CJR's Douglas McCollam has a great review of the INC's campaign to influence the US media.

Slate's Eric Umansky asks, if the US may be mythologizing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to the point of building him up and giving him credit for attacks beyond his actual control.

Indeed, Zarqawi may be only a figurehead around whom Iraqi fighters are rallying, not someone directing operations there. "Most are not members of his group in a formal sense," one insurgent told Time. "But everyone, especially the foreigners in Iraq who share his ideals of jihad, considers himself part of Attawhid"...

The Bush administration has an obvious motivation to place an Osama-connected outsider at the center of the attacks. And it's possible that this analysis is correct. But one has to wonder: Even if Zarqawi is playing a key role in the Iraqi insurgency, is it wise for the United States to keep giving him credit for it?

Investigative journalist Jason Vest has the backstory on the famous "Anonymous" I guarantee you will want to read. The upshot? Anonymous doesn't want to be anonymous, and the CIA's story that his identity must not be revealed in order to protect his security is just a convenient cover story - convenient for the Agency, that is.

The WaPo's Edward Cody interviews Ahmad Chalabi. His arch nemesis Paul Bremer and Bremer's spokesman Dan Senor are gone, Chalabi points out, while he remains, and is urging some changes in how the US left things, specifically to the Iraqi intelligence services and finances:

A good place to start, Chalabi suggested, would be with the new Iraqi National Intelligence Service set up by the CIA to replace Hussein's much-feared services. The new intelligence apparatus, hundreds strong, was organized in secret without a known budget or statute, he said.

The director, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, was recruited by the CIA station in the Jordanian capital Amman after he fled Iraq in 1991, Chalabi said, and has been a favorite ever since. A member of Iraq's Turkmen minority, Shahwani reports directly to the prime minister but is closely supervised by CIA officers, Chalabi added. Under their guidance, the service has turned much of its focus toward neighboring Iran, he said.

According to a report prepared in April by knowledgeable officials for members of the now-disbanded Governing Council, the service roster is two-thirds Sunni Muslim and one-fourth Shiite in a country that is about 60 percent Shiite, giving rise to fears that the new service has incorporated many former members of Hussein's Sunni-dominated services.

"This won't fly here," Chalabi said.

Next, Chalabi said, the new government should grab control of the country's finances. Specifically, he said, it should demand a full accounting of how Bremer, who had check-signing authority, spent funds from the Development Fund for Iraq, a pool of cash from Iraqi oil sales designated to pay for reconstruction...

In addition, Chalabi said, the U.S. Embassy, which replaced the occupation authority on Monday, has sought power to disburse some of the funds even though political authority has been returned to the Iraqi government. Allawi's government should insist that the money flow exclusively through the Iraqi Finance Ministry, Chalabi said.

Isn't the Iraqi Finance Ministry still in INC hands? We have to turn to Iraq'd to find out.

UPDATE: Iraqd's Spencer Ackerman informs us that the Iraqi Finance Ministry is headed by the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He writes:

The Iraqi finance minister is SCIRI -- Adel Abdel Mehldi.

Yet he attended a Jesuit high school in Baghdad – who knew? – with Allawi & Chalabi.

Small world.

Is the US conflicted over conflict diamonds? My colleague working in Sierra Leone sends this Financial Times article, highlighting this passage:

"Alex Yearsley, of London-based Global Witness, alleges that the CIA and FBI long had tried to publicly minimize links between conflict diamonds and Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida. The U.S. security agents feared exposure of their own longtime links with Charles Taylor, the ousted Liberian leader who played a main role in West Africa's insurgencies and blood diamond trade, Yearsley said. Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001, Yearsley claimed in a telephone interview."

That is pretty explosive. No wonder Washington has been so wishy washy about pushing for Taylor's handover to the special court in Sierre Leone to face war crimes charges.

Read the whole article, here.

Karadzic arrest imminent? I have gotten my hopes up many many times only to have them dashed. And I am naturally then much more skeptical about such reports. But I am hearing it on pretty good authority that if the Bosnian Serbs don't handover notorious war criminal Radovan Karadzic within the week, they will be strapped with big economic sanctions. And I am hearing they are likely to turn him over. The jury is still out. Karadzic has slipped out of the noose many many times. But the victory of Boris Tadic in Serbia's presidential elections this past week augurs well for this long overdue move to finally happen. Keep your fingers crossed.

Monday Evening Update: The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum points to a recent Russ Baker article from that magazine on why Karadzic belongs in the Hague, as well as to a Reuters report today that Bosnia viceroy Paddy Ashdown sacked 60 Bosnian Serb officials.

The West's top peace envoy punished Bosnia's Serbs Wednesday for failing to arrest top war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic, dismissing 60 senior officials in the most dramatic such move since the 1992-95 war...

"In all, I am removing 60 people today, 11 will be removed indefinitely, 48 may return to public life once Radovan Karadzic is in The Hague," the veteran British diplomat [Paddy Ashdown] said.

Other measures against officials in the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia's two autonomous entities, included European Union travel bans as well as freezing of assets.

It's about time. Next month is the nine year anniversary of the massacre of more than 7,000 -- some reports say 8,000 -- Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the UN safe haven of Srebrenica, by Bosnian Serb forces.

The US has expelled two Iranian security guards with Tehran's mission to the UN, after the two were caught repeatedly taking video of the New York subway line.

According to the U.S. official, the first photographing incident took place in June 2002, the second in November 2003, and the third occurred recently, the official said.

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in November that two Iranian citizens were questioned while taking video images of the subway tracks on the No. 7 line in Queens.

He said the two men, stopped by a transit officer, claimed diplomatic immunity and were ultimately not charged with any wrongdoing. The commissioner declined to label their behavior suspicious, but called it "unusual."

Unusual, indeed. What could this have been about? Espionage, yes, but to what ends? Who knows. It's a bit unsettling this has been going on since 2002. It would seem that if what they were up to was harmless, it could have all been cleared up with a brief conversation and they would not need to bother to claim diplomatic immunity.

Meantime, this other story on Iran is also disturbing. Essentially, the US is accusing Iran of having used one now-razed Tehran site, Lavizan, for nuclear research. Iran says, it was being used for "military research & development." That sounds a bit ambiguous, doesn't it? From Agence France Press:

"Our inspectors went yesterday to Lavizan (the suspect site). The Iranians said it was a former R and D military site," International Atomic Energy Agency director general ElBaradei told reporters...

The Iranians said the site "was used as a physics institute and later on for biotechnology R and D ... for medicine," ElBaradei said.

Suspicion has surrounded the site since satellite images from a US commercial firm showed that buildings which had been there in August had been razed to the ground by March and that topsoil had been taken away.

The Washington think tank the Institute for Science and International Security(ISIS) said on its website that this set alarm bells ringing "because it is the type of measure Iran would need to take if it was trying to defeat the powerful environmental sampling capabilities of IAEA inspectors."

"I have to wonder if it is the whole story, particularly since they took down all the buildings and razed the site," ISIS scientist David Albright told AFP Tuesday, referring to Iran's claim there was no weapons work in Lavizan.

"Their declaration is rather vague and looks like it covers all the bases. Medical research has to be mentioned" to explain whole body count machines found at the site, machines which measure radiation contamination, he said.

Remember, Albright was not one of those crying wolf about Iraq's nuclear program before the war. Indeed, he was among the most skeptical about the administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear program, particularly, the aluminum tubes claim. Here, Albright indicates more reasons to be concerned.

MORE: More from Albright speaking on Mid East WMD proliferation at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy this past week.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman notices, that apparently we almost went to war with Iran last July. Isn't it a bit hard to believe that with thousands of international war correspondents all over Iraq last summer, and tens of thousands of troops, humanitarians, and others in the area, that somehow no one reported this til now?

Wonder if the US and allies were wrong about Iraq, but right about Iran? Preemption has been discredited as a US foreign policy strategy, at least politically, if not strategically. The US is facing an incredible crisis of confidence in its very intelligence on WMD, its reliance on exiles with a certain agenda, its lack of human intelligence, the problem of the perception of the incredible politicization of US intelligence, and the uncertainty of interpretation of results gathered from signals intelligence, satellite imagery and foreign governments. Relying on diplomacy until the election at least seems to be the plan. From reporting in this area in recent weeks and months, and believe me, I am aware that I am no expert, I am convinced Iran is set to become the foreign policy priority for the US in coming months. I gather from experts coming from a range of of political inclinations however the sense that the Iran nuclear issue is a genuinely tough not to crack. If diplomacy fails, what options are open? I also wonder whether some people on this side of the pond have been persuaded there are people they would be prepared to work with on that end of the problem, and not just people from the opposition groups either; but some who may be very close to the leadership itself, but indicate they are prepared to chart a new course. Can they be trusted? And what is the consequence of US-Iran foreign policy being conducted almost entirely in secrecy, by proxy, and numerous back channels?

Look out your window. Are pink porcine farm animals soaring through the air? Because Bob Dreyfuss has found a point of hearty agreement with the neoconservatives: the time for NATO is past, Bob declares.

Finally there’s something I agree with the neocons about: NATO. That organization is a dinosaur of the Cold War whose extinction is long overdue. Now, the neocons—whose Iraq project ran afoul of old Europe—seem ready to get rid of NATO, too.

I couldn't disagree with both Bob and the neocons more. I think NATO is indispensable, and no where more than in the area of peacekeeping. In fact, I think NATO should be the successor to the mostly failed project of UN peacekeeping. NATO has shown in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan that it is a far more effective peace enforcement institution than anything else out there -- and places like Darfur are crying out for intervention.

If you are subscriber, or you snag a copy on the US Airways shuttle or something, see my article on UN reform that addresses some of these ideas in the current July issue of the American Prospect.

Why is Iran declaring its intentions to continue construction of nuclear centrifuges? Not clear, but the US is pushing the IAEA to formally report Iran's noncompliance to the UN Security Council. Meantime, the Sun story points to this explosive report:

Western intelligence officials believe Iran's Revolutionary Guards tried to cover up a nuclear accident triggered when weapons-grade uranium was being shipped from North Korea.

The accident allegedly caused Tehran's new international airport to be sealed off by Revolutionary Guard commanders within hours of its official opening on May 9.

The first scheduled commercial landing at the airport - an Iran Air civilian flight from Dubai - was intercepted by two Iranian air force jets and diverted to Isfahan, about 300 kilometres away, even though it was low on fuel. At the same time, trucks blocked the runway to prevent other landings...

In December 2002, according to officials with access to the airport, a North Korean cargo jet delivering nuclear technology, including some weapons-grade uranium, was being unloaded at night under military supervision.

A container slipped and cracked on the tarmac, and everyone in the area was taken away for thorough medical examinations.

Crews from the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, wearing protective suits, were brought in to clean up the spillage.

When trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime, one looks for two things: means, and motive. What do we think the motive is of those sources who would seek to discredit the testimony of an individual who is apparently prepared to tell the story of where he got some forged documents? The motive would clearly seem to be: to intimidate that individual, in order to prevent him from telling his story, and by extension, to attempt to prevent the truth from getting out. Who would want to prevent the truth from getting out? It would seem to me, only those who have something to fear from the true story getting out. In other words, those who have knowledge of the crime.

It looks to be a summer of many interesting revelations.

The BBC's Matt Frei pointed out tonight, that what NATO leaders are discussing vis a vis a NATO role in Iraq, is so minor, it is telling: whether NATO should conduct the training of Iraqi forces inside Iraq, or outside Iraq. The pro-US contingent at NATO is pushing for the training to be done inside Iraq. France and Germany are pushing for the training to be done outside Iraq. Either way, NATO's involvement in Iraq is set to remain symbolic at most.

Update: Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports Monday from the NATO summit in Istanbul, that the issue was never resolved.

The NATO statement on training indicated that it would be up to individual countries to decide whether to contribute instructors and whether they would teach inside or outside Iraq. NATO ambassadors are to work out details of a training scheme with Allawi's government "on an urgent basis," the statement said.

The lack of specifics reflected persisting differences over how deeply NATO should become involved in Iraq... French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said they would not send instructors to Iraq.

Good news from Serbia: a reformer, Boris Tadic, has won the presidential elections, making him Serbia's first democratically elected president since World War II. Tadic, 46, is a good guy, a true "liberal democrat," from the Democratic Party of assassinated former Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic. A Sarajevo born psychology professor at Belgrade University, Tadic has long been an advocate of sending war crimes suspects to the Hague. I got to know some of his staff from the bad old days when they were risking their lives in the opposition to Milosevic, and they were impressive, serious, young, pro-western, and pro-human rights. This is especially good news because Tadic's victory means the defeat of an ally of the notorious assassinated war crimes suspect and war profiteer, Zeljko Raznatovic, a.k.a. Arkan.

What a classy guy.

US parts found at suspected Iran nuclear site. So reports Reuters.

A radiation monitoring device spotted in Iran at a razed site where Washington suspects Iran conducted covert atomic bomb-related research was itself made in the United States and sold directly to Tehran, sources said.

A Western diplomat and an independent nuclear expert who follow the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told Reuters the radiation detection device -- called a "whole body counter" -- was identified as having been made by the Connecticut-based firm Canberra Industries, Inc.

The disclosure could prove embarrassing to Washington which has accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and has called on countries to crack down on exports of even seemingly innocent machinery that could be used in weapons programs.

Certainly the fact US industry might even unwittingly be involved in furthering the nuclear aspirations of a charter member of the axis of evil might be embarrassing for Washington.

And Matt is right. Iran may very well have emerged the winner of the US campagin in Iraq. Iran and the Iran nuclear issue also seem to be emerging as the predominant preoccupation of US foreign policy. Task forces at the Council of Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council (led by Brent Scowcroft), and elsewhere are currently working on position papers on what US foreign policy to Iran should be.

Yesterday, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who has been criticized by some in the past for being too pragmatic and pro-(oil) business friendly about Iran, sounded a note of real alarm about Iran's nuclear program in an oped in the Washington Post:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just rebuked Iran for failing to cooperate fully with international inspectors who are examining whether Tehran is meeting its nonproliferation commitments.

How concerned should we be about this development? What does it mean? By its own admission, Iran has been taking steps to develop the capability to enrich uranium...While Iran says its activities are solely for peaceful production of nuclear power and are permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, once enrichment capability exists, a major barrier to producing a nuclear weapon virtually vanishes. The IAEA condemnation is an indication that the world may be on the verge of a major breakdown of the nonproliferation regime, to say nothing of a huge new source of instability in a critically important region.

We are at a critical moment. Are we serious in our efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, or will we watch the world descend into a maelstrom where weapons-grade nuclear material is plentiful and unimaginable destructive capability is available to any country or group with a grudge against society?

What does Scowcroft propose?

Our goal instead should be to delegitimize the spread of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities to any country, because these capabilities are the linchpin of any program to develop nuclear weapons.

Hawkish undersecretary of state John Bolton discussed what he called the administration's "counterproliferation" program (he prefers that over the traditional "nonproliferation" he said) and Iran at AEI and on the Hill yesterday. You can read his AEI remarks here [note, link to .pdf file]. But given the report in Reuters yesterday cited above about US company parts being found at a suspected former Iranian nuclear site casts Bolton's remarks in a new light:

On February 11, at the National Defense University, President Bush gave what is arguably one of the most “wonkish” speeches ever delivered by a President. I liked it. He detailed a number of proposals that made clear the Administration’s overarching approach: the frontlines in our nonproliferation strategy must extend beyond the well-known rogue states to the trade routes and entities that are engaged in supplying the countries of greatest proliferation concern.

