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Iran reportedly arrests several "nuclear spies." This from the Jerusalem Post:
Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi did not identify those arrested but said members of the armed opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, played the main role.
"The Intelligence Ministry has arrested several spies who were transferring Iran's nuclear secrets out of the country," IRNA quoted Yunesi as saying. He did not provide further details. . .
The Mujahedeen Khalq claim they were the first to break a story in August 2003 that Iran was secretly developing a uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, central Iran. But Tehran says it had informed the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, of the Natanz facility months before the Mujahedeen made their announcement. The IAEA has confirmed Tehran's version.
The group, which seeks to topple Iran's ruling Islamic establishment through the use of force, remains on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations. However, fighters from the armed group who are under U.S. military guard in Iraq have been granted protection as noncombatants.
Why is this happening now? The MEK has claimed credit, as this report says, for providing western intelligence with information about Iran's nuclear program for over a year. Surely if Iran knew who the MEK's domestic sources were, it would have already targeted them. So is the Iranian regime arresting people it only accuses of being MEK, or is that regime somehow managing to find out only now the identities of these people? And if so, have any of the intelligence breaches the US has reportedly had regarding Iran the past several months contributed to this? That would be extraordinarily disturbing.
Mitch Cohen has more. More background from Cole.
Too many intelligence crises . . .
[Thx to reader BH.]
Update: A foreign policy question: if a State Department-designated terrorist group is claiming to provide intelligence (its quality unspecified for the purposes of our hypothesizing) on a hostile regime's nuclear program, should a government work with them? Should it wait to get them off the terrorist list first? Or not? And what kind of nod would a government official need to go ahead and try to work with the group? I think it's a serious trade off and not a simple question.
Update II: Dave Meyer sends a fascinating article about a recent US decision not to prosecute members of 'the People's Mujaheden,' and to give the 3,800 MEK members in Camp Ashraf in Iraq formal protected status under the Geneva Conventions. This from the NYT:
A 16-month review by the United States has found no basis to charge members of an Iranian opposition group in Iraq with violations of American law, though the group is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States government, according to senior American officials.
The case of the group, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, or Mujahedeen Khalq, whose camp was bombed by the United States military in April 2003, has been watched closely as an important test of the Bush administration's policy toward terrorism and toward Iran.
About 3,800 members of the group are being held in de facto American custody in Camp Ashraf, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. The group remains on the United States terrorist list, though it is not known to have directed any terrorist acts toward the United States for 25 years. But it does stage attacks against Iran, which has demanded that the Iraqi government either prosecute its members or deport them to Iran.
But senior American officials said extensive interviews by officials of the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had not come up with any basis to bring charges against any members of the group. In a July 21 memorandum, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the deputy commanding general in Iraq, said its members had been designated "protected persons" by the United States military, providing them new rights.
In the case of the People's Mujahedeen, the United States does not appear to have evidence to charge individual members of the group with acts of terrorism, but it also appears unwilling to surrender its members to their enemy, Iran.
. . .
The State Department said Monday that the determination of the status of the group in Iraq did not affect its designation as a terrorist organization.
. . .
Muhammad Mohaddessin, a senior official of the People's Mujahedeen, said in a telephone interview from Paris on Monday that the absence of American charges against members of the group, after months in which they have been held, should raise questions about the organization's terrorist designation.
The designation would make it all but impossible for members of the group to be extradited to Iran, senior American officials said. . . Some opponents of Iran, including dozens of members of Congress, have argued that the People's Mujahedeen serves as an effective source of pressure on the Iranian government and should be rewarded, not punished, by the United States.
Senseless murder in Iraq. The reported killing of 12 Nepalese hostages by Iraqi militants is appallingly sad and enraging. NPR's Ivan Watson had an illuminating feature on "Morning Edition" today on people from the Third World finding economic opportunities in dangerous post-war Iraq that they lack at home. The risks for many of those interviewed were outweighed by the high salaried jobs they can find in Iraq, and send back home. One Indian man said at home, he can make $60 a month; in Iraq, he earns a $1000 a month. But what a choice.
Matt Yglesias makes an excellent point here in Tapped:
One more observation out of the American Jewish Commitee event. Outside in the halls I heard some AJC folks chatting concernedly about the Larry Franklin case and what it all means. In that regard it's worth noting that AIPAC's denial that it's done anything wrong here could be perfectly consistent with the charges against it of having passed classified information to the Israeli government being perfectly true. The legal onus to safeguard these secrets lies entirely with government officials -- if Franklin passed something to an AIPAC staffer or two, it wouldn't necessarily be illegal for AIPAC to hand that information on to Tel Aviv. Only Franklin would be breaking the law.
I agree.
We know there is an FBI investigation of Larry Franklin, an Iran analyst who works in the office of Doug Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for Policy, for allegedly giving classified US documents to the lobby group Aipac. And we know there is a second investigation, by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, of a secret back channel between officials from Feith's office and the former Iran contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, which my colleagues and I reported on over the weekend.
Today, we learn from the Boston Globe's Brian Bender that there is yet a third investigation, also from the Hill, by the House Judiciary committee, of the activities of Feith's office. And this one, now in the preliminary stages, focuses not just on the DoD-Ghorbanifar Iran back channel we reported on, but also on whether yet another official in Feith's office, Michael Maloof, was involved in a back channel whose purpose was to destabilize Syria:
But investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is closely scrutinizing the office as part of a formal probe of pre-Iraq War intelligence-gathering, and Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, who are conducting a preliminary probe, say that the full picture of the office's activities may include more than meets the eye. They are seeking additional documents and interviews from policy officials.
After months of delay, the investigators said, they are getting cooperation from Feith and his staff.
Some of the incidents that prompted the probes are already known.
Franklin and another employee, Harold Rhode, met secretly with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer, in Italy in December 2001 and subsequently in Paris. The Paris meeting was not approved by Pentagon officials . . .
But one congressional investigator said staffers are looking into whether there was an exchange of money between US officials and Ghorbanifar or other Iranians, and whether any proposals for cooperation included seeking assistance from the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a group in Iraq that is seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime but is labeled a terrorist group by the US State Department.
Another Near East policy official, F. Michael Maloof, was stripped of his security clearance a year ago after the FBI linked him to a Lebanese-American businessman under investigation by the FBI for weapons trafficking. A handgun registered to Maloof was found in the possession of Imad el Hage, a suspected arms dealer.
Investigators are seeking to learn whether Maloof's alleged contacts with Hage and a hard-line former Lebanese general, Michel Aoun, may have been part of a back-channel effort to destabilize Syria, which has occupied Lebanon for nearly two decades . . .
The official said he is trying to determine if some of the office's activities may have been prohibited by the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which holds that all activity to undermine a foreign government must be approved by the president in a specific document approving such activity.
I have been told that a Feith official who was part of the DoD-Ghorbanifar back channel had indeed advocated for Ghorbanifar to be compensated for the information the Iranian arms dealer was giving their group*. What's more, I suspect that among the "other people" Ghorbanifar told me he helped arrange for that official to interview in Paris when they met in June 2003 were members of the MEK, which have a big headquarters in Paris. [About a month before this meeting, a State Department-authorized US-Iran back channel, under UN aupices, collapsed; the US withdrew after it allegedly obtained intelligence that al Qaeda suspects in Iranian custody had helped organize a May 13, 2003 bombing in Riyadh. Before it collapsed, that authorized back channel's focus had been on negotiations over a possible exchange of Al Qaeda suspcts in Iranian custody for MEK members in Iraq.] The MEK has long been a key source of intelligence, via Israeli intelligence, about Iran's nuclear program.
What's at issue here? Two things: Whether these alleged Feith office back channels were authorized or not by the administration; and secondly, whether they were not just about intelligence gathering [which would be problematic in and of itself], but if they had aspirations to be operational.
[Thx to DE and BH for the links.]
*Update: Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay reminds me that he and Warren Strobel actually reported on a Feith official's request that Ghorbanifar be compensated in their October 14, 2003 piece on the DoD Ghorbanifar back channel. For their piece, they got access to portions of the classified cable that the official reportedly sent back to the Pentagon:
The Pentagon claimed that the first meeting, which took place in Rome with Ghorbanifar and several alleged Iranian intelligence officers in December 2001, had been authorized and concerned information pertaining to the war on terrorism. . .
U.S. officials said that during the meeting, the Iranians asked for money.
One of the Defense Department officials, Harold Rhode, a Farsi-speaker who works in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessments, recommended that they be paid.
In a classified message sent to Pentagon officials, a portion of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, Rhode said that he had "made contact with Iranian intelligence officers who anticipate possible regime change in Iran and want to establish contact with the United States government."
"A sizable financial interest is required," said the message, which urged that it be provided.
It could not be learned if any money was paid, and Rhode did not return a phone call.
The U.S. officials said that on learning of Ghorbanifar's role, Powell and Tenet became incensed.
Powell called Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and the White House to complain.
The U.S. officials said that the White House told Powell that Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, was aware of what was going on, and that further contacts with the Iranians were then prohibited.
Several attempts to contact Hadley through the White House went unanswered.
Despite the prohibition on further contacts, the second meeting with Ghorbanifar occurred in Paris in June. The Pentagon insisted, however, that it was an unplanned encounter.
Franklin, Flipped: Why are Larry Franklin's defenders trying to portray him as a desk grunt?
Here's a good bio of Larry Franklin, the Pentagon Iran analyst who is under FBI investigation for allegedly passing classified US Iran documents to the lobbying group AIPAC. Franklin is reported by the New York Times and Newsweek to have been cooperating with the FBI since earlier this month. The bio is from Ha'aretz's Nathan Gutman:
Franklin, a religious Catholic in his late 50s, lives in Kearneysville, West Virginia . . . [with] his wife Patricia and their five children . . . Franklin has a doctorate in East Asian studies from St. John's University . . . and speaks Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese . . .
In conversations about Franklin with his colleagues, one of the words that comes up again and again is "naive." He is described as an ideologue who believes wholeheartedly in the neo-conservative approach . . .
The thesis that this is an ambiguous case, and that Franklin may not have known the seriousness of what he was doing, is gaining traction in articles in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the New York Sun. Several media are reporting today that Franklin, if charged at all, is likely to get charged with a lesser crime than espionage, most likely that of mishandling classified information.
Juan Cole is skeptical that a PhD, veteran DIA analyst, Office of Special Plans insider could be so naive. And Cole is extremely correct that the portrayal of Franklin as a "low level desk grunt" is ridiculous: Franklin is the Pentagon's top Iran analyst, he was specifically brought into the Office of the Secretary of Defense because he shared the neocon worldview of Feith, Luti and Wolfowitz, and he was very much part of the inner circle. He was also part of a rogue Pentagon Iran intelligence back channel that I have researched intensively.
[But the encounter Cole recounts of his own experience with Franklin surely does suggest a degree of naivete on LF's part.]
Most interesting to me is the question, which I raised over the weekend. Why was the FBI already monitoring a lunch between AIPAC and an Israeli diplomat when Franklin stumbled into the picture a year ago? The NYT reports that not only did the FBI obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap Franklin, but that the Bureau only did so after Franklin walked into a lunch meeting that the FBI had already been monitoring:
Newsweek magazine reported that the bureau first learned of Mr. Franklin when agents observed him walking into a lunch in Washington between a lobbyist for the American Israeli group and an Israeli embassy official.
So, what was the origin of that, pre-Franklin alleged FBI espionage investigation? The NY Sun's Eli Lake suggests that the origin of that probe was a request by Rumsfeld to the FBI to investigate who in the Pentagon leaked Iraq war plans to the New York Times:
A senior law enforcement official and administration sources told the Sun that the Franklin investigation stems from a two-year FBI probe into who leaked top secret war plans for Iraq published by the New York Times on July 5, 2002. . . In a memo circulated to the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld condemned the improper disclosure of classified information and encouraged staff members to put an end to the practice.
Also unclear: if Franklin had been cooperating with the FBI, why did this leak now, seemingly, from the FBI NY field office where the investigation is headed?
The left has its theories; the right has its.
I don't know the answer as to why this would leak now, except that sources I was meeting with in the past few weeks on an entirely different issue were hearing of an FBI investigation into possible Israeli espionage by an official in Doug Feith's office. Indeed, one source had been visited by the FBI in August asking about Franklin. In other words, sometimes, a leak is just a leak; it's a small community of Iran experts in DC, and they were starting to hear things.
One thing I am curious to know is if there is a grand jury investigation seated on this case. A friend says tonight that Franklin's bosses, including Wolfowitz and Feith, were only interviewed by the FBI in the past few days, e.g. post-leak. They were reportedly asked if Franklin has been authorized to pass such a document [the draft National Security Presidential Directive on Iran] to AIPAC. My friend suggests that the fact Franklin's own bosses weren't interviewed 'til now indicates an indictment against Franklin could not have been soon forthcoming. But it could also seemingly suggest something else: that the FBI did not want Franklin's bosses to know about the investigation.
Now that we all know about it, it remains to be seen if the investigation can continue.
Update: I should say, I've met Franklin, and am aware that he is part of a small network of Iran specialists both in and outside of government, that, like all such networks, does a lot of intensive formal and informal information sharing. For instance, Franklin has until recently been a member of a bipartisan Iran task force at the Atlantic Council headed by Brent Scowcroft, where people in and out of government debate what US policy to Iran should be over the course of months. Some but not all members of the Task Force, as I understand it, hold security clearances. And it's true that not just the neocons but many others point out that a lot of the Iran specialist community in DC was aware of the deliberations that were in the draft NSPD on Iran that Franklin is accused of giving to Aipac. For what it's worth, I would tend to agree there is an element of ambiguity in the Franklin case itself, at least as it's been reported. But does it go beyond Franklin?
Update II: Sources confirm today the leak about the Franklin investigation came from the FBI itself. Therefore, these headlines that "FBI is furious over leak" seem mistaken.
Talk about mishandling classified information!
Remember when Cheney showed Saudi Arabia's US ambassador Prince Bandar a classified Pentagon Iraq war plan that specifically was stamped "Top Secret. No foreign"? This from Bob Woodward's CBS interview on the eve of publication of Plan of Attack:
. . .It turns out, two days before the president told Powell, Cheney and Rumsfeld had already briefed Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador.
”Saturday, Jan. 11, with the president's permission, Cheney and Rumsfeld call Bandar to Cheney's West Wing office, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Myers, is there with a top-secret map of the war plan. And it says, ‘Top secret. No foreign.’ No foreign means no foreigners are supposed to see this,” says Woodward.
“They describe in detail the war plan for Bandar. And so Bandar, who's skeptical because he knows in the first Gulf War we didn't get Saddam out, so he says to Cheney and Rumsfeld, ‘So Saddam this time is gonna be out, period?’ And Cheney - who has said nothing - says the following: ‘Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast.’"
After Bandar left, according to Woodward, Cheney said, “I wanted him to know that this is for real. We're really doing it."
But this wasn’t enough for Prince Bandar, who Woodward says wanted confirmation from the president. “Then, two days later, Bandar is called to meet with the president and the president says, ‘Their message is my message,’” says Woodward.
Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told 60 Minutes that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election - to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day.
I guess when the foreigner in question is promising that he'll help you win reelection, the White House tolerates a little friendly mishandling of classified information.
The story is up, and I can now say that I tracked down and interviewed the Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar for it, earlier this month. With the current FBI investigation targeting those who met with him, I suspect I will be the last American journalist to do so for some time; but who knows, he's unpredictable, as are his American allies.
Go read the piece.
Key points:
1) The secret meetings between Pentagon officials and associates of Ghorbanifar in Europe went on for almost two years, a full year longer than the Bush administration has acknowledged. Ghorbanifar told me of three meetings. While the Pentagon originally told the Post last year that Harold Rhode, an official in Feith's office, had simply run into Ghorbanifar in Paris in June 2003, Ghorbanifar tells me that the two spent weeks planning the meeting.
2) The Italian military intelligence organization SISMI provided logistics and security at the first meeting, in Rome, in December 2001. And the head of Sismi, Nicolo Pollari, as well as the Italian Defense Minister, Antonio Martino, attended the meeting, along with Michael Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Pentagon officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin. [Sismi has been in the news recently for having been reported to have used an Italian middleman to put the forged Niger docs into circulation.]
3) Ghorbanifar told me he has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen "4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents" concerning Iran, Iraq and the Middle East, “material no one else has received.” Ghorbanifar, speaking with me by telephone from France, says those meetings took place abroad because he has been refused a US visa the last two times he has applied.
4) Ghorbanifar has also been meeting with an assortment of other American officials, which I will write about later.
I will get more thoughts on the story up later. For now, go read the piece.
Update: Thanks to Matt Yglesias, DjW at Daily Kos, Atrios, and Tim Dunlop for the links. I should say, in reference to a remark at Daily Kos, that I also interviewed the other fabled Iran Contra arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi, as background for this piece. Khashoggi, in the south of France, is feeling quite well except for a spot of arthritis in his knees. Juan Cole connects many dots here. I have some intriguing news on recent events re: the MEK that I will get out shortly in a piece.
