One part of the CPA still lives: the Inspector General's office. And it's busy, with 100 employees conducting investigations into more than twenty-seven criminal cases, according to the LA Times:

A comprehensive examination of the U.S.-led agency that oversaw the rebuilding of Iraq has triggered at least 27 criminal investigations and produced evidence of millions of dollars' worth of fraud, waste and abuse, according to a report by the Coalition Provisional Authority's inspector general.

The report is the most sweeping indication yet that some U.S. officials and private contractors repeatedly violated the law. . .

More than $600 million in cash from Iraqi oil money was spent with insufficient controls. Senior U.S. officials manipulated or misspent contract money. Millions of dollars' worth of equipment could not be located, the report said . . .

The Times has reported on several cases in which a small circle of former Republican administration officials had drawn scrutiny for their actions in Iraq, including a deputy undersecretary of Defense under investigation by the FBI in connection with a telecommunications contract. In another case, officials have said, a former senior U.S. advisor conducted negotiations with a family connected to Saddam Hussein to form a new Iraqi airline . . .

The report cited several criminal cases under investigation, though it provided no names and few details.

In one case, a senior U.S. advisor "manipulated" the contracting system to award a $7.2-million security contract. The contract was later voided and the money returned.

In another incident, a contractor billed $3.3 million for nonexistent personnel working on an oil pipeline repair contract. A security contractor guarding the pipeline overcharged the CPA by $20,000. Both incidents are under criminal investigation.

In another example, a military assistant to a Pentagon employee gambled away part of a $40,000 grant issued to help coach an Iraqi sports team, the report found.

Just like Texas, we guess. The values of Enron and Halliburton now at work in Iraq.

Just as he needed to, Kerry has reclaimed the center, from Bush, who's yielded it for his conservative base, according to Slate's Will Saletan, in this superb analysis.

In his determination to unite the right, Bush hasn't just united the left. He has lost the center . . .

One more Bush voter on the right, balanced by one more Kerry voter on the left, plus the tilting of one more voter in the middle toward Kerry, is a net loss for the president. That's the lesson of this administration, this election, and this convention. Kerry doesn't have to write any good lines. He just has to read them.

David Kusnet has more.

Is this going to become a Bosnia-like rerun of the UN passing endless resolutions and sanctions while Darfur burns? The UN Security Council has voted to endorse a US-backed resolution giving Sudan 30 days to stop atrocities in Darfur, or face sanctions, CNN reports. But it turns out the resolution doesn't even really include the word "sanctions" at all, though the US insists that is what it really means:

The vote comes after the United States on Thursday dropped the word "sanctions" from its draft resolution on Sudan but maintained sanctions are still possible if the Sudanese government does not comply with commitments it made earlier this year to control the crisis in the Darfur region.

The draft calls upon the Sudanese government to disarm pro-government Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, that have brutally attacked black African farmers in Darfur. Human rights groups estimate 15,000 to 30,000 civilians have been killed and more than 1.2 million people have been left homeless.

The Janjaweed was created in February 2003 by Khartoum as a way of controlling black African groups in Darfur that have accused the Islamic government of favoring the country's Arab population.

[US Ambassador to the UN John] Danforth said the word "sanctions" was objectionable to certain council members. He made clear, however, that the changes in the resolution are "simply a matter of nomenclature" and the threat of full economic and diplomatic sanctions remains.

So, if things aren't better in 30 days, there may possibly be diplomatic or economic sanctions against the government of Sudan. And this was considerably tougher action than some UN SC members wanted (Pakistan and China abstained from the SC vote, which passed 13 to 0.).

For you international law types out there, a question. The US Congress has already overwhelmingly voted to declare what's occuring in Darfur a genocide. So what does this compel the US government, a signatory to the genocide convention, to do?

UPDATE: According to Knight Ridder's Sudarsan Raghavan, the Sudanese government is trying to force refugees back to the horrific conditions they fled in Darfur, to make it appear to the outside world as if refugee numbers are going down. Shouldn't someone at least send a team of a few hundred human rights monitors to be reporting back loudly and often what's happening?

Mariam Ahmed, originally from Tiginalni, was evicted from an IDP camp near the Nyala airport and moved to the Kalma refugee camp in South Darfur. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein / KRT

Terror fears abroad. All of the front pages of the Italian newspapers today are about the fear that Italy could be a prime target for a terrorist attack involving chemical or biological weapons. The stories are sourced to the Italian parliament which was briefed by the country's security services on the issue.

Or maybe Sismi is just trying to change the subject? This piece from Libero Wednesday reports that Italy's "Mitrokhin Commission has criticized the way Sismi handled the dossier outside of institutional circuits. The reports in the Impedian dossier were handled by a 'restricted circle' of people who operated outside 'institutional circuits' and outside all 'democratic control'. According to the ADNKRONOS newsagency the Mitrokhin commission is very critical of Sismi's role in managing the intelligence regarding a network of Soviet spies in Italy. For four years, [from 1995 to 1999], MI6, the British secret service, sent its Italian counterpart intelligence on KGB colonel, Vasilj Mitrokhin, who, in 1992, defected to the West."

More signs the Plame inquiry is wrapping up? The FBI agent leading the investigation has just been promoted to head the FBI's Philadelphia field office.

Nick Confessore and Eschaton point to this Wall Street Journal piece, which indicates Sandy Berger's alleged crime is removing photocopies; as you will remember, certain Republicans tried to insinuate that he had knowingly removed originals -- perhaps at some Dark Leader's behest. Not to rain on Mr. DeLay's parade, but looks like he has to get himself a new conspiracy theory. This from the Journal:

Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Several prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, have voiced suspicion that when Mr. Berger was preparing materials for the 9/11 Commission on the Clinton administration's antiterror actions, he may have removed documents that were potentially damaging to the former president's record.

The conclusion by archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission.

Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said officials there "are confident that there aren't any original documents missing in relation to this case." She said in most cases, Mr. Berger was given photocopies to review, and that in any event officials have accounted for all originals to which he had access.

I guess Hastert is going to have to go back to obstructing the reforms urged by the families of 9/11 for sport.

The WaPo's Kamran Khan on Pakistan's arrest of the al Qaeda suspect:

. . . [Ahmed Khalfan] Ghailani, a Tanzanian citizen said to be in his early thirties, was seized early Sunday, along with his wife and five other African or Pakistani al Qaeda suspects, following a joint Pakistani-U.S. intelligence operation, senior Pakistani police and intelligence officials said. The capture followed a 10-hour shootout in the industrial city of Gujrat, 125 miles south of Islamabad . . .

The operation to capture Ghailani, who is on the list of the FBI's 22 most wanted terrorists, was supervised by agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and coordinated with CIA and FBI officials, according to an official in Punjab state who was present . . .

Ghailani was being held at an undisclosed location and would be debriefed "to our satisfaction before handing him over to the U.S. for the trial," Hayat said. Another senior Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. agents had been participating in the interrogation since the arrest and that Ghailani was isolated from the other suspects shortly after his capture . . .

Another senior Pakistani intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Ghailani's capture was a result of the arrest last month of a lesser al Qaeda suspect in Karachi. Electronic intercepts conducted by U.S. technical teams based in Pakistan led them to the Gujrat hideout.

A senior Punjab police officer and an intelligence official, both involved in the operation to nab Ghailani, said in separate interviews that U.S. and Pakistani officials had confirmed his identity shortly after the arrest.

Pakistani officials have rejected allegations that they delayed the announcement for four days to obtain maximum publicity. Hayat said the delay was a result of "double checks and even triple checks in such cases."

But in the arrests of other high-profile al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, including Abu Zubayida, Khalid Sheik Mohammad and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, the news media received word almost immediately.

"What difference will it make if we do not rush to make a hasty unconfirmed claim?" Hayat said. He said he saw no connection between the late announcement of Ghailani's arrest and the Democratic National Convention in the United States, where Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts was about to accept his party's nomination for president.

Hmm. Count me skeptical that there was "no connection" in the timing of the announcement. Khan sounds pretty skeptical himself.

Three important points to note:

1) US officials -- the CIA and FBI -- were in on the intelligence leading to the arrest, and have already been involved in his interrogation.

2) The timing of the announcement of the arrest was highly unusual, compared to previous Pakistani arrests of al Qaeda suspects.

3) And Ghailani is not "low level" at all - he is on the FBI's list of the 22 most wanted people in the world. As CNN notes here, "Ghailani was one of seven alleged terrorists who were highlighted by Attorney General John Ashcroft in a news conference in Washington on May 26. Ashcroft said Ghailani had 'the skill, ability to undertake attacks both against American interests overseas as well in the United States.'"

Update: Check out Howie Kurtz.

Out of the ballpark. Kerry's speech, which I watched from home in DC on TV, and the whole convention. The Democrats have become the party of hope; polls show Americans believe George Bush and Dick Cheney have led the country in the wrong direction, away from hope towards despair. Kerry, and this convention, offered a highly appealing alternative. Does Dick Cheney inspire hope in anybody?

The most revealing -- and my favorite -- moment? When Kerry said "I know there are those who criticize me for seeing complexities -- and I do -- because some issues just aren't all that simple." Damn straight. John Kerry shouldn't have to apologize for admitting that he actually thinks, that he recognizes some of these issues are not black and white. Can America handle an intellectual president, and more, someone who admits to seeing moral complexity? I think so.

Kerry Foreign Policy and Human Rights. The thing I would argue with Oxblog's David Adesnik about in this post, is that Holbrooke's relentless, entrepreneurial, and -- most important -- effective championing of causes like intervention to stop genocide in Bosnia, and finding meaningful solutions to save the lives of people around the globe with HIV/AIDS and prevent millions more from being infected, is so much more powerful a demonstration of a commitment to human rights than gabbing about it. The human right to survive -- whether it be genocide or disease. Holbrooke used the example of Kerry's commitment to help AIDS victims vs. the Bush administration's failure to deliver what it promised in his talk at the Charles Wednesday, but I didn't get a chance to get everything in to my summary.

David writes in his post, " . . . It's extremely disappointing to see Democrats talk only about alliances and multilateralism while completely ignoring the imperatives of democracy and human rights. The Democrats used to be the party of the idealists, but now their claim is tenuous at best." Maybe . . . But I was struck listening to the team I heard speak yesterday by something that may be better than foreign policy idealism: the marriage of real commitment to do what's possible to make lives better for lots of people on the planet, with an incredible, unideological wealth of experience knowing how to make it happen, from post war nation building, to working with allies on intervening to stop ethnic conflict, to having the right types of troops -- military police, special operatives -- to do these tasks, to getting Republican right wingers to agree to pay the US's UN dues. This is not glamorous stuff. This is the hard learned, hard-slogging negotiations, often done at the domestic level, but internationally too, of marrying often extremely idealistic goals -- getting anti retroviral therapies to as many people infected in Africa, stopping a war that was killing tens of thousands, etc. -- with real how-to knowledge. What's missing of course from the Rumsfeld conduct of post-war Iraq has always been that sort of pragmatism, which was forced to yield to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeldian ideology -- "we won't need more troops," "they'll be welcoming us with flowers," "we don't need those post-war experts" telling us how we are going to be running our occupation, etc.

Matt Yglesias thinks Adesnik got the wrong take-away from our accounts too.

July Surprise, Indeed. When Spencer Ackerman, John Judis and Massoud Ansari call it, they call it. As they predicted, right on freaking schedule! This from CNN:

Security forces have captured a high-level al Qaeda operative in a raid in central Pakistan, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said.

And this, new, from MSNBC:

Pakistan has arrested Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian al-Qaida suspect with a $25 million reward on his head, in connection with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the interior minister said Friday.

Ghailani was arrested on Sunday in the eastern city of Gujrat along with at least 15 others, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat told Pakistan’s Geo television network.

“He was among the foreigners arrested in that operation,” Hayyat said.

Ghailani is under indictment in the United States for the bombings, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. The United States has posted a $25 million reward for Ghailani.

They arrested him on Sunday and only announced it today, the day Kerry happens to be scheduled to give his prime time acceptance speech?

So Spencer, any bets on who's going to win in November? Stock tips?

Go read it.

More Reader Response to my Kerry Foreign Policy post, this time more favorable to Holbrooke.

This letter from Haggai Elitzur, who has taken a break from blogging to start a new post-doc job:

I definitely agree with you on Holbrooke, it would be a real shame if he ended his career without being Sec. of State. A Perry-type at Defense would be great too. One thing that makes me optimistic about having a better foreign policy team with the Dems in power is their better understanding of the necessary separation between State and Defense. The ideological right's combination of hyper-jingoistic militarism and contempt for the leftist/anti-Semitic/Arab-loving State Dept. has surely been a big factor in the militarization of everything under Bush, and marginalizing of the diplomats. I remember one article from a while back--before the Iraq war, I'm pretty sure--where a European diplomat said, "the problem we have now with the US is that
you have two foreign ministries." Not that this is a new idea, but maybe even more than ideology, the problem under Bush has been that nobody knows who the hell is in charge on these major issues. When was the last time any European foreign ministers had to worry about their defense ministers seriously poaching on their turf? It must be very confusing for them to deal with the US on those terms.

I'm sure that some State/Defense clashes are inevitable in any administration, but having someone like Perry at Defense would help . . .

Kerry also seems well-suited to handle State/Defense infighting because of his military experience. Clinton always had a tough time with generals who were playing hardball, but I doubt that Kerry would allow himself to be pushed around by any of them. Of course the Vietnam card is being played against every conceivable criticism of Kerry, no matter how appropriate or inappropriate it may be, but this seems like one case where it makes sense.

More: This from reader Craig Taylor

Hi Laura,

Just wanted to let you know that, given the inanity of the media talking heads, how refreshing it was to just get some journalism out of the convention when you wrote about Kerry's foreign policy. I alerted several people to your post and you're getting thumbs up.

I opposed the war in Iraq but Bush has opened a horrible can of worms. I
support Kerry all the way but it's going to be no picnic next year if he's president. If Bush is reelected, there's a good chance we will slide into World War III, guerilla-style with warlords popping up here and there feeling they have a free hand with an overextended American military; there's a small chance things are already headed that way but I think most people around the world want this stuff to stop.

One thing most Americans don't realize is that not only has Bush ruined our
credibility in terms of our good word and our good will, he has also ruined the
credibility of our military power and our ability to get things done. Kerry
will have the unenviable task of reestablishing both types of credibility while
rebuilding a bipartisan foreign policy and reestablishing real diplomacy as
our main foreign policy tool. I have a great deal more to say on this but the
main point is: thanks. And keep saying what needs to be said. From this point
on, there are no easy solutions and Americans need to know that.

Best,

Thank you for the thoughtful letters, there are some very interesting ones coming in. Of course, a couple yesterday suggested I am a DNC hack. Exactly. One who voted for Dole. Go figure.

Dissent: This letter, from reader Charles Ganske, takes me to task for seeming gleefulness that the Bushies have found themselves despite their preferences coming late to a policy towards North Korea similar to the Clinton administration:

Mrs. Rozen,

Could you at least try not to sound so gleeful about the prospect of more
American taxpayer dollars going to the worst tyranny on the planet? Tee-hee, "the Bushies" are coming around to 'our' policy, and that's all that matters.

The prevalance of such binary, partisan thinking even among people who consider themselves to be intellectuals in this town is one reason I'll be happy to leave it Saturday afternoon.

How many people have starved to death in NK since 1994, and will continue to do so when our aid goes straight to Kim Jong Il's military?

Ideological, not nuanced realist questions, I know. But the question is not rhetorical.

I am sending this email along because you've been posting a lot of emails you've received, including one mildly critical of your praise of Holbrooke. So I figured unlike certain bloggers ( . . .) who post only amens, and like less partisan bloggers ( . . . ), you might post the occasional dissent now and then.

Like I said, at least try to show that restarting the Agreed Framework, after the
North Koreans have proven themselves to be total liars (but if you read Fred Kaplan, their secret uranium program never mattered, right?), is a grim necessity for lack of other, more "ideological" options. Instead your distaste with all things "neocon" leads you unthinkingly into the arms of those who don't want to see regime change, because reunification might cost our South Korean allies some money, and therefore must be put off as long as possible.

If you want to say everything is fine as long as the North pretends to halt its nuke programs for a second time, go talk to human rights activists like Norbert Vollertsen.

Charles D. Ganske

I will try to respond to this later. For now, I find nothing amusing about the plight of the North Koreans. But I don't think the Bush administration has done anything to a) decelerate North Korea having acquired nuclear weapons and the missile power to deliver them or b) improve the lives of North Koreans. North Korea is probably the toughest foreign policy issue out there, and I don't think any administration has a pat solution to it. But the Bush administration was so ideologically opposed to continuing the Clinton administration's approach to NK (and for that matter, so pressured South Korea to give up the Sunshine policy), but when Pyongyang then called Bush's bluff, kicked out IAEA inspectors and declared they had a half dozen nuclear weapons, how did the Bushies respond? I believe they started moving US troops away from the DMZ, begged for six party talks, and now have adopted the Clinton policy. Seems they can't find anything better after all their tough talk and hot air. That's what I was arguing. Am I gleeful that this insane regime has nuclear weapons and starves its people and chemically gases its prisoners in experiements? That's unfair. But this bunch clearly doesn't have the solution. [What's more, I think Iran is learning an awful lot from the North Korea nuclear play book -- e.g. make the nuclear weapons a fait accompli].

Chalabi reinvents himself as a Shiite populist, the LA Times' Alissa Rubin reports. And interesting to note that he's allied himself with the Iran-funded Muqtada al-Sadr for a little anti America hatred:

[Chalabi's] reaching out to Iraq's most prominent anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada Sadr, whose followers come mainly from Baghdad's urban underclass and the impoverished south of the country. Political analysts here believe that the new approach will eventually win support from a significant segment of Sadr's followers if Chalabi chooses to run for office — and, as expected, Sadr chooses to wield his power from the pulpit instead.

That would give Chalabi and his new organization, the Shiite Political Council, mass support that could yield considerable clout in the majority Shiite community.

One thing you have got to give Kerry's foreign policy team. They did not get duped by this guy. How is the FBI counterintelligence investigation going into who leaked to Chalabi, by the way?

Surviving Boston: Neal Pollack is trying.

Greetings From BAHS-TON
. . . At last, then, it's come to this. I suppose you could say, technically, that I'm not in Boston. Or in Massachusetts, for that matter. The Democratic National Committee, which, I want to interject, has been nothing but accommodating toward my fellow bloggers and me, couldn't get me a hotel room closer than Connecticut. But I'm staying right on the state line, close enough to smell the Democratic process, and my credentials allow me to cross into the Granite State whenever I want. So what are my thoughts on the convention thus far? Pretty minimal. My laminates instruct that I'm only supposed to watch the first 15 minutes of every televised hour on MSNBC. But I can say that I'm very impressed by Barack Obama, the senatorial candidate from Illinois. For many years now, I've been saying to myself that the Democrats need a strong black leader who isn't really black. Obama strikes me as our Colin Powell, without the military record or the history of lying to the United Nations. Hang on. I'm getting an Instant Message from a friend of mine blogging live from the convention floor. Max Cleland just wheeled by! Incredible. [10:52 a.m. ET, July 26, 2004]

There's more.

