The strangest thing, for me, about the Miller article is the ending:
In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.
"Judy," he said. "It's Scooter Libby."
Why does she choose to end her story with that particular anecdote?
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On one level, it's a clear rhetorical strategy intended to reinforce the wall of amnesia she erects around herself in the rest of the story. But it does prompt an intriguing question:
Why is Miller going to Jackson Hole after her "national security" conference? She never says it's for vacation, though that's clearly the impression she wants to create with the story about going to the rodeo. Might it have something to do with the fact that Dick Cheney's vacation home is in Jackson Hole? And that he just happened to be vacationing there in August 2003?
What are the odds that Scooter Libby would be, simply by coincidence, vacationing in the same place as his boss in August 2003? This puts this carefully worded paragraph in Miller's piece in an especially interesting light:
"Before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me questions about Mr. Cheney. He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them. The answer was no."
Since we also know that Fitzgerald was only allowed to ask Miller about her conversations with Libby, can we infer (based on circumstantial evidence) that Cheney was also one of her sources? Perhaps the source who gave up Plame, but whom she conveniently can't recall? She never actually says she never spoke with Cheney, and Fitzgerald couldn't ask her. Maybe somebody else should.
I'm starting to think that Miller might be playing an even higher-stakes game with that Libby-rodeo anecdote. Is it possibly a signal, either to Fitzgerald, or to Cheney himself, that she has the "Veep" by the short hairs? Is she firing an encoded "Aspens turning" verbal threat back at Cheney?
~Link that places Cheney in Wyoming in mid-August 2003 (it's from a site that traces "liberal media bias"--tee hee--but quotes CBS News. The official speeches Cheney gave in August 2003 are also all out West in places like New Mexico and Montana. So he's clearly in the neighborhood... Maybe some sharper googlers than I can place BigTime Dick's 8/03 whereabouts, and Judy's, with more specificity.
~more at k/o