Update: Folks, I've had to buy more bandwidth today because the site collapsed under a steep increase in traffic. For those who are able, please contribute to the site. Update: People, sincere thanks for the many generous contributions which have been coming in. I'm grateful.
Has Franklin already been flipped? It appears so, according to this Newsweek piece:
It was just a Washington lunch—one that the FBI happened to be monitoring. Nearly a year and a half ago, agents were monitoring a conversation between an Israeli Embassy official and a lobbyist for American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as part of a probe into possible Israeli spying. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, in the description of one intelligence official, another American "walked in" to the lunch out of the blue. Agents at first didn't know who the man was. They were stunned to discover he was Larry Franklin, a desk officer with the Near East and South Asia office at the Pentagon.
Franklin soon became a subject of the FBI investigation as well. . .
Officials say that Franklin began cooperating about a month ago, after he was confronted by the FBI. At the time, these officials say, Franklin acknowledged meetings with the Israeli contact.
By far the most interesting tidbit to me in this piece is embedded in the first scene Hosenball and Isikoff set the piece up with: Even before Franklin came into the picture, the FBI was already conducting an espionage investigation that had its agents monitoring Israeli officials' meetings with AIPAC officials.
Now that is really interesting. Why were Israeli diplomats/intelligence agents and AIPAC already under surveillance? That doesn't just happen casually.
More than just Franklin? That's what it sounds like from this new Knight Ridder Warren Strobel piece:
An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.
The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.
In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran. INC leader Ahmed Chalabi has denied his group was involved in any wrongdoing.
The linkage, if any, between the two leak investigations, remains unclear. But they both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.
Let's just highlight. The investigation has been going on for more than two years, not for a year as reported most places today. It is looking at more than just the allegations of passing intelligence to Aipac/Israel. And it's looking at more civilian officials in Feith's office than Franklin, including in relation to who leaked US intelligence to the INC. Very interesting.
As is this line, further down in the piece:
Investigators are said to be looking at whether Franklin acted with authorization from his superiors, one official said.
The FBI Investigation Continued.
Key Update: Here's my latest thought on this: As I understand, Franklin wasn't motivated to pass the information to Aipac to give it to the Israelis. He wanted our own government to act. He wanted to get it to the NSC and the White House.
I'm not joking. From what I understand from my sources, Franklin was desperately trying to get the US government to act on this intelligence. Aipac was just a tool for getting influence in Washington and the White House.
Go read the post below for all the background to this.
Update: Ledeen's skeptical about the whole story. His argument can be summed up: "the Bush administration has no Iran policy; what's there to leak?" A point made by reader HE in comments below.
Swopa has more.
The FBI investigation.
For months, I have been working with my colleagues Paul Glastris and Josh Marshall on a story for the Washington Monthly about pre-war intelligence. In particular, the component I have been focusing on involves a particular series of meetings involving officials from the office of the undersecretary of defense for Policy Doug Feith and Iranian dissidents.
As part of our reporting, I have come into possession of information that points to an official who is the most likely target of the FBI investigation into who allegedly passed intelligence on deliberations on US foreign policy to Iran to officials with the pro-Israeli lobby group, AIPAC, as alleged by the CBS report. That individual is Larry Franklin, a veteran DIA Iran analyst seconded to Feith’s office.
Here is what I was told in the days before the FBI investigation came to light.
A source told me that some time in July, Larry Franklin called him and asked him to meet him in a coffee shop in Northern Virginia. Franklin had intelligence on hostile Iranian activities in Iraq and was extremely frustrated that he did not feel this intelligence was getting the attention and response it deserved. The intelligence included information that the Iranians had called all of their intelligence operatives who speak Arabic to southern Iraq, that it had moved their top operative for Afghanistan, a guy named Qudzi, to the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, that its operatives were targeting Iraqi state oil facilities, and that Iranian agents were infiltrating into northern Iraq to target the Israelis written about in a report by Seymour Hersh. According to my source, Franklin passed the information to the individual from AIPAC with the hope it could reach people at higher levels of the US government who would act on it. AIPAC presented the information to Elliot Abrams in the NSC. They also presented the part that involved Israelis who might be targeted to the Israelis, with the motivation to protect Israeli lives.
A couple weeks ago, my source told me, he was visited by two agents of the FBI, who were asking about Franklin. My source couldn’t tell if Franklin was being investigated for possible wrongdoing, or if the FBI was visiting him because Franklin required some sort of higher level security clearance or clearance renewal, perhaps in order to get some sort of new position or posting abroad. My source soon after ran into another official from Feith's office, the polyglot Middle East expert and Bernard Lewis protege, Harold Rhode. My source mentioned the FBI meeting and asked Rhode if Franklin was in trouble. “It’s not clear,” Rhode allegedly told my source.
[Indeed, I have since learned that Rhode has been interviewed by the FBI, but not, allegedly, as a subject of the investigation.]
A second source I met with this past week told me another story. A couple weeks ago, he got called by a consultant to the Pentagon he knows. A small group of Air Force reservists who speak Persian were being trained by the Pentagon at a camp in Virginia in a kind of Iran immersion course, that involved not only language immersion, but “how to play Iranian card games.” The consultant called my second source, an Iran expert, to see if this small elite group could meet with him. He said among the group of four that was supposed to come was Larry Franklin. Franklin in fact did not come, but sent his regrets in a note. My second source said by the way he was terribly impressed with the Iranian language skills that the group that did come possessed.
When the news broke tonight on CBS about the FBI investigation, I tried to get in touch with my first source. But when he answered his phone, he said he couldn’t talk, there were attorneys involved and he wasn’t free to discuss the case.
It’s no secret that some prominent neoconservative officials like Doug Feith, Vice Presidential advisor David Wurmser, and the former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle are sympathetic to the government of Ariel Sharon and the Likud government. Feith, Wurmser and Perle co-authored the paper, A Clean Break, which advocated that Israel abandon the Oslo peace process. But Franklin, although a passionate advocate of regime change in Iran, is not really among them. From modest beginnings, Franklin reportedly put himself through school, earned a PhD, and is now the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst. It would be an irony if he were to be the target of an investigation into passing US intelligence to Israel.
A friend points out one other irony is that what the Pentagon official is alleged in the CBS report to have passed to AIPAC and the Israelis is essentially a diplomatic document that describes a draft US policy position to Iran; in other words -- hardly the crown jewels, and hardly enough to warrant wiretaps and surveillance of Aipac's offices, he says. "The Israelis can get that stuff by going directly to Condoleezza Rice." In other words, it's not deeply technical knowledge about US satellite technology, for instance, or information the Americans had gotten from the Jordanians, or information about say a possible secret US back channel to Hezbollah. He wonders if this case is not politically motivated. It's no secret as well that there's intense competition over who would be national security advisor in a second term Bush administration. Anything that taints Feith and Wolfowitz could benefit their internal Bush administration foes.
We obviously haven't heard the last of this yet. Stay tuned.
Update: Or does this story leaking now indicate rather, a case of "controlled burn?" An investigation that was leaked or interrupted before it could go further, as reader MC suggests? Franklin is seemingly more expendable than others.
Update II: I can't get over the sense this is a ruse, to get somebody else. As Wagster writes in the comments below:
The NYT reports tonight:
Government officials suggested Friday that investigators were seeking the cooperation of the Pentagon official being investigated.
Doesn't that seem to hint that they're using the media to put some heat on the guy, and that they suspect the involvement of others? Why else would they be seeking his cooperation?
Why else indeed.
Update III: Franklin has been investigated for this before, I'm told. What CBS has may not be the whole thing, but part of a pattern. What I have may be another part of a pattern. "There's got to be something else going on here," I'm told.
Update IV: This from Knight Ridder:
The FBI is investigating whether a Pentagon official provided highly classified information about U.S. policy toward Iran to the government of Israel, senior Bush administration officials confirmed Friday.
Investigators have conducted interviews in recent weeks in the potentially explosive case, which has been ongoing for more than a year and targets an individual in the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the officials said.
The case involves allegations that the unnamed Pentagon official passed highly classified data to a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which in turn provided that information to the government of Israel.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity, said the FBI also is investigating the same official's contacts with Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi and with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a controversial Iranian arms dealer. Chalabi was a source of much of the discredited pre-Iraq war intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida.
In June, U.S. intelligence officials said they had evidence that Chalabi's security chief had long been a paid agent of Iran's intelligence service and that Chalabi or an aide in his Iraqi National Congress had tipped the Iranians off that the United States had broken some Iranian communications codes. Chalabi has denied the charge.
The CIA has twice labeled Ghorbanifar, a figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, untrustworthy. Nevertheless, two Pentagon officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who worked on Iraq policy for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, met secretly with Ghorbanifar to discuss Iran.
I wish I could say more but it will have to wait for a few more days. But you can see where this is going. Anyhow, I am not sure Franklin really was the official in Feith's shop who had particularly close ties to Chalabi. I seriously wonder if Franklin is bait.
Update V: Thanks to Jonathan at Daily Kos for the link. And to Atrios. And to Matt Yglesias. And to Mark Kleiman.
Update VI: The Post names Franklin too.
The Wash Times' Bill Gertz has an interesting bit of historical information:
One U.S. official said the FBI had unconfirmed information that Mr. Feith supplied information to Israel in the 1980s. However, the officials declined to provide further information citing the ongoing investigation. It could not be learned whether arrests are expected in the case.
With so many people in Feith's office and in the Vice President's office extremely sympathetic to Israel, it's hard to believe the Israelis needed the documents Franklin was providing. Or put another way: Franklin may have the misfortune of being one of the only officials in Feith's office who would need to use Aipac to pass information to the Israelis.
[Via Atrios].
Update VII: Rhode denies to UPI's Richard Sale that his security clearance was suspended in 1998 pending investigation of allegations he had given classified information to Israel. I think I know who some of Sale's former US intelligence official sources are and believe they are not the most reliable, but this is worth reading.
Update VIII: Here's my latest thought on this: As I understand, Franklin wasn't motivated to pass the information to Aipac to give it to the Israelis. He wanted our own government to act. He wanted to get it to the NSC and the White House.
I'm not joking. From what I understand from my sources, Franklin was desperately trying to get the US government to act on this intelligence. Aipac was just a tool for getting influence in Washington and the White House.
How come pro-choice Republican Catholics get no grief from the conservative Catholic League, while pro-choice Democratic pols get refused communion, asks the Washington Monthly's Amy Sullivan:
Look at the line-up for next week's Republican Convention. On three out of the four evenings, the primetime programming stars a high-profile Republican Catholic who also happens to be pro-choice. Between Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Pataki, their states are responsible for 35 percent of the abortions performed in the U.S. And yet you'll hear nary a peep of protest about this from the conservative Catholic League, a supposedly "non-partisan" organization that has been frothing in continuous outrage over John Kerry's pro-choice leanings.
The dirty little secret about these groups is that they don't demand that Catholic politicians -- who, according to church teaching, should be held to a higher standard because of their visible status -- conform to all church positions on issues like the death penalty or war or immigration reform or combatting poverty. And they don't really care if PCRCs stray from church teaching on abortion (sounds like you need to read Evangelium Vitae a bit more carefully, guys...)
What they do care about is defeating Democrats. Some of them don't even try to gloss over that fact. Deal Hudson (the now-disgraced and resigned former head of Catholic outreach for the Bush/Cheney campaign) told the Washington Post last spring that "he believes the denial of Communion should begin, and end, with Kerry." . . .
The silence coming out of the Catholic League regarding the prominence of a bunch of heretical babykillers at the GOP Convention is simply deafening . . .
Next time reporters are tempted to let these guys drive the story, they should think twice. And while they're at it, they might want to turn the tables and write about the partisan involvement of supposedly neutral religious figures.
Illuminating.
Najaf, suspended, and a Vietnam war that won't end. Go read Spencer Ackerman on a roll on La Manipulation Najaf.
Even if you're SwiftBoated out, like I am, it's worth reading Vietnam journalist Neil Sheehan's extremely moving essay in the New York Times, "A War Without End." [via Nick Confessore at Tapped]:
Unnoticed in the controversy over the Swift Boat group's accusations is an undercurrent that lingers from the war. The men who fought in Vietnam and survived came back as divided as the public at home. Most suffered in silence, then picked up their lives and went on. But some, like John Kerry, were so disillusioned that they felt they had to do something to stop the war. Another minority persisted in their faith that the war could be won, that America is an exception to history and can do no wrong.
The nation has yet to come to grips with what really happened in Vietnam, and Mr. Kerry's accusers are among those who simply cannot and never will. They are driven by more than a political desire to further the fortunes of George Bush. Their remarks make clear that what they really hold against Mr. Kerry are his antiwar activities after his return and his testimony then that atrocities were being committed in Vietnam . . .
There is a way to honestly confront the reality of Vietnam and yet still honor the men who fought there. One must learn to distinguish between the war and the warrior. It always galls me when I hear the generation of World War II referred to as the "greatest generation.'' They were a great generation, but so were the men who served in Vietnam. The soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen who fought there did so with just as much courage as anyone who fought in World War II. The generation of Vietnam had the ill luck to draw a bad war, an unnecessary and unwinnable war, a tragic, terrible mistake. But valor has a worth of its own, and theirs deserves to be honored and remembered.
With the nation cleaved over the decision to invade Iraq, the manipulation of intelligence to rationalize the invasion, and the consequences of the disastrous occupation, America is in the midst of another war that won't end until years after the last troops come home.
Sprucing Up. As you can see, we've been sprucing up the place. Many thanks to Belgravia Dispatch's Greg Djerejian who loaned me his brilliant site designer, Thomas Eberle out of Munich. There will be contact info for Thomas at the bottom left of the site if you need any web design work. And as usual, big thanks to Karen Thomas who does a lot of technical site work for me as a charity case. Many thanks as well to Mike, a.k.a., Mr. War and Piece, who set up the site and has continuously lent his professional marketing eye and ideas to improving it. It was really fun selecting the photos and graphics to use, and thinking about the influences and inspirations for the site, which has been up about a year now. With a steep increase in traffic the past few months, it was high time for a bit of a makeover. At the request of some readers, I have made sure the site stays easy to read and there are no big changes that should worry any one. In the coming days, we are pleased to start collaborating with another great site out there. More on this soon.
As an experiment, goaded by my friend Colin Maclay now at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center on the Internet & Society, and who one summer long ago whipped up Indian food for friends in my apartment in Sarajevo, I have opened up the comments section on a few posts that seem ripe for it. And I have really enjoyed reading the feisty discussion between Eli Lake and Justin Raimondo and others here.
As I trust you will, let me know what you think of the changes, and thanks for all your letters and tips.
Who's attacking southern Iraq's oil pipelines?
Update: A week ago, I heard something interesting. Iran has called in all its trained guys who speak Arabic to go to southern Iraq. That they have and will continue to target state oil workers. That they have also sent operatives to northern Iraq to target the Israelis Seymour Hersh wrote about. That the Iranians have moved the senior Revolutionary Guard operative for Afghanistan, a guy named Qudzi, to the Iranian embassy in Baghdad. That the Pentagon has ignored this intelligence until it is a bit late. Fortunately, it seems al-Sistani has saved the day.
More: The Guardian's veteran journalist Jonathan Steele says the US's reports on Iran's nukes are 'sexed up,' and as such, eerily familiar -- and yet different. The main difference, Steele argues? The UK is not with the US on this one, and is sticking with its European troika, Germany and France:
Britain's difference with Washington on Iran is remarkable. It matters more than the better-publicised splits on the Kyoto environmental protocol or the international criminal court. But does Britain's alignment with France and Germany on Iran mean that Tony Blair has really parted with George Bush on a key geo-political and military issue? Or has he not yet spotted that what he regards as the lily-livered flunkies in the Foreign Office are up to their "realist" tricks again? They also opposed the invasion of Iraq until Ol' Laser-Eyes in Downing Street focused on the file.
We will know the answer after the US election. Even if Kerry wins, European diplomats expect no major change in Washington's policy to wards Iran. Like Cuba, Iran produces special symptoms of irrationality (because of the unrevenged wound to US pride the mullahs caused when they held diplomats hostage in the embassy a quarter of a century ago).
So how will Blair cuddle up to the new president?
I agree that a Kerry foreign policy to Iran will not look so different from a Bush policy to Iran, despite their preferences and rhetoric and instincts. Iran is the X factor here, and it is calling the shots.
Watching Israel watch Iran. Who's running Israel's Iran policy? Until recently, I'm told, Israeli intelligence on Iran has been centered in the Ministry of Defense. More recently, Sharon has appointed Mossad to oversee Israeli intelligence on the Iran nuclear issue. A well informed friend says the man who's commenting most frequently publicly on Israel's approach to Iran these days is Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, of Israeli military intelligence. He suggests this is a good site for this sort of information, and points to a piece there today on "Iran approaching the point of nuclear no return" -- [a variation of the phrase used by NDU Iran scholar Ray Takeyh, who recently said at a Center for American Progress event, Iran is approaching the political, if not yet technical, point of no return on its nuclear program]. From Geostrategy-Direct:
JERUSALEM - Israeli military intelligence has concluded Iran is preparing to accelerate uranium enrichment in violation of Teheran's pledge to the European Union. The assessment anticipates an Iranian effort to complete the acquisition of nuclear expertise and technology and produce fissile material.
