The Plame leak investigation gathers pace. The American Prospect's Tapped reports that Ashcroft has recused himself from the investigation. As we are blogging on a Spanish keyboard we will get the links up to speed after New Year's. Until then, healthy, happy 2004!

Happy Holidays, everyone, wherever you have the occasion to celebrate. War & Piece is going to be quiet until January 1 while we visit Mexico.

A W&P correspondent celebrating Xmas in Baghdad writes that "Once again I'm in Baghdad and if you're here it must be shooting.We just had a guy 8 floors below me open up with an AK. More than 10 rounds fired in three minutes or so. Not sure who he is aiming at but I'm working behind concrete. By the way, it's Christmas Eve. Peace on earth and all that stuff."

Be safe wherever you are and all best wishes to readers in 2004.

P.S. This mad cow disease story seems potentially much bigger than it currently appears to be. Why hasn't the US done more to prevent its outbreak here? Doesn't this prove that more regulation can potentially protect industries? Will Bush pay?

Just Out: My new piece on journalists taking flak in Iraq, in The Nation.

Bob Novak reports that Paul Wolfowitz is losing sway in the Bush White House. [Indeed, Time reports Wolfowitz is likley out of Bush II 2 altogether.] While Wolfowitz was once whispered as a replacement for Colin Powell. the White House is lately eyeingmoderate Indiana Republican Senator (and Powell ally) Richard Lugar to fill that roll, Novak reports. Is the more moderate, internationalist wing of the Republican party gaining sway over the more hardline wing? Stay tuned.

Seems like it's high time to graduate New Republic assistant editor Spencer Ackerman to editor. His solo pieces - and those cowritten with John Judis and Franklin Foer -- on the politicization of intelligence under Bush II -- are just brilliantly reported and written. Spencer, ask for a big raise this Channukah, at least, please.

So what is the Libya back story? None of the pieces so far seem to totally nail it. Who were the actors, the back channels, on both sides? One report suggested such discussions began five years ago. Was the US invasion of Iraq really the event that clinched the negotiations? We hope and expect Seymour Hersh is on the story, but will be interesting to see.

Meantime, it's hard to fathom why Washington appears to remain so sanguine about Pakistani nuclear proliferation to North Korea and Iran -- and perhaps even to emissaries of bin Laden. The evidence here is fairly overwhelming -- and impossible to reconcile with the US's rhetorical commitment to prevent WMD proliferation to rogue states and terror groups.

Punishing the unpunishable. Princeton international affairs professor Gary Bass writes a thoughtful piece on trying Saddam, here:

"Can such a proceeding avoid the bitter accusations of 'victor's justice' that have always accompanied war crimes trials? The risks are many. But if America develops the right approach -- supporting Iraqi efforts to confront their own history; allowing international bodies a supervisory role; inviting Saddam's victims in Iran and Kuwait to detail their own grievances -- then the prosecution of Saddam Hussein may prove to be a turning point in a troubled war."

Genocide scholar and writer Samantha Power advocates for a similar mix of international support for an Iraqi trial, here, and points out that such a hybrid model has a successful precedent, in Sierra Leone. Ultimately, Powers writes however, in spite of all efforts to achieve legitimacy and "Iraqi ownership" of a trial to air and punish them, Saddam's crimes are essentially unpunishable:

"The only predictable outcome of the Iraq trial is that nobody--in Iraq, in the United States, in the Middle East, and in the international public gallery at large--will find it suited to the gravity and barbarity of Saddam's assault on humanity...Saddam Hussein made the impossible possible, but his citizens and successors now have the chance to do the same. If Iraqis can emerge from the coming trials with the dignity, wisdom, and commitment to the rule of law that Saddam denied them, that will be their greatest revenge."

Washington Post reporter Marilyn Thompson, who has reported brilliantly on the anthrax investigation the past year, was a cub reporter in Columbia, South Carolina in 1981 when she got a tip that segregationist South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond had fathered a daughter with an African American woman. When a call came last week -- twenty five years later -- from the lawyer for Thurmond's daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Thompson, who is undergoing chemotherapy, was almost too weak to take it. "A lawyer in Los Angeles is trying to reach you," my editor told me. "He represents someone named Essie Mae Washington-Williams. He says she's holding a press conference next week to tell the world her story."