Trade routes and entities that include Connecticut, I take it?

MORE: As Tim Dunlop reminds us about the old joke about Iraq, we know they have weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts. They pick us up too.

Re: Hersh's story on Israel and the Kurds. This today from Ha'aretz:

Paper says Turkish FM leaked Mossad, Kurd story

By Zvi Bar'el

ANKARA - Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is the source of the
leak to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh that dozens of Israeli
Mossad agents are ostensibly in northern Iraq. The reliable Turkish
newspaper Cumhuriyet yesterday stated that Gul, along with two advisers and a spokesman, had a breakfast meeting with Hersh on May 27, on which occasion he gave the information to Hersh.

Official Turkish spokesmen denied the report in Jumhurriyet, dismissing
it as "a report by an opposition paper," but sources at the paper
insisted the report is "correct, verified, and approved by highly informed
sources."

Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani categorically denied Hersh's report on
Wednesday.

Turkish sources yesterday confirmed to Haaretz that despite the
denials, official Turkey still does not completely believe that no Israeli
agents are present in northern Iraq. According to these sources, Israeli
and Turkish officials held talks over the past year regarding the
possibility of cooperation with the Kurds. The Israeli side indeed declared
that any cooperation of this kind would only occur in coordination with
Turkey and not behind its back. However, "Turkish sensitivity to the
possibility that Israel would exploit an opportunity prevents the Turkish
government from relaxing. Perhaps that is why, if it was indeed Gul who
passed on the information, his sole purpose was to nip the idea in the
bud," they said.

In any event, Israel has made it clear to Turkey that Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon decided not to open a channel of cooperation with the Kurds.
For now, that decision is blocking proposals submitted by Israeli
intelligence officials to Sharon to try to reestablish the connection with
the Kurds.

Many interesting threads to pull from this. Turkey of course has long been anxious about Kurdish separatism; the fear that it would lead to greater autonomy for Iraq's Kurds and subsequently demands for autonomy by Turkey's Kurds was Ankara's principle hang up about a US-led intervention in Iraq. But for nearly a decade, Turkish-Israeli military to military relations have been very strong. So, what does the allegation that the Hersh story was sourced by the Turkish foreign minister indicate about how Ankara is viewing Sharon these days? Is there something to the allegations in Hersh's report about Israel covertly aiding Iraqi Kurdish militias, or is it all based in Turkish conspiracy theories and paranoia about US and Israeli intentions and Kurdish separatism? That remains to be seen, but surely the answer is to be found -- or not -- in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.

Let's hope Hersh comes through with a follow up clarifying all of this.

Meantime, what does the information in this Ha'aretz story say about the evolution of relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv? What had cemented strong relations between Turkey and Israel was a few shared strategic enemies, particularly Syria and Iran, as well as a shared principal ally: Washington. Particularly, Washington over Europe. All that has shifted, with improved Turkish-Syrian relations, somewhat improved Turkish-Iranian relations, improved Turkish-European relations, and deteriorating Turkish-US relations...as well as the rise of a (moderate) Islamist government in Ankara, and a more hardline Israeli government under Ariel Sharon. Neocons have long cherished the idea of a Washington-Turkey-Israel alliance, even over Washington's long-time alliances with NATO and certainly over Europe. But according to my Turkish sources, no one has done more to alienate Turkey from the US than the neocons, particularly Paul Wolfowitz who manages to alienate Turks with every public statement since the run up to the war. [According to Turkish sources, Wolfowitz had said something along the lines of, if what was keeping Turkey from joining the US-led alliance invading Iraq was Turkish public opinion, that Ankara should just disregard it. Not terribly democratic.]

It will be an interesting NATO summit in Istanbul this weekend.

One other point a contact raised with me yesterday. There are multiple reports of an Israeli presence in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. US diplomatic advisors have told me for instance of Israeli advisors to Kurdish Iraqi leaders, and Israeli involvement in the rise of a central bank in Kurdish Iraq. Whether there is some sort of covert relationship between Israel and Kurdish militias I have no knowledge of. But what this contact suggested to me yesterday was that if such contact exists, the real question to ask: is it private, or is it governmental? He hinted strongly that it was private.

Secondly, there's an interesting historical backdrop to this story that I was not previously aware of. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Israel was apparently very close to the father of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, a mullah. Apparently, Israel helped mullah Barzani flee Iraq when he was ill to get medical care in New York, where he ultimately died. Why this relationship? Two things. There were apparently lots of Jewish people from the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, many of them fled to Israel during Saddam's time, but there remains that tie. [In fact, some of them have the last name Barzani.] Secondly, as my contact explained the relationship between Israel and the Barzani family and the Iraqi Kurds to me, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

More: Here's a nice profile of Hersh from the Chicago Tribune (registration required). This is priceless:

[Hersh] inhabits a reality we can barely glimpse, crosscut by the chatter of encrypted satellite signals. For national security officials, leaking to Hersh is "generally better than writing a memo to the president," remarks his friend and competitor --Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus.

In recent months, The New Yorker editor David Remnick says, Hersh "seems to begin every phone call with the line, `It's worse than you think.'"

Phil Carter asks, why we should care about Sudan:

Why should we care about Sudan though? I could make the liberal internationalist argument that America should care about genocide wherever it happens because it's our obligation to care as a world leader. I could make a soft argument about the need for moral leadership, and how we should do here what we failed to do in Rwanda. (See Samantha Power's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Problem from Hell" for more on these arguments.) But instead, I'll point out one not-so-insignificant fact:

Q: What nation hosted Osama Bin Laden and allowed Al Qaeda to thrive during the 1990s when Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan didn't want him?

A: Sudan.

We let states fail, and failed states crumble, at our own peril.

And discusses what it would take to stop the fighting and genocide in Sudan, here.

Writing in the Washington Times, Joel Mowbray contends a June 3 NYT article saying that Pentagon officials were being polygraphed in connection with the Chalabi case is wrong. In fact, he says, the FBI has conducted polygraphs of officials, but in Baghdad, not at the Pentagon itself.

To a number of civilian employees at the Pentagon, a New York Times story on June 3 came as quite a jolt: Some of them apparently already had been polygraphed as part of an investigation into Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi.

But it never happened. Nearly three weeks later, it appears that the implicated civilian employees at the Pentagon have not been polygraphed...

In fairness to the Times, it appears that the FBI has initiated some sort of investigation, including limited use of polygraph testing — but on people who were based in Baghdad.
The June 3 article, however, makes no such allowance and, in fact, is quite clear in identifying polygraphed employees as being "at the Pentagon." The lead sentence is unambiguous in announcing, "Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon."

Further down in the article, readers are informed that "officials familiar with the investigation say that they are ... likely to interview senior Pentagon officials." Three weeks later, it appears that has yet to happen — but the taint from the smear lingers.

So, then, who is being polygraphed in Baghdad?

Famous for DC. Spotted Michael Moore, Wonkette!, Mark Shields, several senators at the DC premier of Farenheit 911. Human Rights Campaigners outside with great blue signs and rolls of stickers saying, "George Bush: YOU'RE FIRED" which everyone had pasted to their chests. Moore gave them the thumbs up.

H.G. Wells on Africa, 1918. Some things have changed -- the League of Nations for which Wells was consulting has become the UN, for instance; shockingly much has stayed the same. As he writes:

...A practical consequence of this disarmament idea must be an effective control of the importation of arms into...Africa. That rat at the dykes of civilization, that ultimate expression of political scoundrelism, the gun runner, has to be kept under and stamped out in Africa as everywhere. A disarmament commission that has no forces available to prevent the arms trade will be just another Hague convention, just another vague, well intentioned, futile gesture.

Cynicism about the effectiveness of Hague conventions banning arms trafficking dating back to 1918....

I love this TNR series.

Darfur, here, here, and here. Kristof is putting together suggestions for what one can do, in the meantime, he's pointing people here.

"EPA: Amount of toxins in air, water and land increased at record level in 2002," Knight-Ridder reports.

The amount of toxic pollutants in America's air, water and land jumped 5 percent in 2002 - the highest increase since the federal government started keeping track of toxins in 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

God, this is so depressing. We have got. to. get. rid. of. these. guys.

Juan Cole is brutal here on the issue of the two Shakirs.

There isn't actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Here's Hayes' take.

The WaPo's Glenn Kessler agreed to be questioned by the Plame special prosecutor on his two phone conversations witih I. Lewis Libby last July. Apparently, Lewis signed a waiver asking Kessler to testify because Libby says he did not mention Plame's name in the interviews. [Kessler's statement, via Romenesko].

Michael Ledeen writes, the Iranians want to defeat Bush.

So the Iranians seized some British "warships" yesterday, and arrested eight British naval officers...

Why?

...Because they were planning to attack (or have their surrogates attack) the oil terminals, silly. And why attack the oil terminals? Because they want to defeat President Bush in November, and they figure if they can get the price of oil up to around $60 a barrel, he'll lose to Kerry.

Frankly, it seems the Bush administration has given the mullahs a pretty good deal. Its chosen Iraqi pet Ahmad Chalabi was allegedly providing them sensitive US intelligence, the Americans removed their life-long enemy Saddam and have delivered them a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and the Bush administration has so overstretched the US military in Iraq that it hardly has the military resources, international (or domestic) credibility, or intellectual capacity to deal with Iran's or North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Why would they want to defeat him?

UPDATE: Gregory Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch has more.

The Anaconda Strategy. David Ignatius has an inside source on how the administration's grand designs for Iraq devolved in the past few months into an effort to find a way to get out.

I'm told the NYT's Douglas Jehl is going to reveal the identity of Imperial Hubris author Anonymous in the coming days.

Update: Well, partially identify him, as "a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999."

Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda...

In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a "sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities." Another new book, "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike.

More: Reader JM writes, "If Steve Coll's 'Mike,', who headed the Bin Laden or 'Alec' Station from 1996-99 is, in fact, Anonymous, then this excerpt about him from James Bamford's just published "A Pretext For War" becomes interesting":

Increasingly under Mike ____, its CIA chief, Alec Station began taking on the feel of the king's executioner. After the decision against blowing up the Tarnak Farm and the hunting camp, Mike unleashed a blast of angry e-mails to an assortment of officials.

Some saw him as an unkempt, tactless, annoying manager who had little understanding of the international ramifications of some of his suggestions. Killing innocent women, children and members of the royal families in harebrained, and likely to fail, cruise missile assassinations was the best way to increase, not decrease, hatred and terrorism directed against the United States.

Complaints began coming in, even from the White House. Mike later acknowledged that many even within his own agancy believed he and his unit had gone off the deep end. "The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic" he said. In 1999, after three years as head of Alec Station, Mike transferred to another job at CIA headquarters.

-- from p.216, James Bamford A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, Doubleday, 2004.

Reader BH points out that Anonymous' "first book also says that Anonymous 'trained as a professional historian specializing in the diplomatic history of the British Empire.' (p. 277)."

I'm told he is one of the few high ranking CIA people to have served in both the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence.

Wolfowitz on Chalabi. Testifying at the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted Tuesday that the Ahmed Chalabi's organization provided information that helped U.S. forces in Iraq, but conceded that some of the Iraqi politician's recent behavior was ``puzzling.''

Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, denied that Chalabi was ever a favorite of the Pentagon, as he has been widely described...

``There's a mixed picture there,'' he said. ``We know from our commanders that some of the intelligence that his organization has provided us has saved American lives and enabled us to capture some key enemy targets.''

Responding to questions from Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee's top Democrat, Wolfowitz would only say that many Iraqi exiles opposed to Saddam Hussein had contacts with Iran, Iraq's enemy in the 1980s.

``Nothing in Iraq is black and white. I don't think I know of any figure we're dealing with who hasn't had in one way or another to compromise with the incredibly difficult circumstances of the last 35 years of that country's history,'' Wolfowitz said. ``It's not surprising that many of them - and Chalabi's not the only one - made contacts with countries like Iran or Syria or others.''

Chalabi has blamed the CIA for his problems and denied wrongdoing. The CIA and Chalabi have been at odds for years.

``I am surprised that he seems to be the target, for many years, of particular animus from some parts of this government,'' Wolfowitz said. ``But on the other hand, there are aspects of his recent behavior that are puzzling to me.'' He did not elaborate on what those activities were.

Vast majority of Iraqis still alive, the Onion reports, via Eric Umansky.

Kim Sun II, who was killed today by his terrorist captors in Iraq, was, the Post reports:

an evangelical Christian who had majored in Arabic, English and theology with university scholarships. [Kim] was working as a translator for a private South Korean contractor providing clothes and food to the U.S. military in Iraq, hoping to save enough money to fulfill his dream of becoming a missionary, his family said. "How could it have come to this?" a distraught neighbor, in tears, shouted at reporters as she consoled Kim's parents. "How can we have faith in the world anymore?"

Seeing this news and the grim picture of his parents one feels the same. But it also makes one angry. Kim's terrorist captors are reportedly associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist the Bush administration failed to kill when it got the chance almost two years ago. Why has the Bush administration been so ineffective at targeting the real terrorists now flourishing in Iraq, since the war?

The facts speak for themselves. Iraq was not cooperating with al Qaeda or its offshoots like Zarqawi in a serious way before the war, certainly not to the degree that members of the Saudi and Pakistani security and intelligence services were. Zarqawi of course was mostly operating in northern Iraq, in terroritory under the control of the US no fly zone - a fact the Bush administration would like us not to remember. By any reading of the news, Iraq today must certainly rank the world HQ for Islamist radical terrorists, and is certainly one of the most insecure places in the world, a misery for its citizenry and foreign occupiers alike.

The State Department's radically revised numbers in its re-released Patterns of Global Terrorism report for the year 2003 make it impossible to show how much terrorism increased in Iraq itself in the year the US invaded and conducted a disatrous post-war turned-back-into-a-war. [And, ridiculously to my mind, the State Department keeps post-invasion Iraq in the list of "state sponsors of terrorism," even as Iraq by May 2003 was under US-led occupation and (incompetent, insecure) administration. Nevertheless, the graph here, of the Total International Attacks by Region, 1998-2003, shows the spike in the number of incidents of terrorism in the Middle East overall in the past five years. And do note that the State Department does not count attacks that wound and kill military personnel, including bombings of buildings and vehicles that kill US troops, for instance, reports of which we hear nearly daily from Iraq, as incidents of terror.

[Many thx to KD for explaining how to post graphics, and to DL for formatting suggestions.]

I think Daniel Pipes gets this wrong, but he's asking an interesting set of questions.

The Iranian government learned recently that American intelligence has deciphered its codes and can read its mail...Who is to blame for this development?...

[Perhaps] Chalabi did tell them that Washington had cracked the code. In which case:

· Perhaps he made this up and just happened to be right. (Plausible: Chalabi reportedly took steps in 1995 to trick the Iranians.)

· Or he thought he was providing disinformation but actually was telling the truth. (Unlikely: Too convoluted.)

· Or he knowingly divulged classified information. (Unlikely: Why should the Americans give Chalabi, a British subject known to be in close contact with the Iranian regime, a crown jewel of U.S. state secrets?)

Perhaps the question to ask is not, "Why should the Americans give Chalabi...a crown jewel of US state secrets?" as if it were a deliberate policy. But rather, how did one American without, presumably, authorized access, learn this information? Is what existed not a conspiracy, but more of an accident, born of a chaotic atmosphere that lacked the discipline of the home office? Of course, this theory would only explain how Chalabi allegedly might have learned the news, not why he allegedly passed it to the Iranians.

