While the New York Times' Judith Miller was hunting for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction last August, she apparently recruited Pentagon official Harold Rhode to help her salvage Iraq's ancient Judaica from a flooded and looted Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Interesting story, truly. I heard the most bizarre story yesterday that the Turkish newspapers are regularly reporting on Rhode's vision for the Middle East. Some interesting maps a Turkish reporter, Serdar Turgut, writing in Aksham, claims to have seen in Rhode's office at the Pentagon a few years ago. Also some interesting reports by Fehmi Koru, a.k.a. Taha Kivanc in Zaman and Yeni Shafak. We'll try to get some links and translations up soon.

Chalabi's fraudulent intelligence and links to lucrative Pentagon contracts in Iraq finally being investigated by Capitol Hill.

"Democrats on the House intelligence panel were angered by reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency is continuing to pay the Iraqi group $3 million to $4 million a year for information, despite findings that show most of the group's earlier information on Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism was false," Knight Ridder's super-hero team of Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay report. "But three senior administration officials said the mood in Washington toward Chalabi had turned sharply cooler as a result of the revelations about prewar intelligence supplied by Iraqi defectors made available by his group.

"In addition, several contracts for rebuilding Iraq that were won by firms with business or family ties to Chalabi are under intense scrutiny....One contract for $327 million to supply equipment to the Iraqi armed forces was suspended by the U.S. Army this week after protests from the losing bidder.

"No criminal wrongdoing has been charged as a result of any of the probes."

Not yet, anyhow.

Wonder if this is linked to Perle's resignation from the Defense Policy Board.

Then get this:

"The senior officials said the White House's mood toward the INC changed markedly after Chalabi told a British newspaper Feb. 18 that it did not matter whether the group's prewar information was correct because its goal of ousting Hussein had been achieved. Chalabi was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying: 'As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.'"

Wow.

So Rupert Murdoch's Daily Telegraph publishes an interview with Chalabi February 18th -- the same day of Perle's resignation letter to Rumsfeld we note -- that leads to the Hill finally investigating why Chalabi is still on the DIA payroll.

Tea leaves? "Several officials said Bush was angered by Chalabi's comments and determined to find out whether the INC or anyone with ties to it was seeking personal gain from the war in Iraq."

Did Perle get asked by Bush to resign after Chalabi's comments were reported by the Telegraph?

In any case, one thing seems sure: these guys -- Chalabi, Perle, and friends -- are so going down.

Update: Darn it. Chalabi's Telegraph interview takes place February 18th, but doesn't get published until February 19. Does that bust my theory? Not sure. We're half a day behind over here, right, so maybe it appeared in Condy's edition of the Early Bird or something.

And here's one more boost to my theory. Who broke this trio of stories, the one about Perle's resignation from the DPB (Feb. 25), and the one about Chalabi's group continuing to receive millions of DIA funds (Feb. 21), and the one about Chalabi's misdeeds finally being investigated (Feb. 27)? The same reporting team. And very possibly, working some of their same sources. Which leads me to believe this stuff is linked.

Update II: Richard Perle gave a really interesting breakfast interview to the Christian Science Monitor the day before his resignation letter to the DPB. And the Times of London ran an interesting story on him too on February 18th.

Is the US close to capturing Mr. Big? Seems the Iranians think so. The US denies it. And it seems pretty hard to believe this is the kind of news one would be able to keep secret.

So what is really going on here? Beyond much ramped up activity on the Pakistani-Afghani border. Seems there is an awful lot of smoke around this story coming out of Pakistan. Maybe Musharraf owes Bush another al Qaeda suspect, after his nuclear scientist sent those weapons designs to Libya, Iran, etc.

Seems Dennis Hastert has had a change of heart concerning granting an extension for the 9/11 commission.

Tara McKelvey has a remarkably good post on tapped phones and intelligence reform over at Tapped [no pun intended].

Tappers strike back?

Our allies, the Saudis. My colleague who knows technology a lot better than I do was able to recover from the web a list of Visa restrictions recently taken down from the official Saudi tourist site. You can see why they might have wanted to take this down [but apparently you can recover what was up using google somehow]:

Visas will not be issued for the following groups of people:

An Israeli passport holder or a passport that has an Israeli arrival/departure stamp.

Those who don't abide by the Saudi traditions concerning appearance and behaviors.

Those under the influence of alcohol will not be permitted into the Kingdom.

There are certain regulations for pilgrims and you should contact the consulate for more information.

Jewish People

Important Instructions:

If a woman is arriving in the Kingdom alone, the sponsor or her husband must receive her at the airport.

Every woman must have confirmed accommodation for the duration of her stay in the Kingdom.

A woman is not allowed to drive a car and can therefore only travel by car if she is accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver.

All visitors to the Kingdom must have a return ticket.

Pilgrims must also have all valid documentation and a passport that is valid for 6 months.

--You know, on this point Richard Perle and I are in total agreement. I think we should treat Saudi Arabia as a hostile country. By all reports, Prince Bandar is a perfectly charming fellow, and I accept that there are many decent Saudi people who don't hate Americans and Jews. But Bandar's charm doesn't alone outweigh the appalling record of not just the goverment in Riyadh, but something deeply disturbing and fundamentally hateful and intolerant about Saudi Wahhabi culture. Repressive, appalling human rights record, that treats women like slaves, viciously intolerant of every other religion and those Muslims it deems insufficiently observant, the financial and spiritual font of Al Qaeda, which killed 3,000 of our citizens two years ago. The neocons use all too blithely the word "fascist" to describe regimes they don't like, but I think Saudi Arabia truly presents aspects of a fascist state, and one that is distinctly hostile to pretty much every one of America's values except for the big one, apparently -- oil. [Thanks to RMS for the help recovering this from the web.]

I don't think anyone at the UN or basically at any embassy around the world could be too surprised that their phones were bugged, or at least could be bugged, and by more than one government too. But what is very interesting is that, all the dirt is coming out now about what everyone already knows to be true. Blair looked positively ill at Short's bombshell yesterday.

Remember a year ago leaks to the Guardian about transcript of a meeting between Powell and Annan when Powell was reported to have privately admitted deep doubts about the credibility of the Iraq WMD evidence. That story disappeared. But seems those transcripts may very well have existed. Interesting.

How should the Democrats deal with 9/11? Especially now that Bush is making his war on terror the centerpiece of his reelection campaign?

Many thoughtful commentators have weighed in, some suggesting the Democrats point out how the Bush administration is overplaying the terrorist threat to scare people -- and get them to vote for Bush/Cheney '04.

But I think the suggestion that Democrats should downplay the magnitude of the threat represented by 9/11 is deeply flawed and would be a serious mistake. Both in terms of US national security interests, and politically.

Does the Bush administration mis-use the "war on terror" to justify everything from insane deficit spending to its misadventures in Iraq? Yes, it does. And not only that, but Bush has impeded the kind of serious US government bureaucratic reform -- in particular at the FBI and CIA -- needed for evolving threats. It's true his homeland security department is a brainless dinosaur -- but only because Bush designed it that way, locating the most important all source intel fusion center inside fortress Langley that screwed up the first 200 times.

But the last thing the Democrats want to do is to be signalling to Americans that they don't take the genuine threat posed by genuine terrorists to the country seriously. Perception of their competence and confidence in national security matters is the single biggest hurdle Democrats have to overcome in November. Put another way, who is your grandmother in Ohio going to vote for: the candidate who says, I know how to protect you? Or the one who says, the terrorist threat is all in their heads?

The Democrats still haven't decided if they are an anti-war party, or just the anti-Bush war party, and that confusion is palpable. [For one of the most brilliant articles on this issue, see Heather Hurlburt's 2002 Washington Monthly piece, "War Torn: Why Democrats Can't Think Straight About National Security."] Frankly, I think both Kerry and Edwards, and when he was still in the race Clark, actually at some level supported the Iraq campaign, in their heart of hearts, but had to pretend otherwise for political reasons. What's more, I think that's actually why they are more successful in the Democratic primaries than their more authentically anti-war rivals, such as Dean. I truly believe Americans, and Democrats too, are just as ambivalent about the Iraq campaign as the candidates trying to sound convincingly anti-Iraq war today. [A lot of the discomfort with the war, I believe, has more to do with mistrust of the administration's motives - and relentless efforts to confuse the war on terror with the campaign to overthrow Saddam - in the public mind. Not with fundamental opposition to getting rid of Saddam. The yawning credibility gap of the Bush administration may be more important to the Democrats come November than pro/anti-war issue itself.]

But I think that Democrats have to get over the left-over, Vietnam-era discomfort and mistrust of the US security services and the military. September 11 was real - both as an event, and in the minds of Americans. US foreign policy may have helped give rise to bin Laden, but it's taken on a life of its own, and one that Americans need to be protected from all the same, whatever US foreign policy follies contributed to the mess. Why should Democrats still be fighting against the Vietnam war? Knee-jerk mistrust of all instances of US use of force, an absolute rule against US military international intervention, can contribute to as much human suffering and misery across the globe, as wars to conquer.

[This entry has been revised -- LKR].

Sad. Boris Trajkovski was one of the good guys, in a region that desperately needs them.

Blair's headache. This UK/US spied on UN story is not going away. Now former UK British cabinet minister Clare Short reveals that the UK spied even on Kofi Annan, and that she read long transcripts of Annan's telephone conversations:

“I know, I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations," Short told the BBC. "In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking ’Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.”’