Note to Air America: Hire Chris Lydon! He created and masterfully hosted the absolute best NPR news/politics/culture call-in show, the Connection, out of WBUR, left when the station's director Jane Christo would not let Lydon and his producer take some sort of ownership role in the show they created and made wildly popular. Ran into him at a party last night and he's interested.

Reader Response: Reader Joshua H. writes:

Hi Laura,

I could not agree with you more.

I was a Bostonian during Lydon's time on the Connection. When Lydon was the host, each day was like getting to audit a seminar in graduate school.

Lydon left WBUR before September, 11 and I have missed his prespective in the time that has followed . . .

Exactly! I miss it too. Diane Rehm and Kojo Nambe at NPR's DC affiliate WAMU are good in their own way, but there is just no comparison between those shows and Chris Lydon's ultra intelligent, edgy "Connection."

Darfur: the UK Independent is reporting something horrific:

Women and children are being chained together and burnt alive by Sudanese militias rampaging in Darfur. The groups, known as the janjaweed, arrived in villages on horseback, rounded up men, women and children, and set them alight in the market-place.

One man, sitting in the devastated village of Dugu in south Darfur, said: "The janjaweed came, they grabbed these people; men, women, everyone and they burnt them. They even killed my son. He was only eight. There was at least one other child there too."

Witnesses say they found between 10 and 15 bodies smouldering. Observers from the African Union found similar burnings in Sulei and Ehda in western Darfur, where "the entire village had been burnt and deserted, except for a few men". The AU observers added: "This was an unwarranted and unprovoked attack on the civilian population by the janjaweed." . . .

The African Union, made up of all the African states, is considering turning its military observer mission into a fully fledged peace-keeping force, with particular emphasis on disarming the Janjaweed. African leaders meet in Ghana today, to try to find an "African solution" to the Darfur crisis.

But at the United Nations, an explicit threat of sanctions against the Sudanese government if it fails to disarm the militias could be dropped from a draft resolution today because of opposition from several countries, including Pakistan, Russia and China.

The UN is useless on just this kind of issue -- a rapidly moving genocide, ethnic conflict, particularly occuring internal to a state. We know that. The Brits, God bless them, are talking about sending in troops, perhaps to complement an African force. Colin Powell is talking about stronger language at the UN. What a nightmare.

We get letters. Complaints about -- and now some praise for Holbrooke! Complaints my Foreign Policy post is a bit too enthusiastic -- I guess might agree, but compared to the alternative, it's hard not to get carried away.

Ms. Rozen:

I've enjoyed your blog thoroughly in the few weeks since I've discovered it, but you embarrass yourself with your fulsome praise of Richard Holbrooke. His
conduct during the Carter administration was despicable, especially in regard to Indonesia...

http://www.atimes.com/se-asia/CC21Ae01.html

...and South Korea.

http://66.70.64.59/issues/0242/mamatas.php

His accomplishments in Bosnia? In the end, those were an attempt to fix the damage done by the Bosnian arms embargo he embraced so enthusiastically -- which had the effect of leaving the unarmed Bosnian Muslims to the tender mercies of the well-armed Serbs. Many in the Muslim world still haven't forgiven the United States for that.

You do a great job of holding the neocons accountable, but please -- spare us your huzzahs for Holbrooke and the rest of the DLC-PPI "muscular internationalism"* crowd. They're just the other side of the same imperial coin.

DG, Chicago

Was Holbrooke really a supporter of the arms embargo [which I also thought was horribly unfair and essentially voted for Dole for in 1996 because of his support for "lift and strike"]? As for Dayton, I think Holbrooke did the best he could with an awful situation and helped get the US in. Remember where things were going in 1995. The aftermath of Srebrenica could have seen the US only go in with NATO to help pull UN peacekeepers out, leaving the parties to fight it out. The Bosnians I met when I lived there for two years were indeed happy NATO peacekeepers came, and were grateful for the end to the war that Holbrooke negotiated.

UPDATE: Reader X who has some knowledge of the back and forth inside the Clinton administration on US policy towards Bosnia, writes to affirm that Holbrooke was no supporter of the arms embargo. " . . . The SECSTATE in waiting really ought not be idolized so. But it's unfair to state he was fan of the BH embargo, not true. He was, if anything, too much a partisan the other way . . . Don't get me wrong: I almost like Holbrooke, but I witnessed the shifty . . . stuff he was up to pre-Dayton."

* I am a "muscular internationalist." That is kind of what my foreign policy politics is all about.

Wireless access from the 7th floor of the Fleet center! On my own laptop! Thanks to the technical genius blogging at Greater Democracy standing on my left, to Tom Lang writing for Campaign Desk...

Foreign Policy: I was pretty blown away by a glimpse of what a Kerry foreign policy could look like, thanks to a panel organized by NDI that drew almost 500 foreign leaders and journalists at the Charles Hotel. It featured Kerry's lead national security advisor, Rand Beers, Richard Holbrooke (who absolutely must become secretary of state), former defense secretary Bill Perry, Gary Hart, Laura Tyson and Ernest Miller of the University of Maryland, introduced by Madeleine Albright. Since this is my thing, I plan to have more on this in posts and articles in the coming weeks. But briefly now, some highlights:

Rand Beers: How would a Kerry foreign policy be different from George W. Bush foreign policy? The four imperatives of a Kerry foreign policy:
1) To return to an era of alliances, reinvigorate our relationships with our friends, our allies, and with multilateral institutions around the world, to ensure as the US acts in the world, we do so with the broadest possible coalitions we can assemble.

2) To strengthen America's military, specifically by providing the kinds of forces that are needed for the threats of the 21st Century: 40,000 more US troops in the areas of special ops, military police, civil affairs, to deal with the threats of terror, failed states, etc.

3) Recognition the use of force is not the only option. Reemphasize the use of diplomacy, economic power, to express the values that America believes in and wishes to promulgate in the world.

4) Kerry believes America's dependence on foreign oil represents a serious impediment....What is unique about this is the marraiage of domestic and foreign policy on the energy independence issue....

Richard Holbrooke. [The beautiful bastard. Let's make him Secretary of State. He's arrogant, he's brilliant, he's a bull dog, he's a pragmatist, he's an internationalist, he's a born leader, even visionary, on the issues that plague the globe, from intervention to stop genocide, to finding a real solution to the global AIDS epidemic. He's as charming and undiplomatic as they come. The Bushies are always invoking Churchill. In my opinion, Holbrooke is as close as the US comes to a Churchill. -- ed: we got it. ]

Holbrooke's telling of the John Kerry story is so compelling but a bit long so will save it for some other telling. For now, just some brief key points:

The real difference between Kerry and Bush, the two men, is revealed in their personal backgrounds. Kerry is fundamentally an internationalist. It is relevant that he is the son of a foreign service officer, that his father served in Berlin during the height of the Cold War, that Kerry was educated in Europe, that he's married to a woman born abroad, it is relevant that he served in Vietnam. This is not just campaign rhetoric. Vietnam is centrally important to understanding Kerry....He came out of the war a war hero but someone questioning the war.....

John Kerry will be his own secretary of state. He will be a real hands on and enaged foreign policy chief. He likes to travel, he likes to sit around and talk about foreign policy issues, he cares about these issues, he is interested in foreign cultures, he's an internationalist.....

The candidates' platforms don't tell you what they are going to do. Presidents are inevitably confronted by realities. The better way to predict is to look at their personalities.

On multilateral institutions, Holbrooke said, the UN is a mess, but it's the only mess we have. We have to strengthen it, not like the Bushies try to delegitimize and weaken and unfund it. Room for some new multilateral institutions, but not to replace the UN (as some neocons have proposed the Community of Democracies would do -- Holbrooke says it won't work, and he's right. See my July American Prospect article on UN reform linked to on the left side of the site).

Gary Hart: globalization and info revolution............He was a bit hyped up, to tell you the truth, and sounded like a smart college kid.....

William Perry: talk about gravitas. If this guy becomes our next secretary of defense, we could not be in better hands. Why: because of Perry's totally clear eyed and intellectually prescient analysis of the problem. The transnational nature of the threats we face -- global terrorism, WMD proliferation, failed states, bifurcated world rich/poor -- need an international response. And he [and Holbrooke] have done it: in 1994, getting former Soviet successor states Ukraine and Kazakhstan to agree to remove their nuclear weapons to Russia, in 1995, the negotiation of the Dayton accords to end the Bosnian war; with North Korea, Perry negotiated getting the South Koreans and Japanese totally on board then going to Pyongyang and getting a deal (which now the Bushies have to their chagrin totally tried to return to)...

Perry quoted Churchill: the problem with allies is that sometimes they have ideas of their own.

He quoted Churchill again, the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting a war without allies.

More on all this later in some form.

Finally, I got to briefly grab former British foreign minister Robin Cook, a man I respect very much for his leadership on the humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, for a brief conversation about a subject near and dear to my heart: those alleged other British sources of intelligence on the African uranium issue. [You will remember Cook resigned from the Blair government expressing the belief that Blair was going to war in Iraq on false pretenses/hyped up intelligence]. Cook's response: there are none. There are no other British sources of intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger. He said the French control Niger's uranium and any other intelligence on this issue the British had would have come from the French, and the French obviously didn't give it much credence.

Then, Matt Yglesias and I got really wonderful greasy cheeseburgers from Charlie's Kitchen, where the 75 year old updoed waitress Helen showed me the beautiful blue sequinced dress, with matching purse, that she is wearing tonight to the hottest and hard to get party ticket in town, the Creative Coalition party at Louis Boston. Go, Helen.

UPDATE: OK, the above is a bit over the top. Mostly I was relieved to be part of an event that involved issues I care about, was accessable in a way the convention is somehow not for me, and with potential future foreign policy advisors with whom I feel a shared perception of the world, reality. After years of going to events at AEI and observing the Bush administration, it is just so refreshing. That said it's over the top. Meanwhile, thanks to Spencer Ackerman for the correction of Bill Perry's former job title...

I'm off to go hear some of Kerry's foreign policy and national security team including Rand Beers and Richard Holbrooke speak at the Charles Hotel. Will report back afterwards, and then head to the Convention.

Barack Obama's speech, via the Command Post. It's worth reading the whole thing. If this guy doesn't get you excited for our country, then I am not sure what will. Some highlights:

. . . My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or “blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential. They are both passed away now. Yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.

I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles . . .

A while back, I met a young man named Shamus . . .He told me he’d joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week. As I listened to him explain why he’d enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us? I thought of more than 900 service men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, who will not be returning to their hometowns. I thought of families I had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one’s full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or with nerves shattered, but who still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists. When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure. John Kerry believes in America. And he knows it’s not enough for just some of us to prosper. For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people . . . Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America . . .

Tonight, if you feel the same energy I do, the same urgency I do, the same passion I do, the same hopefulness I do — if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president, and John Edwards will be sworn in as vice president, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come. Thank you and God bless you.

I listened to it on NPR and have now read it three times and it still gives me chills and brings tears to my eyes. People do want to believe in hope, we do want to be united, we do want to be delivered out of this long political darkness. Obama is such a genuine embodiment of the values he describes, he has a power, an authenticity I haven't often encountered in politics. His secret strength: his Midwesterness, and ability to appeal to the yearning to believe in the American dream among both the moderately conservative people I grew up with in Kansas, and the more pro-defense Democrats I find myself cheering.

UPDATE: More on Obama and his speech from David Kusnet and TPM.

Send me. Clinton's speech masterfully deconstructed by former speechwriter David Kusnet at TNR. Kusnet's analysis? Clinton borrowed from Reagan in using carefully selected of his own weaknesses for maximum effect:

Intriguingly, Clinton used several rhetorical techniques that were put to good effect by the last president before him to move large numbers of voters from one party to the other--the Great Communicator himself, Ronald Reagan. Ideological though he was, Reagan never presented himself as the source of all wisdom, never attacked his opponents, and only rarely was explicit in setting one sector of society against another . . .

Last night, Clinton, too, was deceptively good-natured and lighthearted, making himself the target of his toughest attacks. He began by crediting the Republicans with "honestly held ideas" and both Bush and Kerry with being "strong men who ... love our country." This rhetorical device goes back to Marc Antony's eulogy for Julius Caesar--"And Brutus is an honorable man." And it works better than the crude Bush-bashing that the convention's managers are editing out of most speeches.

Having ruled out personal attacks against Bush and other Republicans, Clinton proceeded to define the difference between the two parties more cogently than any Democratic orator this year. Democrats, Clinton said, "want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared opportunities." But Republicans "believe in an America run by the right people--their people--in a world in which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to." Brutus may be honorable, but he believes in trickle-down economics at home and trigger-happy adventurism abroad.

All this may be standard Democratic oratory, but Clinton did it deftly by making himself an example of what's wrong with Republicans' personal histories and public policies. Praising Kerry for having volunteered for dangerous duty in Vietnam, he compared the nominee to Bush, Cheney, and himself, all of whom "could have gone to Vietnam but didn't." Similarly, Clinton cleverly mentioned that he himself has become one of the fortunate few who benefit from Bush's tax cuts--which, he continued, have been enacted at the expense of education, after-school programs, job training, child care, veterans programs, and homeland security.

If you missed a Biblical reference in Clinton's speech, millions of church-goers didn't. Just as Bush does, Clinton weaves scriptural references into his speeches without citing them specifically--a brilliant strategy because while secular listeners simply hear eloquent, pleasant rhetoric, religious listeners hear evocations of faith. Clinton's speech built up to a litany of sentences beginning with the phrase "Send me" to describe Kerry's eagerness to serve his country and the need for Democrats to work hard in the campaign. The phrase is from Isaiah 6:8 . . .

Even knowing how the magic trick works doesn't change its power and its effect. It was a stunning speech.

We can look forward to more analysis of the religious code in Clinton's speech to the Convention from Amy Sulllivan over at the Washington Monthly soon. UPDATE: Here it is.

I'm with Jay Rosen, so to speak (no known relation). While enjoying the sheer spectacle of being here at the Convention, I'm a bit overwhelmed, especially by the logistics of just moving into and around the Fleet center and wanting to be three places at once, various aforementioned technical difficulties, I can't hear the speeches very well from the 7th floor nose bleed section to which I have access, and am exhausted. And pretty darn starving, come to think of it. [Security confiscated two unopened cans of soda I had brought to the Fleet Center yesterday, but amazingly enough one can buy such beverages in the Fleet Center -- they just want you to buy theirs, I guess. Is this protecting us from terrorists? I doubt it. That said, there are so very many uniformed armed people at this thing, I just smiled and gave them up. I would have given them my wallet if they had insisted . . . Honestly when hundreds of journalists descended on Sarajevo for the first post-war 1996 Bosnian parliamentary elections, there was a better set up for coverage, honestly.] There's something frankly claustrophobic about the Fleet Center -- all these stairwells blocked off, an overwhelming amount of concrete cinder block, a desperate lack of windows, dozens of people waiting up to 20 minutes for one of four elevators that are apparently the only way to get between certain floors, and the fact that entertaining thoughts of leaving for a break entails contemplating the length of time and security procedures for getting back in . . . Like flying in post-9/11 America, once you get through airport security, you're pretty much stuck in an air-sealed universe 'til you land on the other side.

So I am taking Rebecca Blood's advice, via Rosen, and going to take a couple hours and think about what I want to focus on here at this amazing city-wide spectacle and try to get out of it what I can. I'm also going to put a couple hours work into a couple articles imminently due.

A couple observations . . . seeing all of these people in one space - Wes Clark, Clinton, Kerry, Kucinich, even Michael Moore -- is interesting and cool, but living in Washington DC, one sees those people more or less in their natural habitat in any case often enough. It's a bit of a DC road show feel up here.

Secondly, I kind of knew this was not my natural habitat when the convention audience gave a rousing heartfelt standing ovation to Jimmy Carter, just as he was taking the podium. I think Carter has done many admirable things in terms of democracy and peace promotion, but his presidency was a disaster and just what Kerry does not want to be associated with -- foreign policy impotence, essentially.

Matt Yglesias has a great article out at the American Prospect about the Committee on the Present Danger. I think his analysis is largely right that this is largely about a group of neoconservatives making an effort at a political comeback, in lobbying for their approaches to be adopted by whichever administration assumes office next January, for dangers like Iran. I will have more on this coming out soon.

The difference between big media and the rest of us (and this is the last post I will do on this, I promise): the big media are the ones with the gas masks at the convention. This from TNR's Noam Scheiber:

UNMASKED: Ryan mentioned earlier that the bloggers are beginning to drive the established media to distraction. But maybe the bloggers have a point when they complain that big media is overly cautious, self-satisfied, and coddled. I happened to walk into a conference room in our hotel this morning just as a New York Times editorial meeting was breaking up. (We're staying in the same hotel as the Times, which is how the DNC sold us on what seemed like less than ideal accommodations. How the DNC sold the Times on it is still a mystery--but if one can judge from the number of Times people fleeing to other locations, the sale was less than complete.) It all looked pretty typical--a bunch of mostly middle-aged journalists in suits carrying laptops and cups of coffee. But then I noticed people carrying suspicious-looking yellow boxes under their arms, about twelve inches by twelve inches, maybe six inches deep. The front of the box had a picture of a man wearing a white surgical mask, and on the side were what looked like instructions. Waiting for an elevator, I heard one Times-man tell another, "You've got to wear it tight, otherwise it won't do you any good." Increasingly, I'm thinking the most important divide here in Boston isn't between liberals and moderates, but between the people determined to protect themselves from a bioterror attack and the people laughing at their goofy-looking equipment.

??

The 9/11 Commission Report is a bestseller, USA Today reports:

With bookstores from Portland, Ore., to Washington, D.C., out of stock, Norton says it's printing another 200,000 copies in addition to the 600,000-copy first printing.

It's "unprecedented" for a government report, much less, one that can be downloaded for free from the commission website.

What's up with this. Do millions of people want to study the recommendations for intelligence reform? Some of them, yes. But I think even more, people want to buy the book to have a copy of the definitive common national history of the 9/11 attacks. I think they are buying it almost like a flag, as a symbol of this event's meaning in our nation's history.

With flying here today, running to pick up press credentials from a colleague, intense security, and then walking through a really beautiful summer day from Charlestown to the Fleet Center in Boston, I decided to leave my laptop back at the ranch in Cambridge and just see what I could at the Convention, sans laptop. it's a bit of a trade off*; I couldn't write while I observed, and I would have been too tired to run around much if I had to lug my laptop around and worry about it. Briefly, because it is midnight and I am a bit exhausted and will certainly feel more energetic in the morning, I enjoyed meeting colleagues - both journalists and bloggers; the bloggers are really the cool kids at the convention, and it's a bit like being in high school again sitting with everybody, half of them doing their thing on their laptops as a very part of experiencing the Convention. The connectivity was fairly awful, a lot of people couldn't get on, and when they could, it was not just slow, but there seemed to be weird technical kinks -- posts that were 'saved' as published didn't actually appear on the site, etc. Rumor is too many people were able to penetrate the wireless network and it's collapsing under the strain. It's almost to the point that you can either go to the Convention, or you can blog from elsewhere and watch it on TV.

