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Bush Oks Independent Inquiry Into Iraq Intel Failure, the Washington Post reports. Under pressure from Congressional lawmakers...It seems unlikely such a commission could release findings before after the November presidential elections. "Six separate panels -- the House and Senate intelligence committees, a CIA internal review team, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the newly refocused CIA-led Iraq Survey Group and an Army team -- are already investigating the prewar intelligence process," the Post report.
Did the head of the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq accept bribes from Saddam? So allege documents obtained by Iraqi governing council from the Iraqi oil ministry:
"About 270 former Cabinet officials, legislators, political activists and journalists from more than 46 countries are on the list, suspected of profiting from Iraqi oil sales that Saddam allegedly offered them in exchange for cultivating political and popular support in their countries," the Associated Press reports.
"Also on the list is the head of the U.N. oil-for-food program, which ended three months ago, that had allowed the Saddam regime to sell limited quantities of oil to raise funds to help the Iraqi population.
"Benon Sevan has repeatedly dismissed previous allegations of corruption in the program, challenging those who make them to provide the evidence. The United Nations defended him again on Wednesday."
..."One of the Jordanians accused, former parliament member Toujan Faisal, denied to the AP on Tuesday that she accepted bribes or participated in illicit deals. She said, however, that she had served as an intermediary between the Iraqi government and an Amman-based oil dealer."
Interesting. Jordan is one of the principal countries the Iraqi governing council found to have been doing a lot of business with Saddam. But then again, Ahmed Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, has many reasons to want to point figures at Jordan, doesn't he? Between $200 and $300 million dollars worth.
Just Out: My new piece on David Kay's conclusions that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded Iraq last spring. [While I strongly admire the views of the people I interviewed for this story -- Joe Cirincione at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Anthony Cordesman at CSIS, Greg Thielmann recently of the State Department Intelligence and Research bureau, and others, I confess to being a bit uncomfortable with the title and tone the piece assumed in the editing process. The case is definitely not closed, and certainly the intelligence failure of Iraq cannot be solely attributed to administration pressure.]
Writing on the same issue, Joe Conason says don't look to Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, head of the Senate Select Intelligence committee, to conduct an honest inquiry into how the US got Iraq WMD intel so wrong.
Don't look for the White House to admit it was wrong, either, a senior Republican official who has been conferring with White House advisors tells the New York Times' David Sanger. "They've made a pretty huge mess of it," he says. "They wove this giant story, based on intelligence assessments that in hindsight — and this is hindsight, remember — were wrong. It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"
"A receding threat," the Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood sums up the Kay conclusions on the danger posed by Saddam Hussein.
My feeling? Not only does the Iraq intel debacle reawaken all the questions about whether the US should have gone to war in Iraq last spring, and the consternation over the dubiousness of some of the administration's stated justifications for that war, such as an alleged Al Qaeda-Saddam connection. It also brings to the fore what seems a congenital character flaw of the Bush administration: Its total war against "doubt." Nothing Bush or Cheney or Condoleeza Rice asserts ever admits the potential for uncertainty that is an undeniable component of so many of these national security assessments and foreign policy decisions. They almost always speak with exaggerated false certainty, in phrases such as "there is no doubt," "it is clear," "we know," "no one can deny," etc.
Counterpunch put together a nice summary of such statements -- that have all been proved wrong -- including:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
--Dick Cheney August 26, 2002
"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
--Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
--George Bush March 17, 2003
"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."
--Gen. Tommy Franks March 22, 2003
"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction."
--Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003
...
The New Republic's self-declared Dean-o-Phobe Jonathan Chait declares "Deanism" dead -- and his job done. But he's not too fond of John Kerry either.
Bob Novak attacks man who calls him 'traitor'....well, at least pushed him. Via Wonkette and Blah3.com.
Richard Perle is a busy man. He gets in an extraordinary amount of trouble in such a short time. There were his pre-Iraq war meetings with Iran contra figure Adnan Khashoggi, the invasion-eve investment call about business opportunities in post-war Iraq, then last month the implosion of the media conglomerate Hollinger on whose board Perle apparently sat and which invested heavily in his company, Trireme Partners. Then last week, Perle apparently spoke at a Washington event sponsored by three groups the FBI believes are front organizations for an Iranian group, the Mujahadin-el-Khalq (MEK), that the White House considers a terrorist group. Oh yes, but a "terrorist group" that wants to overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran -- a goal Perle and many of his hawkish associates at the American Enterprise Institute and at the Pentagon policy office share.
But there is another striking and almost comical aspect about Richard Perle's business and charitable activities -- how he mixes his ideological agenda with a healthy dose of self-enrichment.
As the Washington Post reports, "Perle, in an interview, said he was unaware of any involvement by the terrorist group, known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), and believed he was assisting the victims of the Bam earthquake when he delivered the paid speech.
"'All of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross,' Perle said. Informed that the Red Cross had announced before the event it would refuse any monies because of the event's 'political nature,' Perle said: 'I was unaware of that.' Perle declined to say how much he received."
--How much he received? For speaking at an event that Perle thought was to benefit the victims of the Bam earthquake? [I guess I'm naive -- big name people like Perle take big fees all the time for speaking at these events, so in that regard Perle is not unique. But it just seems for an event that is to benefit victims of this horrific earthquake, if one cared about this issue, one might you know waive one's fee. That's just me.]
But then Perle told the Post something which suggests a man as intelligent and worldly as he should have surely been able to discern that the event sponsorship was associated with the MEK.
"Perle...said he was contacted by the Premiere Speakers Bureau in mid-January about giving the keynote speech. He asked for more information about the sponsoring organizations and received a letter saying aid would be coordinated though the Red Cross and describing the event as 'solidarity with earthquake victims in Iran and an evening for Iranian Resistance.' The Iranian Resistance is often an alias for the MEK. In August, the State Department shut down the U.S. offices of the political arm of the MEK, known as National Council of Resistance of Iran."
-It's hard to believe Perle didn't well know "Iranian Resistance" was wink-wink, nudge-nudge code for the MEK.
And in fact, "some Pentagon officials considered the MEK as a possible vanguard against the Iranian government, which they viewed as a threat in the region," the Post informs us.
It all sounds familiar, somehow. One remembers Perle's AEI colleague's Michael Ledeen et co's recent meetings with Iran contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar. Clearly the neocons are pushing regime change in Iran from the margins, while they currently are on the outs with Bush/Rove.
Let’s face it. “Unresolved ambiguity” is not a phrase that rolls easily off the tongues of Dick Cheney or George W. Bush.
