McClatchy: US trying to open a dialogue with Sadr.

BBC: Mladic aide arrested in Bosnia.

For anyone else wondering just how the CDC became aware of the condition of this person who flew with drug resistant TB on his European honeymoon, and wondered about the coincidence of him being from Atlanta where the CDC is headquartered, the AP has the answer: his new father in law works at the CDC:

The honeymooner quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was identified Thursday as a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injury lawyer whose new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB.

Bob Cooksey would not comment on whether he reported his son-in-law, 31-year-old Andrew Speaker, to federal health authorities. He said only that he gave Speaker “fatherly advice” when he learned the young man had contracted the disease. [...]

The CDC had no immediate comment on how the case came to the attention of federal health authorities. ...

How did his name get leaked? Did he leak it himself? More from the WP suggests that the fact that the TB-plagued Speaker's father-in-law works for the CDC may be a coincidence (but probably explains how the CDC got his cell phone number in Rome).

Update: Law enforcement apparently released his name to the media.

Behold: the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2008 (.pdf).

More from the Post. "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has demanded a legal review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program for terrorism suspects as part of its version of the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill. ... Another Senate provision, which also appears in the House-passed intelligence bill, would modify the practice of telling only the chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees about the most sensitive operations, such as the warrentless domestic wiretapping involving terrorism suspects that began almost immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The committee's version would require that all panel members be notified of such briefings and be told about the 'main features' of such intelligence activities, including covert actions."

NYT: "The committee rejected by one vote a Democratic proposal that would essentially have cut money for the program by banning harsh interrogation techniques except in dire emergencies, a committee report revealed."

Just Out: a short piece on the demise of the Iran Syria Operations Group, and an interview (reg. req.) with a member of a delegation of American Christian leaders who recently met with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

WP: UN approves Hariri tribunal.

AP: Guantanamo detainee commits suicide.

The Post's Chris Cillizza: Zoellick's appointment as World Bank chief leaves McCain without a policy director.

AP: Boeing subsidiary helped CIA extraordinary renditions, ACLU says.

A reader sends this link. Staggering. The term "enhanced interrogation" and many of the approved methods come from the Gestapo, no exaggeration.

Andrew Sullivan: "The phrase 'Verschärfte Vernehmung' is German for 'enhanced interrogation'. Other translations include 'intensified interrogation' or 'sharpened interrogation'. It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as 'enhanced interrogation techniques' by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their 'enhanced interrogation techniques' would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff ... Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. ... "

NYT: Advisors Fault Harsh Interrogation Methods. More here.

Newsweek: Plame was covert, Fitzgerald says.

State, unplugged. Until a few weeks ago, Price Floyd was director of media affairs at the State Department, a department in which he'd served for seventeen years. Check out his oped upon leaving the public diplomacy job in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:

To turn a famous Hollywood movie quote on its head: What we don't have here is a failure to communicate.

Since 9-11, the State Department has undertaken an unprecedented effort to reach audiences both in the U.S. and overseas to explain our foreign policy objectives. My former office there arranged more than 6,500 interviews in the past six years, about half of those with international media. On any given day, senior department officials, including the secretary of state, were doing four or five interviews.

Yet during this time, poll after poll showed an alarming trajectory of increased animosity toward America and this administration in particular, both here and abroad.

This contradiction -- reaching a larger audience than ever before to explain our foreign policy goals and objectives, while the support for those policies fell -- underscores the gap between how our actions have been perceived and how we want them to be perceived.

We have eroded not only the good will of the post-9-11 days but also any residual appreciation from the countries we supported during the Cold War. This is due to several actions taken by the Bush administration, including pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (environment), refusing to take part in the International Criminal Court (rule of law), and pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (arms control). The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and the continuing controversy over the detainees in Guantanamo also sullied the image of America.

Collectively, these actions have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. That is the policy we have been "selling" through our actions, which speak the loudest of all.

As the director of media affairs at State, this is the conundrum that I faced every day. I tried through the traditional domestic media and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media -- Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat -- to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words.

I was not a newcomer to these issues. I had served at the State Department for more than 17 years, through the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, numerous episodes of the Middle Eastern peace process and discussions in North Korea on its nuclear programs.

During each of these crises, we at least appeared to be working with others, even if we took actions with which others did not agree. We were talking to our enemies as well as our allies. Our actions and our words were in sync, we were transparent, our agenda was there for all to see, and our actions matched it.

This is not the case today. Much of our audience either doesn't listen or perceives our efforts to be meaningless U.S. propaganda.

We need a president who will enable the U.S. to return to its rightful place as the "beacon on a hill" -- a country that others want to emulate, not hate; a country that proves through words and deeds that it is free, not afraid. ... ...

Worth reading in full.

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball: Iran's Department 9000.

FT: Zoellick frontrunner for the World Bank. "Mr Zoellick, 53, a former US trade representative under Mr Bush, has widespread experience of and high-level contacts with Europe, China, Latin America and Africa. He was heavily involved in the peaceful reunification of Germany and played a leading role in efforts to revive the Doha trade round. US officials cautioned that the final decision on the successor to Mr Wolfowitz had yet to be made. The other candidate was said to be Robert Kimmitt, deputy US Treasury secretary."

NYT: Westerners abducted from Jabr's Finance Ministry.

AP: Tehran charges three Iranian Americans.

The US and Iranian ambassadors to Iraq meet for talks in Baghdad:

The United States and Iran held the first high-profile, face-to-face talks in nearly three decades today, adhering to an agenda that focused strictly on the war in Iraq and on how the bitter adversaries could work to improve conditions here.

The meeting between Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker of the United States and Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi of Iran — held in the offices of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad — produced no agreements nor a promise of a follow-up meeting between the two nations, officials said.

But Mr. Crocker told a news conference that the talks “proceeded positively.” [...]

Mr. Crocker told reporters that he “laid out before the Iranians a number of our direct, specific concerns about their behavior in Iraq.”

Washington has repeatedly accused Tehran of meddling in Iraq, including training Shiite militiamen in Iran and shipping lethal weaponry into Iraq for use in militia attacks against American troops.

Mr. Crocker said he told his Iranian counterpart that these activities “need to cease.”

There was no immediate comment from the Iranian delegation after the talks, but Mr. Crocker said the Iranians were focused on “mechanisms, if you will, and principles rather than the detailed security substance that we need to see improvement on.”

He added: “The Iranian side did not respond in detail to the points I laid out, nor did they have specific issues to put on the table beyond those that I mentioned and which we dealt with in the discussion.” [...]

Mr. Crocker said the Iraqi government planned to invite the United States and Iran to another meeting. ...

The meeting reflected a significant shift in President Bush’s approach toward the Iranian government.

The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Iran after the 1979 Islamist revolution and the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran. The Bush administration insisted that Tehran must abandon its plans to enrich uranium before direct, high-level negotiations could take place.

But in recent months, the administration began to soften its opposition to diplomatic contact, particularly over Iraq.

Critics of the administration have urged President Bush to engage its main regional rivals in the Middle East — Iran and Syria — in direct talks on shared concerns, as had the Shiite-led Iraqi government, which maintains close ties with Tehran.

Today’s meeting followed two recent, superficial encounters by high-level American and Iranian officials, one at a regional conference in March, attended by the State Department’s Iraq envoy David Satterfield, and the other at a ministerial-level conference this month, attended by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. ...

More from the Post:

... The Iranians, Crocker disclosed, have suggested a tri-lateral security mechanism that would include U.S., Iraqi and Iranian efforts. Crocker gave few details about that proposal but said he was referring it to Washington for consideration.

In a separate meeting with reporters, Qomi said he told Crocker that Tehran would train and equip the Iraqi army and police to create "a new military and security structure," the Associated Press reported. He did not provide details of that plan or how the Americans responded to the offer.

Crocker said the meeting focused solely on the situation in Iraq. No other matters were on the agenda, including the contentious issue of Iran's nuclear program or Iran's recent detention of a handful of U.S. citizens.

Crocker also added that the Iranian ambassador proposed a second meeting. The United States will consider that, he said, but the "purpose of this meeting was not to arrange other meetings."

Qomi told an AP reporter after his news conference, that he expected such a meeting within the month. ...

Boston Globe: Iran-Syria Operations Group dismantled. Nick Burns didn't like it:

... A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, said the group was shut down because of a widespread public perception that it was designed to enact regime change. State Department officials have said that the focus of the group, known as ISOG, was persuading the two regimes to change their behavior, not toppling them.

R. Nicholas Burns , the State Department's Under Secretary for Political Affairs, revealed in a written statement to a senator this week that the group was disbanded in March 2007 in "favor of a more standard process" of coordinating between the White House, the State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence agencies.

Burns' statement came in a written response to questions submitted by Senator Robert P. Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat.

Shortly before ISOG was shut down, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a major initiative to engage Iran and Syria in a regional effort to stabilize Iraq, reversing long standing US policy against high-level contact with the countries. ....

I agree with Farah's take here. The ABC report has misled people to think the US is pursuing regime change towards Iran. I don't think that is the case.

S.O.S. from Christopher Lydon's pioneering RadioOpenSource here.

WP: White House fall shift on Iraq?

... Bush also hinted at a possible change in military strategy, saying on three different occasions that he liked the recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), to shift U.S. troops from combat to a training mission.

Although the president was initially tepid to the panel's report last December, Bush said its ideas now appeal to him because they offer "a kind of long-term basis" for stabilizing Iraq. "I believe this is an area where . . . we can find common ground with Democrats and Republicans," he said. ...

More here.

Defense secretary Robert Gates to U.S. Naval Academy grads: Press is not the enemy.