"I knew Essie's secret," Thompson writes in today's Post. "Her father was James Strom Thurmond, once one of the nation's most spiteful segregationist...With a Faulknerian irony that only a handful of people suspected, Thurmond at the same time was secretly giving money to Essie, his biracial daughter, the product of a relationship with one of his family's maids.

"Essie had never told me her secret. In fact, in keeping with the pact she had made decades ago with her father, she had adamantly denied it when I tracked her down in Los Angeles in 1984 using a patchwork of clues to piece together first her name, then the details of her life.

"I had been struggling for nearly 25 years to tell her story, absent the birth certificate, DNA evidence or confession that would prove it. Now, Williams's attorney told me in my hurriedly placed phone call, she was ready to talk to me. She had been impressed, he said, with the way I treated her in 1984 when I showed up unannounced at her workplace, carrying two yellowed documents that I believed offered strong proof of her parentage."

An incredible story that Thompson has been investigating for a quarter of a century, described here. Hopefully, it won't take the country quite as long to learn what happened in the anthrax case, and Thompson will recover soon to report her findings.

"Bush Administration Scrubs the Web," writes Steve Aftergood in today's issue of Secrecy News:

-"In a gem of a news story, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development had deleted the transcript of an ABC Nightline interview with AID administrator Andrew S. Natsios last April in which he said the reconstruction of Iraq would cost taxpayers no more than $1.7 billion, a gross underestimate. AID officials told the Post that the page was removed because ABC News was going to charge for it. But the exemplary Milbank contacted ABC News, which said that wasn't true."

Natsios has a history of underestimating the cost of public works projects by a few hundred million here or there, although the Iraq numbers make the Big Dig cost overruns seem piddly. But it is this Administration's serial practice of revising its statements after the fact that is so disturbing. And incredibly frustrating to think they can get away with it.

Donald Rumsfeld made two trips to Baghdad as special Middle East envoy for Ronald Reagan, to meet with Saddam and his foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The much reported trip of 1983. And another trip, in March 1984, to assure Aziz that Washington wanted to strengthen its ties to Baghdad, despite its rhetorical condemnation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons. "Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship," the Washington Post reports today, about the contents of the declassified documents on the Rumsfeld-Tariq Aziz meeting secured recently by the National Security Archives.

-"The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit National Security Archive, provide new, behind-the-scenes details of U.S. efforts to court Iraq as an ally even as it used chemical weapons in its war with Iran. An earlier trip by Rumsfeld to Baghdad, in December 1983, has been widely reported as having helped persuade Iraq to resume diplomatic ties with the United States. An explicit purpose of Rumsfeld's return trip in March 1984, the once-secret documents reveal for the first time, was to ease the strain created by a U.S. condemnation of chemical weapons.

-"Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement on chemical weapons, or CW, 'was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs.'"

Pretty damning stuff. Read the declassified documents here from the NSA archives. Will any of the Democratic candidates -- perhaps the one testifying at the Hague -- pick up the baton on this one?

Just Out: My new piece on the implications of the Istanbul bombings. A new break in the case indicates the bombers had originally hoped to hit the US Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, but were thwarted by tight security, moving next to the "softer" targets of the synagogues and the British outfits. That interrogation of Fevzi Yitiz also indicates Bin Laden did bless the attacks, which were perpetrated by Turkish Islamists who had trained in the Afghan camps.

Reuel Marc Gerecht told me, the Istanbul bombings - as well as the wave of recent bombings in Casablanca, Riyadh, Pakistan - indicate Al Qaeda is no longer so easily able to project itself lethally back into the US and Europe. He says the pattern we are seeing of Islamist extremist groups targeting Middle Eastern states is somewhat back to the future.

But Asla Aydinbastas, a Turkish journalist, told me, what we are in fact seeing is the expansion and metamorphosis of Al Qaeda from an "Arab" organization into one that has attracted disaffected Islamist extremists around the globe, from France to Jakarta.