So when chief Iraq weapons inspector David Kay told the news media this week that Saddam Hussein apparently had no weapons of mass destruction by the time the US invaded Iraq last spring, and that Americans were going to have to face the fact that “there will always be unresolved ambiguity” about why US intelligence got Iraq so wrong, observers braced themselves for blood – David Kay’s blood. After all, this is not a White House that takes kindly to ambiguity; nor has it ever welcomed one-time insiders’ assertion of facts that contrast with the White House version of reality -- something to which Messieurs Paul O’Neill, Joseph Wilson and John Dilulio can attest. “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Vice President Cheney had told the 103rd National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002. “There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
Well apparently, there was some doubt after all...
David Kay testifying before the Senate Armed Services committee is being broadcast on C-Span radio and TV.
Bring It On...Kerry takes New Hampshire. We here at W&P are glad to see Clark still in the top three -- if barely -- and look forward to his showing in South Carolina and the other Feb. 3 primary states. And we wonder where Lieberman's votes will go -- to his Senate colleague Kerry, or to maverick fellow national security centrist, Clark, or to Senate prom king Edwards? In any case, we see a very powerful Kerry-Edwards ticket shaping up.
The 9/11 Commission, which heard a devastating tape of a flight attendant aboard doomed American Airlines flight 11 calling in the hijacking before the plane was crashed into the World Trade Center at hearings today, formally requested an extension....its fate is in the hand of Congress now. The White House doesn't want the commission's report to come too close to the November 2004 elections, sources say. Family members tell me they expect the commission will likely be granted an extension -- if it agrees not to issue its report until after the elections.
What's remarkable about the past two days of testimony at the 9/11 commission hearings is the realization at how many of the basic facts the public has understood about the September 11th plot are just plain wrong:
"In its report on what happened aboard the jets, the commission concluded that the hijackers made bomb threats on at least three of the four planes and shot pepper spray on at least two flights," the Washington Post reports. "Passengers calling from cell phones noted the use of box cutters on only one flight, the report said. The commission also said it was skeptical of an earlier report that a gun was aboard one plane.
..."Some family members of the victims, who attended the hearings, said the tapes provided some closure. 'All the visions I had of what he must have gone through . . . were made real,' said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband, Eddie A. Dillard, was aboard Flight 77. 'I appreciated it. It was hard to listen to.'"
...
The number of leak probes is getting confusing. Now the wires are reporting progress in the one that has to do with Republicans Senate staff gaining access to Democratic senate staffs' memoes on administration judicial nominees for over a year. And that investigation is apparently zeroing in now on an official from the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
"Manuel Miranda, who works for the Tennessee Republican on judicial nominations, is on leave pending the outcome of the inquiry by the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Frist spokesman Nick Smith said Tuesday," the AP reports. "...Miranda told The Knoxville News-Sentinel that investigators were looking at work he performed for the Judiciary Committee before he joined Frist's office. 'There was no stealing,' he said. 'No systematic surveillance. I never forwarded these memos -- period.'"
--"No systematic surveillance" does sound more than a bit qualified to me.
Still confused about the neocons? Read this explainer by one of their own, Max Boot.
David Kay to testify at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
Immigration inspector Jose Melendez-Perez is an undeniable hero. Listening to him testify today at the 9/11 commission hearings at the Senate's Hart Office building, in his Spanish-accented English, about the instincts, military training, and dedication that led him to turn away an arrogant, military-fit, hostile Saudi national who was ultimately supposed to be the 20th hijacker, I was really moved by admiration for people like Melendez-Perez who do their jobs well:
"In testimony to the panel about Mr. al-Kahtani, the immigration inspector from Orlando, Jose E. Melendez-Perez, said the Saudi visitor raised suspicion when he presented his passport at the immigration checkpoint at the airport and was unable to communicate in English; he was later found to have no return air ticket or hotel reservations," the New York Times reports.
"When challenged through an Arabic-language interpreter, Mr. al-Kahtani 'became visibly upset and in an arrogant and threatening manner, which included pointing his finger at my face, stated that he did not know where he was going when he departed the United States,' Mr. Melendez-Perez said. 'The subject then continued, stating that a friend of his was to arrive in the United States on a later date and that his friend knew where he was going.'
"Mr. Melendez-Perez said Mr. al-Kahtani's account made no sense, especially since he said he was to remain in the United States for only six days and was carrying $2,800 in cash and no credit cards.
"'This amount did not appear sufficient for a six-day vacation plus a hotel room and return ticket,' he said. Asked how he intended to pay for a return ticket, he said, Mr. al-Kahtani claimed his friend would provide the money.
"'I then asked, `How long have you known this person?' Mr. Melendez-Perez recalled. 'He answered, `Not too long.'
"Mr. Melendez-Perez said that after consulting with his supervisors, he placed Mr. al-Kahtani on a flight that day back to London, with a connecting flight to Dubai. Members of the panel saluted Mr. Melendez-Perez for actions that, they said, may have prevented United Flight 93 from reaching its intended target.
"'It is entirely plausible to suggest that your actions in doing your job efficiently and competently may well have contributed to saving the Capitol or the White House and all the people who were in those businesses,' Mr. Ben-Veniste, a comment that prompted applause for the immigration inspector from the audience in the hearing room."
...
Well done. The incredible Josh Marshall has published a piece reviewing several recent books on American empire in the New Yorker.
"American power is magnified when it is embedded in international institutions, as leftists have lamented," Marshall writes. "It is also somewhat constrained, as conservatives have lamented. This is precisely the covenant on which American supremacy has been based. The trouble is that hard-line critics of multilateralism focussed on how that power was constrained and missed how it was magnified.
"Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, 'domination' gives way to 'hegemony'—brute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force."
A coup Marshall, whose blog Talkingpointsmemo has become a daily part of so many of our news junky lives, richly deserves.
Daschle calls for an investigation into "the administration's role in the intelligence failures leading up to the war with Iraq." And in the wake of David Kay's comments asserting Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, the administration appears to be hesitating from repeating some of its earlier assertions. ("Who are you going to believe? Me, or the weapons inspector I handpicked to prove myself correct but who instead says I'm flat wrong" is how Tapped's Nick Confessore puts it.)
Very interesting turning point, I believe. Kay, as a hawk former true believer who saw the facts, cannot be easily dismissed by the White House as just another political enemy -- as they painted Joe Wilson -- but has undeniable street credibility. Is he getting through, finally? Seems he may have had a meeting with someone at the White House. And perhaps yet another sign that the neocons' star is fading fast in the administration.
But the important question. What would Rove do? He knows Bush can't win this one. So how to back away? My sense? A prominent administration-affiliated neocon has to be sacrificed at the Bush altar.
Update: I've been asked by a magazine to write something related to the Kay comments. Informed comments, paid opinion, blatant propaganda, welcome.