Asked explicitly whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Kofi Annan, she said: “Yes, absolutely.”

Meanwhile in the wake of the collapse of the UK's prosecution of former UK intelligence service translator Katharine Gun yesterday, the very legality of the war in Iraq is again becoming an issue in London.

Perle resigns from Defense Policy Board. His resignation letter is here. "Despite heated disclaimers, my membership on the defense policy board has led many people to see my articles, books and television appearances to associate my views with those of the administration or the Department of Defense," Perle writes. "We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated. I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign."

[For his part, Perle's lawyer says his resignation from the Defense advisory board will free up Perle to sue the news organizations that accused him of using his DPB position to help his business interests at Trireme and Autonomy Corp.] But resigning your position to go after your detractors seems an unusual move, if no wrongdoing was found.

Something else strange. Was talking with the Justice Department office today that holds files on those registered to lobby on behalf of foreign agents. And the registrar could not find Richard Perle's file. One that she knew to exist. It was genuinely odd.

Came across an interesting 1983 story on another controversy involving Perle:

New York Times
April 17, 1983
Aide Urged Pentagon to Consider Weapons Made by Former Client
By Jeff Gerth, Special to the New York Times
Washington, April 16

Richard N. Perle, an Assistant Secretary of Defense, recommended that the Army consider buying weapons from an Israeli company a year after he accepted a $50,000 consulting fee from the company's owners, according to Mr. Perle and an attorney for the weapons dealer.

Mr. Perle, the Assistant Secretary for International Security Policy, one of the most influential policy-makers in the Pentagon, acknowledged in interviews that he received the consulting fee the same month he entered the Government in 1981. He also acknowledged that in his official capacity he wrote a memorandum to the Secretary of the Army in 1982 urging evaluation of the Israeli company's weapons...

Mr. Perle, who worked on the Ronald Reagan transition team in late 1980, joined the Administration and accepted the $50,000 in March 1981.

He said that he had several other military consulting contracts in early 1981, including a $5,000 agreement with TRW, a major military contractor. The company's files show Mr. Perle signed a one-year agreement with TRW on April 1, 1981, eight days after he began work at the Pentagon. The company said it canceled the contract as of June 30, and on June 25 paid Mr. Perle the $5,000.

Mr. Perle said TRW's files were in error and the $5,000 fee was for work he did before entering the Government. Federal laws on conflicts of interest prohibit Government employees from acting in areas where they have a personal financial interest...

Mr. Perle's influence in the Reagan Administration far exceeds that normally held by an Assistant Secretary of Defense. In the transition, he was able to place associates in important national security positions and, in the Defense Department, he has played a major role in creating policies on arms control and trade with the Soviet Union.

After many years as a Senate aide specializing in military policy and matters involving Israel, Mr. Perle left the Government to become a consultant in 1980.

The Israeli arms dealers, Shlomo Zabludowicz and his son, Chaim Zabludowicz, became clients of Mr. Perle in 1980. They paid $90,000 to the Abington Corporation, a consulting company where Mr. Perle worked that was owned by John F. Lehman Jr., now the Secretary of the Navy [and indeed now in 2004 - a member of the independent 9/11 commission].

It was not until January 1982, nine months after Mr. Perle says the Zabludowiczes stopped being his clients, that he settled his financial arrangements with Mr. Lehman and Abington and received a portion of the $90,000 fee from 1980. The $50,000 Mr. Perle received in March 1981 was in addition to his share of the Abington fee...

Mr. Perle said the Zabludowicz account was the first he brought to Abington. The agreement called for a one-year contract at $10,000 a month to help the Zabludowiczes try to sell their mortars and ammunition to the Defense Department...

[Copyright, New York Times, 1983]

--Ancient history, right? But there seems to be a long-established, and very interesting, pattern here, that has basically been tolerated.

Now this is interesting. The British government has without explanation dropped its case against the British intelligence services translator accused of violating the Official Secrets Act. Katharine Gun had been accused of "disclosing a request allegedly from a US National Security Agency official for help from British intelligence to tap the telephones of UN Security Council delegates during the period of fraught diplomacy before the war," the Guardian reports.

Yesterday, after Gun pleaded not guilty to the charge, "prosecutor Mark Ellison told the court the case would not go ahead. He said: 'The prosecution offer no evidence against the defendant on this indictment as there is no longer sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction. It would not be appropriate to go into the reasons for this decision.'"

No longer sufficient evidence?

Pretty intriguing. How does a case like this suddenly disappear? Gun's supporters as I understand think she is a hero for having leaked -- not an innocent victim. Seems the British government -- or more likely, this one -- wanted this case to go away.

We were with Mike's friend tonight who's been working in the British cabinet office. Like most British people I know, she doesn't care for Blair and finds him really "odd." [This I can't understand, I love the man]. Strangely nobody mentioned Iraq once tonight, not directly anyway, although that must have been a big preoccupation of the cabinet officials she was interviewing for the past year. She did tell me a funny story about Joint Intelligence Committee chief John Scarlett. Walking into his office, she said, was like re-entering the Cold War. He has these four very old Bush TV sets kind of piled in the corner with different channels on and a huge map of Iraq with lots of colored pins in it. [This was back a year ago, weeks before the war began]. Framed honors from various former Soviet republics on the wall thank him she wasn't sure for what, and little trophies of nuclear weapons she hopes indicate his efforts to shepherd Soviet stockpiles into some secure place.

She was supposed to be interviewing cabinet officials about strategic goals and challenges. Scarlett: "Well, there are the challenges, and then there is what I can tell you..."

William Safire actually writes a pretty moving column from Riga, Latvia.

This simply defies belief. Democracy Now is reporting that "the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes which include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba."

Host Amy Goodman: "Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a, quote, service, and the Treasury Department says it's illegal to perform services for embargoed nations. It can be punishable by fines of up to half a million dollars or jail terms as long as ten years. Robert Bovenschulte is with the American Chemical Society, which decided this week to challenge the government and risks criminal prosecution by editing articles submitted from these five embargoed nations. Can you talk more about this decision?

ROBERT BOVENSCHULTE, American Chemical Society: Certainly. Let me make clear first of all that we are by no means alone in taking this position. In fact, there are very few publishers that have decided to restrict their normal publishing activities as a result of the OFAC ruling, which was issued in late September....It is very peculiar. You can divide the so-called services into two categories; one is the traditional peer review function whereby noted scientists in given fields are asked by our editors, who are also experts, to review a given article and make a judgment about it, whether it is publishable or not, whether it's important work, and also to offer comments that might improve the work. The second category has to do with what is regarded as copy editing and this means, of course, correcting grammar, rewriting some sentences in minor ways, changing punctuation, and conforming the material to a given style guideline...The copy editing matter is particularly curious because -- basically, they [OFAC] are alleging that some important service is being provided by a person who sits there and makes sure that the language of the paper -- these are highly technical papers, by the way, that the language has appropriate English and conforms to publishers' style guidelines. This is curious to us and we cannot understand really what the rationale for that prohibition is."

It really must be read to be believed.

It would seem the Justice Department would have better work to do, say, investigating Halliburton's operations in Iran, which certainly must contribute more of a profitable service to the ayatollahs than American publishers copy-editing Iranian and Cuban scholars' texts. Aren't these the people the US would want to cultivate, in any case?

OFAC's rules and spirit are not always applied very logically, especially when Bechtel and Halliburton are involved.

Books. A few days back I recommended some books I had been reading on the vague theme of Western policy and Arabia. Among them, the autobiography of the British Arabist, explorer and travel writer Freya Stark, called the Coast of Incense. It was published in 1953, and the copy I have from the library is literally coming apart at the seams.

In any case, here's a taste of her incredible writing:

[London 1939]

When I reached London, gas masks were beginning to appear in shop windows, and in six days we were at war. Here these chapters of my life should end, if one’s private affairs went into step with the histories of nations. When I reached the Foreign Office, to ask for transport to Egypt, I was kept as South Arabian expert for the Ministry of Information in London: England, it seemed, was to be my home for the years of the war. …[But British diplomat] Stewart [Perowne] telegraphed the Ministry to ask for me as his assistant in Aden [Yemen]…

Four days were given me in [her family home in Italy] Asolo…In a sullen Venice, empty of strangers, puzzled and alarmed by the news published that morning, that Mr. Chamberlain had refused Hitler’s overtures of peace, awakening at last to the fact that the house of cards was sliding to the ground, Herbert and my mother saw me off: on a station platform bare of all the gaiety of travel, we said good-bye. None of us mentioned it, but we knew we were not likely to see each other again, and so it was: and it was in that moment or a little afterwards that I realized how my long quest was accomplished just in time – for I thought of death with no fear, either for them or for me, but gently, as it has ever since appeared. The Orient Express carried me away, through the rich Friuli plain, the gateway of the treasure house of Europe. Among shunting troops and a bustle of preparation, we crossed the Balkans and again climbed into Anatolia; and breaking into Syria, in spite of dimmed streets and busy secretariats, found the little old Asiatic world unchanged, brilliant, enduring hard and gay under the hammering of time: it has had too many strokes not to feel the temporary quality of each...

..

A 'spy' in the office of special plans [or at least, a sane person]: Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked for a year in the Pentagon Near East South Asia department that housed the infamous Office of Special Plans, tells all to the LA Weekly .

