Just came home to lousy news. My friend and the top human rights activist in former Yugoslavia Sonja Biserko has just had her office raided by the Serbian military intelligence. Books were seized, an author of one of Helsinki committee's reports was arrested, and Sonja has been called to testify. Things are so dark in Belgrade, I can hardly believe it. Still learning what is really going on, will post more later.

A brilliant veteran observer of the last decade's misery in the Balkans writes with the line that, sadly, sums it all up somehow. "Recall the timeless wisdom of: Send lawyers, guns, and money."

Oops! The Center for American Progress has an incredible scoop. Someone who was preparing to prep Don Rumsfeld before his Sunday morning talk show appearances left his notes in the Starbucks in Dupont Circle. As well as a hand drawn map to Rummy's house. Now those notes are online at CAP. Check them out!

Post Script: The New York Times on Sunday identified the Starbucks-swilling DoD staffer as Eric Ruff, who was hired two months ago as a deputy press officer at the Pentagon. His boss Larry Di Rita promises Eric has been forgiven.

Bad news: Bush & Kerry running even. Incredibly frustrating. Then again, seeing as how useless pre-Iowa polls were on the Democratic primary, maybe it's not worth taking too seriously at this point, but still....

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Kohut
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 12:31 PM
Subject: Poll: Bush Support Steady in Wake of Clarke Criticisms

A week's worth of criticism of his pre-Sept. 11 record on terrorism has had little impact on President Bush's support among voters. He is now running even with Sen. John Kerry in a head-to-head match-up among registered voters (47% Kerry-46% Bush) after trailing Kerry by 52%-43% in mid-March.

Voter opinions have been fluid in this early stage of the presidential contest, but Bush has held his own against Kerry with regard to personal qualities, while the Massachusetts senator has lost support on key issues like health care and jobs. And on the central question of which candidate would do the best job of defending the country against future terrorist attacks, Bush continues to lead Kerry by a wide margin (53%-29%).

The latest national survey of 1,501 Americans by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 22-28, finds Bush's job approval ratings still sub-par (47% approve and 44% disapprove). Kerry's strength continues to be on domestic issues, including health care, jobs and the economy, but voters' confidence in Kerry has slipped, not grown, over the past week. Today, Bush and Kerry run virtually even on the question of who can best improve economic conditions (44% Kerry, 39% Bush). Kerry held a sizable advantage on this issue as recently as two weeks ago.

This survey is embargoed for release on Monday, March 29 at 4:00 PM. It will be available online at www.people-press.org...

Andrew Kohut
Director
Pew Research Center

I have a contact from the spy world, who, in the early days of our acquaintanceship, it slowly dawned on me, was automatically probing for any potential vulnerabilities he might act on in recruiting a potential asset. Things like, say, money problems, or a weakness for alcohol. He wasn't trying to recruit me. The point is, he did it almost automatically, to everyone he met. It was a trade habit that had become so ingrained as to become almost second nature to him.

Over the past few years, we managed to become friends, minus at least initially a lot of the straightforwardness one enjoys in most friendships. That's a good thing, because he's not useful as a secret source; he's too much of a pro for that, although sometimes we bounce perspectives off each other in an informal way. But getting to observe the mentality and the tradecraft, some of which he has simply internalized, has been, in short, a useful education. Sometimes he has even made the tradecraft a little explicit. For instance, he acquainted me with the idea and practice of disinformation. Perhaps it's just a professional intel word for lying. But not really. It's creating a plausible cover story that trips the object of the disinformation campaign from the real path. It's an art, really.

Then there's the unsubtle art of blackmail. Which seems to be the bind that ties nuclear proliferator/supervillain A.Q. Khan and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, as described in this interesting piece from Pakistan in The New Republic. And it involves Khan's daughter, Dina. Perhaps fodder for LeCarre's next novel.

Rice will testify, after all, in public, and under oath, at the 9/11 commission. Bush and Cheney have now agreed to testify in private before all 10 members of the commission. [Does that mean the White House should face perjury charges for having said many times in the past that they would not testify?] In all seriousness, do they think that doing the right thing at this point, after so much opposition and resistance, really helps their credibility problem?

Meantime, via Federation of American Scientists' anti-government-secrecy guru Steve Aftergood, here is a .pdf file of a new Congressional Research Service report on the history of national security advisors testifying before Congressional committees.