"Millions of dollars were deposited in the bank accounts in Dubai of two senior Pakistani nuclear scientists as nuclear hardware arrived in Iran," reports Pakistan's News, according to the New York Times. "The newspaper also said a senior scientist had been found to have tens of millions of dollars' worth of financial and real estate holdings in Pakistan and overseas, primarily in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The senior scientist also paid a Pakistani newspaper editor in Islamabad to run a publicity campaign, publish books and organize seminars praising the scientist, The News reported.
The Times' David Rohde writes, "Pakistani investigators are looking into the vast real estate holdings of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, and into Mr. Khan's and other nuclear scientists' bank accounts, Pakistani officials said Sunday. 'Investigators are looking into all dimensions, including financial dimensions,' said a senior Pakistani official. He said offshore accounts 'are part of the investigation.'"
One must read the investigation conducted by French author Bernard-Henri Levy that showed the leading suspect in the kidnapping and murder of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a suspected Pakistani intelligence associate, was transferring money in Dubai UAE before September 11th. If Al Qaeda associates do get ahold of nuclear material, it will come from these circles associated with Pakistan's nuclear scientists and Islamist extremist groups, and we will knock our hands on our foreheads wondering why the US government wasn't paying closer attention to this earlier. Chronicle of a congressional joint inquiry foretold, I fear.
"C.I.A. Missed Signs of Chaos," reports former chief Iraq weapons inspector David Kay, in the New York Times. Apparently, Kay believes the Iraqi weapons program became so corrupted after the Gulf War, that Iraqi scientists sold Saddam on bogus programs that fattened their budgets but produced little. "Dr. Kay said the basic problem with the way the C.I.A. tried to gauge Iraq's weapons programs is now painfully clear: for five years, the agency lacked its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information. During the 1990's, Dr. Kay said, the agency became spoiled by on-the-ground intelligence that it obtained from United Nations weapons inspectors. But the quality of the information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998...The agency became far too dependent on spy satellites, intercepted communications and intelligence developed by foreign spies and by defectors and exiles, Dr. Kay said. While he said the agency analysts who were monitoring Iraq's weapons programs did the best they could with what they had, he argued that the agency failed to make it clear to American policy makers that their assessments were increasingly based on very limited information."
Kay's research shows that Iraq's chemical weapons program was apparently abandoned almost entirely sometime in the early 1990s, and the biological program was reduced to research on ricin. Its nuclear program was far less developed than Iran's and Libya's.
"'I think that the system should have a way for an analyst to say, `I don't have enough information to make a judgment,' Dr. Kay said. 'There is really not a way to do that under the current system'...As a result, virtually everyone in the United States intelligence community during both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations thought Iraq still had the illicit weapons, he said. And the government became a victim of its own certainty. 'Alarm bells should have gone off when everyone believes the same thing," Dr. Kay said. 'No one stood up and said, `Let's examine the footings for these conclusions.' I think you ought to have a place for contrarian views in the system.'"
What's striking -beyond Kay's conclusions at how much the collective US intelligence community and its Congressional overseers and White House customers overwhelmingly failed at their job -- is how much Kay's team's research showed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was far more chaotic, corrupt and lacking in strong central control than one would have thought from reports on Saddam's paranoiac rule.
One wonders, when might Congress hold public hearings on the staggering intelligence failure that led, frankly, not just the Bush White House but the Clinton administration before it, and major powers around the world, to wrongly believe Saddam still harbored large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction up through the 2003 war.
Perhaps more pertinent, one wonders when Kay might brief Cheney's office, and urge him to reevaluate his delusional statements based on the facts. And while he's at it, someone might leak a copy to the Weekly Standard.
[Incidentally, heard a very telling - and completely off record -- anecdote this weekend by an expert on a certain relevant region, who was asked to write a piece on a certain country by a certain magazine. When his piece came in, the editor called him, and said, she loves it, but unfortunately the powers that be at the magazine didn't want to run it -- because it didn't conform to their party line about that country -- a party line that was based not on any expert knowledge, mind you, but on essentially wishful thinking about what they would like to happen. In other words, based on delusions and ideology. And then a few weeks later, when pretty much exactly what the analyst had predicted had come to pass, the editor had emailed the writer to remark -- wow! it's eerie how accurate your analysis turned out to be! Analysis, of course, that was never published in the magazine. There's a word for an organization with that kind of mission statement, and it ain't journalism.]
Israel suspends order to expel the Palestinian father of Israeli soldier, reports the NYT, in its ongoing coverage of the case of Adel Hussein, a Palestinian, and his half-Israeli, half-Palestinian son, Muhammad Hussein, a sergeant in the Israeli army. Palestinians consider Adel Hussein an Israeli sympathizer, and have threatened his life. Israeli authorities had considered him to be illegally working and residing in Israel, and had threatened to expel him, until the Israeli courts intervened today to suspend the expulsion.The son, of an Israeli Jewish mother and a Palestinian father, is in a lonely no man's land, while serving in the Israeli army.
This case so exposes the cruelty and utter tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that reduces the space for good decent people of all sides to be able to go about their lives, that it does more than all the thousands of inches of copy that have reported on the Mid East conflict.
But maybe there is some hope better minds will occassionally prevail.
"As Mr. Hussein walked to get an espresso with his son in Tel Aviv on Sunday — a public excursion that would have been highly risky for both men before the court's action [blocking the expulsion] — strangers called to him from passing cars or stopped him to shake his hand, congratulating him and welcoming him. 'You're staying with us, right?' one man asked.
"On the lapel of his gray jacket, Mr. Hussein wore a silver pin of a flying bird to represent his new sense of liberty. 'I haven't felt such freedom since 1999,' he said. 'I can walk with my son anywhere.'"
Must read the series, by the Times' James Bennett, part I here, part II here, and part III here. The photo in part II is just devastating. Thank G-d the Israeli courts intervened to right this awful wrong.
Always good to see companies whose former CEOs are in the White House putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak. You know, in a country the White House has described as a charter member of the Axis of Evil. Companies which now admit their employees took a cool $6.3 million in kickbacks from Kuwaiti subcontractors supplying materiel to US troops in Iraq. Companies that have been awarded U.S. government contracts in Iraq valued at $16 billion.
I thought corruption like this existed only in places like Nigeria.
Just Out: My new piece on the 9/11 commission rushing to complete its work by May, even as the families who lost loved ones in the September 11 attacks urge the commission to seek an extension.
The Antic Muse, Ana Marie Cox is now blogging over at Wonkette, a new Washington DC gossip/policy wonk/culture/hipster site. Check it out as it promises to make virtual Washington at least more interesting.
Grand jury seated in the Plame leak affair, reports Time.