In an Aug. 17 briefing to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser said Iran would spend the next few months acquiring the expertise and technology to produce fissile material and weapons assembly. Kuperwasser said the Iranian effort would be completed in 2005 and Teheran would then be prepared for accelerated uranium enrichment.
Kuperwasser said that Iran plans to acquire enough enriched uranium to assemble its first nuclear weapons in 2007. Iran intends to produce enough nuclear material and expertise to ensure the continuation of Teheran's weapons program in case of a halt in foreign assistance.
Iran has procured about 1,000 gas centrifuges and has been preparing to operate up to 5,000 such systems. The International Atomic Energy Agency has determined that Teheran has already enriched uranium to a level of 54 percent.
"If we permit Iran's deception to go on much longer, it will be too late," U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton told the Hudson Institute on Aug. 17. "Iran will have nuclear weapons."
Bolton said Teheran has told Britain and France and Germany that Iran could enrich enough uranium for a nuclear weapon within a year. The undersecretary did not elaborate but the U.S. intelligence community believes Iran could assemble a nuclear arsenal by 2007.
In July, Israel's intelligence community told the Cabinet that Iran encountered a three-year delay in nuclear weapons development. The Israeli intelligence assessment asserted that Iran would acquire indigenous nuclear weapons capability in 2007 and produce its first atomic bombs in 2008.
UPDATE: Reader HE writes:
I didn't know there was much of a turf war going on in Israel between different agencies on the issue. As far as I could tell, there's pretty much been a consensus across the mainstream of the political spectrum there for at least 10 years (probably since
Desert Storm) that Iran poses the main stragetic threat to Israel in the region, and I don't know if there's been that much argument about what they can do to counter it. Although that is a different issue from whether Mossad or military intelligence are really calling the shots on what their overall intelligence outlook is.I do remember a funny note from a couple of years ago, when the current Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz was still the Chief of Staff, and Fuad Ben-Eliezer of Labor was the Defense Minister in Sharon's national unity government. Ben-Eliezer was also a lifer in the military, and apparently he and Mofaz had disliked each other for some time, so they were always squabbling. Because of their respective backgrounds--Mofaz was born in Iran, Ben-Eliezer in Iraq--their constant arguing became known in military circles as "the Iran-Iraq war."
And my favorite, extremely opionated reader "else" writes:
I can't believe it. An hour after I ask you a question, you've got a post on it....
Israel says... Bolton says... Haven't we been through this before? Don't forget that 18 months ago, John Bolton assured Israel that the US would take care of Syria and then Iran right after attending to Iraq. At the time, there were retired Israeli generals who were willing to tell Ha-aretz that Iraq was much less of a threat in 2003 than in 1991. Bolton could do it in his sleep. FYI, he is a signatory of PNAC.
So there we go. Thanks for your comments...
We're juggling with one too many balls up in the air at the moment, six windows open on the computer screen, and a serious shortage of mental RAM available. Posting is going to be thin for a day or so. For now, let me just point out some interesting work other people are doing.
On Darfur: Samantha Power has been interviewing displaced people and Janjaweed militia leaders in Darfur and Chad, and has a dispatch in the New Yorker. In his New York Sun column, Eli Lake urges the new UN envoy to Sudan to save everybody a lot of time and look at the available evidence Sudan is not living up to its end of the resolution.
My rival for CPD stalker in chief, Matt Yglesias appreciates some pretty major cognitive dissonance coming from one of its most visible members.
My friend BF points me to Fred Kaplan's predictably excellent analysis of the motives for Pat Roberts' plan for radical intelligence reform.
And as my friend BF and I discussed by email yesterday, and then my colleague Bob Dreyfuss and I discussed on the phone yesterday, a dismal thought: where should we move if Bush wins? Bob is thinking Amsterdam. Any thoughts? I am tempted to open the comments section for this. Behave!
Talk about being in need of lessons in common virtues. Don't they teach manners at Yale? Morals at Bush's church? Bush is a coward:
Former Democratic Sen. Max Cleland tried to deliver a letter protesting ads challenging John Kerry's Vietnam service to President Bush at his Texas ranch Wednesday, but neither a Secret Service official nor a state trooper would take it.
The former Georgia senator, a triple amputee who fought in Vietnam, was carrying a letter from nine Senate Democrats who wrote Bush that "you owe a special duty" to condemn attacks on Kerry's military service.
"The question is where is George Bush's honor, the question is where is his shame to attack a fellow veteran who has distinguished himself in combat?" Cleland asked. "Regardless of the political combat involved, it's disgraceful."
Encountering a permanent roadblock to Bush's ranch, Cleland left without turning over the letter to anyone.
Cleland is right: where is Bush's honor?
This event could not have been more tailor made to elicit outrage, and yet it does. Bush is such a spineless coward. Like the new reports on the abuse at Abu Ghraib echo, and so many other events of the past three years, Bush is no leader, the country has no leadership, it has spineless cowards who duck and hide when it's time to do the right thing. What a wimp. Bush and his handlers don't have a shred of common decency, and this just proves it.
Go read Spencer Ackerman and Paul Glastris on the Schlesinger report on Abu Ghraib issued yesterday.
Here's Spencer Ackerman on Schlesinger's curious description of violent interrogation techniques "migrating" to the Iraq context:
In seeking to explain what led to the torture committed by U.S. military police and intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and his colleagues use variants of the word "migrate" over a half-dozen times in the 92-page text. That is, the Schlesinger panel posits a simple explanation for how brutal interrogation techniques--initially reserved for Al Qaeda and Taliban "enemy combatants," whom President Bush decided were exempt from the Geneva Conventions--came to be used on Iraqi prisoners, whom the administration never determined fell outside the Geneva rules. Those techniques simply--as Schlesinger would have it--"migrated."
. . .
But, of course, no policy "migrates." Officials actively provide instructions to other officials. Or, failing such active authorization from their superiors, some officials take individual initiative based on what they judge to be relevant prior circumstances. A combination of these two factors is what Schlesinger surely means by the "migration" of interrogation policy. What his preferred euphemism glosses over are the questions of who told what to whom, with whose approval.
Paul Glastris takes it from there, asking:
To what degree, if any, do Bush administration policymakers, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in particular, bear responsibility? Obviously, nobody at the top ordered this kind of sick (and militarily counterproductive) abuse, or wanted it to happen. But did their decisions to some extent “set the conditions” for it?
. . .
From what I can tell, Rumsfeld’s leadership contributed to the problem in three ways. First was his best-case-scenario planning, or lack of planning, for what might happen after Saddam’s regime fell . . .
Second, and most disastrously, was Rumsfeld’s decision to put too few troops in Iraq, and to shut down anyone who questioned that decision . . .
Third was Rumsfeld’s efforts to parse or otherwise get around legal constrains on how prisoners at Guantanamo could be interrogated, and his decision to apply some of those looser standards to Iraq . . .
This third issue is the one I’m most curious about. . . It should be noted that the panel did not believe that Rumsfeld should resign or be fired for what happened at Abu Ghraib . . . I agree. He should resign or be fired for screwing up the entire war.
UPDATE: Greg Djerejian, back at work after a late summer vacation, has more.
Going, going, gone. Benjamin Ginsberg, the lawyer advising the SwiftVets, resigns from the Bush campaign, the AP reports:
I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election," Benjamin Ginsberg wrote in a resignation letter to Bush released by the campaign.
I bet he can't begin to express his sadness! Good grief is right.
Update: Here's Ginsberg's full resignation letter (courtesy of the Corner):
ARLINGTON, VA --
Below is a letter from Bush-Cheney '04 National Counsel Benjamin L. Ginsberg to the President:
Dear Mr. President:
It has been the highest honor to represent your campaigns for President and the truly outstanding people I have had the pleasure to work with in those efforts. My family and I have been privileged to know you as a governor, a candidate and now, as one of our nation's most inspirational presidents.
Nothing is more important to me or to this country than your reelection. The choice in this election between your principled, decisive leadership and John Kerry's record of vacillation on the most important issues facing this nation deserves the undivided attention of our nation.
I am proud to have given legal advice to American military veterans and others who wish to add their views to the political debate. It was done so in a manner that is fully appropriate and legal and, in fact, is quite similar to the relationships between my counterparts at the DNC and the Kerry campaign and Democrat 527s such as Moveon.org, the Media Fund and Americans Coming Together.
Unfortunately, this campaign has seen a stunning double standard emerge between the media's focus on the activities of 527s aligned with John Kerry and those opposed to him. I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election. I feel I cannot let that continue, so I have decided to resign as National Counsel to your campaign to ensure that the giving of legal advice to decorated military veterans, which was entirely within the boundaries of the law, doesn't distract from the real issues upon which you and the country should be focusing.
Very truly yours,
Benjamin L. Ginsberg
Ginsberg's effort at establishing "moral equivalence" between the obviously coordinated SwiftLiars/Bush/Cheney04 and Kerry '04 and Moveon.org is truly comical. Ginsberg, there's a job for you with the UN somewhere, I am sure of it.
Matt Yglesias calls attention to Andrew Apostolou's article in the National Review arguing Bush should take a tough line on Uzbekistan's strongman Islam Karimov. [It's uncanny, I should say, how many of the articles that catch my eye catch Matt's, first. Spencer has noticed this phenomenon too.]
Apostolou is the director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. [For more on the FDD, see my post and article below, which describe the links between the FDD and the latest incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger.] And that's where Antiwar.com blogger Justin Raimondo a few weeks back noticed something interesting. One of the CPD's founding members, Hedieh Mirahmadi, is part of the "cheering section" for Islam Karimov, Raimondo writes:
. . . Although [Mirahmadi's] affiliations are not mentioned on the [Committee on the Present Danger] website . . . Ms. Mirahmadi is General Secretary of the Islamic Supreme Council of America (ISCA), a small Sufi cult devoted to the teachings of one Shaykh Hisham Kabbani. Apart from ISCA's religious activities, the group has long been an American cheering section for the brutally repressive regime of Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov. About a government that bans all dissent, represses religion (including Christianity and even the poor old Hare Krishnas), and boils dissidents alive, Ms. Mirahmadi had this to say:
"We were all grateful to experience for ourselves the spectacular growth of this new republic. We sincerely believe Uzbekistan will be a formidable contributor to Islamic tradition and culture for centuries to come. Their great history and scholarship will preserve the traditional Islamic teachings of our ancestors and deserves the support and acknowledgement of the American Muslim community."
These words of praise for a viciously repressive and manifestly undemocratic government, uttered at the conclusion of her trip to Uzbekistan, where Mirahmadi was feted by a dictator so ruthless that not even the U.S. government can stomach him – is this what Lieberman and Decter mean by "fighting for ... an expanding worldwide community of democracies"?
On their website, ISCA exults that "the Uzbek authorities are not simply not opposing the spread of the Naqshbandi order but, on the contrary, are doing all they can to support it" – even as the Uzbek secret police disappears virtually all political opposition, and the weird personality cult of President Karimov has the entire country frozen in an alternate time-warp. As bit players in this production of The Twilight Zone, Ms. Mirahmadi and ISCA leaders were invited to monitor, in January, 2000, what she described as "Uzbekistan's second democratic elections since its emancipation from communism." Those "elections," denounced by every watchdog group as a sham, are described by Ms. Mirahmadi as follows:
"On January 10, 2000 at a Press Conference hosted by the Central Electoral Commission and the Foreign Ministry, it was announced that 95% of those eligible had voted. Of that over 91% had voted for President Karimov, including the opposing candidate! From an objective standard, that is a staggering percentage of the population to partake in the voting and represents an unprecedented victory. It is apparent that the criticism of the Uzbek electoral process by the Western nations is not a sentiment that is shared by the Uzbek people themselves, as demonstrated by their commitment to voting for him. Therefore, if the overwhelming majority of the Uzbek people (88% of whom are Muslims) are pleased with the leadership of President Karimov, should not the American Muslim community endorse his Presidency?"
So, memo to Andrew Apostolou: what's up? If the FDD, and CPD find Karimov the kind of dictator the US doesn't need for the war on terror, why does the CPD have a member of the cheering section for Karimov as one of its founding members?
Just out: my piece on the Committee on the Present Danger. I was able to interview the CPD's chairman Jim Woolsey, its new acting managing director Cliff May, the director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and learn a bit more about its tax status and funders:
. . . At times, one is struck by an element of sloganeering, of speaking in code, when reading the Committee's literature and listening to its leadership describe what it will actually do. All this talk of "Islamofascism" and "jihadism" raises questions about the reason for the resurrection of the CPD – and just who is financing it.
But May says that's no mystery. He explains that the CPD is registered as a 501(c)4 organization, which gives it a tax status that allows it to lobby Congress on behalf of specific policies. And that's something that the Foundations for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) cannot do. May, who is also director of the FDD, says that is a 501(c)3 organization, which is not permitted to lobby. But the FDD's funders, he says, helped raise the money to launch the CPD.
The relationship between the FDD and CPD is central to understanding what the new CPD's true purpose is about. While one CPD member staffer told me the CPD was initially funded by a grant from the FDD, May tells me it's a bit more indirect than that. "People who have supported the FDD have also wanted to help get the Committee going," May says. "Some of our backers have gotten their friends to contribute" to the CPD.
And who funds the FDD? . . .
You can read the whole thing here. I'll have more on this later. But the truth is, even if I don't agree with all their ideas, I sort of admire this sort of citizens' lobby (much, I imagine, to my editor's frustration). I conclude:
Whether the latest iteration of the Committee on the Present Danger will find the kind of receptive audience among dissidents in oppressed societies in the Middle East – the Lech Walesas and Vaclav Havels of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria – as Woolsey desires isn't clear. So far, the CPD has seemingly targeted its marketing efforts squarely at readers of the print editions of the Washington Post and the New York Times, to which most Middle East dissidents don't have subscriptions. But whatever skepticism one may harbor for the Committee's marketing, and its evocations of the Cold War, its ultimate aim may have already been partially realized: to recognize that the "war on terror" begins at home, as a war of ideas.
Update: Yglesias elicits some interesting comments on his and my articles on the CPD.
Another Swifty Defends Kerry. From reader BH:
For 35 years, Rich Baker seldom talked about Vietnam, Swift boats or John Kerry's ability as a young naval officer.
But now, with Republican partisans challenging Kerry's wartime record, Baker said he feels compelled to strike back.
"Every Swift boat officer gave his all in Vietnam, but Kerry stood above the rest of us," said Baker, 61, of Scott, a former Navy lieutenant and Swift boat commander. "He was number one as far as courageousness and aggressiveness. He set the tone."
. . .
Baker, who ran a bakery after coming home from Vietnam, complied. He granted a handful of interviews and agreed to appear today at a Pittsburgh news conference organized by the Kerry campaign.
A registered Democrat, Baker voted for Republican George W. Bush for president in 2000. But this time, Baker said, he is supporting Kerry for two reasons.
For one, Baker said, he considers Kerry better qualified than Bush to be commander in chief.
Second, Baker said, he is perturbed that Kerry is being criticized for his service in Vietnam while Bush's activities during wartime receive almost no scrutiny.
"George Bush has two silver dental fillings in his teeth to show what he did during the Vietnam War," Baker said. "John Kerry has a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts."
Ain't it the truth.
All the credible evidence, from military records to the testimony of those who served with Mr. Kerry, confirms his wartime heroism. Why, then, are some veterans willing to join the smear campaign? Because they are angry about his later statements against the war. Yet making those statements was itself a heroic act - and what he said then rings truer than ever.
The young John Kerry spoke of leaders who sent others to their deaths because they wanted to seem tough, then "left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude." Fifteen months after George Bush strutted around in his flight suit, more and more Americans are echoing Gen. Anthony Zinni, who received a standing ovation from an audience of Marine and Navy officers when he talked about the debacle in Iraq and said of those who served in Vietnam: "We heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
Mr. Kerry also spoke of the moral cost of an ill-conceived war - of the atrocities soldiers find themselves committing when they can't tell friend from foe. Two words: Abu Ghraib.
Let's hope that this latest campaign of garbage and lies - initially financed by a Texas Republican close to Karl Rove, and running an ad featuring an "independent" veteran who turns out to have served on a Bush campaign committee - leads to a backlash against Mr. Bush. If it doesn't, here's the message we'll be sending to Americans who serve their country: If you tell the truth, your courage and sacrifice count for nothing.
Leadership Vacuum. More findings of atrocities against juveniles at Abu Ghraib, in the Fay report, reports the Washington Post [via Nick Confessore].
And the report by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, expected to be released later today, will implicate higher level officials in the the Pentagon leadership, according to the Post:
Another report regarding the prison abuse, commissioned by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, is expected to be released this afternoon. That independent commission, chaired by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, will be critical of the guidance and policies set by top Pentagon and military officials as they worked to get more useful intelligence from detainees in Iraq, said a source familiar with the commission's work.
