About Judy's Security Clearance

by emptywheel

By now folks are zeroing in on one of the biggest bits of scandal to come out from NYT's story dump over the weekend. Judy claims to have some kind of security clearance. Judy tells us,

In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

This is not the first mention of Judy's security clearance. For a review of past mentions, go here. The short version? Judy has claimed to have clearance for quite some time. But there is some dispute about the nature or level of that clearance.

So while I think the expressions of indignation and disgust and caution are appropriate reactions to news Judy had clearance, I think we also should consider closely the nature of that clearance.

For a more detailed analysis of Judy's actions in Iraq, see my series on Judy's actions as an embed. In the last of those, I considered the nature of her embed. While Judy obviously had clearance to see things other reporters couldn't see, she also claimed to have restrictions placed on her reporting--restrictions no self-respecting journalist would accept.

Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.

Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked.

[snip]

While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried.

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection. [emphasis mine]

Judy claims this access/restriction balance gives her enough access to deem the story credible, while eliminating details the military finds important. But it doesn't seem like she has real top security access. If she did, she'd be able to do more than look at the scientist (I call him Yankee Fan) from afar. This would suggest those who question her top secret clearance are right.

Except that in the weeks following this story, she does get access. It appears that Judy not only gets to meet Yankee Fan, she gets to accompany him on little adventures. Which suggests the restrictions placed on her were about managing how the story appeared (the timing and the details) rather than protecting security. Judy uses the excuse of limited access to shield precisely the details of this story that would uttterly discredit it.

She does that again through her efforts to prevent other embeds from interviewing her unit. We  have one opportunity to compare Judy's portrayal of her unit with the portrayal a, shall we say, more objective journalist would offer. In a May 11 article--an article which Judy seems to have tried to prevent--Barton Gellman profiles her unit.

Throughout her articles, Judy only quotes from a few members of 75th XTF: Gonzales, McPhee, a DIA officer, and a few members who remain completely anonymous (who therefore could be one of these three people off the record). The rest remain silent, occasionally described, but never quoted. As a result, her stories feature a few carefully crafted heros (mostly Gonzales) with full commitment to and faith in the search for WMDs. In a May 9 article, Judy quotes Gonzales speaking in very measured tones about having had important evidence apparently removed in the past 48 hours.

''It is clear that in the past 48 hours, someone has removed many of the most critical items that we had hoped to salvage,'' said Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzalez, the team's leader.

Contrast that with Gellman's article, which I describe in Part Five of my Judy series. Gellman quotes Gonzales speaking 4 days earlier, sounding much more human--and more discouraged:

"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

Judy had told members of MET Alpha that Gellman didn't have clearance to talk to them. But it's clear, here, that Judy wasn't trying to prevent the exposure of classified information. Rather, she was trying to hide how frustrated MET Alpha members were. She was trying to bury the doubts people were expressing about the hunt for WMDs.

It appears, then, that whatever Judy's clearance status, it serves not to manage the release of classified information, but to put the best spin on the WMD hunt.

Which is why one detail of Judy's embed must be stressed. It appears that Judy didn't go through normal channels--either to get assigned to a unit or to gain whatever security clearance she had. Rather, she went to Rummy.

According to [Miller's Public Affairs officer] Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon—an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” [emphasis mine]

Judy's embed rules (and presumably, security clearance) were not approved by military censors. Rather, they came from an agreement she personally struck with Rummy.

I go into this in obssessive detail in my series on Judy. But based on her portrayal of 'Secret Squirrel' Yankee Fan and a few others, I'm fairly convinced the sources and methods Judy is hiding are details of veracity, not security. That is, Judy has clearance to report on staged stories. Her clearance is about reporting the details Rummy wants reported and hiding the really sketchy provenance for those stories. It has almost nothing to do with a real security clearance, with trying to prevent any info that would compromise national security from being released. (Although, this is probably more and more true of security clearances in BushCo--they're hiding their lies, not our vital truths.)

