Here we are again in this alternative universe in which it's front page news that Colin Powell has conceded that some of his testimony before the UN Security Council early last year was based on intelligence that was not "that

I also hear that Pope has conceded that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not vice versa. But I'm not sure that development garnered equal press coverage.

Since it has been a given for months that none of the speech's intelligence assessments about current programs were correct, this would seem to be a rather limited concession.

Powell is an ambiguous figure in all this. In an effort which he and his handlers went to great lengths to make known to the press at the time, he sat down at CIA headquarters for I think a couple days shortly before this appearance, and tossed out much of the more ridiculous material from Chalabi's defectors which OSD and OVP were pressing upon him. What he went with was the stuff that seemed at least more credible at the time.

Yet in the key months leading up to the war Powell also repeated particularly incendiary bits of intelligence information which we now know were already widely discredited within the Intelligence Community.

In one of the more comic and farcical strands of this story, many of the more ardent Iraq hawks and bogus intelligence schemers and dupes in and out of the administration now point to Powell as the biggest culprit in the whole manipulated intelligence fiasco. Their argument is that when it came time for the US government to make what was the closest thing to its official case -- that is, before the world at the UN -- it was Powell speaking the words, not Doug Feith or Paul Wolfowitz or Scooter Libby or anyone else.

So Powell takes the fall in their eyes because he gave that presentation and that apparently is vastly worse than a year of muscling the intelligence agencies, getting this goofiness before congress, salting it into the president's speeches and being the sources for myriad newspaper articles.

Let's touch on another matter that should have our attention: control of the electronic media on the ground in Iraq. It's become a given in some circles that whatever actually happens in Iraq over the coming months -- particularly during the handover ceremonies this summer -- will prove secondary to the fact that a highly politicized and Republican CPA will control the images on TV. The control of the electronic media -- particularly television -- will be that tight.

Print journalists are another matter. They can have the run of the place and are not so easily controlled. But images are key.

Again, it's a subject we'll return to, because a lot of work has gone into establishing the basis for such control, which is only one part of the heavy politicization of the whole operation.

One final point -- one to do with TPM and computer technology, not politics -- so skip down now if you're not interested. Thanks to everyone who's sent in advice about Tablet PCs so far. The consensus among TPM readers at least seems to be that Toshiba makes the best line of Tablets -- though some of the other brands have their admirers. A number of readers have suggested using one of these Wacom tablets for the sort of document mark-up we discussed earlier. Basically this is a little tablet you lay on your desk. And when you write on it with the pen the writing shows up on your screen. I've tried this. But I find it doesn't work for the sort of marking up of documents described earlier, or at least I can't get it to work well. We need something where you are actually writing directly on a screen. In any case, please keep the suggestions coming. They're very helpful. And they'll help us bring you more interesting and hopefully informative documents and materials that will provide context for what we discuss on the site.

According to tomorrow's Washington Post, the White House has quickly capitulated on the question of these 9,000 Clinton-era terrorism related documents that they had thus far refused to hand over to the 9/11 Commission.

The lede reads ...

The Bush administration agreed yesterday to let the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks review about 9,000 pages of documents from the Clinton archives, which the White House had earlier refused to release, despite the conclusion of federal researchers that they were relevant to the panel's work.

But then there's this: "But in comments to

Is this an issue of whether the Commission gets physical custody of the documents, as opposed to reviewing them at some facility controlled by the White House, as has been the case with other material?

The article says some commission members are now raising the possibility that the White House is withholding other documents as well.

And, finally, here is what has to be the quote of the day, from Commissioner Jamie Gorelick:"We can't afford to have documents that are relevant to our inquiry being withheld on a technicality. This is not litigation. This is finding facts to help the nation, and we should not treat this as if we're adversarial parties here."

Too bad some White Houses don't seem to see it that way.

A reader just pointed me to a post Mickey Kaus wrote yesterday in response to one of mine the day previous which discussed the speech on national missile defense which Condi Rice was supposed to give on 9/11.

Mickey makes two points. Let me respond to both.

First he quotes me saying this ...

Perhaps it goes without saying, but let's say it: It was as obvious four years ago as it is today that the most potent threats to America are asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority.