The Schlesinger report is not expected to implicate high-level officials by name, but it would be the first report to link the abuse at Abu Ghraib to policies set by top officials in Washington. The Fay report, by contrast, does not point a finger at the Pentagon and instead assigns most of the blame to military intelligence and military police who worked on the chaotic grounds of the overcrowded and austere Abu Ghraib. . .
The reports are part of several investigations into U.S. detainee operations around the world, and so far they have expanded the scope of culpability beyond the seven MPs charged in connection with the most notorious incidents of abuse . . .
The core conclusion of the Fay report, said one general who is familiar with it, is that there was a leadership failure in the Army in Iraq that extended well beyond a handful of MPs. "There's a vacuum there," he said. "Either people knew it and turned a blind eye, or they weren't paying attention."
Time's Matt Cooper gives limited testimony to Plame investigator Fitzgerald. Seems there is much interest in Scooter Libby:
Fitzgerald has shown a continuing interest in Libby. Witnesses have said Fitzgerald has e-mails and phone records showing his contacts with reporters and that prosecutors are interested in a story Cooper wrote for Time last summer in which Libby was interviewed.
Thanks to S. for the heads up.
Department of Slightly Surprising Headlines:
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY AWARDS HANDGUN CONTRACTS
(Washington, DC) August 24, 2004 – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the award of two contracts today for handguns for all organizational elements within the department, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
SIGARMS Incorporated and Heckler & Koch, Incorporated each received a contract award with a maximum quantity of 65,000 pistols that may be purchased over the next five years. SIGARMS Incorporated, a small business located in Exeter, New Hampshire, received a $23.7 million contract for 9 x 19 mm and .40 caliber pistols. Heckler & Koch, a large business located in Sterling, Virginia, received a $26.2 million contract for 9 x 19 mm, .40, and .357 caliber pistols . . .
A week ago, Ha'aretz's Zvi Bar'el published an interesting story about Feith, Zell and L'Affaire Chalabi, that I've just come across in Counterpunch. For many of us curious about the mysterious staying power of Doug Feith, when his office's work has gone so awry in Iraq and elsewhere, this article begins to help answer the question of why; Feith is a connected guy. At his old law firm Feith, Zell, [now Zell Goldberg], Feith was representing Israeli arms manufacturers in the US:
L. Marc Zell, an Israeli citizen, and his partners have offices in Israel--in the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem--as well as in Moscow, Seattle and Washington. In a telephone conversation he refused to confirm or deny his ties with Salem Chalabi. However, until a few months ago, the home page of the Iraqi International Law Group --the name of Chalabi's consultancy company--listed as its address the offices of Zell, Goldberg in Washington, and according to Arab sources, Salem Chalabi visited Israel a few weeks ago.
Zell, Goldberg represent Israeli defense manufacturing firms in the U.S. and in other countries. Until 2001, Douglas Feith was a senior partner in the law office, which was then known as Feith, Zell. In 2001, Feith was appointed U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy and is thought to be the progenitor of the war strategy against Saddam Hussein.
Another name has to be added to the Feith, Chalabi, Zell parallelogram of forces: businessman Abdul Huda Farouqi, owner of a company called Nour USA. Farouqi's good connections with Ahmed Chalabi date back to 1989, when Chalabi, then the CEO of Petra Bank, helped him finance projects around the world. Farouqi was on the brink of bankruptcy, but succeeded in extricating himself, and a few years later his names cropped up on the list of donors to President Bill Clinton.
At the end of the war in Iraq, Farouqi's firm won a huge tender to supply equipment to the new Iraqi army that the U.S. was about to establish. However, the intervention of an unseen hand, probably U.S. officers in Iraq who weren't satisfied with the services they were getting, brought about the annulment of the tender, with other companies winning the lucrative contracts. Farouqi, though, came out of it well: He won a tender to secure oil facilities and pipelines in Iraq, for which he hired the services of some 6,000 Iraqis, naturally from Chalabi's followers. The attorney who brokered the deal was Salem Chalabi, who still holds the title of president of the tribunal to try Saddam Hussein, but who is himself wanted by the Iraqi authorities.
I don't have a big point to make from this, it's just incredibly interesting. Following the money almost always is. [Recent research I've been doing on another article shows Feith's father Dalck Feith among those who have donated money to the organization behind the Committe on the Present Danger, which has been set up with the tax status of a lobbying organization, a 501(c)4 . . . I'll be having an article on this coming out soon.]
While I'm on the subject of Feith, and my post from a couple days back that put forward Juan Cole's contention that Feith, Wurmser, Perle (who's done his own share of lobbying for Israeli arms manufacturers), etc. believed in the fantasy of the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq in remaking the Middle East map . . . my very clever reader BH has written me this:
Here's the relevant section A Clean Break, which I'm sure you've seen:
"King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najaf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which - and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows - is King Hussein."
It seems to me that this has more to do with Chalabi's relationship with former Jordanian Crown Prince Hassan than anything related to reality. Chalabi credits
Hassan with saving his tuchus in Jordan.To wit:
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/166
Then, of course, there is the inconvenient fact that in the 1920s the Najaf clergy issued a little fatwa forbidding Iraqi Shia from collaborating with the
Hashemite monarchy ...Here's a relevant passage from Yitzhak Nakash's book on the Iraqi Shia:
The very small number of Shi'is employed in the Iraqi civil service in the 1920s was not only a result of government policies and existing patterns of patronage, but also a reflection of the reluctance of Shi'is to accept government positions. The question of lawfulness of accepting office under an illegitimate ruler was an old problem in the Shi'i legal system.
Shi'i ulama traditionally considered Sunni governments illegitimate, and very few Shi'is were employed by the Ottoman government. As part of their opposition to the British presence in Iraq and the Iraqi government as
it was constituted in the 1920s, the mujtahids declared a ban on accepting government office. Thus, in March 1920 Mirza Muhammad Taqi Shirazi issued a
fatwa pronouncing all service under British rule unlawful. In 1921 Mahdi al-Kahlisi too banned acceptance of government office, considering it as an
act of cooperation with the infidels. The ban issued by the mujtahids, which remained in force until 1927, evoked a heated debate within the Shi'i community
regarding the morality of becoming a government functionary and the implications of holding state office."There seems to be some discrepancy about the dates, but the point stands: the authors of "A Clean Break" were full of [it.]
History repeats itself.
Oy.
Incredible. It's like the victors of World War I in 1919, drawing up the maps of the old Ottoman empire, etc. free form according to some romantic notions. It hasn't worked out very well.
Singing like a canary? Markos "Daily Kos" has heard some pretty hyperventilation-inducing rumors about the Plame investigation. We'll be sure to keep an eye on this.
Agenda Setting. Go straight away to read Michael Tomasky reminding the media that what truly deserves scrutiny is what Bush and Cheney were doing in 1969 while Kerry served in Vietnam:
So now we're having a debate about whether the man who did the honorable thing may have embellished his record a little (although nothing in the documentary record suggests he did this), while we have two cowards who did everything they could to stay miles away from the place Kerry demanded he be sent. This is the fundamental truth. And while yes, Kerry has made his war service a centerpiece in a way that Bush and Cheney for obvious reasons did not, is it really Kerry who deserves scrutiny for how he behaved in 1968 and 1969? Why shouldn't the major media be doing comparisons of how Kerry, Bush, and Cheney passed those years? Why shouldn't The Washington Post be devoting 2,700 words to a comprehensive look at Cheney's deferments? . . .
Our media can sort through the facts in front of their nose and determine, at least some of the time, who's lying and who's not. But they are completely incapable of taking a step back and describing the larger reality. Doing that would require making judgments that are supposedly subjective rather than objective; but the larger reality here is clearer than clear. Just imagine if the situation were reversed: The same people now questioning Kerry's "character" would have worked to establish Bush as a war hero long ago. They would have labeled Kerry a coward. If by chance a liberal-backed group came forward to question Bush's wartime actions, they would have been called traitors and worse. And the mainstream media would be following the agenda they set every step of the way.
Well said. Let's get some perspective. I hope to see serious press examination of Cheney's five deferments from Vietnam soon.
Eli Lake launches a new weekly column in the New York Sun with a defense of Undersecretary of State for arms control John Bolton. I don't disagree with Lake that Bolton's "public statements advance the policy of the president and his administration." But I disagree with Lake that it's Bolton's critics who are the deceivers here; rather it's the administration that tries to get it both ways: to wink at their conservative and neoconservative base through Bolton, but without ever publicly backing up his statements, as if to wink at moderates that Bolton is a bit off the Bush reservation. What is Bush's policy on Iran? The administration hints to neocons, through Bolton's statements, that leave it to them, with a second term, Iran's nuclear program will be taken care of (just don't look at Bush's first term record on Iran for proof.) But Bush won't get reelected by stating clearly that a second term would could likely lead America to a new military engagement in the Persian Gulf, especially after the last one went so disastrously based on the fantasies the Bolton supporters wove about what that would entail, and indeed, about what the very threat Iraq posed was. Go read Eli's column and see what you think.
Update: Matt Yglesias has more on Eli's column, here.
While you're at it, go check out former Clinton speechwriter and Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris blogging up a storm this week on the Swift-Vets saga at the Washington Monthly:
What I find infuriating about all this is that Kerry’s willingness to protest the war is an essential part of what, to my mind, makes him one of the great heroes—indeed, perhaps the greatest hero--of that era. Here’s a guy who, as a college student, understood and expressed publicly serious and well-founded doubts about the wisdom of America’s Vietnam strategy. Then, unlike many others of his generation, he put his doubts aside and his life on the line in order to do what he could to make his country’s policy a success. Then, having seen first hand that his initial suspicions were correct, and that the line coming out of Washington—that victory was just around the corner, that the “Vietnamization” strategy was working—was a lie, he stood up and told the public the unvarnished truth. In my book, that’s three morally courageous acts in a row. And that’s not counting the thankless but vital roles he played in investigating and ending the POW/MIA controversy, opening relations with Vietnam, and improving federal services for veterans. Name me one person in public life today who negotiated the moral minefield of Vietnam with greater courage and sure-footedness.
Exactly right. As one reader BC wrote me over the weekend, "Bush, of course, never having written or reflected on anything, is immune to this sort of thing. (Did you hear the Swiftvets complaining that Kerry set aside 10 pounds of his 90 pound personal allotment for a *typewriter*? How un-American could you get?)."
While we're at it, can I just say how much Dole sucks? He should be ashamed.
A friend over the weekend reminded me that Karl Rove's strategy has always been: don't attack your adversary on his weaknesses. Those will take care of themselves. Attack him on his strengths.
But this can be played both ways, right? The fact is, Bush's so-called "strengths" have become his vulnerabilities. Even some Republicans recognize Bush's 'decisiveness' in taking the war to Iraq in hindsight reflects rashness and and lack of reflectiveness.
Go read Juan Cole:
. . . That American neo-imperialists like Richard Perle, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz thought they could remove Saddam and step in to reshape Iraq without having to grapple with Khomeini's legacy is an index of their ignorance and arrogance. Perle and Feith and David Wurmser even wanted to try to bring back the Hashimite monarchy in Iraq, seeming to think that it might still have influence with Iraq's Shiites. But the central idea of Khomeinism was that Shiite Islam is incompatible with monarchy, and the Sadrists would have made endless trouble about this. (Perle, Feith and Wurmser even thought a revived Hashimite monarchy could be used to "moderate" Hizbullah in Lebanon, which is ridiculous on the face of it, and you wonder in what world do these people live?)
Would be interesting to know where these people do get their theories.
update: I'm told the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq idea may have come from Harold Rhode, and that David Wurmser didn't necessarily get behind it.
Dismantle the CIA? Remove the DIA and NSA from the Department of Defense umbrella? Sen. Pat Roberts hasn't shared his intel reform plan with the Democrats, nor with the White House yet, but he did run a two page summary by CBS' Bob Schieffer on Sunday:
Roberts' plan would put the CIA's three main directorates — Operations, which runs intelligence collection and covert actions; Intelligence, which analyzes intelligence reports; and Science and Technology — into three new, separate and renamed agencies, each reporting to a separate assistant national intelligence director. It also would remove three of the largest intelligence agencies from the Pentagon.
Although the measure would essentially dismantle the CIA, Roberts said in a paper he released: "We are not abolishing the CIA. We are reordering and renaming its three major elements."
"No one agency, no matter how distinguished its history, is more important than U.S. national security," the paper said.
A congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would be no CIA director, and the agency's parts would have new names under a new management structure.
Despite Roberts' assertion that he wouldn't abolish the CIA, some intelligence officials think that sounds exactly like what he is trying to do.
UPDATE: And the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group has apparently decided, contrary to earlier reporting, not to project the threat Iraq might have posed had the US not invaded. A follow up report by the LA Times' Greg Miller reports: "Charles Duelfer, speaking by telephone from Baghdad, said the search team had discussed making such a projection but decided not to pursue it. Duelfer said the fact that the idea was discussed might have created the impression among officials in Washington that such speculation would be a component of the final report."
MORE: Here's more about Roberts' plan -- and reaction -- from the NY Times.
And a friend from that world says of Roberts' plan, "Terrible idea, will never happen ... if DoD loses NSA & NGA (DIA is irrelevant), the services will simply recreate NSA & NGA under new names, under full DoD control."
He adds, "Keep in mind that recasting the IC has been a 'big new idea' since 1955 ...we're still waiting. Never underestimate the power of inertia."
Indeed.
I usually admire Dobbs' reporting. But here he reminds me of the UN during the Bosnian war twittering that each side is equally guilty. All sides in the Swift Boats nonsense are not 'equally guilty.' The facts overwhelmingly back up the Kerry side, as this first-hand account by William Rood of the Chicago Tribune adds to the overwhelming evidence of.
How can John McCain stand to be associated with this gang of thieves, who perpetrated the same atrocities against the truth during the 2000 Republican presidential primary? He should be ashamed to have anything to do with them.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum asks an interesting question at the end of this post:
Why does Dobbs hide this simple fact [that every single piece of available evidence backs up Kerry and Rassmann's claim that they were under fire] in a huge mass of detail? Hard to say.
But talking this over with a friend, I think Dobbs may be using this article [hinting as it does that while all the documentary evidence out there backs up the Kerry portrayal and discredits the SwiftVets, the Kerry camp has not been as forthcoming as Dobbs would like], to try to pressure the Kerry camp, and in particular historian Douglas Brinkley, to make the Kerry writings and journals Brinkley had exclusive access to for his book, Tour of Duty, available to the Washington Post. One wonders if not Kerry, but Brinkley, has something he'd rather not share? But it would certainly be better to be forthcoming if it was a mistake on his part?
More: Go watch this ad. And check out Dowd: "It makes sense for W. to use surrogates to do his fighting, just as he did when he slid out of Vietnam and just as he did when he sent our troops to fight his administration's misbegotten vanity war in Iraq."
SUNDAY UPDATE: Check out this letter to the editor from the Telluride (Co.) Gateway newspaper, by Jim Russell, who claims to have served as a US Navy Psychological Operations Officer on the No. 43 boat during the March 1969 Swift Boat river excursions. [Thx to reader JW].
Good for Kerry. From Reuters:
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry asked the Federal Election Commission on Friday to force Republican critics to withdraw ads challenging his military service, and accused the Bush campaign of illegally helping coordinate the attacks . .
The campaign said there is "overwhelming evidence" that the group [the Swift Boat Veterans] is coordinating its spending on advertising and other activities with the President Bush's campaign for reelection . . .
Bush and a top adviser have long-standing ties to people behind the advertisements . . but the campaign denies any part in the ads themselves.
MORE: Evidence the Bush campaign is coordinating with the Swift Boats [via Atrios.]
The 2004 US presidential election will be decided on US foreign policy, according to a Pew poll out earlier this week.
Barring a sizable shift in public opinion over the next few months, the 2004 election will be the first since the Vietnam era in which foreign affairs and national security issues are a higher public priority than the economy . . .
Currently, four-in-ten Americans (41%) cite international and defense issues such as the Iraq war and terrorism as the most important problems facing the country, while just a quarter of the public (26%) offers economic concerns. And both Pew Research Center and Gallup surveys show that, if anything, the public's focus on foreign and security issues is increasing as the campaign progresses.
An analysis of Gallup Poll data from 1948 through 2004 shows that foreign policy and international security issues dominated elections during the early part of this period (1948-1972) . . .
This changed markedly beginning with the election of 1976. From that point through the election of 2000, economic issues were, on average, cited as the most important problem facing the nation at least twice as often as international and security issues . . .
In the current campaign, however, foreign policy is once again assuming much greater importance . . . Moreover, the proportion citing foreign and security problems has been rising . . .
The increased importance of international and security issues following Sept. 11 and the U.S. military action in Iraq coincided with a spike in public attention to foreign news.
Emerging Democratic Majority has more analysis of this poll, released August 18th, here, which suggests swing voters are moving closer to Kerry.