I got to shake Wes Clark's hand, and saw Jon Stewart chatting with fans at the security entrance to the fortress that is the Fleet Center. Especially enjoyed meeting Daily Kos's Markos, Susan Epstein who blogs at Daily Kos, Bill Sher of Liberal Oasis, Matt Stoller of Blogging of the President, and some others. After six hours watching Gore, Carter, and many others, a fellow blogger and I decided to take off back for separate points in Cambridge, and I made my way to the house where I'm staying via a lovely pub, Cambridge 1, where we close captioned the Clinton speech, and frankly, were very moved, even without hearing it. I was struck especially how Clinton used his own weaknesses to great effect -- his new wealth, his not going to Vietnam, (like Bush and Cheney's not going to Vietnam), etc. I was also struck by how genuinely nuts the audience of delegates went for him. He's just the Lance Armstrong of politics, his sheer gift for it is undeniable.

More tomorrow.

* The solution to my problems is obvious - and technological. What I need is a Blackberry! . . . If only Mid East peace would be so simple.

Hello from the Fleet Center, Boston 3rd floor press filing room. Connectivity thanks to Verizon and the generosity of Matt Yglesias who has let me jump on his computer for a few minutes from here. Still getting oriented, looking forward to the Clinton and other speeches tonight. Made friends with someone on the shuttle who invited me to a Wednesday night party. Have seen one politician, Henry Ford, Jr. Have seen many more journalists, many who I already see occasionally in DC. Hope to have more earthshattering [but not too earthshattering!] to report in a few hours!

The Convention: This site, Convention Blogging, is your one-stop-shopping for convention blogging. The Washington Monthly has a team of people led by Amy Sullivan in Boston and Kevin Drum in California reporting. The American Prospect's TAPPED is also offering 2004 Convention Watch.

With a wary eye on the reports of the logistical complications of navigating a city under such incredible security, (and having lived there off and on for over a decade, I can tell you Boston was never that pleasant to drive in anyhow!), I am shuttling up there today. We'll see! The good news is beyond the events at the Fleet Center themselves of which there will be no shortage of coverage, there are some incredible events occuring around town that should be a might easier to attend, including a talk by Kerry's foreign policy advisors Rand Beers, Richard Holbrooke, Bill Perry, Gary Hart, etc. Wednesday hosted by NDI, which should be right up my alley.

Sandy Berger. ? ? ? ? . This story just gets weirder and weirder. The possibility that his telephone calls from the archives were monitored by an "unauthorized agency" would seem to suggest the calls were monitored by a second agency as well, right? Presumably - an authorized agency to know about the first agency conducting the unauthorized monitoring? And he is being accused of putting files back into the archives on the second and third visits?

UPDATE: Readers have written to inform me the owner of this Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Richard Mellon Scaife, is "a known right-wing smear merchant," who made Clinton the chief target of his vendetta. More recently they were "involved in an incident where a reporter baited Teresa Heinz Kerry and got her to say 'Shove it' to him." [Kevin Drum has more on this.]

Reader Lauren Sedowsky writes, "To call Scaife 'a known right-wing smear merchant' really does not do justice to his position as heir to the $1 B Mellon fortune, as well as a small newspaper group, and director of the Scaife family of foundations (Scaife, Sarah Scaife, Carthage, Allegheny), which have funded the seminal right-wing think-tanks, publications and propagandist scholars . . . over the last 30 years. He is a major force behind the revolution unraveling before our very eyes, in which the Clinton assault was a mere skirmish."

Apologies, I should have known. Thanks to Thomas Brooks, Nick Sweeney and Lauren Sedowsky for the background.

MORE: Senate Democrats want to know why the Bush administration has asked the director of the National Archives to resign.

Worth reading Sunday: Richard Clarke in the New York Times:

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers . . .

Even more important than any bureaucratic suggestions is the report's cogent discussion of who the enemy is and what strategies we need in the fight. The commission properly identified the threat not as terrorism (which is a tactic, not an enemy), but as Islamic jihadism, which must be defeated in a battle of ideas as well as in armed conflict.

The battle of ideas. I'm a bit late to note it, but I think David Brooks makes a compelling argument here on just this issue:

The commissioners don't say it, but the implication is clear. We've had an investigation into our intelligence failures; we now need a commission to analyze our intellectual failures. Simply put, the unapologetic defenders of America often lack the expertise they need. And scholars who really know the Islamic world are often blind to its pathologies. They are so obsessed with the sins of the West, they are incapable of grappling with threats to the West.

We also need to mount our own ideological counteroffensive. The commissioners recommend that the U.S. should be much more critical of autocratic regimes, even friendly ones, simply to demonstrate our principles. They suggest we set up a fund to build secondary schools across Muslim states, and admit many more students into our own. If you are a philanthropist, here is how you can contribute: We need to set up the sort of intellectual mobilization we had during the cold war, with modern equivalents of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to give an international platform to modernist Muslims and to introduce them to Western intellectuals.

Most of all, we need to see that the landscape of reality is altered. In the past, we've fought ideological movements that took control of states. Our foreign policy apparatus is geared toward relations with states: negotiating with states, confronting states. Now we are faced with a belief system that is inimical to the state system, and aims at theological rule and the restoration of the caliphate. We'll need a new set of institutions to grapple with this reality, and a new training method to understand people who are uninterested in national self-interest, traditionally defined.

Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological. He observed that we are in the fight against Islamic extremism now where we were in the fight against communism in 1980.

I firmly believe the battle of ideas is as or more important than the military campaign, but that this administration is uniquely ill equipped to wage it. Why? For one, because Bush himself is uniquely uninterested in ideas, in thinking itself, in trying to understand or engage with people who do not see the world as he does. [He's failed to bring along even a small percentage of people who see things differently from him in this country; in the Middle East, a poll discussed today on Meet the Press shows that 100% of Egyptians are hostile to America now. 100%. And this is Egypt, e.g. among those countries a certain foreign intelligence official I recently interviewed counted among the Middle East regimes that could be counted in the hunkey-dory camp as far as Israel and the US are concerned. What about the people?...] Two, Bush's national security team, the Vulcans, share the preeminent fixation on the Pentagon and military force as the vehicle for US foreign policy. America's alienation from and isolation among its allies has never been greater in my lifetime -- a consequence of the administration's striking disdain for and incompetence at persuading allies by diplomatic or other non military means. [For instance, the administration could have made a tactical decision to endorse Kyoto -- full well knowing as did Clinton the Senate was not likely to ratify it -- in order to get alliance buy-in later on for future "emergencies." Instead, they thumbed their nose at the world, they paid for that mistake, we are paying now, and Bush is likely to lose office....And the air is polluted, too.]. Three, the people who are genuinely interested in the war of ideas in the Bush camp, the neoconservatives, are so deeply discredited . . .

And talking about the war of ideas...it all starts at home, as they say. I can report that it did not come to blows.

Late notice convention advice request. A variety of circumstances has me headed to the Democratic convention in Boston with access to a pass that should get me into the building at least part of the time. So, advice welcome. I can navigate Boston, but I have no clue how most of this works:

a) The Convention: 7 to 11pm most nights, who, what, when?

b) Para convention conferences: what are the important ones? Particularly for a foreign policy/security wonk?

c) How do I get myself and my chief pass benefactor into at least a couple wonderful parties that will endear me to her for the duration of the convention, and beyond?

All convention advice appreciated at laura@warandpiece.com. Many thanks.

Victor Bout stalkers in chief: Washington Post reporter and author of Blood from Stones, Douglas Farah, who blogs here, and Alexander Harrowell, in the UK, who blogs here. Harrowell writes me today that Richard Chichakli, who serves as the 'CFO' of the airline company Bout uses to fly munitions for the Americans into Iraq, Jet Line, (as well as for his blood diamonds trafficking), has been writing to him on his blog. Harrowell writes me:

Congrats on getting the Bout story operational again. Interestingly enough,
since the last mention of him on your and D. Farah's blogs, Richard Chichakli has been reading my blog. You may recall I had a commenter claiming to be him in May, but for various reason I believed him to be phoney. This time, though, an IP address that came up in the referrer log came up with this "who is" result:

IP: 65.65.122.176
CustName: Chichakli,
Hickman-Riggs & Riggs
Address: P. R. City: Richardson
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75080
Country: US
RegDate: 2001-02-22...

Chichakli, Hickman-Riggs and Riggs is his accountancy firm. The street address checks out, as does another address in the whois files (his home address). I note that he seems to be an egosurfer - the hit arrived from a Google search for "richard chichakli". As far as Jetline goes, I assume we're talking about a firm called Jetline International, registered in Equatorial Guinea with operating bases in Tripoli and (here goes) Ras al-Khaimah in (guess where) the UAE. It was established in 2000 ostensibly to provide "VIP flights to the Community of Sahel-Sahara governments," but strangely most of its aircraft are large long-haul types (Ilyushin 62, Ilyushin 76, DC-8). Some of the Il-62s move about registry oddly. One of them, serial no. 4648414, registration either EL-ALM, 5A-DKT or 3C-QQR, has apparently gone from well-known Boutco Air Bas to Jetline and back whilst being reregistered 3 times in 3 different national registries - nice!

He's got the airplane registry numbers for goodness sake. Bout is working for the American military in plain sight. People should be jumping all over this.

[thx to BH and MW for the links]

Here's a photo of Richard Chichakli, born in Syria in 1959, member of the US Army from 1990-1993, financial overseer of Victor Bout's air cargo operations.

Committee on the Present Danger Redux: Check out Justin Raimondo's latest. Apparently there are more questionable affiliations of CPD members.

The Senate will break its August recess to hold hearings on reforms proposed by the 9/11 commission. It's the good and right move. But one more sign, there is a sense that there will be a political cost for those who appear as if they did not do all they could before another attack.

Clearly, Dennis Hastert is the first person who should be voted out of office. He has been the single biggest opponent to the families of 9/11 in Congress, and he's already rejected the 9/11 commission's recommendations for key reforms. And he's too lazy to study the proposals now:

The Senate's announcement followed a prediction by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., that any legislative action probably would not occur until after the next president is inaugurated in January. “Anything that we’re going to do is going to be deliberate and not rushed,” he said Thursday.

The Families of 9/11: Spencer Ackerman gets this tribute just right.

Swopa is right. Someone appears to be planting just the kinds of stories you would expect to see were the administration to be anticipating indictments in the Plame affair very soon. Check out this Wash Times piece from today, highlighted by Swopa:

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

That's all very interesting; but not nearly as interesting as asking oneself, does this sound like the kind of flailing, tortured legal excuse the official who is being set to be exposed or indicted is preparing? e.g. it wasn't that damaging, even if it was a technical crime, to out the identity of an undercover officer who was already "outted" to the Russians and the Cubans? Doesn't it only make them look worse? It certainly would seem to reveal the key fact: the official who outted her identity to Novak was aware that Plame was an undercover CIA officer.

Victour Bout. A source told me today Bout supplies the PXs of the US army in Iraq. Because he is the cheapest...Affiliated with the company "Jet Line." A couple readers have in the past sent me very interesting Bout-related contract material. Would be interested in what people know about this.

Update: Apparently, Bout is supplying the US with ammunition in Iraq. For real. There ought to be a law against the US government working with black market arms dealers.

Independent 9/11 commission final report release highlights:

*Total family buy-in to the report and the recommendations. Family members and commissioners vowing to lobby relentlessly til the commission's recommendations are undertaken.

*Everybody is talking about another attack. This from National Review's Corner captures it:

All that matters between now and election day was summed up in a single sentence uttered this morning by Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission:

“Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even greater magnitude is now possible, and even probable.”

*No evidence of Iran knowing about 9/11 in advance.

*No link between Iraq and 9/11. Kean said there had been a relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, but no "collaborative" relationship.

*Gossip: that Jamie Gorelick, and Thomas Kean, are contenders for top intelligence community positions, depending on who wins in November.

* Family member Kristen Breitweiser [she's the blond "Jersey girl"], when asked by another reporter after the press conference, how she felt after her long journey lobbying to bring the commission into existence and keep it on its toes, said: “Inspired and motivated...Listening to the commissioners express their commitment to ensure results is very inspiring and very refreshing...It is very rewarding for the families to know the next attack may be averted, because of their work...It makes me feel like my husband’s death was not in vain.”

One could not ask for much more than that. More of the interview with Breitweiser and others in a piece going up in a couple hours.

Update: My piece is out:

. . .Through such committed activism by the families to get the commission created and keep its profile so visible, the U.S. government may finally be thrust into a process of reform and even reinvention for the vastly changed security landscape. That may be the most meaningful legacy the families of 9/11 can leave the rest of us. That the independent 9/11 commission has managed to tune out the white noise of partisan debate to write the definitive common national history of the 9/11 attacks—and a consensus blueprint for future reform—is its own significant achievement.

Read the 9/11 commission report (link via NRO).

Or read Kevin Drum's condensed executive summary.

MORE: Spencer Ackerman has the last word on Iraq al Qaeda.

And one more "last" word: the NY Sun's Eli Lake agrees, that the independent 9/11 commission report shows no collaborative operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The 9/11 commission final report has been issued, [keep checking the website, it's not up yet], and I'm headed now to the release, and should have a piece up on this in a few hours. In the meantime, here's a good TNR piece by Alan Wirzbicki on how a former Bush I national security advisor, who crafted this administration's preemption strategy, guided the commission with intellectual honesty, not partisanship. Worth reading. As is the TNR house editorial endorsing the recommendation for the creation of the post of a director of national intelligence.

Going, going, gone. The director of the Committee on the Present Danger has stepped down. This from the NY Sun:

The managing director of the Committee on the Present Danger stepped down yesterday, just a day after the organization’s official launch.

Some members of the committee called for Peter Hannaford’s resignation after learning he once represented the political party of an Austrian nationalist, Joerg Haider, in Washington, The New York Sun has learned . . .

A freelance journalist, Laura Rozen, first disclosed Mr. Hannaford’s past affiliation with Austria’s Freedom Party on her Web log, War and Piece.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Hannaford said he had met Mr. Haider once at a Vienna dinner party in 1996 when he agreed to meet with members of his political party to discuss a possible contract with his public relations firm. “Haider said many silly things and he was trying to live them down,” he said.

But Mr. Hannaford also said the party’s agenda was quite reasonable. “Three or four of their Parliament members were quite level-headed,” he said. “The kinds of programs they supported in the Austrian context were quite sensible.”

The optics of Hannaford's historical lobbying client list when laid out [and which includes the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria, as well as the Austrian Freedom Party] were pretty incompatable given that the whole purpose of this group is a sort of exercise in moral self-righteousness on foreign policy affairs. This whole resurrection of the COPD is really one big PR campaign after all, for purely domestic public consumption, as far as I can tell. [They weren't taking full page ads out in the Kansas City Star, either, if that gives us a sense of the swathe of domestic consumption they are looking to target.] After learning a bit more about the funders of this effort, from Justin Raimondo, it was clear to me why this resignation happened so quickly. More soon in a reported piece.

A couple weeks ago, I let hope triumph over experience to post rumblings of alleged action to finally catch Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic. It didn't happen. Tonight I ran across an article that reminded me how many years this is overdue. [Redacted] It was already overdue when I wrote this in 1996, for goodness sake. Let me look foolish tomorrow and have him have been surrendered.

With all this recent discussion of Iran giving safe passage to some of the 9/11 hijackers, including at this site, it's worthwhile to remember that Dulles airport let them pass through too. [Indeed, I think Dulles is in the Virginia district belonging to GOP House Government Reform Chair Tom Davis.]

P.S. Of course, Iranian officials knowingly ordering border control to not stamp al Qaeda operatives' passports with Iran/Afghanistan border exit-entry stamps is qualitatively different from the incompetence at work at US government agencies, border control, airport screening, immigration, the FBI, and the CIA, etc. in terms of not catching the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives living and working and crossing in and out of the US. There's a difference between incompetence and complicity. Will await the 9.11 commission report release later today with interest to understand the level of complicity it judges was at work between Iran and AQ.

There appear to be some developments in the Committee on the Present Danger, related to what I dug up and posted yesterday. Stay tuned. One member's office told me this took up most of their day today, in fact.

My question, which no one has yet answered for me: who is funding this effort? [Did you see the full page ad they took out in the New York Times today?] And as the NY Sun pointed out yesterday, why did some prominent usual suspects for this sort of thing like Kristol and Schmitt, decline to sign up?

P.S. It appears to be funded by a grant from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, whose president is Clifford May of the National Review, and whose board member is Jim Woolsey. But that only begs the question, who is really funding them?

Ha'aretz reports on the intelligence war between Israel and Hezbollah.

. . . The intelligence war between Israel and Hezbollah rests on the assumption that the latter's actions are constrained by considerations of Lebanese public opinion, and by Syrian concerns about a possible escalation of violence on Lebanon's southern border. On this assumption, Hezbollah's ability to respond is limited - just as Israel's ability to initiate military action is limited. Under such circumstances, genuine strategic goals cannot be obtained; instead, the best that either side can hope for is to revise the status quo slightly in its own favor . . .

Yet the attempt to tilt the balance in the status quo with Hezbollah could in the end undermine Israel's working assumption. True, domestic politics in Lebanon work as a restraining factor on Hezbollah's activity. But this does not mean that prominent Israelis, or Jews around the world, might not end up as targets of Hezbollah strikes.

Juan Cole writes yesterday that the pro-Likud crowd is gunning for Iran because

They want the Tehran regime overthrown in part because it stands in the way of an Israeli annexation of southern Lebanon, with the Litani river as the long-sought prize. Iran is allied with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, which forced the Israelis back out of Lebanon with a nearly 20-year long guerrilla struggle. They also want to force Hizbullah to pull back its support of the Palestinian uprising. Since Iran has substantially cut back on its support for Hizbullah, however, overthrowing Tehran would have little effect on such local political dynamics. (The Likud's Ariel Sharon should never have invaded Lebanon in 1982, which is what created Hizbullah, suicide bombings as a tactic, and radicalized Lebanese like 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah).

Newsweek scoop: Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the would-be 9/11 terrorist now in US custody, flew from Amsterdam to Tehran in January 2001, en route to meet 9/11 plot planners in Afghanistan. What's more, this next bit, if true, would certainly suggest Iranian leaders were aware of plans for the 9/11 attacks:

Commission sources acknowledge they have been unable to resolve key questions about what precisely the 9/11 plotters did while they transited through Iran and, in particular, whether they were receiving active assistance from Iranian security officials, who appear to have maintained relations with Al Qaeda. But investigators say there is mounting evidence about Al Qaeda-Iranian relationships that appear to have been overlooked by a Bush administration that was far more focused on finding connections between bin Laden’s organization and the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Indeed, during the trial of another alleged Hamburg cell member, Abdelghani Mzoudi, prosecutors produced a last-minute witness, Hamid Reza Zakeri, who said he was a former officer of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Zakeri testified there was a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001, between top Iranian leaders—including supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani—and one of Osama bin Laden's elder sons, Saad, at which plans for 9/11 were discussed.

Zakeri also reportedly claimed he had earlier helped arrange security for a January 2001 meeting between Saad bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's principal deputy. He also claimed that he met with a CIA officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in July 2001 and passed on a warning to the United States about the forthcoming 9/11 attacks.

U.S. and German authorities have never been able to corroborate Zakeri's claims about the involvement of top Iranian officials, and some officials have questioned his credibility. German government efforts to use Zakeri as a witness against Mzoudi proved ineffective; the defendant, unlike the previously convicted Motassadeq, was acquitted of charges of being an accomplice to the 9/11 hijackers.