The Senate Intelligence committee releases a new part of its Phase II investigation (.pdf): Report on Prewar Intelligence Assessments about Postwar Iraq. Chairman Rockefeller: "Today’s report shows that the Intelligence Community gave the Administration plenty of warning about the difficulties we would face if the decision was made to go to war. These dire warnings were widely distributed at the highest levels of government, and it’s clear that the Administration didn’t plan for any of them. The Intelligence Community believed an American invasion would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists and that an occupation of Iraq would fuel Islamist extremism. They also assessed that al Qaeda would seek to re-establish its presence in Afghanistan while the United States was diverted in Iraq." (Link fixed).

More from the Post.

NBC previews the next section of the Senate Intelligence committee's Phase II investigation, to be released Friday.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence announces it has passed its fiscal 2008 Intelligence Authorization Bill. "The Committee emphasized four legislative themes in its bill: providing greater flexibility and authority to the Director of National Intelligence; requiring greater accountability from the Intelligence Community and its managers; improving the mechanisms for conducting oversight of intelligence programs; and reforming acquisition procedures."

Go read Spencer Ackerman's "The Bitter End," on the troops, the surge, and politics.

From the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence to be Dual-Hatted as Director of Defense Intelligence":

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell signed a memorandum of agreement this week that establishes a role for the under secretary of defense for intelligence as the director of defense intelligence within the Office of the DNI.

In his role as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr. will continue to report to the secretary and deputy secretary of defense. The responsibilities and the authorities assigned to this position by the secretary will not change. ...

WP: GSA chief violated Hatch Act, report says. "'Her actions, to be certain, constitute an obvious misuse of her official authority and were made for the purpose of affecting the result of an election,' investigators said in a copy of the 19-page report obtained by The Washington Post. 'One can imagine no greater violation of the Hatch Act than to invoke the machinery of an agency, with all its contracts and buildings, in the service of a partisan campaign to retake Congress and the Governors' mansions.'"

I'm with Kevin Drum. I'm skeptical of the spin on this story, in particular the contention that this reported covert action is about a committed Bush administration policy to destabilize the Iranian regime. It seems the named sources in the piece are saying if such a covert action has been authorized, it's about in fact the US deciding NOT to confront Iran militarily -- but rather, to try to gain leverage as it moves towards negotiations with Tehran, which limited to Iraq security are set to begin Monday in Baghdad. And who would like to sabotage that? Hardliners in both Washington and Iran -- potentially, some of the former may be ABC's sources, with an eye to a report that would get Iran to call off the talks. While there may be covert components to the effort, the fact that the US is trying to pressure Iran economically is hardly a secret -- Nick Burns and his counterparts at the Treasury Department have been going around the world openly for more than the past year trying to get countries and even individual banks on board to sanction Iran economically. Propaganda and disinformation ops? Perhaps. (Kevin makes a case that this may be an example of that; remember the CIA or the Pentagon for that matter aren't supposed to place propaganda in the US press. Apparently the White House did not try to dissuade the ABC report, so maybe it didn't mind the publicity, to cover its own right flank going into controversial talks with Iran next week? In any case, it takes little effort to make the Iran regime paranoid and strike out against all sorts of people who seemingly have nothing to do with any velvet revolution plan). I am also skeptical of an earlier ABC Brian Ross report that the US is indirectly funding Iranian Baluchi separatists in order to attack or destabilize the Iranian regime. What I hear -- the US is not working with Iran's separatist groups and is very much holding them at arms length. Among the disappointed and frustrated, those in Washington eager for the US to work with Iran's dissident and minority groups to overthrow the regime, including those groups. "They want to do something to interfere with the Iranians' ability to build its program," suggests a former Iran hand of the administration's rationale for the reported covert action. "They will never go far enough to be effective. ... The political goals are limited." As much as it would prefer to be dealing with a different Iranian government and would like Iran to have a different sort of government in the future, as best I can tell, the Bush administration is not seriously pursuing a policy to destabilize the Iran regime to the point of regime change, but is moving to to pressure this regime to change its behavior. What's being reported are seemingly alleged attempts to get leverage in that larger effort.

Update: Check out Steve Clemons here.

Just Out: "The Scion: Kurdistan's Man in Washington," a profile of Qubad Talabani:

Qubad Talabani is one of those cultural anomalies who somehow seem like natural creatures of Washington. Few twenty-nine-year-olds are trusted to serve as the top envoy of a foreign entity to the United States, as Talabani—the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani—is by Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. But Talabani—slim, goateed, English-accented, a onetime Italian-car mechanic with an American wife—handles his duties with aplomb, rushing around town in subtle suits to meet with policy makers and power brokers. His most distinctive attribute may be that he represents perhaps the sole triumph to emerge from postwar Iraq: a relatively peaceful region free of foreign troops, eager for American protection and open for business. [...]

Yet although the soft-spoken Talabani is a far less polarizing figure than Chalabi, his intentions are complex. On the one hand, Kurdish political leaders are currently the glue in the American project to hold a unitary Iraq together. On the other hand, many of the positions Talabani advocates in Washington are feared by non-Kurdish Iraqis, and Iraq’s neighbors, as being incremental steps toward Kurdish secession. For instance, foremost on Talabani’s agenda at the moment is Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed city that Kurds consider their Jerusalem. Talabani is pushing the U.S. government hard to honor a provision in the Iraqi constitution calling for a referendum on the city’s status before the end of the year. Iraqi non-Kurds and Turkey oppose the referendum fiercely, and experts warn that both parties could react violently should the city be placed under Kurdish control. In April, the nonpartisan International Crisis Group recommended the referendum be postponed to avoid “the risk of an explosion.” The question that surrounds Talabani and the Kurds is whether their current support for U.S. efforts in Iraq is simply a calculated, tactical move in a long-term play for greater independence. ...

E&P;: McClatchy PNG'd at the Pentagon? Funny thing is their coverage is still better than almost anyone else's. Maybe access is overrated.

WP:

Iran has imprisoned a consultant for philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute programs, according to sources who work with the Columbia University-educated social scientist. Kian Tajbakhsh becomes the fourth dual U.S.-Iranian national to be incarcerated, detained or put under house arrest in recent weeks.

Tajbakhsh was picked up around May 11, although relatives and colleagues learned of his imprisonment only this week, the sources said.

In another sign of U.S.-Iranian tensions, Tehran has refused visas to several Americans invited to two conferences in the Iranian capital next week, Iranian officials and U.S. academics said. Others had visas in their passports revoked.

Analysts suggested that the new tensions may be related to talks Monday in Baghdad between U.S. and Iranian diplomats on Iraq's future.

"There is a clique of powerful officials who have entrenched financial and political interests in Iran's status quo isolation and don't want to see any improvement in the U.S.-Iran relationship," said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Tajbakhsh, 45, has worked with the Open Society Institute in Iran since 2004 and also has done work for the World Bank in Iran, colleagues said. An Iranian government official said yesterday that Tajbakhsh had also advised Iranian ministries and was widely respected as a social scientist.

Iran's outgoing UN envoy Javad Zarif is to represent Iran at talks with the US in Iraq next week. Update: Apparently, Zarif says this is not true.

Marty Lederman responds to a response from Reagan/Bush I DOJ/OLC official Douglas Kmiec: " ... But let's not minimize the underlying offenses: No, they were not attempts to engage in third-rate burglaries, or to manipulate the Department of Justice, in order to influence the outcome of an election or to cover up such wrongdoing. (The U.S. Attorney and voter-fraud-fraud scandals are much closer to the mark on that score.) But the law being violated here -- FISA -- was much more important than the one being violated at the Watergate Hotel, and in some sense the threat to the Constitution is much greater here, too, because, pace the David Frost incident, Nixon did not actually think or argue that the break-in (or most of the cover-up) was legal, whereas the Bush/Cheney/Addington theory of the Constitution would quite forthrightly allow the President to disregard statutes and treaties whenever he thinks they get in the way of how he chooses to prosecute an international conflict. And, as in Watergate, all of this (the electronic surveillance, the torture, etc.) was done in secret, with no opportunity for the other branches or the public to apply the checks and balances that the Constitution contemplates. ... "

Check out Harper's interview with Marcus Stern, the co-author of the the new book -- The Wrong Stuff -- on the Duke Cunningham corruption scandal by the team that won the Pulitzer prize for breaking the story. This website has some excerpts. More from Paul Kiel. (And the book looks really cool, too - great old Hollywood/dime store novel design).

NPR: Critic of Iraq war questions democracy after son's death.

Ignatius: "President Bush and his senior military and foreign policy advisers are beginning to discuss a "post-surge" strategy for Iraq that they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize may be unachievable within the time available."

WP: Iran charges scholar Esfandieri with trying to topple the Iranian regime. "The Wilson Center said the charges had no foundation. 'It's very disturbing. We deny all the charges. There is not one scintilla of evidence to support these allegations,' said Lee H. Hamilton, Wilson Center director and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who once chaired the House International Relations Committee. Esfandiari's husband Shaul Bakhash, a George Mason University professor, also said today that the charges against his wife were 'totally without any basis.'"

Gary Sick adds, "The effort by Iran's security services to transform serious and legitimate scholars into spies is so transparently ludicrous that one is forced to ask what their real motives are in persecuting innocent people, and why the senior leadership of Iran, who know these charges to be false, do not assert themselves in this matter."

Ha'aretz: Bush administration gives Israel green light for talks with Syria, with conditions.

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani at the Mayo clinic for medical treatment. SCIRI/SICI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim in Houston for treatment of lung cancer. The two leading candidates for greater federalism of Iraq in the States for medical treatment.

