Judy Miller and that OTHER scandal...

Josh Marshall wonders why the NYT's editors allowed Judith Miller to cover the oil-for-food scandal for a year -- even after executive editor Bill Keller had ordered her to stay clear of Iraq and related matters. Obviously, Judy had, has, an "enabler" on the editorial staff. That enabler may be Keller himself, despite his protestations.

The more interesting question: What was it about this controversy that mandated placing the coverage under the care of a Bush-friendly journalist?

Right-wingers spun the oil-for-food scandal into unrecognizability. Most people still don't know that it involved Tongsun Park -- the Moon-connected, CIA-connected shady businessman from South Korea. Back in the mid-'70s, Park specialized in acquiring sexual blackmail information on various Washington politicos. He then passed the data on to the Director of Central Intelligence -- whose name, you may recall, was George H.W. Bush.

Another indicted figure in the scandal is Houston oilman David Chalmers, who has ties to this same network of spooked-up international wheeler-dealers. According to Forbes:

In the 1980s, Bayoil brokered the sale of 20 million barrels of oil from Iraq to Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen.

What Forbes doesn't tell you is that Saddam used oil to pay for Cardoen's arms. They also don't tell you that Cardoen functioned as -- to put the matter crudely -- a front man for the CIA.

The informal network Joseph Trento calls "the rogue CIA" controlled every aspect of the secret arming of Iraq, as detailed in chapter 32 of Prelude to Terror). We thus have good reason to presume that Chalmers belonged to this same group of spooked-up Old Boys. We may even hazard a guess as to which DCI recruited him.

In short, an honest investigation of the oil-for-food scandal would force one to examine some long-time clandestine cronies of the Bush interests.

And that's why someone placed Judy the pseudo-journalist on this beat. Since other papers tend to follow the lead of the NYT, her coverage helped to frame the issue. What might have been a right-wing scandal of Iran-contra proportions became an excuse for an orgy of U.N.-bashing.