The WMD Porn Returns

by emptywheel

Am I the only one who finds it curious that Judy Miller returns to the stage, back to her "stories to cover," telling stories about Libyan remorse, the day after the US announces it will restore diplomatic relations with Libya? Smarter people than I have offered some interesting arguments about what the Libyan thaw means: It's a vindication of multilateralism and a repudiation of the Neocons. It's a sign we're going to war in Iran. But I'm interested in Judy's take. Is this the old Judy, is she leaking at the direction of some White House Iran Group? Or is she putting her extensive experience (including in Libya) to actually tell her readers something worthwhile for a change?

The answer? I'm not sure.

There are signs, I must admit, that Judy has been through rehab for her old addiction to the SAO leak. For example, she admits that any Libyan deal depended on keeping news of it from the Neocons.

To prevent leaks and sabotage by neoconservatives and other officials opposed to normalizing relations with Tripoli, details of the Libyan overtures and some half-dozen secret meetings that followed the March overture over the next seven months in London, Geneva and even Tripoli were known to only a handful of senior U.S. officials.

And Judy allows strident criticism of the imperial presidency--couched, however, in the old, "some critics" dodge.

While Libya has clearly dawdled, some critics of the Bush administration now argue that Washington's temporizing toward Libya has undermined its nonproliferation victory and has reinforced rogue-state conviction that disarmament will not get one far with Washington. Moreover, the administration quietly continues to attribute Col. Gadhafi's WMD decision to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a claim that has embarrassed Col. Gadhafi among Libyans and his Arab neighbors.

But absent a court-supervised recovery program, I'm not sure Judy can give up her old ways. Just after admitting the Neocons were the impediment to an agreement, for example, she relapses into SAO mode.

Yet as American forces became bogged down in Iraq, Col. Gadhafi's enthusiasm for giving up his WMD programs seemed to wane. Libya had yet to acknowledge even that it possessed banned weapons and programs, a senior official told me. And while the Libyans had agreed in principle to let a team of U.S.-U.K. weapons experts visit sites in Libya, no date had been set. "No agreement on a date meant there was essentially no agreement on a visit," the official said. The talks stalled.

This comment, with its petulance about a country admitting something, sounds a lot like John Bolton, but I could be wrong.

There's an intesting tribute to Stephen Kappes--the former and recently restored CIA Deputy Director of Operations--in this article. Judy gives him much of the credit for the Libya deal (at the expense, compared to other accounts, of the British efforts).

And a key figure in that effort, Stephen Kappes, is now slated to be the next deputy director of the demoralized Central Intelligence Agency.

But she admits Kappes is not one of her sources for this article.

A 15-person team, headed by Mr. Kappes, then the CIA deputy director of operations, (who declined to be interviewed for this piece) entered Libya on Oct. 19 on a 10-day mission.

Accompanied as this is by a comment describing the Libya thaw as the Bush Administration's "sole undeniable--if largely unheralded--intelligence and nonproliferation success," I can't help but wonder whether someone ascendant has decided to put new emphasis on such negotiated non-proliferation settlements.

But then there's the same old WMD porn, both the super secret details that seem worthy of Dougie Feith,

But a review of confidential government records and interviews with current and former officials in London, Tripoli, Vienna and Washington suggest that other factors were involved. Prominent among them is a heretofore undisclosed intelligence coup--the administration's decision in late 2003 to give Libyan officials a compact disc containing intercepts of a conversation about Libya's nuclear weapons program between Libya's nuclear chief and A.Q. Khan--that reinforced Col. Gadhafi's decision to reverse course on WMD.

And the scary parables about how close we came to having nuclear-armed brown people.

Not only had Libya developed highly compartmentalized chemical and nuclear programs that were often unknown even to the Libyans who worked at the facilities, they had already imported two types of centrifuges from the Khan network--aluminum P-1s, (for Pakistan-1), and 4,000 of the more advanced P-2s. By 1997, Libya had already gotten 20 preassembled P-1s from Khan and components for another 200. In 2000, it got two P-2 model centrifuges, which used stronger steel, and had ordered 10,000 more. Libya had also imported two tons of uranium hexafluoride to be fed into the centrifuges and enriched as bomb fuel. In fact, it had managed to acquire from the Khan network what it needed to produce a 10-kiloton bomb, or to make the components for one, as well as dozens of blueprints for producing and miniaturizing a warhead, usually the toughest step in producing an atomic weapon.