How right Matt Yglesias is, when he writes, regarding the al Qaeda-Iraq canard, that "Bush’s words may be semantically secure, but his intent has always been to mislead." Check it out.

Seems 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman may have his names mixed up. [Given that Lehman was apparently getting his information from allies of Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, what does this indicate about how scrupulous was the OSP's intelligence analysis? All those foreign names?]

This from the WaPo, via Atrios:

An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein's private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said yesterday.

Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda." Although he said the identity "still has to be confirmed," Lehman introduced the information on NBC's "Meet the Press" to counter a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."

Yesterday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar-sounding names.

One of them is Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, identified as an al Qaeda "fixer" in Malaysia. Officials say he served as an airport greeter for al Qaeda in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, at a gathering for members who were to be involved in the attacks on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Iraqi military documents, found last year, listed a similar name, Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, on a roster of Hussein's militia, Saddam's Fedayeen.

"By most reckoning that would be someone else" other than the airport greeter, said the administration official...He added that the identification issue is still being studied but "it doesn't look like a match to most analysts."

In an interview yesterday, Lehman said it is still possible the man in Kuala Lumpur was affiliated with Hussein, even if he isn't the man on the Fedayeen roster. "It's one more instance where this is an intriguing possibility that needs to be run to ground," Lehman said. "The most intriguing part of it is not whether or not he was in the Fedayeen, but whether or not the guy who attended Kuala Lumpur had any connections to Iraqi intelligence. . . . We don't know."

Still possible that Azzawi might, in the great scheme of probability in the universe, be affiliated with Iraqi intelligence? That would be the triumph of fantasy over probability. He might also be a billion other things. What does Lehman want Azzawi to be? Iraqi intelligence of course. Does that make it true? No.

Spencer Ackerman has more on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, [not to confuse matters, but that would seem to actually be the same identity as the Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col. described in the WaPo piece above, Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, who is not to be confused with Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, the al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia. For future reference, Ackerman refers to the Iraqi Fedayeen colonel in his post as "Shakir"].

But because he is working from the background on Shakir provided by the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, Spencer would seem to be repeating the mistake that Hayes and indeed Lehman made. Conflating the identity of Shakir the Iraqi, and Shakir Azzawi, the al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia.

Indeed, it is confusing. Good for Pincus for clearing it up.

Here's Newsday's Knut Royce's take:

The CIA concluded 'a long time ago' that an al-Qaida associate who met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia was not an officer in Saddam Hussein's army, as alleged Sunday by a Republican member of the 9/11 commission...

The claim that the Iraqi officer and al-Qaida figure are the same first appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial on May 27. A similar account was then published in the June 7 edition of the Weekly Standard, which reported that the link was discovered by an analyst working for a controversial Pentagon intelligence unit under Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

As correspondent R writes, "Did the OSP get *anything* right?"

Here's a handy guide:

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a.k.a. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad = Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col.

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi = al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir does not = Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi

Update: Spencer Ackerman points to this report by Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay on the issue of Shakir's identity, and it offers new information I hadn't seen in the other pieces: Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, the al Qaeda "greeter" in Kuala Lumpur, was an Iraqi, who "was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer."

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer as a "greeter" or "facilitator" for Arabic-speaking visitors at the airport at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In January 2000, he accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al-Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000.

There's no evidence that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir attended the meeting. Four days after it ended, he left Kuala Lumpur.

Several days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Qatar in possession of highly suspicious materials that appeared to link him with al-Qaida.

The Qataris inexplicably released him, and he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was arrested again. The Jordanians freed him under pressure from Iraq and Amnesty International, and he went to Baghdad.

That would seem to offer more credence to Lehman's suspicions. What's more, as Ackerman points out, twice, "This is something we probably can know. We have three individuals in custody who either were directly present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting or pulled its strings: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Kuala Lumpur attendees Khallad bin Attash and Yazid Sufaat."

If it's knowable, why don't we know it?

And finally, why in the world did Amesty International push for Ahmad Hikmat Shakir's release from Jordanian custody? After all, while people may be quibbling over whether he had any connection to the Iraqi security services, no one argues that he was not affiliated with al Qaeda.

Post Script: I think Ana Marie Cox gets this just about right.

More: Reader N writes Wednesday:

From what Amnesty said at the time, I don't think they 'pushed for his release' so much as asked the Jordanians for confirmation that he was being humanely treated and whether charges would be brought:

[See this Amnesty report.]

There's something a little bathetic about the final comments, given what we now appear to know, but in context it seems like form-letter stuff rather than, say, a protracted letter-writing campaign for a prisoner of conscience. So I think the K-R report, written well after the fact, overstates Amnesty's role here...

Thanks much for the letters.

William Safire is, true to form, out of control. He tries to portray the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda did not indeed engage in meaningful cooperation as the marginalized opinion of the commission's [Republican] staff director, Philip Zelikow, and says the commission's co-chairmen have walked back from that conclusion.

The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow. After Vice President Dick Cheney's outraged objection, the staff's sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton.

"Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?" Kean asked himself. "Yes . . . no question." Hamilton joined in: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections . . . we don't disagree with that" — just "no credible evidence" of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attack.

The Zelikow report was seized upon by John Kerry because it fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks (which, as Hamilton said yesterday, modifying his earlier "no credible evidence" judgment, was "not proven one way or the other.")

Excuse me. Safire is here saying not only that there is evidence of meaningful cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and not only that the 9/11 commissioners buy into that conclusion [contrary to everything they have been reported to have said on the matter, with the exception of commissioner John Lehman, whose brother Chris worked in the Office of Special Plans]. Safire is out there with the Laurie Mylroie die-hards saying that there is evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks. What's more, he's saying the 9/11 commissioners haven't ruled that out.

That more than contradicts what the commissioners themselves are reported saying, to say the least. From the Times Monday:

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, reiterated Sunday that the inquiry turned up no evidence that Iraq or its former leader, Saddam Hussein, had taken part "in any way in attacks on the United States."

But Mr. Kean said that conclusion, made public last week, did not put the commission at odds with the Bush administration's contention that links existed between the terrorist group Al Qaeda and Iraq.

In an interview on the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Kean said, "All of us understand that when you begin to use words like `relationship' and `ties' and `connections' and `contacts,' everybody has a little different definition with regard to those statements."

Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview on Friday that "the evidence is overwhelming" of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Asked if he had information that the commission did not have, he replied, "Probably."

Mr. Kean said Sunday that if such information exists, "we need it — and we need it pretty fast."

Any normal person who would read this would conclude, the 9/11 commission's chairman Thomas Kean is challenging Cheney and the Bush White House to hand over any 'evidence' they continue to cite that would support such out-there conclusions. That Kean does it in the diplomatic language that would allow the administration to save face while doing so is true to form. Kean has consistently, even while protesting the Bush White House's stonewalling of the commission, always been strategically polite in his public statements about the administration. What he could have said is "Cough it up, or shut up."

But Safire does something else insidious here, which is to portray the commission's conclusion to date as being the opinion of one person, the staff director, who Safire implies must be working for Bush 43's political opponents. What is Safire talking about? If Zelikow is not getting attacked by the left for his having served with Condoleezza Rice in the first Bush administration's National Security Council, he is getting attacked by the wing-nuts on the right like Safire for not endorsing their most conspiracy-minded fantasies. Safire the wordsmith needs to reacquaint himself with one word missing from his endless propagandizing on behalf of the Mylroie-conspiracy crowd, a five letter word beginning with "t."

Post Script: Another take on 'Cheney vs. the NYT.'

Israel and the Kurds. Seymour Hersh reports this week on Israel's development of a "Plan B" after concluding that the US had lost the post-war in Iraq: building up a covert alliance with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and with Kurdish groups in Iran and Syria as well. For what strategic purpose? To counter the strength of Iraq's Shiite majority and a potentially nuclear armed Iran in the near future.

Hersh reports:

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan...

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war.

The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do—penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey.”

The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way—as balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration.”

Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes.

For what it's worth, I too have heard reports from former American diplomats consulting in northern Iraq that Israel is behind the creation of a Kurdish central bank in Kurdish northern Iraq, of mysterious Israeli American advisors to Iraqi Kurdish leaders, of Israelis buying property located around southeastern Turkey's GAP dam, and other developments that would seem to give credence to this report.

But one contrary thought: it is quite clear that a significant part of the pro-Israel professional lobbying community in Washington is among Turkey's greatest supporters in Washington. Is this covert Sharon policy of backing the Kurds even to the point of separatism that is clearly so alienating to Turkey dividing those who count themselves among Israel's greatest supporters?

This leads to another observation which is probably obvious to those who cover Israel in more depth. The alienation of Israel's national security establishment from the Sharon government and Likud foreign policy, very similar to the alienation of the US national security establishment (CIA, State Department, elements of the uniformed military) from neocon policies and Bush foreign policy.

More on this all soon.

[Ed. note: this post has been revised.]

Zakaria, Anonymous, and the war on terror. Fareed Zakaria takes readers on a grim tour of Saudi Arabia on the brink, and asks if the country is doomed by the extremism its own political leaders have long cultivated.

The depth of this created culture of extremism is most evident regarding tolerance for non-Muslims...Even last week, as the regime was issuing fatwas against the killing of Paul Johnson, one could see forces that fueled his execution. A prominent cleric, Sheik Saleh bin Abdullah al-Humaid, explained that "killing a soul without justification is one of the gravest sins under Islam; it is as bad as polytheism." So polytheism is akin to murder? Is it any wonder that the leader of the recent terrorism in Khobar explained his killing of Westerners and Indians thusly: "We purged Muhammad's land of many Christians and polytheists"?

Why doesn't the regime take on the religious establishment more frontally? There is little danger that it would lose. Between state and mosque, there is really no contest. Every imam in the country is on the government's payroll...And yet the regime is extremely cautious about clipping the wings of these bureaucrats.

The key to the kingdom is not religion but politics. To understand why, you only have to drive through Riyadh, large parts of which are decaying, and then around the perimeter of the royal court. Rising on one side is an extension of the king's palace, a fantastical set of buildings, with a vast domed Renaissance extravaganza. When I commented on it, a government official nervously said to me, "Well, the French have Versailles." (I couldn't help but note, "Yes, and then they had a revolution.") Actually, Versailles doesn't capture it. Only Las Vegas compares...

But the reason corruption is so debilitating for Saudi Arabia today is this: the only way to effectively take on religious extremism—whether by terrorists or government clerics—is for the government to have its own source of credibility..."The fear is that if they take on the religious folk, the imams will stop preaching about infidels and start talking about decadence," said a journalist who asked not to be named.

That's from Part II of the Zakaria piece.

Meanwhile, over at Talking Points Memo, Imperial Hubris author Anonymous tells Spencer Ackerman something unexpected about why he thinks we're losing the war on terror, given his critique of the US's war in Iraq. We can't defeat Islamist extremist terrorists by engaging in a war of ideas, or by pushing for democratic reform in the Islamic world, Anonymous argues. We have to take them on with war, and with war with no political goal of democratization on the other side. Ackerman writes:

But Anonymous doesn't really consider it possible for the U.S. to answer bin Laden in a battle of ideas throughout the Islamic world: U.S. support for what many Muslims may see as unjust policies has drained us of our credibility, he argues. He combines that critique with a rejection of anything resembling democracy promotion...Insisting on democratic reform in the Muslim world then becomes naïve futility...

Without the option to work for reform, a large portion of what Anonymous advocates is essentially a policy of brutal and unforgiving war.

[From Imperial Hubris:]

To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing …

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. … [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

[Ackerman continues]: While military force will surely be necessary in the war on terrorism, a scorched-earth policy of warfare, especially in the age of Al Jazeera, seems tailored to play into Bin Laden’s arguments about U.S. desires to destroy Islam, to say nothing of transforming the U.S.'s war on terror into something resembling Russia's dirty war in Chechnya...I asked him about this.

ANONYMOUS: The war we need to conduct is simply to protect America. It's to stop the enemy, to have him cease and desist from attacking us. It is not--I hope it's not--to make them democratic, or to make them become libertarians or whatever...

Go read the interview. But I have to say, Anonymous' scorched earth, nihilist "final solution" to the crisis posed to western civilization by al Qaeda considerably weakens his other arguments in my eyes. That kind of uber-realism seems as morally bankrupt and of a type that generated some of the very Cold War policies that led to al Qaeda's emergence in the first place. I don't think this spook has the answers.

Iran has seized three British navy vessels and arrested eight British sailors, the BBC reports. A British Ministry of Defense spokesman says the British navy was "assisting the Iraqi water police in the area." So, is this some post IAEA meeting hard-ball?

Just out, at long last, my piece on why the Democrats are hesitant to embrace the issue of UN reform. It is subscription only, but here's the top.

The woman who knew too much....

What went wrong. An overall devastating Iraq report card on the eve of the handover by the Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran. But I found these observations among the most interesting:

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who want to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

...Over the course of the occupation, the relationship between the CPA and the military has become increasingly bitter. Soldiers have blamed civilians for not performing enough reconstruction to pacify the country, while civilians have blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding...

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

The piece goes on to offer reflections from Paul Bremer and other CPA officials on what went wrong.

Don't miss Spencer Ackerman's interview at Talking Points Memo with the anonymous US intelligence official who next month will release his second book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. [The book is also discussed here by Kevin Drum.] Ackerman interviewed Anonymous, a veteran intelligence official who's tracked radical Islamism going back to the 1980s, on the subject of the brutal killing of Paul Johnson by Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia yesterday, and what that event says about the US's war on terror. Don't miss it.

Laurie Mylroie, phone home.

The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.

"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said that, in particular, they wanted any information available to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either...

"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about."

Good to see the commission calling Cheney's bluff. Maybe they can duke it out on Meet the Press this Sunday.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a very interesting post on (what else?) Chalabi and the allegations of espionage for Iran....Here's the source she cites, Bruce Schneier at Cryptogram. They also both point to an earlier instance when the US had apparently broken Iran's communications codes. More on this later.

I've taken an interest in this company, Peninsula Investment Company SA. And in the fate of its former adminstrator, Tariq (or "Tarik") Mohsen and his wife Patricia Mohsen, who are Swiss nationals. Here's an interesting story about the Swiss subsidiary of a Saudi oil company, Delta Services SA, that they were involved in, that was outted recently as allegedly profitting from Saddam's oil for food program. But these folks are also very connected to people, I am told, who would be uncomfortable being revealed as benefitting from Saddam Hussein's regime.

From Friday's New York Times:

For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration's response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.

Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.

Intelligence failure. Lying defectors, defectors to the UK never interviewed by the CIA, mis-read satellite intelligence, the failure of allied intelligence services. Not a single high level intelligence source in Saddam's inner circle. Do we have reason to believe we're doing any better in Iran or North Korea? No. [Via Kevin Drum.]

Just had the second surreal meeting of the past eight days. This one involved drinking beer in the afternoon at Kramerbooks with the Iraqi National Congress's Washington advisor Francis Brooke, his wife Sharon, and my colleague Spencer Ackerman, of the New Republic. [Ackerman is guest blogging at Talking Points Memo this week while its boss slacks off on a tropical paradise somewhere.]