And then he responds thus ...

Huh? Clearly the Bush administration failed, as WaPo's Robin Wright puts it, to "take seriously enough the danger from al Qaeda." (Duh!) They should just admit it. But to say this sort of threat was as obvious four years ago as it was after the World Trade Center was destroyed is idiotic, and reflects a counterproductive, bloggish anti-Bush intellectual overstretch.

Here Mickey seems to both misquote and misunderstand my point. I make no specific mention of al Qaida in that passage.

What I do make is a more general point, which I believe to be correct and is frankly not even that controversial. Namely, that because of America's overwhelming military superiority to any single rival state or even any potential grouping of rival states, the most potent threats we face are not traditional military to military conflicts but rather asymmetric threats, particularly ones that we would not be able to retaliate against easily with our overwhelming military superiority.

(For some illustration of this point, see this 'threat spectrum' analysis graphic produced by the Pentagon in early 2001 -- I don't know the precise date, but pre-9/11 -- which I've just added to the TPM Document Collection. Note how terrorist attacks fall right in the 'sweet spot' where the 'probability of occurrence' and 'threat continuum' lines meet.)

This is a strategic argument about where our chief vulnerabilities are and where and how our defense resources should be applied -- not a question of who saw what Presidential Daily Brief or what was contained in it.

You can agree with this point or disagree with it without misrepresenting it or misunderstanding it.

Next there's this.

Mickey quotes me saying that Rice's speech "contained little real discussion of terrorism. The only mentions were swipes at the Clinton administration's supposed over-emphasis on transnational terrorism at the expense of more important priorities like missile defense."

Mickey then writes ...

Here's what Rice actually was going to say, according to WaPo:

"'We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway,' according to excerpts of the speech provided to The Washington Post. '[But] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open?'"

That's not exactly downplaying the threat of non-state terrorism, is it?

In fact, I think it is.

As Mickey knows, what Rice was doing here was the speech-writing equivalent of what journalists call a 'to be sure' line -- a reference to an obvious line of potential disagreement or attack coupled with a preemptive rebuttal of the same. As in, to be sure X, but Y is so much more important, etc.

The context of Rice's speech also helps elucidate the point.

In its article on Rice's speech, the Washington Post made quite a lot -- and understandably so -- of the irony that she was scheduled to give this speech on the day the attacks actually occurred.

But that's not all that was happening.

Rice and other lead White House officials were in a running debate with missile defense opponents who opposed the policy for reasons quite similar to those I've noted above. Namely, that national missile defense was a costly and destabilizing defense against a quite improbable threat. Meanwhile, much more tangible threats like global turmoil, terrorism, loose nukes and the rest would go untended to if we dumped all our resources into missile defense.

This wasn't just a general debate, but a very specific one Rice was involved in in the days just preceding the attack.

On September 9th, 2001 Rice and then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden appeared on Meet the Press and had just this debate. The following day, September 10th, Biden followed up on that debate with a speech at the National Press Club. Below is a key passage ...

Sure, we'll do all we can to defend ourselves against any threat, nobody denies that, but even the Joint Chiefs says that a strategic nuclear attack is less likely than a regional conflict, a major theater war, terrorist attacks at home or abroad, or any number of other real issues. We'll have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat, while the real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.

And I ask you, you want to do us damage, are you more likely to send a missile you're not sure can reach us with a biological or chemical weapon because you don't have the throw weight to put a nuclear weapon on it and no one's anticipating that in the near term, with a return address saying, "It came from us, here's where we are?" Or are you more likely to put somebody with a backpack crossing the border from Vancouver down to Seattle, or coming up the New York Harbor with a rusty old ship with an atom bomb sitting in the hull? Which are you more likely to do? And what defense do we have against those other things?

Watch these hearings we're about to have. We don't have, as the testimony showed, a public health infrastructure to deal with the existing pathogens that are around now. We don't have the investment, the capability to identify or deal with an anthrax attack. We do not have, as Ambassador to Japan now, Howard Baker, and his committee said, the ability to curtail the availability of chemical weapons lying around the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union and Russia, because they don't know what to do with it.