Many analysts no longer doubted that Libya could have made a bomb, eventually, if the program had not been stopped and it had found a way to supplement its limited technical expertise. Though most of the rotors for the centrifuges were initially missing (many turned up months later on a ship near South Africa) experts said that had the centrifuges been properly assembled in cascades--always dicey in a technologically challenged state--Libya could have produced enough fuel to make as many as 10 nuclear warheads a year. "We definitely would have done it," said Mr. Ma'atouq, head of the program, just before my tour of Tajura, site of Libya's research reactor and its "hot cells" where scientists could separate fuel for a bomb. "Our original goal was to do so between 2006 and 2008, and if the program was accelerated, by 2007, with a year to spare," he said.

This is classic Judy, a verbal diarrhea of details about WMD that serve to hide the underlying thinness of the case. Note, she basically admits, that Libya would only have gotten the bomb, "eventually," if it had gotten something more, technical expertise. But underneath the scary pile of numbers--the P-1, the numbers of centrifuges, and the size of bombs--she's trying to obscure the fundamental futility of the program.

And [the head of Libya's nuclear program, Ma'atouq Mohamed Ma'atouq] said: Let's assume we have these weapons. What would we do with them? Who is the target? Who would we use them against? The U.S.? We had no delivery system. Yes, nuclear weapons are a deterrent, but it's better to have nothing at all than a deterrent without a means of delivery."

And she tells a story about centrifuge blueprints that, I'm fairly certain (looking for the link), the warmongers have already used to make their case on Iran. Apparently, Pakistan routinely throws in centrifuge blueprints to close the deal.

During its second trip in December, the team was taken to sites that U.S. intelligence had not previously spotted and was permitted to photograph and take notes on the astonishing blueprints that few weapons designers had ever seen outside declared nuclear states. The drawings were of a relatively old, crude, but workable design that Pakistan got from China in the early 1960s. The blueprint copies that Khan had provided, as a "sweetener," no less, with their Chinese scribbling still in the margins, had been kept in their original wrappings--a plastic bag from a Pakistani tailor's shop--another bonanza for Western intelligence.

I gotta say, this sounds like a pretty worthless blueprint, particularly for a country hoping to find turnkey solutions to their nuclear aspirations. A blueprint from the 1960s? In any case, they seem to be recycling their stories here, or perhaps Judy just missed this one while she was in jail.

Perhaps Judy's stupidest moment comes when she tries to spin a Bush speech made to promote scrapping the ABM treaty, one preparing for his pre-emptive policy with Iraq, and one that doesn't mention terrorists in the least (though it mentions terror in a state context three times) as evidence of his foresight about "new threats."

Even before 9/11, the Bush administration was focused on unconventional "new threats" to the U.S., particularly WMD in the hands of rogue states and terrorist groups. In his first speech on national security policy, in May 2001, Mr. Bush said he might use force to limit the spread of WMD to those who "seek to destroy us." Deterrence, he said, "is no longer enough."

Still spinning, huh Judy? Still stuck in a fantasy where Bush gave a damn about terrorist groups at the time he was ignoring the August 6 PDB?

But there is one sign that Judy is not just regurgitating what her handlers tell or--or at the least, that she's no longer the central player she once was. Judy doesn't appear to have known that DC would restore relations with Libya until just before this article was released. She includes one sentence admitting relations had been restored in a long paragraph describing, using the present tense, how frustrated the Libyans are that their WMD concessions haven't yet resulted in normalized relations.

But although the sanctions that helped cripple its WMD programs and oil-dependent economy were lifted, and a small U.S. liaison office was established in Tripoli, Libya remained on Washington's list of states that sponsor terrorism, and full diplomatic relations were not restored, until this week. While Libya has clearly dawdled, some critics of the Bush administration now argue that Washington's temporizing toward Libya has undermined its nonproliferation victory and has reinforced rogue-state conviction that disarmament will not get one far with Washington. Moreover, the administration quietly continues to attribute Col. Gadhafi's WMD decision to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a claim that has embarrassed Col. Gadhafi among Libyans and his Arab neighbors. Today, the strongman, or Brother Leader as he prefers to be called, is frustrated, and the leadership coterie is restive. [my emphasis]

This passage makes no sense--the last four sentences assume that Libya has not yet received what it now has, diplomatic recognition. It reads like Judy did a quick edit to reflect changed conditions, without changing the rest of the paragraph.