Spencer Ackerman and Juan Cole ask if the events in Najaf will push Michigan decisively in the Kerry camp, and cost Bush the election.
UPDATE: The principles American voters believe should guide US foreign policy bode well for Kerry, too, according to the Pew analysis:
Americans today believe the guiding principles of U.S. foreign policy should be morality, caution and decisiveness. Fully 72% of the public says following moral principles should be a top priority in the way the U.S. conducts foreign policy. Roughly two-thirds (66%) say being cautious should be a top priority and 62% place equal importance on being decisive. Smaller majorities say being practical and compassionate should be part of the equation as well.
While Americans view morality as a key foreign policy value, they place less emphasis on following religious principles. And though decisiveness is valued, being forceful is among the public's lowest priorities (23% say it should be a top priority). Being flexible in the conduct of foreign policy is valued by four-in-ten Americans, and idealism is a top priority for just 25% of the public.
Few could credit the Bush administration with being flexible.
Both Republicans and Democrats "agree on the importance of being practical, compassionate and idealistic." But here's where Republicans and Democrats divide: over the issue of decisiveness:
The biggest gap between the two major party groups is on the importance of being decisive. Fully 75% of Republicans say this should be a top priority in conducting foreign policy, only 56% of Democrats agree. The parties are also divided over how much priority should be given to following religious principles 43% of Republicans say this should be a top priority, compared to 29% of Democrats. Following moral principles is the Republicans' leading foreign policy value 79% say this should be a top priority. For Democrats, caution and morality share the top ranking 69% say each are top priorities.
Here's the full analysis of the values driving voter attitudes on US foreign policy.
Seymour Hersh has a book coming out about Abu Ghraib, appropriately titled Chain of Command.
UPDATE: More.
The CIA is a sucker for punishment. Get this, from the LA Times' Greg Miller.
Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is preparing a final report on its search that will speculate on what the deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials.
The CIA plans for the report, due next month, to project as far as 2008 what Iraq might have achieved in its illegal weapons programs if the United States had not invaded the country last year, the officials said.
The new direction of the inquiry is seen by some officials as an attempt to obscure the fact that no banned weapons — or even evidence of active programs — have been found, and instead emphasize theories that Iraq may have been planning to revive its programs.
The change in focus has angered some intelligence officials and at least one key Democrat in Congress . .
Such an effort would be a significant departure for a survey group whose primary mission when it was established last year was to locate and destroy stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that the CIA and other agencies believed were hidden across Iraq.
David Kay, who led the group before resigning in January, said that speculating on Iraq's future capabilities was never part of the team's mission.
"Absolutely not," Kay said in a telephone interview Thursday. "We were to search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No one ever suggested to me in any of the discussions before I took the job, afterward, or even when I left, that [assessing Iraq's future capabilities] was a thing that should have been done."
Projecting some fantasy hypothetical threat that is not going to be may be easier for the CIA than providing intelligence that interprets reality. But that's not their job. [Thx to reader JR for the clip.]
Books. Lorelei Kelly has many admirers in DC, and when you read the new how-to book, Security for a New Century: Policy Matters: Educating Congress on Peace and Security she and Elizabeth "Libby" Turpen co-authored, on engaging Congress on peace and security issues, you will understand why. In a town with hundreds of think tanks and conferences and policy wonks, Kelly has carved out a unique niche at the nexis of policy practitioners and security thinkers, peaceniks and security hawks, founding a Congressional study group on national security issues, Security for a New Century, that is open to Hill staffers, media, and the public alike. In all honesty, having been traveling non stop for the past few weeks, I only learned about the book a week ago because a senior Afghan official Kelly had helped arrange for me to interview last minute told me it was going to be his plane reading on the flight back to Kabul. You couldn't ask for a much better endorsement than that.
Another book recommendation: I finally had the chance to read Azar Nafisi's phenomenal Reading Lolita in Tehran while on my trip, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I learned more about Iran from that book than from a hundred news articles. More on Nafisi's book later.
NSC: MIA. Where was the NSC? asks former Iraq weapons inspector David Kay, at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on pre-war intelligence reported on by the New York Times:
"Every president who has been successful, at least that I know of, in the history of this republic, has developed both informal and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him things are in fact telling him the whole truth," Dr. Kay told the Senate intelligence committee at a hearing called to discuss the findings of the Sept. 11 commission.
. . .
Dr. Kay added: "The dog that did not bark in the case of Iraq's W.M.D. weapons program, quite frankly, in my view, is the National Security Council."
. . .
Dr. Kay did not identify Ms. Rice by name in his often-impassioned testimony. But his remarks were clearly aimed at her performance and reflected a widespread view among intelligence specialists that Ms. Rice, perhaps Mr. Bush's most trusted aide, and the National Security Council have never been held sufficiently accountable for intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war . . .
In his sharp attack on the National Security Council, Dr. Kay said that the council had failed, in particular, to provide Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell with the intelligence information they needed before the war about Iraq's weapons capabilities, especially after both had expressed some skepticism about the extent of Iraq's weapons programs.
"Where was the National Security Council when, apparently, the president expressed his own doubt about the adequacy of the case concerning Iraq's W.M.D. weapons that was made before him?" Dr. Kay asked.
"Why was the secretary of state sent to the C.I.A. to personally vet the data that he was to take the Security Council in New York, and ultimately left to hang in the wind for data that was misleading and, in some cases, absolutely false and known by parts of the intelligence community to be false?" he continued. "Where was the N.S.C. then?"
I have the chance to go hear Rice speak later this morning on the subject of "Waging the War of Ideas in the Global War on Terror," where I imagine she will be asked to explain why the NSC under her leadership has been one of the most ineffective in recent memory.
Apologies to Condoleezza Rice, of sorts. It turns out not she, but Pakistani officials were responsible for leaking the name of the al Qaeda computer wizard, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, arrested by Pakistan in July and apparently cooperating with them since then in the hunt for other al Qaeda operatives. Perhaps Pakistan not only wanted to get credit for the arrest, but to prevent the investigation of further suspects enabled by Khan's arrest and cooperation to get very far. Writing in Salon, Husain Haqqani, a former advisor to Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, reports:
But in fact, U.S. officials did not leak Khan's name. The first leak of Khan's name, according to well-informed, reliable sources in the region who spoke on condition of anonymity, came from Pakistani officials in Islamabad -- who perhaps were motivated by eagerness to show off their success in arresting al-Qaida figures or, more ominously, by a desire to sabotage the penetration of al-Qaida that Khan's arrest had made possible. A second Pakistani leak to Reuters, blaming the Americans as the source of the leak, served to absolve the Pakistanis of any responsibility in breaking up new al-Qaida cells -- an important move domestically.
The Bush administration was hardly in a position to haul Gen. Pervez Musharraf's regime over the coals for this disaster. The United States and Pakistan have a twisted relationship in the hunt for al-Qaida. Although it is ostensibly driven by the mutual desire for security, there is clearly a political element to the relationship related to the survival of both the Bush and the Musharraf governments.
Few people likely paid attention last week when former President Clinton accused the Bush administration of contracting out U.S. security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan in its zeal to wage war in Iraq. In an interview with Canadian television, Clinton asked, "Why did we put our No. 1 security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis, with us playing the supporting role, and put all our military resources into Iraq -- which was I think at best our No. 5 security threat?" Clinton also observed, "We will never know if we could have gotten him [bin Laden] because we didn't make it a priority."
One consequence of the decision to subcontract the hunt for members of al-Qaida to Pakistan is that the terrorists appear to be regrouping . . .
Despite Pakistan's past role in propping up the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Bush administration -- in one of its least transparent foreign alliances -- continues to rely on Pakistani military and intelligence services to deliver bin Laden.
Given Pakistan's competing domestic and international interests, it seems highly likely the Bush administration's subcontracting out of the hunt for high value al Qaeda operatives to Pakistani authorities will ultimately backfire, enabling us to win the battle for an operative here, and operative there, but lose the war.
UPDATE: Here's a Newsweek profile of Khan [via Alexander Dryer at Slate]:
[After] the Taliban's collapse . . . Suddenly Khan found himself running a network that kept the group's leaders in touch with their agents and each other. Bin Laden and his inner circle couldn't use radios or satphones for fear of revealing their hideouts. Instead, Khan became their nexus between the caves and the Internet cafes. Some communications arrived from the mountains in handwritten notes or on computer discs delivered by secretive relays of couriers who never saw each other, using dead drops to avoid being traced. Other messages came in electronically from far-flung "cutouts," intermediaries who forward e-mail with no clue what it means, where it goes or who sent it.
Khan's task was to encrypt and pass on orders from the caves. Some he posted on jihadist Web sites; others he would e-mail directly to Qaeda operatives . . .
the other half of Khan's job. He handled operatives' reports and recommendations, collating them, adding related documents, maps and his own observations, and sending them via courier into the mountains. Sometimes he collected intelligence on his own. The senior Pakistani official says Khan made at least six trips to Britain over the past six years, including a brief stint at City University in London . . .
A one man al Qaeda communications hub, Khan may have been one of the most important intelligence gets since the capture of KSM; as with the AQ Khan saga, Pakistan's deliberate outting of Khan's capture to the western and Pakistani media in order to neutralize his value as a cooptee is evidence that Pakistan is truly a wolf in sheep's clothing - al Qaeda's refuge, and at the nexis of al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction proliferation.
MORE: Reader and Daily Kos blogger Marcy "EmptyWheel" Wheeler writes:
In addition to the speculation that the Pakistanis leaked Khan's name, you might consider two other signs of a dangerous partnership. According to this NYT article, we have still not talked to AQ Khan (suggesting that we probably don't know the most damaging aspects of the Pakistani nuclear store), and that Pakistan and the UK have taken the lead on analyzing Khan's laptop--we haven't gotten a look at it yet (suggesting that it is possible that the 4-year old data we got was intended to be a feint away from more pressing information). In short, the most important information we're getting right now is all going through the Al Qaeda friendly ISI.
That New York Times piece by Amy Waldman and Eric Lipton describes the "testy" relationship between the intelligence services of Britain, the US and Pakistan, and goes on to say:
One senior American official said last week that the United States was letting Pakistan and Britain take the first passes through material from computer records seized in Pakistan. "It's not going as fast as we would like," the administration official said. "But the Pakistanis work at a different pace than we do."
The differences in how swiftly the distinct intelligence services have gathered and analyzed the data and whether details are then shared with the public are examples of the varying tactical styles that the United States, Britain and Pakistan have shown as they work together to dismantle the Qaeda terrorist network . . .
The description of Pakistan's new spirit of cooperation has been voiced broadly across the Bush administration and has been backed up with both money and military and espionage equipment. But it remains a delicate relationship; the United States has not sold the Pakistanis the additional F-16 fighter jets it had promised and the Pakistanis have not allowed the Americans to directly interrogate Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, who has acknowledged that he shared nuclear technology with Iran, North Korea and Libya.
. . .
How details of the arrests emerged in the United States and in Britain illustrates that despite the cooperation between the countries' intelligence services, tensions remain. In Britain, the police would not confirm Mr. Hindi's name, saying little more in an official release than that the arrests were "part of a preplanned, on-going intelligence operation" and that the 13 suspects were involved in the "commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."
. . .
As for the timing of the arrests, British officials hinted that they were concerned that the investigation might be compromised by the flurry of news reports about the heightened alert in the United States and the details about the life and activities of Mr. Khan.
The release of Mr. Khan's name - it was made public in The New York Times on Aug. 2, citing Pakistani intelligence sources - drew criticism by some politicians, like Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who charged that this leak might have compromised the search in Britain and Pakistan for Mr. Khan's Qaeda partners. (No officials in Britain, Pakistan or the United States have told The Times on the record that identifying Mr. Khan had such an impact).
It was American officials, meanwhile, who released Mr. Hindi's name, details about his possible connection to Mr. Khan and information on his suspected role as the leader of a three-man team that surveyed the New York Stock Exchange and other buildings in New York.
So, while it was Pakistani officials who leaked Khan's name, it was American officials who leaked Hindi's name.
And is it possible that the US has still not interviewed AQ Khan?* Nor seen Khan's computer? How seriously can this administration take WMD proliferation or the war on terror if it hasn't insisted on doing either of these??
Talk about burying the lede. Where's Anonymous when you need him. . .
*UPDATE: A well informed journo friend who has been covering this issue closely writes that it is indeed apparently true that the US agreed to some sort of deal with the devil, whereby "AQ Khan’s off-limits. The deal with Pakistan is you help us with Al Qaeda and we can conveniently ignore the proliferation bazaar your army is helping AQ run."
Incredible. The nuclear programs in Iran, North Korea and Libya among other places were undeniably aided by AQ Khan, and the Bush administration agreed that he not only basically gets off scott free, but they don't even get to interview him? How does John Bolton sleep at night? His yappy dog shrillness is bad enough, but knowing it's all just hot air is unbearable. Proliferators, proliferate all you want as long as the Bush administration is in charge.
Anonymous claims the US didn't kill bin Laden in 1999 because there were three officials from the UAE in the Afghan camps with him. At stake? Whether the UAE would then cancel a pending purchase of 80 F-16s from Lockheed Martin. [via the New York Times, where Anonymous is no longer so.]
Kanan Makiya has given up on Iraq, Matt Yglesias hears. That is very sad, and very interesting, too. I hope AEI has him come speak about why soon.
On an indirectly related note, go read this summary of one battle for the soul of the neoconservative movement, here. From Francis Fukuyama's critique of Charles Krauthammer's brand of neoconservative foreign policy in the new In the National Interest (via Steve Clemons):
It was at one of these dinners that Charles Krauthammer first articulated the idea of American unipolarity. In the winter of 1990-91, he wrote in Foreign Affairs of the "unipolar moment"; in the Winter 2002/03 issue of The National Interest, he expanded the scope of his thesis by arguing that "the unipolar moment has become the unipolar era." And in February 2004, he gave a speech at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute in which he took his earlier themes and developed the ideas further, in the aftermath of the Iraq War. He defined four different schools of thought on foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and his own position that he defines as "democratic globalism", a kind of muscular Wilsonianism-minus international institutions-that seeks to use U.S. military supremacy to support U.S. security interests and democracy simultaneously.
Krauthammer is a gifted thinker and his ideas are worth taking seriously for their own sake. But, perhaps more importantly, his strategic thinking has become emblematic of a school of thought that has acquired strong influence inside the Bush Administration foreign policy team and beyond. It is for that reason that Krauthammer's writings, particularly his AEI speech, require careful analysis. It is in the spirit of our earlier debates that I offer the following critique.
The 2004 speech is strangely disconnected from reality. Reading Krauthammer, one gets the impression that the Iraq War-the archetypical application of American unipolarity-had been an unqualified success, with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based fully vindicated. There is not the slightest nod towards the new empirical facts that have emerged in the last year or so: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the virulent and steadily mounting anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, the growing insurgency in Iraq, the fact that no strong democratic leadership had emerged there, the enormous financial and growing human cost of the war, the failure to leverage the war to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, and the fact that America's fellow democratic allies had by and large failed to fall in line and legitimate American actions ex post.
The failure to step up to these facts is dangerous precisely to the neo-neoconservative position that Krauthammer has been seeking to define and justify. As the war in Iraq turns from triumphant liberation to grinding insurgency, other voices-either traditional realists like Brent Scowcroft, nationalist-isolationists like Patrick Buchanan, or liberal internationalists like John Kerry-will step forward as authoritative voices and will have far more influence in defining American post-Iraq War foreign policy. The poorly executed nation-building strategy in Iraq will poison the well for future such exercises, undercutting domestic political support for a generous and visionary internationalism, just as Vietnam did.
It did not have to be this way. One can start with premises identical to Krauthammer's, agree wholeheartedly with his critiques of the other three positions, and yet come up with a foreign policy that is very different from the one he lays out. I believe that his strategy simultaneously defines our interests in such a narrow way as to make the neoconservative position indistinguishable from realism, while at the same time managing to be utterly unrealistic in its overestimation of U.S. power and our ability to control events around the world. It is probably too late to reclaim the label "neoconservative" for any but the policies undertaken by the Bush Administration, but it is still worth trying to reformulate a fourth alternative that combines idealism and realism-but in a fashion that can be sustained over the long haul.
Let's hear it for Fukuyama for being one of the first and certainly one of the most thoughtful (erstwhile, perhaps) neoconservatives to offer some soul searching over the failures in Iraq, and to articulate what those failures mean for their theories, for their worldview. [David Brooks tries at times, but always reverts back to putting back on the rose-tinted glasses.]
More on this later, when I am back at a real keyboard.