But U.S. officials say they are concerned about the increasing evidence of possible Iranian connections to the 9/11 attacks, noting that as many as 10 top Al Qaeda operatives, including Saad bin Laden and another top bin Laden deputy, Said Al-Adel, fled to Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. The Al Qaeda operatives are believed to be in some sort of government custody, most likely house arrest. But the Iranian government has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. entreaties to turn over the Al Qaeda leaders, and some U.S. intelligence officials believe they may be still supervising terror operations—especially in Saudi Arabia—through the use of couriers. “This is an evolving story,” said one U.S. official about the evidence of possible Iranian ties to Al Qaeda.

It surely is an evolving story. Of course, history with the likes of Chalabi, some INC defectors, etc. has taught us we can't trust every word of everyone who does a little information sharing with the Vevak. But who knows? Maybe this was a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Iran was reportedly implicated in the Khobar Towers bombing, and a back channel dialogue involving US and Iranian officials was supposedly broken off last May after US intelligence came to believe al Qaeda plotters based in Iran had helped plan the May 13, 2003 al Qaeda attacks in Riyadh.

My colleague points out that this Newsweek piece is using the 9/11 commission report Iran findings as a peg for reports from German intelligence and the Mzoudi trial that have been out there for a while.

The Washington Monthly's Christina Larson has compiled a map more important than Charles Duelfer's.

Nevermind.

USA Today's John Diamond does a nice job here cutting through the muck on the Niger uranium Wilson story:

Did Iraq, in fact, try to buy uranium in Niger? The Senate Intelligence Committee report accepted the CIA's ultimate assessment — not reached until after the war — that there was little if any credible evidence available to U.S. intelligence to support the charge that Iraq sought, let alone bought, uranium from Niger.

• Has the White House changed its position on Bush's January 2003 charge? The White House has not withdrawn or amended its statement last July that the intelligence behind the charge "did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech."

Berger steps down as Kerry adviser.

Update: My few right wing friends and relatives are having a field day with this. But I find their insinuation that Berger must have been acting at the direction of someone highly implausible. Like, who, the Peoples' Republic of China? Who is damaged from this except Berger himself?

"Halliburton admits to criminal probe on Iran," the FT reports:

Halliburton, the oilfield services company formerly headed by US vice-president Dick Cheney, has disclosed that a Treasury department probe into its business dealings with Iran had been elevated to a criminal investigation.

The company acknowledged that it had been subpoenaed by a grand jury in the southern district of Texas to present documents related to a Cayman Islands subsidiary that serves the Iranian National Oil Company . . .

The US imposed sanctions on Iran following the 1979 revolution that led to the seizure of American hostages for more than a year.

Halliburton's work there, which has raised complaints from shareholders, amounts to about $80m a year - less than 1 per cent of its total revenues.

I guess some people were advocates of engagement a little earlier than others.

Update: Mitch Cohen is following this case closely, and has more here. Apparently Cheney was indeed CEO when Halliburton got involved in the business of oilfield development in Iran in 1997.

NYT Corrections: This only sounds like it's from the Onion. [Via Wonkette]

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about British prewar intelligence on Iraq misstated the location cited by President Bush in his State of the Union address when he talked about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium. Basing his comments on a British report, the president said Iraq had made those efforts in Africa. He did not specifically mention Niger, though that country was identified several weeks earlier — along with Somalia and Congo — in the National Intelligence Estimate provided to members of Congress on Iraqi purchase attempts. (Go to Article)

Oy Vey II. The resurrection of the Committee on the Present Danger? My first reaction is to giggle. What is this, did these guys not get enough of the Cold War? There are tours of the nuclear bomb-proof bunker at the Greenbrier, you know. Maybe it could be rented out for parties.

PS. The managing director of this - uh - effort, Peter Hannaford, has been lobbying for some of the world's nasties, I noticed in some recent reporting. Including for Austria's Nazi-nostalgic Jorg Haider and the Austrian Freedom Party, and some African dictators, too. I guess it all depends on how you define "present danger." Groups which track anti-semitism had pretty grave things to say about Haider and the Austrian Freedom Party back in 1997 when Hannaford was a paid lobbyist for the party, according to Justice Department records.[thx to FD for the correction.]

P.P.S.: Remember when Jorg Haider went to cheer up an isolated Saddam Hussein in 2002? Here's a photo to jog our memory.

The two epistomologies, again. Matt is right. The issue of the weakness of the intelligence about whether or not Iraq sought uranium from Niger is being overshadowed by a separate debate about Joe Wilson's credibiliy. It's the two epistomologies again. Those who want to believe, incredibly, Bush should have stood by his sixteen words, can trumpet on about Wilson, without looking at the total poverty of the intelligence backing up their claim. But they don't really care whether Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger as far as I can tell. Because it's too hard to figure out? Not really, at least some evidence is out there to peruse, I've done it, and it's pretty darn underwhelming. Kevin Drum makes a valiant effort to actually try to get to the truth on the Joe Wilson claims. Unfortunately, I suspect there's about as much of a market for the truth about Joe Wilson as there was for an attempted analysis of the other sources for the Niger uranium intelligence.

UPDATE: If this was a political cartoon, it would have a couple guys with a magnifying glass looking at tiny letters on forged documents about Niger uranium, and then two huge mountains of North Korea and Iran and all their nuclear warheads piling up, whistling at the sky, and the Bush people pointing at the magnifying glass.

Iran Update: While reserving the right to "go Michael Ledeen" on us, for now, Greg Djerejian thinks the CFR approach basically gets it right. I largely agree, but am interested in the coming debate on competing approaches. While admitting that I find the idea behind the "Faster please" group's advocacy of nonviolent regime change quite appealing, those who know internal Iran politics well (and not just Iranian exile politics well, which is different) seem to believe Iran is not on the verge of a revolution. [And let's face it, there's already plenty of independent broadcasting, the BBC, VOA, etc. going into Iran.] More American dollars to the opposition may raise the temperature, but it may also get a whole lot of student protestors killed. Those I have interviewed within the radius of the CFR world point out that Iran under the mullahs is oppressive (and no one disagrees with that, nor the fact that Iran supports terrorism, is pursuing nuclear weapons, etc.) but not anywhere near as totalitarian as was Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and that Iranians, when they are ready, are capable of changing the regime on their own. More on this soon, in a piece.

Oy Vey. Here is my feeling: Berger should not get any position in any Kerry administration. He was an awful national security advisor, reflecting all that was lawyerly and slow to acquire a real national security vision for the president he was advising. This case makes one just scratch one's head. But it certainly doesn't seem to reflect any malice, e.g. using information from classified documents to destroy someone's career, as apparently officials from the Bush administration have done. Nor does it rise to even one one millionth of the level of leaking to Ahmad Chalabi that the US had broken Iranian intelligence's communications codes, I might add.

John Negroponte may still be missing, but Iraq'd is back, from the Middle East.

Is more direct engagement with Iran the answer? So argues the Council of Foreign Relations in this new report, released today:

The Task Force concludes Iran is experiencing a gradual process of internal change. It argues this process will eventually produce a government more responsive toward its citizenry's wishes and more responsible in its international approach. In the meantime, the urgency of U.S. concerns about Iran and the region mandate that the United States deal with the current regime rather than waiting it out.

Some of the Iranian exiles in the audience (and indeed, Task Force member Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, who declined to sign the report), and a few dozen protestors outside, complained the recommendation would have the US approach Tehran from a position of weakness, and doesn't channel the pent up frustration of Iran's oppressed citizenry for a better option: regime change. But I thought the Task Force's chair Zbigniew Brzezinski made a good point, when he pointed out, that with Iran's nuclear program gaining broad political and public support, who's to say regime change would lead to Iran relinquishing its nuclear ambitions?

[Meanwhile, Michael Ledeen's take on the media's reaction to the 9/11 commission's allegation Iran gave safe passage to al Qaeda members is indeed darkly funny: "....Are you sitting down? Iran is a terrorist state..."]

MORE: Is Ledeen abandoning Bush? This doesn't exactly sound like an endorsement:

Those of you who have followed along these little therapy sessions of mine know of my despair regarding this administration's fecklessness concerning the mullahs. It has pained me enormously, especially because I still believe that this president has a solid understanding of the evil of the Islamic Republic, despite the efforts of the State Department — even after the departure of Haas — to convince him that a really good deal is just minutes away. I have been reduced to begging "faster, please," but I have long since recognized that nothing would happen until after the elections (a potentially suicidal policy). Now the London Times has found a nameless someone in the Bush administration who promises that a second term for W. would bring vigorous support of democratic revolution in Iran, and decisive action against the atomic project. It is beyond me why anyone would take seriously such claims, given the fact that after four years in office this administration still has no Iran policy, and the deputy secretary of State, Richard Armitage, has never backed off his claim that Iran is a democracy, nor has he been gainsaid by any other top official. I certainly hope the Times is right, but I have my doubts. I'm afraid we're not going to get serious about Iran without another 9/11.

Qu'est-ce que tu penses, Monsieur Djerejian?

Maybe 9/11 commission chair Thomas Kean would be a good candidate for CIA director, or even director of national intelligence.

What British other sources? The Guardian is reporting that Britain is pointing fingers at France as the original source of its Niger uranium intelligence.

Though it has not been stated in the four official inquiries into British intelligence, London's source for its claims about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium - widely repeated in the US until discredited - almost certainly came from French intelligence.

France has much influence in Niger, the west African state in which Iraq allegedly tried to buy the so-called "yellow cake".

A convention between intelligence services allows a provider of data shared with an ally to control further dissemination. British sources say that Paris, in this instance, refused further dissemination, even when the US basis for a similar claim proved to come from crudely forged documents.

The Butler report said "there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached", and that statements in the UK government's dossier and by the prime minister to the commons about Iraqi attempts to buy such ore "were well-founded".

So, has Britain not provided what it has to the IAEA because the other sources are, in essence, second hand, via France? And France has not permitted Britain to further disseminate them?

In other words, is Britain disowning that the "other sources" for Niger uranium claim were even its own sources? They were really "second hand" sources it got from France?

Pretty intriguing. It would seem that Britain may be backpedalling here under further scrutiny of its "other sources."

There certainly does seem to have been an awful lot of laundering of the Niger uranium intelligence via several intelligence services, doesn't it? So, who was the real Wizard of Oz?

Stay tuned.

[Thx to reader N for the link].

Bill Safire didn't do his research. And misspeaks, numerous times:

. . .State Department intelligence also was dubious, reports the Senate, more so in October when an Italian journalist brought in a bunch of phony documents somebody was trying to sell him about a Niger uranium transaction. This outweighed the report of a top security official in the French Foreign Ministry, who told U.S. diplomats in November 2002 that "France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger."

Two months later, with no objection from C.I.A., the famous 16 words went into Bush's 2003 State of the Union.

But when word leaked about the fake documents — which were not the basis of the previous reporting by our allies — Wilson launched his publicity campaign, acting as if he had known earlier about the forgeries.

What did Safire get wrong here?

-- The Italian journalist was not a "he."

-- The forged Niger docs were indeed the chief basis for Italy's reporting to the US on the Niger uranium claims.

-- The French report was based on the forged Niger uranium docs.

-- Reports from the fake documents were the chief source of the previous reporting to the US by the Italians, and partly by the British as well, on the Niger uranium issue.

A few weeks ago, I noted how Safire had attacked the staff of the 9/11 commission for its report that there was no compelling evidence of Saddam-al Qaeda cooperation. Safire attacked the staff personally in the most obnoxious, rabid language.

Now that the commission is expected to reveal Iran gave safe passage to several of the 9/11 hijackers, can we expect Safire to praise the commission staff to high heaven?

What I'm trying to get at, is Safire's essential intellectual dishonesty. He attacks total strangers personally when their findings do not reinforce his ideology, his screed. He praises them effusively if they do jack up his ideology. It's not about the evidence, and it's not about the truth, and even though he's praising or attacking, it's not really about the ostensible subjects of his attacks or praise. They are just convenient vehicles for hammering out his pre-ordained views, on which objective facts have no apparent influence. The poverty of his research and fact checking shown above -- in a column about the truth or falsehood of 16 words no less -- demonstrates of how little interest or concern the truth really is to Safire. He just can't be bothered to get the most basic facts straight. How his editors let him get away with it is beyond me.

Update: Kriston Capps and Jonathan Schwarz had issues with this column too.

Iraq Intelligence: the guys who got it right. The tiny State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, with only 300 employees. There should be some important case studies here.

Meantime, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace gives the SSCI report a poor grade.

Other Sources. Or, the tale of the Algerian businessman, the Somali businessman, the West African businessman, and the [redacted] businessman, and those stubborn forged Niger uranium documents.

For the moment, let's set aside discussion of the relative merits - or not - of the claims regarding whether Iraq did or did not in fact seek uranium in Niger and in DR Congo in the 1999-2000 time period, to ask a different question. [After all, neither the SSCI report nor the Butler report ever establish that Iraq did in fact seek uranium from Africa since 1998. They say, the claims were not in their opinion disproven [e.g. absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it's not evidence of a positive, either...] Further, it's important to point out, neither report even begins to contend that Iraq actually succeeded in acquiring any uranium . . .]

As I said, let's set that discussion aside for the moment to ask something different. That is: what specifically were the other alleged sources for the claim Iraq sought to discuss acquiring uranium in Niger, other than the reports Britain and the US received from Sismi that were discredited upon the discovery that Sismi's report was based on the counterfeit Niger uranium documents?

As I have previously noted, the Butler report asserts that the UK had "multiple" sources for the claim, while obscuring what those sources actually were. The IAEA, for one, has asked Britain to clarify the other sources it claims to have, which it has yet to do.

So what do we know about the nature of the reputed other sources? The most specific references to be found come from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report. Here are all the references to reputed other sources from the Senate report I could find:

* Several analysts interviewed by Committee staff also pointed out that information in the second intelligence report matched [redacted] reporting from 1999 which showed that an Algerian businessman, Baraka, was arranging a trip for the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawi, to visit Niger and other African countries in early February 1999. [Redacted]. [Cited from page 38 of the Senate report]

[ . . . ]

* The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, [redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq." [page 43]

[ . . . ]

* ([Redacted]) On November 25, 2002, The Naval [redacted] issued a very brief report Alleged Storage of Uranium Destined for Iraq [redacted] that a large quantity of uranium from Niger was being stored in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin. The uranium was reportedly sold to Iraq by Niger's President. The report provided the name and telephone numbers for the individual, a West African businessman, who was responsible for coordinating the alleged uranium transaction and indicated that he was willing to provide information about the transaction. CIA's DO told Committee staff that the businessman has never been contacted and the DO has not made an effort to determine whether this individual had any useful information . . . The Defense Humint Service (DHS) and the Navy also told Committee staff that they did not try to contact the businessman . . . The DHS told Committee staff that because the DHS examined the warehouse on December 17, 2002 and saw only what appeared to be bales of cotton in the warehouse, they did not see a reason to contact the businessman. . .[Pages 59-60]

[ . . . ]

* On March 8, 2003, the DIA provided an info memo (TS-99-177-03) to the Secretary of Defense in response to a March 8, 2003 Washington Post article, "Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake." The memo said, "we believe the IAEA is dismissing attempted Iraqi yellowcake purchases, largely based upon a single set of unverified documents concerning a contract between Niger and Iraq for the supply of 'pure uranium.' The [memo added that the] USG had not shared other [information] with the IAEA that suggested a Nigerien uranium deal with Iraq." The other intelligence referenced in the memo is the CIA intelligence report on the former ambassador's trip, which described the Nigerien Prime Minister's belief that an Iraqi delegation was interested in uranium, the Navy report from November 2002 which said uranium destined for Iraq was being stored in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin, and a fax from late 2001 found in the possession of a Somali businessman which described arrangements for shipping unidentified commodities in an amount that appeared similar to the amount in the Iraq-Niger yellowcake deal. The fax, however, did not mention uranium, Iraq, or Niger. [pages 69-70]

[ . . . ]

* On April 5, 2003, the [National Intellience Council] NIC issued a Sense of the Community Memorandum (SOCM), Niger: No Recent Uranium Sales to Iraq, (NIC SOCM 2001-12.) The SOCM said, "we judge it highly unlikely that Niamey has sold uranium yellowcake to Baghdad in recent years. The IC agrees with the IAEA assessment that key documents purported showing a recent Iraq-Niger sales accord are a fabrication. We judge that other reports from 2002 - one alleging warehousing of yellowcake for shipment to Iraq, a second alleging a 1999 visit by an Iraqi delegation to Niamey - do not constitute credible evidence of a recent or impending sale." . . .

(•) On June 12, 2003, the DIA sent an information memorandum to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in response to questions about Iraq's nuclear program. The memo said, "while the Intelligence Committee agrees that documents the IAEA reviewed were likely 'fake,' other unconfirmed reporting suggested that Iraq attempted to obtain uranium and yellowcake from African nations after 1998." The other reporting mentioned was the Navy report from November 2002, which said uranium destined for Iraq was being stored in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin.[pages 70-71]

So, let's review. The universe of other sources, at first glance, appears to include:

1) An Algerian businessman, Baraka.

According to the Senate report, Baraka was reported to be involved in arranging the trip for the then-Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawi, to Niger and three other African countries in early February 1999.

Where did this report of Baraka come from? The Senate report says Baraka was mentioned in the CIA Directorate of Operation's "second report" on the Niger uranium subject, issued on February 5, 2002. From the Senate report, p. 37:

Reporting on the uranium transaction did not surface again until February 5, 2002 when the CIA's DO issued a second intelligence report [redacted] which again cited the source as a "[foreign] government service." Although not identified in the report, this source was also from the foreign service. The second report provided more details about the previously reported Iraq-Niger uranium agreement and provided what was said to be "verbatim text" of the accord.

From what I know from other reporting, the foreign government source for this second intelligence report was not Britain, but Italy's Sismi. The timing is right around the time a high ranking Sismi official briefed a high ranking CIA official in Washington in February 2002 on the Niger uranium claims.

And as you can see from the section excerpted above, the obvious source for the "verbatim text" the "foreign service" gave to the CIA in February 2002 was lifted from the documents which we now know to have been the counterfeit Niger uranium documents. In any case, Baraka is not described so much as an independent source on the deal, but as someone described by the foreign government service to the CIA as part of the deal. Nevertheless, the larger context for the Baraka claim to the CIA appears to be the counterfeit Niger uranium docs.

More alleged sources for the claim:

2) A "[redacted] businessman."

The Niger prime minister and former foreign minister Mayaki said..."that in June 1999, [redacted] businessman approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss 'expanding commercial relations' between Niger and Iraq...The intelligence report also said that 'although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq.'"

Who is this businessman? The timing alluded to here suggests he is not the Algerian businessman, because the Algerian businessman referred to above was reportedly trying to broker the meeting between the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican and the Niger authorities back in February 1999, not in June 1999.

I'll reserve a hypothesis for now until I can get more information. But one thing to note is this is a pretty uncompelling allegation. The Niger prime minister is saying that the redacted businessman was trying to set up a meeting which he admits occurred, but says that he didn't allow uranium to be discussed.

3) The West African businessman.