While the implications of this debate strike me as fairly shocking - revealing as they do how very little the US and its allies seem to really know about Al Qaeda and how it is evolving -- both Turkish and American analysts offer a note of cautious optimism. The Middle Eastern states affected by this new iteration of Al-Qaeda-affiliated, domestic Islamist terrorist groups will not hesitate to crack down ruthlessly against them -- with much less fuss over civil liberties concerns.

These strikes "differ from the previous kind of terrorism Turkey faced," Abdullah Akwuz, of the Turkish business association Tusiad told me. "There is no popular support for the recent attacks. And I think if there previously existed any kind of sympathy to those in Al Qaeda - this is gone entirely, given the fact that most of those killed were fellow Muslim citizens. And they [Al Qaeda] are destroying themselves by doing that."

More Fake Documents, Newsweek reports:

-"A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001 is probably a fabrication that is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip presumably would have taken place," Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff report.

-"The new document, supposedly written by the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service, was trumpeted by the Sunday Telegraph of London earlier this week in a front-page story that broke hours before the dramatic capture of Saddam Hussein. TERRORIST BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11 STRIKE WAS TRAINED BY SADDAM, ran the headline on the story written by Con Coughlin, a Telegraph correspondent and the author of the book Saddam: The Secret Life.

--"But U.S. officials and a leading Iraqi document expert tell NEWSWEEK that the document is most likely a forgery—part of a thriving new trade in dubious Iraqi documents that has cropped up in the wake of the collapse of Saddam's regime."

Read the whole thing here.

It does seem that the neo-con-stocked, Hollinger-owned Telegraph tends to be pushing the most outrageous of the Laurie Mylroie crowd's fantasies. Yesterday, they published excerpts of Saddam Hussein's novel, which Laurie Mylroie sent around to her crew with the hysterically cryptic note: "NB: the reference to the burning twin towers in the allegorical America in Saddam's last novel, as described in this Daily Telegraph article." Well that certainly seems to prove the case! Saddam must have indeed been behind 9/11.

David Kay to leave Iraq weapons hunt. As mentioned in an earlier W&P post. Indeed, Kay may not even return to Iraq from Christmas break back in the Washington suburbs.

--"When [Kay] accepted the job in June...he expected to quickly find the expansive evidence that the administration had claimed as its primary reason for going to war," the WP reports. "Rather, Kay's preliminary report in October said the group had so far discovered only that Iraq was working to acquire chemical and biological weapons, had missile programs under various stages of development and possessed only a rudimentary nuclear program."

Baghdad Blogger Salam Pax isn't worried about Saddam getting a fair trial:

--"He looked like a tramp...and for some reason you expected him to bite that soldier's finger a la Hanibal Lecter. But he just sat there...he sounded like he has totally lost it. I want a fully functioning Saddam who will sit on a chair in front of a TV camera for 10 hours everyday and tells us what exactly happened the last 30 years. I do not care about the fair trial thing Amnesty Int. is worried about and I don't really care much about the fact that the Iraqi judges might not be fully qualified, we all know he should rot in hell. but what I do care about is that he gets a public trial because I want to hear all the untold stories."

Frankly, I'm inclined to agree with Salam, that it's hard to be too impressed with ever-virtuous Amnesty International's call for Saddam to get POW status, and the Red Cross's demands that it get to visit Saddam in prison to assure themselves of his fair treatment. [And W&P actually started an Amnesty cell at Shawnee Mission East high school back in 1984, what a waste of youthful political activism]. Were they making nearly so much noise when Saddam was torturing and murdering tens of thousands of people? Not much more noise.

Apologies for the site being a bit slow of late, War & Piece has been busy doing underpaid work as a journalist, while nursing a cold. [New pieces slated to go up this week and next at TomPaine and the Nation]. But we'll let nothing get in the way of the first annual "War and Piece: Best of 2003" list -- you know, best book of 2003, best news event, magazine, blog, movie, best quote, etc. We're accepting nominations, at bestof2003atwarandpiece.com. Send before W&P heads to Mexico for some R&R, the day after Christmas.