Update: Hakim apparently is in Iran for health tests. "Mr. al-Hakim flew to the United States on Wednesday for tests after doctors at a hospital in Baghdad detected signs of cancer in one of his lungs. The diagnosis was confirmed at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, officials in the al-Hakim organization said. Mr. al-Hakim left the U.S. early yesterday for Iran, where he will undergo chemotherapy treatment, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. He chose treatment in Iran rather than the U.S. because he wanted to be close to his family and proper treatment was not available in Iraq, party officials said. His choice of Iran also reflected his close links to the Shi'ite theocracy there."

The LAT, Shane Kadidal, and Mike McConnell on proposed changes to the FISA law.

WP: Second life for Iraq Study Group.

AP: "TRIPOLI, Lebanon - After spending hours huddled in basements and bathrooms as gunfire raged nearby, hundreds of Lebanese in this northern port city emerged to cheer on army troops who battled a shadowy Islamic militant group holed up in apartment buildings and a nearby Palestinian refugee camp. [...] The Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. TV station reported that among the dead militants were men from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab countries, underlining the group’s reach outside of Lebanon. ... Fatah Islam is an offshoot of the pro-Syrian Fatah Uprising, which broke from the mainstream Palestinian Fatah movement in the early 1980s and has headquarters in Syria, Lebanese officials say. ... Some Lebanese security officials consider Fatah Islam a radical Sunni Muslim group with ties to al-Qaida or at least al-Qaida-style militancy and doctrine. Others say they are a front for Syrian military intelligence aimed at destabilizing Lebanon. ...

WP: Academics plan boycott of Iran.

WP: SCIRI/SICI leader Hakim in the US for treatment of lung cancer. "In a reflection of Hakim's stature, President Bush authorized immediate transportation to get Hakim from Iraq to the United States, an administration source said yesterday. Vice President Cheney played a role in arranging for Hakim to see U.S. military doctors in Baghdad, who made the original diagnosis, and for the current medical treatment in Houston, the sources said."

Sarkozy names medecins sans frontieres co-founder Bernard Kouchner France's foreign minister. "Mr. Sarkozy is also signaling that he is serious about putting both human rights and outreach to the United States at the core of his foreign policy. Mr. Kouchner is as close as a Frenchman comes to being pro-American." A kind of Holbrookian figure.

Somalia under the warlords. Newsweek's Rod Norland: "How bad is it in Somalia? Bad enough that people fleeing the capital have been reduced to renting trees for shelter. It's the sort of thing that happens when drug-addled warlords roam the countryside, imposing taxes of 50 percent on aid recipients. And the sort of thing to be expected of a government whose prime minister, Ali Mohamad Gedi, has publicly accused the United Nations agency feeding the country of spreading cholera along with food deliveries. And that's the internationally recognized government, which enjoys U.S. support, although it is widely unpopular in southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu."

LAT: SCIRI/SICI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim arrives in the US "for medical treatment." Wonder if that is the only reason he's here.

Check out Anonymous Liberal on a little noticed 2006 US News & World Report story on FBI Director Mueller's role in allegedly pushing back against the administration on warrantless domestic spying and searches on Americans. I've also speculated that Mueller's presence with Comey in the Ashcroft hospital room drama possibly signals that the component of the program that troubled Comey was not the NSA run Terrorism Surveillance Program per se, but FBI run, in other words, that it was about systematically spying on Americans without warrants, as an outgrowth of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Update: A friend sends this along from a chat with Post reporter Dana Priest yesterday:

Brookline, Mass.: Why is it that the FBI, rather than the NSA, figures so prominently in the wiretap testimony?

Dana Priest: Because it's the FBI that requests wiretaps. The NSA carried those requests out. It's the justification for the wiretaps that has been under scrutiny lately and those came from the FBI.

But my sense is that it was the NSA surveillance itself that identified targets for further surveillance. In other words, the calls from targets abroad - non US persons who enjoy no protection under US law from NSA surveillance -- to US persons (who ordinarily under the FISA law would enjoy protection from warrantless surveillance) that identified the US persons to target for further surveillance. And then, who those US persons communicated with, and who those people communicated with. ... It was the communications themselves -- the fact that X called Y, Y called A, B, C; A called D, E, F; D called etc. etc. -- that identified who to target. If the FBI knew who to target before the NSA surveillance spit out tens of thousands of phone numbers, it would be easy enough to get a warrant, right?

Going back and forth with a colleague, I think I have a clearer view of what might have been going on. Cheney/Addington/Bybee/Yoo view was that the President's Article II authorities allowed him to essentially ignore the FISA law. But after the Goldsmith review of late fall 2003, Goldsmith, Aschroft, Comey and Mueller determined that Article II did not authorize the president to ignore the FISA law when it involved systematically surveilling domestic communications of US persons without a warrant. (These are the US persons who presumably made or received calls that were tracked under the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and possibly -- going out a few degrees - the people they communicated with, and the people they communicated with). Let's say Gonzales was not technically lying in his testimony last year. That Comey's problem was with something other than the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- the warrantless NSA surveillance of communications between terrorism suspects (however loosely they defined it) abroad and US persons. I think there were at least other parts of the wider surveillance program that Comey et al would not agree to say that the president had the right to pursue based only on his Article II powers. (Addington et al disagreed, believing that the president's Article II authorities allowed him to essentially ignore any law -- la loi, c'est moi.) So what were the modifications made that satisfied Comey? Some sort of DOJ audit, a "proxy" for the FISA process, apparently. Some sort of paper trail that presumably the Congress could obtain? Something else: when did the White House start briefing the Gang of Eight? Were they read into the parts of the program that went beyond the Terrorism Surveillance Program? Did Comey insist on that? (And what about this, although it would seem to be the wrong agency?)

Marty Lederman critiques the "misguided" contra Comey oped by former Reagan-era Office of Legal Counsel official Douglas Kmiec.

MJ Rosenberg muses on Michael Chabon's The Yiddush Policemen's Union.

Newsweek: Decoding the NSA Surveillance Debate:

[Daniel] Klaidman: . . . What's interesting is that a lot of this theater, while both fascinating and substantively important, has obscured the critical question. What was what it about the NSA domestic spying program that sparked the revolt in the first place? The New York Times, in an editorial Thursday morning, raises the possibility that President Bush authorized the NSA to "intercept domestic e-mails and phone calls without first getting a warrant." The administration has acknowledged authorizing interceptions of coimmunications between people overseas and people in the United States. That would be a huge development, if true. In my reporting, I was never able to get anyone to confirm that. What our sources said was that the program did not impose sufficient legal standards required by the constitution and statutory law. The reformed program essentially required government officials to come up with probable cause before they could start spying. With every new development, it seems a better likelihood that the facts will come out. Fascinating and important stuff.

[Michael] Isikoff: Indeed. As for what precisely was going on here, look at the wording of the statement the Justice Department released Wednesday night:

“In response to questions about press accounts of internal dissent within the Justice Department over intelligence programs, the Attorney General, in his testimony to Congress, relayed that there had not been serious disagreement about the Terrorist Surveillance Program—that is, the NSA surveillance activities publicly confirmed by the President that targeted for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.

“At the same time, the Attorney General acknowledged that there have been disagreements about other intelligence activities, as one would expect. The Attorney General’s testimony on these points was and remains accurate. While the Attorney General provided this testimony in an unclassified setting, it is important to consider that the fact and nature of such disagreements have been briefed to the Intelligence Committees.”

So again, note the wording here. There may have been disagreements about "other intelligence activities." Maybe it's purely domestic interceptions or some variations thereof. But until we know the answer, the debate over what is arguably the biggest single legal issue of the Bush presidency—whether the president engaged in large scale domestic spying outside the orbit of the law—is taking place entirely in the dark.

Editor & Publisher/NYT: Cartoonist's site among targets of pre-GOP convention NY police surveillance. Here's the list of groups and individuals reported on and surveilled by NYPD intel, including Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, Billionaires for Bush, cartoonist Ted Rall, the NYC Independent Media Center, the ACLU, MSNBC, the Sierra Club, NOW, the Federation of East Village Artists, and Grandmothers Against War.

Brookings' Benjamin Wittes on the White House versus the Justice Department:

At least as Comey relates it, this affair is not one of mere bad judgment or over-aggressiveness. It is a story of profound misconduct on Gonzales's part that, at least in my judgment, borders on the impeachable. Put bluntly, faced with a Justice Department determination that the NSA's program contained prohibitive legal problems, the White House decided to go ahead with it anyway. In pursuit of this goal, Gonzales did two things that both seem unforgivable: He tried to get a seriously ill man to unlawfully exercise powers that had been conveyed to another man and to use those powers to approve a program the department deemed unlawful. Then, when Ashcroft refused, the White House went ahead and authorized the program on its own. In terms of raw power, the president has the ability to take this step. But it constitutes a profound affront to the institutional role of the Justice Department as it has developed. The Justice Department is the part of the government that defines the law for the executive branch. For the White House counsel to defy its judgment on an important legal question is to put the rawest power ahead of the law.

Via Balkinization. More on this from Glenn Greenwald.

AP: Specter predicts Gonzales will quit by the end of their investigation.

Marine commanders Charles Krulak and Joseph Hoar in the Post: Torture betrays us too.

Check out Marty Lederman's post this morning speculating on what was the nature of the "program" before Goldsmith and Comey demanded changes.

The Woodrow Wilson Center releases a statement about its Middle East program director Haleh Esfandiari, held in Tehran's Evin prison.