Rice's planned speech the following day, in favor of missile defense, was her response to these points. In that context I think Rice's remarks were very much a 'to be sure' line, intended not as a serious discussion of the threat of transnational terrorism or non-state threats generally, but a reference to Biden's remarks aimed at rebutting them.

Just-In-Time Production? March's jobs report says the economy racked up 308,000 new jobs -- truly robust job growth, at least for last month.

Krugman's column in the Times today is absolutely must-read.

Oh when the frogs!

Come marchin' in!

Oh when the frogs come ...

Okay, enough of this silliness. Let's get down to business.

Friday's New York Times runs an article

The key revelation, which comes in the first graf, is that investigators have "expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case."

The point here would be that prosecutors are now considering indictments not directly related to the underlying crime but of members of the White House staff who lied to investigators during the course of the investigation.

It's classic 'not the crime but the coverup.'

Unfortunately, the piece doesn't make clear whether these might be indictments in addition to ones tied to underlying crime or whether the prosecutors are going for this because they can't make a case on that underlying bad act.

What's more, prosecutors are apparently preparing to take further grand jury testimony. But the authors say it's not clear whether this signals that indictments are coming or that they're getting some final testimony before closing the investigation without indictments -- what you might call a rather substantial difference.

None of this is meant as a criticism of the piece. These are devilishly difficult articles to write. And it seems like the authors got some key leads but not enough to quite present the full picture.

But lets shift gears a bit and discuss another subject.

Earlier this month Murray Waas reported in the American Prospect that Karl Rove had admitted "that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists [but] also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak."

In itself, this is not surprising. It's been pretty clear from the start that Rove pushed the Plame story with reporters after the Novak column appeared. The question is whether he was also the original source of the story.

If he only did only the former, I've always assumed that he was legally in the clear, notwithstanding the ethical sliminess of the behavior.

But perhaps that's not so.

A couple weeks back a legal memo fell into my hands from the sky. And it suggests that even the facts Rove has apparently admitted to put him in clear legal jeopardy.

First, a brief note about the memo: this is not a memo that is in any way a product of the investigation itself. The facts it discusses are exclusively ones which have appeared in media reports. I'm not a lawyer so I cannot myself vouch for the strength of the arguments advanced in the memo. (They certainly seem, to my non-legal mind, to press for an interpretation which yields legal jeopardy.) But it was prepared by lawyers with the proper professional expertise to compose such a memo and interpret the statutes and precedents in question. Finally, this memo is not the product of any political campaign or organization. Not that it would matter particularly, but it's not.

Now to the memo.

The essential argument is that the law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, does more than simply prohibit a governmental official with access to classified information from divulging the identities of covert operatives. The interpretation of the law contained in the memo holds that a government insider, with access to classified information, such as Rove is also prohibited from confirming or further disseminating the identity of a covert agent even after someone else has leaked it.

I won't try to explain it anymore than that. The memo is only a few pages long and I've marked the key passages.

There is one point the author of the memo doesn't raise. My layman's reading of the memo suggests to me that it would be critical to ascertain whether Rove learned of Plame's identity before the Novak article appeared or whether he learned of it for the first time when he read Novak's column.

If the latter, then I'm not sure the argument contained in the memo holds up.

Again, that's what occurred to me reading this memo. But bear in mind that my legal education is limited to a summer studying for the LSAT and a mortifying few hours about a decade ago taking the damn thing itself.

Here's the memo. I'm curious to hear your opinions.

Sometimes you just can't trust a Republican senator with a microphone ...

Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, at a recent GOP event, told diners that state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo, his likely opponent in the November election, looks like one of Saddam Hussein's sons.

Yesterday, his campaign said it was a joke and apologized.

"We're sorry if this joke, which got a lot of laughs, offended anyone," Bunning campaign manager David Young said.

Read more here ...

We’ve been eager to hit the half-a-million monthly TPM readers benchmark. And in March we finally did.

Stats for March: Unique visitors: 560,957; Total visits 2,577,021; Total pageviews 3,540,296. As always, a sincere thanks to everyone who made

A few other points to discuss.