Meanwhile, go check these out:

Joshua Micah Marshall debating Richard Perle on neoconservatism, earlier this week at the Hudson Institute, here. A fascinating debate, including how the neocons view their relationship with George W. Bush (the Project for the New American Century's Gary Schmitt, on the panel, saying something to the effect that after 9/11, President Bush was able to choose from the buffet of policy ideas offered by various schools, and simply chose to eat from the neocons offerings.)

And from the archives: Nick Lemann predicting way back in January 2001 -- months before September 11th -- that a Bush/Cheney presidency would lead us into an Iraq war, here:

--"It would be too much to say that Bush's agenda includes the goal of going after Saddam," Lemann writes. "What seems quite likely, though, is that the new President will hear different opinions from his foreign-policy advisers. In that sense, the question of Saddam makes for an especially interesting test case of the new Administration's foreign policy, for the differences of opinion represent well-established splits in the Republican foreign-policy world, and are likely to reappear in other areas. Because Bush...is [an] unknown a quantity on foreign affairs...He will inevitably wind up gravitating toward one or another of the Republican camps. We can't know yet which it will be—Bush probably doesn't know himself. But the camps themselves, and their leaders and their views, are in plain sight."

Fascinating stuff. Hard to remember back three years ago when Bush was taking office, how much his campaign's foreign policy pronouncements suggested a very different course. In recent articles, foreign policy watchers have suggested that the influence of the neocons has been waning in recent months in the Bush White House, in part because of the difficulties the US post-war mission in Iraq is experiencing. Will be interesting to watch if this proves to be case after the capture of Saddam. And indeed, whose influence would replace theirs?

Follow Up: Journalist Bob Dreyfuss writes that Saddam's capture puts the neocons "back in the saddle," in this Tom Paine piece.

A game. Who said, "If we'd gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein — assuming we could have found him — we'd have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground someplace. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you've got to put a new government in his place, and then you're faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq?"

"Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shia government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the course of this operation?"

Colin Powell, you say? James Baker? How about Dick Cheney (in an interview with the BBC in 1992 - back when he was still giving interviews to the BBC).

Many such gems in this little New York Times piece on the two generation of Bush's finding satisfaction in the capture of Saddam, who referred to George W. as "the son of the viper," and "little Bush."

"The clues that led to Hussein's capture emerged three weeks ago, officials said, when intelligence analysts and Special Operations forces shifted the focus of their hunt from Hussein's innermost circle to the more distant relatives and tribal allies who they suspected had been sheltering the deposed president," the Washington Post's Dana Priest and Walter Pincus reports. "The new strategy led to the capture in Baghdad on Friday of a relative from Hussein's Tikriti clan. Under interrogation, the man contributed a vital, though still undisclosed, clue to Hussein's whereabouts...Photographic and infrared surveillance in the 24 hours that followed narrowed the search area inside Dawr, a village near Hussein's birthplace..A 'fusion cell of [High Value Target] analysts' drawn from the CIA and military intelligence personnel, commenced a fresh review in late November of the vast trove of information already in hand about who was giving Saddam refuge."

Saddam Captured...and, incredibly, looks headed to stand trial on war crimes charges. Currently he is being held by US forces at an undisclosed location. The Washington Post's Dana Priest and NBC's Andrea Mitchell on NBC this morning saying we can expect some sort of war crimes trial. Meanwhile, Mitchell says, David Kay, who is back in Washington to meet with CIA Director George Tenet, was expected to ask to be replaced as head of the weapons hunt team. Now with Saddam in custody, hopes are raised that he will provide information about what did happen with the weapons of mass destruction.

Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of 4th Infantry Division, speaking to journalists in Baghdad Sunday, said he expects the insurgency will continue, that it does not seem to have been coordinated by Saddam, but rather is being conducted by cells operating more at the regional and local level. Juan Cole agrees, writing "the Sunni Arab resisters to US occupation in the country's heartland had long since jettisoned Saddam and the Baath as symbols...They are fighting for local reasons. Some are Sunni fundamentalists, who despised the Baath. Others are Arab nationalists who weep at the idea of their country being occupied. Some had relatives killed or humiliated by US troops and are pursuing a clan vendetta. Some fear a Shiite and Kurdish-dominated Iraq will reduce them to second class citizens. They will fight on, as Mr. Bush admitted today."