See "Presidential Advisers' Testimony Before Congressional Committees: A Brief Overview" by Harold C. Relyea and Jay R. Shampansky, April 5, 2002:

http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL31351.pdf

For the families' sake, in any case, I am pleased that Rice has agreed to testify publicly. This from them, on Tuesday:

Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission Statement Regarding Condoleezza Rice’s Testimony www.911independentcommission.org March 30, 2004

The Family Steering Committee is pleased to learn that Condoleezza Rice will testify under oath in a public hearing.

This is good news and will undoubtedly make the 9/11 Commission's Final Report more complete, comprehensive, and transparent in nature.

More than anything, the families want to know why our nation was so vulnerable to 19 hijackers on the morning of 9/11. We look forward to Ms. Rice answering questions about her priorities as National Security Advisor to the President, the processes used before, and after, 9/11 to share critical intelligence and other related data regarding this country’s counter terrorism activities within the government, her knowledge of Al-Qaeda, and her role, and the role of the NSC- leading up to, on, and after the morning of 9/11.

We are hopeful that the information gleaned from Ms. Rice's public testimony can be used by the Commission as part of their investigation and be included in their Final Report and Recommendations to help minimize the chances of a future attack and thus, save lives.

Upon the signing of the 9/11 Commission into law, President Bush stated that the Commission's work was their most solemn duty. He also stated that the Commission must go wherever the facts may lead. We hope that the following qualifying language presented in the letter to the Commission regarding Ms. Rice's testimony does not know contradict these words:

"The Commission must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice. The National Security Advisor is uniquely situated to provide the Commission with information necessary to fulfill its statutory mandate. Indeed, it is for this reason that Dr. Rice privately met with the Commission for more than four hours on February 7, fully answered every question posed to her, and offered additional private meetings if necessary. Despite the fact that the Commission will therefore have access to all information of which Dr. Rice is aware, the Commission has nevertheless urged that public confidence in the work of the Commission would be enhanced by Dr. Rice appearing publicly before the Commission. Other White House officials with information relevant to the Commission's inquiry do not come within the scope of the Commission's rationale for seeking public testimony from Dr. Rice. These officials will continue to provide the Commission with information through private meetings, briefings, and documents, consistent with our previous practice."

Consistent with Bush’s statement upon the formation of the Commission, the FSC sincerely hopes that the commission will be given full and unfettered access to any officials in the White House whom they feel it is necessary to interview under oath. The above condition, which prohibits them from seeking further public testimony, is of particular concern because decisions made by those officials on the day of 9/11 are critically important to provide a full accounting to the American public.

Nevertheless, the families are cautiously optimistic that Dr. Rice's public appearance before the Commission will enhance its ability to produce the kind of Final Report that the nation deserves.

Thanks to family steering committee member Monica Gabrielle for the announcement.

These guys are finished. Is Karl Rove even still alive? From a sheerly tactical perspective, what was the point of having Condi Rice go on 60 Minutes to say pretty much nothing except that she will not testify at the 9/11 commission? How did the White House think this would help them? Even Republican 9/11 commissioner John Lehman, "who has written extensively on separation-of-power issues, said that 'the White House is making a huge mistake' by blocking Rice's testimony." Rice "has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Democratic 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste told the Times. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."

Post Script: A former Hill staffer friend yesterday pointed out to me one possible tactic I hadn't considered before: is the White House simply trying to bombard the American public with so very much essentially white noise on the Clarke affair that the public simply tunes out?

It is increasingly obvious that Ahmad Chalabi set out to deliberately deceive the American government about Iraq's WMD programs.

This story in the Los Angeles Times today describes the knowingly false intelligence provided by the brother of a top aide to Chalabi. Code named "Curveball," the "young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army..."

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling.

"This is the one that's damning," he said. "This is the one that has the potential for causing the largest havoc in the sense that it really looks like a lack of due diligence and care in going forward."

Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us." But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

Anyone who goes around continuing to vouche for Chalabi's integrity may want to watch it. This White House and its friends would be the last ones who should want to go throwing around perjury charges, don't you think?

Let's Declassify All of It. Richard Clarke on Meet the Press this morning continues to be absolutely devastating for the Bush administration. Just devastating.

