One question that has haunted people following the Valerie Plame leak case
has been “Why was Judith Miller jailed if she did not write an article?” Well
further reading into

Raw Story’s explosive new report sheds some light on that very question.

The group relied heavily on New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who,
after meeting with several of the organization’s members in August 2002,
wrote an explosive story that many critics of the war believe laid the
groundwork for military action against Iraq.

On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, Miller wrote a story for the Times quoting
anonymous officials who said aluminum tubes found in Iraq were to be used as
centrifuges. Her report said the “diameter, thickness and other technical
specifications” of the tubes — precisely the grounds for skepticism among
nuclear enrichment experts — showed that they were “intended as components
of centrifuges.”

She closed her piece by quoting then-National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice who said the United States would not sit by and wait to
find a smoking gun to prove its case, possibly in the form of a “a mushroom
cloud.” After Miller’s piece was published, administration officials pursued
their case on Sunday talk shows using Miller’s piece as evidence that Iraq
was pursuing a nuclear bomb, even though those officials were the ones who
supplied Miller with the story and were quoted anonymously.

Rice’s comments on CNN’s “Late Edition” reaffirmed Miller’s story. Rice
said that Saddam Hussein was “actively pursuing a nuclear weapon” and that
the tubes — described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as “dual-use”
items — were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge
programs.”

Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” also mentioned the aluminum tubes
story in the Times and said “increasingly, we believe the United States will
become the target” of an Iraqi atomic bomb. Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” asked viewers to “imagine a September
11th with weapons of mass destruction.”

Full article

here.

The group referred to is the White House Iraq Group, which was run out of
Dick Cheney’s office and chaired by Karl Rove. Turns out Judith Miller was their
media voice in order to publicize the reasons for war. The same aluminum tubes
were quickly discredited by the IAEA as useless considering they did not have
the finish necessary to be used as a nuclear centrifuge.

Fitzgerald started looking into this group in January of 2004. Prior to that
it was not well known to people outside the beltway. Considering Joe Wilson’s
story actually discredited all the work this group did, they had perfect intent
to discredit him by associating him with the CIA through his wife.

All the pieces are starting to come together in one of the most complicated
scandals to hit Washington since Watergate.