The Los Angeles Times' John Daniszewski disagrees, writing "the tables-turned scene of today — with Hussein himself reduced to a disheveled, compliant prisoner, bending his head obediently as an American doctor searches his wild, shaggy hair for lice — will resonate among his followers. Rather than fighting on to avenge him, they more likely feel contempt for him and despair for their cause. The gasps that arose when Iraqis first saw his TV image could well be the sound of the air leaving the insurgent movement."

"Captured not killed" is what Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden describes as one of the really positive aspects of the arrest. The BBC's Guto Harri in London remarked on this too: "Tony Blair is pleased not just with what's happened -- Saddam's capture -- but also how. We all imagined that if the Americans got a tip off they would just bomb somewhere off the face of the earth. But he was captured without a shot being fired. He's looking healthy, he's not been tortured, he's being handed over to Iraqi justice."

Separate from the capture of Saddam, presumably, Reuel Marc Gerecht argues in the Weekly Standard that Bush and Bremer should call for direct elections in Iraq sooner than later, to assuage Iraq's majority Shiites and prevent them from creating their own bands of guerrilla forces against the occupation.

Nice piece on the inspired rookies working on Clark's campaign:

-"An actress, a Briton and a dot-com millionaire join other amateurs to give the retired general's run for the presidency a different feel...

-"Michael Sean Winters had no inkling of how to write a news release when he showed up," at Clark's campaign headquarters in Little Rock, the LAT's Eric Slater writes. "He had penned numerous articles on the Roman Catholic Church for such publications as The New Republic, but the only 'real job' he'd had was at D.C. landmark Kramerbooks & Afterwords, where, as restaurant manager, he hired refugees from the Balkan wars during the 1990s. As commander of NATO forces, Clark led the bombing campaign that ended the ethnic strife in Kosovo. 'Many of the people I hired, or someone in their family, would be dead' had the war continued, the 41-year-old Winters said. 'When [Clark] announced, I quit my job, took out a second mortgage on my house and came down here. I'm budgeted through Jan. 1 for my mortgage and 10 dinner parties.'"

Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold Inc., the maker of electronic voting machines, wrote in an August 14, 2003 letter inviting people to a $1000 a plate fundraiser for President Bush to be held at O'Dell's mansion in Ohio, that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The problem is that Diebold makes the electronic voting machines that have been at the center of election fraud disputes in Georgia, and other states.

Now, the Maryland Gazette newspaper reports:

--"An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland 'out the yin-yang,' if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased.

--"The e-mail from 'Ken,' dated Jan. 3, 2003, discusses a Baltimore Sun article about a University of Maryland study of the Diebold system:

--"'There is an important point that seems to be missed by all these articles: they already bought the system. At this point they are just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts.'

--"'Ken' later clarifies that he meant 'out the yin-yang,' adding, 'any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive.'"

?!&$#)!

Remember Dick Cheney's repeated claim that an Iraqi intelligence operative met with Mohammed Atta in Prague in 2001? Well, it seems for the umpteenth time that such a meeting never occurred. "A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told American interrogators the meeting never happened," the New York Times' James Risen reports. "Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the United States in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations."

But somehow we expect that this will still not put the claim to rest in some circles.

You've got to love Congressman Henry Waxman. The California Democrat was out there ahead of his colleagues investigating the fat in the President's requested budget for Iraq, and now he's pushing the House Government Reform committee to investigate who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Bob Novak. At the same time, investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss reports in this tompaine piece, Waxman has created a 'tip' line "on his official Web site...[where] current and former U.S. national security officials [can] come forward and disclose how the administration played with intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda....Rep. Waxman is making it possible for officials to go on the record or remain anonymous."

Got an insidery tip on how the US got Iraq intel so wrong? Report it here.

It's good to see a few people in Congress fulfilling their watchdog role.

Worth Reading: Seymour Hersh and Robert Dreyfuss on a secret US program to create Iraqi assassination squads.

"Part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups," Dreyfuss reports in the American Prospect, here. "Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists—up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq."

"The U.S. occupation of Iraq is beginning to resemble Vietnam in more ways than one," Dreyfuss continues. "American forces under attack are reportedly responding with indiscriminate fire, often killing combatants and innocents alike."