In the fall of 1999, when I wasn't in Kosovo or Belgrade, I could occasionally be found taking classes with a dozen future US gov't officials, Mossad agents, and a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, etc. at a Harvard grad school class taught by the brilliant US intelligence historian Ernest May. Within two years, I later learned, the Chinese guy had defected to the US in an intricately arranged defection which involved lots of blue US government vans and his wife being at a US embassy party the very same night. Needless to say at the time I was unaware of all of this, just dimly aware of a bunch of people in the class who seemed to be a lot more professionally intelligence-oriented than I, freelance hack, was and a US military guy who also happened to be in my Serbo-Croatian class across the campus. I enjoyed May very much, but I think my instinct about intelligence history is by and large correct and not very academic: you can study it all you want, but intelligence failure is basically the almost inevitable consequence not of a lack of information, but of a failure of imagination. The reason the US didn't foresee Pearl Harbor, Stalin didn't believe Hitler would invade the Soviet Union, the US didn't foresee India's nuclear tests, etc. is not for lack of information. It is about the blindnesses that occur on this side in the processing of information, the inability or unwillingness to yield one's assumptions to think like one's adversary, and the moving of such insights within the bureaucracy. It will make one a big fan of Red Team practices. In any case. The same semester, I was taking classes with current Kerry advisors Ash Carter and Graham Allison, and former Bush I official, Bob Blackwill, now an NSC official overseeing Iraq. Catastrophic terrorism was what we woke up with and what we went to bed with. But the assumption was always WMD terrorism. Not airplanes as missiles, or Amtrak as missiles, etc. Anyhow, in one of those classes, I can't remember any more which one, I studied with the author of this Jersualem Post article:
This week, Chalabi was also scheduled to meet with visiting members of the US House of Representatives, who are in Iraq on a fact-finding mission regarding the UN oil-for-food scandal in which UN officials and foreign governments allegedly earned millions of dollars in scurrilous oil giveaways by Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been conducting the IGC's investigation of the scandal. His investigation was coming to a fore last spring as the Bush administration was seeking to mollify the UN in order to receive its imprimatur on the handover of governing authority to the Iraqi provisional government.
As a result, last May, Robert Blackwill, the National Security Council's point man for Iraq, had his aides put together an options memo on how to marginalize Chalabi. Shortly thereafter, Maliky ordered the raid on Chalabi's offices.
I am not as inclined to the pro-neocon position Glick takes but she's obviously well informed and worth reading.
Another contact sends this LA Times piece, informing us the US government wasn't so blindsided by Maliky's recent arrest warrants on the Chalabis than its spokesmen have indicated.
U.S. officials were informed in advance that Iraq's interim government planned to crack down on Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime Bush administration ally, and did not object to the move, a U.S. official said.
Early this week, administration officials sought to distance themselves from the furor over arrest warrants issued Sunday for Chalabi, a prominent former exile, and his nephew Salem. They said they were unaware of the Iraqi government's plans.
But a U.S. official acknowledged in an interview Thursday that the Bush administration had been aware of the impending move against the Chalabis.
"We knew we were heading in this direction," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We had had discussions with senior members of the interim government, who had basically been telling us what they had uncovered."
In Iraq, the speculation is widespread that the charges were part of an effort by the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a longtime rival of Ahmad Chalabi, to tighten its hold on power.
U.S. officials publicly tried to steer clear of the confrontation, portraying it as the internal workings of a sovereign country. At the same time, the Americans have avoided taking steps — such as consulting on the criminal charges — that would make Allawi's government appear to be under U.S. control.
Meantime, my wonderful friend Andras writes to take issue with my post from yesterday recommending an article in rumorcontrol alleging Iranian support to Moqtada al-Sadr. Andras writes:
I'm writing as a devoted reader of your blog to let Nyou know that I think Rumor Control's stories about the Iranians should not even be dignified as rumors. To be sure, Shiites everywhere (and many non-Shiite Muslims as well) are very upset about what's happening in Najaf and elsewhere in Iraq. But the notion that Muqtada is a tool of Tehran is simply ludicrous. There are people in Washington who have been agitating for a confrontation with Iran for a long time now; the rumors you refer to may originate with them. But they're projecting their own geostrategic
fantasies that have only the loosest of connections with reality in Iraq
and the region. I would give far more credence to Juan Cole's analysis
of the situation - Juan is fluent in Arabic, knows Iraq, has written an
excellent book on Shiites and their politics there and doesn't have to
rely on Fox News for intelligence and analysis about what's happening
between Samarra and Basra.
Andras has much expertise in the Islamic world and in particular in the preservation of Islamic history and culture, etc. I'll yield to his expertise on this region any day. It's obvious some of the usual suspects would like to take the fun and games to Tehran. But even recognizing this, what is not obvious to me is that one can totally dismiss reports from outside of those circles, that Iraqi Shiite insurgents are getting support from elements in Iran. The evidence seems to be coming from a wider circle than the usual suspects who have been discredited on other matters in Iraq/Chalabi etc. This wouldn't seem to be unknowable. Iraq is not North Korea. We have 150,000 US troops there, we have the biggest CIA field office in history in Baghdad, there are thousands of reporters. When will we know just what is Iran's role in Iraq?
A friend has recommended to readers of my site a new site, this is rumor control, that he thinks would be of interest to those interested in foreign and national security policy. Check out their latest scoop on Iranian infiltration of Iraq.
Meantime, don't miss WaPo reporter Doug Farah's latest scoop on Washington's favorite covert arms dealer Victor Bout. Doug writes:
Here is the latest bit on one of Victor Bout's airplanes leased to the U.S. military: It was an Ilyushin with the registration number 9L-LEC, now operating out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, flying the Goma, Kissingani and Kinshasa routes. It was leased to a company called Jetline, who then subleased it to a company called Skylink, where it was used to fly ammunition for U.S. forces. It was withdrawn from Iraq for maintenance earlier this year, then sent on to Congo, where Victor is again operational. Amazing how many lives his companies have!
Anyone know anything about Jetline or Skylink? All information welcome and properly credited.
As for me, we are enjoying one of our favorite corners of the Balkans. And after witnessing the behavior of two stout Austrians who still behave as if this particular corner were under the control of the Austro-Hungarian empire, we can say, we are really happy we won the war! I know this is the opening night of the Olympics and we should all be experiencing an extra dose of brotherly love, but trust me, if you'd witnessed their behavior, you'd be inclined to agree.
Chalabi's US lawyers go on the offensive, against the Jordanian bank fraud charges against him, while Chalabi reportedly returns from Iran to Iraq, and promptly goes missing. Knight Ridder reports the Us-filed lawsuit accuses Jordanian authorities not only of framing Chalabi for embezzlement back in 1989, but of colluding with the CIA on the more recent allegations Chalabi spied for Tehran:
In Washington, U.S. lawyers for Chalabi filed a federal court lawsuit that accused the Jordanian government of illegally seizing Chalabi's bank in 1989 and framing him on embezzlement charges to stop him from exposing illegal arms sales to Saddam.
The smear campaign continued into this year, the suit says, when Jordanian officials enlisted unnamed CIA officials last spring to spread to U.S. reporters "the knowingly false story" that Chalabi had told Iran that the United States was monitoring its secret communications.
Meantime, the New York Times reports, Chalabi continues to pursue his campaign to appeal to Iraq's Shiite insurgents and their sympathizers.
Despite the day's troubles, there were signs that Mr. Chalabi might be enjoying the new attention. In an appeal to poor Shiites, his staff printed posters with his face and the words, "We'll be back to stop the massacre at Najaf," the city where the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has been under siege by American and Iraqi forces since last week.
As for Mr. Chalabi's relationship with Mr. Sadr, Mr. Musawi said that the two men "are not that close. Yet."
Moqtada reportedly receives funds and instructions from Tehran. Whether Chalabi does as well, as some allege, isn't clear, to me anyhow. But as Chalabi apparently sees it, what's good for him, is good for Tehran. If Chalabi serves Iran's interests in Iraq by helping forge some united radical Iraqi Shiite political block in alliance with al Sadr, Iran is gaining an extraordinary hand in Iraqi politics, and Chalabi is acting as Iran's agent even as he acts as his own.
Department of Subtle Hints. This from Agence France Press:
Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Tuesday gave the party of disgraced Pentagon favourite Ahmed Chalabi 24 hours to leave its Baghdad headquarters, the interior ministry said.
Ministry spokesman Sabah Khadim insisted that eviction orders would follow against other parties which he said had seized state property after the fall of Saddam Hussein`s regime in April last year, but acknowledged that this was the first. . .
An official from Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress party charged that the order was part of a continuing conspiracy against the group, after its leader was charged with banknote forgery late last week.
For the moment, Allawi´s Americans appear to be winning.
Housekeeping Note: Am traveling, posting will be even more sporadic than usual. And I can´t check blog email this week.
Swopa and Kevin Drum have some interesting theories regarding today's news about Tim Russert and the Valerie Plame inquiry. I myself don't quite understand why each journalist seems to be being treated differently by the judge. Time's Matthew Cooper has been deemed in contempt of court, and been ordered jailed and Time fined [sentence pending his appeal], and Russert apparently testified in a limited way before the Plame grand jury.
In a decision dated July 20, 2004, but made public today, Judge Hogan ordered both Mr. Russert and Mr. Cooper to testify before the grand jury investigation.
Mr. Cooper refused, leading to today's contempt order. Mr. Russert, on the other hand, agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
In a statement, NBC said Mr. Russert was interviewed under oath by prosecutors on Saturday. NBC said Mr. Russert had not been a recipient of the leak and was not asked questions that would have required him to disclose a confidential source.
"The questioning focused," NBC reported, "on what Russert said when Lewis `Scooter' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, phoned him last summer. Russert told the special prosecutor that at the time of the conversation he didn't know Plame's name or that she was a C.I.A. operative and did not provide that information to Libby."
The investigation does seem very close to a finale.
This story about the kidnapping of an Iranian envoy by an Iraqi group is interesting:
Mystery last night surrounded the fate of an Iranian diplomat after a video purportedly made by an Iraqi militant group said he had been taken hostage . . .
Nine separate forms of identification were displayed for the man, including a passport and a business card identifying him as the "consul for the Islamic Republic of Iran in Karbala".
The group, which called itself the "Islamic Army in Iraq" accused Mr Jihani of provoking sectarian war in Iraq, and warned Iran not to interfere in Iraq's affairs, the television network said. The kidnappers did not appear to threaten the Iranian or make any demands. A group using the same name claimed responsibility last month for seizing two Pakistanis . . .
The kidnap claim is puzzling because the Iraqi government have been the most vociferous in protesting against interference by the Iranians in their internal affairs, and even fuelling the insurgency. The Iraqi press at the weekend reported the arrest of other Iranian agents in Baghdad and published a picture of the identity card of one.
In other words, were the kidnappers proxies for the Iraqi government? Clearly, official Iraq is getting tired of Iranian agents infiltrating Iraq, and sending arms to al-Sadr's insurgent army:
''There are Iranian-made weapons that have been found in the hands of criminals in Najaf who received these weapons from across the Iranian border,'' [Defense Minister Hazem] Shaalan said [on al-Arabiya].
Is the fighting in Najaf the kind of not-so-low intensity conflict the Iranians hope to bog the US down with in Iraq? You bet. And could Iran raise the temperature if it wants to, in the coming weeks? I'm afraid so. Could the Pentagon not see this coming? In fact, I'm told some Iran experts at the Pentagon did see this coming, but didn't feel the message was getting effectively through the bureaucracy here. My concern is different. It's not for lack of envisioning the scenario that seems to be the problem here. It's that as usual in Rumsfeld's Iraq, there's not really the US capability to pro-actively deal with the threat of thousands of Iranian-backed Shiite insurgents and Iranian operatives who have infiltrated Iraq. That's what you call a big fat failure, and it rests solely on the Pentagon chief and his planners.
[Thx to Marcy Wheeler for the link.]
This is a Big Deal leak that compromised ongoing investigations, worldwide. This makes Berger, even Shelby pale into meaninglessness by comparison. Rice admits her fingerprints are on it. I assume the FBI will get right on it. Senator Charles Schumer is asking for an investigation.
UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman has more. He points out, the Pakistani Interior Minister has said he thought Khan could have netted Osama bin Laden. And that this guy had contacted possible terrorists here in the US. I'm still trying to come to terms with how staggering this is, that the administration could have even thought of blowing it for political purposes. If their judgment is truly that bad, they should resign. When will we start hearing from the British about this?
Chalabi admits there were counterfeit dinars to be found at his offices when they were raided this past May. But he says he was collecting them because of his duties as the chairman of the finance committee of the now-dissolved Iraqi Governing Council.
[Chalabi] said he had collected the false currency as part of his role as chairman of the Governing Council’s finance committee.“It is these samples that Iraqi police found when they illegally raided our offices last May,” he said. “The idea that I was involved in counterfeiting is ridiculous and the charges are being made for political purposes.”
UPDATE: Tim Dunlop reminds us what a favorite of the PNAC Chalabi was, while Matt Yglesias notes the continued loyalty of the folks at AEI to him.
L'Affaire Chalabi Returns! Ahmad Chalabi, now the subject of Iraqi arrest warrants on alleged charges of counterfeiting, spends an awful lot of time in Iran.
Ahmad Chalabi, who fell out with Washington over accusations he provided false information on weapons of mass destruction, said he would come home to fight the charges brought by the U.S.-appointed judge which he said were politically motivated.
"I do not know who is doing this and why. They are not patriots. I have done my duty and helped liberate Iraq," he told Reuters from Iran, where he was on holiday.
"I will return in a few days. I can easily prove that these charges are untrue and I intend to defend myself and clear my name."
On holiday in Iran, perchance to meet with his former intelligence chief?
One thing that doesn't hold. Ahmad Chalabi is accusing judge al-Malaky of acting on the orders of the American government. Uh, Ahmad "I demand to speak with Paul Wolfowitz!" Chalabi, who are you to talk?
UPDATE: Here's the latest from the AP. It's not looking good for Ahmad:
The warrants, issued Saturday, accused Ahmad Chalabi of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars, which were removed from circulation after the ouster of Saddam’s regime last year.
Iraqi police backed by U.S. troops found counterfeit money along with old dinars during a raid on Chalabi’s house in Baghdad in May, al-Maliky said. He apparently was mixing counterfeit and real money and changing them into new dinars on the street, the judge said.
And the AP says Chalabi is attending an economics conference in Tehran.
But INC Washington advisor Francis Brooke is quoted in the Times saying Ahmad is indeed on vacation in a mountain cabin outside Tehran. Sort of like the Aspen Institute, Persia, it sounds like.
Francis Brooke, a Washington adviser to Mr. Chalabi, said the charges against both men were categorically untrue and said both would return to Iraq to defend themselves. He said that the elder Mr. Chalabi would leave a vacation cabin in the mountains outside Tehran immediately and that the younger man would return to Iraq later from his home in London. Mr. Brooke assailed the magistrate who issued the charges, calling him an unqualified political appointee of L. Paul Bremer III, the former chief administrator of Iraq.
"Unqualified political appointees" of certain American officials? Again, I don't think this is something INC officials want to be accusing anybody else of!
Meanwhile, while Ahmad Chalabi is being accused merely of counterfeiting, nephew Salem Chalabi is in potentially very serious trouble:
The charges against the younger Chalabi, Salem, appear more serious, alleging his involvement in the killing of Haithem Fadhil, a director general of the Iraqi Finance Ministry, in June.
"They should be arrested and then questioned,'' Judge Maliky told The Associated Press. "If there is enough evidence, they will be sent to trial.''
If tried and convicted, Salem Chalabi, 41, could face the death penalty, the judge said. Capital punishment was restored by Iraqi officials on Sunday. His uncle, if tried and convicted, would face a sentence to be determined by the judges. One Iraqi newspaper, Al Ghad, reported that the case against the senior Mr. Chalabi was initiated by a complaint by the central bank, and that the other case followed a suit lodged by an individual who was not identified. The newspaper said Mr. Fadhil had been auditing the Chalabi family's financial holdings and real estate in Iraq.
The death penalty just happened to be restored on Sunday, the day of these charges? [One thing I will grant Chalabi's supporters. The fact that both Chalabi, Ahmad and Chalabi, Salem were the subject of arrest warrants on totally separate and unconnected charges, on the same day, by the same judge, while they both happened to be out of the country, does have the faintest whiff of politicization about it.]
One thing is clear: it is war between two old rivals of the Iraqi exile community, Messieurs Allawi and Chalabi. And Allawi seems to want the Chalabis to leave Iraq for good.
P.S. It occurs to me that the Chalabi affair could be rich fodder for Iraq's first reality TV show. [Next week: Chalabi tries to forge an alliance with the young firebrand, Moqtada al-Sadr. Can the Saville Row Shiite and the rebel cleric find common ground? Stay tuned.]
P.P.S. Spencer Ackerman proposes the obvious solution. Allawi could dispense with the whole Chalabi matter in one swift move, by extraditing Chalabi to Jordan. And perhaps store up useful credits with the Hashemite monarchy next door. Why do we still think Chalabi will slip out of this one? [Next week: Chalabi plots his comeback from the prison camps of the East Bank of the River Jordan . . .]
Slow Boats. Check out the incredible anti-Semitism of Jerome R. Corsi, PhD, the co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Corsi has admitted to posting under the handle "jrlc" at FreeRepublic.com from whence these hate-filled statements come. From "Media Matters for America" [via Kevin Drum]:
• Corsi on "John F*ing Commie Kerry": "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"
• Corsi on Islam: "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion"
• Corsi on Catholicism: "Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press"
• Corsi on Muslims: "RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together"
[Click here to read a full set of Corsi's FreeRepublic posts.]
