they turn in clusters
Where do the roots connect the aspens?
Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is testifying today in the perjury trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff. The blog firedoglake is posting a play-by-play.
Will Miller shed light on Libby’s mysterious allusion to her vacation in Jackson Hole, in a letter he penned while she was in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury in 2005? Or will she discuss their meeting at the JH Rodeo in 2003, back when the controversy first raged over who leaked an undercover CIA officer’s name to the press?
It was August 2003, and wildfire smoke tinged the hot, dusty air in Jackson Hole. Critics were turning up the heat on the Bush-Cheney administration over the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq, the fruitless search for Osama and Saddam and the leak of a covert CIA agent’s name, possibly in retaliation for criticism of the war.
As the sun dipped low over East Gros Ventre Butte late one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached New York Times reporter Judith Miller at the JH Rodeo. Amid the dirt kicked up by bulls and broncs, the man asked Miller about the national security conference she had just come from in Aspen, Colo. She did not recognize him.
“Judy,” he said. “It’s Scooter Libby.”
These were the closing words to Miller’s first-person account of her grand jury testimony, published in the Times on Oct. 16, 2005. Miller eventually testified before the grand jury after spending 85 days in jail. Libby faces charges for obstructing prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Scooter storms JH (run cursor over photos for captions)
Using Libby as a source, Miller wrote overblown stories before the war about Iraq’s supposed weapons arsenal. When she was in jail in 2005, with her work discredited and Libby under investigation, he wrote to her and urged her to testify.
“Your reporting, and you, are missed,” he wrote. “You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover — Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program.
“Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — and life.”
After Miller’s story was published, the allusion to Jackson Hole and the aspens turning “in clusters” stirred a swirl of intrigue, particularly on the Internet. (Ecology note: Aspen trees share a common root system; a whole grove may be connected underground.) Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Libby once wrote a suspense novel, set in a mountain blizzard, titled The Apprentice.
Bloggers wondered whether Miller met with Cheney on the trip to Jackson Hole, as the vice president owns a home at Teton Pines and was on a “working vacation” there at the time. Was Big Dick part of the cluster?
Scooter is an avid skier and has visited Jackson Hole often, sometimes accompanying his boss. In 2003 he carved powder at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort with Ski magazine columnist Jackson Hogen, arranged an interview for Hogen with the vice president and mingled with Teton Gravity Research athletes at the Mangy Moose. Photographer Flo McCall captured the images displayed here for the magazine.
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The trial is likely to reveal whether Libby lied to investigators to cover up for his superiors, namely Karl Rove and Big Dick. It’s unclear whether the Libby-Miller rendezvous at the rodeo or other Jackson Hole allusions will be relevant.
What is clear is that the trial is shedding light on the inside workings of the Bush administration, particularly those of the Oval Office Overlord, who is being exposed as a dangerous, deluded despot.
The best summary of recent Cheney coverage comes from WashingtonPost.com blogger Dan Froomkin, in his newly renamed White House Watch column.
Froomkin writes:
While Dick Cheney undoubtedly remains the most powerful vice president this nation has ever seen, it’s becoming increasingly unclear whether anyone outside the White House believes a word he says.
Inside the West Wing, Cheney’s influence remains considerable. In fact, nothing better explains Bush’s perplexing plan to send more troops to Iraq than Cheney’s neoconservative conviction that showing the world that we have the “stomach for the fight” is the most important thing — even if it isn’t accomplishing the things we’re supposed to be fighting for. Even if it’s backfiring horribly.
But as his astonishing interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer laid bare last week, Cheney is increasingly out of touch with reality. He seems to think that by asserting things that are simply untrue, he can make others believe they are so.
Maybe that works within the White House. But for the rest of us, it’s becoming a better bet to assume that everything — or almost everything — Cheney says is flat wrong.
Froomkin adds that testimony from former White House aides in the Libby trial already has highlighted Cheney’s role as “master-manipulator of misinformation and vindictive retaliator-in-chief.”
(For anyone unfamiliar with Froomkin’s column, his compiling and analysis of news about the Bush administration has been a beacon of journalistic tenacity since 2004.)
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For the full News&Guide story from 2005 about the Jackson Hole connection in the Libby case, click here. The story has useful background information explaining why a crime may have been committed and how the case is connected to the bogus buildup to the Iraq war. There’s also reaction from local pols, including state Rep. Monte Olsen’s comical defense of Cheney.
Also of note is the author’s pausing to explain to an uninitiated audience that bloggers are “authors of ongoing Web logs.” We’ve come a long way in the last 14 months.
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The publisher notes for Libby’s book read, “The Apprentice takes place in a remote mountain inn in northernmost Japan, where a raging blizzard has brought together wayfarers who share only fear and suspicion of one another. It is the winter of 1903, the country is beset with smallpox and war is brewing with Russia.
“In the flickering shadows of the crowded room, the apprentice, charged with running the inn during the owner’s absence, finds himself strongly attracted to one of the performers lodged there. His involvement with the mysterious travelers plunges him headlong into murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow.”
A Boston Globe review called the book “an alluring novel of intrigue.”
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Here’s an amusing Gawker post about Judy Miller criticizing blogger ethics.
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Even Bush is poking fun at Cheney these days. And he has a good sense of humor. Also from Dan Froomkin, here are some of the jokes the president told in a speech to the exclusive Alfalfa Club on Saturday night:
“As always, I’m delighted to be back at Alfalfa. When I was here last year, my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn and my vice president had shot someone — ah, those were the good old days.
“What with the polls and everything, the Washington Post said the other day that I was, quote, ‘at the nadir of my presidency.’ The press always underestimates me. I can go lower.”
And: “Hey, let me give you an update on that satellite that was blown out of the sky last week. The Chinese didn’t do it. Cheney was out hunting again.”
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For anyone keeping track: According to the Veterans Affairs Department, the number of U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is 50,508. (That’s in addition to the 3,081 Americans killed in Iraq and 357 killed in Afghanistan.) Not much to joke about there. This casualty count includes noncombat injuries, a number the military tries to downplay.
So while Big Dick, W. and Scooter have been playing war games, with help from Judy Miller, 53,946 U.S. soldiers have been killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. And more than 100,000 Iraqis have died. At a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $1.2 trillion (projected).
Makes you wonder if there will be more trials to come.
Explore posts in the same categories: politics, skiing, dick cheney, scooter libby, new york times, Iraq war
January 31st, 2007 at 5:36 pm
According to Fire Dog Lake, the aspens letter came up in court today as Judith Miller continued to testify, but curiously the cryptic phrase was not brought up by attorneys.