What was surreal about it? Well, Francis Brooke is an unusually open, pleasant and forthcoming person for someone whose long time political partner Ahmad Chalabi is facing US allegations of spying for Iran, and who himself is facing an Iraqi arrest warrant for allegedly obstructing the US-Iraqi raid on Dr. Chalabi's compound last month. Brooke says the charges are ridiculous, and he intends to return to Baghdad next week, surrounded by as many members of the US press corps and TV cameras as he can round up to accompany him. As Spencer points out, Brooke says his preferred route may have him flying to Tehran [to whom his boss Dr. Chalabi and his business partner, INC intelligence chief Aras Habib Kareem are accused of passing US intelligence] and then convoying into Baghdad. A provocation not lost on Brooke.

Brooke was telling me in some detail about the corporation he, Kareem, and US accountant Margaret Bartel, set up as a vehicle to receive first State Department and later Pentagon money to operate the Information Collection Program. [A "gentleman's agreement" between the Pentagon and them prevented them from previously discussing it much earlier - but Brooke promises much transparency about such mechanisms in the coming days. After all, their Pentagon funding runs out at the end of the month.] Brooke detailed for me the organization chart of the ICP, its funding mechanisms, number of agents and activities. He insists that the ICP's director Aras Habib Kareem, who has been reported to have fled to Tehran, is in fact in Iraq, although "he travels", and that Brooke has spoken by phone with Kareem more than once since the charges were brought against him. That Kareem has gone into hiding to evade an arrest warrant Brooke does not deny.

Brooke told me he was aware as early as March about the possible espionage charges coming down the pike [he first heard whispers of it from other journalists well briefed by US intelligence sources, shortly after Chalabi made another public visit to Tehran where he was greeted by a color guard, met with Khatami, Khamenei, and others]. Brooke is the first to admit that Chalabi and he himself have met with the Iranian intelligence official in charge of operations inside Iraq, Suleimani, to whom Chalabi is alleged to have passed the information that the US had broken the Iranian intelligence's communications code. [Brooke denies Chalabi passed any such intelligence to the Iranians, or indeed, that Chalabi even had access to sensitive US intelligence.] That Chalabi and Kareem had such liaison relationships is no secret, Brooke says, and indeed, was ostensibly part of what they were paid by the US to do. [The INC had such liaison relationships with many countries, Brooke asserts, including Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey.]

Brooke himself says he has talked with US intelligence officials who have parroted back to him recordings of conversations of his the NSA had "ping'ed."

He adamantly denies that Chalabi or Kareem would have been spies for Iran, I should point out. He also says that the INC's intelligence was so good that they knew days before the raid on Chalabi's compound that it was coming, informed their DIA colleagues to relocate, and stored elsewhere much of the sensitive information they had collected.

Brooke's cell phone rang from Baghdad throughout the meeting. He says he talks to Dr. Chalabi every day, who is doing very well. [He also revealed that NSC Iraq envoy Bob Blackwill lives across the street from him in Georgetown, and that Brooke has been disappointed in his performance in Iraq, as well as with Blackwill's memo on sidelining Chalabi.]

Brooke tells me that he hopes to finish up his work in Iraq soon, and to work in the future in the US, with perhaps the US government as his client. What would he like to do? Perhaps show them how to set up more innovative intelligence operations in other places on the cheap, as he feels he and the INC have done in Iraq. [He mentioned India-Pakistan, or Korea, as being places where Washington is desperately in need of more such HUMINT. We laugh over Iran.] He points out that US intelligence for all its budgets and heft had almost no human intelligence coming from Iraq except that provided by the INC, and that what the ICP managed to do for $340,000 a month, including helping enable the capture of Uday Hussein [who went to college at Baghdad University with fugitive INC intel chief Aras Habib Kareem, 36, Brooke says] and half of the 55 people on the US's most wanted list, shows what can be done with such an operation. [As for the three Iraqi defectors the INC provided to US intelligence who allegedly had information on Iraq WMD, Brooke went into some detail about two of them, can't remember the third, and I will report it out in a forthcoming piece.]

More soon.

Which Iraqi exile leader boasted of a powerful network inside Iraq that could overthrow Hussein that never materialized, coached defectors who provided bogus intelligence to the CIA, and is accused of having anti-democratic tendencies? Ahmad Chalabi, you say? How about Iyad Allawi, reports the NY Sun's Eli Lake.

"Rumsfeld ordered prisoner held off the books: Iraqi terror suspect hidden from International Red Cross," NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held “off the books” — hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else — in possible violation of international law.

It’s the first direct link between Rumsfeld and questionable though not violent treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

The Iraqi prisoner was captured last July...Shortly after the suspect’s capture, the CIA flew him to an undisclosed location outside Iraq for interrogation. But four months later the Justice Department suggested that holding him outside Iraq might be illegal, and the prisoner was returned to Iraq at the end of October.

That’s when Rumsfeld passed the order on to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep the prisoner locked up, but off the books.

And then what happened? The military forgot about the guy and seemed to have lost track of him! This important Ansar al Islam terrorist who Rumsfeld ordered had to be held off the books, because he had such potentially important intelligence information!

Once the prisoner was returned to Iraq, the interrogations ceased because the prisoner was entirely lost in the system.

Honestly no one accused Slobodan Milosevic of being incompetent, just brutal. But Rumsfeld -- should he be fired for incompetence or tried for war crimes?

Spencer Ackerman has figured out the dark secret about the so-called "independent" 9/11 commission...

The neocons are still in the saddle, undersecretary of defense Doug Feith taunts in a recent interview with the LA Times' Jacob Heilbrunn:

No doubt neoconservatives have been put on the defensive in recent months. When I met Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy, for an interview at his home recently, he was eager to discuss the attacks on him and his neoconservative associates. Sitting in his library surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East, Feith stated that his critics "are being shabby with the facts, cherry-picking evidence — doing things they're accusing us of."

But Feith was adamant in saying that the neoconservatives had not been sidelined. They remain influential, he said, and will remain so as long as ideas remain important in the administration. "Bush is not some empty vessel that we're pouring this stuff into. He's [been] underestimated the way critics underestimated Reagan."

Heilbrunn cites other evidence of the neocons holding on: chiefly, that none of them has been thrown overboard yet.

The truth is that, currently, the neocons are the only ones with any ideas in the administration. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell bridles at any drafts from his speechwriters that he considers too theoretical. Feith, by contrast, filled his office with neocon intellectuals.

So far, no neoconservative has been thrown overboard. Despite charges that his homemade intelligence network at the Pentagon relied on bogus intelligence from Chalabi, Feith remains firmly in place at the Defense Department. David Wurmser, the architect of the pro-Chalabi strategy, is Cheney's Middle East advisor now. Mark Lagon, a neoconservative who worked for Jeane Kirkpatrick, has been promoted at the State Department. A host of younger neocons remains embedded in other agencies.

Embedded, huh? Talk about needing James Jesus Angleton to smoke 'em out.

I do think Heilbrunn makes a good point. While the neocons may not be the only ones with interesting foreign policy ideas, it's not like they are getting much competition from the leading Democrats. John Kerry could do a better job of articulating a broad foreign policy vision...

Heilbrunn predicts, if Bush loses, a blood bath within the right, with conservatives gaining prominence over the neocons. But if Bush wins? Syria and Iran are next, Heilbrunn predicts, and Lord help us, John "Cuba has a biological weapons program" Bolton may be the next head of the CIA.

Addendum: I am not sure I agree with Heilbrunn that the neocons are not in trouble within the administration. Richard Perle was thrown overboard, more or less, in February. It is highly unlikely Feith or Wolfowitz would be promoted in any Bush II administration, or even be retained. The ousting of Chalabi does seem to indicate a shifting of gravity within the administration, benefiting pragmatists at State and CIA over Chalabi's neocon supporters in the Pentagon, and the office of the Vice President. And while the neocons might have dreamed of pursuing wider regime change in Syria and Iran, where would the US troop strength come from? And is there any sense the US public or the Congress would be able to be brought along this time, with the amazing discontent with the administration's conduct of the Iraq post-war? And mistrust of the administration's credibility on intelligence issues? [I don't believe Tenet's resignation had much to do with l'affaire Chalabi, it's been coming down the pike for months.]

Post-Script: Don't miss the priceless description, above, of Feith in his library, "surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East." No doubt, most of them by Bernard Lewis.

I really like this blog, Belgravia Dispatch. Must be because of its author's many years in the former Yugoslavia.

No Prague Meeting. Here's one more neocon/Cheney canard the blessed independent 9/11 commission puts to rest: Mohammad Atta never met with any Iraqi agent in Prague. This from MSNBC:

Hijacker never met with Iraqi agent:

In a second report released Wednesday, the commission staff said that Mohamed Atta, the pilot of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center and leader of the 19 hijackers, never met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic. That purported meeting also has been cited as evidence of a possible al-Qaida connection to Iraq.

“We do not believe that such a meeting occurred,” the report said.

Matt Yglesias is right. Dick Gephardt is a terrible choice for Kerry's running mate. Now, a question: Matt has about three posts a day over at Tapped, several posts a day on his own site, and about two articles a week at the Prospect. So, when does Matt sleep? Are we sure there is only one of him?

Commissioner Tim Roemer just asked US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is testifying at the 9/11 commission, if he has anything to say about the Plame investigation. I'm listening on the radio so couldn't see Fitzgerald's reaction, but everybody laughed. Nice try, Tim!

Over at Slate, journalist Alan Berlow says White House counsel Alberto Gonzales has been torturing international law for a long time; first in Texas, where as legal advisor to then Gov. Bush, Gonzales created legal justifications for the state of Texas killing foreign nationals on death row.

Berlow writes:

Although the president said he's only approved actions consistent with U.S. and international law, that hasn't settled the matter because the main thrust of the memos crafted by Gonzales as well as Justice, Defense, and intelligence agency lawyers, seems to have been to come up with justifications for torture within the law...

The president also said he couldn't remember if he'd seen legal opinions written by Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers. But it may prove more difficult for him to deny having seen a January 2002 "Memorandum for the President" in which Gonzales argued that the Geneva Conventions were "obsolete" and that by disregarding them the administration would substantially reduce its vulnerability to "criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," which he noted could incur a death sentence.

Curiously, it was in his role as legal counsel to then-Gov. Bush that Gonzales penned yet another memo pertaining to international law, only in that case his advice was designed not to avoid death sentences, but rather to expedite them on Texas' heavily populated death row. On June 16, 1997, Gonzales first showcased his proclivity for torturing international law when he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that, "Since the State of Texas is not a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, we believe it is inappropriate to ask Texas to determine whether a breach … occurred in connection with the arrest and conviction" of a Mexican national. Or, put another way, he asserted that an international treaty just didn't apply to Texas.

Look where compassionate conservatism got us.

No link or meaningful cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda, the 9/11 commission reports. Someone tell Dick Cheney.

In fact, bin Laden explored using Saddam's Iraq for training camps, but Saddam "never responded."

This from the AP:

In a report released this morning and based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader's secular regime.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, the panel found, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

Here's the .pdf of the 9/11 commission staff report released today, "Overview of the Enemy." Here's the text version of the report.

Here's the "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," commission staff report No. 16, in .pdf format. Here's the text version, thanks to MSNBC. Very interesting. The commission got to question Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the plot mastermind, and review other US government agencies' interviews with him. Among other interesting facts uncovered, was that the 9/11 plan was originally to involve more pilots, more planes, and more targets:

As originally envisioned, the 9/11 plot involved even more extensive attacks than those carried out on September 11. KSM maintains that his initial proposal involved hijacking ten planes to attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States. He claims that, in addition to the targets actually hit on 9/11, these hijacked planes were to be crashed into CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State. The centerpiece of his original proposal was the tenth plane, which he would have piloted himself. Rather than crashing the plane into a target, he would have killed every adult male passenger, contacted the media from the air, and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport. He says he then would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers.

KSM concedes that this ambitious proposal initially received only a lukewarm response from the al Qaeda leadership in view of the proposal’s scale and complexity. When Bin Ladin finally approved the operation, he scrapped the idea of using one of the hijacked planes to make a public statement but provided KSM with four operatives, only two of whom ultimately would participate in the 9/11 attacks...

According to KSM, al Qaeda intended to use 25 or 26 hijackers for the 9/11 plot, as opposed to the 19 who actually participated. Even as late as the summer of 2001, KSM wanted to send as many operatives as possible to the United States in order to increase the chances for successful attacks, contemplating as many as seven or more hijackers per flight. We have identified at least nine candidate hijackers slated to be part of the 9/11 attacks at one time or another...

Also very interesting, and very tragic too, that the commission uncovered, is the fact that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, part of the "Hamburg Group," seemed to seriously consider dropping out of the plot, in large part because of his attachment to his Turkish girlfriend in Germany [Two others who KSM originally identified for the plots were prevented from participating by their families in Saudi Arabia, the commission found]. KSM was preparing to replace Jarrah with Zacarias Moussaoui, the commission believes, if need be. But ultimately, Jarrah decided, or was coerced, to proceed with the suicide attacks.

Wolfie's in Baghdad, correspondent J writes. Why don't they just keep him, he asks.

Interesting that Wolfowitz met today with, among those you would expect, Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah Hassan al-Nakib. That was the agency to which the eight DynCorp contractors who participated in the raid on Chalabi's home last month said they were assigned.

The coming reports. The CIA is trying to suppress publication of up to 40% of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war intelligence blunders, according to the NYT.

The Central Intelligence Agency has ruled that large portions of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that is highly critical of the agency includes material too sensitive to be released to the public, Congressional and intelligence officials said Tuesday.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the material in a 400-page report was deleted by the C.I.A. in a version that was returned to the committee on Monday as approved for public release, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the 9/11 commission, which holds its last hearings today and tomorrow, featuring among others US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald who also happens to be heading the Valerie Plame investigation, has concluded the 9/11 hijackers were originally planning their attacks for May or June 2001. They were reportedly delayed because ringleader Mohammad Atta wasn't ready, the Post reports.

Bush and war crimes, by William Pfaff.

Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.

Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

...The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions ... were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed.

Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities.

High U.S. administration figures reportedly lingered - with delectation? - over what exactly was to be done to the unfortunate prisoners - for how long, in what position, with what pain inflicted...

And when all this began to come out, what did the administration have to say? The president said on May 24 that "a few American troops ... disregarded our values." Civilians in the Pentagon, speaking informally to the press, blamed the Abu Ghraib scandals on "a few hillbillies."

. . .This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil.

[Via Atrios.]

Meantime, WaPo editorial writer Anne Applebaum says political will is draining from the Hill to fully connect the dots linking the White House to the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and beyond.

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it...

They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it ... Unfortunately, Congress has no real motive to find the answer either. After a bit of obligatory spluttering, the House has gone silent... Meanwhile, Sen. John Warner's Armed Services Committee, conducting the only active investigation on Capitol Hill, is moving at a leisurely pace...

If the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all. Edmund Burke, a conservative philosopher, wrote, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

The Post house editorial also says torture was the policy of the Bush White House:

SLOWLY, AND IN spite of systematic stonewalling by the Bush administration, it is becoming clearer why a group of military guards at Abu Ghraib prison tortured Iraqis in the ways depicted in those infamous photographs. President Bush and his spokesmen shamefully cling to the myth that the guards were rogues acting on their own. Yet over the past month we have learned that much of what the guards did -- from threatening prisoners with dogs, to stripping them naked, to forcing them to wear women's underwear -- had been practiced at U.S. military prisons elsewhere in the world. Moreover, most of these techniques were sanctioned by senior U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Iraqi theater command under Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.