...TIM RUSSERT: Is there any inconsistency between your sworn testimony before the September 11 Commission last week and two years ago before the congressional committee?

MR. CLARKE: No, there isn't. And I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there. Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony.

MR. RUSSERT: You would request this morning that it all be declassified?

MR. CLARKE: And I want more declassified. I want Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission declassified, and I want the thing that the 9-11 Commission talked about in its staff report this week declassified, because there's been an issue about whether or not a strategy or a plan or something useful was given to Dr. Rice in early January. And she says it wasn't...Let's declassify that memo I sent on January 25th and let's declassify the national security directive that Dr. Rice's committee approved nine months later on September 4th, and let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't. And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on January 25th and what they finally agreed to on September 4th, is that they're basically the same thing and they wasted months when we could have had some action.

MR. RUSSERT: But to be clear, Mr. Clarke, you would urge Congress, the intelligence committees, to declassify your sworn testimony before the congressional inquiry two years ago as well as your testimony before the September 11th Commission?

MR. CLARKE: Yes, and those documents I just referred to and Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission because the victims' families have no idea what Dr. Rice has said. There weren't in those closed hearings where she testified before the 9-11 Commission. They want to know. So let's take her testimony before the 9-11 Commission and make it part of the package of what gets declassified along with the national security decision directive of September 4 and along with my memo of January 25.

In fact, Tim, let's go further. The White House is selectively now finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed were covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press. Let's take all of my e-mails and all of the memos that I've sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to September 11 and let's declassify all of it.

MR. RUSSERT: As well as her responses?

MR. CLARKE: As well as her responses.

MR. RUSSERT: As you know, the White House has been rather aggressive trying to undercut your credibility. They've released an e-mail which says it's Richard Clarke vs. Richard Clarke...

MR. CLARKE: And it's not inconsistent. Let me explain. I was asked by Condi Rice, by the White House press secretary, by the White House chief of staff, to give a press background. Why? Because Time magazine had come out--and this was almost a year after September 11. Time magazine had come out with a cover story, after extensive research, and the cover story was devastating. The cover story of Time magazine was that the White House had been given a plan by me on January 25 and had taken the entire nine months to get around to looking at it, at the principals level, that there had been over 100 meetings of Dr. Rice's committee on subjects involving Iraq, Star Wars, China, but only one on terrorism and that one was on September 4.

Now, the White House naturally wanted someone to say that things had been going on during that summer. I said, "Well, you know, it's true. Things had been going on. But the plan wasn't approved until September 4." And I was told, "But you can say that it was approved by the deputies. You can say that things were approved in principle." I was told to spin it in a positive way.

Now, the question is: Why do you do that? I thought Pat Buchanan, a conservative Republican, former White House aide, put it pretty well last night when he was asked the same question. He said, "When you're in the White House, you may disagree with policy." But when you're asked to defend that policy, you defend it, if you're a special assistant to the president, as Pat Buchanan was and as I was. I had a choice. I could have done what I was asked to do and defend them when they were being criticized for not having done enough before September 11 or I could have resigned. Why didn't I resign? Because I believed it was very, very important for the United States to develop a plan to secure its cyberspace from terrorism. And the president had asked me to do that. I did it. I didn't get it done until February of 2003. Here it is: The National Plan to Secure Cyberspace, which the president thanked me for effusively. I wouldn't have been able to do this--important document if I had quit on the date that you suggest. And so there's no inconsistency. I said the things that I was told to say. They're true. We did consider these things but no decisions were taken. And that's the point. It was an important issue for them but not an urgent issue. They had a hundred meetings before they got around to having one on terrorism.

MR. RUSSERT: But if you were willing to go forward, and, as you say, "spin" on behalf of the president, then why shouldn't people now think that this book is also spin? Why should people believe you?

MR. CLARKE: Because I have no obligation anymore to spin. When you're in the White House, you spin. And people have been doing a lot of that against me this week. You know, they're engaged in a campaign. People on the taxpayers' rolls, dozens of people, are engaged in the campaign to destroy me, personally and professionally, because I had the temerity to suggest that the American people should consider whether or not the president had done a good job on the war on terrorism. The issue is not me. The issue is the president's job on the role on terrorism.