"One conclusion to be drawn from this latest step, said one lawyer familiar with the case, is that investigators clearly have a sense of how the case is shaping up. 'They clearly have a sense of what's going on and can ask intelligent questions' to bring the grand jury up to speed. A grand jury is not a trial jury, but is used as an investigative tool and to decide whether to bring indictments in a case."
And reportedly, the White House is very nervous: "'No one knows what the hell is going on,' says someone who could be a witness, 'because the administration people are all terrified and the lawyers aren't sharing anything with each other either.'"
Explosive: Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
"From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
"The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
"With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives."
Must-read the whole thing here.
Tom Friedman writes on the triumph of the 'Blair Democrats' in Iowa: "It seems to me that Iowa Democrats, in opting for John Kerry and John Edwards over Howard Dean, signaled (among other things) that they want a presidential candidate who is serious about fighting the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies...Without a serious Democratic critique of the war — and I define 'serious' as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team's — Mr. Bush has gotten away with being sloppy and unprepared for postwar Iraq."
A group of ex-CIA officers has written to Congress asking for an investigation into the Novak-Plame leak affair. Meanwhile, while the progress of the Justice Department's investigation of who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to Novak remains unclear, the investigation into who leaked dirt on the NSA's pre-9/11 performance has apparently honed in on Senator Richard Shelby's office.
Richard Schultz, a professor at the Fletcher school of law and diplomacy and a national secular scholar and author, and a consultant to Rumsfeld's Pentagon, analyzes an interesting question in the Weekly Standard: why were special forces never used to go after terrorists? and the answer may not be what you would expect. The fault is indeed not with Clinton -- who ordered special forces be used just for this purpose several times; but with the Pentagon brass who resisted doing much of anything.
[Now one can see what Wes Clark was fighting all these years -- a Pentagon who didn't want to do very much except dated ground wars similar to Gulf War I.]
"Epitaph on the Bush administration's failed policy in North Korea," writes Jack Pritchard, who recently resigned in protest as US Special Envoy to North Korea, and who last week was part of a US delegation that visited that country's Yongbyon nuclear facility from which 8,000 spent fuel rods have been moved.
"Whether the [spent fuel rods] have been reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, as Pyongyang claims, is almost irrelevant," Pritchard writes. "American intelligence believed that most if not all the rods remained in storage, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue and worked laboriously to devise a multilateral approach to solving the rapidly escalating crisis.
"But events of the last several years show that this approach is not working. In December 2002 North Korea was suspected of having one or two nuclear weapons that it had acquired before agreeing in 1994 to freeze its known nuclear program and to allow it to be monitored.
"More than a year later, North Korea may have quadrupled its arsenal of nuclear weapons. During the intervening period, the Bush administration has relied on intelligence that dismissed North Korean claims that it restarted its nuclear program at Yongbyon with the express purpose of reprocessing previously sealed and monitored spent fuel to extract plutonium to make a 'nuclear deterrent.'
"Now there are about 8,000 spent fuel rods missing — evidence that work on such a deterrent may have begun. It is just the most recent failure in a string of serious North Korea-related intelligence failures."
--The take-away? Anyone who thinks the Bush administration is serious about preventing nuclear proliferation is dangerously deluded. Indeed, Pyongyang has seemingly quadrupled its nuclear weapons arsenal during the Bush II reign while Bush and Cheney looked the other way -- at a disarmed and already well contained Saddam. The Bush administration isn't serious -- they are bigger fools and windbags than one could have imagined.
The Real Would-be 20th Hijacker? It's not Zacarias Moussaoui, according to Newsweek, but a Saudi whose last name is Al-Qahtani, who was turned away by an alert U.S. immigration official upon his arrival from London to Orlanda airport in August 2001, while Mohammad Atta anxiously waited for him in the Orlanda airport arrivals lounge. That alert US immigration official, Jose Melendez-Perez, is scheduled to testify at the 9/11 commission hearing next week. The alleged would-be Saudi hijacker, is reportedly in custody in Guantanamo Bay. Now lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui reportedly want to talk to him too.
Perle-Frum -- Intellectually Dishonest? or Stark Raving Mad?
..."The involvement of Saudi citizens in 9/11 and revelations about Saudi financing of extremist groups has made policy toward the kingdom a campaign issue," the two write in an oped from today's New York Times. "Both Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards acknowledge that the Saudi government has condoned — or perhaps worse — extremist activities against the United States. Both senators have said in speeches that they want to rethink the relationship with the Saudis. But that's where they stop. They have given us no inkling of what a new relationship with the Saudis would look like."
--Ah, and what have the Wahabi-behind-kissing Bush and Cheney done about Saudi Arabia? Could any administration have done more to prop up the Saudis than Bush (save for Bush I and his administration)? Remember the Bush administration's censoring of the 28 pages of the 911 report which dealt with Saudi financing of Wahabi terrorism? Bush's consistent refusal to name Saudi Arabia among those regimes aiding and abetting terror? Perle and Frum are outrageous if they think the burden is on the Democratic presidential candidates to answer how the US relationship with Saudi Arabia should change. Why isn't their oped asking this question of their political comrades, Bush and Cheney?
Self-declared Dean-o-Phobe Jonathan Chait, of the New Republic, makes an interesting point in his post-Iowa analysis: "Another thought on what Iowa means: As others have noted, voters no longer regard Iraq as the seminal political issue of the race. That's an extremely auspicious sign for Democrats. Dean's most important effect on the race was to make Iraq the ultimate litmus test of ideological purity. Iraq is a perfect wedge issue for Republicans--most voters support it, but most Democrats oppose it. Dean's harping on Iraq put Democrats in a no-win situation. In order to win they must somehow fudge the issue." [italics added]
--I firmly agree. And that outside of the Democratic left, most Americans are Deanophobic on precisely the Iraq issue, and national security issues more generally.
The majority of Kerry's Iowa voters are old -- 43% of the votes he got are from voters over age 65. A majority described themselves as conservative. Meanwhile, a majority of Edwards' Iowa voters are women. Really interesting numbers here.
"The vast majority of people who are going to vote in the primaries and caucuses, not to mention the general election, are only just now beginning to pay attention," writes Mark Schmitt, in his superb blog on the US electorate, the Decembrist. Must read on the 'Dean bubble,' Edward's appeal, and why Clark would make a great president.
"Open, protracted" primary fight now anticipated, writes the Post.
I am so pleased with the results out of Iowa. I just think Kerry -- and hopefully after New Hampshire, Clark -- are much stronger candidates to take on Bush in the general elections.