The Post calls on the Senate to pass an "amendment to the defense authorization bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), [that] would reaffirm the commitment of the United States not to engage in torture, and it would require the defense secretary to provide Congress with guidelines ensuring compliance with this standard."

At the very least. But what about trials of Bush and Rumsfeld on war crimes? How can this just remain a matter for editorial writers?

A couple days back, Salon ran a very interesting interview with intelligence historian and author, Thomas Powers. Powers is the author of the newly released Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Powers describes in the interview the Bush administration conducting a virtual coup against US government agencies, particularly the intelligence community, in its efforts to mobilize the US to invade Iraq.

Salon: It seems like there has almost never been direct acknowledgement by the White House of any policy problems.

Powers: Yes, but they've done something else which troubles me more than anything. They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.

President Bush used the intelligence system as a blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along -- the Congress was in an almost impossible position. When the president uses the maximum power of his own office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta listen to the guy. At least once.

Worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Powers' book is being released at the same time as James Bamford's A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, described below, which sounds to offer a very similar analysis.

Looks like John Ashcroft has at least one friend in his Paranoia tree house club.

Check out Bob Dreyfuss' "Investigation Summer" post today at TomPaine. Between the FBI Valerie Plame investigation, the forthcoming 9/11 commission report, the Senate Select Intelligence committee report on pre-war intelligence, the multiple counterintelligence investigations of who leaked US intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, and multiple panels investigating the Abu Ghraib abuse, it looks set to be a summer of non stop revelations of Bush administration scandal. As Bob Dreyfuss writes, "John Kerry, who specialized in investigations in the Senate . . .must be marveling at the irony: official investigators are going to help elect him this summer."

This is so unbelievably disturbing. I cannot believe this is my country. Via Salon. Between Ashcroft permitting torture and deporting British journalists, . . . he really should spend some time in a totalitarian prison. Will 60 Minutes please do a story on this?

Halliburton's sweetheart deal. It's becoming pretty obvious that the office of undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith consulted with the office of vice president Cheney before secretly awarding Halliburton an uncontested $1.9 million contract to develop secret plans for Iraq's oil industry back in October 2002. [The first contract helped make way for Halliburton to be positioned to receive more than $2.4 billion in US-government-funded Iraq oil contracts later on.] As the NYT reports today:

In the fall of 2002, in the preparations for possible war with Iraq, the Pentagon sought and received the assent of senior Bush administration officials, including the vice president's chief of staff, before hiring the Halliburton Company to develop secret plans for restoring Iraq's oil facilities, Pentagon officials have told Congressional investigators . . .

In November 2002, a Pentagon energy group led by Michael H. Mobbs, a political appointee and adviser to Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense, gave Halliburton a $1.9 million "task order," under another contract, to develop secret contingency plans for the Iraqi oil industry.

The proposal was had been described at a meeting in late October of the Deputies Committee, a foreign policy body. Participants included the deputy national security adviser, deputy secretaries of state and defense, deputy director of central intelligence and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff.

Pentagon officials, including Mr. Mobbs, provided the new details of the oil contracting to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform at a June 8 briefing.

In a letter faxed Sunday to Mr. Cheney and given to reporters, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the minority leader of the panel, asked him for all records of his office's communications on the oil contracts and for records of Deputies Committee meetings where the Halliburton deals had been discussed.

"These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Mr. Waxman, Democrat of California, wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton."

Here's a Fox News-provided biography of Feith's deputy, Michael Mobbs, who looks to be another Perle acolyte (Mobbs, an attorney, served under Perle during Perle's reign as undersecretary of defense during the Reagan administration).

I ran across Mobbs' name yesterday as the point of contact for another multimillion dollar Pentagon contract coming out of Feith's office to SAIC, here (note: .pdf file linked).

But this article is interesting for another reason. Certain people who formerly worked in Feith's office have talked about a number of people from the DC think-tank community participating in a secret Feith-run group looking at Iraq's oil industry, months before the administration declared its intentions to go to war in Iraq. I suppose that would be the Pentagon energy group described above. I was told these consultants worked out of the Pentagon basement. As yet, this story hasn't fully been told that I have seen.

Addendum: More on Michael Mobbs. Correspondent TM writes, "You should lay [your] hands on the new Atlantic. There’s an article by Benjamin Wittes on the Padilla and Hamdi cases. Mobbs, according to the article, is the one who wrote the government declarations on the two which were filed with the Fourth Circuit last year. Hamdi’s lawyer can’t reveal his classified conversations with his client but strongly insinuates that the declaration is (shockingly I know) demonstrably untrue.

This article isn’t available online as far as I can tell but it’s worth reading."

Thanks for the letters. Readers, take note.

Meanwhile, much good stuff in the Center for American Progress's Tuesday "Progress Report" on Halliburton's sweetheart Pentagon Iraq contracts, thanks to Mssrs. Cheney, Feith and Mobbs.

Slate's Eric Umansky has a new eponymous blog up, here, and already has an interesting post up about the commission investigating the US's WMD intelligence. Big welcome to the competition!

I love AEI events. Truly, honestly, they have the best events in town. Today's was no exception. Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Tom Donnelly and Danielle Pletka discussed the prospects for the June 30 handover of power in Iraq. Perle was in top form, insulting the idea that German or French troops would be useful in Iraq ("the Germans, with their tradition in this area" he said, eyebrows arched, and the French, "whose troops' last great accomplishment," Perle said, "was the sinking of the [Greenpeace ship] the Rainbow Warrior.") But Perle used most of his time to attack the Iraqi judge, Zuhair al-Maliqi, who has been issuing arrest warrants for senior INC leaders and advisors, and Paul Bremer for appointing Maliqi judge of something called the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI), which Perle said was probably an illegal institution.

The gloves are off. Perle: "Happily, Bremer will leave Iraq shortly." Bremer seemed to overly enjoy his viceroy position, Perle implied. He also had slightly more guarded hostility for top levels of the US administration for going along with what Perle described as the politicized attacks on Ahmad Chalabi.

Perle said the charges of espionage against Chalabi were being "promulgated in a whispering campaign by the CIA, members of the DIA, ex intelligence agents, and the FBI."

Saying as far as he can tell there has been no real journalistic scrutiny of the charges against Chalabi, Perle urged journalists to examine the following questions:

1) Is it possible that if messages were intercepted (that implied Chalabi had told the Iranians the US had broken its communications codes), that the Iranians deliberately sent such messages to the US, in order to marginalize Chalabi and the INC in Iraqi political life?

2) Did the other messages from this channel result in actionable intelligence? As far as Perle can tell, there has been no serious analysis of the intelligence coming from this channel (that Chalabi supposedly compromised, Perle said). The other messages in this channel need to be reexamined, Perle said, it's a serious counterintelligence matter. If it's not being done, it's another example of the "woeful incompetence of our intelligence community."

After the conference, during the Question and Answer period, Francis Brooke, the INC advisor who is the subject of one of judge Maliqi's arrest warrants, spoke standing in front of his seat in the audience, before asking a question. He spoke of the persecution campaign against Chalabi and himself, and asked why the Iraqi caretaker government implemented only this past week could not have been created from day one of the post-war, which some people on the panel seemed to agree would have made sense. He worried that Chalabi was being marginalized from the Iraqi political scene as part of a witch hunt that could prove dangerous for Iraq.

Afterwards, journalists gathered around Brooke, who is extremely open and seems to be genuinely troubled by all the allegations.

I asked him what Boxwood (see below) was actually contracted by the Pentagon to do. He paused, looked down at something he was writing, said that was a good question. More on this soon.

I also spoke with Margaret Bartel, for whom Maliqi has also issued an arrest warrant for allegedly obstructing the investigation of Chalabi's compound. I asked her about her and Brooke's business partner in Boxwood Inc., the fugitive INC intel chief Aras Habib Kareem. She told me she didn't want to know where he was. [Some reports say he has fled to Iran.] I asked her if it troubled her that here she and Brooke were, speaking to the press, but that he had gone into hiding, that the allegations might be true. She said, he went into hiding because if he had been arrested he would have been killed. I said, why does she think that? And she cited the Nick Berg arrest and al Qaeda operating in Iraq, etc.

Then I asked her if the Pentagon was continuing to fund Boxwood and she wouldn't say, and I said it's tax money, it should be information available for the public, and she said, ask the Pentagon. She told me Boxwood is still very much in existence.

I also spoke briefly with INC spokesman Entifad Qanbar, and I have to say, he seems like more than a decent guy. I do wonder if beyond any legitimate charges against certain INC individuals coming from both the Iraqi and US side, if there is not something of a witch hunt occurring.

John Ashcroft refused to give the Senate Judiciary Committee the August 1, 2002 torture memo the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel prepared at the request of the White House. So the Washington Post got ahold of it and posted it here.[note: .pdf linked]. The Justice Department's top lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel is Jay S. Bysbee.

Meantime, the NYT is reporting that a small unit of military intelligence interrogators at Abu Ghraib began alerting senior US military officers in November 2003 to the abuse. This contradicts what senior military commanders have said: that they did not learn of the abuse until January.

Here's an interesting February 2001 article on the Pentagon renewing ties to INC intelligence chief Aras Kareem.

Notice the date -- several months before September 11th.

In one of the most telling signs the Bush administration will revamp U.S. Iraq policy, Pentagon officials began meeting this week with the chief of operations for the umbrella of Iraqi resistance groups known as the Iraqi National Congress . . .

Aras Kareem -- a man previously considered so dangerous in U.S. intelligence circles that his cousin, Ali Karim, who sought asylum was detained in a California jail in part because of his association with him -- arrived last week in Washington for a series of meetings with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency on tactical training . . .

Kareem told United Press International that his meetings focused on "non-lethal" training for INC forces preparing to infiltrate Iraq in the coming months in an information collection campaign. The rebels won a major coup in this regard last month when the Treasury Department granted the group a license to begin operating in Iraq with U.S. funding.

But Kareem's Pentagon meetings also show the U.S. government has begun
implementing a plan to use the much-maligned INC in a strategy to foment
revolution in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Kareem said he was essentially the point man for the INC in the early and
mid-1990s in its campaign of propaganda and low-intensity warfare against
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That operation, which received more than $360,000 a month from the CIA, provided U.S. intelligence with useful information on the physical decoder the Iraqi military used in transmitting official messages through the physical cable that connects Saddam's interlocking underground telecommunications networks, according to Kareem.

But Kareem ran afoul of the American spy agency after the CIA opted to
support a palace-coup strategy rather than popular resistance . . .

Eventually, [the CIA] used Kareem's open meetings with Iranian officials against him -- tarring him as someone too close to the Mullahs in Tehran.

Seems Kareem knew something about the mechanics of decoding intelligence communications . . .

Time magazine's review of James Bamford's new A Pretext for War has a pretty explosive allegation here:

Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored "mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure from within and without to shut up about it.

[italics added].

It comes in the context of describing Bamford's analysis of the role the neocons played in the pre-war intelligence.

The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle Eastand Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. The result was a war built on sand . . .

Is Iran going nuclear, asks James Traub in this NYT magazine piece.

Like Iraq in the 1980's, Iran through much of the 1990's received a clean bill of health from the I.A.E.A. Iran reported that it had only a ''limited nuclear program,'' and inspectors duly certified that it was so. American and foreign intelligence agencies felt certain that Iran was hiding something, but the agency, as one inspector put it to me, ''was sleeping on its ear.'' Then, in the summer of 2002, an Iranian resistance group disclosed the existence of several secret nuclear facilities, chief among them an enrichment plant in the town of Natanz. ElBaradei and a team of inspectors visited the compound the following February and discovered a highly sophisticated facility with an array of the centrifuges necessary for enriching uranium.

The Iranians claimed that Natanz was intended for civilian purposes; and since the exact same technology is used to make the low-enriched uranium required for a power plant and the highly enriched uranium required for a bomb, this was a plausible claim. But Iranian officials began to make matters much worse by lying about almost everything else. The inspectors immediately recognized that the centrifuges were a Pakistani variation on a Dutch design, known as the P1, but the Iranians insisted they had been domestically designed. . .

Agency experts became convinced that the Iranians must have received the same designs for an advanced centrifuge, known as the P2, that the Libyans had. And when Olli Heinonen confronted Iranian officials in December, they admitted that it was so. The Iranians then made matters worse by concocting one of their legalistic defenses; they didn't think ''research and development'' had to be disclosed.

The great irony of course is that all the lies may not hide a terrible truth, as in Iraq. But it's hard to know. As Traub writes:

Inspectors have found no weapons, no weapons drawings, no evidence of weapons research . . . While [Christian Charlier, an I.A.E.A. inspector] . . . finds all the lies maddening, ''so far, we don't have any facts that say they have a nuclear weapons program.''

You would think, given the humiliating experience in Iraq, where no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program has been found, that the Bush administration would subject the evidence in Iran to exacting scrutiny. But it hasn't. In fact, its position amounts to ''Where there's smoke, there's fire.''

So, does the system of nuclear non proliferation and the IAEA nuclear inspection system work, or is it breaking down? Traub explores and it's worth reading. The IAEA meets Monday in Vienna on Iran.

A few people have emailed (okay, one) to ask, so what's the big deal if Francis Brooke had a company with the INC intel chief Aras Habib Karim, who after all, wasn't until recently widely reported to be a paid Iranian intelligence agent?

Fair enough.

But Brooke himself seems to have taken pains to downplay and obscure how very many INC-linked groups ran through his Georgetown home (which was paid for by a Chalabi front company). He had a reason to obscure it: it's illegal to use US taxpayer money to lobby the US government.

This from an April 22, 2004 report from Knight Ridder:

An Iraqi exile group may have violated restrictions against using taxpayer funds to lobby when it campaigned for U.S. action to oust Saddam Hussein . . .

If the charge - which is the subject of an upcoming probe by Congress' General Accounting Office - is borne out, it means that U.S. taxpayers paid to have themselves persuaded that it was necessary to invade Iraq.

Officials of the Iraqi National Congress, which played a central role in building support for last year's invasion of Iraq, deny that the group crossed the line prohibiting lobbying, or that it broke any other rules . . .

The incorporation papers of the spin-off group, the Iraq Liberation Action Committee, say it was founded "to work in support of United States and international efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" and to help in "drafting resolutions, legislation and regulations" to advance democracy there.

The group's principal founder was Francis Brooke, the INC's Washington representative, according to the corporate documents obtained by Knight Ridder.

Brooke, in a telephone interview, acknowledged a "professional relationship" with the lobby group. But he said there was "no crossover between that and anything else."

No cross over? No less than three INC-linked organizations were at one time or another in the past couple years registered at Brooke's Georgetown town house.

The three organizations are Boxwood Inc., the Iraq Liberation Action Committee, and the Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation.

How could that not be considered cross over?

For the record, here are the incorporation details for the Iraq Liberation Action Committee, which shares the Georgetown address described in gory detail below.

Business Name: IRAQ LIBERATION ACTION COMMITTEE (THE)
Corporate ID Number: 200346
Filing State: DC
Type: DOMESTIC - NON PROFIT
Status: ACTIVE - ACTIVE CORPORATION
Date of Incorporation: 01-31-2000
Address Type: REG. AGENT ADDRESS
Name: FRANCIS BROOKE
Address: 3743 WINFIELD LN NW
WASHINGTON DC 20007...

So what was Boxwood funded by the Pentagon to do exactly? And by whom exactly in the Pentagon was it funded?

Boxwood, Inc. Here's an update to today's very interesting Chalabi news.