All this doesn't not definitively explain which side of the security clearance issue Judy comes down on. Perhaps she does have clearance, but getting it was contigent on Judy writing precisely the stories they wanted her to write, on never questioning the stories she was given. Or perhaps she doesn't have clearance at all. When you deal entirely in fictions, why would you need clearance?

One more thing. The nature of her embed suggests Rummy's personal involvement here. Is it possible he gave her "clearance" without going through the normal channels of clearing someone? That is, it possible her clearance isn't clearance at all, just Rummy's carte blanche to circulate classified information? Fitz seems to know a bit about Judy's clearance. I wonder if he knows how she got that clearance?

Comments

[marky]

I would like to know if she had a security clearance of some sort earlier than Spring of 2003----perhaps it started in jul/aug of 2002, when she became a secret member of WHIG?
What do you think?

[alabama]

Poor Fitzgerald! He must be on Judy overload, and she's such a minor player (if anyone playing in this comedy has a truly minor role). He's so unrelentingly exact that by now he probably knows the make and the cut her underwear, where she bought them, how much (if anything) she paid for them, when she wears them, and when she takes them off, who washes them (if they're ever washed), and what she thinks (if anything) about everyone else's underwear. Not that he's interested in underwear, or that Miller's in any way interesting on this particular subject....

[Rob W]

I doubt she had a formal clearance. Just an agreement that she would report as told if allowed to see the documents. I do security clearance defense and she would not be able to reveal any classified information as the part of the terms of any security clearance under the Executive Orders under which they are granted.

[mrsandcoop]

Here is what I don't understand - I am not a journalist nor do I work for the govt. I am an average citizen.

You have Judy Miller claiming to go to jail for First Amendment reasons - refusing to reveal the identity of her source and claiming she did this because the public has a right to know, yet, she willing accepted a security clearance that forbid her to report certain things?? Something doesn't add up here.

[Redshift]

I do hope Fitzgerald subpoenas the any records of clearance processing for her (and I'm pretty confident he has.) Needless to say, an informal "clearance to see kinda secret stuff in Iraq" won't get Libby off the hook for leaking classified information, no matter how loudly the Kristols of the world bleat that "he thought she had a clearance, so it's no crime!"

[RadicalFringe]

I'd give anything to have Richard Clarke's take on all of this. . . Why did he visit Judy in the slammer? I can't believe he doesn't see right through her.

[John Casper]

Emptywheel:

Have you talked to a book agent yet? Big publishers, the kind that give advances will be drooling over your Non fiction stuff on Mata Whoori, Jimmy Jeff, WHIG, and my hero, Fitz. You have already written it. They can have galleys in a month or two depending on what your other obligations are.

You can continue to post and use all of us as unpaid editors.

If you hesitate, someone else will simply steal your stuff. I do not know if they will be interested in your Enron comparison, but they will let you know.

www.authorlink.com will charge you about sixty bucks to post something for three months???. My guess is you will have twenty or thirty really good book agents pawing at you in about a week.

[Kagro X]

~wheel: Remember this?

First, re: the big lie and stovepiping intelligence. Anyone notice how none of the people with indictments hanging over their head are from Defense? The closest would be Wolfie's buddy Libby, but still. It astounds me that Defense, which was really the department tactically going after State and (the real) CIA, will avoid any penalty here.

Judy? Security clearance? Rummy's personal involvement? What?

I think Defense's invisibility spell just wore off.

[emptywheel]

Kagro,

Oh, did I forget to gleefully say that we could get at Rummy this way? I'm sorry, because that's what I was thinking: finally we get to Defense!

[Kagro X]

I don't know, did you say that? I couldn't actually get a ticket to your post. They said I wasn't "on the list."

[mlk]

It doesn't matter if Judy had a clearance or not. People seem to forget that Valerie Plame's indentity was under double super secret security where her identity was on a need to know basis. Judy would *never^ have had that level of clearance. Only the inner circles of the WH and the CIA would know her status.