A reader raises a good point. Why were FBI director Mueller and the FBI so involved in Comey's decision-thinking on the NSA warrantless domestic spying program? Was this about a separate component of the program, that involved the FBI spying without warrants on Americans? Not just the NSA? Now that the Senate Judiciary committee anticipates a confirmation process for the DAG nominee, will its members ask to review some sort of list of those specifically targeted and who signed off on it and get a determination of why it was not possible to get a warrant for these people? And to get all the documents involved? Comey was more than adamant in his testimony yesterday that these conservative Republican appointee Justice department officials -- he, Ashcroft, Goldsmith, Philbin -- could find no legal basis for the program until modifications were made. As Marty Lederman says, imagine just how bad it must have been. And Marty worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel until just over a year before the events described, so he's in a position to imagine that scenario pretty vividly.

Update: Did Gonzales lie under oath, when he said Comey did not object to the NSA domestic spying program whose existence the president confirmed? Or was he in fact suggesting that Comey's problem was with a second covert warrantless domestic spying program, one perhaps run by the FBI, such as I outline above?

Update II: After a conversation with a knowledgeable lawyer, I think I have at least a plausible theory of what roughly might have been going on. The NSA program targeted calls from terrorism suspects (however loosely defined) say from abroad to the States, and vice versa, without obtaining warrants, including for the US persons targeted. According to this speculative theory, the presumed second, FBI part of the program - the part that Comey and Goldsmith et al found objectionable, conceivably - then, without warrants, tracked all of the other communications that recipient made and received. How might the program have been brought into compliance when Comey et al objected? If the gov't decided to use the first part - the calls received from a terrorism suspect - as probable cause to obtain a warrant* for all of the recipient's domestic and other communications. The problem? Getting a warrant could presumably cause the FISA judge to question why and how the target was identified in the first place. Maybe they found a way to get around the problem of illegal search and seizure. Just a theory. (*It could not have been to get a warrant, because the program didn't get FISA warrants at all until recently. The NYT article below suggests with Comey's modifications, it just came in for some sort of internal DOJ audit).

As Balkinization's Lederman tells me, the relevant Congressional committees need to get all the documents from the DOJ. "They need to see the documents - about torture, about the NSA spying program, about military commissions, treaties, everything John Yoo wrote. And they have not appeared to be willing to get that. They just back down. Just yesterday, Comey says he can't talk about this, and can't talk about that. This is ridiculous. You don't give away NSA operational capabilities. You go into closed session for that. This is: we want to know what the legal theories were, what the programs were. ... Until the committees see the documents, they're totally speculating. If the Senate really wants to find out what's going on, they must get all the documents before them, and stop this nonsense."

More: NYT: "Mr. Bush allowed new procedures in the N.S.A. program, which officials have said included Justice Department audits, and the eavesdropping continued without the court warrants some legal authorities believe the law requires."

And from the Post.

Balkinization's Marty Lederman: Can You Even Imagine How Bad it Must Have Been?

IraqSlogger reports that Gen. Petraeus is now saying he will not be able to give a definitive judgment of the results of the surge in September.

NPR/Bloomberg/AP: Wolfowitz negotiating resignation deal.

Listening to Comey's testimony again, how can the Senate Judiciary committee not invite to testify, and if need be subpoena Ashcroft, FBI Director Mueller, Andrew Card, and Gonzales and possibly Jack Goldsmith, Patrick Philbin and possibly Theodore Olsen about what transpired that night of March 11, 2004? And when is the Judiciary committee and/or Intelligence committees going to seriously investigate the warrantless domestic spying program and obvious questions over concerns senior DOJ officials had over its illegality? It seems plausible that Goldsmith becoming acting head of the OLC in October 2003 is what led to the DOJ's conclusion that the program as it was conducted did not have a legal basis.

Update: Nice 2004 piece by Dahlia Lithwick, "All the President's Lawyers."

For when the former acting attorney general is not available to give a first hand account of White House aides conspiring to get the signature of a semi comatose Attorney General on the presidential order for a covert domestic spying program deemed illegal by the legal professionals -- 24 has been renewed for two more seasons.

WP editorial: "JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. ... Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. ... The dramatic details should not obscure the bottom line: the administration's alarming willingness, championed by, among others, Vice President Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, to ignore its own lawyers. ... That Mr. Gonzales is now in charge of the department he tried to steamroll may be most disturbing of all."

NYT: "Iraq Attacks Stayed Steady Despite Troop Increase, Data Show."

WP: Bush taps skeptic of Iraq build-up as war czar. I remember his name as having written a book on US intervention --- "Improving National Capacity to Respond to Complex Emergencies: The U.S. Experience," published by the Carnegie commission on preventing deadly conflict in April 1998 -- and note that his wife, Jane Holl Lute, is a noted humanitarian expert, poli sci PhD from Stanford, currently serving as the assistant secretary general of the United Nations for peacekeepeing. In some earlier reporting, I remember learning that Hadley had served on the board of one of the Carnegie institutes, so perhaps he's drawing also from that more technocratic network. In any case, all in all Lute would seem to represent a different pedigree from the usual Bush administration national security pick.

Another reason to worry about Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones: a newly revealed caste system.

Time: Will Bloomberg run for president?

Read this part of the transcript of Comey's testimony today. Then acting attorney general Comey preemptively asked FBI director Mueller to inform the FBI agents providing security outside Ashcroft's hospital room that they not allow Comey to be removed from the room "under any circumstances." And who was Comey worried about? Gonzales:

COMEY: I got out of the car and ran up — literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.

SCHUMER: What was your concern? You were in obviously a huge hurry.

COMEY: I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to that.

SCHUMER: Right, OK.

COMEY: I was worried about him, frankly.

And so I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off.

SCHUMER: At that point it was you, Mrs. Ashcroft and the attorney general and maybe medical personnel in the room. No other Justice Department or government officials.

COMEY: Just the three of us at that point.

I tried to see if I could help him get oriented. As I said, it wasn’t clear that I had succeeded.

I went out in the hallway. Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances. And I went back in the room.

I was shortly joined by the head of the Office of Legal Counsel assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith, and a senior staffer of mine who had worked on this matter, an associate deputy attorney general.

So the three of us Justice Department people went in the room. I sat down…

SCHUMER: Just give us the names of the two other people.

COMEY: Jack Goldsmith, who was the assistant attorney general, and Patrick Philbin, who was associate deputy attorney general.

I sat down in an armchair by the head of the attorney general’s bed. The two other Justice Department people stood behind me. And Mrs. Ashcroft stood by the bed holding her husband’s arm. And we waited.

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.

SCHUMER: But he expressed his reluctance or he would not sign the statement that they — give the authorization that they had asked, is that right?

COMEY: Yes.

And as he laid back down, he said, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. There is the attorney general, and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room. And within just a few moments after that, Director Mueller arrived. I told him quickly what had happened. He had a brief — a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general and then we went outside in the hallway.

SCHUMER: OK.

Now, just a few more points on that meeting.

First, am I correct that it was Mr. Gonzales who did just about all of the talking, Mr. Card said very little?

COMEY: Yes, sir.

SCHUMER: OK.

And they made it clear that there was in this envelope an authorization that they hoped Mr. Ashcroft — Attorney General Ashcroft would sign.

COMEY: In substance. I don’t know exactly the words, but it was clear that’s what the envelope was.

SCHUMER: And the attorney general was — what was his condition? I mean, he had — as I understand it, he had pancreatitis. He was very, very ill; in critical condition, in fact.

COMEY: He was very ill. I don’t know how the doctors graded his condition. This was — this would have been his sixth day in intensive care. And as I said, I was shocked when I walked in the room and very concerned as I tried to get him to focus.

Stunning to think it's Gonzales -- the man who tried to coerce a semi conscious Ashcroft into signing a presidential order in his hospital bed against the wishes of the man formally, legally recognized as the acting attorney general - who wields power as the top law enforcement officer in the country to this very day.

More from the Post.

Via Marty Lederman, here's a transcript (.pdf) of today's extraordinary testimony by former deputy attorney general James Comey before the Senate Judiciary committee. Read it to get a sense of the dimensions to which top administration justice department appointees including Comey, Jack Goldsmith, Patrick Philbin, and ultimately Ashcroft came to believe that the White House did not have a legal basis for the warrantless NSA domestic spying program, after searching hard for one, a belief that informed then acting attorney general Comey's decision not to sign the presidential order that authorized the program as it had been run for almost three years. Comey later resigned. Comey: "I didn't believe that as the chief law enforcement officer in the country I could stay when they had gone ahead and done something that I had said I could find no legal basis for."

Lederman: "Most importantly: Can anyone think of any historical examples where the Department of Justice told the White House that a course of conduct would be unlawful (in this case, a felony), and the President went ahead and did it anyway, without overruling DOJ's legal conclusion?"

AP:

President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was so questionable that a top Justice Department official refused for a time to reauthorize it, sparking a battle with top White House officials at the bedside of an ailing attorney general, a Senate panel was told Tuesday.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he refused to recertify the program because Attorney General John Ashcroft had reservations about its legality just before falling ill with pancreatitis in March 2004.

Comey, the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's absence, said then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card responded by trying to get Ashcroft to sign the recertification from his bed at George Washington University Hospital.

During that dramatic meeting, also attended by Comey, Ashcroft lifted his head off the pillow and appeared reluctant to sign the document, pointing out that Comey held the powers of the office.

Gonzales and Card then left the hospital room, Comey said.

"I was angry," Comey told the panel. "I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general."

The hospital room confrontation had been previously reported, but this was the first time Comey has spoken about it publicly.

Comey is shaking the walls and the trees. Must-see hearing at the Senate Judiciary committee.

Just out: an interview with Armando Spataro, the prosecutor of the upcoming Abu Omar extraordinary rendition trial in Milan.