Here's some registration info on the INC-linked company Boxwood Inc. headed by long-time INC advisor Francis Brooke. As reported today in the Post and in an earlier W&P; post, among Boxwood's directors are fugitive INC intelligence chief Aras Habib Karim and Margaret Bartel.

[For the sake of having it from first hand sources, here's a list of the company's principals, from the Commonwealth of Virginia's State Corporate Commission:

DATE 12/12/03
CORPORATE NAME: Boxwood Inc.

OFFICERS/DIRECTORS:
FRANCIS BROOKE PRESIDENT
MARGARET BARTEL DIRECTOR
ARAS KAREEM DIRECTOR

Here's the corporate registry info:

Name: BOXWOOD INC.
Corporate ID Number: 589920
Filing State: VA
Type: DOMESTIC CORPORATION
Status: ACTIVE
Date of Incorporation: 01-16-2003

Address Type: REG. AGENT ADDRESS
Name: MARGARET BARTEL
Address: 911 DUKE ST
ALEXANDRIA, VA 22314

===================================================

Name: BOXWOOD INC.
Corporate ID Number: R145444
Filing State: VA
Type: NAME RESERVATION - CORPORATE
Status: ACTIVE
Corporation Dissolved: 05-13-2003

Address Type: REG. AGENT ADDRESS
Name: BOXWOOD INC
Address: 3743 WINFIELD LANE NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20007

A few notes here:

The Winfield Lane address appears to be Brooke's Georgetown residence. Jane Mayer reports in a recent New Yorker that "Brooke, his wife, Sharon, and their children live for free in the [Georgetown] town house, which is owned by Levantine Holdings, a Chalabi family corporation based in Luxembourg."

In addition to Mayer's report, property records for 3743 Winfield Lane show that it is indeed owned by Levantine Holdings:

Address: 3743 WINFIELD LA NW...
Owner and Sales Information
Owner Name: LEVANTINE HOLDINGS SA

A search for Levantine Holdings shows that it is registered at:

LEVANTINE HOLDINGS SA
Mailing Address: 2544 28TH ST NW;
WASHINGTON, DC 20008-2744

in the Woodley Park/Mass Ave neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

A search for who owns the property at 2544 28th Street NW turns up someone named Mohsen A. Khalil "et al."

Owner Name: MOHSEN A KHALIL ET AL
Mailing Address: 2544 28TH ST NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20008-2744

Who is Mohsen Khalil?

Mohsen Khalil is a joint Director at the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the Global Information and Communication Technologies Department, one of the first Global Product Groups formed out of the integration of the World Bank and IFC. In this capacity, Mr. Khalil is in charge of all the World Bank Group’s activities in the area of telecommunications and information technologies world wide. This would involve advisory work to governments on sector reforms, regulatory frameworks and institutional capacity building, in addition to supporting private investments in developing countries.

Prior to this appointment, he was Director of IFC's Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa Department. He has also served IFC as Chief Investment Officer in the Telecommunications, Transport, and Utilities Department . . .

Before joining the World Bank Group, while also serving as Professor of Business at the American University of Beirut, Mr. Khalil served as Chief Advisor to the Lebanese Minister of Post and Telecommunications, Board Director of Lebanon's Autonomous Fund for Housing, and advisor to various governments and major corporations in the Gulf. He also worked with McKinsey & Co. Management Consultants, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and MITRE Corporation.

Mr. Khalil holds a M.Sc. from MIT Sloan School of Management, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California . . . and a B.Sc. in physics from the American University of Beirut.

Very interesting. Among other interesting things, Dr. Khalil appears to be among the most important people at the World Bank and the supreme leader of the Bank's global telecommunications work. My my, Dr. Chalabi appears to have friends in high places all over the place.

Dr. Khalil also appears to originally be from Lebanon, where Chalabi is reported to have lived with his family after fleeing Iraq in the 1950s, and where he reportedly married a Lebanese woman. [Indeed, a recent UPI article alleges that one of Chalabi's brothers works in Beirut as an agent of the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), for what it's worth.]

It's also worth noting that, according to property records, Dr. Khalil is enjoying a "homestead deduction" tax benefit for people who reside in the homes they purchase. In other words, according to the tax benefits he has claimed, Dr. Khalil is not renting the property to someone else [such as the Chalabi-linked Levantine Holdings SA], but is living there as his primary residence himself.

What is Khalil's relationship to Ahmad Chalabi and his family, who are presumably the "et al"?

[Immense thx to RS for the registry and incorporation info, which I cited at tedious length here because it's not available online without various subscriptions and fees.].

Addendum: Khalil appears to be a fairly common name. But it's worth noting that Chalabi does have a niece, Sarah Khalil, who briefly worked for the New York Times in Baghdad. Could Khalil be the maiden name of Chalabi's Lebanese-born wife? Or the daughter of one of his sisters, (married to a Lebanese?)

Who killed Iran's first secretary in Baghdad, Khalil Naimi, while he was driving near Tehran's Baghdad embassy on April 15th? Was Naimi's assassination linked to the INC's being found out as spying for Tehran? Some reports say it was to Naimi that INC intelligence chief Aras Habib Karim was providing his intelligence reports.

INC fugitives on the run . . . in DC? A couple weekends ago, at a nearby party in DC, INC spokesman Entifad Qanbar, dapper in a navy suit, sat on a stone hedge huddling next to Christopher Hitchens, deep in conversation. I took the opportunity when Hitchens went inside to corner Qanbar for a few minutes' discussion of the fate of his colleague Ahmad Chalabi. In a follow up phone interview the next day, Qanbar politely reiterated the party line to me -- the charges of espionage and corruption against Chalabi and INC senior leadership were all a smear campaign perpetrated by George Tenet and the CIA, and Chalabi and INC leaders were willing to submit to a US Congressional investigation that would sort out the matter, he said. In a short interview on the day the New York Times published the explosive details of the espionage charges against Chalabi, I asked Qanbar if perhaps he was just not aware of what Chalabi or others in the INC might have done.

Qanbar: It’s all nonsense; it’s all not true. The INC never passed any information to the Iranians. The INC has no access to any confidential information in the US. And it is not our practice as the INC to pass information regarding the national security of the US or any other country to any other country. This is a smear campaign by the CIA and George Tenet against the INC. And we are ready to come to the US and stand for a Congressional investigation to find out the truth.

LKR: Is it possible that you just would not be aware if there was someone who was engaged in espionage in the INC?

Qanbar: No, we are very much aware of our intelligence work. We know exactly what to do.The premise that someone went to Iranians and gave secret information about the Iranians communications code being broken and then sent a message with the same broken code is nonsense. I don’t think a five year old would believe it.

Now it's getting clearer why Qanbar and Chalabi and their friends would prefer that such an investigation take place States-side. Today, the Washington Post's gossip columnist Richard Leiby reports that Qanbar has recently been notified that he himself is wanted as a material witness in the Iraqi investigation, while the INC's long time American advisor Francis Brooke and INC financial advisor Margaret "Peggy" Bartel, are the subject of Iraqi arrest warrants, alleged to have obstructed the Iraqi investigation. [Peggy Bartel's letter of outrage at what she witnessed during the US-Iraqi raid on Chalabi's compound was sent out to friends of Laurie Mylroie at the urging of Office of Special Plans veteran and Chalabi supporter Harold Rhode.] All the fugitives are on the lam, of course, right here in D.C. and Alexandria, VA. [All the fugitives, that is, except for INC intel chief -- and Brooke and Bartel business partner, Aras Habib Karim, who is reported to be on the lam in Iran. Who knew Tehran would turn out to be such a neocon safe haven?]. Leiby reports:

Times are tough for Washington supporters of Ahmed Chalabi, the suave exile whom neocons once touted to run Iraq. The latest fallout since Chalabi turned radioactive amid allegations that his group disclosed secrets to Iran: Two of Chalabi's U.S. aides told us they are facing arrest warrants in Iraq that allege obstruction of justice, and a third is being sought for questioning there as a material witness.

Francis Brooke, a veteran Washington political strategist for Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, said he and Margaret Bartel of Alexandria, who handled the party's books, learned of the obstruction charges in recent days after returning from Iraq. Entifahd Qanbar, an Iraqi American spokesman for the INC, said Saturday he'd received a court summons as a witness but, "it doesn't mention what type of charge." He added, "Until I find out that I'll receive due process I'm not going to turn myself in."

All three say they've done nothing wrong, but Chalabi loyalists have seen their star fall precipitously since Iraqi police, with the help of American troops and contractors, raided his headquarters last month. The United States has poured $40 million into the INC over the years, and Brooke said its $342,000-a-month subsidy will expire this month.

Brooke, 42, was part of the vanguard that pushed the Iraq Liberation Act through Congress in the Clinton administration. He wants to return to Iraq to answer the allegations, which stem from his conduct during the raid. "I did do a lot of yelling until I found the commanding officer, but that's all," he said. "I am a polite person to policemen."

Bartel, 52, told us: "I didn't do anything except ask where the warrant was. I didn't prevent them from doing anything. I did want to see what the legal basis was for the search and seizure. They were taking property that was bought by the U.S. government" for Chalabi.

"It's a political vendetta," Brooke told us, attributing the allegations to American occupation officials who have turned against Chalabi, who has not been charged with any offenses.

"Why in the hell am I under arrest instead of being given the chance to do the work that I have done better than any human being over the past decade? Good golly, what a waste of time," said the onetime beer industry rep, pouring himself the second Red Hook of the morning in the Georgetown townhouse that has served as an INC base since 1996.

Brooke is president and Bartel is director of Boxwood Inc., a Virginia corporation that Brooke said received Pentagon funds for Chalabi's party. Another director is Aras Karim Habib, who served as the Iraqi National Congress's intelligence chief and is now a fugitive from an Iraqi arrest warrant. (Several press reports say the CIA has long considered him a paid agent for Iranian intelligence; he has denied it.)...

Now this is truly explosive: Francis Brooke and Peggy Bartel are actually partners in a VA business with Aras Habib Karim who almost no one disputes is a long time paid Iranian intelligence agent?

This is needless to say quite interesting. More on Boxwood, Brooke, Bartel and their Pentagon-funded business relationship with Aras Habib Karim soon. Who initiated their working relationship? Who else might be serving as directors in Boxwood? How does Boxwood fit in with the constellation of companies and lobbying groups working for the INC? How does it fit in with the Rhode-Feith-Perle Mylroie crowd (if at all)? How will the inevitable leaking of more details of the INC espionage allegations affect Chalabi's American supporters, and those who shared offices and payrolls with them in Iraq, and indeed, in Washington? How will Bartel and Brooke's being the apparent subject of arrest warrants in the Iraqi investigation of INC corruption, extortion and kidnapping, affect the FBI and CIA counterintelligence investigations of senior INC leaders passing the most highly sensitive US intelligence to Iran espionage?

In other words, how long will Washington remain a safe haven for Chalabi's and Karim's friends and business associates?

The National Journal's Siobhan Gorman has an excellent piece on the window of opportunity for real US intelligence reform opened up by Tenet's resignation. In particular, for the idea of the creation of a Director of National Intelligence. Gorman argues that Tenet's departure allows the debate about real intelligence reform to occur in a less politicized environment. Worth reading, if only for the names of who's being proposed for such a position. Topping the list -- Sam Nunn and Brent Scowcroft.

More that suggests that the Bush administration's Project BioShield solution to the problem posed by the 2001 anthrax letters attacks may actually be counterproductive. With the Bush administration pouring millions of dollars into biodefense research, now hundreds of facilities across the country -- many with little such experience -- are setting up hot zones to work with live biological agents, in all of our backyards.

From the San Mateo County Times:

The live sample [of anthrax], shipped via FedEx in liquid form three months ago, was injected into live mice beginning two weeks ago in an experiment to develop an anthrax vaccine for children. The mice died, raising alarms among the researchers, who did cultures to confirm the presence of the live agent. The FBI escorted the samples to the state's lab in Richmond Wednesday, where the findings were confirmed...

The Bacillus anthracis that killed the mice at Oakland Children's Research Institute was the Ames strain, the same type of anthrax bacteria used in the October-November 2001 letter attacks. Those attacks killed five people and spurred almost $10 billion in spending on new biodefense labs and research nationwide.

Congress and the Bush administration intended this rapid expansion of U.S. biodefense research to attract fresh minds and new ideas.

The anthrax vaccine studies at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute fit that bill.

The institute's lead scientist, Alexander Lucas, came to Oakland 15 years ago from the University of California, San Diego and the prestigious Scripps Research Institute. Scientists who know his anthrax vaccine work say it shows originality and promise. But a review of his scientific publications show his work until last year focused on salmonella, streptococcus pneumonia and other pediatric infections.

A colleague, Terry Leighton, studied anthrax spores at the University of California, Berkeley. Children's Research Institute never has worked intentionally with live, virulent Bacillus anthracis.

Up until about five years ago, anthrax research was an extremely small field. Only about 10 to 15 researchers in the United States were working on it, including Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, a foremost expert on anthrax at Louisiana State University.

Now there's unbelievable sums of money in it so everyone can discover all the pleasures of homeland security paperwork, Hugh-Jones said...

There are 350 entities nationwide that can handle live anthrax. Yet it's unclear how many labs are, like Children's Oakland, working with the dead agent.

Live anthrax sent via FedEx? Can one imagine how easily this could have been a catastrophe?
[Thx to linguistic analyst DT for some sentence structure suggestions.]

Seymour Hersh has seen all the Abu Ghraib torture photos, Brad DeLong reports, and he looks frightened. DeLong was conveying an email he received from Rick Pearlstein. Pearlstein had gone to see Hersh speak at the University of Chicago. "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened." Worth reading observations of Hersh's other remarks.

Also worth noting: "And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it...."

Matt Yglesias has a very funny blog entry on having a miserable time at his fifth high school reunion and deciding there to become a Republican.

The New Republic's Spencer Ackerman got an interview with the elusive Pentagon intelligence chief Steve Cambone, part of his published profile of Cambone available to subscribers here. Well worth reading, esp. given the current heightened focus on intelligence community reform issues, the resignation of George Tenet, and the question of military vs. intelligence responsibilities highlighted by the continuing Abu Ghraib scandal. Ackerman's piece surfaces this: the militarization of US intelligence -- (whose implications might very well be seen in the Abu Ghraib abuse itself, some might argue).

In a rare interview, Cambone--a longtime defense wonk and veteran of George H.W. Bush's Pentagon--is emphatic that he's not a rival to the [Director of Central Intelligence] DCI. "I can't imagine that's true," he says. He describes his 120-member office as focused on "workaday and relatively unglamorous kinds of things." Its foremost responsibility, according to Cambone, is to ensure that military commanders have the intelligence they need, which in turn guarantees that "the other [intelligence] agencies are concentrating on the right things." (He declined to discuss Abu Ghraib.) Beyond focusing on immediate battlefield needs, Cambone makes sure the Pentagon civilian leadership also has the intelligence it requires. He emphasizes that his office does not itself perform either intelligence collection or analysis. But, in the event of disagreement between the intelligence agencies, Cambone will explore the roots of the dispute and "encourage the community to engage in those comparative analyses."

There has never been a senior Pentagon official with this much direct involvement in intelligence matters. Previously, the Pentagon's role in compiling the intelligence budget was spread out among officials from a variety of military intelligence services, all of which contributed to the budget request that the DCI's staff would compile. Now, Cambone's office provides a solitary mechanism to ensure that the defense secretary's interests are reflected in the intelligence budget. He and the CIA's deputy director for community management sit down to hammer out budget priorities, a process Cambone describes as "highly collegial."

