq war propaganda operation serving as a member of the Office of Global Communication and the White House Iraq Group. If there was anyone who would have been charged with getting a special “off the books” special security clearance it would have been him. He had his own special pipeline to the White House and the DOD.
Elsewhere, the Financial Times confirms that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has most likely widened his inquiry to include “the administration’s handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence”:
According to the Democratic National Committee, a majority of the nine members of the White House Iraq Group have been questioned by Mr Fitzgerald. The team, which included senior national security officials, was created in August 2002 to “educate the public” about the risk posed by weapons of mass destruction on Iraq.UPDATE: At least one person has thought to interview Jim Wilkinson — special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.Mr Fitzgerald, who has been applauded for conducting a leak-free inquiry, has said little publicly about his 22-month probe, other than that it is about the “potential retaliation against a whistleblower,” Joseph Wilson.