According to The Hill, Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee may try to subpoena Doug Badger, President Bush’s White House healthcare adviser, if he doesn't show up to testify on Capitol Hill. They want to ask him about possible White House involvement in fudging the numbers of the recent Medicare prescription drug bill.

(The story is also covered here by Knight Ridder.)

Normally, Committee Republicans can shut something like this down on a party-line vote. But a mix of political pressure and genuine Republican disgruntlement over being lied to may prevent that.

The White House is refusing to make Badger available. Why? One guess ... Separation of powers.

One would imagine that Badger's testimony would be allowable under the White House's recently-discovered 'scandal exception' to the normally high bar on testimony from White House aides. But apparently that theory is no longer operative. Or perhaps it's one of those precedent-less arguments which only apply to Condi Rice. One way or another it's apparently down the memory-hole -- which is starting to get rather full, in case you haven't noticed.

(A Note to White House gaggleers: This is a spoon feed, folks. Just last week the White House argued that the separation-of-powers bar on testimony applied to questions of policy not appearances tied to scandal or congressional investigations into wrongdoing. This clearly falls right into that category. It's wrapped in a bow. Why not ask?)

And speaking of White House shenanigans ...

Yesterday, Rep. Henry Waxman wrote a letter to White House Counsel Al Gonzales asking whether he had placed calls to "selected" members of the 9/11 Commission during Richard Clarke's testimony last week, as reported today by the Washington Post. Presumably this was to feed them White House talking points to be used when they got to question Clarke. We've just posted the letter to the TPM Document Collection.

Longtime readers know we used to keep the TPM Document Collection section of the website very up-to-date -- confidential documents, video of nasty attacks ads, public records that should be more public, etc. But with all the rush of events over the last several months, we haven't been able to update it often enough. And the existing design isn't up to snuff.

In any case, with some expanded resources we're going to redebut the Document Collection with a new design and other added features. One of the things we're going to do is more marking up of the various electronic documents we post -- highlighting key passages, interlinear notes, stuff like that.

And here's where I'd like to enlist your assistance. To do this I'm probably going to need to get one of these Tablet PCs to allow me to handwrite on electronic documents, mark them up, and so forth. Now, about seventy or eighty thousand people visit this website each day. So I figure there must be more than a few people out there who have a sense of which are well-designed and which aren't. So any input would be greatly appreciated.

And one other thing.

In case you missed it, make sure you read Steve Clemons' oped in the New York Times yesterday on part of the collateral damage from the war on terror -- namely, the steep decline in educational, scientific and cultural exchange visas issued since 9/11. Steve is going to be opening up his own blog in the near future. And if he ever gets the lead out and puts the thing online we'll be linking forthwith since it's sure to be a must-read.

Sometimes a poetic truth captures only ... well, only the poetic truth. And then sometimes a poetic truth turns out to be the real thing.

We've been describing for some days now the backdrop -- well-known then but somehow forgotten -- to Richard

Transnational terrorist groups were almost off the radar. The real near-term threats were rogue states which could hit the US with WMD-bearing ICBMs -- longer-term the threat was China. And thus the centerpiece of our new national security strategy -- and the target of the biggest funding -- would be national missile defense.

Now in a front page piece in Thursday's Washington Post we learn that on September 11th, 2001 Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver a major foreign policy address on missile defense as the centerpiece of a new strategy to combat "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday."

Then reality intruded.

As the Post explains, the speech contained little real discussion of terrorism. The only mentions were swipes at the Clinton administration's supposed over-emphasis on transnational terrorism at the expense of more important priorities like missile defense.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but let's say it: It was as obvious four years ago as it is today that the most potent threats to America are asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority.

In plainer speech, the biggest threats we face today are ones that don't come with a return address.

An ICBM, which has a launch point that can be determined down to the yard and requires a vast apparatus to get off the ground, really doesn't fit into that category.

In any case, this is just another example that they simply failed to understand where the real threat was coming from.

That in itself is forgivable. The problem is that they tried to shoehorn 9/11 into their existing paradigm rather than rethink that flawed analysis.

Reading the lede of this piece from Reuters, I had to wonder whether I might actually be reading a spoof from The Onion ...