Newsweek: Voting with their feet.

Via TPM, McNulty resigns from DoJ. More from the Post.

Danny Postel reports on an ominous arrest in Iran.

Some excerpts from German Vanity Fair's profile of the Uzbek dictator's daughter:

In November 2006 she organises a fashion week in the Uzbek capital Tashkent. Mainly her fashion and jewellery is being shown. ... Designers who do not belong to Gulnara's circle of friends, have a difficult time in Uzbekistan. In summer 2004, a fashion designer was forced to let her models walk over the green lawn of an ambassador's residence. None of the hotels in Tashkent was allowed to rent a hall to her. Competition does not exist. In Gulnara Karimova's world. There is only one that she has to tolerate: Her younger sister Lola. In tough competition, they design fashion, open clubs and restaurants in Tashkent in which they regularly show up with their entourage.

Gulnara Karimova got the necessary pocket money for this in 2001 after the divorce from Mansur Maqsudi. After her studies at Harvard, she married the young Maqsudi, son of a rich Afghan family in the USA who, amongst other things, had the general representation of Coca Cola in Uzbekistan. The couple lived with their two children alternatingly in Tashkent and in the villa of the family in New Jersey. The family luck did not last for long. Gulnara fled with the children to Uzbekistan. The anger of the father hit the ex-husband. For months, there was no Coca Cola on sale in Uzbekistan. The possessions of the Maqsudi family in Uzbekistan were confiscated and the family members that remained in the country were deported. Until today, both parties are fighting a war of the Roses for 3-digit million amounts and child kidnapping. ...

The company "Zeromax" in Zug, Switzerland, controls large parts of the billion [dollars] worth [of] oil, gaz and gold business in Uzbekistan. The partner of "Zeromax" explains that Zeromax has nothing to do with Gulnara Karimova. However, a foreign diplomat in Tashkent explains that nobody believes that in Uzbekistan.

Gulnara always likes travelling to Russia. In St. Petersburg and Moscow she celebrates at extensive parties, to which Russian celebrities arrive in numbers, even if she does not appear herself. This happened mid March of this year. Her foundation was supposed to open the project "Various on various" and to present the magazine "Eurasia", which was dedicated to the most important women in Europe and Asia. ... The longest article, however, describes Gulnara Karimova. It also came with a poem book from her. But the President's daughter did not come to her own party and the Russian stars had to celebrate without Googossha, as she was already in Paris with her thoughts. ...

KC Star: Criminal defendants allege prosecution brought by Schlozman politically motivated.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed's Zvika Krieger chronicles the near collapse of Iraq's universities:

... According to Mr. Jawad, the political-science professor, more than 100 courses at the university have been canceled this semester for lack of instructors. At Al-Nahrain University, says Mr. Kamal, some departments have lost all their faculty members.

In addition to assassinations, insurgents have bombed university campuses, killing dozens of students and faculty members. And in their quest to secure sectarian enclaves, militias have made universities throughout the country unsafe for anyone of the "wrong" ethnic group.

The higher-education ministry recently decided to allow students and professors to transfer to other universities in the face of such threats. More than 1,000 academics and 10,000 students chose that option this year. But an even larger number of students, especially women, have stopped going to college altogether, with some universities operating at 10 percent to 20 percent of their usual capacity.

The result is a near paralysis of Iraqi universities. Almost all academic research in Iraq has halted because fieldwork and data collection are nearly impossible. Even the most mundane activities have become a challenge. ...

Many of the professors are trying to flee for their lives:

Topsy Smalley, an instruction librarian at Cabrillo College, in California, got involved with professors in Iraq through a book drive she helped organize for Iraqi universities in 2003. The first flurry of e-mail messages she received from Iraqi professors were thanks for her books. "The Arabs send us terrorists to kill us and destroy our country while the Americans send us books to help us learn," read one.

But the messages soon turned desperate.

"Terrorists are the master of the city," wrote one high-ranking university administrator last December, to whom Ms. Smalley had sent books. "I hate to ask, but I really need your help."

One week later, he wrote: "Yesterday, six persons were killed in my area. Three of them are my close friends. They hadn't done anything. They were killed because they are teachers."

The following week came another message: "Yesterday was the first time in my life I have seen how terrorists kill people. I saw them killing three men in the middle of the street, then they cut their heads and separated the heads from their bodies. It was really horrible."

And in January: "Today one of my friends told me that one of the terrorists was arrested and there was a list of university professors in his pocket. My name was on that list. He confessed his task was to kidnap or kill us."

Ms. Smalley has been desperately trying to help the administrator get a job elsewhere, and has contacted universities in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain, but to no avail."Reaching out counters, but does not erase, the despair and constant worry," Ms. Smalley says in an e-mail message.

As her experience illustrates, the dire circumstances in Iraq have left the majority of Western academics with but one way to help professors: get them out of Iraq.

Groups like the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and the Institute of International Education have devoted much of their energy to resettling Iraqi academics who are at risk. The institute says it used to receive about two requests for help every month from Iraqi academics at the start of the war. It now gets 40 a week.

"We've been doing this since the 1920s," says Mr. Goodman, the institute's president. "Our first rescues were from the Bolshevik Revolution. You would have thought that in the 21st century we wouldn't be still having to do this. But this crisis could turn out to exceed all of those — including South Africa and Nazi Germany — combined." ...

WP: Voter-fraud complaints drove US attorney dismissals.

WP: President Bush authorized US-Iran talks on Iraq.

AP: Iran says it arrested the Woodrow Wilson Institute's Mid East program director Haleh Esfandieri. As the Carnegie Endowment's Karim Sadjadpour tells the AP, "By detaining her, the Iranian government only eliminates an advocate for diplomacy and strengthens the voices of those in Washington who say the regime is too cruel to be engaged." More from the Post.

According to his spokesperson, VP Cheney blesses US-Iran talks on Iraq:

"We are willing to have that conversation, focused on Iraq" at the ambassador level, said Lea Anne McBride, the vice president's spokeswoman. She added that U.S. officials have earlier expressed an interest in such talks.

McBride spoke after Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said that Tehran has agreed to a formal request from the U.S. to talk about security in Iraq during meetings in Baghdad, the country's official news agency reported.

The report said Iran had received the request through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which often acts as an intermediary for the United States in the country.

"Iran has agreed to this [negotiation] after consultation with Iraqi officials, in order to lessen the pain of the Iraqi people, support the Iraqi government and establish security and peace in Iraq," the Iranian agency quoted Mohammad Ali Hosseini, spokesman of Iran's foreign ministry, as saying, according to the Associated Press.

The report said the negotiations would be held in Baghdad.

McBride said she didn't have all the specifics and could not confirm that the United States had formally made the invitation. ...

Bob Ney's high-rolling gambling partner Fouad al Zayat, a.k.a. the Fat Man, wins a court case against Iran over a jet he was apparently asked by Iran to help purchase for them, but never delivered:

... The case centres on a deal that Mr al-Zayat brokered during 2002 with intermediaries acting for Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian President.

The Iranian leader had ordered a £49 million passenger jet through Mr al-Zayat’s companies in Britain, Cyprus and the Middle East.

The deal became [stuck] in a dispute about payments. During a trip to Lebanon in 2004, Mr al-Zayat claims, he was kidnapped at gunpoint by members of the Iranian Revolutionary guard in Beirut. According to reports, he was held in the Iranian Embassy for a week and released only after signing a document agreeing to pay back the money that the Iranians claimed that he owed them. ...

Zayat had been cultivating Ney to try to win US government permission to sell export-controlled civilian airplane parts to Iran. According to one source, Zayat had at one time served as a kind of rep for McDonnell Douglas in the Gulf, while serving more generally as a defense equipment middleman.

Patrick Coolican and Michael Mishak in the Politico: Momentum builds against GOP candidates.

AP: With new pipeline deal, Russia moves to control bulk of Central Asian energy:

... Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of the region's main energy producers, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, agreed to build a pipeline running from Turkmenistan through Kazakhstan and into Russia's network of pipelines to Europe.

The three presidents also said that, with Uzbekistan, they would revamp the entire Soviet-built pipeline network that carries Central Asian gas to Russia.

Along with two oil deals, the new gas agreements are a blow to U.S. and European efforts to construct oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia that would cross under the Caspian Sea, avoiding Russia, and connect to Europe through Azerbaijan and Turkey.

They mean that Russia would control the bulk of Central Asian energy exports, boosting its role as a major supplier of oil and gas to Europe and strengthening Western fears that Moscow could use its energy clout for political purposes. ...

With the new deal Putin signed in Turkmenistan today, "Russia, the world's No. 1 natural gas exporter, would further strengthen its clout by maintaining a monopoly on movement of Turkmen and Kazakh exports to Europe. ... In another blow to Western hopes of securing Central Asian energy shipments that bypass Russia, Putin and [Kazakh president] Nazarbayev on Thursday agreed to expand the existing oil pipeline that carries crude oil from Kazakhstan's Tengiz field to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. Putin also agreed to Kazakhstan's participation in a Russian-controlled oil pipeline that runs from Bulgaria's Black Sea port of Burgas to Alexandroupolis, in northern Greece. The two deals are likely to reduce Kazakhstan's interest in routes connecting with the U.S.-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that carries Caspian oil to Turkey on a route that bypasses Russia." Meantime, at a talk at Brookings the other day, Richard Holbrooke also said Putin is aggressively trying to destabilize Georgia and topple the pro-Western president there.