Hersh also evokes comparisons of the US occupation of Iraq to Vietnam. He notes that US special ops teams are being trained and advised on counterinsurgency techniques by Israeli intelligence and commando units in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. And that makes sense, because apparently the "rising star" in the Pentagon is Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. "Cambone also shares Rumsfeld’s views on how to fight terrorism," Hersh writes. "They both believe that the United States needs to become far more proactive in combatting terrorism, searching for terrorist leaders around the world and eliminating them." In other words, targeted assassinations.

War & Piece has been slogging through deep snow in Boston to attend a journalism conference, and has a meaty article assignment to get out before it can resume full force, later this week. But a few articles attracted our eye this weekend.

One name that keeps reappearing in regards to the Vice President's intelligence channels, pressure on the CIA, and liaison with the head of the CIA's nonproliferation center (i.e., exposed CIA operative Valeria Plame's boss) is John Hannah. And unlike Lewis "Scooter" Libby or Karl Rove, Hannah is one name the White House hasn't specifically claimed was definitely not responsible for exposing Plame's identity to Bob Novak. "Another Cheney aide...flatly denied that the vice president received 'raw' intelligence from the INC. Hannah discussed only Iraqi political issues with INC representatives, not intelligence, the aide said," Newsweek reports. Somehow, given what Iraqi politics was before the Iraq war, we find that hard to believe. An earlier New Republic profile of Cheney mentioned that Hannah had done a stint in the Clinton campaign. Would be interesting to learn more about him.

And the neocon hawks flitting between AEI and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans seemed to be awfully busy in December 2001, and specifically, in Rome, about when the "Niger nuclear" forged documents appeared -- in Rome. All of these mysterious Syrian and Iranian operatives, some with Iran contra ties -- seemed to come through then. Remember the Michael Maloof/el Hage/Perle affair? What about former Reagan official and AEI scholar Michael Ledeen and Manucher Ghorbanifar?

Bush names James Baker as envoy on Iraq debt....

Muddling Through the Post War Occupation in Berlin 1945: It's no excuse for the poor planning for the Iraq post-war by the Pentagon neocons. But these comments by World War II Office of Strategic Services Berlin chief - and later head of the CIA - Allen Dulles to the Council of Foreign Relations on December 3, 1945, published in this month's Foreign Affairs, are fascinating:

"...As soon as you attempt to get Germany to tick and to make arrangements for a government, the lack of men becomes apparent at once," Dulles told the Council of Foreign Relations. "Most men of the caliber required suffer a political taint. When we discover someone whose ability and politics are alike acceptable, we usually find as we did in one case that the man has been living abroad for the past ten years and is hopelessly out of touch with the local situation. We have already found out that you can't run railroads without taking in some Party members.

"...The present political set-up in Germany is based on the agreements reached at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam...The arrangement did not include the French zone, which was added later. But regardless of its genesis, by and large the scheme is almost entirely unworkable. We have chopped up Baden, Württemburg, and Hesse into artificial zones. In the case of Saxony, the Russian zone cuts off the American and British zones from their counterparts there. It is difficult to see how the Allies could have done otherwise inasmuch as the Russians would not consent to British and American domination of Germany and the Americans and British likewise refused to consider letting Russia get an advantage. Even so, very little progress is being made toward the centralization of the various services. To complicate matters, the French have been saying that they could not set up an administration in the zone assigned to them until they knew what disposition was going to be made of the Rhine and the Ruhr.

"In the zone under Russian control the application of Soviet doctrines is thus far confined largely to paper. The Russians are finding it a little difficult to mix collectivist doctrines, including the nationalization of banks, a new system of land tenure, and the creation of a small farmer class, with the set up as it existed under the Nazis and more broadly under a capitalist economy.

"We, ourselves, have excellent men on the job. I have the highest regard for Clay, and Eisenhower is a genius as a diplomat and administrator.* Yet I am inclined to think that the problems inherent in the situation are almost too much for us. Our people in Germany are unduly fearful of criticism in the United States. For example, the road between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden is so full of holes that it is almost impossible to drive over it, and one cannot cross the Main between those two places because all the bridges are down. But no repairs are made since the Army feels certain it would be criticized for 'restoring the German war potential.'