Coming on a year after the Iraq war, it turns out that Iraq did not have nuclear, chemical or biological weapons when the US invaded. And it turns out the post-war isn't going so well. And it is now apparent that a certain office in the Pentagon is largely responsible for the US having been so ill prepared for the Iraq postwar. And that one individual feeding this office "intelligence" provided lots of discredited and unreliable information. In fact, he was paid to provide it. So what do you do? Investigate? Pillory? How about give him $4 million dollars to keep it coming. Unbelievable.

Biggest CIA office in history. "The Baghdad office has become the biggest in CIA history, even surpassing the size of its Saigon post at the height of the Vietnam War," AFP reports. "There are nearly 500 CIA agents in Iraq."

Just pause to think about that a moment.

Interesting what leaks out when Congressional investigations are diverted from looking at the important stuff.

But now NPR's Mary Louise Kelly is reporting that the Senate Select Intelligence committee does plan to investigate the role of the Office of Special Plans. Go Carl Levin! But NPR also reports that the Pentagon says that something something rules do not permit them to give the names of civilian contractors to the Office of Special Plans to Congress?! The office that is supposed to provide oversight of them? Who are paid by US tax money? That is hard to believe.

On these issues...Bob Dreyfuss has an intriguing entry on Israel's own 'office of special plans.'

The New York Times is reporting a pretty startling find of the independent 9/11 commission: In March 1999, two and a half years before the September 11 attacks, "German intelligence officials gave the Central Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan al-Shehhi, and asked the Americans to track him."

"After the Germans passed the information on to the C.I.A., they did not hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, a senior German intelligence official said. 'There was no response' at the time, the official said. After receiving the tip, the C.I.A. decided that 'Marwan' was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked him down."

The whole piece is here.

We now know that the US intelligence community had several of the September 11 puzzle pieces in advance-- [and granted, it doesn't look like a puzzle until after the fact]: the Phoenix memo about flight schools and the Minneapolis flight school arrest. Two hijackers in particular, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, repeatedly drifted on and off the radar of the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI.

But the revelation of advance CIA knowlege of Marwan [al-Shehi]'s identity, and the fact they had a phone number and were able to determine his association with bin Laden- not in the month before September 11th but many months before-- is by far the most devastating. Why? Because al-Shehi was at the very center of the Hamburg cell that hatched the 9/11 plot. As the Times reports, "Unlike the leads to Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi in San Diego, the earlier information about Mr. Shehhi could have taken investigators to the core of the Qaeda cell at a time when the plot was probably in its formative stages. According to testimony in Germany in December in a criminal case related to the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Shehhi was one of only four members of the Hamburg cell who knew about the attacks beforehand."

Bad news at the Milosevic trial. Presiding Judge Richard May has had to resign because of illness -- after almost two years of hearing the Milosevic case. The UN has to now appoint a new judge who has to read through 300 court days of testimony to get up to speed. Milosevic cannot stop killing people even while he's on trial. Said one colleague of Judge May, "He has been slowly broken by the case — you could see him aging."

Remember a few weeks back, when Russian opposition presidential candidate Rybkin disappeared and reemerged a few days later, rumpled and woozy in Kiev, with a tale of having been kidnapped, drugged and filmed in some sort of compromising situation by the KGB? The left may have to resort to such tactics with Ralph Nader. Update. Wonkette, and Wonkette.

Might the Senate Select Intelligence committee want to hear from the one US agency that got closest to calling Saddam's nuclear capabilities correct? State's Intelligence and Research Bureau? Apparently, not.

"Some have speculated that Republicans want to keep the focus on CIA Director George J. Tenet," the Los Angeles Times reports. "But a Republican aide to the Intelligence Committee rejected those claims and said the panel opted to exclude the State Department mainly because members were primarily interested in hearing from Tenet and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. The two men generally field most of the questions from senators."

I have some thoughts on the sorry track record of this committee to ever do anything serious to undertake real US intelligence reform. Particularly under the leadership of Pat Roberts, whose performance is just dismal. Sometimes, for the exact opposite reasons he says, one actually is tempted by Richard Perle's call for massive revamping of the intelligence agencies. But Dems are left calling for preserving the status quo againt the proposed wrecking ball and ravages of the likes of Perle.

It's interesting that there are reports that in both the UK and the US, and in Israel as well, that ad hoc 'red team' intelligence offices have been formed in policymakers' offices, that bypass the traditional intelligence bureaucracies in those countries. Clearly, the US case of the Office of Special Plans demonstrates why this is so dangerous. But it may be also worth asking why policymakers in these countries find the intelligence bureaucracies that are supposed to serve them so unworkable. Do these rogue offices operate without Congressional or parliamentary oversight? Absolutely. But is that their sheer attractiveness to policymakers? Or the fact that these offices on the margins of the bureacracy have a unique ability and flexibility to hire some of the brightest people, at short notice, with minimal bureaucratic hassle, and give them the assignments they want answered? [Do their unmonitored, insidery hiring practices incline these rogue offices towards their own sort of group think -- hiring people who are all inclined toward the same ideological point of view? In the case of OSP, obviously, yes. They of course are utterly politicized. But there is something wrong with a CIA that, despite all of its professionalism and exhaustively studied professional standards and techniques for intelligence collection and analysis, again and again fails to predict or get right all sorts of intelligence threats and estimates. Or, perhaps, which is forced to rate so many potential threats as probable, that the US government can adequately prepare for none. This is something I'd like to think more about in coming weeks].

Could Ahmed Chalabi be more out of Central Casting in his portrayal of a shamelessly corrupt wheeler dealer type? As to all the lies he fed our political leaders and intelligence agencies the past few years, Chalabi says with satisfaction, the end justifies the means:

"During an interview, Mr. Chalabi...shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled U.S. intelligence," The Daily Telegraph reports. "'We are heroes in error...As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. Our objective has been achieved. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.'
"Mr. Chalabi added: "The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if [President Bush] wants.'"

Actually, Chalabi's candor is refreshing. If only the people who bought and paid for Chalabi's lies hook line and sinker would be so candid, for a change.

Could you imagine the headline? Doug Feith says, "the end justifies the means?"
I'd love it.

Watch carefully what's happening with the Lakhdar Brahimi mission to Iraq. My read? This was not really about early elections in Iraq. This was about the UN answering the US's plea to quietly take on a larger role managing the political transition to Iraqi 'sovereignty.'

Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister, is one of the most talented and important diplomats at the UN. Like Sergio Vieira de Mello who was killed in Iraq last August, Brahimi is one of the real entrepreneurs at the UN who has tackled such key issues as why the UN fails repeatedly to be effective at peacekeeping. [The "Brahimi Report" on UN peacekeeping operations is available here.]

It was interesting that at an event yesterday on UN reform sponsored by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute -- not exactly known as a hotbed of support for the UN or multilateralism -- that the tone was one of rapprochement and of the US returning to the fold. Also noted by former Amb. Thomas Pickering was a meeting two weeks ago between Bush and Kofi Annan that apparently was where the deal was sealed that sent Brahimi on his Iraq mission.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting some more thoughts and reporting on UN reform, US relations with the UN, and Iraq.

[Update: Bob Dreyfuss's take is different: it's all about the US getting military bases in Iraq. so how much "sovereignty" can the US really afford Iraq to have?, Dreyfuss wonders...]

Word is the 9/11 commission is going to be severely cutting back its planned public hearings. This despite the fact that the commission is likely to be granted a two month extension, which it requested. To a large degree, administration foot dragging is responsible for delays in the panel getting access to the documents it needs to conduct its investigation. But one also wonders what they have been doing for the past nine months or so.

Check out investigative journalist Bob Dreyfuss's new blog, "The Dreyfuss Report," on Iraq and national security, over at TomPaine.

Dreyfuss has been researching US policy towards the Middle East - in all its overt, covert, and contradictory variants - for the past thirty years, and that depth of insight is on display.

We're so busy reading about real-life government intrigues -- historic and recent - that War and Piece has not had time to review several books it has received from publishers in the past few weeks. So here is a better review than I would have written in any case, of John Le Carre's latest, Absolute Friends, by Slate's Fred Kaplan.

For real-life spy stories, I highly recommend the unspeakably brilliant Charlie Wilson's War, by 60 Minutes producer George Crile, about the covert US war to arm the Afghan mujahadin. It reads like the front book end to the current mess coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's one of the best reads I've had in years, no kidding.

And for more historic cases of US and British spy games in the Middle East, I recommend former CIA operative Miles Copeland's The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, and Freya Stark's autobiography, The Coast of Incense, and a biography of Stark, Passionate Nomad. Stark, the Italian-born British Arabist who taught herself Arabic, Persian, and Turkish while exploring the Middle East starting in her thirties, served during World War II as an agent of British intelligence. For England, Stark conceived of and helped set up in Egypt and Iraq, a parallel network to the secret society, the Muslim Brotherhood, as natives of both countries were being courted by the Germans well aware of the Arabs' strafing under British colonial rule. British support for the creation of Israel in British-controlled Palestine -- a policy Stark opposed -- added to growing anti-British sentiment fueling rebellion against British colonial rule in the Muslim world. Copeland's book to some degree picks up where Stark's leaves off -- with the US and Britain fighting the Cold War in Nasser's Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Thanks to colleagues for suggestions for the above.

And it doesn't really fit with the Mid East theme of the others. But for one of the best, and funniest, post-Cold War, post-modern spy-ish novels, check out Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale, recommended by a dear friend in the business. In fact, I have to get my own copy of this. As one who has done my own fair share of scribbling and trying to chase down slippery facts on elusive figures and events for tiny magazines and BBC documentaries across Europe and Washington, I could relate to Bradbury's Francis Jay only too much.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Mansoor Ijaz says that his father, Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr. Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz, was working for "atoms for peace."