We make no pretense here about knowing much about domestic politics. It's not a subject I have ever covered, at least national races, and it does not play to my strengths. But from the experience I have had as a repoter in Bosnia and Kosovo, when I had the chance to meet General Clark, but more frequently to observe his work in action -- I am a deep admirer. He is the first politician I have ever been really excited about, who I believe represents my strongest political values, and I passionately hope by some miracle he wins. This is a leader who will know when and how to use not only military intervention but "soft power" and other tools to advance not just the most narrowly defined US national security interests, but a broader definition that includes what the Bush administration has so trampled on -- NATO, healthy relations with allies, and connecting human rights with a muscular foreign policy in a way I just don't trust Dean will.
So ... I can't help but be excited about the polls which suggest a tightening race in Iowa and New Hampshire, anything that portends that Clark may have a chance, including this.
If Clark doesn't show well - I would be far more comfortable voting for Kerry than for Dean. I am one of those outlyer people who vote primarily based on foreign policy - and Clark and Kerry have the foreign policy and national security credentials that Dean just doesn't have. I'm praying for Clark, who I really believe can save us from the mess we're in.
How Pakistan's Khan Research Laboraties fuels nuclear arms race, the Observer reports on its investigation.
"...In the mid-Seventies, these engineering problems were faced by a Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. An ardent nationalist, he had just seen India test its first nuclear bomb. At the time he was working in Holland for an Anglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium called Urenco. Through his work there, Khan became aware of secret blueprints for two types of uranium enrichment centrifuges: one based on rotors made of aluminium and another based on a highly-strengthened alloy of steel.
"Khan went on to steal the blueprints and a list of Urenco suppliers. With the blessing of the then Pakistani government, he established the Khan Research Laboratories near Islamabad and, with the help of the Chinese, went on to secretly develop the country's atomic bomb.
"When, in 1998, Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in the desert of Baluchistan, Khan became a hero in his home country as the 'father of the Pakistani nuclear programme'. He once said: 'All Western countries are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam.'
"His fundamentalist sympathies mean that it is perhaps no surprise that he is also known as the 'godfather of the Islamic bomb'. Evidence has now emerged from Iran and Libya that Khan's programme in Pakistan may be the source of the greatest level of nuclear weapons proliferation since the Cold War.
"The Observer has learnt that UN inspectors who have recently visited a number of facilities in Libya discovered large amounts of aluminium centrifuge parts that had 'all the hallmarks of the Urenco designs' stolen by Khan. Pakistan used these to enrich uranium before later turning to the more complex steel centrifuges.
"A Vienna-based diplomat familiar with the Libyan inspections said: 'The big surprise was that components found were almost off-the-shelf turnkey equipment. It was as if somebody had been shopping at Ikea and just needed to put the bits together.'
..."It is clear that the extent of the black market in nuclear weapons technology is only just beginning to emerge."
You can read the whole thing here.
What is infuriating to me is not so much that Northwest Airlines shared passenger information with the government in the wake of September 11th, but that it lied about it until a FOIA request revealed its deception. Why don't airlines just come clean? I expect a lot of people would be less concerned about passenger screening programs if the programs themselves were more transparent and less of a black box.
"The nation's fourth-largest airline asserted in September that it 'did not provide that type of [passenger] information to anyone,'" the Post's Sara Goo reports. "But Northwest acknowledged Friday that by that time, it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center."
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, which launched the FOIA request that obtained the documents that reveal Northwest's lying about its handing over of passenger information to a government agency from September to December 2001, has published documents about the case here.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, neocon? Or maybe better, a neo-lib. Was provocation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan worth the cost of the US's current security troubles with Al Qaeda, a vastly expanded Wahhai and Islamist radicalism and militantism across the world?
That was the apparent (pre-9/11) view of Carter-era national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski back in 1998, when he admitted in a widely publicized interview with France's Le Nouvel Observateur that he and CIA director Bill Casey had cooked up the idea of trying to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by providing covert aid via the Pakistani intelligence services to the mujahideen. "What is most important to the history of the world?," Brzezinski reportedly told the paper, in its January 15-21, 1998 issue. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
The stir over the revelations in the Brzezinski interview are not new. Pankaj Mishra for one revived discussion of them after September 11 in his fascinating November 15, 2001 article in the New York Review of Books, "The Making of Afghanistan." [Of which a friend of War & Piece recently reminded me].
But it strikes me as particularly relevant in light of the current preoccupation among many of us Perle-watchers who fret endlessly about the excesses, audacity, and wrecklessness of the neocons. In particular, the radical means endorsed by the neocons in their quest to achieve their radical foreign policy vision -- the projection of US military power into the Muslim world as a first step in order to preserve and even expand American predominance in the world, and make the world more in the US's image.
The policy Brzezinski was advocating was perhaps less controversial -- many would still -- even after September 11th -- agree that bolstering the Mujahadeen in the larger struggle to weaken the Soviet Union was valid. But the potential consequences of such a policy were not only underappreciated at the time - but even up to only three years before September 11th, when Brzezinski gave the interview.
Even if one agrees with Brzezinski's 1998 pronouncement - that getting rid of communism was worth stirring up some Muslims, as he crudely put it, it should still give those of us involved with skewering the neocons some pause. Brzezinski's policy clearly utterly and totally failed to anticipate how massive blow back from this policy - in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the massive export of Saudi Wahabism around the globe would combine to become perhaps the largest threat to US national security in the current era.
This recounting of Brzezinski's role from Pankaj Mishra's rivetting November 2001 New York Review of Books article on Afghanistan is worth re-reading:
...3.
By the late Seventies, proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union were already being fought in Angola, Somalia, and Ethiopia. That is why the revelation made three years ago—by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter—that small-scale American aid to the Afghan Islamists based in Pakistan had begun some months before the Soviet army arrived in Afghanistan is not surprising. In July 1979, President Carter signed the first of the directives for the clandestine aid that Brzezinski later said had the effect of drawing the Russians into "the Afghan trap." "We didn't push the Russians to intervene," Brzezinski said, "but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." This secret operation explains his exultant tone in the letter he claims to have sent to President Carter on December 27, 1979, the day the Soviet army entered Afghanistan. "Now," he said, "we can give the USSR its Vietnam War."[5]
Brzezinski's enthusiasm was shared by William Casey, a veteran of the OSS and the director of the CIA under President Reagan. In the mid-1980s, Casey committed CIA funds to the even grander plan of organizing the Muslims of the world into a global jihad against Soviet communism. By the mid-1980s, the CIA office in Islamabad, Pakistan, had become second in size only to the headquarters in Langley, Virginia; and American assistance to the Afghan Islamists, channeled through the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, was running into billions of dollars.[6]
The military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq, was more than eager to place his country in the avant- garde of the jihad. Since April 1979, two years after his coup and after he had hanged his former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he had been urgently seeking both money and respectability from the United States. By promoting radical Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan he also hoped to suppress Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's Party, and the intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists agitating for the restoration of democracy. Somewhat similar local reasons prompted President Sadat of Egypt to offer cheap arms to the CIA for use in Afghanistan. The most generous support of the jihad among other pro-American governments came from the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, which was concerned about the growing influence of its traditional Shia rival, Iran, since its Islamic revolution.[7]
The Saudis saw the jihad in Afghanistan as a way of exporting Wahabism —an especially austere Saudi version of Sunni Islam, whose founders in the early nineteenth century attacked Mecca and Medina and purged them of the Sufi-style venerations which involved idolatry as well as dancing and music. They matched the American assistance to the Afghan Islamists dollar for dollar. Prince Turki, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency, worked closely with the CIA and the Pakistani ISI, and sent a rich Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, to organize the thousands of poor Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa who, attracted by promises of food and money, had traveled to Pakistan to enlist in the CIA-backed jihad against communism.[8]
Thus many separate ambitions and strategies powered the Afghan struggle against communism. The diverse agenda of its sponsors and prime agents meant that little attention was paid to organizing the highly fractious Afghans into a cohesive resistance movement that in time could replace the unpopular and discredited Communist government in Kabul—which by Najibullah's own admission had lost control over 80 percent of the Afghan countryside.