I think, before 9/11, he himself said--if you look at what he said to Bob Woodward, he himself said before 9/11, "This was not an urgent issue for me. I didn't feel a sense of urgency." He acknowledged bin Laden was not the focus of him or his national security team. So, before 9/11, not as focused. After 9/11--I say by going into Iraq, he has really hurt the war on terrorism. Now, because I say that, the administration doesn't want to talk on the merits of that. They don't want to talk about the effect on the war on terrorism of our invasion of Iraq. And so, instead, A, they try to do character assassination of me; but, B, they try to punish me for having said it by going after my professional life, by going after me, besmirching me. This is just not appropriate.

And you know, Tim, what I would like to do, beginning today, it's been going on for a week now. What I would like to do beginning today, is let's raise the level of discourse. Let's get some civility back into this issue. And let's talk about the issues. Let's not talk about the personalities. I have great respect for Dr. Rice. People have been saying all week that, you know, I must have a grudge against Condi Rice. I have known Condi for a long time. I think she's a very, very good person. And I don't want this to be about personality. I want it to be about the issues, about the war in Iraq and its affect on the war on terror.

MR. RUSSERT: You did tell Time magazine that the review that the administration did moved as fast as could be expected.

MR. CLARKE: I said it was the normal process for the consideration of issues. Now, it's not a normal issue, however. Every day George Tenet was going in to see the president in the Oval Office. Because George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, now gives the president his daily briefing. And almost every day the president was hearing from George Tenet that there's an impending al-Qaeda attack. As far back as February, George Tenet testified before the Congress that al-Qaeda was the major national security threat. And yet, they have 100 meetings before they get around to dealing with it.

MR. RUSSERT: On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate President Bush's performance on the war on terror prior to September 11?

MR. CLARKE: Well, there wasn't any personal performance by the president prior to September 11. Now, the only thing that I was ever able to detect that he did on the war on terrorism was after Tenet had been briefing him day after day after day after day about an al-Qaeda threat, the president said, in May, "Well, let's, you know, get a strategy." That's the only thing I ever heard that he got involved in personally. And when he said that, Dr. Rice called me and said, "The president wants a strategy." And I said, "Well, you know the strategy was what I sent you on January 25, and it's been stuck in these low-level committees." And she said, "Fine. I'll deal with that." Well, she didn't deal with it until September.

And, interestingly enough, the president never said after that May conversation, "Where's the strategy?" And, again, if you go back to what the president himself says to Bob Woodward, he said, "I knew there was a strategy in the works. But I didn't know how mature the plan was." He's saying this on September 11. He didn't know where the strategy was. The strategy that he had asked for in May? He'd never come back and asked where it was. You know, basically, it wasn't an urgent issue for them before September 11.

MR. RUSSERT: It sounds like a failing grade.

MR. CLARKE: Well, I think they deserve a failing grade for what they did before because, frankly, they didn't do--they never got around to doing anything. They held interim meetings, but they never actually decided anything before September 11.

MR. RUSSERT: Now, when you resigned, you sent a very polite letter to the president: "It's been an enormous privilege to serve you these past 24 months. I will always remember the courage, determination, calm leadership you demonstrated on September 11. I thank you again for the opportunity to serve you. You have provided me"--was that just being polite?

MR. CLARKE: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: Or are you now just being disloyal?

MR. CLARKE: No. Well, my mother taught me to be polite. Let me read another line from the letter, which I have. I don't know what you have over there. But this is the actual letter. "I will always have fond memories of our briefings for you on cybersecurity." Not on terrorism, Tim, because they didn't allow me to brief him on terrorism. You know, they're saying now that when I was afforded the opportunity to talk to him about cybersecurity, it was my choice. I could have talked about terrorism or cybersecurity. That's not true. I asked in January to brief him, the president, on terrorism, to give him the same briefing I had given Vice President Cheney, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And I was told, "You can't do that briefing, Dick, until after the policy development process."

MR. RUSSERT: Who told you that?

MR. CLARKE: Condi Rice. And I said, "Well, can I brief him on cybersecurity?" "Oh, yes, you can brief him on that." Now, you read my letter to him. Let's read his letter back to me. Maybe you'd like to read it, if you can read this.

MR. RUSSERT: Go ahead, please.

