Arianna Huffington has been out in front of the Plamegate story for a long time. She grasped the absolute centrality of the Judith Miller scam before anyone else. I am still just beginning to understand the absolutely premeditated, cruelly mendacious, and blasphemously cynical nature of the crime she and Dick Cheney perpetrated together. At the risk of being repetitive, I'll link to and copy a good piece of Huffington's recent summary of what happened, and what Fitzgerald's investigation is really about. What must be understood is that the whole clusterfuck--EVERYTHING that unfolded between Spring 2002 and Spring 2003, including ALL of the news stories and television shows--was PLANNED by Dick Cheney. I don't know if I'm stating the obvious for the tenth time, or if I sound like a nutcase. But the whole shit-sandwich was ready-made before you ate it. The New York Times front page IS that powerful. And if you have a mole who is planting stories on it, you CAN create reality.

Here is the beginning of Huffington's summary:

Sunday Sept. 8, 2002 was a red letter day in the White House Iraq Group’s efforts to market the war. That was the day the administration’s war salesmen scored one of their biggest propaganda coups.

That morning, the New York Times ran a front page story co-written by Judy Miller about how Saddam was trying to get a hold of aluminum tubes to be used in building nuclear weapons.

Perfectly timed to coincide with this planted (and bogus) info, the administration blanketed the Sunday shows with its big guns -- who all used the New York Times’ credibility to bolster their case against Saddam and scare the American people.

Dick Cheney did Meet the Press, citing the Times story as evidence that Saddam was “actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons”. Condi Rice went on Wolf Blitzer and warned that the "smoking gun” in Iraq could turn out to be “a mushroom cloud”. Colin Powell on Fox News Sunday, Don Rumsfeld on Face the Nation, and Richard Meyers on This Week all made similar points, raising the specter of a nuked up Saddam. A month later, the House and Senate hastily authorized the administration to go to war.

Of course, the Plamegate investigation has revealed the political alchemy of turning crap into gold via a deadly game of neocon telephone tag. Cheney to Libby to Chalabi to Miller back to Libby for confirmation by “a senior administration official” (or is it “former Hill staffer”?)… then right to the front pages of the Times, which Cheney and Rice and Powell and Meyers and Rummy can wave around as “proof”.

Here's the rest. Huffington's online newspaper is always worth checking out.