Who Leaked the NIE to Judith Miller in 2002?

That's the question BooMan asks over at Booman Tribune. He lays out a piece by piece comparison of that 2002 NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) and a column written by then NYT reporter Judith Miller and her co-author Michael Gordon on September 8, 2002 that contains much of the evidence in the NIE.

I'd submit these four prospects, based on diaries I had written for Booman Tribune about the explosive articles Italy's La Repubblica published in October, 2005:

1) Larry Franklin, who held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001.
2) Stephen Hadley, who, although he met secretly with Niccolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, on September 9, 2002 - one day after the Miller/Gordon NYT article - certainly had knowledge of the forgeries in time to provide the leak.
3) someone else in the Pentagon, CIA or the White House who had access to the NIE and/or the information about the Niger forgeries which had been presented to and rejected by the CIA in 2001.

That's a very wide field of possible suspects and does not necessarily lead straight to the White House, nor may we ever know the answer unless it has been revealed to Patrick Fitzgerald in his extensive investigation into the Plame Affair, but I'd thought I'd join the lefty blogosphere in trying to figure out the mystery that BooMan has laid before us.