But others aren't so sure relations between the Pentagon and the CIA will remain so cordial. "By definition," says Aftergood, the creation of Cambone's position "means that there's going to be a lot more high-level intelligence policy-making going on at the Pentagon. That, in turn, means that U.S. intelligence will take on an increasingly military-oriented focus"...

There are already some signs that the Pentagon is moving aggressively into what have been traditional CIA functions. It has reportedly opened a new intelligence training center near the Tacoma, Washington, home of the 1st Special Forces Group. Some officials have argued for greater Special Forces control over battle-space preparation activities--that is, the insertion of teams into enemy territory to establish safe areas and local intelligence assets in anticipation of larger military activity--which the CIA typically performs.

Ackerman's conclusion may surprise you:

But it's not Cambone--nor even Rumsfeld--who makes the office of undersecretary of defense for intelligence problematic. The problem is the office itself. The position allows the Pentagon to assert ever more influence over the nation's intelligence priorities at a time when the CIA is ill-positioned to serve as a counterweight.

Well worth getting ahold of. Amazing how little is known about some of the individuals weilding so much control -- at least for now -- over US national security policy. And how very little public debate there is over which agency weilds power over US intelligence policy, operations and budgets in a campaign as long term as the US war on terror.

Update on anthrax: Am informed by Richard Ebright, a scientist at Rutgers, that what was involved in Southern Research Institute apparently accidentally sending live anthrax to the Oakland Children's Hospital Research institute indicates that SRI is in possession of "not just B. anthracis...[but] B. anthracis *Ames.*" In other words, the same strain used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, FYI.

Am informed by my colleague Scott Shane at the Baltimore Sun that David Franz, the former USAMRIID commander who had headed SRI's bio/chem program out of Frederick Maryland, has moved to a different outfit. He moved to someplace called the Midwest Research Institute in November 2003.

Am additionally informed by Ebright that Patricia Fellows now manages SRI's biosafety level 3 facility in Frederick now. And that previously, Fellows worked with Ames at USAMRIID from 2000-2003. Worked with Ames at SRI from 2003 to present.

Post Script: The BaltSun's Scott Shane, who has consistently led the pack on covering the anthrax story, has a good piece on what happened.

Richard M. Smith writes that, "For me, Project Bioshield is just money down the rat hole. If the anthrax attacks did come from a U.S. biodefense insider, then we need to be looking at security at places like Ft. Detrick, not building new labs. In addition, the lack of bioweapons in Iraq is another reason we don't need to be doing this kind of defense research now. There is more productive uses for the $6.5 billion."

Absolutely agreed.

TNR's Spencer Ackerman has quite a scoop: "The DIA relationship with Mr. Chalabi's INC is continuing through the new Iraqi Defense Ministry," he notes with proper emphasis was reported earlier this week by the Washington Times' Bill Gertz. As Spencer says, why not just give Iranian intelligence a tour of Langley? Check it out. More on this soon.

UPDATE: A contact who is aware of who Gertz's source was on this story says it's not true that the INC is still getting funded by the DIA.

From the WaPo:

The detainee, identified in the documents as Ballendia Sadawi Mohammed, said he was suddenly snatched from his bed in cell No. 5 one night and sent into the hallway handcuffed.

"They sent the dogs toward me. I was scared," Mohammed told investigators. "The first dog bit my leg and injured me there and this was bad luck. The bite from the first dog caused me to have 12 stitches from the doctor of my left leg as a result I lost a lot of blood."

Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, said she saw the incident and said the detainee was bitten after he tried to run from the dog and was cornered. Cardona, whose dog apparently bit the detainee twice, once on each leg, justified letting his dog go to the end of its leash because he believed the detainee was fighting with Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr.

Military investigative records show that Frederick and Graner were key participants in the abuse. Harman, who said she saw two other inmates with dog bites around late December, also has been charged.

...On Jan. 13, Spec. John Harold Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators.

"When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on themselves," Ketzer said.

As this and the recent avalanche of stories and memos released on this subject make clear, it is obvious that these attacks were approved up through the chain of command. Col. Pappas makes clear that they were approved. These commanders all the way up the line should face charges of war crimes and command responsibility. Let them try to defend themselves in court.

Incompetent? Or deliberately misleading? It's hard to know how it is possible that the State Department global terror report analysts and writers failed to count every terror attack that occurred in the whole year of 2003. "Among the mistakes, [State Department spokesman Richard] Boucher said, was that only part of 2003 was taken into account." Apparently, they for some unknown reason stopped counting terror attacks in November.
Good for Rep. Henry Waxman for writing to Powell in May to demand an explanation. Take note - he is still waiting for a reply, and the State Department still apparently hasn't come up with the correct numbers yet. How hard can this be?

Who knew that defense contractor Southern Research Institute worked with live anthrax? Check this out. Would seem to expand the FBI's pool of those who had access to anthrax and knowledge how to process it to the aerosalized form used in the 2001 anthrax attacks considerably to contractors beyond USAMRIID, Dugway, Battelle, and SAIC. Also interesting that some of the leaders of the bioweapons defense program at SRI have served among the dozen scientific experts advising the stalled FBI anthrax investigation. Check out my piece on 'the enemy within?' from two years ago on this problem. It's never a good thing when the investigators are so very close to those being investigated.
[thx to JR]

Iran has recently sought tens of thousands of parts for its nuclear program from a European black market arms dealer, the AP is reporting. Is the black market arms dealer talking? Us officials have recently told me that it's no secret Europe, and in particular Italy, is the home for dozens of front companies for Iran to acquire dual use (or single use) technology. It is alarming to observe growing signs of the degree to which Iran and North Korea have seemingly advanced their nuclear programs while the Bush administration has been preoccupied with Iraq which apparently had abandoned its program even in advance of the war...

Congratulations to Nick Confessore for winning a big journo award, for this piece.

The fate of Kanan Makiya's Iraq Memory Foundation project at stake, as it fails to win US funds to support it via L. Paul Bremer. Have heard from friends in this world that Makiya and Chalabi had been having their differences, but since the raid on Chalabi's compound, have heard that Makiya keeping those differences below the radar. Seems there's the potential for money from Harvard if the US doesn't come through, right?

The Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten makes a very good point here: journalists should be more skeptical of reports sourced by intelligence agencies where we almost never really get to see the evidence. (Remember when you know who committed this sin?). Point well taken -- especially the presumption by journalists - outside trying to get inside information -- that spies possess secret knowledge or a clearer picture of the truth because of access to privileged information the rest of us don't have. But whenever you talk to someone who's seen a lot of classified information, they almost always comment that they see most of the substance of what's in those reports in the newspapers sooner or later. [Today, I was in a diplomat's office and spied a pile of documents with a red cover page marked SECRET on the top, and I have to admit, I was intrigued! It could have been his grocery list for all I know....) Anyhow, here's Rutten:

Both the Chalabi and Tenet stories reflect an unsurprising lack of skepticism on the part of the media about stories involving, in one way or another, the intelligence community. Intelligence sources and their activities long have exerted a seductive attraction to journalists precisely because of the spies' presumed possession of secret knowledge, a hidden truth available only to the elect — what the ancient Greeks called gnosis. It always has been a problematic attraction, made even more so by this administration's predilection for what one CIA veteran calls "faith-based intelligence."

The peril has been amplified by the easy compatibility between many journalists and the neoconservative intellectuals, who have dominated the Defense Department's thinking under Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. One of the reasons the neocons swing so easily between think tanks, government service and high-profile media slots is that, like many reporters, they have a glib, wiseguy fluency derived from a theoretical rather than experiential understanding of the world.

The inconvenient real world, however, yields grudgingly to theory. Take the case of Chalabi, the neoconservatives' putative liberator, a cloaked De Gaulle-in-waiting. With all respect to Paul D. Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and their confreres and journalistic admirers, just how street smart do you have to be to know that you shouldn't put too much faith in a guy wanted for bank fraud — in Jordan?

Here's the whole piece.

A follow up on yesterday's post on the Daily Telegraph report saying an Iraqi judge has issued an arrest warrant for American INC Chalabi aide Francis Brooke, who apparently has returned to Washington. This from the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs.

A top American aide to controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi said yesterday that he is eager to answer allegations that he obstructed Iraqi justice by interfering with a police raid on the headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress in Baghdad.

Francis Brooke, who has functioned as Chalabi's unofficial lobbyist in Washington for much of the past decade, was commenting on reports from Baghdad that an Iraqi judge issued a warrant for his arrest after a confrontation between Brooke and an Iraqi police officer. He said he had no information to confirm the report, which first appeared in the London Sunday Telegraph.

The Telegraph quoted an Iraqi judge, Zuhair Maliky, as accusing Brooke of interfering with the work of the Iraqi police during the raid last month on Baghdad headquarters of Chalabi's group. Brooke is alleged to have told the police that they did not have the legal authority to enter the offices "because he was an American and they were Iraqis."

Although it was conducted by Iraqi police, the raid on Chalabi's headquarters was widely seen as signaling a rupture in relations between the Iraqi politician and his patrons in Washington, who viewed the Iraqi National Congress as an important intelligence source. The Pentagon recently stopped paying the Iraqi National Congress a monthly subsidy of $342,000 after charges that Chalabi had shared intelligence information with Iran.

U.S. and Iraqi officials were unable to confirm the Telegraph report, and the Iraqi judge who is said to have issued the arrest warrant for Brooke could not be reached.

Brooke, who returned to Washington from Baghdad over the weekend, said that he found it difficult to believe that an Iraqi judge could issue a warrant for his arrest without the approval of the U.S. occupation authorities. If the report turned out to be true, he said, he would fight to clear his name.

"I am not guilty," Brooke said. "But if this is true, I hope to have a fair venue to defend myself."

Brooke said he protested the raid on Chalabi's headquarters to U.S. officers whose troops sealed off the street. He said he had little contact with Iraqi police officers at the scene, other than a police captain who said he wanted to "apologize" to Chalabi for the incident.

Chalabi, calling from Baghdad yesterday, said, "Francis didn't obstruct anyone. He just wanted to find out who was in charge."

Looks like the French should stop being so smug about the US-UK decision to try to keep notorious black market arms dealer Victor Bout off a UN sanctions list. Check this out. [thx to E].

Maybe Tenet really decided on his own to resign? The American Prospect's Jason Vest weighs in here, with an analysis of the Agency's reaction to the resignation of James Pavitt, the director of the CIA directorate of operations, here -- and foreshadows others who may soon be ready to turn in their resignation letters as well, as well as those who may be taking their places. Who for the top spot? Vest's sources say Richard Armitage, who the must-read James Mann book Rise of the Vulcans asserts is a veteran of the CIA Vietnam era Phoenix program, even as Armitage denies it.

Meantime, the Plame inquiry seems to be drawing to a head.

Headlines -- checking news on a Catalyan keyboard that thinks it's something else.

Arrest warrant issued for the INC's Francis Brooke, the Daily Telegraph reports.

An arrest warrant has been issued for Ahmed Chalabi's right-hand man in Baghdad, the American consultant Francis Brooke, who tried to stop the recent raid on the politician's headquarters in the Iraqi capital.

In the latest in a series of damaging blows for Mr Chalabi, an Iraqi judge said that Mr Brooke had obstructed the Iraqi police. He is believed to have returned to Washington, leaving his former master to tackle claims that his Iraqi National Congress passed American secrets to Iran.

"He stopped the raid by telling the police they didn't have the legal power to do it because he was an American and they were Iraqis," said Judge Zuhair Al-Maliky, of the central criminal court in Baghdad. "

As a result, the raid didn't go as planned. The warrant is for interfering with the work of the Iraqi police in their legitimate business...

Mr Brooke, who is an evangelical Christian, has worked with Mr Chalabi since 1990 - first as a consultant paid by the CIA and most recently as a consultant for BKSH and Associates, a company run by Charlie Black, a Republican Party veteran.

Reports from Iran suggest that Mr Brooke acted as an intermediary between Washington and Teheran, passing letters between the two governments.

Meanwhile this from a friend who tracks the INC's DC paid lobbying arm closely.

Riva Levinson worked with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) from 1999 through the summer of 2003. This group, funded by the United States State Department, will form the nucleus of the new democratic Iraqi Government. For four years, Ms. Levinson managed the INC’s communications initiatives as the voice of the Iraqi people in exile. Since the country’s liberation, Ms. Levinson has worked with the INC at its headquarters in Baghdad to conduct programs to support democracy and the building of civil society.

As my friend says, "I thought that there was suppose to be democratic elections in Iraq. I didn't realize that it would be a foregone conclusion that the INC would 'form the nucleus of the new democratic Iraqi Government'."

Meantime, the American Enterprise Institute's vice president Danielle Pletka takes up a strange sort of defense of Ahmad Chalabi, in the LA Times:

The recent reports detailing the alleged perfidy of Ahmad Chalabi actually say much more about his accusers in the U.S. government than they do about Chalabi himself. They reveal Washington as a faithless friend and its agencies as more concerned with carrying out vendettas than with pursuing the real enemies of the United States...

Chalabi himself never changed. He was very consistent: He wanted the
overthrow of Hussein. When the CIA dumped him, he went to Congress; when
Congress lost interest, he went to the Pentagon...

Throughout the 1990s, Chalabi was regularly accused of malfeasance by his
enemies...The latest charges have been dizzying....Of all the charges, passing secrets to Iran is the most serious. It is gravest, obviously, for the American who supposedly told Chalabi that we had broken Iranian codes. That person is governed by U.S. laws, and if he exists, he should be prosecuted.

Chalabi, on the other hand, is a foreigner and owes us no fealty.

No fealty, indeed.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias captures a classic moment of the so called radical pro-democracy pusher at AEI stomping on free speech - something I have witnessed myself in a very ugly form by Ledeen at AEI in recent months, when he physically removed someone asking a question. Why is Michael Ledeen so afraid of questions from the audience? Isn't that a pretty fascistic response to a genuine question from the Nation's David Corn? It's extremely ugly behavior, even if AEI is willing to put up with it.

[Thanks to R.]

Post Script: W & P for some reason doesn't get much of a chance to watch TV States-side, so forgive me if this is something I overlooked for months. But noticed the other night that CNN International has added to its international line up The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. On Friday night, the subject was none other than your and my favorite, Ahmad Chalabi. Stewart: "It turns out, that Ahmad Chalabi has indeed been providing timely, accurate intelligence about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.....To the Iranians." Welcome addition.

War & Piece is traveling with minimal opportunity to post. So two brief things:

RIP, Ronald Reagan.

The events marking the commemoration of the D-Day landings are very moving, and eerie to watch while finishing James Mann's must-read Rise of the Vulcans and realizing the Bush and Rice et al are there feeling like their Iraq campaign is part of a larger new national security vision they believe is comparable to the US helping liberate Europe from the Nazis. If they really believe that, then why for G-d's sake didn't they do Iraq right??? Isn't that what is unforgiveable? How can people who claim such depths of conviction about the nobility of what they are doing have insisted on doing regime change in Iraq on the cheap?

In anticipation of the 9/11 commission report, which will almost certainly recommend the creation of an American 'MI5,' FBI director Robert Mueller has proposed the creation of a special intelligence unit at the FBI. Seems George Tenet is not the only one reacting to anticipated reports. My few encounters covering extremely complicated FBI investigations has led me to conclude, for what it's worth, that the FBI generally lacks the kind of ultra competent, multilingual staff to do a sufficiently good job with this. Cops don't necessarily make good detectives or intelligence analysts, and the FBI has a real cop mentality, is my impression. Also I have never before encountered an organization more subject to political pressure than the FBI -- the kind of pressure that can discourage certain politically inconvenient avenues of investigation.