"...On Jan. 20, 1972, my father (then a tenured physicist at Virginia Tech and senior research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee), along with 300 of Pakistan's best nuclear physicists and engineers had been summoned home from around the world by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. They came to a rural Pakistani town where Bhutto ordered them to 'build me a bomb.' He vowed to 'eat grass,' if necessary, to make Pakistan a nuclear power.

"And so began one of history's most defiant and notorious efforts to set up a worldwide clandestine network aimed at purchasing, copying, even stealing whatever was necessary to get the technology that would yield the Muslim world's first functional nuclear weapons. These efforts ended in humiliation and disgrace last week when Abdul Qadeer Khan, the metallurgist who allegedly first stole blueprints for Pakistan's uranium enrichment centrifuges from a Dutch nuclear consortium in 1975, admitted to selling state secrets and technology based on those designs to Iran, Libya, and North Korea."

I must say, I am baffled by how Ijaz can intellectually separate the work of his father in helping Pakistan get a nuclear bomb - from the fact that Pakistan's nuclear program has been used to further the nuclear aspirations of such rogue states as Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Except perhaps in that a child would want to see his parents in the best possible light.

Despite his unconvincing argument that the nuclear program for which his father worked had peaceful intentions -- Ijaz himself points out that his father was contacted by students considering requests to provide nuclear assistance to other nations -- Ijaz's judgment that the Bush administration seems to be "whitewashing" official Pakistan's role in the proliferation scandal, and his condemnation of Khan's activities, sounds sincere.

"Whitewashing Pakistan's official complicity in such activities, as the Bush administration seems to be doing, will only result in rogue proliferators sprouting up everywhere," he writes. "But if making Khan the scapegoat protects Pakistan's military and intelligence institutions so they can earnestly--albeit secretly--debrief international investigators about which other countries and terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, have received Pakistani nuclear materials and technologies, so be it."

A couple years ago I engaged in a series of long interviews with Ijaz, for a story that I ended up never publishing [for growing fear the magazine that commissioned the piece wanted to turn it into a two-dimensional slam of Ijaz]. Ijaz was understandably annoyed that I had wasted so much of his time, but I was relieved to avoid what seemed an inevitable catastrophe. He's a fascinating, complex, self-aggrandizing and utterly conflicted character, with a hand in both the Democratic Party, the neocon brain trust, and Pakistani intelligence and security circles some very sympathetic to Islamist radical extremists. The psychological difficulty of Ijaz's position -- connected to all these deeply, ideologically conflicting groups -- was brought home to me during his frantic efforts to help gain the release of Daniel Pearl, for whom he had served as a source. I take Ijaz at his word that his father was a decent person. Yet, the fact is, his work contributed to rogue states -- and possibly the very same rogue groups who kidnapped and murdered Pearl -- coming close to acquiring the means to kill thousands.

Fear at the White House in the silence among those interviewed in the Plame proble, the New York Times reports:

"At the White House, the topic is rarely discussed openly among those who have already been drawn into the investigation and those who think they may be, people who have been questioned in the case said. The result, they said, is an information vacuum that is being filled to some extent by fear of what current or former colleagues may be telling investigators.

"Some officials now find themselves in a bind borne of the potentially huge political stakes of the case. Since the investigation began in September, President Bush has said repeatedly that he wants to get to the bottom of the matter and that he has directed everyone on his staff to cooperate fully. Some lawyers involved in the case said White House officials were now trapped between that direction from the president and legal advice that they aggressively assert their own rights."

..."The case has heated up since December, when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself...Soon afterward, some administration officials were summoned to interviews at an office building a few blocks from the White House that is customarily used for investigations of national security breaches.

"There, a two-member team of prosecutors, referring to specific e-mail messages, notes and phone calls, started asking tough, confrontational questions about the leak and who might have been behind it. Then came the grand jury, where as usual witnesses must answer questions without a lawyer present, not knowing what their colleagues have testified."

On a related subject, the American Prospect's Murray Waas has an interesting story that Robert Novak was warned by two US officials not to publish Plame's name in the piece.

OK, Ashcroft is truly, certifiably a scary *&#@%!er. He is his own one person axis of evil. We need those gun records too. If gay marriage court rulings are somehow helping the Republicans, Ashcroft's cartoon-evil behavior is surely good for the Democrats.

Seems Colin Powell cannot get out of Foggy Bottom soon enough.

Did Saddam's spies fool the US gov, asks Newsweek. Perhaps a better question is, were Chalabi's INC defectors, really defectors, or double agents of Saddam -- a theory the LA Times Bob Drogin wrote about back in August 2003.

But wonder if what occurred is what is most obvious? The defectors the INC put forward were coached to tell the Americans exactly what the INC needed to get financial support and the increasing commitment of the Americans to pursue regime change in Baghdad? The New York Times describes that INC Washington operation here.

"The fact that the Iraqi National Congress was disseminating information about Iraq to the United States government and the Western news media before the war has been previously reported," James Risen reports. "Less widely known is that the effort was carefully coordinated through a special analytical unit the group established in Washington that was paid for by the United States.

"In the 2002 memo, the group included an organizational chart showing five analysts in charge of processing information and writing reports to be distributed to the group's own newspaper, the United States government and other recipients — including many news organizations. The memo included the analysts' job descriptions, describing their areas of focus, including the Iraqi military, Baghdad's intelligence services and human rights. It also said a consultant was in charge of tracking Iraqi military-industrialization programs, including efforts to develop unconventional weapons.

"...The program was transferred from the State Department to the Pentagon in 2002, and the information it produced was then sent to the Defense Human Intelligence Service...Mr. Qanbar said that he had been the overall manager of the Iraqi National Congress's Washington office and that he was 'not an intel guy.' But he said that the analytical unit in Washington had done 'a lot of work figuring out about Saddam's family, and the Baathists,' and that 'it was not all about W.M.D.'..

It's definitely worth reading the whole thing.

Anyone can understand that the INC was an incredibly successful advocacy operation -- and their purpose wasn't to tell the truth, but to have their interests served. That's what lobbying groups do. When you talk to them, you have to keep in mind, where they're coming from and what their purpose is in saying x y z.

What I can't understand is the long time Washington champions of Chalabi and the INC. They've been implicated in Chalabi's lies now. Chalabi doesn't care -- he's not running for office in the US, (and probably not in Iraq either given how incredibly little traction the INC has in Iraq). But Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and very many other long time champions of Chalabi in DC -- who have reputations to defend in the US, wouldn't it seem that they might want to speak to obvious questions about Chalabi's credibility, and their own role peddling what has now been revealed as Chalabi's discredited - or deceitful - pronouncements about Iraq's WMD programs?

When I've asked Perle about an earlier NYT article about a DIA review that had found that the information from various INC-provided defectors had turned out to be worthless -- or worse -- his response was, "No, no, no, no, that's not true.....I never said it would be a cakewalk in Iraq...The DIA is as bad as the CIA...It's not true."

Well -- untangling his multiple denials, it is true, that the information provided by the INC defectors was deceitful. But did Perle know it's not true? Perhaps Seymour Hersh's insights on this subject, given in an interview, are most apt: "One of the great questions is 'Were they lying? Did they know the truth?' And the answer, I think, to a large degree, is that, whatever they may have suspected, they didn't know the truth, because the truth was simply impossible for them to see. The system had been set up so that they saw only what they wanted."

Kind of hard to engage in a 'war of ideas' with the Arab world, as the neocons champion, if the Arab world can't read your ideas!

Fox News reports that the reason former White House press aide Adam Levine may have been interviewed by the Plame leak grand jury is "because Fleischer and Bartlett were with Bush on a July 7-12 trip to Africa just prior to publication of Novak's column, and McClellan, then Fleischer's deputy, was on vacation."

Newsday has a nice timeline of the Plame leak affair, here.

"Everyone who needs triple therapy is getting triple therapy." Romania declares victory in war on AIDS. Pretty incredibly spectacular that a poor ex communist Balkan country is making anti retroviral drugs universally available to all who need it.

"Now everyone in treatment is tracked on one national database. Those with full-blown AIDS — about 5,300 patients — get not only triple therapy, but a daily $2 food allowance, a monthly stipend of $100 for a caregiver (usually a child's mother) and 12 train tickets a year to Bucharest or another city for tests and counseling," Don McNeill reports. "The government buys AIDS drugs in bulk, giving it more bargaining power than individual hospitals, and does not tax them."

Sad. Wes Clark reported to drop out of the race. He was a really strong candidate for starting so late and with no political background, but he clearly appealed to many of the same constituents flocking to the better established Kerry. Maybe if Kerry wins Clark would find a role in the cabinet.

The White House press aide interviewed this week by FBI officials in relation to the Plame leak investigation, Adam Levine, apparently left the White House in December. Which is when John Aschroft recused himself from the investigation. Now several news organizations report that Levine's job was to serve as a link between the White House press office and television networks. An old Knight Ridder story refers to "Adam Levine, the assistant press secretary at the White House who coordinates the Sunday appearances." A more recent Washington Post story writes that "Adam Levine, a former White House aide who portrayed Russert in mock sessions with administration officials," referring to White House prep of the President in advance of his appearance on Meet the Press this past weekend, so seems he is playing some sort of White House consulting role even though he left the job in December.