MR. CLARKE: This is his [President Bush's] writing. This is the president of the United States' writing. And when they're engaged in character assassination of me, let's just remember that on January 31, 2003: "Dear Dick, you will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor. You have left a positive mark on our government." This is not the normal typewritten letter that everybody gets. This is the president's handwriting. He thinks I served with distinction and honor. The rest of his staff is out there trying to destroy my professional life, trying to destroy my reputation, because I had the temerity to suggest that a policy issue should be discussed. What is the role of the war on terror vis-a-vis the war in Iraq? Did the war in Iraq really hurt the war on terror? Because I suggest we should have a debate on that, I am now being the victim of a taxpayer-paid--because all these people work for the government-- character assassination campaign.

MR. RUSSERT: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: "On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. `Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness--and anxiety--against imminent terrorist attack."

Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?

MR. CLARKE: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."
...

Our disgrace.

Richard Clarke will be on Meet the Press Sunday morning. Always a step ahead of Rice, huh?

This Post piece confirms what I have thought: the Republicans are starting to realize how very badly they misjudged what picking a battle with Clarke would mean. Meanwhile, can you catch how much sarcasm the Post's White House reporter dares to reveal against the Bush White House's total demolition of their own rules on background sourcing? "One Bush aide, who refused to be identified because the administration limits who may speak on the record, acknowledged that the White House had underestimated the political and media firestorm that Clarke would ignite." Jesus Christ, I hope the press who covers this White House strikes back in a big way.

[Meanwhile, what is up with McCain? Is there any possibility this shred of a rumor about a Kerry-McCain flirtation is real? This also is from the same Post piece:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who rode in Bush's limousine during a presidential visit to Phoenix on Friday, said the Clarke counterattack was "the most vigorous offensive I've ever seen from the administration on any issue.

"These attacks go to the heart of the strength of the president, and they felt it had to be put down and put down quickly," McCain said. "Whether they'll succeed or not is unclear."

For more tealeaves on how Clarke vs. Bush will fare, check out this from Romenesko.

Just to reiterate, Condoleezza Rice will be on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

Needless to say, while I am as interested as everyone else in what Rice will have to say, I firmly agree with candidate Kerry that, "If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do 60 minutes on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath. We are talking about the security of our country," Kerry was cited by the Washington Post.

Richard Clarke, and the Family Steering Committee for the Independent 9/11 Commission have called the White House's bluff. Declassify everything related to September 11th, they say.

Speaking with NPR's All Things Considered Saturday, Clarke called on the White House to declassify everything of his related to September 11th. The link is not available yet but I will get it up when I can.

Meantime, "the Family Steering Committee demands the appearance of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice under oath in a public hearing immediately," the Families said in a statement Saturday:

We believe that testifying before the Commission in a public forum is Ms. Rice’s moral obligation given her responsibility as National Security Advisor to protect our nation. The death of nearly 3000 innocent people warrants such a moral precedent...

We would encourage White House counsel to view this commission for what it is - a quasi-legislative entity. After all, Chairman Kean is an Executive Branch appointee to the Commission. Furthermore, the mere fact that the Commission has gained access—albeit limited access, to the Presidential Daily Briefings (something that the Joint Inquiry of Congress was refused for reasons of Separation of Powers principles) further supports the notion that this Commission is not a purely legislative body.

Assuming arguendo that White House counsel continues to persist that a legal precedent might be presented, Dr. Rice should testify to set a moral precedent that is aptly warranted by the murder of 3000 people. Voluntarily coming forward to testify under oath during a public hearing without the use of a subpoena would simply set a rare, refreshing, and appropriate moral precedent for all of history to judge.

Finally, in light of recent actions on behalf of Senate Majority Leader Frist, we also request the de-classification of the infamous 28 blank pages of the Joint Inquiry Final Report. The Saudi government stated to the media in August 2003 that they would like the 28 pages released. Members of the Joint Inquiry have stated on the record that the 28 pages did not include national security secrets. Nevertheless, the White House continues to refuse to release said information on grounds of national security.

One of the underlying themes of this past week’s hearings was the failure to garner the “will of the nation.” One way to arouse the will of the nation is to engage the American people in healthy debate and dialogue. In order to have the will, the nation must be properly informed. As such, we encourage the release of the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry Final Report that pertains to the foreign sponsorship of terrorism.