Of the KKK type of crowd you would expect the Republican party, if not the FreeRepublican party, to have tried to put back in the closet. If they don't seriously make efforts to disassociate themselves from these people soon, it would seem they are really trying to keep the Republican party a big tent, welcome to all the bigots out there.
UPDATE: I assume National Review's Rich Lowry didn't get the memo?
UPDATE: Oh yeah. And the sources for the book are retracting their statements.
P.S. Then again, a confirmed eugenics backer is running as the Republican Congressional candidate in Tennessee:
[James L. Hart] insists his beliefs have nothing to do with racism and everything to do with "favored races" from Europe and Asia and "less-favored races" from Africa. To achieve his goal of a country populated by "favored races," Hart proposes eliminating both welfare and immigration.. . .
"Every person who opens the door — as long as they're white — I'll say, 'I'm James Hart. I'm running for Congress. My name will be on the ballot in the Aug. 5 Republican primary.'"
Isn't this kind of hideous racial supremacy theory and its consequences that the US entered World War II to defeat?
UPDATE: Corsi stands by all his "comic" comments at FreeRepublic (via Atrios).
I give the neocons a lot of flak; so it's only fair I point out that the American Enterprise Institute hosted a really superb event this morning on Darfur, that went so far beyond the coverage and the headlines, it educated people who think they know something about the situation. AEI's top notch military analyst Tom Donnelly moderated a panel that included John Prendergrast of the International Crisis Group, Ronald Sandee of the Netherlands Ministry of Defense, William Kristol, and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). Wolf is just back from a fact finding trip to Darfur; he showed a highly disturbing homemade video he and Sam Brownback took of their visit to the camps, of interviews with refugees and rape victims, you can see the actual Janjaweed on camels surrounding the camps, and see the utterly desolate burned villages. Most disturbing you can see and hear the roar of helicopters and planes that are being used to fly in the supplies the Janjaweed have used to kill almost 50,000 people and displace a million from their villages, which they then burn. As Donnelly pointed out, no militia has a fleet of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft; that has all the earmarks of support of the central government in Khartoum. Kristol pointed out, this is a humanitarian crisis caused by a political problem (the Khartoum government), not by say a natural disaster; therefore the solution must address not only the extraordinary humanitarian suffering, but the underlying political problem, perhaps ultimately by pursuing regime change, but in the interim by severe pressure on the Khartoum government. Sandee made clear that Khartoum is truly a radical Islamist sponsor of terrorist groups, training camps, and atrocities, that has ties to all the baddies (Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, radical Islamist groups in Pakistan, etc.). Prendergast said, you don't need lots of US or British troops; the Bush and Clinton administrations have trained African forces to do what's needed right now -- send in peace enforcement troops made up of the African Union, assisted logistically perhaps by the US and Britain. Wolf is pushing the administration to declare Darfur a genocide. He said that the administration simply saying it would electrify the world. Wolf said, he read Samantha Power's book, and he doesn't want to wait for her to have to write another book next year about why we didn't do anything about this genocide. He said, the lives of the people of Darfur have every bit as much value as the lives of people in Europe and the US. When he meets the victims of these atrocities, he said he thinks of his own five children and nine grandchildren, and how they wouldn't have anywhere to go. Wolf is truly heroic, he is right, and I commend him. I don't have time to write everything now, but meantime, AEI promises to get a full transcript up later today. Keep checking this site if this interests you.
Victor Bout, the arms dealer with more blood on his hands than anyone else on earth, has not one, but two contracts with the Department of Defense, reports Doug Farah, here.
Seems like Victor Bout has not one, but two contracts with the DoD, one with the U.S. Army and one with the Marines. They run through the end of the year, and haven't been cancelled because of legal issues involved. I find it hard to believe Victor would actually sue, but who knows. An American contractor (whose name I do not yet have) subcontracted out the work to Bout. The business is apparently being handled by Victor's brother, Sergei, while Victor remains in Moscow. There have been several high level meetings at State Department and DoD to try to figure out how to get out of the contracts, which everyone now seems to agree are poison. But is seems a contract is a contract, even with a wanted criminal with an Interpol "Red Notice" and arrest requests, whose assets have been frozen by both the United Nations and the United States. Talk about iron-clad! More as it becomes available.
You just couldn't make this stuff up. Seems the State Department and Defense Department might want to consult some new lawyers. I mean, there's "illegal" regarding stuff on the small contractual level, like, we can't get out of this contract without being vulnerable to a lawsuit, and then there's ILLEGAL, like, he's on an Interpol wanted list as a war criminal!!! With this logic, I guess this is how you get Abu Ghraib.
And I cannot emphasize enough how lucky we are to have Doug Farah blogging his investigative finds at his own site. If this nexis of investigative journalism and human rights interests you, his site is must-check every week.
More on the developing anthrax investigation. Today the FBI searched homes belonging to MD and bioterror expert Dr. Kenneth Berry in upstate New York and New Jersey. I've written about it below.
What strikes me is, nothing in his biography suggests Berry had the skills, expertise or experience to make or process the anthrax in the letters.
A couple interesting points from his biography however.
In 1997, Berry drew up this scenario of an anthrax attack on San Francisco for use at a bioterror preparedness conference his organization, Preempt, held. It's interesting, involving as it does anthrax threats called into news organizations. But it's worth remembering, this is the type of exercise national security types use all the time to plan response.
At 07:30AM this date, a group known as "The Friends of Yousef" (a group supported by the HAMAS Terrorist Organization) called in a threat to CNN's San Francisco Bureau. The group informed the network that they are prepared to make multiple airborne releases of a large quantity of an "allegedly" new strain of anthrax. The medical community believes that the new strain is resistant to many antibiotics. The terrorist group stated that the anthrax release is set to occur over many areas of San Francisco if their demands are not met. The faction's demands are $500 million in U.S. gold bullion and the release of Ramzi Yousef and his two co-conspirators from prison within 48 hours or the anthrax releases will occur immediately following that deadline.
The initial call was taken at the news station and transferred immediately to the CNN Bureau Chief, who taped the call and informed the authorities.
Reliable sources indicate that a small group of scientists from Eastern Europe and Central Asia have formed liasons with the HAMAS, a radical Islamic extremist organization that calls for the eradication of Israel. It is reported that this group of scientists has developed this bio-agent for the terrorist market . . .
Here's the whole scenario.
A second interesting thing: On September 25 and September 28, 2001, Berry applied for two patents for bioterror detection and defense systems. That was a few days after the first batch of anthrax letters were sent to news organizations.
Key Point: Here's an educated guess. The person who made the anthrax is not the same person who mailed the anthrax letters. It was carried out as some sort of pact between two or more "bioevangelists" who believed the US needed to be woken up to the bioterror threat.
UPDATE: This from the New Jersey Star Ledger today has more interesting:
Neighbors said Berry took his family to breakfast at the nearby Sand Dollar Pancake House as the [FBI] search proceeded.
Later in the afternoon, Berry was arrested at a motel in Point Pleasant Beach following a domestic dispute in which the doctor allegedly assaulted four family members, police said. He was released on $10,000 bail last night from the Ocean County jail, a jail spokesman told the Associated Press.
In Chadwick, agents removed garbage bags filled with bulky contents from the bungalow, according to a neighbor. Authorities also removed boxes with clear plastic bags in them . . .
Berry's father, in an interview late last night at his home in Newtown, Conn., said the FBI was making his son a scapegoat for a botched investigation.
"Hey, here's a guy being shafted by the FBI," said William C. Berry, a retired financial director who now serves as president of PREEMPT. "It's just buying time because they have nothing on anthrax. You are looking at a setup."
Point Pleasant Beach police said last night that officers responding to a 911 call at the White Sands Motel discovered Berry being detained by an off-duty police officer and a motel employee.
Berry allegedly assaulted four family members, police said. His relationship to the four was not immediately known.
Five persons died and at least 17 were sickened after anthrax- laced letters, postmarked Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001, were sent to two Democratic senators and media organizations. The letters were processed at a postal center in Hamilton Township -- finally reopened this year after a costly decontamination -- and may have been sent from a mailbox in Princeton. The attacks prompted the closure of many government buildings and rocked a nation still reeling from the 9/11 terror strikes.
Over recent weeks, authorities have appeared to ramp up their efforts to crack what ranks among the most frustrating cases in FBI history.
For several days last month, they shut down labs at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. They have reinterviewed former researchers from the Frederick, Md., base and even drained a nearby pond looking for discarded lab equipment.
Federal agents have logged more than 270,000 hours on the case, conducting more than 5,279 interviews, according to Weierman. Thirty FBI agents and 13 postal inspectors continue to hunt for clues.
Most attention so far has focused on another medical doctor, Steven J. Hatfill, described as "a person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft but never charged.
From 1997 to 1999, Hatfill worked at Fort Detrick, the Army center that originally housed the anthrax strain sent in 2001. He has proclaimed his innocence and is suing the government and the New York Times.
Neither Hatfill nor Berry could be reached for comment yesterday. Berry's Web site says he presented a bioterrorism paper at Fort Detrick in January 1997, and, according to Berry's father, the two men know each other.
The father described Berry as exhausted and upset. He said his son has been interviewed before by the FBI because of his counterterror expertise.
"They have been on him for three years. They have no leads," William Berry said from his farmhouse, near Danbury.
Kenneth Berry, a father of seven who has been married twice, now teaches emergency room skills at a hospital affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, his father said. Born in Teaneck, Kenneth Berry moved with his family to Switzerland at age 5. They returned to New Jersey, living in Wayne, and then moved to Connecticut.
The attention of the FBI is not all that Berry shares in common with Hatfill. They have foreign medical degrees, an evangelism for bioterror preparedness, and a flair for self-promotion and even hyperbole in their quests to become bio- defenders for the country.
Years before 2001, each man gave extensive interviews warning how bioterror attacks might be attempted, and how to thwart them . . .
Berry's Web site also cites forensics experience that included the crash investigation of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. That was questioned yesterday by a spokeswoman for James Kallstrom, the former FBI official who headed the crash probe.
"He had nothing to do with it," Vicky Loughman, Kallstrom's spokeswoman, said of Berry.
Licensed as a physician in New York state, Berry lists a 1983 medical degree from the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine. Three years ago he quit as director of emergency medicine at the Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville after a scandal.
Berry and two others were charged in 1999 with forging the will of a fellow doctor who had died of a heart attack the year before. The common-law wife of the deceased doctor eventually was sentenced to five years in prison on forgery charges. Berry pleaded guilty in May 2000 to a disorderly conduct charge and paid $300 in fines and court fees . . .
The forgery episode did not derail Berry's counterterrorism efforts. According to his Web site, he spoke at a June conference in Sweden, advocating a network of air sensors to alert the population to bioterrorism agents and filtration systems in federal buildings such as the White House and CIA headquarters.
Housekeeping. Apologies blog has been slow, and will be even slower. Have been gathering string, conducting interviews with people connected to Chalabi, certain interesting individuals I cannot name, etc. No less than two separate channels helped me locate one such individual via a man who runs one of those book stalls along a river in a European city, and by god, he had the phone number I needed. gathering string. I am headed back to Europe next week, unfortunately most likely via a funeral of a remarkable lady, Eleanor Webers Kay. Born in 1905, Eleanor was the child of a couple who had emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine at a time when it was still part of Germany to work in the beer factories of St. Louis. The eldest of 10 children, she, a Catholic, married my grandfather, son of a Jewish refugee from Poland. It was a love match not initially approved by his parents anyhow, but it lasted from the 1930s until he died in 1996. They had a gorgeous child, my mother. My grandmother and grandfather both were the children of refugees, but she was always willing to tell us the stories my grandfather was reluctant to tell, in particular the one about the time his parents went back to Europe and Palestine in the 1930s on a ship to try to get his uncles to leave before the coming war. The diaries and photos from that trip I now have, with the Hebrew writing on the back of the photographs of the great great uncles and their families in Palestine. My grandmother has lived 99 extraordinary years. When I post a photo of her, you will gasp, she was that beautiful. She has seen all of her three grandchildren's weddings, and already has six lovely great-grandchildren. We will all miss her terribly.
New break in the anthrax investigation? This from the Associated Press:
Federal agents investigating the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks searched homes Thursday belonging to the founder of an organization that trains medical professionals to respond to chemical and biological attacks.More than three dozen agents, some in protective suits, combed through two homes in this upstate New York village at the same time as similar search occurred in New Jersey.
Property records list the New York homes as the past and present addresses of Dr. Kenneth Berry, 48, who founded PREEMPT Medical Counter-Terrorism in 1997. It was not immediately known why the agents searched the homes. Berry is a bioterrorism expert who once advocated the distribution of anthrax vaccine.
In New Jersey, agents searched a lagoon-front bungalow and hauled out garbage bags that neighbors said appeared to be filled with bulky contents. Authorities also removed boxes with clear plastic bags in them. Two sport utility vehicles remained parked outside the home Thursday, along with two white rental vans.
It was not immediately known who owned the property in Dover Township, about a half-hour north of Atlantic City.
An FBI spokesman in Washington said the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service were searching multiple locations in Wellsville and Dover Township as part of the anthrax probe.
"There is no present danger to public health or safety," Joe Parris, FBI supervisory special agent said.
Anthrax-laced envelopes were mailed in the fall of 2001 to news media and government offices, including those of Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Five people were killed and 17 sickened, further rattling a nation already on edge after Sept. 11.
FBI spokeswoman Debbie Weierman said authorities have conducted 5,200 interviews in connection with the attacks. She said 30 FBI agents and 13 postal inspectors are currently devoted solely to the investigation.
In a 1997 USA Today interview, Berry said: "We ought to be planning to make anthrax vaccine widely available to the population starting in the major cities." The remarks were made soon after the Pentagon announced it would begin inoculating all 2.4 million military personnel against anthrax.
Over 30 FBI agents friom Buffalo, Maryland and Pennsylvania closed down two streets in Wellsville because of what they call an "anthrax investigation incident." They are searching the Pearl Street home of a Wellsville resident and his old apartment on Maple Avenue. Agents have removed boxes and bags from the apartment and were searching through the resident's home with white glove. More updates to follow on www.wellsvilledaily.com. [Wellsville] Daily Reporter photo by Kathryn Ross.
More on Dr. Kenneth Berry:
Buffalo News (New York)
March 9, 1999HEADLINE: DOCTOR CHARGED WITH FORGING WILL
A Jones Memorial Hospital emergency room director was accused last weekend of forging the will of a deceased colleague.
Dr. Kenneth Berry, 41, was charged with two counts of second-degree forgery, state police said. Berry allegedly signed the forged will of 46-year-old Dr. Andrew Colletta, who died of an apparent heart attack last May.
Berry was arraigned in Wellsville Town Court and released on his own recognizance pending a March 17 court appearance.
The hospital's board of directors will wait until court proceedings are over before deciding what action to take against Berry, officials said.
Allegany County prosecutor Terry Parker said investigators believe the will was signed after Colletta's death.
And:
NBC NIGHTLY NEWS
June 14, 1997HEADLINE: LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO BETTER PREPARE FOR FUTURE TERRORIST ATTACKS
REPORTERS: STAN BERNARD
JOHN SEIGENTHALER, anchor:
The bombing in the Oklahoma City has also heightened the fear of other terrorist acts in the United States. Today, experts from the medical, military and law enforcement communities were trying to figure out how to be better prepared for the next terrorist threat. NBC's Stan Bernard has that story.
STAN BERNARD reporting:
A hymn for those who died and suffered in acts of terrorism opened the Philadelphia meeting. It was a forum of officials from Washington and citizens, many from medical institutions and police and fire agencies. They are trying to improve the response to threatened acts of domestic terrorism. The Oklahoma City tragedy, while the worst domestic terrorist act, was just one among many incidents discussed here. The serin gas attack in Tokyo's subway was brought up. So was the false alarm outside the Washington headquarters of the B'nai B'rith, which appeared to be a biological threat.
The organizers of the Philadelphia meeting said what America needs now is better training at the local level for thousands of medical and emergency services personnel.
Dr. KENNETH BERRY (Academy of Emergency Physicians): For any response to be successful, it must begin at the local level, since response time is the critical factor.
BERNARD: He called for a program which would eventually train hundreds of thousands of personnel across the country. It would start with 200 being trained and they would train 2,000, and eventually 200,000. They would have to learn how to protect themselves while trying to save others. Congressman Curt Weldon is chairman of a subcommittee looking in to the terrorist threat.Representative CURT WELDON (Pennsylvania): We in the security committee see two major threats emerging. One deals with missile plethoration and the other deals with the threat of terrorism, and both of them involve weapons and mass destruction . . .
You will remember the 1997 B'nai B'rith bacillus cereus incident was also of great interest to another subject of interest in the anthrax investigation.