"...So far as the treatment of industry in various zones is concerned, the Russian policy is particularly hard to fathom. It is hard to say whether the Russians really intend to tear down the zone for the purpose of building up Russia, but there is some evidence pointing that way. The Russians have torn up all the double tracks, they are keeping all able-bodied German prisoners, and they have taken East a great many industrialists, bankers, scientists, and the like.

"Russian standing in their zone is low. Russian troops are living off the land, and have looted far more than anyone else. They have gone about Berlin looting workers' houses in very much the same way they did in Hungary. This seems to indicate that in both localities the Communist party is not very strong. At any rate, the Russians have seen the West and vice versa."

...

Well worth reading.

Is the Pentagon Subcontracting out its shuttered Office of Strategic Influence"?

"Early last year Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known that the office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad. But a couple of months ago, the Pentagon quietly awarded a $300,000 contract to SAIC, a major defense consultant, to study how the Defense Department could design an 'effective strategic influence campaign to combat global terror, according to an internal Pentagon document. Sound familiar?"

--asks the New York Times's Eric Schmitt, here (reg. req).

Just Out: a Who's Who of the US Iraq occupation; and a piece asking why the Palestinians have been so late to come to the Washington lobbying game.

Not to beat a dead horse. But this horse appears very much alive and prospering, even. Last year, the US government declared Milan-based businessman Ahmed Idris Nasreddin a key financier of Al Qaeda, along with his associate Youssef M. Nada. (The two are apparently devotees of the Muslim Brotherhood, and give credit, financial advice and money laundering services, to a variety of Islamist terrorist groups, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden among them). The UN Security Council soon followed suit, while the US put a couple dozens of the men's identified businesses -- banks in the Caribbean, holding companies in Switzerland, Italy and Liechtenstein -- on a list of designated terrorist entities with which US businesses are forbidden to do business.

But as NBC's Lisa Myers reports today, Nasreddin's luxury hotel in Milan , Hotel Nasco (that is short for Nasreddin Co.) appears to be open for business.
And as I pointed out in a recent article for the Nation, Nasreddin has a long time business partner with whom US businesses such as Bechtel and new Mississippi governor Haley Barbour's New Bridge Strategies, are getting cozy in Iraq, Iraqi businessman, Sadoon Al-Bunnia. As I wrote in my Nation piece:

"Sadoon Al-Bunnia is one of three principals in one of Iraq's oldest companies, the Al-Bunnia Trading Company. The Iraqi firm has become a major subcontractor for US firms working under US government contracts in Iraq. But, as documents obtained by The Nation from the Lugano office of the Swiss Federal Commercial Registry show, Sadoon Al-Bunnia is also a founding partner of a Swiss-registered firm called the Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber (MIGA), which the US government and the United Nations Security Council have designated as funders of Al Qaeda. MIGA is one of fourteen businesses controlled by Ahmed Idris Nasreddin and Youssef M. Nada..."

We wonder if and when the US government will make the connection.....

Update on Guantanamo Releases: Seems former Canadian Guantanamo detainee Abdulrahman Khadr was able to return home to Canada from Yugoslavia this past weekend.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is preparing to release 140 of the 660 Guantanamo detainees, apparently without filing any charges against any of them. Another one G-tmo detainee is supposed to get a lawyer. And the US-born "enemy combatant" in a South Carolina brig is going to get a lawyer....

Has Sec. Rumsfeld got religion? Or have the DOD general counsel's memos finally been read now that some of these cases were headed to the Supreme Court?

It does seem unconscionable that the cases against so many of these 660 Guantanamo detainees are so weak, that the Pentagon now considers them so harmless, that they are letting them go, when until two weeks ago, these prisoners had no prospect of ever facing due process in their lives, and the Pentagon was trying to convince Americans this was necessary for our security! Shocking.

IF 140 human beings who were portrayed to us as Al Qaeda insiders are now apparently free to go, how much reassurance should this give us about the culpability of the other prisoners? And the legal twilight zone into which they have been placed?