One thing that comes up in a google search for Adam Levine is a series of stories written by one Adam Levine in the late 1990s on Missouri state politics. We will remember that Ashcroft is a former governor of Missouri (1984-1993) and one of Missouri's Senators from 1994 until 2000. Who knows if there's any connection. It seems that there are multiple reasons Ashcroft may have had in December to recuse himself from the investigation, as the investigation gathered pace, and now seems to be zeroing in on fairly senior White House staff. But interesting if someone can figure out if between his stint at the Missouri state house news org in the mid-late 1990s and the White House press job in 2001-2004 if Adam Levine did any work for Sen. Ashcroft. It could be of course a completely different Adam Levine, and not working with a broadcaster, I honestly have never encountered him in his WH job before.

In reviewing some of the facts, it seems like we are really close to knowing what happened.

Wilson's NYT oped exposing the bogus nature of the Niger uranium documents appears July 6, 2003.

Novak's column exposing Plame's identity appears July 14, 2003.

On September 28, The Washington Post reported that according to 'a senior administration official,' that 'two top White House officials'...had called at least 'six journalists' to reveal the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife.

In the October 13, 2003 edition of Newsweek, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell is quoted as saying, "I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that was the real story." Newsweek also reported that Wilson had received a call from Chris Matthews, of MSNBC's 'Hardball,' who told him, 'I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.'

--It's kind of interesting -- that Adam Levine's job was to book White House officials on TV news and talk shows. He doesn't sound like he's the kind of senior official or has the job description to have likely known in intimate detail who's who at the CIA. He would have no reason to know about Plame's role, except had he been told by his superiors to try to get his contacts say at NBC to follow this other side of the Wilson story.

As the Times notes "Armed with handwritten White House notes, detailed cellphone logs and copies of e-mail messages between White House aides and reporters, prosecutors have demanded explanations of conversations between aides and reporters for some of the country's largest news organizations that under ordinary circumstances would never be publicly discussed.

As the Times also reports, "Prosecutors, referring to the story as 'one by two by six,' have sought to learn the identity of the senior administration official or the two top White House officials, believing that whoever provided the information to the Post knew who spoke with Mr. Novak."

You almost don't have to talk to the reporters. You can see who called who from the phone records, and know when certain stories did or did not appear.

But who passed on the 'dirt' about Plame was probably not likely the person who came up with the idea -- who had access to the information about Plame's job at the CIA. That is the kind of information much more likely to be known by the few people who were frequenting the CIA at that time haranguing CIA analysts to come up wtih the Iraq intel findings they believed to be true. We now know one of the people they were haranguing is Alan Foley, the head of the non proliferation office at the CIA, who was Valerie Plame's boss, and who reportedly quit under the pressure. As the New Republic reported, those doing that haranguing were John Hannah and Libby Lewis, from the Office of the Vice President. After all, Wilson got sent on his fact finding trip to Niger in the first place because the Vice Presidnet's office had been fed (by whom?) this report of the documents which surfaced in Italy that purported to show sales of uranium from Niger to Iraq. Documents which Wilson's research suggested were fraudulent.

It seems more and more plausible that the Plame leak originated in the senior staff in Cheney's office, and was conveyed to the White House press staff, including perhaps to the press secretary who books guests for TV networks.

"K Street" Meets Plame-Leak Grand Jury: "White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he talked to the grand jury last week," the Post reports. "Mary Matalin, former counselor to Vice President Cheney, testified Jan. 23, the sources said. Neither is suspected by prosecutors of having exposed undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame, but both were questioned about White House public relations strategy, the sources said.

"...FBI agents have interviewed at least eight current and former Bush aides -- including Matalin and McClellan -- and have questioned them about thousands of e-mails that the White House surrendered in October, along with stacks of call logs and calendars, the sources said. The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to columnist Robert D. Novak shortly before July 14, when he published a column quoting 'two senior administration officials' saying that Plame, 'an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction,' had suggested her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to acquire uranium there as part of an effort to develop nuclear weapons.

..."Officials interviewed by the FBI include Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser; McClellan; Matalin; White House communications director Dan Bartlett; former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; Adam Levine, a former White House press official; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Cathie Martin, a Cheney aide, according to the sources."

The New York Times adds, "One set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser. Prosecutors have described the notes as 'copious,'", lawyers told the Times. "In addition, the prosecutors have asked about cellphone calls made last July to and from Catherine J. Martin, a press secretary for Mr. Cheney.

Now get this:

"At first, the investigation seemed narrowly focused on trying to identify who at the White House provided the information about Ms. Plame to Mr. Novak," the Times reports. "But more recently, prosecutors have focused on a Sept. 28, 2003, article in The Washington Post, which said the newspaper had been told that 'yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife.' Prosecutors, referring to the story as 'one by two by six,' have sought to learn the identity of the senior administration official or the two top White House officials, believing that whoever provided the information to the Post knew who spoke with Mr. Novak."

All very interesting, needless to say. Seems the phone records indicate several calls between Novak and various White House officials and press secretaries during the time between Wilson's oped and the publication of Novak's piece. But who had the security clearance to know about Plame to pass on the "dirt"? Presumably not the press secretaries? But they might know who was calling who at that time?

Pushing Democracy in the Middle East: "The Bush administration has launched an ambitious bid to promote democracy in the 'greater Middle East' that will adapt a model used to press for freedoms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe," the Post's Robin (does she ever sleep) Wright and Glenn Kessler. "Details are still being crafted. But the initiative, scheduled to be announced at the G-8 summit hosted by President Bush at Sea Island, Ga., in June, would call for Arab and South Asian governments to adopt major political reforms, be held accountable on human rights -- particularly women's empowerment -- and introduce economic reforms, U.S. and European officials said.

"As incentives for the targeted countries to cooperate, Western nations would offer to expand political engagement, increase aid, facilitate membership in the World Trade Organization and foster security arrangements, possibly some equivalent of the Partnership for Peace with former Eastern Bloc countries."

This initiative, following up on Bush's November NED speech, is stirring genuine hope and interest in the democratization community...Stay tuned...

Just Out: My piece on the new panel investigating the Iraq WMD intel debacle -- as well as the Iran, Libya, and North Korea WMD intel debacles. Which plans to report back to us - maybe - some time in 2005.

The press and the government's Iraq WMD case, examined in detail here.

National security writer William Arkin describes a classified Pentagon study involving names familiar from the Office of Special Plans.

"Soon after 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld commissioned a 'B Team,' which, according to a still-classified Pentagon document, was supposed to 'challenge the conventional wisdom that no global connections exist between terrorist groups.' The 'Wurmser-Maloof' project, as it was called, was led by two neoconservative civilians, David Wurmser and F. Michael Maloof. The team went back through intelligence debriefings and intercepts and made an elaborate flow chart, known as 'the matrix' that showed links between a number of countries and various terrorist groups. The project concluded that Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other groups with disparate ideologies and objectives were increasingly putting aside their differences and uniting behind a shared desire to harm the U.S.

"Were their conclusions accurate? The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency were certainly skeptical of the approach. But Defense Policy Board member Richard N. Perle, who was briefed on the Wurmser-Maloof report, dismissed the agencies' concerns, saying that intelligence analysts had failed to look for the kinds of connections uncovered in the report 'because it wasn't consistent with their theory' that the groups operated more or less autonomously. 'They had filtered out the whole set of possibilities,' Perle said in an interview with the PBS show 'Frontline,' calling the incompetence of CIA analysts 'appalling.'

"'If you're walking down the street, [and] you're not looking for hidden treasure, you won't find it,' Perle said."

...

Even George Will seems to think George W. Bush is hemorraging credibility....

--"After the war, in May, on Polish television, President Bush said, 'We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories.' No, we did not. 'So what's the difference?' said the president in December about the failure to find WMDs, because 'if [Saddam Hussein] were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger.' Such casualness, which would be alarming in any president, is especially so in one whose vaulting foreign policy ambitions have turned his first term into Woodrow Wilson's third term, devoted to planting democracy and 'universal values' in hitherto inhospitable places.

--"Once begun, leakage of public confidence in a president's pronouncements is difficult to stanch. This president's certitude that $400 billion 'is enough to meet our commitments' for 10 years under the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement was followed by a one-third upward revision of the estimate. Especially dismaying was the fact that the president seemed not to know -- or, worse, care -- that an inherent problem with vast welfare state expansions is that no one can know crucial variables...

--"Republicans are swiftly forfeiting the perception that they are especially responsible stewards of government finances. It is surreal for a Republican president to submit a budget to a Republican-controlled Congress and have Republican legislators vow to remove the 'waste' that he has included and that they have hitherto funded."

Hmm. "Leakage of public confidence?" "It is surreal for a Republican president..."; "After this winter of his discontent, this president needs spring training?" Is SS George W. Bush a sinking ship, or what? After all, this is not Paul Krugman writing. It is George Will, for goodness sake.

Kevin Drum seems to have the goods on W.'s military service. Absolute must-read:

"...To make a long story short, Bush apparently blew off drills beginning in May 1972, failed to show up for his physical, and was then grounded and transferred to ARF as a disciplinary measure. He didn't return to his original Texas Guard unit and cram in 36 days of active duty in 1973 — as Time magazine and others continue to mistakenly assert — but rather accumulated only ARF points during that period. In fact, it's unclear even what the points on the ARF record are for, but what is clear is that Bush's official records from Texas show no actual duty after May 1972, as his Form 712 Master Personnel Record from the Texas Air National Guard clearly indicates..."

