Conspiracy Theory?

Arianna Huffington reveals Judith Plame's role with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha, the outfit charged with finding WMD in Iraq.

Miller’s assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a “Judith Miller team.” Another officer said that Miller “came in with a plan. She was leading them… She ended up almost hijacking the mission.” A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.”

“Judith,” said an Army officer, “was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat.”

In one specific instance, she used her friendship with Major General David Petraeus to force a lower ranking officer to reverse an order she was unhappy about.

I submit that my assertion the neocons are waging an active campaign to pull the media off the trail in the Traitorgate affair is anything but a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. To think they're playing on the up and up is complete denial of their proven track record.

Yeah, you can see why Miller preferred jail over testifying to the grand jury, all right.

Watch the political yak shows this weekend. Notice how many times the right wing types pull the conversation away from the "sixteen words" and drive it back into "which reporter outed Plame."

And keep this in mind--whoever said what to whom when, the "original" source couldn't have been a reporter.