[RadicalFringe]

Regarding the Pentagon Perps: At the risk of being a broken record, I'll say it again: Douglas Feith headed up the Office of Special Projects for Rummy (and Wolfie), specifically to find or fabricate 'intelligence' to support the WHIG agenda. Indeed, I think it could be argued that the OSP was created as the WHIG's work-around solution to the fact that Cheney's intimidation tactics weren't producing the 'intelligence' they needed from Langley analysts. Feith's team was all about collecting and massaging junk from drunken Iraqi ex-patriots and other sources previously discounted by real spooks. The whole thing existed to support the WHIG.

Douglas Feith most certainly had access to Valerie Plame's identity as well as inside files on Wilson. If you're Cheney (or Rove) and want to pre-emptively knee-cap Wilson, who do you go to for dirt? The CIA or your chums at the Pentagon? The Pentagon of course. Hell, you're so clever, you probably have your buddy John Bolton make the request so it comes from the State Department...

[Crone]

Oh, we get to Defense...

through the Larry Franklin espionage case...

[windansea]

WASHINGTON Oct 17, 2005 — 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.
Whether it came from Libby or Miller's notes, former federal prosecutors and investigators said the incorrect information provides a significant lead for Fitzgerald and FBI agents to follow. It could suggest Libby thought Plame was not an undercover spy, and therefore couldn't have knowingly revealed her occupation, or that he got his information from uninformed sources, they said.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1224295

[Kagro X]

I'll give you what emptywheel's giving the folks at Daily Kos:

Covered, September 24th:

First, we know that WINPAC includes Operations officers. We know, for example, that two WINPAC officers who questioned the CIA’s use of Iraqi intelligence were kicked out of WINPAC. One of these appears to be the CIA officer now suing the CIA for retaliating against him for refusing to adapt his intelligence to desired outcomes. And this officer is a DO operative—he worked with top Iraqi sources. In other words, this officer was, at one time, part of DO and part of WINPAC. So we know it’s possible.

Further, some of the details we know about Plame suggest she, too, may have had such a position. In a seminal WaPo article on the Plame Affair (George Tenet has always been considered one possible source for this article), she is described as having both an operations role and an analytical one.

She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction.

Further, CIA ubersource Vincent Cannistraro, himself the former chief of Counter-Terrorism in the DO, affirms that Plame worked for WINPAC.

Contrary to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s reporting, former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro said that Plame worked undercover for the Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control, or WINPAC. (Wilson xl)

[emptywheel]

windansea

Thank you for coming over here to peddle the latest GOP talking points. Helps me keep abreast of the latest attempts to spin this without having to frequent GOP blogs. But, as Kagro points out, this one won't last long.

[Ella Storey]

The more I think about Cheney, WHIG, and OSP's fear that WINPAC might actually sabotage their WMD hype to War(i.e. Veep, neocons, and fellow yellowcakes did/said anything to discredit CIA/INR/UN analysts and even edited by omission, exaggeration or misplaced-footnotes the NIE requested by Congress);

the more I think the Plame leak was intended to damage Valerie (slurring her husband Joe was a convenient cover)as an example to potential CIA-WINPAC leakers.

[windansea]

Thank you for coming over here to peddle the latest GOP talking points. Helps me keep abreast of the latest attempts to spin this without having to frequent GOP blogs. But, as Kagro points out, this one won't last long.

EW

LOL....you have no idea what's going to happen do you???

Fitz is playing you...the MSM...and more importantly...the real culprits like a drum

[Kagro X]

Muahahahaha! No, my evil plan is working and it is you who are being played like a drum! Yes, only I know the true seeeeeecret plaaaaaaaannnnss! Muahahahahaha!

That there can be no doubt of my superior knowledge is clearly indicated by my haughty use of the "LOL" protocol! Muahahahahahaha!