One of the few things that united the five million Afghans in Pakistan and Iran and millions more in Afghanistan itself was their resentment of the Afghan Communists and their Russian backers. Seven Afghan resistance "parties" came forward to receive the millions of dollars' worth of arms and humanitarian aid that started flowing into Pakistan in the early 1980s. The parties represented the ethnic, linguistic, and tribal divisions within the Afghans; but many of their members had little or no connection with the Mujahideen commanders and soldiers in Afghanistan who were fighting a sporadically intense guerrilla war against the Soviets.
The CIA avoided direct contact with the Afghans in order to maintain the fiction of American noninvolvement; it used Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) for the important logistical tasks: the distribution of aid, the military coordination between Mujahideen outfits. But the officers of the ISI had their own favorites; they wanted to promote the pro-Pakistan men within Afghanistan's majority ethnic community, the Pashtuns. As a result, one of the most effective fighters who was neither led by the CIA nor coordinated by the ISI, the brilliant Tajik Mujahideen commander in northern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masoud, received hardly any assistance. Masoud fought the Taliban for six years, until he was assassinated last month, two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, by two suicide bombers posing as Arab journalists, who were in all likelihood sent by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The largest beneficiary of foreign aid was the Pashtun Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who amassed a huge ar-senal in southern Afghanistan and most of the time avoided the battlefield.
Then there were the obvious instances of corruption produced by a prolonged war effort, bankrolled covertly with unaudited money, and controlled through several intermediaries: the proof of unrestrained plunder is all there in the mansions of ISI officers and Afghan resistance leaders you see in Pakistan. A large number of sophisticated weapons ended up in an arms bazaar near Peshawar or traveled elsewhere in Pakistan, stoking the various ethnic and sectarian conflicts that ravaged the country in the late 1980s and 1990s. Mujahideen leaders like Hekmatyar, indulged by the ISI, branched off into opium cultivation—for years a small-scale business in Afghanistan— and smuggling, and began a turf war against other Afghans.[9]
5. All quotes are from an interview Brzezinski gave to Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15–21, 1998, p. 76. When asked in the same interview if he regretted "having supported Islamic fundamentalism [intégrisme]" and given "arms and advice to future terrorists," Brzezinski said: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" That some stirred-up Muslims were a minor price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet empire cannot but seem now an especially cynical and wrongheaded bit of Realpolitik.
[6] Casey's and the CIA's dabblings in Afghanistan have been described in Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–87 (Simon and Schuster, 1987). Lawrence of Arabia met James Bond in many of the fantasies that bloomed in this expensive but relatively underreported battle of the cold war. Casey wanted the ISI to involve the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the jihad; and he wasn't satisfied with the ISI-arranged smuggling of thousands of Korans into what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, or with the distribution of heroin among Soviet troops. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, a senior officer of the ISI, got Afghan Mujahideen to mine and bomb military installations a few kilometers deep inside Soviet territory; but plans for more such attacks were hastily dropped after the Soviet Union threatened to invade Pakistan. The story is told by Yousaf and Major Mark Adkin in The Bear Trap (London: Leo Cooper, 1992).
[7] Zia did make himself unassailable through his partnership with the CIA. Many of his political opponents stayed in prison, and while promising elections and democratic rule all the time, he remained the dictator of Pakistan until his death in a plane crash in 1988. The present military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, was offered a similar partnership by the US government, which expects Pakistan to be a "front-line state" again, this time in a war against terrorism. But Zia's encouragement of the jihad in Afghanistan produced hundreds of thousands of radical Islamists who make Pakistan an unstable country; and Musharraf, who seems to realize well that cooperation with the US could endanger rather than consolidate his hold on power, has responded cautiously so far, agreeing to cooperate in intelligence and other ways, but resisting the presence of US troops there. Unlike Musharraf, the Communist-era despots of the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan ruthlessly persecute their relatively few radical Islamists, and have been quick to ally themselves with the United States.
[8] These and other details about Osama bin Laden are to be found in Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press/Nota Bene, 2000).
[9] In fact, Hekmatyar, who inaugurated his career as a radical Islamist by assassinating a left-wing student at Kabul University in the late 1960s, is held responsible for the murder of many rival Mujahideen as well as some of the liberal-minded Afghan intellectuals who had fled Kabul for Pakistan after the Communist coup in 1978. Hekmatyar's rocket attacks on Kabul during the civil war in 1994 killed more civilians in the capital city than had died in ten years of anti-Communist jihad.
--Pankaj Mishra, "The Making of Afghanistan," New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, Number 18, November 15, 2001.
Update: Weird -- seems for a variety of reasons several people have the US policy vis a vis Soviet-era Afghanistan on the mind. This afternoon, a few hours after posting this Mishra article, I was browsing the blogs and was directed by Josh Marshall's site to Calpundit's review of Charlie Wilson's War. The book is about the covert US effort to arm and train the mujahadin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. Calpundit shares some utterly gruesome anecdotes from the book that reveal how truly deluded Richard Perle -- and Ollie North -- were. The holding onto their delusions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is what is so consistent about Perle and his circle. Check it out here. Must read.
Al Qaeda's cell phone network of choice? Apparently, Swisscom.
A strange story on a South African-based Israeli middleman sending US nuclear technology to Pakistan.
