Source sez Judy was a WHIG || New York Daily News has better sources on WHIG than the New American Pravda (aka the NYT)

If you want to really find out what went wrong at the New York Times, don't waste your time reading 10,000-word apologias in The Grey Lady. The New York Daily News explains it all for you in one sentence at the end of a snappy little article in yesterday's paper:
Prez Iraq team fought to squelch war critics
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.
So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.
One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a "side show" for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said.
The Plame leak is now the subject of a criminal probe that has seen presidential political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, hauled before a grand jury.
Both men were members of the group, also known as WHIG. From late 2002 through mid 2003, it was locked in a feud with officials inside the CIA and State Department over claims Saddam tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium in Niger to build nukes, a former Bush administration and intelligence sources told The News.
"There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.
"People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.
Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.
"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Official Newspaper of the WHIGs masquerading as the bastion of "The Liberal Media" (and that will henceforth be known as the New American Pravda), still has yet to mention the words "White House Iraq Group" or "WHIG" (in its modern context) in its news pages. Only Frank Rich's column of last Sunday broke their embargo on the name of the group that controlled their pre-invasion coverage of mythical so-called "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (a combination of words for which you will find 7,865 Times articles, not that they're trying to scare anyone, or do the WHIG's dirty work).

Crossposted from WHIGGATE UPDATE @ whiggate.org