Check it out.

The New York Times' David Rhode reports at the end of an interesting piece on the Pakistani nuclear proliferation network led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, that "Simon Henderson, a London-based author and associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has repeatedly interviewed Dr. Khan and his associates, said that much more information about the scientist's exploits could come to light, potentially embarrassing people inside and outside Pakistan.

"'Musharraf hopes he has killed the story,' Mr. Henderson said. 'But while Khan is still around, there is the danger that the real story will emerge.'"

So what's the real story?

"Dr. Khan was not working alone. Dr. Khan was part of a process," Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Washington Post.

"Among the countries known to be involved are Malaysia, South Africa, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Germany. A company in another European country was also involved," the Post reports...Two German businessmen identified by Libya as alleged suppliers of centrifuge technology -- Otto Heilingbrunner and Gotthard Lerch -- have been interviewed by IAEA investigators but not charged with any crimes, according to two officials close to the investigation. A third German named by Libya, Heinz Mebus, is now deceased. All were formerly employed by companies that manufacture equipment used in gas centrifuges."

So who else was working with Khan, and who else had knowledge of his network's activities trading nuclear technology with Libya, Iran, and North Korea? When did Musharraf learn of the network. (While Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is reported to have presented Musharraf with the evidence on Khan's activities back in October 2003, is it plausible that intelligence service-overrun Pakistan really had no awareness of his activities in advance of that? The Times of India, for one, reports that Pakistani authorities have been aware of Khan's activities for at least three years).

"Musharraf was said to be stunned by the detailed evidence against Khan and his associates," the Post reports. 'It seemed that the Americans had a tracker planted on Khan's body,' a Pakistani official said. 'They know much more than us about Dr. Khan's wealth spread all over the globe.'

"Among other things, he added, the U.S. officials presented evidence of Khan's alleged attempts to sell nuclear secrets to Saddam Hussein when he was president of Iraq and reported that Khan had traveled to Beirut for a clandestine meeting with a top Syrian official in the mid-1990s."

And what about the intelligence services of the other countries involved? Is it possible the Bush administration didn't want this information to come out earlier this summer when it was busy trying to do damage control in Iraq, which turned out not to have nearly as developed a nuclear program as the countries Khan had been aiding? Does the Bush administration have any thing to answer for why it continues to treat Pakistan as an ally, when it seems one of the single most dangerous country to US national security interests in the world?

"Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil," writes Kevin Phillips in the Los Angeles Times.

"The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back" Bush told Russert, "was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions, and it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to the set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective. And those are essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War."

A political war? What about the politicized post-war planning witnessed in Iraq?

We know the White House, and more specifically the Vice President's Office and Rumsfeld, systematically ordered US civilian and military planners to reject the input of experienced post-war specialists in planning for the Iraq post-war, in favor of hiring those who subscribed to the neocon/INC fantasy for what post-war Iraq would look like. A fantasy vision that included GIs greeted as liberators, flower garlands hung on their necks, Iraqi children singing kumbaya, etc. Rumsfeld and Cheney deliberately ordered first Garner and then Bremer to fire from their post-war planning teams lots of experienced post-war military and civilian experts and Iraq specialists who warned of a far grimmer -- and more realistic -- picture of what post-war Iraq would look like: epic looting, violence, black outs, roadside bombs, ethnic violence, rising Islamic extremism, flooding in of foreign jihadis, etc. If that imposition of the neocons' fantasy of post-war Iraq on top of the grimmer and more realistic situation that presented itself doesn't demonstrate the politicization of a military process, then what does?

And what about the White House's politicization of the Iraq intelligence? The White House made very clear what "intelligence" it wanted to justify and pursue an invasion of Iraq, and bullied, cajoled and selected the intelligence snippets to do just that. Now it's accusing the intelligence community of giving it imperfect intelligence. Choosing to give credence only to that intelligence which justified its preconceived policy decision, the White House got the war it wanted -- and the post-war findings which show how flawed and politicized that decision-making process was.

Not a great performance. Did Bush skip out on part of his National Guard service in Alabama in 1972? Nothing he said today offers the slightest bit of proof that he did not. What's striking is how Bush did not even try to prove that he had showed up when required in Alabama. All he said was he served and got an honorable discharge. Similarly, Bush did not address -- and Russert did not ask -- whether his Iraq intelligence commission will look at the role his office, the Office of the Veep, and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans played in hyping intelligence that had numerous caveats and qualifications that got entirely flattened out of administration pronouncements.

One couldn't help while listening to Bush's notably inarticulate early performance on Meet the Press imagining how much more coherent, confident and articulate a President Kerry would be talking with Russert. Bush just didn't look presidential at all.

The main virtue of this interview, in my opinion, was the fact that Bush was willing to do it at all -- was willing to submit to an interview format which obviously makes him uncomfortable and which does not play to his strengths.

Strong Friedman piece about the bankruptcy of Bush's foreign policy vision.

And yet another Weekly Standard oped attempting to use Bill Clinton's observations about Iraq WMD to justify the Bush Administration's war. Can one imagine, for instance, the Reagan administration justifying the Iran contra scandal based on statements by Jimmy Carter?

Bush may have appointed a commission to look into the Iraq intelligence imbroglio. But pretty much everything any voter needs to know is here, in this old article by the New Republic's Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman on the Office of the Vice President (OVP), Cheney. Lots interesting here too to mine about John Hannah, who UPI's Richard Sales reports is a focus of the Plame-leakgate investigation.

"...But Cheney's office didn't escape the government bubble so much as create a new one. Any doubts expressed by the intelligence community about the OVP's sources, especially Chalabi, were ignored. During his stint as an adviser to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Hannah had been one of the Clinton administration's most fervent INC supporters. Working for Cheney, he stayed in regular contact with the exile group. "He relied on Ahmed Chalabi for insights and advice," says a former Bush administration official. Cheney himself became an increasingly vocal Chalabi advocate. At an NSC meeting in the fall of 2002, the State Department and Pentagon feuded over releasing even more funding to the INC. In a rare burst of open influence, Cheney "weighed in, in a really big way," according to a former NSC staffer. "He said, 'We're getting ready to go to war, and we're nickel-and-diming the INC at a time when they're providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMD.'" To the OVP, the CIA's hostility to such "unique" INC intelligence was evidence of the Agency's political corruption. Before long, "there was something of a willingness to give [INC- provided intelligence] greater weight" than that offered by the intelligence community, says the former administration official.

Chalabi was not the only source Hannah used to get alternative information to Cheney. In 2001, Luti had moved from the OVP to across the Potomac to become Feith's deputy for Near East and South Asia (nesa). By late 2002, Luti's Iraq desk became the Office of Special Plans (OSP), tasked with working on issues related to the war effort. In addition to actual planning, the OSP provided memoranda to Pentagon officials recycling the most damaging--and often the most spurious--intelligence about Iraq's Al Qaeda connections and the most hopeful predictions about liberated Iraq. In the fall of 2002, one of the memos stated as fact that September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent months before the attacks--a claim the FBI and CIA had debunked months earlier after an exhaustive investigation. And the OSP didn't just comb through old intelligence for new information. It had its own sources. For example, one of Luti's aides, a Navy lieutenant commander named Youssef Aboul-Enein, was tasked with scouring Arabic-language websites and magazines to come up with what Aboul-Enein would call "something really useful"--statements by Saddam praising the September 11 attacks, Palestinian suicide bombings, or any act of terrorism.

"According to those who worked in nesa, Luti's efforts had a specific customer: Cheney. "Cheney's the one with the burr under his saddle about Iraq," says retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked for Luti from May 2002 until the eve of the war. During that time, Luti held only about six or seven staff meetings, she says, and "I heard Scooter Libby's name mentioned in half those meetings." Discussing Iraq, Luti would say "things like, 'Did you give something to Scooter?' 'Scooter called; hey, call him back,' ... [or] 'Oh, well, did you talk to Scooter about that?'" And Luti would make trips across the Potomac to see his old colleagues at the OVP. White House officials would often see Luti disappearing into Hannah's office before going on to Libby's.

"The OVP didn't just generate this information for themselves. They tried to pump it back into the intelligence pipeline on visits to Langley. "Scooter and the vice president come out there loaded with crap from OSP, reams of information from Chalabi's people" on both terrorism and WMD, according to an ex-CIA analyst. One of the OVP's principal interlocutors was Alan Foley, director of the CIA's Nonproliferation Center. Cheney's office pelted Foley with questions about Iraq's nuclear weapons program-- especially about Saddam's alleged attempts to purchase uranium from Niger. According to a colleague, Foley "pushed back" by "stressing the implausibility of it." Months earlier, after all, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone to Niger at the behest of the CIA--a visit that had itself been instigated by questions raised by Cheney in an Agency briefing-- and concluded that the sale almost certainly did not occur. But Cheney kept pressing, and it took its toll on Foley. "He was bullied and intimidated," says a friend of Foley.