In an address before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council today, Congresswoman Jane Harman, the ranking democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HiPSI), described how after study of 19 volumes of pre-war intelligence, she believes "group think" warped the administration and intelligence community's Iraq intelligence assessments. "A troubling example of groupthink, as we are coming to learn, was the unquestioned assumption that the failure to prove that Saddam Hussein destroyed weapons of mass destruction after 1991 was proof that they still existed." Harman called for reform to start at the top: "Quite frankly, this willingness to learn lessons should start at the top. The President should lead the effort to improve his intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. I urge him in his State of the Union address next Tuesday to acknowledge the problems and outline specific steps to fix them." Read the whole thing here.
In his address to the same council on Wednesday, Vice President Cheney championed the administration's policy of preemptive war: "Our national security strategy also recognizes that the doctrines of deterrence and containment, which served us so well during the Cold War, are not sufficient to meet the threat of terrorism. It's hard to deter an enemy that has no territory to defend, no standing army to counter, and no real assets to destroy in order to discourage them from attacking you. Containment is meaningless in the case of terrorists. And neither containment nor deterrence offers protection against rogue regimes that develop weapons of mass destruction and are willing to pass along those weapons secretly to a terrorist on a suicide mission.
"Given these realities, there can be no waiting until the danger has fully materialized. By then it would be too late. And so we are waging this war in the only way it can be won -- by taking the fight directly to the enemy."
You can read Cheney's speech here.
The Iraqi Governing Council "has voted to wipe out" progressive provisions in Iraq's civil code that protect women's rights, ordering that "family laws" be governed not by the civil code, but by religious sharia law. Conservative Shiite clerics reportedly pushed for the systemic change, which would deprive Iraqi women of such protections as prohibition of marriage before age 18, arbitrary divorce, and male favortism in custody disputes. Bremer has ultimate authority to approve or reject the 25-member governing council's decisions.
Talk of fatwa is in the air, in Najaf. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is demanding the coalition provisional authority turn over power to an Iraqi government selected in direct elections next summer. The CPA has said 'til now it's simply logistically impossible to hold full fledged elections so soon -- one problem - no census in years and without it hard to make the voter rolls that determine who is eligible to vote. Sistani and Washington are looking to the UN to broker a compromise deal. Bremer heads to the UN in NY on Monday.
Sanchez orders probe of abuse of prisoners in coalition custody in Iraq.
Clark gains in New Hampshire. Kerry gains in Iowa. Why is Dean losing steam, asks the Post's Terence Neal. Be wary of Iowa polling, warns Ruy Teixeira.
Bremer vs. Sistani, here.
More on the "frighteningly intelligent" Sistani -- the "most powerful man in Iraq" - according to Newsweek's Michael Hirsh.
That the White House has continuously dragged its feet in regards to the investigation into the facts and responsibility for not preventing the 911 attacks is a frustrating fact of political life. But to take out that frustration on such a dedicated person is unfair -- and self-defeating. There is simply no one else as supremely capable to lead this investigation.
That said, I do agree the families have a point. The commission should do a better job of articulating how its overall conciliatory approach to getting documents and testimony from agencies and individuals has given the commission a fuller picture than it would have got had it gone in guns blazing and subpoenas flying. And more substantive interim reports might help alleviate peoples' frustration and anxiety that the commission report will be too diplomatic. And absolutely enough with the ultra academic hearings about intelligence reform.
Slate's Jacob Weisberg asks well known liberal hawk intellectuals if the post-war revelations about the apparent lack of WMD in Iraq make them reconsider their former support for the war, here. Tom Friedman's post is especially worth reading.
"I think there were four reasons for this war, and I identified with three of them: There was the stated reason, the moral reason, the right reason, and the real reason.
..."The right reason for the war, and this was the core of my own argument, was that the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten our open society were not the hidden WMD of Saddam. Those, as I said, were always deterable because Saddam and his sons loved life more than they hated us. No, the real WMD that threatened us, and still do, are the young people being churned out, year after year, by failed and repressive Arab states, who hate us more than they love life and therefore are undeterable. I am talking here about the boys of 9/11.
..."The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the 'terrorism bubble,' which had built up during the 1990s. This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as 'martyrs,' and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable.
"Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them."
USA Today publishes its account of the Kelley investigation here.
I can add some value here. The human rights activist who Kelley apparantly told his editors gave him access to the Yugoslav army officer's journal which indicates the VJ's intent to 'ethnically cleanse' the Kosovar Albanian village of Cuska, Natasa Kandic, emails via a mutual friend that: (1) she doesn't remember meeting Kelley before she met with him and his editors at USA Today last October 2003 during the course of their investigation of Kelley's work. She doesn't exclude the possibility that she did talk to him in 1999 - but doesn't remember his face. (2) She is convinced she anyhow never showed Kelley the journal in question. After receiving it from Ethan Ceku, a relative of Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Ceku, in a meeting in Pec in June 1999, Kandic apparently gave the journal to a UN Hague investigator who attended the meeting with her. Kelley did not publish his story until July. (3) Kandic says it is quite possible Agim Ceku, Ethan Ceku, or the UN Hague investigator showed Kelley the journal -- or a copy of the journal, but is sure Kelley did not see the document from her hands.
What's proved by all this? Kelley's story doesn't indicate who showed him the journal, which he describes in detail. It sure strikes me from the details that he saw the journal -- from someone -- and Kandic's email makes clear there were other sources he could have seen it from than her. Indeed, Kandic didn't keep possession of the journal for long, it sounds like, as she gave it to the Hague investigators as potential evidence for their war crimes investigation. I remain perplexed by this entire case.
"Libya's decision to renounce its nuclear program was crucially pushed by Kaddafi's son—trained at the London School of Economics—who urged his father to help Libya rejoin the world and the world economy," Fareed Zakaria notes in an interesting column on the recent India-Pakistan peace deal. "The father could see only the stick. The son also saw the carrot."
The Army strikes back? at Rumsfeld and the armchair warriors at the Pentagon, in an army war college report described here. Phil Carter has a nice round up of several recent such reports analyzing what he calls the 'willful ignorance' of the Pentagon in not adequately planning for the Iraq post-war. Carter also asks here if the fact that the US is gathering some 200,000 forces in Iraq indicates a spring offensive against an Iraqi insurgency is planned.
Resigned USA Today reporter Jack Kelley was kind to me when I was a young know-nothing reporter starting out in the Balkans in 1995, and a few months after meeting him, I was stringing for the paper from Sarajevo. He was always [and is] not only an extremely talented and energetic international correspondent, but a decent and generous person who tried to help many others, as is evident from the many testimonials about his kindness and professionalism over at Romenesko.