An emotional former President George H.W. Bush on Tuesday defended his son's Iraq war and lashed out at White House critics.

It is "deeply offensive and contemptible" to hear "elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail" dismiss progress in Iraq since last year's overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the elder Bush said in a speech to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual convention.

Defies parody ...

I am a little surprised that the White House's new insistence on a joint private meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney hasn't elicited more notice.

In its Wednesday editorial the Times writes ...

Yesterday, Mr. Bush's lawyer told the commission that Ms. Rice would testify. And after months of unacceptable delay, the lawyer said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would also talk to the entire commission in private, not under oath. But the panel had to pay a price: it agreed, at the administration's insistence, that after Ms. Rice testifies, it will not call her back or ask any other White House official to testify in public.

So the Times doesn't even mention the jointness issue or any problems it could raise.

Now, amidst all the stonewalling and foot-dragging and character assassination I guess this matter won't

All the other arguments adduced for ducking the Commission investigators have had at least some conceivable constitutional basis, however weak: testimony in private, testimony not under oath, privilege for White House aides, etc.

(One might note that there will be no recording kept of this meeting -- just one sore-wristed Commission staffer allowed to take written notes of what is said by the ten Commission members, the president and vice president.)

In any case, clearly there cannot be any matter of constitutional precedent or principle involved in needing the president and vice president speak to the Commission together.

So, again, what's the deal?

Only three scenarios or explanations make sense to me.

The first -- and most generous -- explanation is that this is simply another way to further dilute the Commission's ability to ask questions.

If, say, the meeting lasts three hours, that's three hours to ask questions of both of them rather than three hours to ask questions of each -- as might be the case in separate meetings.

That wouldn't be any great coup for the White House. But it would be one more impediment to throw in front of the Commission's work, which would probably be a source of some joy for the White House.

From here the possible explanations go down hill -- in every respect -- pretty quickly.

Explanation number two would be that this is a fairly elementary -- and, one imagines, pretty effective -- way to keep the two of them from giving contradictory answers to the Commission's questions. It helps them keep their stories straight.

(It's a basic part of any criminal investigation -- which, of course, this isn't -- to interview everyone separately, precisely so that people can't jigger their stories into consistency on the fly.)

The third explanation is that the White House does not trust the president to be alone with the Commission members for any great length of time without getting himself into trouble, either by contradicting what his staff says, or getting some key point wrong, or letting some key fact slip. And Cheney's there to make sure nothing goes wrong.

These last two possibilities do, I grant you, paint the president and his White House in a rather dark light. But I would be curious if anyone can come up with another explanation for this odd demand.

I've long thought that political observers were greatly overstating the challenge Tom Daschle faced this November from Republican John Thune.

My reasoning: Thune couldn't beat a substantially weaker candidate, incumbent Sen. Tim Johnson, in the

This might change that, though.

Tim Giago, a Native American journalist who publishes something called the Lakota Journal has announced that he plans to enter the senate race as an Independent. South Dakota Democrats rely on and generally get overwhelming support from the state's Native American community. So this could certainly mix things up.

I still think Daschle takes this race pretty comfortably. But this bears watching.

What if Condi Rice, when she testifies, makes statements in flat contradiction of earlier statements by Richard Clarke? Nothing, it would seem, since the Commission appears to have agreed not to "request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice." That would seem to rule out testimony (at least public testimony) from various aides who might be in a position to say which of the two is being truthful, should such a contradiction arise.

And then there's this, also from Al Gonzales' letter to the Commission ...

I would also like to take this occasion to offer an accommodation on another issue on which we have not yet reached an agreement - commission access to the president and vice president. I am authorized to advise you that the president and vice president have agreed to one joint private session with all 10 commissioners, with one commission staff member present to take notes of the session.

Is that an 'accommodation'?

Why is this is

I hesitate to assay some jesting constitutional theory (the two jointly elected constitutional office-holders must appear jointly because they were elected jointly?) for fear that it might end up in Gonzales' next letter.

One can speculate about several reasons -- one in particular -- for making this stipulation. And, in addition to having no conceivable constitutional basis, none of them are flattering.

This from Reuters...