We hope that Senator Frist will show the same zeal to release the 28 pages as he has shown in de-classifying Mr. Clarke’s testimony. We request that all witness testimony to the Joint Inquiry of Congress be impartially reviewed and declassified if possible. We abhor the tendency to over-classify information and we support the release of any material as long such public release does not legitimately harm national security.

So, what do you say, Sen. Frist?

As I wrote a friend who works closely with the families of those killed September 11th, I think it is necessary that "the families" come out in favor of Clarke's gripping honestly. I think they should be on CNN and Good Morning America and every channel saying they are deeply offended by the White House's refusal to genuinely cooperate with the 9/11 commission hearings and to deny them the truth they are owed, and they are deeply offended by the White House's efforts to intimidate Clarke from speaking the truth that they desperately want to know.

Meantime, Newsweek reports that Clarke's revelations are causing the American public to lose confidence in Bush's handling of homeland security issues. [It's worth noting this poll was conducted Wednesday March 25 and Thursday March 26th, in other words, before the shocking show of naked threats and intimidation by Frist and Congressional Republicans Friday]. A friend of mine at Princeton Survey Research Associates which did the poll for Newsweek warned me last night that next week may not show a sustained Clarke "bounce," so stay tuned. On the contrary, it strikes me that the White House panic in the face of Clarke's revelations has only served to make Clarke's bounce last a hell of a lot longer. Wonder if they had just gone through the motions of cooperating with the 9/11 commission from the beginning, they would never have had this problem. But, of course, meeting the genuine search for truth with anything like decency and honesty is totally contrary to everything in their nature.

Certainly, everybody will want to watch Condoleezza Rice's appearance on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

Thanks to 9/11 Family Steering Committee member Kristen Breitweiser for forwarding me their statement.

This is simply must-read. Please, G-d, is it cocktail hour yet, this week has been endless. I had lunch with a friend of Clarke's today and this guy Clarke is fearless. He has enough in book sales to defend himself from the Politburo. But really this is too much. If it's any consolation to Clarke, Paul O'Neill was this week cleared of any mishandling of classified documents in his cooperation with Ron Suskind on his book, The Price of Loyalty. That title really resonates.

Funny. At least at the end of a very long week with very little sleep.

Big thanks and forever gratitude to reader Nathaniel I. who did indeed send me instructions on how to do indentation. Let me see if this works. This is more of an article of mine and Bob Dreyfuss's that came out today in the Nation, which is not available online. I'm afraid if I post anymore I'll get in trouble, so go buy the magazine, it's a good piece and looks to be a good issue, with book reviews by Juan Cole, a piece on Israel by Roane Carey and Adam Schatz, David Cole on security vs. civil liberties, etc.. Here's Part II of Still Dreaming of Tehran:

...Leading the charge against Iran is AEI's Michael Ledeen, perhaps best known for setting in motion the US-Israeli arms deal with Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as Iran/contra. Supporting Ledeen's position are two other AEI fellows: Richard Perle, the ringleader of the neocons and a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and David Frum, a Weekly Standard contributing editor and the former White House speechwriter who coined the phrase "axis of evil."

In their new book, An End to Evil, Perle and Frum call for a covert
operation to "overthrow the terrorist mullahs of Iran." Speaking to retired US intelligence officers in McLean, Virginia, in January, Ledeen called Iran the "throbbing heart of terrorism" and urged the Bush Administration to support revolutionary change. "Tehran," he said, "is a city just waiting for us."

Ledeen is viewed skeptically by many experts, including at the State
Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. "Ledeen doesn't know anything about Iran," says Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who is an expert on the Shiites of Iran and Iraq. "He doesn't speak Persian, and I believe he has never been there." But Ledeen does have connections in the Iranian exile community. For the past two years, he has maintained a relationship with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian wheeler-dealer who worked closely with him in Iran/contra. Ledeen introduced Ghorbanifar to a key neo-conservative official, Harold Rhode, a longtime Pentagon staffer who speaks Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Hebrew and who until recently served in Iraq as a liaison between the Defense Department and Ahmad Chalabi. Rhode and another Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, have been talking to Ghorbanifar about options for regime change in Tehran. "They were looking at getting introduced to alleged sources inside Iran, who could give them some inside information on the struggles in Iran," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. Ghorbanifar, he said, was spinning tall tales about alleged (but unsubstantiated) transfers of Iraqi uranium to Iran's nuclear weapons program...