In related fronts, the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler asks if Tenet is the fall guy for the Bush administration? At some level, clearly yes, but as I note in the previous post, perhaps not the kind of fall guy that will help the Bush administration distance itself and recover politically from the multiple failures and scandals it has brought upon itself since it came into office. Further down, Kessler asks, who will be left of Bush's national security team should he somehow manage to win reelection?

Still, Tenet's resignation signals the beginning of the breakup of a foreign policy team that has taken the country through the Sept. 11 crisis and two wars over the past 3 1/2 years. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice have made it clear they will depart at the end of the current term, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appears unlikely to remain in the wake of the prison scandal in Iraq and the many calls for his resignation.

That pretty much leaves Stephen Hadley, Ashcroft and Cheney as far as I can tell, and who knows where the Plame investigation will lead in regards to Cheney's office.

Finally, via Kevin Drum, a Post article that reveals not only that Chalabi was detected on a 1995 intercept to be discussing with the Iranians a fake Saddam assassination plot (source: seemingly Bob Baer); the piece also interestingly notes that Chalabi is a British citizen (source: the FBI). The FBI is exploring what that means in terms of his potentially being subject to US espionage charges.

Why Tenet quit. Or more precisely, why did Tenet quit now? According to the Times and Newsweek, because of the forthcoming 400 page Senate Select Intel committee investigation report into Iraq pre-war intelligence.

Here's Newsweek's take:

Congressional sources said the timing seemed to be influenced by the impending release of a massive Senate Intelligence Committee report that one official described as a “devastating indictment” of the agency’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Another report expected next month from the national commission investigating the September 11 attacks is expected to roundly criticize the agency’s failure to develop sources inside Al Qaeda and piece together evidence—including information in its files on two of the hijackers—that might have helped uncover the plot.

And the New York Times:

George J. Tenet's resignation may have been hastened by a critical, 400-page report from the Senate intelligence committee that was presented to the Central Intelligence Agency for comment last month.

Government officials and people close to Mr. Tenet said the classified report is a detailed account of mistakes and miscalculations by American intelligence agencies on the question of whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons before last year's invasion by the United States. An unclassified version of the report is to be made public later this month. Some close to Mr. Tenet say the report was among the factors that led him to step down from a post he had considered leaving for several years.

Maybe a better question to ask, as Slate does, is how did Tenet keep his job for so long? But, politically, didn't Bush pick the wrong fall guy to help his reelection chances? Why reward Chalabi and his supporters with this? [I guess, some of them have FBI polygraphs and jail time to contemplate, if that's any small comfort. Tenet's only going to have to retire. And I know for a fact the Senate Select intelligence committee has been interviewing members of Feith's Office of Special Plans as well of late.] As devastating an indictment of the CIA's pre-war Iraq intelligence as the Senate Select Intelligence committee is likely to make, and as devastating as the 9/11 commission report will likey be for Tenet and the FBI, it's not only incompetence in the administration that hurts Bush -- and there's plenty to go around. It's that Americans resent those in the Bush administration who deliberately, willfully deceived them. People like Feith, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and members of Feith's and Cheney's staff. As they say, it's not the mistake, it's the cover up, the specter of real deceit, that outrages people. And loses votes.

This administration has plenty of incompetence to go around. But it's those whose incompetence - in managing the Iraq post-war for instance - was the direct result of ideological zeal and contempt for the truth - who should be in the White House cross hairs. If you need to dump someone overboard, start with Feith. You don't need an FBI counterintelligence investigation to fire him.

Meantime, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Sun have pieces on just how extraordinarily damaging Chalabi's alleged leak to the Iranians is to the US. I mean, it's not like we were worried about Iran's nuclear program or something, were we?

This from the Post's Dana Priest and Walter Pincus:

In a closed-door damage assessment on Capitol Hill, National Security Agency officials said the disclosure cut off a significant stream of information about Iran at a time when the United States is worried about the country's nuclear ambitions, its support for terrorist groups and its efforts to exert greater influence over Iraq.

The LA Times reports:

Reports citing secret intercepts of another country's intelligence traffic typically are given the highest level of classification and are shown to only a handful of U.S. officials. Transcripts would be stamped as a top-secret National Security Agency product, with a code word to indicate they were encrypted signals that had been intercepted and decoded.

These are considered among the most valuable of intelligence products, and federal law even provides for the death penalty in some cases in which "communications intelligence or cryptographic information" has been disclosed.

"The number of people who could have leaked this is small, in the dozens or less," said Flynt Leverett, a former CIA officer and former Middle East director for President Bush's National Security Council. "If this is true, someone in this administration did this. It really cries out for accountability."

As the Sun's Eli Lake and others report, Chalabi's own attorneys have written to Ashcroft and Mueller asking them to investigate, who leaked to the press, what Chalabi leaked! Talk about gall. Former CIA Counterterrorism Center director and Iran contra alum Duanne Clarridge, who himself once faced the Agency's wrath for publishing his memoir without CIA vetting approval, weighs in in the Sun, on Chalabi's behalf. This piece neglects to mention that Clarridge has recently reportedly been on the payroll of the Rendon Group to promote Chalabi and the INC. This from the Sun:

The American intelligence community is conducting an extensive damage assessment of its Iranian operations in light of recent intelligence that alleges Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi disclosed to an Iranian agent that America had penetrated secret communications in Tehran. Administration officials briefed both the House and Senate intelligence committees on the matter yesterday... Attorneys for Mr. Chalabi yesterday sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller asking them to launch an investigation into who leaked information about the alleged Iranian leak to the press... A former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Duane Clarridge, told the Sun that the damage assessment was 12 years too late. "Since 1992, everybody in northern Iraq knew the Americans were reading the Iranian ciphers," he said. "Since World War II, the United States government has assiduously never talked about signals intelligence. The fact that so many unnamed officials are doing so now shows that this is a political act of desperation to make sure that Chalabi does not run Iraq." But many in the intelligence community believe the charges are true, based on an intercepted conversation between two Iranian officials discussing in detail America's ability to crack what the Islamic republic had believed before was an encrypted communication... Mr. Chalabi has a doctorate in mathematics [and]...completed a thesis on prime numbers, one of the building blocks of modern cryptology. Sharing information about code breaking is considered as serious an intelligence breach as disclosing the identities of agents in foreign countries...Indeed, the penalty for disclosing penetrated communications to a foreign government is a minimum 10 years in jail. The damage assessment centers around the ultrasecret National Security Agency, America's code breakers and eavesdroppers, according to an administration official.

A couple things I am mulling over. A certain joint super secret CIA-NSA program is interesting to explore as the likely source of the US's original success in breaking the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security's communications code. They do the embassy break ins and the like. Secondly, I am interested in the "chain of custody" of the intelligence reported to have been given by Chalabi to Vevak. For instance, it seems possible that someone say at DIA on loan to the Office of Doug Feith might have originally been aware of the US's success in breaking Vevak's code and passed on that information to a colleague in the same office who did not himself have the same access. And then it was that person, likely a close Chalabi confidante and handler, who leaked it to Chalabi who passed it to Vevak's Suleymani. More on this to come.

Also worth pondering, how soon can Tenet get out with his book, and when will he appear on 60 Minutes?

You get off a long plane ride, jetlagged, and discover when you finally meet the ethernet again, that in your absence, all hell has broken loose! Everybody has lawyered up, certain people are being polygraphed!, and a grand unifying theory of lies and espionage and pre war intelligence is somehow emerging. I hate vacations.

Posts will be slow 'til Monday.

TENET RESIGNS.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA Director George Tenet, under fire for his agency's intelligence lapses in Iraq, resigned and will leave in July, the Bush administration announced on Thursday.

President Bush said Tenet submitted his letter of resignation on Wednesday night at the White House and told the president he would leave his post for personal reasons.

"He has done a superb job on behalf of the American people. I accepted his letter," Bush told reporters as he was leaving the White House to begin a trip to Italy and France.

Tenet will continue as CIA director until mid-July, when his deputy John McLaughlin will become acting director.

Can we expect to see Richard Perle start to defend Chalabi's leaks of the most sensitive US intelligence to the Iranian terror masters? Ledeen? Harold Rhode? Michael Rubin? I hear Larry Franklin isn't defending Chalabi any more.

There are only two defenses I can see: it's not true (seems the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of, it's true). Or, it's okay that Chalabi did it.

Or, there's a third. How about, WE WERE WRONG. We were fools, and dupes. But none of these people seem to have the moral capacity to admit they were wrong. What kind of blindness, what kind of pathological arrogance, prevents these people from ever admitting they are wrong?

MORE: A friend says Chalabi supporters may also use the defense, Chalabi was framed by Iranians who wanted him to be politically neutralized in Iraq. [As if he even needed to be neutralized by outside forces!] That the two Iranians who were detected in an intercept to be discussing what Chalabi supposedly gave them could have been trying to frame him. I find this deeply unconvincing. [Remember how each shred of bogus intel about ties between al Qaeda and Saddam these very same neocons clung to as the holy grail? This is that in reverse].

A question. Is Chalabi simply believed to have conversationally told an Iranian source that the US had broken XYZ communications code? Or is he actually believed to have had physical access to some sort of code breaking technology itself? Why does this matter? Because the number of US officials who might have known the formeris certainly greater than the latter. Even a civilian Pentagon official known to be very close to Chalabi and who believes himself a huge expert on Iran and the Middle East might have heard the latter and passed it on to Chalabi.

STOP THE PRESSES. Chalabi disclosed to Tehran the US had broken Iran's secret communications code. "Drunk" Pentagon civilian reportedly gave Chalabi the higly classified information. From the New York Times, which along with other news orgs apparently had known about the nature of the breach, but complied with US intelligence officials' request not to disclose its exact nature, 'til today, since it was already leaking out:

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials...

The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, asked The New York Times and other news organizations not to publish details of the case. The Times agreed to hold off publication of some specific information that top intelligence officials said would compromise a vital, continuing intelligence operation. The administration withdrew its request on Tuesday, saying information about the code-breaking was starting to appear in news accounts...

American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.

According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.

American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of "them" — a reference to an American — had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American had been drunk...

The account of Mr. Chalabi's actions has been confirmed by several senior American officials, who said the leak contributed to the White House decision to break with him.

It could not be learned exactly how the United States broke the code. But intelligence sources said that in the past, the United States has broken into the embassies of foreign governments, including those of Iran, to steal information, including codes.

The F.B.I. has opened an espionage investigation seeking to determine exactly what information Mr. Chalabi turned over to the Iranians as well as who told Mr. Chalabi that the Iranian code had been broken, government officials said. The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.

Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi's strongest supporters* and served as his main point of contact with the government*, the officials said.

More soon. [Big thanks to E.]

Post Script: If this* doesn't sound like a certain Pentagon civilian deputy to Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans......[Alas, am told by a friend that it's not. That individual doesn't have that sort of access. Times piece is sure pointing in that interesting direction, however, isn't it? Wisful thinking?]

Post Script II: Not to be totally obnoxious. But someone riffed today on the theme, wonder if Iran did not believe that what it had gotten from Chalabi was so valuable? And would the CIA really want to disclose if something truly highly sensitive had been compromised by espionage? I think one well informed friend must have known the basic story for a while.

Will Congress please initiate public hearings, and will someone please put whoever gave this stuff to Chalabi in jail?

A friend claims to know about the specific intercepts but won't say because the agency asked him not to. What's left to be compromised at this point? [Update, now apparently he got permission to say. I'm still waiting to hear. Something about two Iranians....What? I'm losing you.]

MORE: From the NY Sun:

American intelligence officials have collected intelligence in the last six weeks that strongly suggests Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi has compromised America’s penetration of Iranian top secret communications in Tehran, according to American officials. Concerns about the intelligence breach first surfaced after Mr. Chalabi held an unreported meeting with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard General whose last name is Sulaymani, according to an American intelligence official. General Sulaymani heads the Quds command, for the revolutionary guard, a unit of that service in charge of funding anti-Israeli terror organizations as well as anti-American activities inside Iraq. The information on Mr. Chalabi was collected through a separate report regarding two Iranian officials discussing the information Mr. Chalabi apparently gave them.

Hmm. The last time I heard Suleymani mentioned was in Michael Ledeen's NRO piece last week, when he wrote:

[SCIRI's] Hakim reports regularly to an Iranian intelligence official named Sulemani, surely one of the most dangerous men in the country. And SCIRI has its own militia, the Badr Brigades, which at least until very recently conducted military maneuvers with units of the Revolutionary Guards on Iraqi territory adjoining the Iranian border.

Are the Iranians rolling over laughing at having hoodwinked among the very most zealous pro Israel members of the US foreign policy elite, into accepting into their inner circle someone sending the very most sensitive US intelligence to the very people planning and conducting terror operations against Israel and the US? How easy does it get?

Assume for the sake of argument that Chalabi has thrown more than a few scraps of US intelligence the Iranians way over the past decade. Do you think the Iranians found it any more reliable than what the US has gotten from Chalabi over the past decade?

Is it possible Chalabi really did pass something valuable to the Iranians recently, something that most smoke seems to suggest involves signals intelligence, and the Iranians didn't realize what they had gotten?

Secondly, if it was really so valuable as some reports allege, wouldn't the US intelligence community have an interest in not disclosing it?

Finally, reports suggest seized in the May 13 raid on Chalabi's China house compound was Chalabi's personal computer. While some reports suggest the seeming FBI and CIA operatives present at the raid may have been DynCorp employees on contract with the Iraqi ministry of the interior [who would seem to be subcontractors ultimately of the CPA in any case, at least until June 30], does anyone really doubt that the laptop is not now in the custody of US counterintelligence agencies, rather than the Iraqi judge who issued the arrest warrants for members of the INC in regards to kidnapping and corruption? All reports suggest such an investigation is underway. I do hear again that a source high in the Pentagon does say the difference in perceptions about the espionage allegations remains between those few US officials who have been briefed on what senior INC officials are alleged to have given the Iranians, and those who haven't.

The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports that Ahmad Chalabi asked his nephew Salem Chalabi to back the choice of Iyad Allawi as the interim Iraqi government's prime minister.

Mr. Allawi’s nomination Friday to lead the interim government was supported by one of his rivals in the old Iraqi resistance, Ahmad Chalabi. Mr. Chalabi, who spent the weekend in Najaf trying to broker a resolution of the standoff between Muqtada al-Sadr and American forces, instructed his nephew, Salem Chalabi, by satellite phone to vote for Mr. Allawi’s nomination, according to Iraqi National Congress sources.

“On the governing council there were some differences, but there has been a lot of cooperation between Dr. Chalabi and Iyad Allawi,” one of Mr. Chalabi’s deputies, Haidar Musawi, told the Sun yesterday.

Does Chalabi think the Caretaker Government is set to fail, and therefore Allawi's association with it will neutralize him politically over the medium term?

Meantime, the US' and UN's choice for president of the Caretaker Government, Adnan Pachachi, has resigned, after Iraqi Governing Council members chose Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer as the new transitional government's president. Al-Yawer, a Sunni, who was educated in Saudi Arabia and at Georgetown, has reportedly been quite critical of the US occupation.

After the announcement of the members of the new cabinet, the IGC dissolved itself.