Amazing the people who were on the DoD payroll as consultants to be protecting the country from bioterror have turned out to compose the small pool of suspects in the crime of killing Americans with anthrax.
Berry was a consultant on WMD to the Defense Department, and the FAA, and a part time pilot. But how did he ever presumably get access to anthrax?
New and improved ways to harm our country:
Bush misspeaks during signing ceremony: 'New ways to harm our country and our people'
President Bush spoke Thursday during a White House signing ceremony.WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush offered up a new entry for his catalog of "Bushisms" on Thursday, declaring that his administration will "never stop
thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people."Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," Bush said.
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
No one in Bush's audience of military brass or Pentagon chiefs reacted.
Ain't it the truth.
[Thanks to my friend Sharon Fisher for the clip.]
I usually try not to think about Ralph Nader. The past few months, I have occassionally let myself be convinced that, surely Nader will drop out of the race once he's satisfied he's made his point. But listening to him on NPR's Diane Rehm show this morning, I became livid. If this guy seriously can't comprehend that living under George W. Bush is qualitatively different than being led by Al Gore or John Kerry, he's dumber than Dubya. If he in his heart of hearts concedes there's a difference, then his staying in the race is nothing short of evil. Nader represents the kind of perversion of the far left that one more often sees in Europe, where it has on occasion blurred at the edges of the political spectrum with the excesses, destructiveness and hatred of the hard-right. I am not a poll watcher or public opinion expert; for that go see Ruy Teixeira's indispensable site. But I am hoping and praying that Democrats realize now is the time to unite behind the candidate.
Were we right? ask The New Republic's intelligence reporters Spencer Ackerman, John Judis and Massoud Ansari, regarding their article "July Surprise?" predicting Pakistani arrests of high level Al Qaeda figures during the Democratic National Convention.
But some American and Pakistani intelligence and counterterrorism officials do question the timing of the announcement. After his arrest, Ghailani's Pakistani captors, with assistance from FBI officials, set to work getting him to talk. While they had little initial success, a source privy to the interrogations says, "It might have taken awhile, but he would ultimately have broken down," at which point Ghailani might well have shared information, such as the names of Qaeda associates, that the Pakistanis could have acted on. But, before that could happen, according to an ISI officer, FBI officials, who had initially insisted on keeping the arrest secret, told officials in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's government that Islamabad should announce Ghailani's capture . . . [An ISI] official and another ISI official believe that the driving factor behind the announcement was U.S. politics. "What else could explain it?" the second official says.
Worse than useless.
At a Senate hearing on the [9/11] commission's findings, the commission's staff director, Philip D. Zelikow . . . suggested that the commission believed that there was little room for compromise on the essential powers that needed to be granted an intelligence director.
"Creating a national intelligence director that just superimposes a chief above the other chiefs,'' he said, "without taking on the fundamental management issues we identify, is a step that could be worse than useless."
Bush tried to implement a sham cosmetic reform instead of doing what the commission really recommended. What a con.
I'm sure we're all shocked, shocked! that Halliburton got $1.66 billion in illegal contracts from the Iraqi oil fund under a shady deal arranged by the CPA. The money was supposed to go the Iraqis, not to Dick Cheney's old friends:
Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.
Most of the money is for two controversial deals that originally had been financed with money approved by the U.S. Congress, but later shifted to Iraqi funds that were governed by fewer restrictions and less rigorous oversight.
For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept . . .
Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton, was paid $1.66 billion from the Iraqi money, primarily to cover the cost of importing fuel from Kuwait. The job was tacked on to a no-bid contract that was the subject of several investigations after allegations surfaced that a subcontractor for Houston-based KBR overcharged by as much as $61 million for the fuel.
If there is one preeminent reason to get rid of this administration it is Dick Cheney, and the hideously corrupt group of people he has helped enrich from Saudi Arabia to Texas.
Journalist Eric Umansky is running his Cuba diaries over at Slate. A fresh-eyed look at the harshness and desperation underneath the languid, tropical veneer:
. . . I go to see a foreign correspondent in Havana with whom I had gotten in touch before arriving. I'll call him Dennis Hopper. We go out to the hallway to speak, since Hopper and his colleague say their place is bugged. "Man," says Hopper, "this place is so fucked up. You think it's just another Third World getaway spot with nice beaches, because it's hot here and people complain about the economy. But underneath, man, it's fucking East Germany. I know, you don't think like that. You won't think like that. It took me a long time and I was burnt. But trust no one here, man. No one."I temporarily postpone my search for dissidents. . .
Go read.
Iran's ambivalent relationship with Al Qaeda, as described in this interesting Los Angeles Times piece:
Despite its periodic crackdowns on the terrorist network, Iran has served as a refuge for Al Qaeda operatives suspected of plotting attacks in Europe and the Middle East and of playing a central role in the Iraqi insurgency, European investigators say.
Investigations in France, Italy, Spain and other countries since the Sept. 11 attacks point to an increasing presence in Iran of Al Qaeda figures, including suspected masterminds of this year's train bombings in Madrid and last year's car bombings of expatriate compounds in Saudi Arabia . . .
But Iran's complex politics and secretive policies have made it difficult to determine the nature of any relationship between Iranian officials and the terror network, investigators say.
As Osama bin Laden's movement has reconfigured since 2001, Iran has become an intermittent refuge for kingpins who have gained stature and autonomy while Bin Laden has faded from the limelight, European officials say . . .
European investigators think Iranian officials have alternately pursued and tolerated Al Qaeda because the group serves as a tool for Iran's geopolitical interests in neighboring Iraq and against key foes: the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
A fascinating piece, worth reading, and noteworthy as well for the fact that it is sourced to European intelligence officials. I've just finished a long piece on US policy towards Iran that won't see daylight for a couple weeks, but which has had me immersed in interviews on the issue for the past couple months really. And one conclusion I've drawn in it is that, once again, the US won't really have European support for serious pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program. In the end, it's highly unlikely key European states and Japan are willing to give up their consumption of Iranian oil, for the sake of pressuring Iran as part of multilateral action to give up its nuclear program. The implications for whoever wins in November are stark.
Pakistan, the gift that keeps on giving. Pakistani forces have managed to arrest two more high ranking al Qaeda suspects in eastern Punjab province!
"In addition to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, whose bounty was $25 million, we have captured another most wanted suspect with a bounty on him running into the millions of dollars," the minister, Faisal Saleh Hayyat, said.
He said both suspects were of African origin but refused to identify them or their nationalities.
Four Egyptians and a Libyan on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists are believed to be in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Each of them has a $5 million bounty on his head in connection with the embassy bombings.
Osama bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, is also from Egypt. He and the al-Qaida chief are believed hiding along the Pakistan-Afghan border, far from Punjab province.
Hayyat's announcement followed news that at least six al-Qaida suspects, including a Syrian, have been arrested in separate raids in recent days.
Kevin Drum is skeptical about the timing of all these arrests being accidental.
Given that hundreds of workers in New York and Washington and Newark have just been jerked around based on intelligence gleaned from the recent Ghailani arrest that turned out to be more than two years old, I am skeptical that these arrests will necessarily benefit our incumbent in any case. Any al Qaida arrest is a good thing, whenever it comes.
UPDATE: But now Newsday's Knut Royce is reporting that an al Qaeda operative has told British intelligence that an attack is planned for September 2.
The former senior National Security Council official said he was told by British intelligence that they are interrogating an al-Qaida operative who confirmed that financial institutions are being targeted and that an attack was planned for September," Royce reports. "The former NSC official, who asked to not be further identified, said that the al-Qaida operative in British custody, while confirming that financial institutions were at risk, did not know which financial institutions were being targeted. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
More: Blogger glassfrequency sends a provocative scenario put forward by former CIA and State department counterterrorism analyst Larry Johnson on PBS' The News Hour tonight:
"But our reaction to this, Ray, is setting up the ultimate cyber-terrorist attack where in the future all the terrorist has to do is put together a very elaborate plan-- well produced with some key graphics showing that they know about a target, have surveilled it, and then put a threat in it. All they have to do is phone it in, and we start shutting down cities. They don't even have to do anything to put themselves at risk of getting captured; yet what we are seeing is that they can shut down cities."
Larry Johnson
3 August 2004, PBS Newshour
(interviewed by Ray Suarez)
My initial response: An interesting scenario, but the fact is we didn't shut down our cities because of this threat. Indeed, people showed up at work at the very buildings that were described as targeted. How to balance real risk with risk of perceived risk?
Yet More: Even prominent bloggers are being targeted!
Matt Yglesias wonders if Bush really ought to question Kerry's alleged dearth of achievements:
While John Kerry was serving as an officer in the United States Navy, leading men in a shooting war and winning an armful of medals in the process, Bush was a male cheerleader and fraternity president at Yale. He later went on to use family connections to land a spot in the Air National Guard, duty from which he took ample time off to run losing political campaigns. Kerry became a leader in an influential movement, a candidate for office, a successful prosecutor, the Lieutenant Governor of a medium-sized state, and then a U.S. senator during a period when Bush was letting alcoholism nearly wreck his marriage, doing something with drugs he refuses to answer questions about, and running a variety of businesses into the ground, losing his dad's friends a bundle of money in the process . . .
The president, meanwhile, doesn't read the newspaper. Or his daily intelligence briefings. Or the reports of government commissions. Not even the executive summaries!
I thought being a faux-cowboy underachiever was the whole schtick that Bush was running on anyhow? [Granted that the underachievement may be Bush's most authentic quality.] I had not known however that Bush was a cheerleader.
The Bush administration has voted to kill the crucial "inspection and verification" component of a nuclear non proliferation treaty:
In a significant shift of US policy, the Bush Administration has announced that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty to ban production of nuclear weapons materials.
For several years the US and others have been pursuing the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons.
At an arms control meeting in Geneva last week the US told other countries it supported a treaty, but not verification.
. . .
Arms control specialists said the change in the US position would greatly weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. They said the US move virtually killed a 10-year international effort to persuade countries such as India, Israel and Pakistan to accept some oversight of their nuclear production programs.
This administration is insane. I have no words.
Hard right conservatives and neocons have always disdained arms control treaties saying "Why bother? They can't be verified." But by killing the verification component of this treaty which would ban production of nuclear materials, they have surely made that a fait accompli. To what end? It surely couldn't hurt, and it's not like the US has such a good track record of intelligence on WMD issues in India, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, or Libya.
"The State Department and Pentagon have begun making plans for how to provide protection, transport, and logistical support to a possible peacekeeping mission in western Sudan," the New York Sun reports:
A senior State Department official told the Sun over the weekend that a larger peacekeeping operation could be assembled for Darfur and ready for deployment by the end of August, coinciding with the deadline for Sudan's compliance with the U.N. resolution. Part of the work now for American diplomats and military planners will be to draw up options for how large a force will be needed to deliver most of the aid the international community is prepared to send to refugees in Darfur and end the Janjaweed's campaign of terror against the refugees already forced to leave their homes. To date, the U.S. Agency for International Development has estimated that 20% of American aid is reaching its target.
Two important points. First, there's a big difference between a peacekeeping operation to help assist the delivery of humanitarian aid, and one to "end the Janjaweed's campaign of terror against the refugees." The right definition of the underlying real cause of the crisis, and the right mandate, force size, and firepower for peacekeepers to be effective and protect themselves and the vulnerable are essential. Bosnia and Somalia offer case studies for where there was a failure to do this. Despite being in the midst of a brutal war, UN peacekepers in Bosnia were only initially mandated to help protect delivery of humanitarian aid, and the result was them becoming ineffectual witnesses refusing to intervene to protect tens of thousands of people killed in horrible atrocities before their eyes. The US mission to Somalia was initially supposed to only provide assistance for the delivery of food aid; gradually US forces decided the famine was really the result of a turf war between warlords, not a real shortage of food. The proper definition of the real problem is essential from the get-go. Any mission that failed to forcefully ensure the Janjaweed are really disarmed would probably be too little.
Secondly, this contingency planning is better than nothing, but is less than it may sound. There are contingency plans for lots of contingencies that are not acted on. It doesn't mean that there is any will to really intervene. In addition, it is important to note that essentially, contingency plans are being prepared for the possibility that the US military could be involved only in the lift and logistics for an international peacekeeping mission to Darfur. Essentially we'd only be the airline.
All that said, it is encouraging that some sort of international force may be being prepared to go in sooner than later, since one thing the people of Darfur do not have is time.
The source for the recent alarm about possible terror attacks planned on financial targets in DC, New York and New Jersey may be a trove of documents and computers seized by Pakistani forces during the arrest of the Tanzanian al Qaeda suspect a week ago, the Washington Post reports. In particular was found evidence of sophisticated surveillance of specific buildings, including by al Qaeda operatives posing as couriers and delivery men:
The fresh intelligence that led to yesterday's extraordinary terror alert comes from documents discovered after Pakistani and U.S. forces broke up an al Qaeda cell in Gujrat, Pakistan, eight days ago, U.S. intelligence officials said yesterday.
One of the men arrested in that raid led authorities to the documents, which contained the startling details of al Qaeda surveillance of corporate and government targets in Washington, New York and New Jersey.
Officials from several U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies huddled virtually round-the-clock Friday, Saturday and Sunday to discuss the fast-emerging information, government sources said, assembling intelligence from the arrested al Qaeda operatives and translating and culling through the documents.
"This is definitely a nail-biter," one law enforcement official said.
The information that emerged confirmed that al Qaeda continues to plan operations and conduct surveillance against targets inside the United States . . .
It was unclear yesterday whether the new documents, which a senior U.S. intelligence official called "a treasure trove," were plucked from two laptop computers recovered from the hideout in Gujrat where the al Qaeda operatives were arrested after a shootout July 25 . . .
The joint Pakistani-U.S. raid netted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as five other Pakistani and African al Qaeda suspects. U.S. intelligence sources said the most important new information came not from Ghailani but from one of the other al Qaeda associates, who led them to the cache of documents in recent days . . .
Another senior U.S. intelligence official said the new information comprises a virtual playbook of the tradecraft al Qaeda surveillance teams use. It details, for example, the use of phony couriers and delivery people to get inside the buildings, intelligence officials said.
This is really one of the most insightful pieces I've read about al Qaeda operations planning in a while. Worth reading.
UPDATE: On his superb blog, WaPo reporter and author of Blood from Stones, Douglas Farah writes that the U.S. nearly nabbed Ghailani three years ago, in Liberia, where Ghailani was then living under the protection of Charles Taylor:
In November 2001, the Defense Intelligence Agency had multiple source, reliable intelligence reports that it could score a major blow against the al Qaeda network that had just carried out 9-11. Their reports said Khalfan Ghailani, the senior al Qaeda operative arrested last week in Pakistan, was hiding out in Gbatala, Liberia, under the protection of Charles Taylor. This was just two weeks after my initial story on al Qaeda's ties to the blood diamond trade. Gbatala was the ultra-secure base of Taylor's ill-named Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), housed right next door to Taylor' s sprawling private farm.
With virtually no forces in the area, the Pentagon ordered a small U.S. Special Forces team carrying out a training operation in neighboring Guinea, to prepare a snatch operation. With Ghailani were three other suspected al Qaeda terrorists, including Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, Ghailani's partner in the West Africa diamond buying operation. The two had also worked together in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. The other two were not identified.
The team prepared its mission and was placed on high alert. But, with no other assets on the ground and no one in the area who spoke Krio or was not obviously a foreigner, final reconnaissance and recognition of the target was not able to be achieved. After about a week, the group stood down, and were rotated to a different location. (For more details, see pp. 82-83 of Blood From Stones). It would have been a different al Qaeda today if the operation had been able to proceed and had nabbed the two. Fazul went on to participate in the Mombasa bombings and other attacks. Ghailani returned to Afghanistan after West Africa, then resurfaced in the al Qaeda cell in Pakistan that was planning multiple attacks on the United States.
Ghailani was one of several al Qaeda operatives from the East Africa operational wing of al Qaeda to move to West Africa in the weeks following the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi . . .
Talk about the nexis of failed states and terrorism. It couldn't be more explicit in this case, which Farah has done more to expose than anyone and which still seems to be meeting resistance in some quarters.
It's hard to keep all those investigations straight. Now UPI's Richard Sale is reporting yet another one -- an alleged DIA investigation of the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group which was created after September 11 by Doug Feith. "The investigation is trying to determine if the two-man unit leaked sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, which passed them on to the government of Iran, Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials said," Sale reports. But the article spends much more time detailing what we pretty much already know -- this group's repeated briefing of officials with the White House and Office of the Vice President, outside of normal intelligence channels. And the DIA spokesman tells Sale it's not accurate to say it's conducting an investigation per se. Update: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous suggests this story is based on "intel rumor" more than fact, a rumor he suspects is sourced by Pat Lang, the former DIA official . . .
For anyone expecting a slow August in Washington, think again. It's come in with a bang. I'm constrained from discussing all I'd like to at the moment. Suffice it to say, I suspect that will change. In any case, I have an article due now, a sick grandmother, and a nasty post-Convention cold to boot. Let's hope things look better in the coming days. More after I file.