Wow, it worked! Thanks! And thanks as well to Mitchell P. who also emailed some technical advice. Next maybe we'll work on color.

The Center for American Progress's Progress Report has a contest for you, described here:

"Progress Report Contest Update"

"No winners yet, but political strategist James Carville has sweetened the pot. Yesterday on CNN's Crossfire, Carville promised a copy of his book to the first person to win the "Beat the Progress Report" contest by finding proof of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice saying the words "al Qaeda" or "bin Laden" between the time they took office and 9/10/01. (You can watch the video of Carville's announcement yesterday on Crossfire.) There's still time to play - submit your entries to pr@progressreport.org."

It continues to be extremely dangerous to be a journalist, or a translator, or a foreigner, or for that matter, an Iraqi, in Iraq. The wires are reporting that Time magazine's Iraqi translator died today from wounds sustained in an ambush earlier this week. Ambushes targeting those working with foreigners seem to be on the rise. I can't imagine the kind of courage it takes to stick it out to operate in such an environment, that is from all accounts I have read exponentially more risky than what I experienced in Kosovo. And the journalists can find little comfort with the coalition forces either, by many accounts, who are understandably on edge. Which really speaks volumes.

Meantime, if you happen to be a journalism fan in DC this weekend, they are having all the great classics of this genre at the AFI Silver theater-- the Killing Fields, All the President's Men, The Year of Living Dangerously, and some new ones, too.

A friend in the US intelligence business who reads my blog, if only to give himself heartburn, calls to say -- he has long respected Clarke. It's true the Bush administration and Rice did not take the threat from Al Qaeda seriously enough. But he's frustrated that Clarke denies ever seeing a shred of evidence to connect Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He says that is simply not true. I told him, that what I thought Clarke said was not that he saw no single piece of raw intelligence to suggest a connection, but that the overall judgment of the CIA and FBI and Clarke himself was that there was not a credible case to be made that the two were working in a serious way together.

Anyhow, I am not sure I even want to wade into this debate because I am never going to have access to the information he has seen, and don't have the training to understand what the context is. [What would the volume of raw intelligence suggesting elements of the Saudi Arabian government have worked with Al Qaeda look like by comparison? Pakistan?] It's clear if there is anything to this theory that Saddam and al Qaeda cooperated in some way, that its deep association with Laurie Mylroie has discredited it, at least to my mind.

But I share his overall point, that the findings of the 9/11 commission are being totally lost, at least for the moment, in the incredibly heated partisan debate swirling around.

Delete this message after you've read it.

Spencer Ackerman has an excellent article that captures the exact moment when it became clear to me that Bush would lose this election: when the families of 9/11 applauded Richard Clarke essentially telling Bush's lackies on the 9/11 commission to screw themselves. By extension, we the voters are on the side of the families of 9/11. And the pendulum has most definitely swung to Clarke's side. I am utterly convinced Bush is finished.

The Bush White House will come to regret that it made its battle Bush vs. Clarke. Because the families of 9/11 are clearly on Clarke's side -- and their judgment resonates, it's radioactive. Who else can call the White House's bluff that Bush is a capable or worthy post 9/11 president? Watch for advertisements to come out soon: September 11th -- Truth.

Maybe I'm getting carried away. As Greg Allen reported on NPR this morning from Kansas City on the heartland's reaction to the Clarke saga, for all the fuss and extraordinary 90% name recognition that Clarke now has and his books flying off the shelves, few hard core people on either side of the partisan debate feel Clarke vs. Bush changed their minds about Bush. But what about those who were undecided? or wavering?

As long as they are relaxing the rules on identifying senior officials giving background briefings and declassifying lots of White House documents, why doesn't the White House release this letter?

On September 4, 2001, "Clarke wrote to Rice summarizing many of his frustrations. He urged policy-makers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad and ask themselves what they could have done earlier...He warned that unless adequate funding was found for the planned effort, the directive would be a hollow shell. He feared, apparently referring to Bush's earlier comment, that Washington might be left with a modest effort to swat flies relying on foreign governments while waiting for the big attack."

--As told by 9/11 commission staff member Dan Marcus in a prepared staff report delivered in open testimony Thursday. See the linked .pdf, page 12.