This reads like a game of telephone gone awry -- or perhaps something a bit different. Kondracke's Plan B, "unleash the Shiites," or the 80% Solution, is an idea that was advocated internally to the administration last fall chiefly by the Office of the Vice President. It's worth considering that Cheney may want to reinforce just such a message on his current trip to Saudi Arabia and the region, that if the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians can't lean on their Sunni brethren in Iraq to make the Iraq gov't of national reconciliation a go, the alternative could be worse for them. Is Kondracke part of the effort to deliver that message, as it were?

You read it here first. Former CIA executive director Dusty Foggo was conspiring to throw a major, approximately $100 million covert air plane contract to his friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, facts now charged in a new 30 count indictment.

As I first reported in March 2006:

As I have already reported, alleged Cunningham co-conspirator #1 Brent Wilkes already got a couple smallish CIA contracts ($5 million to $10 million/year deals each), through a company nominally owned by his nephew and former ADCS and Group W Advisors employee, Joel G. Combs, called Archer Logistics. As I reported in December, one contract dates to 2003 and was to supply water to CIA personnel in Iraq. But sources tell me far larger CIA contracts were in the pipeline, until Wilkes was revealed to be involved in the Cunningham corruption case. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source indicates. "There were several more opportunities on the board when the federal investigation came down on Wilkes. Opportunities worth much more than the $5M or $10 million/year deals Wilkes was used to. The FBI probably knows about these from the raids they conducted, but I wonder if they have shared that information with the CIA." ...

And what were the forthcoming contracts for? According to a source, they were to create and run a secret plane network, for whatever needs the CIA has for secret fleets of planes. ... "I Imagine that since their whole flying operation has been outed, it makes it tough to operate clandestine flights," the source explained. "I bet it would cost a bundle to set up a whole new operation that no one knew about ... How do they operate a secret fleet of aircraft now that everyone knows about the planes we have? If I were high up in the CIA, this would be a big priority for me, and I would need a solution outside the normal range of solutions." Enter contractor Brent Wilkes and Archer Logistics, and perhaps a whole new front company to be invented for the purpose.

In fact, the would-be subcontractor was a company whose head I also interviewed who seems to have blown the whistle on Wilkes and Foggo after getting shaken down by them.

Harper's Ken Silverstein has an interesting story on a Washington firm that seems to be aiding the cause of the first daughter of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov. What he doesn't mention is that the firm, GlobalOptions, is now apparently suing its former partner involved with the Uzbek account. As Legal Times' Emma Schwartz reported April 30 (sub. only):

Neil Livingstone has been the voice of Global Options since he founded the corporate strategy group in 1997 to advise companies and business leaders on industrial espionage, internal investigations, and hostage recovery. But Livingstone's January exit from the company has devolved into a bitter battle in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Global Options sued Livingstone in March, saying he violated his severance agreement by soliciting clients for his D.C. startup, ExecutiveAction. The solicitations, Global Options lawyer Brian Shaunnessy said in court papers, defamed his client by claiming its recent listing as a publicly traded entity created "constraints."

Livingstone fired back in court filings last week, saying his separation came after "more than a year long deterioration" of his relationship with executive Harvey Schiller "over significant differences about the direction of management." Livingstone claims that in lieu of a severance package, both sides agreed he "would proceed to open a new firm," according to court papers filed by his lawyer, Richard Heideman of Heideman Nudelman & Kalik.

Not clear whether the Uzbek account is among those that went over to ExecutiveAction LLC.

Update: Ken does mention the lawsuit, although it seems in the editing to have been relegated to the footnotes. It's there now.

A former employee of a firm closely tied to Nevada governor Jim Gibbons tells NBC that he saw the head of the firm give Gibbons $100,000 in cash and gambling chips. And he's given NBC some photos of Gibbons on the Caribbean cruise he and his wife were on at the invitation of defense contractor eTreppid founder Warren Trepp.

More here, on developments in the investigation of the relationship between Gibbons, his wife, and defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation, that also involves a cruise, this time in Turkey.

Boston Globe: " The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Congress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their remarks transcribed, according to Defense Department documents. [ . . . ] Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress see the move as a blatant attempt to bog down investigations of the war. But veterans of the legislative process -- who say they have never heard of such guidelines before -- maintain that the Pentagon has no authority to set such ground rules." The new guidelines were written up by Robert Wilkie, "a former Bush administration national security official who left the White House to become assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs last year."

Go read Dahlia Lithwick on Alberto Gonzales' appearance at the House Judiciary committee yesterday.

Nat'l Journal's Murray Waas:

The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. ...

The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin's appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove's role in supporting Griffin. ...

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the committee, said he was infuriated that he knew nothing of the existence of the order.

Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel's office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.

Worth reading: Harper's interview with Tara McKelvey about her new book, Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.

Steve Aftergood: Congress Not Told of Covert Action, House intel committee finds.

U.S. intelligence recently undertook a "significant" covert action without notifying Congress, as required by law, the House Intelligence Committee disclosed in a new report on the 2008 intelligence authorization bill.

"The Committee was dismayed at a recent incident wherein the Intelligence Community failed to inform the Congress of a significant covert action activity. This failure to notify Congress constitutes a violation of the National Security Act of 1947."

"Despite agency explanations that the failure was inadvertent, the Committee is deeply troubled over the fact that such an oversight could occur, whether intentionally or inadvertently."

"The Committee firmly believes that scrupulous transparency between the Intelligence Community and this Committee is an absolute necessity on matters related to covert action."

In response to this lapse, the Committee adopted a provision in its authorization bill that would require the CIA Inspector General to audit each covert action program at least once every three years. ...

More from Walter Pincus.

Who conspired in this strange maneuver and its cover up? Was it Gonzales' own idea? Did Harriet Miers have a role? Others?

Rare suicide truck bombing in Irbil, Kurdish northern Iraq today. A correspondent writes that a "huge truck of dynamite exploded and destroyed the [Kurdish Regional Government Ministry of Interior]. Forty people affected." AP: "Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman blamed the attack on Ansar al-Sunnah, a Sunni Arab insurgent group, and Ansar al-Islam, a mostly Kurdish militant group with ties to al-Qaida in Iraq. Ansar al-Islam has been blamed for a number of attacks, including attempts to assassinate Kurdish officials."

Update: More from McClatchy.

David Ignatius:

Abdullah's criticism of the "illegitimate" American presence in Iraq reflects the Saudi leader's deep misgivings about U.S. strategy there. Saudi sources say the king has given up on the ability of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to overcome sectarian divisions and unite the country. The Saudi leadership is also said to believe that the U.S. troop surge is likely to fail, deepening the danger of all-out civil war in Iraq.

The Saudis appear to favor replacing the Maliki government, which they see as dominated by Iranian-backed Shiite religious parties, and are quietly backing former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and ex-Baathist who has support among Iraqi Sunnis. Allawi's advisers say that his strategy is to exploit tensions within the Shiite religious alliance and form a new ruling coalition that would be made up of Sunnis, Kurds and secular Shiites. Allawi's camp believes he is close to having enough votes, thanks in part to Saudi political and financial support.

The Bush administration appears to have little enthusiasm for an Allawi putsch, despite its frustration with Maliki. U.S. officials fear that a change of government in Baghdad would only deepen the political disarray there and encourage new calls for the withdrawal of troops.

The ferment in the region is driven partly by the perception that U.S. troops are on the way out, no matter what the Bush administration says. To dampen such speculation, Bush is said to have told the Saudis that America will not withdraw from Iraq during his presidency. "That gives us 18 months to plan," said one Saudi source.

WP: "The Pentagon announced yesterday that 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades will begin deploying to Iraq in August, making it possible to sustain the increase of U.S. troops there until at least the end of this year. U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working."

Reuters: U.S. charges against anti-Castro militant dropped.

WP:

Iran today detained prominent American academic Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, according to a family member and center president Lee Hamilton.

Esfandiari, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen who has lived in the United States for more than a quarter century, has been under virtual house arrest since last December when the government refused to allow her to leave Iran after visiting her 93-year-old-mother. Since then, she has been summoned repeatedly for interrogations by intelligence officials about U.S. programs on Iran. In particular, she was questioned about Iran programs at the Woodrow Wilson Center, one of Washington's most prominent foreign policy think tanks.

Esfandiari was summoned by the intelligence ministry again today but was then taken to Tehran's Evin Prison, the sources said.

Esfandiari is one of three "soft hostages," all dual U.S.-Iranian nationals, whose passports have been confiscated by the Iranian government, rendering them unable to leave the country.

The quiet measures undertaken by people for months on her behalf sadly do not seem to have worked.

IraqSlogger's Christina Davidson has a nice write up of a shift in Washington language on Syria. Via the Friday Lunch Club.

Phase II.3. From the Senate Intel committee: "The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, and the Vice Chairman, Senator Kit Bond, announced today that the Committee has adopted its Phase II report on prewar intelligence assessments about postwar Iraq. The Committee will submit the report to the Director of National Intelligence for classification review. Following declassification, the Committee will release the report to the public."

AP: Cheney to the Mid East:

Vice President Dick Cheney is reaching out to moderate Arab leaders for help in bringing stability to Iraq, a mission that will include pleas for postwar support for minority party Sunnis.

Cheney departs Tuesday on a weeklong mission to the Middle East, right after a visit to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

While Rice's trip had a wide-ranging agenda that included other tensions in the region, administration officials said Cheney would focus largely on the next steps in Iraq.

Cheney's first stop will be Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Other announced stops include Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Cheney also will visit the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis in the Persian Gulf.

What can Cheney bring to the region that Rice couldn't?

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the trip publicly, said President Bush asked Cheney to go because of his close ties with leaders in each of the four countries.

But some Mideast experts outside the administration suggested that Cheney's visit also might be an attempt to try to clear up what might be viewed as mixed messages from Rice by some leaders in the region.