The White House said on Tuesday that the 9-11 commission agreed to terms that would allow national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to give sworn public testimony on the Sept. 11 attacks, and President Bush and Vice President Cheney to meet in private with the full panel.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters the commission had agreed to state in writing that neither appearance would set a precedent under the constitutional separation of executive and legislative powers.

Isn't this more face-saving than precedent-blocking? To the extent that this precedent issue is even a real issue, what consequence does something in writing from the commission possibly have? Setting aside the logical problems with viewing this as a separation of powers issue (namely the fact that the commission is not an arm of congress) jurists decide what's a precedent, not some slip of paper a cornered White House extracts from people it appointed.

Tuesday's Washington Post runs an editorial recommending that the White House allow Condi Rice to testify publicly before the 9/11 Commission.

But the members of the editorial board can only just barely bring themselves to say it. Their desire to give the president (and the underlying policy at issue here) every possible benefit of the doubt wars visibly with their recognition that Rice's continued refusal is no longer tenable.

In that vein ...

Richard A. Clarke's book criticizing the administration, while stimulating an important public debate, brings this concern [keeping advice of presidential aides confidential] into sharp relief. If career national security officials write tell-all accounts while the presidents they serve not only remain in office but are facing reelection, decision-making is bound to suffer. Presidents are more likely to surround themselves with political loyalists, depriving themselves of diverse ideas and valuable experience. Staff members are more likely to censor themselves for fear of later exposure.

In other words, we're only in this terrible mess of having to cross this woeful threshold because this showboater Clarke wrote

Toward the issue of substance underlying all of this the editorial displays an odd indifference. And the authors are at pains to proclaim their belief that there are no questions Rice would have any difficulty answering or confronting -- a classic case of premature exculpation.

Says the Post: "[W]e see no reason to credit Democratic insinuations that Ms. Rice has something to hide, given that she spent four hours answering the commission's questions in closed session and has offered to answer more."

As for the danger of presidents surrounding themselves "with political loyalists, depriving themselves of diverse ideas and valuable experience", that horse has sort of already left the barn, hasn't it? Or has no one been paying attention?

It's been clear for some time that one of the key shortcomings of this administration is the presence of so many loyalists and ideologues who can usually be counted on to shout "Onward! Onward! Onward!" as the ship of state sails off the edge of the world.

More prosaically one might start with this Knight Ridder article from Sunday, the first sentence of which reads: "Accounts from insiders in the Bush White House describe a tightly controlled, top-down organization that pushes a predetermined agenda, shuns dissenting views and discourages open debate."

What's notable about this is that many of the premises of the Post editorial are belied by excellent reporting which has appeared in their own pages in recent days.

I confess that I don't read newspaper editorials (as opposed to signed columns and opeds) that closely or frequently. But if this and other recent examples I've seen are any indictation, the disconnect between the Post's editorials and the factual information being generated on their own news pages seems to be approaching Wall Street Journal-like proportions.

Declassifying the transcripts is not compatible with national security. But taking the transcripts, cutting the individual words into scraps and pasting them back together into incriminating sentences might be okay.

How far different is this ...

U.S. officials told NBC News that the full record of Clarke’s testimony two years ago would not be declassified. They said that at the request of the White House, however, the CIA was going through the transcript to see what could be declassified, with an eye toward pointing out contradictions.

That's the last graf from a late story from NBC.

You know something's wrong -- when an

Look at what this is: using the CIA and the classification process for an explicitly and exclusively partisan purpose, at the direct behest of the White House. Call me old-fashioned but back in the good-old-days this used to be done with a bit more indirection, subterfuge and cover, no?

It's one thing to declassify the whole thing. Perhaps there's some rationale for that -- though why Clarke's testimony and no one else's should be released seems questionable.

But the whole thing won't be released -- which would be the only way to really judge what he said -- only portions which can be selected to highlight apparent contradictions.

We're moving on to dangerous enough ground when the White House starts using the nation's intelligence agencies for explicitly domestic political purposes. But you know we're really in trouble when they don't even try to hide it.

See what your dollars have bought ...