"In the view of many at Langley, the OVP wasn't simply highlighting what it considered weaknesses in CIA analysis. Rather, it was trying to stifle information that it considered counterproductive to the case for war. The tone of the questioning, some analysts felt, was less inquisitive than hostile. "It was done along the lines of: 'What's wrong with you bunch of assholes? You don't know what's going on, you're horribly biased, you're a bunch of pinkos,'" says a retired analyst close to his active-duty colleagues. Some analysts saw the questioning as a method of diverting overtaxed CIA analysts from producing undesired intelligence product. On one occasion, officials asked analysts hard at work on Iraq to produce a paper on the history of the British occupation of Mesopotamia following World War I. The request might seem reasonable on the surface--after all, an occupation ought to be informed by precedent. But policymakers in the OVP and the DOD could just as easily have picked up histories of Iraq from the library and let the CIA go back to work on classified analysis. But, after enduring the questioning for months, an ex-analyst explains, "It gets to the point where you just don't want to fight it anymore."

"Eventually the OVP's alternative analyses found their way into the administration's public case for war. The distance between the OVP and the intelligence community was greatest on terrorism, and the OVP was determined to win. Libby wrote a draft of Colin Powell's February speech to the U.N. Security Council that outlined a far different threat than the secretary of State envisioned. "[The OVP] really wanted to make it a speech mostly about the link to terrorism," says one former NSC official. Although Powell and his staff balked at the most controversial--and poorly substantiated--details, Libby still provided the initial outline for the speech.

"Cheney's own public statements went far beyond what the CIA and other intelligence agencies had verified. In an August 2002 speech in Nashville, Cheney asserted, "The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago." The intelligence community was in fact deeply divided over whether the nuclear program was again active, and a classified DIA report a month later indicated that the Agency had "no reliable information" about Iraq's chemical weapons program. But these doubts never seeped into Cheney's public statements. Days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," "We know [Saddam is] out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons, and we know that he has a longstanding relationship with ... the Al Qaeda organization." By contrast, the intelligence agencies assessed that, despite some apparently fruitless contact between Saddam's henchmen and Al Qaeda terrorists in Sudan in the mid-'90s, Iraq and Osama bin Laden were two unrelated threats.

"The OVP never considered that it could be wrong, despite the fact that none of its senior members had intelligence training. The CIA, on the other hand, rather than behaving as a rigid and unshakable bastion of unquestionable truth, subjected its judgments to rigorous criticism. On Iraq, the CIA had what is known as the "red cell," a team of four highly regarded retired analysts who conducted alternative assessments of Iraq's ties to terrorism. The OVP, by contrast, put its judgments through no comparable wringer. Perhaps that is why so much of what they embraced was wrong. On the ground in Iraq today, there is no evidence that Saddam reconstituted his nuclear weapons program; according to chief American arms-hunter David Kay's interim report, the evidence of any ongoing chemical or biological weapons programs is fragmentary at best. A classified study prepared by the National Intelligence Council in early 2003 found that only one of Chalabi's defectors could be considered credible, The New Republic has learned. A more recent investigation undertaken by the DIA has found that practically all the intelligence provided by the INC was worthless."

...

Worth rereading the whole thing.

Juan Cole advances the Plame inquiry story honing in on two staffers of the office of vice president Cheney, here.

The changing terrorist threat? Al Qaeda is changing, the New York Times reports, evolving from a pyramid into a constellation of regional radical Islamist terrorist groups from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South Asia that take inspiration but not necessarily orders from bin Laden, as described here:

"...The shifting picture of the terrorist threat flashed before the authorities in Australia last fall when Willie Brigitte, a 35-year-old French citizen, was arrested on terrorism charges. Mr. Brigitte hardly fit the terrorist profile. He was recruited after Sept. 11 and had never trained in the Afghanistan camps, officials said. His name was not on any country's watch list. He entered Australia without being detected, lived for five months in a Sydney suburb and was believed to be selecting targets for attacks, officials said.

"But the most unusual part of the case is that the authorities believe that Mr. Brigitte was a low-ranking member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Pakistani group that was formed a decade ago with help from Pakistan's intelligence service to fight against India in Kashmir. The group was not known to have operations outside that region.

"...Mr. Brigitte had contacts with Lashkar-e-Taiba members in the United States, Canada and Europe, a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the interrogation of Mr. Brigitte said. When Mr. Brigitte was discovered, the Australian authorities had been on the lookout for members Jemaah Islamiyah — viewed as a Qaeda affiliate in Southeast Asia — trying to slip into the country."

Worth reading the whole thing.

A word of caution on two previous posts. Josh Marshall notes news orgs seem to be sitting on the UPI report that suggests the Plame probe is close to moving against two leading officials in the office of the Vice President.

And Juan Cole says there is confusion over whether there really was an assassination attempt against leading Iraq Shiite cleric Ali al-Sistani yesterday.

Stay turned.

Indictments in the Plame affair forthcoming, report Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias. Two members of Vice President Cheney's office, John Hannah and Lewis "Scooter" Libby being named by UPI. Hannah is Cheney's top Mid-East analyst, and a former deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Late last year, Newsweek had an interesting piece referencing Hannah, which said Hannah was one of two top Bush administration officials to be directly fed "raw intelligence" (read bogus, discredited) reports by INC defectors.

"For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC," reports Newsweek. "But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, 'defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed'; the info was then reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.' The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a 'principal point of contact' for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans."

It's kind of amazing how the same characters keep turning up again and again in this saga, like on those TV shows where all US intelligence operations seem to be conducted by the same half dozen TV characters. The vice president's fingerprints seem to be all over the room where the bodies are buried this week, if not on the bodies themselves.

Holy Shiite. Sistani survives assassination attempt, Reuters and the Washington Post report.

Update. Juan Cole reporting that maybe there was no assassination attempt on Sistani. Confused? We've been Iraq'd, I guess.

Get out the popcorn. Bush to appear on Meet the Press Sunday as lots and lots of attention suddenly focused on the months he seems to have disappeared from his national guard service in 1972. Check out Calpundit and talkingpointsmemo for details of Bush's guard service interruptions. And thanks to the Prospect's Nick Confessore for the heads up about Bush's prospective appearance with Tim Russert.

Bernard Lewis' powerful influence on the Bush administration's thinking about the Middle East, described by the Wall Street Journal's Peter Waldman. "Bernard Lewis has been the single most important intellectual influence countering the conventional wisdom on managing the conflict between radical Islam and the West," Richard Perle tells Waldman. "The idea that a big part of the problem is failed societies on the Arab side is very important. That is not the point of view of the diplomatic establishment."

The neocons have always been attracted to the notion of the war on terror as being a war of ideas; [similar to their cherished notion that Ronald Reagan helped win the Cold War by engaging in an aggressive war of ideas]. It's a very attractive notion, but some Mid East experts warn it's a mistaken one, that fails to take into account the extraordinary sense of alienation and mistrust with which many moderate Muslims worldwide view the US actions in the Middle East, particularly in regards to Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Mideast historian Juan Cole of the University of Michigan praises Mr. Lewis's scholarly works earlier in his career but says his more-popular writings of recent years tend to caricature Muslims as poor losers, helpless and enraged," the Journal reports.

"Mr. Cole is among those who say Mr. Lewis's call for military intervention to transform failed Muslim states risks making the culture clash between Islamic lands and the West worse. So far, they say, Iraq looks more like a breeding ground for terrorism than a showcase of democracy -- not surprising, they say, given that the U.S. invaded an old and proud civilization.

"'Lewis has lived so long, he's managed to live into an era when some people in Washington are reviving empire thinking,' says Mr. Cole. 'He's never understood the realities of political and social mobilization and the ways they make empire untenable.'

"Ilan Pappe of Haifa University says Mr. Lewis's view that political cultures can be remade through force contributed to Israel's decision to invade Lebanon in 1982. 'It took the Israelis 18 years, and 1,000 soldiers killed, to abandon that strategy,' Mr. Pappe says. 'If the Americans operate under the same assumptions in Iraq, they'll fail the way the Israelis failed.'"

"After Sept. 11, a book by Mr. Lewis called What Went Wrong? was a best-seller that launched the historian, at age 85, as an unlikely celebrity. Witty and a colorful storyteller, he hit the talk-show and lecture circuits, arguing in favor of U.S. intervention in Iraq as a first step toward democratic transformation in the Mideast. Historically, tyranny was foreign to Islam, Mr. Lewis told audiences, while consensual government, if not elections, has deep roots in the Mideast. He said Iraq, with its oil wealth, prior British tutelage and long repression under Saddam Hussein, was the right place to start moving the Mideast toward an open political system.

"Audiences lapped it up. At the Harvard Club in New York last spring...another interrogator pushed forward, this one clearly intent on the possible next phase of America's remolding of the Mideast. 'Should we negotiate with Iran's ayatollahs?' asked Henry Kissinger, drink in hand.

"'Certainly not!' Mr. Lewis responded.

"Up on the podium, Mr. Lewis lambasted the belief of some Mideast experts at the State Department and elsewhere that Arabs weren't ready for democracy -- that a 'friendly tyrant' was the best the U.S. could hope for in Iraq...Others, like himself, believe Iraqis are heirs to a great civilization, one fully capable, 'with some guidance,' of democratic rule, he said. 'That policy,' he added with a rueful smile, 'is called 'imperialism.''"

Anne Applebaum has written a really important piece on atrocities in North Korea. She points out that by and large, the policy and journalistic community in Washington and the West views North Korea primarily as a national security story. But what about the reports of extraordinary, medieval violence and human suffering of North Koreans?

Traveling this week with sporadic access to both news & computer. But wanted to throw up a couple threads that advance issues this blog has recently been following:

Donald Rumsfeld hasn't given up hope that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. Maybe they're still some to be found, in Syria, Rumsfeld hopes.