"Some of these people wonder if Condi Rice really speaks for the president when she decides she's going to talk to the Syrians, or when she agrees to go to a conference that includes the Iranians," said David Mack, a retired diplomat who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and a consultant to the bipartisan Iraq Study group.

"They wonder if the president is going to pull out the rug from under her. The vice president, who is generally identified as having opposed a lot of the things that we've been increasingly doing, can assure them that she speaks for the president as well," said Mack, now vice president of the Middle East Institute, a group devoted to fostering knowledge of the region. ...

In particular, the senior administration official said, Cheney will appeal to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to use their influence to help rein in Sunni violence against Shiites in Iraq as well as charting ways to better protect Sunnis from violence at the hands of militant Shiites.

In other words, nobody knows what Cheney is telling Sunni leaders. But the US hardly has to apologize to Saudi Arabia for meeting with Syrian or Iranian diplomats, given that the Saudi king recently held a state dinner for Ahmadinejad, etc.

NYT: World Bank finds Wolfowitz at fault. "A committee of World Bank directors has formally notified Paul D. Wolfowitz that they found him to be guilty of a conflict of interest in arranging for a pay raise and promotion for Shaha Ali Riza, his companion, in 2005. The findings stepped up the pressure on Mr. Wolfowitz to resign."

Also, FT: Wolfowitz's other top aide, the one who hasn't resigned yet, in new controversy.

Bloomberg:

Turkey's military sent 20,000 soldiers to the country's southeastern province of Sirnak in an operation against the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, CNN Turk said.
Turkish Army units, supported by local paramilitaries and 20 attack helicopters, were searching mountains in the area for members of the armed group, the Istanbul-based television channel said, citing unidentified security officials.
Turkey has fought a two-decade war against the PKK at the cost of almost 40,000 lives, most of them Kurdish. The Turkish government says the U.S. and Iraq aren't doing enough to stop PKK fighters based in neighboring northern Iraq from crossing the border to mount attacks in Turkey.
The PKK seeks autonomy for Kurds in Turkey's southeast from the central government in Ankara. The group is described as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union.

More here. (Thanks to RT.)

Reuters: Wolfowitz aide Kevin Kellems resigns. "One of two key aides to World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz resigned Monday, saying he could no longer effectively help advance the mission of the institution under the current leadership crisis. Kevin Kellems, who was an advisor to Wolfowitz since 2002 at the Pentagon and throughout the planning of the Iraq war, told Reuters he was leaving 'for other opportunities.'" Kellems was a former spokesman for Cheney and aide to Sen. Richard Lugar. More from the AP. (Via the Friday Lunch Club.)

Tim Shorrock: Tenet's financial backstory.

Ha'aretz: Foreign Ministry conducting project to prepare to renew talks with Syria. "Livni asked the ministry's Political Research Center to prepare a detailed intelligence survey of Syria's demands, which she has since received. She also asked ministry officials for a detailed map of the risks and opportunities entailed in talks with Syria. One of the key assessments she received was that Syria is not yet militarily ready for war with Israel and that its desire for negotiations is genuine. Haaretz reported last August that Livni had appointed Yaki Dayan, the former head of her diplomatic bureau, to coordinate staff work on Syria. Dayan submitted his conclusions a few months ago, and ministry sources said that the current project is meant to update and expand Dayan's work, inter alia in light of the war's results. Livni is very close to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Rice has recently promoted a change in American policy toward Syria, as evidenced by her meeting last week with her Syrian counterpart, Walid Moallem, during a regional conference on Iraq. However, Rice told Israel that this discussion dealt solely with Iraq." Last week Israel's ambassador to Washington Sallai Meridor told a press conference that Israeli intelligence observes Syria accumulating missiles and digging tunnels, preparations that resembled those undertaken by Hezbollah months in advance of the conflict last summer, but whether such preparations were defensive or offensive was not yet clear.

Update: Dennis Ross: Talk to Syria:

. . . Paradoxically, I see two competing impulses among former and current Israeli security officials: Israel cannot wait for Hamas or Hezbollah to continue to acquire the military means that will make another round very costly to Israel. Alternatively, now is the time to reach out to Syria.

The former impulse is driven, not only by the need to minimize the cost of what Hamas or Hezbollah can impose on Israel, but also by the perception that Israel must restore its deterrent. Proving itself in a new conflict with either or both would have an effect on Syria and potentially even Iran -- or so this thinking goes. The latter impulse is that another round with Hezbollah may well be inevitable, but this time Syria will not be allowed to stoke the conflict and sit on the sidelines with impunity. As such, Israel, according to the military officials I spoke with, could be at war with Syria in the coming year, and if Syrian President Bashar Assad is willing to talk, shouldn't Israel engage Syria and see if a war can be averted? . . .

It's been strangely underreported in the US press what's clear listening to Israeli officials, that Israel is anticipating fighting a new war with Hezbollah in the coming year that would if it happens likely take the war to Syria. That is why the urgency over the issue of whether talks or no talks with Syria.

In response to my Nat'l Journal story on tensions between the Turkey and Iraqi Kurds over the PKK camp in northern Iraq, Ankara-based TurcoPundit writes in correspondence to me:

Force is not sufficient but necessary to deal with the PKK. Washington and Baghdad can't and Iraq Kurds won't do that. It's Turkey's problem. Ankara should do it.

U.S. should let Turkey intervene militarily against PKK in Northern Iraq. This intervention may take place with Washington’s consent, cooperation, reservations. It can be limited in geographical scope, duration and type of force used. Turkey must show utmost care not to harm the civilian population...

Otherwise, if Turkey is forced to intervene without US cooperation and “permission”, the relationship may suffer very seriously. Some very nasty things may happen. US prestige may suffer even further and it may be the last nail in Iraq projects' coffin.

It is 50 months now and US did not do anything against PKK in N Iraq. Penalizing Turkey for 2003 is unjustified and incomprehensible. Turkey contributed a lot to the US effort in Iraq. (see these for more details, esp. Fata and Fried). ...

PKK cannot afford to resist or attack the U.S. forces. Iraqi Kurds cannot afford to alienate Washington. They may protest a little but it is impossible for them to do anything against U.S. wishes or interests. Similarly Iraqi Kurds cannot respond to a Turkish intervention against PKK. They will know that otherwise Turkish forces will end up at Kirkuk.

Turkey, for her part, may offer a limited, conditional phased amnesty for PKK militants. An additional economic incentives program for private sector investment in the Kurdish region is possible. Lowering the 10 percent threshold in Turkey's election system which makes it impossible for Kurdish parties to participate in Turkish parliament may be lowered. More cultural rights is desirable. More political space to Kurds should be permitted. (even allowing them to voice demands for autonomy and independence provided they do not resort to violence).

I know what I suggest is not easy and risk-free. ... Turkey is rebuilding N Iraq, giving them electricity, consumer goods and outlet to the world in return for unbelievabe ungratefulness. Enough is enough.

US is on the verge of losing Turkey. Delaying tactics will no longer work. When the currecnt political crises and elections pass, number one issue will be a Turkish intervention to N Iraq.

My sense reporting that piece was that the US was more or less kicking this issue down the road at its own peril, and underestimating the potential for this issue to become a crisis, and the depth of anger on the Turkish side, even among the pro Western elites.

WP: Feith vs. Tenet -- at Georgetown. "Each professor asks his students to play the role he gave up in 2004. Assignments include briefing the president on threats and preparing plans for war. At one point, Tenet played the president, grilling students about terrorism threats and chastising them for being unprepared for rigorous inquiry, Salvo recalled."

MSNBC: Sarkozy wins in France.

Reuters: Gul withdraws his candidacy for Turkish president.

A seeming professional associate of Comey at FDL, was Comey the first one purged?

... Pretty much from the day he arrived, the word was that Comey was effectively running DOJ and that Ashcroft was off at his farm in Virginia doing the planning work for his next job, and taking care of his health.

Certainly, Comey became the guy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back the worst of the WH power grab and trying to protect his beloved DOJ from the unethical assault that was to come.

You may have noticed from Marcy's timeline and Jane's post building on it, that the really outrageous things which were apparently in the planning stages for a long time, could not be executed while Comey remained in office.

Question, why did he leave? We can all see why he might want to leave, it must have been incredibly draining to be the only meaningful pushback against the WH and the Rovians.

But why did he leave?

Maybe, just maybe …..

Was he the first one purged? Was the purge of James B. Comey the necessary beginning of the larger purges to come?

Follow up question for the still open Comey testimony record.

Were you asked to resign?

If so, by whom?

Where did you believe that idea originated?

Another thought. ...

Newsweek: "May 5, 2007 - It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ’08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979. This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOP’s chances for victory in ’08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups."

Just Out: Six questions for me on Iran policy at Harper's, Ken Silverstein's insights into the investigation into Iraq fraud IG Stuart Bowen Jr.; and a piece of mine (subscription only) on recent tensions between Iraqi Kurds and Turkey at National Journal, "Iraq's Potential New Front." If the latter is a topic of great interest to you, shoot me an email.

The NYT's Adam Cohen: The US Attorney, the GOP Congressman, and the Timely Job Offer. "Ms. Yang says she left for personal reasons, but there is growing evidence that the White House was intent on removing her. Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. Yang. He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protégé."

Newsweek's Mike Isikoff: Did Rove try to mislead Congress?

UPI's Ben Lando: "Iraq oil law author now a critic."