With only three months to go before L. Paul Bremer trades in his Iraqi pro-consul baton for beachwear and a hard-earned vacation, the country's most controversial politician is already well positioned to become prime minister.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon. Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents. Key ministries, such as Defense and Interior, will be taking orders from the prime minister.

Chalabi holds the ultimate weapons -- several dozen tons of documents and individual files seized by his Iraqi National Congress from Saddam Hussein's secret security apparatus. Coupled with his position as head of the de-Baathification commission, Chalabi, barely a year since he returned to his homeland after 45 years of exile, has emerged as the power behind a vacant throne. He also appears to have impressive amounts of cash at his disposal and a say in which companies get the nod for some of the $18.4 billion earmarked for reconstruction. One company executive who asked that both his and the company's name be withheld said, "The commission was steep even by Middle Eastern standards."

Chalabi is still on the Defense Intelligence Agency's budget for a secret stipend of $340,000 a month. The $40 million the INC has received since 1994 from the U.S. government also covered the expenses of Iraqi military defectors' stories about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's links with al-Qaida, which provided President Bush with a casus belli for the war on Iraq.

(That's from

It's not quite so clear to me that Chalabi is really in line to be prime minister. (Our presumed desire not to have the place blow up in our face any sooner than necessary would seem to militate against that option.) But it's certainly nice to know that we've equipped him with enough patronage opportunities and ammunition for blackmail to give him a running start, isn't it?

Think about it. We invaded Iraq. We occupy Iraq. Why exactly was Chalabi's INC -- itself a creation of the US government, though later a bamboozler of the same -- allowed to seize the files of the Iraqi secret police? Obviously, this is really more of a rhetorical than an actual question. But we know from post-Communist Eastern Europe -- and actually countless other sorrowful examples -- that the possession of secret police archives in a formerly authoritarian or totalitarian state is an invitation to abuse, corruption, blackmail and all manner of bad acts, if not entrusted to the surest, most ethical and responsible of hands. Needless to say, those aren't adjectives that leap from the lips when talking about this guy.

With all the multiple and mushrooming investigations of Chalabi and possible wrongdoing he may have committed, rather than continue to give him taxpayer dollars, perhaps we might better spend our time considering how to take him into custody while we're still the sovereign authority in Iraq and have it within our power.

From a reader ...

I can't help wondering who at the White House reviewed Clark's book and cleared it for publication? And where will they be working next week? They sure don't act like they saw this one coming. Maybe the warning never made it "up the chain". I guess it wouldn't be the first time that happened, eh?

This missive not only made me cough up some of the soda I was drinking this morning, it's also on the mark and raises a puzzling question.

Playing by the strictest of rules, of course, what the NSC bureaucrats see for classification purposes shouldn't end up in the hands of the politicals either at NSC or the White House political office. But from the first months of the administration we've seen that those proprieties aren't given a lot of attention. In any case, right out of the gate the White House seemed to have good chapter and verse talking points prepared, challenging Clarke and points raised in his book. So I think we can dispense with any notion that they hadn't given his book a pretty close read.

And that again raises the question: why has the response been so contradictory and feeble? Why, as the reader puts it, have they acted as though they didn't see this coming?

Partly, I think the answer is the same as I gave in a column I wrote for The Hill a few weeks ago: "We’re looking at a White House that is increasingly insular and isolated. Most specifically, its missteps show how deeply out of touch it is with how much its public credibility has atrophied over the last eight months."

The White House can be a very isolated and isolating environment -- especially on the downward side of the mountain. And I think this is a large part of what we're seeing. Many of the challenges they've faced over the last two or three months are ones they might easily have weathered as recently as eight or nine months ago. And they keep reacting as though they have little grasp of how much the ground has moved beneath their feet during those intervening months.

One other point. We certainly don't know yet. But I think the early signs are that this perjury attack on Clarke was a major, major blunder. I don't think the perpetrators of this ugly stunt even thought they'd ever get into a courtroom. That wasn't the point: this was watercooler ammo. Something you get on to the news so that when Mr. X asks Mr. Y over the watercooler what he makes of Clarke's testimony, Mr. Y responds, "Hell, that guy? He's probably gonna get indicted for perjury. You can't believe anything that guy says."