"...The Naval [redacted] issued a very brief report Alleged Storage of Uranium Destined for Iraq [redacted] that a large quantity of uranium from Niger was being stored in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin. The uranium was reportedly sold to Iraq by Niger's President. The report provided the name and telephone numbers for the individual, a West African businessman, who was responsible for coordinating the alleged uranium transaction.

This would seem to be the strongest example of a genuine potential "other source" to be found in the report on the Niger uranium issue, to my mind. And yet, no one ever interviewed him, so he clearly is not much of an independent source. And when the USG did check out the warehouse supposedly involved, it didn't find any yellowcake.

Here is mention of someone who is alleged in a Navy report to actually be involved in the coordination of a deal. It's also worth noting that this section on the Navy report is different from citations of "other sources" in the Senate report because it does not appear to be originally sourced from a foreign government at all. At least the Senate report doesn't indicate the Navy got this from a foreign government service (or where the Navy got this information at all).

In any case, a month after the Navy report is issued in November 2002 mentioning the West African businessman, US sources did get check out the Cotonou, Benin warehouse alleged in the Navy report to be the transit point for yellowcake, and it turns out to hold bales of cotton. Subsequently, according to the Senate report, there's no US government effort to follow up and interview the businessman.

I basically agree with the SSCI report admonition that the US government should have at least tried to interview this West African businessman - which none of the three US intel agencies, including the Defense HUMINT agency, did. If his identity can be ascertained, some journalist should try to go interview him.

But it's hard to see how the West African businessman ultimately amounts to a real other source for the Niger uranium claims, by virtue of the fact, no one ever interviewed him. If someone leaves a journalist a voice mail with his name and phone number and says on the message, I know about X, Y, Z, one simply can't include him in one's article as a source, without interviewing him. What's more, if the journalist checks out what the person said he's involved in, and it appears to be false, it wouldn't be enough to base a story on. So even this West African businessman, the potentially strongest inkling of another source from the SSCI report, seems to be deeply problematic at best.

4) A fax from late 2001 found in the possession of a Somali businessman, "that appeared similar to the amount in the Iraq-Niger yellowcake deal. The fax, however, did not mention uranium, Iraq, or Niger."

It's hard to know what to make of this, the mention is so cryptic, and seems to evaporate from further reporting. How the fax alluded to was obtained, and how the Somali businessman upon which it was found came to the US's attention, remain steeped in mystery. This would seem to likely be a potential British other source, but until Britain makes clear what or who it provided, it's hard to know.

I will point out that among the forged Niger uranium documents is a fax reporting that quantities of something chemical being transported from Niamey to Cotonou Benin from August 2001. Check out this one.

However, this does not appear to be the fax in question, because it is a fax from the Niger Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the fax mentioned in the SSCI report is described as having no mention of Niger, Iraq, or uranium.

In any case, the research so far suggests the fax found on the Somali businessman is the closest hint we have to what Britain's other source may be. Secondly, some news reports have suggested Britain's "other source" had been obtained by signals intelligence, and a fax would potentially seem of that nature.

So, where are we?

It seems to me the only potential "other sources" left standing are the Somali businessman and potentially the West African businessman, who the US never interviewed. That said, there is evidence pointing against the fact that the transaction with which the West African businessman was alleged to have been involved actually transpired. There was no yellowcake found in the Cotonou warehouse, and -- oh yeah -- there was no new uranium found in Iraq.

It seems the Somali businessman is the strongest contender for a "British other source." But then again, he is the source ultimately of a fax that mentions no Niger, no Iraq, and no uranium. It's not quite the kind of evidence one would want to take a country to war on.

I'm obviously not an intelligence expert. But it seems to me the CIA's judgment, described below from the Senate report, makes sense:

(U) On June 17, 2003, nearly five months after the President delivered the State of the Union address, the CIA produced a memorandum for the DCI which said, "since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad."

When you compare the other sources described in the Senate report with the forged documents themselves, and the fact that no WMD have been found in Iraq (a crucial point), they seem largely to evaporate, and appear rather to be elements of a fictional transaction recorded in what all investigators have agreed are counterfeit documents.

But we won't know for sure unless and until Britain clarifies what its independent sources for the uranium from Africa claims were. Why it doesn't begs the question, what does it have to hide? Is it ashamed its claimed "other sources" aren't more credible, or is there some other explanation?

Roberta Smith has written an incredible essay in last Sunday's New York Times about a new exhibit of photographs of the Anne Frank family in pre-war Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

. . .In another image from 1941 Anne leans over the balcony of their modern Dutch apartment, looking back at Otto with the city behind her. One of the few photographs in the show that are not spatially intimate and contained, it shows her in effect dangling before a vortex of deep space. It captures an incipient wildness that glimmers from only a few images, the dark circles speaking of her worried acuity. Once more the future speaks to us: Anne is pictured as if moving toward her final destination, far beyond Otto's loving protection.

Neocons who won't be voting for Bush. Tim Dunlop notes that Francis Fukuyama, one of the founders of the neocon movement, has decided that he won't be voting for the imcumbent because he has made the US more vulnerable:

Famous academic Francis Fukuyama, one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement that underlies the policies of US President George W. Bush's administration, said on July 13 that he would not vote for the incumbent in the November 2 US Presidential election.

In addition to distancing himself from the current administration, Fukuyama told TIME magazine that his old friend, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should resign.

In 1997, Fukuyama together with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush, signed a declaration entitled 'The New American Century Project'. That declaration set the groundwork for the neo-conservative movement.

Fukuyama began to distance himself from the administration during the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The tension between the two came to a head prior to the invasion of Iraq. Fukuyama opposed the war.

Fukuyama is still angry at the Bush administration since they refuse to admit to the mistakes they have made. Fukuyama had warned that after the war, Iraq would be dragged into an internal conflict and would export terror to the world.

Fukuyama said that because of those reasons he could not vote for Bush in the upcoming elections.

Fukuyama has an interesting opinion piece in the Australian, pointing out a seeming contradiction in neocon ideology: if they don't believe in social engineering in the US, why do they believe in it for Iraq?

OF all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neo-conservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on from there to democratise the broader Middle East.

It struck me as strange precisely because these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and how social planners could never control behaviour or deal with unanticipated consequences.

If the US cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington, DC, how in the world does it expect to bring democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot? . . .

The point here is not who is right, but rather that the prudential case was not nearly as open-and-shut as many neo-conservatives believed. They talk as if their (that is, the Bush administration's) judgment had been vindicated at every turn, and that any questioning of their judgment could only be the result of base or dishonest motives. If only this were true. The fact that Washington's judgment was flawed has created an enormous legitimacy problem for the US, one that will hurt American interests for a long time to come.

[Thanks to John Richardson for the link.]

As usual, Fred Kaplan says better what I was trying to say below.

With all genuine respect, shouldn't the question be: "Bush: Effective Steward of the War on Terror?"?

Isn't that the question? I sense from such discussion that we Democrats just don't take the security threat posed by Al Qaeda, Iraq, etc., seriously enough. That we don't even realize there's a war on, for goodness sake. But, it's not true, to say the least. Some of us do take it very seriously. And just because Bush keeps saying he's a war time president doesn't change the fact that his team has shown such incompetence in conducting the war on terror and the post-war in Iraq.

Greg Djerejian, who has put his own boots on the ground in numerous war zones and post-war zones, doesn't sense Kerry gets how dangerous the world is:

There's, er, a lot going on--and I'm not confident that Kerry a) fully gets the stakes and b) will field a national security team that will be up to the challenge.

But doesn't that perception defy the demonstrable evidence of recent administrations and the comparative competence with which they have used force, and the principles they have cited for using it? Wouldn't an objective observer have to say the post-wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were conducted with more competence under the Clinton administration than the post-war was conducted in Iraq by the Bush administration? The fact is, basic levels of security were achieved from the moment General Nash crossed into Bosnia from Croatia, and when asked by the Bosnian Serbs for his passport, pointed to the machine gun toting lieutenant behind him and said, that's my passport. The Bush administration, Rumsfeld, for ideological reasons, were not willing to even recognize the need for more troops on the ground in Iraq, and the result has been disastrous. Why is Greg, who has real expertise in conflicts, willing to give the Bush team the benefit of the doubt when it has demonstrated so much willful incompetence in conducting post-war Iraq, post-war Afghanistan, and aspects of the war against al Qaeda? And why is he skeptical immediately off the bat about a prospective Kerry national security team, which could very well include people like Holbrooke, Biden, Beers, even Hagel or McCain, who have years of war time experience between them and who in my judgment have demonstrated so much competence in dealing effectively with a world they fully recognize is dangerous, and has evil in it that must not be accomodated?

P.S. A confession. I am not really a gauchiste, as Greg calls my site. I even protest-voted for Dole in '96, because I was frustrated it took Clinton and that weasel Warren Christopher so long to intervene in Bosnia. [And, just to be clear, the evidence was that any second Bush I administration, whose foreign policy team was led by James "We don't got a dog in that fight" Baker, would have never done the right thing in Bosnia, BTW, had it won in '92.] But when the Clinton team with its NATO partners did intervene in Bosnia, and later in Kosovo, they did a far more competent job than the Bush team has done in Iraq.

MORE discussion of this here and here.

As I noted in some earlier posts, part of what seems to make the issue of US foreign policy towards Iran so contentious is that it is largely conducted in secret, by back channel, and many of the players involved on the American side have staked out their positions so long ago, that their camps are now so hardened. But the issue is becoming very ripe again. Several events over the next few weeks are blowing some of the opacity away from the topic and renewing questions about if and how the US should deal with Iran, and bringing these questions to the fore for more open debate. The Center for American Progress held a small meeting on the topic of the security implications of a nuclear Iran today that I attended and will try to write more on later. But the one many in the city are anticipating is Monday's release of the report by the Council on Foreign Relations task force on Iran, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The NY Sun's Eli Lake runs down the issues the report raises in a piece today, that is worth reading:

The Council on Foreign Relations will recommend Monday that America negotiate with Iran in an effort to stabilize Iraq, end Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and capture members of Al Qaeda . . .

The report says America should pursue an offer Iran made last spring to American diplomats in Geneva to turn over some members of Al Qaeda to other countries, according to sources familiar with its contents.

In exchange, the report recommends that members of an anti-Iranian violent insurgency movement under custody of American forces in Iraq be sent to other countries to face prosecution for crimes against the Islamic republic.

Tehran originally asked for the 4,000 members of the Mujahadin e-Khalq to be rendered to their country, where State Department lawyers at the time feared they would be killed or tortured.

This advice comes as the State Department is negotiating the status of the MEK with the Iraqi interim government. A State Department spokeswoman Wednesday told The New York Sun,“We are working with interim Iraqi government and international organizations on the status of the MEK detainees. At these consultations we discuss methods to insure that the MEK members are treated in full accordance with international law and cannot pose a threat to individuals inside or outside Iraq.”

America’s support of a European initiative to entice Iran’s cooperation with nuclear inspectors through dialogue and trade has appeared to do nothing to blunt the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions.

Meanwhile, conditions for Iranians seeking a referendum on the powers of the Supreme Leader have worsened since February, when the country’s council of experts barred hundreds of reformist candidates from even running for office in the Majlis.

Last month, an interim report from the September 11 commission concluded that Al Qaeda sought and received training in Hezbollah training camps inside Iran and in southern Lebanon. The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, has also said his government has compiled recent evidence that Iranian agents have supported insurgents attacking American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

It is in this environment that the Council on Foreign Relations task force on Iran has called for increased engagement with the Islamic Republic and concluded that a counterrevolution ousting the mullahs from power is not likely, but recommends America invite more Iranian students and professionals to visit America through so-called people-to-people contacts . . .

Most of the members of the task force include foreign policy realists that have been longtime advocates for engaging rogue states. The task force includes President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski; former defense secretary Frank Carlucci, who is also the chairman emeritus of the Carlyle Group; and the first President Bush’s director of central intelligence, Robert Gates . . .

The report’s recommendations for selective engagement echo in many ways the Clinton administration’s Iran policy in its last year in office. In 2000, Secretary of State Albright addressed a group of Iranian Americans and apologized for America’s clandestine efforts to catapult the Shah to power.

She then initiated a set of dialogues with Iran over their support for international terrorism; nuclear proliferation, and Afghanistan. The council’s report also recommends this approach . . .

The Iran hawks' position is skeptical (to put it kindly) of the realist-dominated CFR recommendation for more direct engagement with Iran. But there's at least two schools of Iran hawks. The Iran hawk realists, who think the US should offer Iran the threat of bigger sticks, and reward of bigger carrots, in focused negotiations on the nuclear issue. And then the "Faster, Please" school, who think we should further isolate the mullahs, and push for regime change, not by the threat of force, but through financial and moral support to opposition groups, independent broadcasters, etc. The irony of course is that the theory advocated by the "Faster" group borrows lock stock and barrel from the nonviolent revolution policy of Peter Ackerman pursued to great success by none other than Madeleine Albright (who the Iran hawks ridicule) and the Clinton administration against Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, who is now in the midst of his trial on war crimes at the Hague.

More on these issues later, but for now, go read the Lake piece.

MORE: Iran procuring dual use technology from Europe. This from Reuters today:

Western diplomats say recent intelligence reports show Iran has been attempting to buy items which could be used to build nuclear weapons -- a charge Tehran dismisses as baseless.

The diplomats cited European customs information and intelligence gathered in the Middle East showing Tehran had tried to buy, among other things, high-speed switches that could potentially be used in a nuclear weapon and high-speed cameras the Iranians might use to test a nuclear explosion.

``They appear to be working on the planning for a high-speed nuclear implosion device,'' the diplomat said, adding that Iran had also been
experimenting with ``high explosive that would be appropriate for the core of a nuclear weapon.''

A senior U.S. official told Reuters in Washington that these procurement efforts were part of an effort that has been going on for a long time. . .

The diplomats said their motivation for briefing Reuters was concern that France, Britain and Germany were enabling Iran to play for time while the trio struggle to find a way of enticing Tehran into fully suspending its uranium enrichment programme.

That last line is key. A battle between approaches is coming to the fore. But this "leak" is ammunition in a battle between the opposed American camps as much as one between the Europeans and Americans as far as I can tell. More on this soon.

The IAEA challenges Britain to produce the goods on uranium from Africa.

This from the Independent.

UN nuclear watchdog challenges Britain to reveal Niger intelligence

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

The United Nations nuclear watchdog yesterday challenged the Government to share intelligence which it used to accuse Saddam Hussein of trying to buy uranium from two African countries for a nuclear bomb.

Lord Butler of Brockwell said the Government's claims were "well-founded," after admitting "significant controversy" surrounded the reliability of government statements about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium ore.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) determined in March 2003 that documents which allegedly "proved" an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger were forgeries. But the British government, the first to put the claims into the public domain in the September 2002 dossier, continued to insist it had separate sources which confirmed its statement.

Lord Butler's report revealed the accusations against Iraq concerned not only Niger, but the war-ravaged, mineral-rich country of the Democratic Republic of Congo. An IAEA spokesman said that the Vienna-based body responsible for monitoring Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions on nuclear issues, had not been informed of the specific intelligence on the two countries. . A spokesman, Mark Gwozdecky, said: "We did not see any indication of any violation, but we remain open to reopening the investigation if the information is made available to us."

Governments are bound by UN resolutions to submit to the IAEA any information concerning illegal Iraqi weapons.

Let's see what Britain comes up with.

See my post from yesterday that also questions precisely why the Butler report seems to deliberately obscure what were its "multiple" sources for the uranium in Africa claim.

Heads Up: Knight Ridder is going to break something big in tomorrow's papers.....

Update: Here it is:

A former CIA director who advocated war against Saddam Hussein helped arrange the debriefing of an Iraqi defector who falsely claimed that Iraq had biological-warfare laboratories disguised as yogurt and milk trucks.

R. James Woolsey's role as a go-between was detailed in a classified Defense Department report chronicling how the defector's assertion came to be included in the Bush administration's case for war even after the defector was determined to be a fabricator.

A senior U.S. official summarized portions of the report for Knight Ridder on condition of anonymity because it's top secret. The report said that on Feb. 11, 2002, Woolsey telephoned Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Linton Wells about the defector and told him how to contact the man, who'd been produced by an Iraqi exile group eager to oust Saddam. Wells said he passed the information to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Woolsey's previously undisclosed role in the case of Maj. Mohammad Harith casts new light on how prominent invasion advocates outside the government used their ties to senior officials in the Bush administration to help make the case for war. . . By using his Pentagon contacts, Woolsey provided a direct pipeline to the government for Harith's information that bypassed the CIA, which for years had been highly distrustful of the exile group that produced Harith. . .

Francis Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress . . .said intermediaries such as Woolsey and former Pentagon official Richard Perle, another leading war advocate, contacted the Bush administration multiple times on the INC's behalf.

Such referrals were an efficient way to get potentially crucial intelligence to the government, Brooke said. He stressed that the INC made no claims about the defectors' veracity and it was up to U.S. officials to decide whether to use their information. . .

Woolsey denied in a brief exchange with a Knight Ridder reporter July 1 that he brought Harith to the Defense Department's attention. He declined to respond to multiple efforts to contact him this week after Knight Ridder learned new details of the Harith case.

The classified Pentagon report said that on Feb. 11, 2002, Woolsey telephoned Wells, who at that time oversaw the Defense Intelligence Agency, with word that the INC had produced Harith. Wells then informed the DIA through an "executive referral" how to contact Harith through the INC's headquarters in London.

Wells confirmed details of the report in an e-mail to Knight Ridder.

It seems that the CIA was not really the only organization to blame for the administration's pre-war intelligence screw ups, but rather, the one the GOP has determined should take the fall for mistakes championed by the very heart and center of the [paid] neocon INC advocacy machine. That these folks have yet to fess up about their direct roles in delivering the central casting bogus INC defectors into the very bosom of the US government shows serious limits to their moral courage. And why per chance are these parts of the report classified? To protect delicate sensibilities of good friends of the administration?

Update: The classified report described above that describes Woolsey's direct role in delivering the lying INC defector to the Defense Department was a Defense Department report, not the Senate Select Intel Committee report. My mistake.

I've enjoyed in the past few weeks getting a significantly increased amount of reader email, and suspected that my site had gone from being something largely checked by a few friends and regulars, to something seen by a slightly broader group. I got on a site usage tracking program for the first time today and the facts bear out those observations. I got 300,000 hits in June, and just under 90,000 visits, with a daily average of 10,000 hits per day, up from half that in May, and a quarter of that in April. July still has a couple weeks left but looks set to be close to June's numbers. [The list of referring sites, if I understand it, is just what I would have expected, since they are largely what I spend the most time on: after this site, they are the Washington Monthly, Atrios, Google, Yahoo, Talking Points Memo, Matthew Yglesias, Phil Carter's Intel Dump, the American Prospect, msn.com, TomPaine.com, cryptome.org, theleftcoaster.org, Digsby, Liberal Oasis, Ruy Teixeira, The New Republic, the Daily Kos, and google canada in that order.] Why the Weekly Standard is not on this list I don't understand.

I've been spending more time on the site while working on some larger investigative pieces, and that effort on the site has paid off thanks very much to readers, fellow bloggers, and colleagues. Many thanks to everybody, especially Kevin Drum and Karen Thomas who have been generous with technical advice. I hope to spend a few days making the site look a bit spiffier in the next few weeks so bear with me through any reconstruction.