Ha'aretz's Yossi Melman, in PostGlobal: "The reality that both options – to withdraw or to stay – are bad ones forces the U.S. to choose not between good or better but between bad or worse. To remain in Iraq is the worst decision possible. But improvement can be achieved only by dialogue and engagement with all the major players – above all Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria and, yes Iran. The Bush administration has to acknowledge that its policies so far have failed. It has to admit that it needs Iran and Syria to neutralize the Iraqi minefields. Tehran and Damascus hold important keys to defuse the tension. ..."

Now's a good time to mention that Yossi Melman, one of the best intelligence reporters around, and co-author Meir Javadanfar, an Iranian affairs specialist, have an illuminating new book out, "The Nuclear Sphinx of Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran." It's one of the few detailed accounts I've seen on Ahmadinejad's background and biography and offers an account of Iran's nuclear program going back to the Shah's day.

Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary:

It looks like it's official: the United States Army thinks that American reporters are a threat to national security. Thanks to some great sleuthing by Wired's "Danger Room" blogger Noah Shachtman, the Army's new operational security guidelines (OPSEC) hit the Web in a big way yesterday, and the implications they have for reporters -- who are grouped in with drug cartels and Al Qaeda as security threats to be beaten back -- are staggering.

Make no mistake, this is a very big deal, and every American citizen, not just reporters and soldiers, needs to understand the implications of the Army's strict new policy, because it directly affects how citizens receive information about their armed forces: information that it has every right to get.

Shachtman reproduces a slide from the new "OPSEC in the Blogosphere," document, which lists and ranks "Categories of Threat." Under "traditional domestic threats" we find hackers and militia groups, while "non-traditional" threats include drug cartels, and -- yes -- the media. Just to put that into some perspective, the foreign "non-traditional threats" are listed as warlords, and Al Qaeda. In other words, the Army has figuratively and literally put the media in the same box as Al Qaeda, warlords, and drug cartels.

As far as I know, the Kansas City Star is part of the McClatchy newspaper chain. But I noticed going back and forth on a couple of recent trips between here and Kansas City, the KC Star rarely runs McClatchy's excellent reports on the US attorneys dismissals case, and in particular on the KC, Missouri angle to the case, even though one arm of the multi-faceted case involves the city's very own US attorney who resigned voluntarily and the ultra partisan interim US attorney who was appointed to replace him, who then proceeded to indict members of the get-out-the-vote group ACORN just before the November 2006 elections. They hardly cover the case in any way at all. Today, is a case in point. McClatchy's Greg Gordon has an important piece, "2006 Missouri's election was ground zero for GOP." As far as I can tell, that story or any wire version of it or any thing that might mildly annoy any local constituency doesn't appear in the local paper. Given that Kansas City is the second largest city in Missouri, one might think that the KC Star might consider such a story by a DC reporter for its own parent company after all one with some local traction and relevance and worth running, even the day it is available, but one would be wrong. A month ago, I happened to be in KC the day the LAT oped page and WP both had stories that focused on the actions of Kansas City's then interim US attorney - nobody in KC had heard about it - the KC Star wasn't covering the story at the time. It has run a few stories on the issue in the weeks since, not many, for a story that seemingly has tremendous local, state and national import -- this is potentially about the corruption of justice, an effort to use the US attorneys office to suppress minority voting in the city, a local boy who rose to the high rungs of a highly politicized Justice Department who came back to Kansas City to implement those policies back home under a snuck in provision of the Patriot Act that didn't require Senate confirmation for interim US attorney appointments, you know -- what an editor might think of as a good story. It's really a shame, what a pretty meaningless exercise that paper has become, and how studiously its publishers seemingly avoid any hint of political controversy, unless it can't be avoided. The McClatchy reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay told Bill Moyers that when they were at Knight Ridder and doing their investigations on pre-war intelligence showing the evidence was thin, it was the same story: a lot of Knight Ridder's member papers simply didn't run their stories. The phenomenon of local papers like the KC Star avoiding publishing well reported material that local political constituencies would perhaps find inconvenient is an enormous disservice to the cities they cover. There's lots and lots of spilled ink these days about the fate of the big newspapers and their business models. But the substantive rigor mortis of so many mid size city papers in the interim, in particular their absymal coverage of important national and international topics, is a subject worthy of attention too. There was this incredibly striking quote from a Frontline piece on the financial troubles at the Tribune company from one of the company's then-high finance investors, saying it wasn't the job of Tribune member paper the LAT to tell Los Angeles readers about the Iraq war, that the LAT should be providing readers sports and entertainment and local news, that readers who wanted national and international news could get that from the Wall Street Journal. It's hard not to conclude that such sentiments are reflected in the daily editorial decisions of what stories not to cover and run in papers like the KC Star. To offend nobody and treat readers as essentially dumb, frivolous and uninterested in stories of national import.

Update: A friend from KC writes that Gordon's story doesn't appear in the KC Star today, but that Frank Morris, a reporter for local NPR affiliate KCUR, had a long report on former interim US attorney in Kansas City, Brad Schlozman, today.

Friday Update: The Star ran the full Gordon piece today, page A4, a friend calls to say.

Later Update: Here's some analysis of how the piece was edited by the Star for local consumption, seemingly so as not to offend too many state or local poobahs, and to politely obscure some of the agency involved:

... But the headline isn't the only place that the Star hacks up the story. Consider the stark difference between versions of the following semi-analogous grafs. In the original McClatchy piece, Gordon wrote (emphasis added):

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent's defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

Compare that with what the Star ran today:

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, wielded the power of the federal government to protect the ballot.

Now, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys have led to allegations that that Republican campaign was not as it appeared.

From this we can assume that the Kansas City Star editorial staff feels the need to protect "the Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly" from exposure to facts reported on and published by its parent company. And also that it felt the need to change the original piece in a way that defined McClatchy's reporting as "allegation" rather than as fact, as they were originally reported. And --perhaps most appallingly-- that the Star felt compelled to excise mention of one of the central facts of the McClatchy piece: that "no significant voter fraud was ever proved."

Worth reading the whole analysis, to see if the edits appear to you to have a certain neutralizing tilt to them.

The NYT's James Risen:

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

WP: Justice Department probes whether Monica Goodling hired career lawyers based on party affiliation:

The Goodling revelations raise uncertainty about whether she will testify before the House Judiciary Committee, which offered her limited immunity from prosecution last week in exchange for her testimony about the firings. Goodling, who resigned last month, has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to answer questions from Congress.

Such an immunity deal requires approval from the Justice Department, which must agree that her testimony would not interfere with an ongoing criminal probe, according to administration and congressional officials. Although the joint probe into the attorney firings by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and OPR is not criminal, the allegations against Goodling raise the possibility that a crime may have been committed.

McClatchy's Margaret Talev:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to turn over all e-mails to or from White House political adviser Karl Rove in connection with the controversy over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys.

The subpoena suggests that the congressional inquiry is focusing on Rove and whether he shaped the firings and hirings of U.S. attorneys and whether the purge was influenced by GOP concerns about corruption probes and investigations of voter fraud in battleground states during the last election.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he took the step only after Gonzales twice declined to turn over such e-mails voluntarily. The subpoena gives Gonzales a May 15 deadline. If he does not comply, Leahy said, he will be asked to appear before the panel to answer questions.

Neither the Justice Department nor the White House issued an immediate response.

The development could be significant on two fronts: Any e-mails turned over could shed light on the White House’s role in the firings, which Democrats say they believe may have been improperly motivated by politics.

Moreover, the action suggests Leahy is running out of patience with the White House and may be gearing up to issue additional subpoenas. ...

Lawmakers believe the Justice Department has custody of many Rove e-mails through an unrelated investigation into whether anyone in the Bush administration leaked a CIA agent’s identity after her husband disputed pre-war intelligence claims.

Reuters: Iraq IG Stewart Bowen under investigation by the WH Office of Special Counsel.

Also under investigation, the inspector general of the Department of Commerce.

CNN:

Iraq's prime minister has created an entity within his government that U.S. and Iraqi military officials say is being used as a smokescreen to hide an extreme Shiite agenda that is worsening the country's sectarian divide.

The "Office of the Commander in Chief" has the power to overrule other government ministries, according to U.S. military and intelligence sources.

Those sources say the 24-member office is abusing its power, increasingly overriding decisions made by the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior and potentially undermining the entire U.S. effort in Iraq.

The Office, as it is known in Baghdad, was set up about four months ago with the knowledge of American forces in Iraq. Its goal is ostensibly to advise Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki -- the nation's new commander in chief -- on military matters.

According to a U.S. intelligence source, the Office is "ensuring the emplacement of commanders it favors and can control, regardless of what the ministries want." ...

NYT: "Turkey’s constitutional court today supported an effort to block a candidate for the country’s presidency whose background is in political Islam, pitching the country into early national elections and a referendum on the role of religion in its future."

Murdoch offers to buy Dow Jones. AP:

Shares of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, soared almost 60 percent on Tuesday after the financial news network CNBC reported that Rupert Murdoch's media company News Corp. offered to buy the company for $60 a share.
After opening at $37.12, the shares jumped $20.95. or 58 percent, to $57.28 before being halted on the New York Stock Exchange for news pending. They had traded in a 52-week range of $32.16 to $40.08 before Tuesday's news.
Spokesmen for Dow Jones and News Corp. did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Dow Jones is controlled by the Bancroft family through a special class of shares and cannot be taken over without their consent.

The "D.C. madam", Deborah Jeane Palfrey, had once speculated that she came to the attention of the Feds by way of the Wilkes/Wade investigation. Apparently, there's no evidence that's the case, and she was just speculating. We'll apparently know more about the whole story after ABC's "20/20" report on Friday. More here.

The Hill: "House oversight panel may look past Rice, Tenet in inquiry into uranium."