And Pakistan's top nuclear scientist has performed a strange kabuki dance of apologing to the nation for spreading nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and been promptly pardoned by President Musharraf. This story is so bizarre, enormous, and undertold -- and the US reaction is so strangely muted, I am convinced there is something else going on here. What exactly did the US know about Abdul Qadir Khan's network providing nuclear assistance to rogue states? Was there a US or western component to all of this? [The AP reports here on the global hunt for the extent of Khan's network.] Why is the US government so strangely quiet about all this? Tenet in his address at Georgetown today said the CIA was aware of Khan's network. But it seems there's still another shoe to drop here.

How frustrating. Before the FBI has solved the anthrax letters case, now they have to grapple with a new case of ricin in the Senate mail room. I hope they've learned something about how to conduct such an investigation involving bioweapons in the three years since the anthrax letters case. Most crucially -- that the government experts the FBI consults on bioweapons often have their own agenda, at odds with the findings of the investigation. Josh Marshall points out that a ricin threat letter appeared at a South Carolina post office in January, "signed 'fallen angel' and the sender identified himself as 'a fleet owner of a tanker company,'" Marshall reports. "The package said the author could make much more ricin and will 'start dumping' large quantities of the poison if new federal trucking rules went in effect," he cites CBS and the AP.

"The CIA Ate My Homework," writes Bob Dreyfuss at TomPaine.

"Bush isn’t quite ready himself to go to war with the CIA," Dreyfuss surmises. "That’s the secret behind the White House’s decision to support an investigation into the Iraq intelligence mess...But the president couldn’t attack the CIA himself. Not only would that look silly and unpresidential, but it would probably unleash a flood of resignations, op-eds by former CIA officials, leaks to the media by current ones, and more. The CIA may not be very good at covert operations, but they’d manage to run an effective one against the White House.

"So, aided by the malleable Kay, the White House decided to punt, calling for one of those Kissingeresque blue-ribbon commissions that will report back in, oh, say, 2005."

Check out the whole thing here.

Cheney key to Iraq probe, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer's star team of Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and Joe Galloway. Current and former US officials said that "intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the [intelligence] errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions...Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaeda and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said."

For the most part, we already know much about the role of the office of the vice president in the manipulation of Iraq intelligence. But whether the real impact of his efforts will be investigated by the commission is still unclear. What's more, whether the commission's efforts will be relegated to the history books rather than the current political debate in the run up to the election is in doubt.

Certainly, no one should listen to journalists for predictions on the Democratic presidential race (remember Howard Dean?). But here's someone who seems to have some interesting insights on the issue.

Some ally. Did Musharraf know Pakistan's nuclear scientists were helping North Korea, Libya and Iran with their nuclear programs? The Post reports that the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb Abdul Qadeer Khan is naming Musharraf and other top leaders of Pakistan's military as in the know. "Khan told investigators that he supplied materials and assistance to Iran, Libya and North Korea not to make money but to deflect attention from Pakistan's nuclear program and -- in the case of Iran and Libya --as a gesture of support to other Muslim countries."

Maybe this is something Bush's proposed intelligence commission will want to probe. Its scope seems to be being caste wide. The Post says former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, and former CIA directors William H. Webster and James Woolsey, have been discussed as possible members of the 9 member panel. The Times names former Bush I-era CIA director Robert M. Gates, former New Hampshire Senator Warren B. Rudman, former deputy CIA director Richard J. Kerr, former Clinton-era defense secretary William Perry, former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, and former weapons hunter David Kay himself, as under consideration for the team.

Meantime, Britain's Blair is also getting forced to approve the creation of an Iraq intelligence probe. What was going on on each side of the Atlantic in the run up to the Iraq war will all make an incredible history book some day.

The Weekly Standard is really experiencing a massive credibility gap on this issue. Where is their coverage of the fact Kay says there were no WMD in Iraq by the time the US invaded Iraq last year? Are they going to leave it at the Gary Schmitt LA Times oped that "our instincts were sound?" Our basic instincts were sound?? Is that the normal reaction of policy intellectuals in a country that spends $30 billion a year on intelligence? The fact is, the Weekly Standard didn't want the US to have sound intelligence on Iraq -- it would have hurt the cause for war.

Journalist Spencer Ackerman's new blog, Iraq'd, over at the New Republic, looks worth visiting frequently.

"Halliburton allegedly overcharged more than $16 million for meals at a single U.S. military base in Kuwait during the first seven months of last year," according to Pentagon auditors, the Wall Street Journal reports. "This dispute focuses on meals served at Camp Arifjan, the huge U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. The e-mail memo that went out Friday said that in July alone, a Saudi subcontractor hired by KBR billed for 42,042 meals a day on average but served only 14,053 meals a day. The difference in cost for that month exceeded $3.5 million, according to Pentagon records. The Pentagon last year paid KBR more than $30 million for meals at the camp from January through July, a tab that included charges for nearly four million meals the government asserts were never served. Pentagon officials couldn't provide an estimate for the total cost of feeding troops in Iraq."

Truly, a despicable company.

Too tired to do more than point it out, but the Project for the New American Century's Gary Schmitt, one of the major long-time proponents of a military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, has an oped in the Los Angeles Times on the Iraq intel failure. He warns the US not to retreat from preemptive wars in the face of stunning new evidence from David Kay that US specific technical intelligence isn't so accurate. Intelligence on intent is more important than on specific stockpiles, he seems to say.

"Whatever the shortcomings in our intelligence on the particulars of Iraq's programs, the basic intelligence assessment that Hussein had never given up his desire to reconstitute his WMD programs was correct. While we should not avoid a debate over how the intelligence community came to misjudge the state of Hussein's programs, this should not distract us from what has always been the core issue for both defenders and critics of the war: To wit, given Hussein's intentions and history, would a policy of containment and deterrence have been sustainable and sufficient to prevent him from becoming a dangerous threat to the U.S. and our interests in the region?"

Very "Minority Report." One wonders, why have an intelligence agency at all if policymakers should just go with their gutt? [I'm being sarcastic. I await the political cartoon that can do this situation justice!]

Nine member panel proposed to investigate Iraq intelligence failure, the Los Angeles Times reports. Brent Scowcroft being discussed as possible chair. Panel will likely be asked to look at US Iraq intelligence going back several administrations, observers say, and can't be expected to return results before the elections. "This seems like an effort for the president to appear as concerned about faulty intelligence as the Democrats are, as the Congress is, as everybody else is," Stuart Rothenberg, described as an independent politial analyst, told the LA Times. "If he didn't do this, and continued to resist, it'd look as though he was covering things up, that he was trying to protect himself."

Listening to Howard Dean on Meet the Press today, and reading Lisa DePaulo's piece on the campaign manager Joe Trippi that Dean recently demoted, among numerous other reports, I have gone from merely eyeing him warily as weak on national security and therefore unlikely to be able to beat Bush, to come to dislike him.

As DePaulo writes, "Howard Dean celebrated his second stunning primary loss, in New Hampshire, by whacking Joe Trippi, the guy who believed when nobody else did, the guy who built this thing from nothing...The dream was over. Because, in the end, it was Howard Dean who didn't get it." There is just too much evidence of lots of daylight between the rhetoric and the reality of Dean -- and I for one was never a huge fan of the myth in any case, given Dean's really troubling statements about Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. I hope for the sake of the larger and far more important campaign against Bush's reelection next November, that Dean bows out soon.

The Observer reports that defectors say North Korea is gassing prisoners to death -- whole families - and taking notes as the people die. "Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime." If this regime was removed off the face of the earth, there is no one who can say it is not a good and just thing. But the Bush administration has so blundered its North Korea policy, and been so discredited in its Iraq campaign, a solution to the North Korea conundrum is unlikely to come from it.

Intelligence Failure Iraq:

"What happened?," asks former CIA analyst Bruce Berkowitz, writing in the Washington Post. "U.S. intelligence analysts have been taking a lot of criticism lately, but I believe that, when all the investigations are completed, we will discover that this wasn't an intelligence analysis failure. It was mainly an intelligence collection failure, combined with a misunderstanding all around about how intelligence really works."

"But trying to understand an often-hostile world with incomplete data is, in essence, not an intelligence problem at all. It's a policy problem," Berkowitz adds. "This suggests that intelligence is -- or ought to be -- the most important input for government officials. In reality, intelligence is just one drop in a fire-hose torrent of facts and analysis an official sees every day...When used wisely, intelligence can contribute to good policy. But history shows that any policymaker can seize upon bits of intelligence that confirm his or her worst fears or greatest hopes, especially when there's little to choose from."

"Saddam had tons of anthrax, VX nerve agents and other deadly materials before the gulf war," Newsweek reports, "and his regime would never produce documents showing they had been destroyed. Given Iraq's long history of deception, it seemed clear Saddam must have been hiding something. But this inference was questionable....

"But if Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, why didn't he come clean?" the reporters ask. "After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private—even outside the country—and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn't that the sensible option?

"Getting inside Saddam's head isn't easy—the man is famous for miscalculating on a catastrophic scale—but the most likely explanation is the most simple: transparency is the enemy of all dictators," they surmise. "Saddam ensured his continued rule by keeping his many enemies—foreign and domestic—off balance. None could be allowed to know all his secrets, because in Iraq, what you didn't know, you feared."

And from the Weekly Standard? They don't address the Kay findings at all. Instead, they have republished Steven Hayes' story on a memo by Doug Feith cherry picking reports mostly from discredited INC defectors alleging links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.