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a USA Today editor and reporter and told that they wanted to do a follow up story to one of Kelley's stories from Kosovo in 1999 - on an issue I had written on as well - the horrible plight of elderly Serbian women in Kosovo suffering revenge attacks by Kosovar Albanians after the NATO war. I put the editor in touch with two reporters I thought were still in Kosovo -- and he promised to let me know the result. When the news broke at the Post the other day about the USA Today investigation into Kelley's work, I realized to my great discomfort that I had been used under false pretexts in the Kelley investigation. But I also expected that the sources I had put the editor in touch with would surely be able to verify whatever questions they had about Kelley's Kosovo stories, which struck me as more than credible and plausible.
I know well enough the background to a couple of the stories Kelley wrote which were apparently under investigation -- the Yugoslav army massacre at Cuska, Kosovo, and the revenge attacks against Serbian grandmothers in post-war Kosovo -- and am convinced they were utterly true. I also know fairly well the human rights activist Natasa Kandic who was apparently the source for Kelley's Cuska story and who was called into USA Today to verify whether she indeed gave an interview to Kelley. As the Post reports, Kandic apparently told them she couldn't recall. But Kandic did apparently also tell the USA Today investigators that she was deluged for interview requests at that time, and it wouldn't at all be surprising for her not to remember everyone she was speaking with four years ago. That she was so deluged by the international and domestic media I and dozens of other reporters covering post-war Yugoslavia can attest.
Clearly the fact that Kelley panicked and turned to another Yugoslav interpreter to portray his original interpretor to the investigators breathing down his neck is indefensible and makes his resignation more understandable - but not any less tragic. He admits he employed this pathetic deception to prove his story was accurate -- but there's nothing I've seen to suggest his original story was not accurate. The fact that Kelley was apparently such pressure that he would make such a suicidal move is really quite tragic.
I'm really disturbed by what's happened and wish Kelley all the best. It would seem the paper where he had worked for 18 years might have done more to give him the benefit of the doubt when they received the anonymous letter apparently accusing Kelley of journalistic fraud, seeing as USA Today's editors as far as they have admitted never found a single assertion in any of Kelley's stories under investigation that require a correction. It's highly disturbing that a man's career and credibility have been destroyed based on what followed his editors' receipt of an anonymous letter.
And one other thing -- Kelley apparently received serious threats and thousands of hate emails after a story he wrote about Israeli extremists' hateful comments about the Palestinians. Is it inconceivable that Kelley could be the victim of an anonymous letter sent by those who feel his story hurt the cause? Any journalist who's written on the Balkans or the Middle East -- even local school boards - knows the kind of heat one can face when one ruffles the feathers of certain interest groups-- it happens every day. Surely this possibility should have been investigated by the USA Today editors as well?
Follow Up: Editor & Publisher reports that USA Today plans to run a "blow-by-blow" account of the Kelley investigation on Tuesday.
Mark Schone, writing in the Boston Globe's Ideas section, worries about what the neocons are writing in their novels.
Tom Friedman opines on the necessity of the EU inviting Turkey for membership, here, a viewpoint with which I totally agree.
Condoleeza Rice tells the New York Times she is definitely out of a second George W. Bush White House. My bet is on Robert Blackwill to succeed her as national security advisor.
Actionable intelligence. Travelers may have the impression that it was a false alarm that led to the cancellation and delay of specific flights between Paris and Los Angeles, London and Washington, and Mexico City and Los Angeles over the Christmas and New Year's holidays. Earlier reports suggested that one passenger scheduled to fly on December 24 on an Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles had the same name -- but a different identity -- as someone on a US terror watch list. In other words, that the flights were cancelled based on a mistake -- a false positive. But in fact, wonder if such measures prevented - or postponed - an attempted attack?
Now ABC News' Brian Ross is reporting that "France today confirmed...that it was hunting for a man...suspected of having links to al Qaeda and [who] may have access to a concealable bomb...The man had a ticket for Air France's Flight 68 from Paris to Los Angeles on Dec. 24, but the flight was canceled and the passenger never showed up at the airport."
"The man's identity and description have been passed on to security officials in London, adding to other potential threats being dealt with there."
Fox News reports that the man French authorities are searching for is an Afghan carrying a French passport, who had a ticket but failed to show up to fly on the Dec. 24 Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles, which was canceled. Meanwhile, another Murdoch outlet, the New York Post, is reporting that British and European authorities are searching for two Al Qaeda-terrorists carrying US passports, also intending to attack US-bound flights from France and the UK.
Apologies blog has been silent of late. A vacation, a delightful house guest from Balkan days, and some new writing projects broke the news junky habit for a spell.
While varying the news diet the past few weeks, had the chance to catch up on some books that have been lying around here for months. Including the extremely bleak Disgrace by recent Nobel laureate J.M. Coetze. I recommend it, with the warning that its vision of post-apartheid South Africa is almost too bleak and nihilist to bear.
More satisfying: in the 100th anniversary year of his birth, the stories of another Nobel laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, about which we are preparing an appreciation.
And borrowed from my brother in law, Jeffrey Toobin's memoir of the Iran contra investigation, which reacquaints one with the squalor of the Reagan administration, and reawakens one's disgust at the Bush II/(Roger Ailes) rehabilitation of such despicable figures as Ollie North, John Poindexter, etc.
In the news, I'm struck by Pakistan as 'nukes-R-us' -- here. Max Boot on the US's dubious alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, echoing a couple articles I [and others] wrote on a similar theme.
For an illuminating -- and chilling -- tour of Pakistan's dangerous nexus of intelligence officials, Islamic militants, and nuclear scientists, read Bernard Henri Levy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl. From the series of articles in recent months that disclose Pakistan's centrality in nuclear proliferation to North Korea, Iran and Libya, as well as Levy's contention that elements in Pakistan's security services sympathetic to bin Laden aspire to deliver nuclear capabilities to Al Qaeda affiliated groups - I firmly agree with the assertion by the Post's Robin Wright today on NPR that "Pakistan is the most dangerous place in the world today." Why doesn't the US foreign policy apparatus seem to treat it as such? Granted, Musharraf seems like a good guy compared with others who could be leading Pakistan. His survival - both political and literal - is both desirable and nothing to take for granted. But the US can't ignore the fact that even under Musharraf Pakistan presents conditions which represent perhaps the single-most major future threat to US security -- the prospect of a truly WMD empowered Islamist militancy.
In the competing concerns Washington has regarding Pakistan -- detente between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India, cooperation on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, cooperation in the hunt for Al Qaeda figures such as bin Laden who Levy and others contends may very well have received refuge in Pakistan -- the fact that Pakistani nuclear scientists are apparently even under Musharraf's reign helping deliver nuclear capabilities to North Korea and Iran and Libya - and perhaps to groups affiliated with Al Qaeda - should seem to be preeminent. What do you do when the problem is not a country's leadership, but a significant portion of the population and state apparatus? How do you vet and reform an entire security services where large constituencies are working for the wrong side? If it's not reformable, then what?