These investigative projects take an extraordinary amount of effort and a good dose of patience and restraint; but one advantage is that in reporting them one acquires a lot of material, some of which is well suited to this sort of site -- it can go out quickly and provide some intriguing strings to pull as news develops.

Echo Theory. Matt Yglesias is up on the Butler report's findings on Niger uranium. I have read through that section a couple times and am bound to have further thoughts later. One observation I share with Matt: as helpfully searchable as the Butler report is (unlike the version of the report the Senate released), the Butler report sheds little light on what were the Brits' actual sources on the Africa uranium issue. Indeed, the sourcing seems deliberately obscured. [Of course, intelligence agencies try to protect sources and methods; but our Senate report did at least indicate if sources were "a foreign government," Curve Ball, INC defectors, etc., without naming them.]

Why would the sourcing be obscured? I suspect for three reasons. A possible one, as I have mentioned, is to protect sources. Secondly, because it seems there was an echo chamber among four governments at issue: Britain, France, Italy and the US. In other words, what seemed like multiple independent sources for the Niger uranium claim actually turned out to be the echo of one source multiple times, plus perhaps another source [but the Butler report, frustratingly, won't make this clear.] And then it turned out that the one source that echoed through four governments was content in documents that were later deemed counterfeit. And three, the sensitivity for the British government that it was the named source of the information the US president cited - and later his staff recanted - on the Niger uranium issue.

And while I'm at it, here's a theory for a second echo. Months before the documents got into US hands, there was one, possibly two governments' reporting of essentially the content in some of the documents to allied intelligence agencies. [e.g. the fake contract about the 500 tons -- which turned out to be counterfeit.]

Keep in mind that some of the documents that make up the "Niger uranium documents" were not fakes at all, and were essentially copies of telexes planning the real trip that the former Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See made to Niger and three other western African countries in 1999. In other words, there was a real trip to Niger by an Iraqi official. Copies of real documents planning that trip between the Niger and Iraqi embassies were part of the mix of documents - some outrageous forgeries, some genuine - that were later given to the US Embassy in October 2002.

Let me explain what I think might have happened in this echo theory. Let's say you have Countries A, B, and C. Country A reports to allied countries B and C in 2000, we have intelligence that Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See al-Zawahie went to four west African countries in 1999. We believe the purpose for that visit was possibly talks to inquire about purchasing uranium. Who he met with and dates might have been reported to allied agencies.

Allied agencies store the report, more or less. It's pretty thin.

Then 9/11 happens in Country B. In October 2001, Country C's intelligence service reports to Country B, Hey, Special Friend, we have intelligence that Iraq might have sought to discuss acquiring uranium in Niger in 1999. [Country C does not share with Country B the source of that report. But keep in mind the possibility that Country C's and Country A's report on that trip may in fact originate from the same source, documentation of or surveillance of the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican's 1999 trip to Niger, Congo-Brazzaville, etc.]

Country B's intelligence service analyst looks at that new intelligence report from Country C and says, "noted, but thin."

But a few months later, in December 2001, Country A, the original source of this report, (again) reports to Country B, we have information that Iraq sought to discuss uranium in Niger in 1999. They offer more details. Country B's DIA issues a new report.

The vice president from Country B hears about this report, and says to country B intelligence service, I'd like to know more.

So Country B has heard from two sources -- Country A and Country C -- that there is this report of an Iraqi offiical visiting Niger in 1999 potentially for the purpose (what else could it be?) of discussing purchasing uranium. And it asks for more information. In February 2002, Country B gets a much more detailed briefing from Country A [according to the Senate report].

So detailed that, when Country B, finally, eight months later, in October 2002, actually acquires copies of the documents, and determines they are counterfeit, Country B believes the report it received in February 2002 from Country A had to be based on these counterfeit documents...This casts considerable doubt on the reports on this issue Country B received from Country A.

But there's still the report Country B received from Country C. We basically know the rest.

But you can see why the actual sources for Country C on these reports would be important to understanding, how much of what it reported to Country B was "an echo" of what came from Country A and which has been discredited, and how much is original and new and not discredited.

[We know from the Senate report p. 69 that the original source for France's report to the US on the Niger uranium issue was based on the counterfeit docs.]

And it seems to me the Butler report deliberately obscures what was/were Country C's sources for the Niger uranium issue, because, let's face it, this is an issue of pretty extreme political sensitivity for Country C. The president of Country B cited Country C as the source for precisely one "factoid" in his SOTU. And despite the fact that Country B's national security team ultimately publicly said, the president shoudn't have cited that factoid from Country C, it's a major point of embarrassment in Country C that it might have provided to country B intelligence which later looked too dubious to cite as a case for war. So, it's sensitive for Country C.

That said, British press reports preceding the release of the Butler report suggested the British had another source for the claim Iraq possibly sought to discuss acquiring uranium in Niger and in DR Congo. I believe that source is what some reports have referred to as a Somali businessman. The Butler report makes zero mention of a Somali businessman. Would be interesting to find out more about him if he exists. Especially given Italy's interesting long historical involvement with Somalia.

Indeed, I have just done searches through the Butler report, and there is only one businessman that comes up at all, and he is part of the AQ Khan network, and nothing to do with Iraq. There is nothing under "Somali" or "Somalia" and nothing under Benin either.

So where are these press reports coming from? In fact, they seem to be coming from the Senate Select Intelligence committee's report on what it got from the British. [Page 63 of the Senate report]. Not from the Butler report. Strange that the Butler task force - which had the benefit of seeing the Senate report before it issued its findings - made no mention of these supposed British sources.

Undoubtedly, more later.

Right on, Kevin Drum.

Robert Dreyfuss worries about Iran catapulting onto the US foreign policy agenda, by hook or by crook. Here's the irony, and not for the first time. I honestly think Bob's skepticism about the (bi-partisan) national security establishment folks who believe the US can do something approaching engagement or accomodation with the Tehran regime is very similar to those he only seemingly ridicules in the Iran hawk crowd. The Iran hawks' real enemy at the moment are those who believe accomodation with Tehran is possible. And those accomodationists, as I understand the hawks' position, can be found in Bush's State Department as well as among certain Hill Republicans and Democrats. An Iran hawk told me frankly last night, as far as he's concerned, Bush has no Iran foreign policy, and isn't going to get one before the election. [He's not optimistic about a Kerry policy towards Iran either, for that matter.] Sure, the Iran hawks have friends in the Pentagon and the NSC. But...who's to say what a prospective Bush II 2 national security team would look like? Sure, a John Bolton - Iran hawk in chief - may emerge at the top of the CIA, or elsewhere. But the Iran hawks are sure to lose a few key allies in the Pentagon as well.

LA Times investigative journalist Ken Silverstein is all over the Iraq war advocates who have made a pretty penny off the war [reg. req.]. Several of these names may be familiar to you as INC advisors. Jim Woolsey, check.

• Neil Livingstone, a former Senate aide who has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and issued repeated public calls for Hussein's overthrow. He heads a Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions, that provides contacts and consulting services to companies doing business in Iraq.

• Randy Scheunemann, a former Rumsfeld advisor who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 authorizing $98 million in U.S. aid to Iraqi exile groups. He was the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Now he's helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there.

• Margaret Bartel, who managed federal money channeled to Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, including funds for its prewar intelligence program on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. She now heads a Washington-area consulting firm helping would-be investors find Iraqi partners.

• K. Riva Levinson, a Washington lobbyist and public relations specialist who received federal funds to drum up prewar support for the Iraqi National Congress. She has close ties to Bartel and now helps companies open doors in Iraq, in part through her contacts with the Iraqi National Congress.

Other advocates of military action against Hussein are pursuing business opportunities in Iraq. Two ardent supporters of military action, Joe Allbaugh, who managed President Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Edward Rogers Jr., an aide to the first President Bush, recently helped set up two companies to promote business in postwar Iraq. Rogers' law firm has a $262,500 contract to represent Iraq's Kurdistan Democratic Party.

But rest assured that none of the people named above see any conflict of interest. Or even, an interest in conflict.

In the past few weeks, some well and some not so particularly well connected sources have basically told me they are convinced we are set to face more terrorist attacks, before the elections. One person I met with tonight from another country's defense ministry told me, he knows we are going to face another attack. He doesn't wish it, but there it is.

My nerves have sort of gone on vacation, so I can't say I feel it. But at least intellectually at the moment, one does wonder, how things like the elections might be affected. [One also wonders, and hopes, that it is just so much hogwash.] I did find it more than a bit disconcerting the way this official spoke tonight of an Al Qaeda attack as a certainty. So since he made it clear that for his country's government, a Bush reelection would be favorable, for a variety of reasons, I threw back at him the possibility that such an attack would seem to make calling such an elections basically impossible. He literally wrote it down.

I just don't see how one could predict it. Sure there's one possible sociological sentiment of sticking with the leader, but surely as well there could be a well-deserved groundswell of resentment that this administration took some pretty major diversions instead of doing more to protect us from al Qaeda. Daniel Drezner and Matt Yglesias wonder about the same issue in posts today.

While we're being depressing, later on tonight I met with an interesting Iranian American who does work on international issues. And she basically feels that far from headed for some liberalization, the majority of the Middle East is headed for Islamist fundamentalism, of the type Iran saw a quarter century ago in the months after the Khomeini revolution.

Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan -- countries that if they were truly democratized, would become Islamist fundamentalist, she and others she cited as recently speaking at think tanks around town believe.

For what it's worth, the official from this other country said the exact opposite. Imagine, he said, if the regime would change in Iran, what the Middle East would look like: you would have moderate regimes in Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt, and tremendous pressure on the Syrian regime. When I mentioned Saudi Arabia, he changed the subject. But almost all of the countries on the list above are already problematic to say the least.

Christopher Hitchens plants himself firmly on the side of those who say there was an underlying truth behind those forged Niger uranium documents.

Now turn to the front page of the June 28 Financial Times for a report from the paper's national security correspondent, Mark Huband. He describes a strong consensus among European intelligence services that between 1999 and 2001 Niger was engaged in illicit negotiations over the export of its "yellow cake" uranium ore with North Korea, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and China. The British intelligence report on this matter, once cited by President Bush, has never been disowned or withdrawn by its authors. The bogus document produced by an Italian con man in October 2002, which has caused such embarrassment, was therefore more like a forgery than a fake: It was a fabricated version of a true bill.

The fabricated version of a true bill. Now that is really interesting.

I am struck by to what degree the Niger uranium issue has seemingly become in miniature the entire debate for and against the Iraq war. But for the hawks looking for vindication, it would seem to me that renewing one's claims based on evidence that is largely based on forged documents would seem a shaky thing to do. The British sources have not yet been clarified, although the Butler report should clarify things tomorrow. The French claim is apparently based on the forged documents which turned up in Italy, according to the Senate report. [And, apparently the French weren't so moved by their report that they were compelled to try to do anything about it.]

The fact that there does not seem to be anything more solid for some to base the WMD-argument-for-war is interesting. The aluminum tubes debate is too discredited even for them to touch. Chalabi's defectors have been proven deceptive. The once true believer David Kay has proven an unreliable ally for those who still claim, incredibly, Iraq has WMD stockpiles. But the arguments to which they seem to be clinging are hardly compelling, certainly nothing of the "mushroom cloud" nature the administration cited as its most dramatic case for war. Indeed, all that hasn't been totally put to rest according to the administration-friendly Senate report is that Iraq might have sought to discuss acquiring uranium from Africa, in other words, the case wasn't entirely disproved, not that it was proven. Nor does anyone assert that Iraq actually acquired any uranium from Niger or elsewhere in Africa in 1999-2000, just that it hasn't been disproved that it might have tried to discuss it. That's pretty thin.

All in all, I think the human rights argument for removing Saddam is still the only rationale that makes sense in retrospect [one the administration didn't really make], not the tired old, overwhelmingly discredited WMD case. And people like Hitchens have done a noble job in the past of making the human rights argument. By contrast, championing a case that to date has only been made by what turned out to be forged documents - and the reports parrotted from them to western intelligence agencies; and the effort to champion the legitimacy of outting a CIA officer's identity to the press are petty and ignoble.

Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress denies that the Iraqi defector to Germany known to US intelligence as Curve Ball is a relative of a top INC official, as has been much reported in the press and in the Senate intelligence committe report. Curve Ball, who purported to be an Iraqi chemical engineer when he defected to Germany, was the chief US source on the since disproven claim that Iraq had mobile bioweapons labs. This from the INC press office today, sent out via Laurie Mylroie:

INC DENIES CIA ALLEGATIONS

"part of a campaign to divert attention away from the real intelligence
failures in Iraq"

BAGHDAD (13 July, 2004): The Iraqi National Congress today issued the following statement denying recent false allegations made by the US Central
Intelligence Agency.

The CIA has recently alleged that one of their main sources of information on mobile bio-weapons facilities was an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball who they claim is the brother of a senior INC official and thus was coached by the INC. The CIA claims that the INC introduced Curveball to the German
intelligence service. These allegations are false.

The INC knows of no such person and challenges the CIA to produce evidence
or stop making unsubstantiated and false allegations. These charges are part of a campaign to divert attention away from the real intelligence failures in Iraq and shift blame on to the INC.

The INC did not provide false or fabricated information to the US Government or the media on Saddam's WMD programs. The INC did not coach defectors or
tell them what to say and there is no evidence to support this. The INC
introduced to the US Government people who claimed to have important
information on WMD. The INC never claimed to vouch for such information.

I am obviously skeptical of almost everything in the last graph. But I have heard senior INC officials swear up and down they truly have nothing to do with Curve Ball -- they do not deny the other three defectors they provided to US intelligence on the WMD issue BTW.

Here's what the Senate report says about Curve Ball[p.152]:

...Committee staff found several areas of concern regarding the HUMINT sources upon which the IC relied to build its assessments concerning Iraq's mobile BW production program. Those sources were CURVE BALL, [Redacted], the INC source, and [redacted].

2. CURVE BALL
A CIA BW analyst told Committee staff that the translation process used to
debrief CURVE BALL led to some misunderstandings. CURVE BALL spoke in English and Arabic, which was translated into a Western European language.
DHS officers translated the reports back into English before transmitting them to the Intelligence Community. [Then the next several pages are redacted].

So the Senate report refers to Curve Ball, it seems, first by his "code" name, then by his name, which is redacted, and then describes him as "the INC source." What accounts for the discrepancy between what US intelligence knows about Curve Ball, and what the INC is saying? Who really is Curve Ball?

James Bamford's book suggests the original allegation that Iraq had mobile bioweapons lab came to US intelligence not from Curve Ball at all, but from Israeli intelligence, back in 1994. But when I skimmed that section of Bamford's book the other day, I wasn't totally convinced. One reason? Of the two sources for that allegation in Bamford's book, one was an official who was cited anonymously in a British newspaper report. Indeed, it seemed possible -- even likely to me -- that the anonymous second source may indeed be the same person as the first source, who Bamford cited as former NESA official retired Air Force Ltn. Karen Kwiatkowski. I could be wrong, and anonymous may be someone else entirely, someone perhaps like Scott Ritter, although he usually doesn't seem to hesitate to go on the record.

In any case, it really truly does seem a mystery to those of us without access to the classified Senate report who really is Curve Ball.

Bin Laden aide surrenders...on the Afghan-Iranian border, and is flown from Iran to Saudi Arabia. And Iran is apparently holding more al Qaeda suspects. Maybe the deal Ignatius discussed in his piece last week is back on?

Here's an interesting piece by Lawrence Kaplan about the fate of Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi intellectual who allied himself with Ahmed Chalabi, and currently finds himself without any US governmental support. Makiya has long advocated the creation of an archives "memory project" to preserve knowledge of the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime. But Bremer for some unclear reason never released $1 million requested by the administration of Congress for the project. Kaplan suggests Makiya may have been caught in the battle between the State and Defense Departments. But until he flew off a few weeks ago, Bremer was answering to the Pentagon. In fact, Makiya may have been caught in another battle entirely; the fact is, Makiya and Chalabi broke in the months after the end of the Iraq war, reportedly over Makiya's disgust at Chalabi's increasingly surrounding himself with self-enriching thugs. And those who until recently dominated the Pentagon's control of Iraq affairs were on Chalabi's side, until that little Iran espionage issue arose.

The very depressing account of the Afghan-American translator who translated at the interrogation of an Afghan who was later beaten to death by a CIA contractor. This account should go in the legal record and make sure the CIA contractor David Passaro goes to prison and never sees daylight again.

UPDATE: Read M writes Tuesday night:

You should check out Hyder Akbar's original reports for This American Life radio show. He's not really a translator, but [an] Afghan-American teenager spending summers in Afghanistan, where his father is now a provincial governor. Fascinating -- and heartbreaking -- stuff.

Recorded summer 2002
Come Back to Afghanistan
(Teenage Embed, Part One)
1/31/03
Episode 230

Recorded summer 2003
Teenage Embed, Part Two
12/12/03
Episode 254

Greetings from a fan in Joshua Tree, Mojave Desert...

It is more than heartbreaking...it is deeply troubling.

Thank you for the pointers and the letters...

Several interesting points in this piece. One is, the SSCI report essentially condemns the CIA for never questioning its long standing assumptions that Saddam Hussein still had an active WMD program. But the gist of the SSCI report criticism of the CIA on the Niger issue is the opposite: that the CIA was too quick to dismiss the ambiguous "evidence" (some of it since proven forged) that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger. What gives? Was the CIA too critical of the WMD evidence, or not critical enough?

Good point. Why don't those who leaked Wilson's wife's name have the courage to step forward to defend their actions if they find them so noble? I guess it will have to wait for Fitzgerald's findings.

This past week's Senate Select Intelligence committee report [now searchable in this version] on Iraq intelligence skewered the CIA. Next week, when the 9/11 commission is expected to release its final report, we can expect the FBI to get it in the forehead. What can we expect from the 9/11 commission report? The following recommendations:

-- The creation of the post of a Director of National Intelligence

-- The creation of a domestic counterterrorism or intelligence agency, a US "MI5" to overtake the FBI's lead counterterrorism role

-- No pointing of fingers at direct officials for their failures -- a point which will disappoint the families greatly.

My feeling? I can't get that excited - or not - about the director of national intelligence idea. Or more that, I can't see that it is going to make the decisive difference everybody is talking about. Why? Because so much of the intelligence budget will still ultimately be controlled essentially by the Pentagon. And because as the Iraq intel report discussion has shown, the corruption of intelligence, the politicization of intelligence, is not something that will be eliminated by basically a more powerful intel chief, because intelligence analysis and recommendations are occurring in a political/policymaking process that is always subject to political tides.

My limited journalistic experience with the FBI does make me more favorable to the idea of the creation of a domestic counterterrorism agency separate from the Bureau. I frankly just think the FBI is out of its league. Their technology is hopeless, their culture is that of the street cop, and they are hopelessly vulnerable to political pressure. In short, as an institution, I don't think the FBI is smart enough.

At not pointing fingers? I will let the families speak for themselves. The fact that the only person who has lost his job in the wake of the largest intelligence failure in US history is George Tenet seems more than a bit shocking. Can you really blame all that on the "system?"