Still, Clarke -- who was unflappable on the shows this morning -- and Hill Democrats seem to have immediately called Frist & Co.'s bluff. Not only have they welcomed the release of Clarke's materials, they've called for the release of more documents, correspondence and testimony from him and Rice. Selective declassification would be very difficult in the current context -- and could complicate efforts to keep so much other stuff out of the public's view.

This was a very high stakes bluff, not least because it looked like the worst sort of Nixonian tactic, using the coercive machinery of the state to bludgeon political opponents. But if they were going to play hardball at this level, they should have been certain they had him dead to rights. And it seems like they didn't. Now even a number of partisan Republicans I know feel like this looked ugly and wrong. To use the Napoleonic aphorism again: this was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.

When you walk into a crowded room, walk up to a man, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, make sure the gun's loaded. If not, you have the worst of all worlds -- like the White House.

Department of threading it awfully fine.

From tonight's 60 Minutes interview ...

ED BRADLEY: The secretary of state, defense, the director of the CIA, have all testified in public under oath before the commission. If - if you can talk to us and other news programs, why can't you talk to the commission in public and under oath?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle here ... it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.

ED BRADLEY: But there are some people who look at this and say, "But this - this was an unprecedented event. Nothing like this ever happened to this country before. And this is an occasion where you can put that executive privilege aside. It's a big enough issue to talk in public."

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: It is an unprecedented event. We've said that many, many times. But this commission is rightly not concentrating on what happened on the day of September 11.. So, this is not a matter of what happened on that day, as extraordinary as it is - as it was. This is a matter of policy. And we have yet to find an example of a national security advisor, sitting national security advisor, who has - been willing to testify on matters of policy.

To call this explanation tortured is to give human rights abusers a bad name.

Look again at these last two sentences of Rice's

Each word of these two sentences was chosen to fit an unhelpful set of facts.

Sandy Berger twice testified in 1990s -- once in 1994 on Haiti and then again in 1997 during the Asian campaign contribution hearings. In 1994 though Berger was Deputy National Security Advisor. Constitutionally, it's not at all clear to me why a Deputy National Security Advisor should be more obliged to testify before congress than his boss. But that's their out in this case.

Then in 1997, when he was NSC Director, he was testifying in the course of an investigation into a scandal -- but certainly one with policy implications, since I'm pretty sure what they were asking him about was whether money affected policy. Why this is a constitutionally significant distinction is lost on me too. But again, that's their out -- it wasn't about 'policy'.

National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski testified before congress in 1980. But again, that was in the context of an investigation -- into an accusation that Billy Carter, the then-president's brother, had tried to influence the US government on behalf of Libya.

But, again, that's not 'policy'. So apparently by Rice's standard, it doesn't count.

I think there's a growing realization in Washington this weekend that Rice is going to testify, whether she realizes it yet or not. Among several reasons why is the fact that her rationales for not testifying are just becoming more and more visibly bogus, drawing tortured distinctions of no clear constitutional import.

She might just as easily have argued that they have found no record of a National Security Advisor named Rice testifying before congress, or a female NSC Director testifying, or one who served under a Republican president. Each would have made about as much sense. And on top of this you have the fact that the separation of powers argument is questionable at best because the commission itself is not an arm of congress.

A deal (though perhaps a tacit one) between Kerry and Nader? This AP story is pretty vague. But something seems to be afoot.

In a moment I'll discuss Richard Clarke's very strong performances on the two Sunday shows I watched this morning (Russert and Blitzer). But let me first note Richard Perle's comments in response to Clarke's on CNN -- which just finished up a few

Given the character assassination and attacks peddled by administration surrogates over the last week, I did not know quite what to expect. But I must say I was surprised.

I don't think I heard Perle utter one ad hominem attack. There was some disinformation about operational links between Iraq and al Qaida. But by and large he argued that Clarke simply didn't grasp the nature of the war on terrorism. And he focused on what really is the central issue -- whether the war on terrorism is principally a battle against states (which sponsor terrorist groups or, we might say, launder violence through them) or transnational terrorist organizations who are not fundamentally reliant on state sponsors.

That's the essential question. And in a new column out in Newsweek Fareed Zakaria tackles it.