To be honest, I don't know what to make of it. There are signs that she's recovering from her SAO addiction. And signs that she's out of the loop. But there are greater signs that she remains the purveyor of WMD porn that dragged us into Iraq.

I don't understand how Judy's article would serve the Administration's purpose. It may serve to scare people about a nuclear armed Iran. But it just as easily justifies a peaceful solution.

But it's (not) good to see she hasn't lost her skills at inventing WMD porn.

Comments

[obsessed]

I think she spinning tales of Libbyan remorse.

[emptywheel]

LOL

Though she may just be resorting to WMD porn because that's what she knows best. I can see the conversation:

Qadaffi: Judy Judy Judy. I hear you've fallen on hard times.

Judy: Oh, Moammar, you don't know the half of it. My old aspens friends have all abandoned me. They're even calling me unreliable. Isn't there some WMD porn you can thrown my way.

Qadaffi: Haven't you heard? We're out of the business. Hmmm. Well, I can do this. I'll tell my people to give you an exclusive on all the WMD porn we used to have. Would that help?

Judy: Thanks, Moammar. I really need the help.

[obsessed]

Ahmed will be jealous.

[viget]

Looks like it's time for Judy to update her myspace page. She needs to add another friend.

[emptywheel]

LOL!!

[free patriot]

since when did we put recovering crack heads in charge of sorting the crack ???

do AA members offer to restock the beer case in some parallel universe that I can't see

If I rob a bank, do that qualify me to be a bank teller (cuz I got a ski mask, and I really need a job)

Judy wants to write about WMDs ???

lets start with a comprehensive review of what judy's already written

and while we're at it, let judy explain why she cooperated with scooter's criminal plan to hide the source of the Plame leak

sorry judy, no points this round

try getting into a barber college or clown college, cuz you need a new gig (insert prefered obscene prejorative here)

[QuickSilver]

If she must publish, it's just that it's under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal Editoral Page, whose track record on the CIA leak scandal has been so abysmal. Who can forget what they wrote on July 13th, 2005, praising Karl Rove as a "whistleblower," in the wake of the revelation that Karl Rove had leaked to Matt Cooper (and after the White House had been lying about Rove's role for nearly two years)? "He told the truth about Wilson." Just not to the FBI and grand jury.

Loyal as ever to Cheney, Bush, Rove, and the cabal, it's little wonder the WSJ Editorial Board is now plotting Judy's rehabilitation.

[Jérôme à Paris]

The discussion has run on similar themes over at European Tribune. (also at Booman's) No that she is totally discredited as a journalist, everybody she knows she now works as a PR flak - but for who? someone who likes to think s/he speaks for the White House?

Or is it a hint that the WH will go for a diplomatic solution with Iran?

[Marysz]

Poor Judy's trying to make a comeback. Like Jerome, I'm wondering who she's working for now. She has so little credibility that it's hard to take her seriously; but obviously someone out there is setting her up to write these articles. It's curious.

[oldtree]

why exactly would anyone care what she writes if what she writes is a lie?
analyze it for the truth? self abuse is more rewarding. probably more productive by comparison

[emptywheel]

Well, I don't think she's working for whatever faction just made peace with Libya (probably Condi's). I thought for the moment she might be working for the Brits, but given how little credit she gives them for the deal, that can't be right. Maybe the Fracis Fukuyama "I'm Not a Neocon" Neocon branch?

[Blue Meme]

The benefit of Judy's WMD porn to the junta is pretty obvious to me -- it claims that Dubya's otherwise disastrous adventure in Iraq had a silver lining after all.

[Druthers]

When Mrs. Miller appears with her magic pen it is like preparation for the War Lullaby. Does she hope to put us to sleep again in preparation for Iran?

[Jeff]

emptywheel

Are you ever going to love part 2 of Miller's piece in today's WSJ. It's got Bolton, it's got Joseph, Curt Weldon even makes a cameo. And it's got a completely nonsensical explanation for why the Bush administration told everybody - including Congress - so late in the game about Libya's removal from the terrorist list. It was all about the Dubai ports furor. No kidding.