Recently, in the midst of reading a stack of Congressional reports and accounts of the Vulcans, the US entering the war in Afghanistan, and Iran contra memoirs, I occasionally find myself in the mood for a diversion from government scandals. One pleasure for such times are cookbooks. In my case, I am chagrined to admit, not for cooking so much as for just reading. I will read a good cookbook on vacation and then ask my husband what he wants to do for dinner. I'm reading a really great one now, that I hope never to finish, because it's such a pleasure to read as well as a wonderful history of Jewish life in places like Egypt, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. I highly recommend it. In the future, I hope to let you know if any recipees from it turn out.

If your local NPR station carries the Diane Rehm show, my fellow Bosnia scribe Philip Smucker, who has written the book Al Qaeda's Great Escape about how the Bush administration let Osama bin Laden get away at Tora Bora in 2001, will be on Monday at 11 am.

More testimonies of pre-war pressure on US intelligence analysts, from the archives. This Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel piece for Knight Ridder, from October 8, 2002, describes intense pressure on analysts. [Thanks to reader SM again for the clip.]

While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.

These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.

They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.

"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews.

No one who was interviewed disagreed.

They cited recent suggestions by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network are working together.

Rumsfeld said on Sept. 26 that the U.S. government has "bulletproof" confirmation of links between Iraq and al-Qaida members, including "solid evidence" that members of the terrorist network maintain a presence in Iraq.

Read the whole thing.

I listened to Sen. Pat Roberts on the Sunday talk shows today saying the committee asked the 200 some intelligence community officials it interviewed if they had felt under pressure, and if so, if that pressure had caused them to change their analysis. He said, and I believe he is sincere on this point, that no one said that. It's hard to understand how to reconcile the seeming discrepancy between the many news reports such as this one interviewing analysts off record describing the pressure they felt they were under, with the committee's findings. But one obvious potential reason could be concern that the wrong answer could cost one one's job. There's no protecting one's identity before the committee, as there is with a trusted reporter agreeing to protect a source's anonymity. And it wouldn't be inconceivable to someone being asked to testify before such a committee that one's answers might get back to higher ups.

For evidence of vindictiveness by high level Bush officials against staff who gave "the wrong answers," check out the section of the report on administration pressure around pages 280, where John Bolton tries to get a State Department intel analyst fired from his position because he tries to take out language from a Bolton speech that would have accused Cuba of having active offensive biological weapons program. Check out page 280 where Doug Feith pressures a NESA analyst to stop using the word "assassination" in regard to Israel's policy of targeted assassinations.

UPDATE: As a journalist who has been covering the national security beat for a few years, I have intelligence sources who told me in the past couple years about pressure to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, and more than pressure, an environment where this was a certain obsession, the holy grail. I called up Pat Roberts' office many months ago and spoke with a staffer there about it, and the staffer said sincerely, tell those people, call us from a payphone, we don't have to know their names, but we want to know. But when I told this to various intel sources, their response was, are you crazy? This is a culture of people who are uniquely willing to submit to authority, uniquely subject to crimping of their private lives, their very ability to conduct their daily lives with a degree of forthrightness. They are subject to regular polygraphs, etc. They knowingly subject themselves to that kind of life. That takes a certain type of person, a person who is more willing than many of the rest of us to sacrifice a high degree of autonomy, privacy, freedom, honesty, for something they think is more important. I mean, I know people in the intel world who have gone through breakdowns in their marriages who would sooner have died than gone for counseling, because being seen as mentally unstable they believed could have ruined their careers. So I am not surprised there is a discrepancy between what intel people say "anonymously" and what the committee heard on the record.

UPDATE: Tim Dunlop of the excellent Road to Surfdom has some strong analysis of the report and pressure issue.

Would the administration postpone - or cancel elections - were there to be heavens forbid another terrorist attack? Department of Homeland Security officials are looking into it, Reuters reports.

WASHINGTON, July 11 (Reuters) - U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda, Newsweek reported on Sunday.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network may attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.

The magazine cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the election if an attack occurred on the day before or the day of the election...

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter "to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election."

Creepy. Or creeping coup? It would seem unthinkable, except given how disturbingly the last US presidential elections were decided.

[thx to J for the clip]

Backdated Update: Kriston Capps has already thought about this.

Next up: The 9/11 commission report is expected out next week. Unlike Dan Darling, who has read all 511 pages of the SSCI report on Iraq Intelligence, I still have about 250 pages to go [fortunately many of them are blacked out].

Meantime, Newsweek reports on Curve Ball showing up hungover for a meeting with the lone US official who ever debriefed him. How many meetings did the US official have with the chief source for the administration's claims about Iraq's "mobile biological weapons labs," which turned out not to be? One.

The more he read, the more uneasy he became. In early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a "terrible hangover."

He wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

Why isn't the Committee telling us why "The Powers That Be" weren't interested in whether Curve Ball was credible, or as the case evidently was, distinctly not credible? Anyhow, as a friend pointed out last night, for the vast majority of the American public, are they really going to distinguish between the administration and the CIA, or will they see a report damning the CIA as ultimately implicating the administration?

Matt Yglesias has a couple of interesting posts regarding reaction to the Senate Select Intel Committee report, the charge of "group think" at the CIA (as opposed to among administration hawks who cherished not only the conviction in the existence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq but fantasies of Saddam's intimate cooperation with Osama bin Laden as well), and lots of recent back and forth on the issue of whether and when Iraq might have sought to purchase uranium in Niger. To say I've been studying some of these issues a lot would be to vastly underestimate the amount of work invested. For now, let me just point out a couple things.

The gist of the push back on the Niger uranium issue in places like the FT can basically be summed up like this: elements of other European intelligence agencies, including in France, Britain, and Italy, thought there might be something to the allegation that Iraq might have been seeking uranium in Niger. After all, Iraq did acquire uranium from Niger in the 1980s. But nobody -- not even the FT which has been carrying water for those who are trying to blow smoke around this subject, or the administration-friendly Senate report -- is suggesting that the Niger uranium docs peddled in Italy in October 2002 were anything but counterfeit. Not even the Italians. Indeed, the Italians are desperately trying to distance themselves from anything having to do with the documents.

So, just keep in mind, that there are several stories becoming intertwined here, and it's not helpful. One story line is: did Iraq seek to purchase uranium in Niger in 1999-2000. A second story line is: what are the sources for this allegation, if true? A third story line, which should not be confused with the first story line, is: who tried to put into circulation the crudely forged documents that would seek to show Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger in 1999. The first story line can be true or false without affecting the deception at the heart of the third story line.

Another point: Matt points to an interesting section of the SSIC report, that seeks to explain why the CIA and State Department analysts were immediately skeptical of whether the Niger docs were genuine. From page 58 of the report:

(U) The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document - a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium - mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates.

I believe this is a copy of the "companion document" that the INR Iraq nuclear analyst found so implausible.

When you read this, it is so laughably outrageous, so cooked up out of some utterly goonish central casting spook house (or else a really truly funny Saturday Night Live crew), it requires its whole own Senate report treatment. [The translation borrowed from David Loepp's posting at Cryptome]:

CONFIDENTIAL

REPORT ON THE MEETING REALIZE[D] WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PLAN OF ACTION "GLOBAL SUPPORT"

Our group, which met today June 14, 2002, at 4 PM in the residence of the Iraqi ambassador, via della Camillucia n° 355 in Rome has determined as follows:

The group directed by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Iran have decided that "Global Support" which is composed of specialists belonging to different military corps of the allied countries will be active immediately.

We are convinced that the high profession of the military belonging to "Global Support" are qualified with considerable experiences and very diversified in the sectors of defence and security and without a doubt they are responsible for the tasks assigned to them.

The Global Support (our group) is active worldwide, in all areas and extreme climates.

The competences of the members of Global Support are the following:

- Our support will above all be extended to:

governments subjected to an embargo;

governments continually suspected, and without just cause, of producing nuclear, biological, chemical weapons;

governments accused, without just cause, of international terrorism;

Islamic patriots accused of belonging to criminal organizations, to cells having non-existent ramifications;

Gee, you think the CIA might find something a little fishy about documents that basically purport to be the Rosetta Stone of all rogue Islamic countries taking notes of their meeting where they conspired together to forge a military alliance to defeat sanctions against fellow rogue regimes? A meeting supposedly held in the Iraq ambassador's residence in Rome, where surely none of the participating countries' ambassadors could have any inkling they might be under any sort of surveillance? And written in French that is not even correct? Glad the CIA caught that.

If it had been signed, P.S. We love you Saddam, it couldn't have been more cooked up, more staged. [I especially like the bit "Global Support (our group)..." part way down, just in case you didn't catch the first few times that the group was calling itself "Global Support."]

But even in such outrageous forgeries, there are clues about the thinking of the deceivers. Both of the people who might have created such a document, and of those who tried to put a package of such documents into circulation. Hersh's theory that the documents might have been created by anti-administration elements who wanted to ultimately embarrass the administration willing to seize on them for a time seems not implausible, when one gets a glimpse at how almost comically outrageous these documents are.

No political pressure on CIA analysts? This is pointed out by reader J, from the Washington Post Saturday:

A few days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell gave his 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction -- with its startling allegation that four individuals had confirmed that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories -- a government analyst who had read a draft of the speech sent an urgent e-mail to his boss.

All those sources are suspect or unreliable, especially the key one nicknamed "Curve Ball," warned the analyst, the only U.S. intelligence official who had met Curve Ball.

The analyst received a dismissive reply. "This war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say, and . . . the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," replied the deputy chief of the CIA's Iraq task force. The warning was never passed on to Powell or his top aides.

You don't need a Congressional investigation to figure out that is political pressure.

MORE PRESSURE: Reader SM sends this article, by James Risen in the New York Times March 23, 2003. Headline:

C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure In Preparing Iraqi Reports

The recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents has renewed complaints among analysts at the C.I.A. about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled, several intelligence officials said.

Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush administration policies.

For months, a few C.I.A. analysts have privately expressed concerns to colleagues and Congressional officials that they have faced pressure in writing intelligence reports to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda.

As the White House contended that links between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda
justified military action against *Iraq,* these analysts complained that reports on *Iraq* have attracted unusually intense scrutiny from senior policy makers within the Bush administration.

"A lot of analysts have been upset about the way the Iraq-Al Qaeda case has been handled," said one intelligence official familiar with the debate.

That debate was renewed after the disclosure two weeks ago by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that the claim that *Iraq* sought to buy uranium from Niger was based partly on forged documents. The claim had been cited publicly by President Bush.

I think the US should move up its presidential elections, to trip up any al Qaeda plans. Like - how about in August.

Senate report here, and conclusions here.

Running a "private intelligence failure" certainly should be a crime. This from Senate Select Intelligence committee vice-chair John Rockefeller [D-WV]:

We've done a little bit of work on the number three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether, his relationship with the INC and Chalabi, who was very much in favor with the administration wanting them to come on in. And was he running a private intelligence failure, which is not lawful. As a result, the committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly.

Meantime, shouldn't the Senators have managed to get their report up by now?

The NYT is currently mistakenly linking to the Joint Inquiry 9/11 report, not the Senate Select Intel Committee report on Iraq intelligence, which does not yet seem up. Will get it up when I can.

Ahmad's defectors, coached in how to fool lie detector tests and what to say about Saddam and al Qaeda and WMD.

Two interesting pieces on US policy towards Iran out today. The NY Sun's Eli Lake reports on the increasingly tepid support for pro democracy supporters in Iran coming from the Bush White House, on the fifth anniversary of massive pro democracy demonstrations in Tehran:

Buoyed by statements from President Bush and a campaign on the Internet to provide timely photographs and news of the events on the ground, many Iranian dissidents were hopeful America’s policy that led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein would inspire a counterrevolution in Iran. Today, many of those dissidents feel betrayed by a president who had once so publicly voiced solidarity with their struggle.The author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Azar Nafisi said the silence from the White House was “terrible.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post's David Ignatius provides more details about a previously reported administration-authorized back channel between Washington and Tehran headed on the Washington side by former State Department official Ryan Crocker and former NSC official Flynt Leverett, which got scuttled by the neocons in the Pentagon. Leverett is currently the rapporteur for an Atlantic Council task force on US policy towards Iran being headed by former Bush I NSC advisor Brent Scowcroft. Crocker previously held the Iran portfolio for the State Department. Tehran and Washington had apparently discussed trading al Qaida suspects in Iranian custody for members of the Iranian dissident/some say terrorist group the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq in Iraq.

In a secret meeting in May in Geneva, the two sides explored an exchange of the "terrorist" captives. To assuage U.S. human rights worries, Iranians pledged to grant amnesty to most of the 4,000 Mujaheddin-e Khalq captives, to forgo the death penalty for about 65 leaders who would be tried in Iranian courts and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to supervise the transfer.

The Bush administration ultimately rejected this exchange, bowing to neoconservatives at the Pentagon who hoped to use the Mujaheddin-e Khalq against Tehran. Some administration officials were disappointed: "Why we didn't cut this deal is beyond me," says Flynt Leverett, who was in charge of Middle East policy for the National Security Council until last spring. The secret contacts were broken off in late May 2003...

In the year since, Iranian hard-liners have crushed reformers there and pushed ahead with their program to acquire nuclear weapons.

With Iranian hardliners in ascendence, pro democracy activists disheartened by lack of support or a single message coming from the Bush administration, and Tehran hard in pursuit of nuclear weapons, with many fingers in Iraq, it's hard to see how the Bush administration could have pursued a more destructive policy towards Tehran to date.

Maybe the Bush administration should have done more to catch those al Qaida high value targets, instead of trying to time their capture for political gain. If there's another attack, no amount of photo opportunities of Dick Cheney touring the Department of Homeland Security is going to persuade the public this administration did all it could to fight al Qaida.

You know, 500 tons of yellowcake is a pretty startlingly large amount. That's about 250 elephants worth of yellowcake. Even if it was very very dense, how many elephants could you fit on a C130? Like, three maybe, right? It wouldn't have been easy for Iraq to slip shipments of that size undetected by satellite and other means. What's more: Iraq already had uranium. It was under IAEA seal at Iraq's Tuwaitha nuclear facility since the 1991 first Gulf War, until the US invasion last year. After that, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports, the US somehow shockingly let the facility get looted:

In April 2003, just days after the statue of Hussein in Baghdad was pulled down, a U.S. Marine engineering company took a close look at Tuwaitha, which is 30 miles south of Baghdad. There they found guards had abandoned their posts and looters were roaming the giant facility. At one storage building, which later was found to hold radioactive samples used in research, the radiation levels were too high to enter safely, although the entrance door stood wide open.

Now, Pincus reports, the IAEA is frowning on the US alerting the agency after the fact that it finally last month removed two tons of the low-enriched uranium samples that had been stored at the facility. Removing the "1.8 tons of uranium, 6.6 pounds of low-enriched uranium, and about 1,000 highly radioactive sources" required a major secret airlift, the LA Times reports. [Imagine the ingenuity it would have taken for Iraq to sneak in 250 times that amount from Niger during the sanctions days!] Meantime, even though the US let the facility get looted before it managed to get it back under IAEA control again, US Energy secretary Spencer Abraham is describing the secret airlift as "a major achievement."

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Tuesday disclosed the secret airlift from Iraq as "a major achievement" in an attempt to "keep potentially dangerous nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists."

Only this administration could claim a major achievement out of failing to have the competence to secure the nuclear facility in the first place.

Matt, Matt, Matt. There's no question. Tolstoy is far superior to Dostoevsky.

UPDATE: Ever the contrarian, Gregory Djerejian disagrees with me. I don't see how he can believe that any of Fyodor's female characters can compare with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. But he and Matt and their commentators are putting some dusty old Dostoevsky novels I have not picked up since my Russian literature major undergrad days on my list for August re-reading. My honest memory of Dostoevsky is that it is like being accosted on the subway by a drunk lunatic type spewing his prophecies to all before him. You want to be polite...and get away as soon as possible. It's not they don't have something to say, or even access to some important truths. But it's so unpleasant to be around. Tolstoy is a completely more masterful experience, to my mind, with insights about human nature and society and life choices I have always found more meaningful to my own life.

The Center for American Progress' Judd Legum has assembled the evidence that Bush is the ultimate flip-flopper in chief. Here are some highlights:

4. North Korea

BUSH WILL NOT OFFER NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA INCENTIVES TO DISARM… We developed a bold approach under which, if the North addressed our long-standing concerns, the United States was prepared to take important steps that would have significantly improved the lives of the North Korean people. Now that North Korea's covert nuclear weapons program has come to light, we are unable to pursue this approach. [President’s Statement, 11/15/02]

…BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFERS NORTH KOREA INCENTIVES TO DISARM Well, we will work to take steps to ease their political and economic isolation. So there would be -- what you would see would be some provisional or temporary proposals that would only lead to lasting benefit after North Korea dismantles its nuclear programs. So there would be some provisional or temporary efforts of that nature. [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 6/23/04]...

7. Iraq Funding

BUSH SPOKESMAN DENIES NEED FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR THE REST OF 2004..."We do not anticipate requesting supplemental funding for '04" [White House Budget Director Joshua Bolton, 2/2/04]

…BUSH REQUESTS ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR IRAQ FOR 2004 “I am requesting that Congress establish a $25 billion contingency reserve fund for the coming fiscal year to meet all commitments to our troops.” [President Bush, Statement by President, 5/5/04]

8. Condoleeza Rice Testimony

BUSH SPOKESMAN SAYS RICE WON'T TESTIFY AS 'A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE'...“Again, this is not her personal preference; this goes back to a matter of principle. There is a separation of powers issue involved here. Historically, White House staffers do not testify before legislative bodies. So it's a matter of principle, not a matter of preference.” [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 3/9/04]

…BUSH ORDERS RICE TO TESTIFY: “Today I have informed the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States that my National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, will provide public testimony.” [President Bush, 3/30/04]...

10. Ahmed Chalabi

BUSH INVITES CHALABI TO STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS...President Bush also met with Chalabi during his brief trip to Iraq last Thanksgiving [White House Documents 1/20/04, 11/27/03]

...BUSH MILITARY ASSISTS IN RAID OF CHALABI'S HOUSE"U.S. soldiers raided the home of America's one-time ally Ahmad Chalabi on Thursday and seized documents and computers." [Washington Post, 5/20/04]

11. Department of Homeland Security

BUSH OPPOSES THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY..."So, creating a Cabinet office doesn't solve the problem. You still will have agencies within the federal government that have to be coordinated. So the answer is that creating a Cabinet post doesn't solve anything." [White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 3/19/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY "So tonight, I ask the Congress to join me in creating a single, permanent department with an overriding and urgent mission: securing the homeland of America and protecting the American people." [President Bush, Address to the Nation, 6/6/02]

12. Weapons of Mass Destruction

BUSH SAYS WE FOUND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION..."We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories…for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." [President Bush, Interview in Poland, 5/29/03]

...BUSH SAYS WE HAVEN'T FOUND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION "David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out." [President Bush, Meet the Press, 2/7/04]

Pakistan, that epitome of liberal democracy and religious tolerance, has made a deal to help its friends in the Bush White House win in November. The Pakistanis are to deliver on schedule three high value Al Qaeda suspects to Bush, in time for the Democratic National Convention later this month, or at least before the election.

GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss, who had the grace in his campaign ads to portray his Democratic rival Max Cleland, a double amputee from his service in Vietnam, as unpatriotic, sets the tone for the release Friday of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report: it's all the CIA analysts' fault, he tells Knight Ridder:

A Senate committee has determined that CIA analysts were primarily to blame for flawed U.S. intelligence assessments of Iraq's banned weapons programs, a Republican member of the panel said Wednesday.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia told Knight Ridder that a Senate Intelligence Committee's review found that CIA analysts had committed "wholesale mistakes" by improperly analyzing data or relying on faulty information...

Chambliss said the report would absolve Bush and Tenet of accusations that they had misled the nation with allegations that Iraq had programs to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. U.S. inspectors have found no evidence of such programs.

"I would say it's a total vindication of any allegations that might ever have been made about what the administration did with the information," Chambliss said.

A Senate aide sought to temper Chambliss' remarks.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because the report hasn't been released, the aide said that while the findings take aim at CIA analysts, they also fault Tenet for the defective assessment of Iraq's outlawed weapons programs.

While "we found a lot of problems with the analysis itself ... in the end he (Tenet) is in charge," said the aide.

So the report will absolve Bush, but not Tenet, or the working level CIA analysts. At least this seems one report that the Bush White House won't rush to classify.

Knight Ridder further reports, "Even before its release, the report was being criticized by some for not examining the administration's use of other information sources, such as defectors supplied by Iraqi exile groups, against the advice of the CIA and other agencies."

Did the Senate committee even interview the defectors provided by Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress who have been proven to have provided disinformation to the US? And who of Chalabi's many erstwhile supporters in the Pentagon and the office of the Vice President is going to take the fall for inserting their lies into the system?

Remember the excellent chronology Spencer Ackerman and John Judis assembled in their New Republic report on the incredible politicization of pre-war intelligence:

Facing resistance from the CIA, administration officials began a campaign to pressure the agency to toe the line. Perle and other members of the Defense Policy Board, who acted as quasi-independent surrogates for Wolfowitz, Cheney, and other administration advocates for war in Iraq, harshly criticized the CIA in the press. The CIA's analysis of Iraq, Perle said, "isn't worth the paper it is written on." In the summer of 2002, Vice President Cheney made several visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters, which were understood within the agency as an attempt to pressure the low-level specialists interpreting the raw intelligence. "That would freak people out," says one former CIA official. "It is supposed to be an ivory tower. And that kind of pressure would be enormous on these young guys."

But the Pentagon found an even more effective way to pressure the agency. In October 2001, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up a special intelligence operation in the Pentagon to "think through how the various terrorist organizations relate to each other and ... state sponsors," in Feith's description...In August 2002, Feith brought the unit to Langley to brief the CIA about its findings. If the separate intelligence unit wasn't enough to challenge the CIA, Rumsfeld also began publicly discussing the creation of a new Pentagon position, an undersecretary for intelligence, who would rival the CIA director and diminish the authority of the agency.

In its classified reports, the CIA didn't diverge from its initial skepticism about the ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. But, under pressure from his critics, Tenet began to make subtle concessions. In March 2002, Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Iraqi regime "had contacts with Al Qaeda" but declined to elaborate. He would make similar ambiguous statements during the congressional debate over war with Iraq.

The intelligence community was also pressured to exaggerate Iraq's nuclear program. As Tenet's early 2002 threat assessments had indicated, U.S. intelligence showed precious little evidence to indicate a resumption of Iraq's nuclear program. And, while the absence of U.N. inspections had introduced greater uncertainty into intelligence collection on Iraq, according to one analyst, "We still knew enough, [and] we could watch pretty closely what was happening."...

By the fall of 2002, when public debate over the war really began, the administration had created consternation in the intelligence agencies. The press was filled for the next two months with quotes from CIA officials and analysts complaining of pressure from the administration to toe the line on Iraq. Says one former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "People [kept] telling you first that things weren't right, weird things going on, different people saying, 'There's so much pressure, you know, they keep telling us, go back and find the right answer,' things like that." For the most part, this pressure was not reflected in the CIA's classified reports, but it would become increasingly evident in the agency's declassified statements and in public statements by Tenet. The administration hadn't won an outright endorsement of its analysis of the Iraqi threat, but it had undermined and intimidated its potential critics in the intelligence community.

UPDATE: MSNBC reports that the Senate Select Intel committee won't release its findings on the administration's pre-war statements about Iraq's WMD until after the elections.

Gone fishing...Back Wednesday. Until then, enjoy the good news from the Kerry camp.

It looks like the Iran beat could be very rewarding.

Max Boot has an entirely frustrating opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post. In it, he says the US is not getting out of the "imperialism" e.g. the military intervention business, so we might as well get better at it. But the US has thousands of people who know perfectly well how to do a military intervention: the point that Boot misses, is that the Bush administration deliberately shut such people out, for two reasons: a) a lot of those real experts had served in interventions championed by the Clinton administration [Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti] and b) those like Eric Shinseki who had the gall to know the truth and say it about the troop strength that would be required to secure Iraq were ridiculed and pilloried by the likes of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Boot himself makes the point that he somehow refuses to really digest, when he cites former Clinton era envoy to the Balkans Jim Dobbins' Rand study:

THERE HAVE never been more than 160,000 coalition soldiers to control a population of 25 million Iraqis. Even adding in 20,000 private security contractors, that still amounts to only one soldier for every 139 Iraqis. According to a study conducted by James Dobbins and his colleagues at RAND, in most successful occupations, ranging from post-1945 Germany to post-1999 Kosovo, the figure has never been lower than one soldier per 50 people. In Iraq, that would mean 500,000 troops, or three times the number the coalition has today.

That study wasn't classified, and Dobbins was talking at think tanks all around town about his findings. But the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz crowd refused to hear that the ratio of troops required for Iraq should have approximated successful Clinton era interventions of 1 soldier for every 50 local people, e.g. 500,000 troops for Iraq, just as Shinseki had said.

I agree with Boot, the US should not check out of the intervention business for good [although who would ever have confidence in a Bush administration intervention again? I suspect not even very many Congressional Republicans, much less Democrats]. What's needed is US leadership which is not hostile to the truth and the experts who have real experience and wisdom to offer war and post-war planners. Not ideologues who are willfully blind, even hostile, to the truth.

PS: Mary at the Left Coaster points to more case studies that back up the ratio of one peacekeeper for every 50 people as the recognized standard for stable peace operations.

Frida Ghitis writing in the New Republic says the intended audience for Iran's recent seizure of British sailors and its tough talk on continuing production of nuclear centrifuges is not the West, but the Middle East. But she warns this strategy may backfire:

So it's easy to understand why Iran wants to send a message to its neighbors. But the Islamic government's efforts to gain respect in the Middle East could carry the seeds of its own destruction. Israelis (correctly) view their country's bombing of Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 as an unqualified stroke of wisdom. If Israel sees Iran's nuclear ambitions turn into a tangible threat to its existence, there is a possibility that Israel would act again, this time in Iran. In the Middle East, playing for power is a perilous game.

A well informed contact who was the first to inform me this was even a topic of discussion says that he finds such talk blissfully thrown around extremely damaging. "Iranians take it very seriously, and it only increases Iranian paranoia," he says. What's more, he says, there's no way Israel would take such action without long consultations with the US. It's premature to even talk about; especially when diplomacy is still in the fairly early stages.

He had some other interesting thoughts and snippets from the region I will put together for a later post.

Update: The NYT's Ed Wong reports on Iran's influence in Iraq. Worth reading, this is pretty comprehensive on what US military and intelligence leaders on the ground in Iraq are observing about who in Iran is funding who in Iraq. Dreyfuss and I reported on the same issue a few months back.

No progress. The NYT's White House reporter David Sanger provides a devastating report sourced by a "former senior official with the just dissolved" CPA, who says US forces and intelligence have made not a dent in the overall number of Ba'athists and foreign Jihadist insurgents in Iraq.

Moreover, said the former senior official, who has spent more than a year in Iraq and had access to the highest-level intelligence, American officials had found it ``almost impossible to penetrate'' the network organized by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is believed responsible for many of the suicide bombings that have killed both American troops and Iraqis.

The official also said that over the last year, both Iran and Syria had stepped up their activity in Iraq, and that the Iranians might have been financing Moktada al-Sadr, the young radical cleric whom the Bush administration first promised to capture or kill, then decided had to be spared to avoid urban warfare in Najaf, his stronghold. The Iranians have ``become more active over time, and not helpful,'' the official said, though he said intelligence indicated that far more foreign fighters were coming over the border from Syria than from Iran.

Taken together, the description of the paucity of intelligence still available to the 138,000 American troops in Iraq and the assessment of how few inroads have been made at reducing the insurgency sounded a very different note from the optimistic-sounding messages that President Bush has been sending all week about the prospects of the new Iraqi government.

Sanger later indicates that this former senior administration official was "speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity at the request of the White House."

How useful could the Pentagon funded, INC-run Information Collection Program have been if it was unable to begin to enable US forces to have even a solid understanding of who they are fighting?

A strategy of engagement with Iran, pushed by the European troika of Britain, France and Germany, isn't working, declares the Economist.

The premise of the October deal was that, offered a face-saving way to come clean and find a better relationship with the West, Iran would quietly drop any weapons ambitions. Although the premise appears to have been wrong, the Europeans have, so far, merely held up negotiations on a new trade and co-operation agreement. They have other levers at their disposal: some 40% of Iran's imports come from the EU...

Iran and the Europeans seem now to be playing for time, awaiting the outcome of November's presidential election in America. But whoever wins, America is unlikely to tolerate a nuclear-arming Iran. Some Europeans hope that a new administration might try talking to Iran. But, with America tied up in Iraq, the Iranians may calculate that time is on their side and—so long as the IAEA finds nothing new—that the Europeans will never agree among themselves to a tougher line. If so, far from being a success for Europe's common foreign policy, Iran could become a big irritant in relations between America and Europe.

That the US will continue to play the bad cop to Europe's good cop with Iran seems inevitable, no matter who wins in November.

Matt Yglesias has some interesting thoughts about Iran as well, including about the seeming contradictions in the Iran hawks' approach to Iran. Go read. I remain a tad skeptical about the reports he points to of Italy's security services being any more hardline on Iran than those services informing the governments of Italy's European partners/rivals. What seems more likely is that Sismi provides to its friends little snippets of intelligence that confirms what its friends want to hear. And certainly, Iran provides no shortage of material. One reason for my skepticism? Italy is reportedly Iran's biggest trading partner in Europe. As this article points out:

Cordial Tehran-Rome relations are important to both countries. The volume of trade between Iran and Italy in 2003 stood at 3.85 billion euros, an increase of 5% over the previous year. Italian exports to Iran added up to almost 2 billion euros in 2003 and imports from Iran amounted to 1.9 billion euros. Oil makes up 90% of Italian imports from Iran but non-oil imports from Iran are on the rise, including agricultural products and stones.

Another reason for skepticism? Recently, I have been told about several alleged front companies for Iran to acquire certain technologies based in Italy -- and elsewhere in Europe, that apparently are no secret to Sismi or the Italian authorities. That Iran is seeking dual use technology wherever it can get it, but particularly in Europe, no one disputes. But what was remarkable is the allegation that the Italian authorities know full well what some of these companies are about; Sismi has a whole division focused just on this counterproliferation issue. Yet, for some reason, some of these companies anyhow are permitted to operate there unmolested. Business as usual? After all, Italy had no qualms apparently about maintaining especially close ties to Libya in the decades before Qaddafi just a few months back renounced his WMD program and agreed to pay damages for the terrorism it reportedly sponsored. Or does some other motive explain why the Italian authorities permit them to operate there? Perhaps, simple greed? Fear that if the business doesn't go to them, it will go to the Germans?

Tim Dunlop has compiled a helpful list of things which really don't matter [such as "that there was no serious planning for the post-war" and "troop strength for stabilisation was underestimated"...] as well as a list of things that matter a lot [such as, that "Michael Moore is fat."]
Good to print out and keep handy for those times when you get confused.

Along the same lines, Matthew Yglesias has some interesting Clinton-My Life-inspired thoughts about why the traits that make for good political leaders make for bad spouses.

Will President Bush let the word "genocide" cross his lips in regard to the catastrophe in Darfur, Sudan? Human rights activist John Heffernan, writing in the American Prospect, says genocide is what is taking place. And the US, as a signatory to the genocide convention, has a legally binding obligation to act.

There is ample evidence to indicate that an organized campaign on the part of the Sudanese government is under way, targeting several million people from this region of the country either by killing them or forcing them to migrate. Without an immediate and concerted international intervention, a substantial part of the targeted group may be eliminated. Current predictions from governmental and nongovernmental sources suggest that the toll could be between 300,000 and 1 million if a robust intervention does not occur.

But the NY Sun's Eli Lake writes that, despite high profile visits yesterday by Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to a handful of the 173 refugee camps that have sprung up to house some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been forced to flee their homes by the Sudanese-government-trained Janjaweed militia, what is being proposed in a UN resolution is just a slap on the wrist to Khartoum.

A copy of the American draft of proposed sanctions obtained by The New York Sun stops short of recommending either military action against Sudan or directly targeting members of the government of President el-Bashir.
It does call upon his government to “disarm and neutralize the Janjaweed militias of the Darfur region of Sudan, protect civilians...cooperate fully with all humanitarian relief organizations and provide them unrestricted and sustained access for the provision of humanitarian relief to the effected populations.”

Talk about appeasement. And don't look for stronger actions from other Security Council members either, human rights activist Eric Reeves tells the Sun.

Mr. Reeves believes that Secretary-General Annan has no interest in sending a U.N. force to western Sudan. Many member states share that view. For example, China, which wields a veto on the Security Council, has been notoriously quiet on the atrocities of the Sudanese government. Its national oil company owns the largest stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the Sudanese concern that built a pipeline in the late 1990s, often uprooting the towns and villages in its path.

In a piece published Wednesday, Lake notes the State Department's lawyers are carefully reviewing whether the language of genocide should be used by US government officials regarding Darfur -- and what that would oblige Washington to do.

[US ambassador at large for war crimes Pierre Prosper] also said State Department lawyers were looking at whether the government-backed campaign in Darfur fit the international legal definition of genocide.
The director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, said such a determination would be one of the first times America proactively labeled a massacre genocide while blood was still being shed.
“This is the first example of the State Department reviewing a situation under the genocide convention while the mass violence is still unfolding,” she said. “I remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in response to our request as to whether there was a genocide occurring in southern Sudan in the late 1990s. She turned to her Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Harold Koh, who said if a finding of genocide were made, the U.S. would be compelled to do something.”

Compelled to threaten the Khartoum regime with action they would fear. Check out the New York Times report today to see how frightened the refugees who desperately tried to see Powell on his visit are of the government troops and minders, who threaten them.

Thousands of people swept like water across a sandy plain to meet the convoy of vehicles carrying Mr. Powell and his entourage to a camp of 40,000 displaced people in El Fasher, in north Darfur. They filled the air with applause and trills, although the presence of government minders prompted many camp dwellers to only whisper of their despair.

If you've been in a refugee camp, of people who have fled violence that has killed family members and neighbors, people who feel entirely forgotten by the world, who have what they believe is their one chance to tell a powerful visiting western official like Secretary Powell about their plight, you then realize what it means when these people are too afraid to speak to him in anything but a whisper. It is chilling. Will President Bush give them hope, or no comfort?

Post Script: Cleansing the ethnically cleansed? More evidence of the bad faith of the Sudanese government, which cleared out the el Fasher refugee camp today hours before Kofi Annan arrived. Knight-Ridder reports:

Sudanese government officials emptied a camp of thousands of refugees hours before United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was to arrive here Thursday, preventing him from meeting some of the hardest-hit victims of the humanitarian crisis in the province of Darfur.

"There may have been 3,000 to 4,000 people here as of 5 p.m. yesterday," a visibly stunned U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said as he gazed at the empty camp of Mashtel. "Now, as you can see, no one is here. I can't imagine they spontaneously moved."

The forced removal came a day after Sudanese officials promised Secretary of State Colin Powell that humanitarian aid workers would have unrestricted access to Darfur and agreed to other U.S. demands to avoid possible U.N. sanctions.

Sudanese officials acknowledged they'd moved the refugees, but said it was for their own good.

If this is how the Sudanese government behaves, when for once the eyes of the entire world are upon it, with the presence of Annan and Powell there this week, how will it behave when most everybody goes home?

The CIA's links with Charles Taylor?: Numerous readers have written to inform me that the quote by Global Witness' Alex Yearsley alleging the CIA had been making payments to Liberia's exiled former leader and accused war crimes suspect Charles Taylor until as recently as 2001 has mysteriously disappeared from the FT piece in which it originally appeared yesterday. I have calls into Global Witness to try to understand what has happened.

But, keep in mind, the US does seem to be giving financial contracts to the notorious black market arms dealer and friend-of-Taylor Victor Bout as well. And that there seems to be an extremely unflattering pattern emerging here of the US government maintaining ties with two of the men on the planet who have not only an extraordinary amount of blood on their hands, but who also have helped fund al Qaeda through the blood diamonds trade. [For its part, the independent 9/11 commission disputes Al Qaeda has profitted from conflict diamonds.]

More on this soon, with an eye to doing it in a reported piece. As Ryan Lizza has masterfully reported in the New Republic, Taylor long enjoyed the political support of the likes of evangelist Pat Robertson, Jesse Jackson, and the former Massachusetts DNC chair and attorney Lester Hyman who successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to drop US federal and Massachusetts state charges against Taylor for breaking out of a Plymouth County MA jail in 1985. Meanwhile, thanks for the many tips, particularly to my friend in Sierra Leone. The BBC, meanwhile, is reporting that Nigeria is agitating to extradite Taylor to face war crimes prosecution in Sierra Leone. Who doesn't want Taylor to get there?

Karadzic action underway? This from Belgrade's independent B92:

Troops close on Karadzic stronghold | 12:42 July 01 | B92

SARAJEVO -- Thursday – International troops from Bosnia’s Stabilisation Force this morning searched a hotel in Han Pijesak, and blocked all entrances to the town of Crna Rijeka where the Bosnian Serb Army was headquartered during the war of the 1990s.

The SFOR contingent has established a radio communications base on the roof of the hotel. There are believed to be only about thirty troops in Crna Rijeka itself but according to local residents, large numbers of soldiers have been deployed throughout the surrounding woods.

Republic of Srpska police director Radomir Njegus and the public security chief of Sarajevo’s Serb zone, Dragan Andan are reported to be in Han Pijesak.

SFOR spokesman Mark Hope told media that authorities in the Republic of Srpska had been informed of this morning’s operation, but gave no further details.

Karadzic surrender "under negotiation" | 12:26 -> 12:43 July 01 | B92

SARAJEVO -- Thursday – International officials and Hague Tribunal prosecutors have been negotiating for several days for the surrender of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Dnevni Avaz writes today.

The Sarajevo daily cites international sources as saying that Karadzic has been in eastern Hercegovina and Montenegro in recent days.

International High Representative Paddy Ashdown yesterday replaced senior Bosnian Serb officials and moved against a total of 59 people believed to form part of Karadzic’s protection network.

This, says today’s report, could mean that Karadzic will no be prepared to surrender.