Phil Carter points to an interesting discussion and article on a problem highlighted by Richard Clarke in his testimony Thursday: sure terrorism was a priority of the Bush National Security Council. But among how many other priorities? A lack of "discipline" in defining such priorities was something Condoleezza Rice tartly criticized the Clinton administration for, in her 2000 Foreign Affairs article describing what a Bush foreign policy might look like. But doesn't look like she got the priorities right either.

Couldn't the Times have gotten Judith Miller to write this?

Juan Cole notes that Chris Lehman, the brother of Republican 9/11 commissioner John Lehman who attacked Richard Clarke at his testimony Wednesday, worked in the Office of Special Plans. And as I pointed out previously, Lehman is also close with chief neocon Richard Perle, who once worked for Lehman's lobbying firm, Abington Corporation, back in the 1980s. The association came to light in a 1983 New York Times article which documented that then assistant secretary of defense for international affairs Richard Perle took $90,000 from an Israeli arms maker whose arms Perle then lobbied the Pentagon to buy.

So how does this play in the country? That the White House has been made so desperate by Richard Clarke's contentions that it is trying to destroy him? Or that the White House is on the side of truth? Right, exactly.

Nine out of ten Americans now say they have heard of Richard Clarke, a new Pew poll shows.

"The Pew Research Center reported on Thursday that about 42 percent of the 1,065 adults surveyed had heard 'a lot' about Mr. Clarke's claims; 47 percent said they had heard 'a little' about his charges. Only 10 percent said they had heard nothing about his criticisms," the New York Times reports today [italics added].

If your bookstore has run out of Clarke's book, Slate has a nice summary here.

As I noted....the hottest book in town and in the country...already in its FIFTH printing since Monday.

The White House takes on more water...

Just out...A piece Bob Dreyfuss and I wrote on the neocons' designs on Iran, "Still Dreaming of Tehran," at The Nation. Unfortunately, it's for the moment subscriber and in the print edition only, but I am working on seeing if I can get an on-line version made available.

Meanwhile, here's the top as it went through final edits:

Still Dreaming of Tehran
April 12, 2004
Robert Dreyfuss and Laura Rozen

The Bush Administration's hawks and their neoconservative allies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and The Weekly Standard are engaged in a high-risk and high-stakes effort to restore their fading power in Washington by pressing for a confrontation with Iran. It's no secret that the neocons' star has fallen since the war with Iraq.

The intelligence scandal plaguing the White House and the ongoing crisis in Iraq itself can both be laid at their doorstep, and it's widely believed that President Bush's re-election team would dearly like to extricate the President from the Iraqi tar baby.

But the neocons aren't giving up, and they are trying to pull the White House in even deeper. Not only are they undeterred by the chaos in Iraq, but they are pressing ahead to advance their regional strategy, one that calls for regime change in Iran, then Syria and Saudi Arabia. Says Chas Freeman, who served as US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War and a leading foe of the neocons, "It shows that they possess a level of fanaticism, or depth of
conviction, that is truly awesome. There is no cognitive dissonance there."

What makes the neocon strategy on Iran especially risky is that with Iraq teetering on the brink of civil war, neighboring Iran has significant clout inside Iraq, including ties to various Iraqi Shiite factions and a growing paramilitary and intelligence presence. If Iran chooses, it can help ease the daunting task that the United States faces in trying to put together a sovereign Iraqi government.

But if it seeks confrontation, it can help spark an anti-US revolt in southern Iraq, home to most of Iraq's Shiite majority. In that case, nearly all analysts agree, the American occupation could be overwhelmed...

I know this story has been out for a while now, but it really reveals such a shocking assault on the truth, even by this White House's standards:

"Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster told lawmakers Wednesday he had shared his higher estimate of the cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill with White House, Health and Human Services and Office of Management and Budget officials, but Democrats angered by the administration's suppression of that higher price tag did not find the 'smoking gun' they were seeking in the controversy," GovExec.com's Emily Heil reports today.

"In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Foster for the first time discussed publicly how Thomas Scully, the former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), threatened to fire him if he responded to requests by members of Congress seeking cost estimates of the Medicare bill that Congress passed last year.

"The Congressional Budget Office had estimated the new law would cost $395 billion, while Foster's tally was $534 billion. Many conservatives resisted the bill, and others were only convinced to support it by promises that it would not top $400 billion. House Ways and Means ranking member Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said if Foster's estimate had been made public, the bill would have died..."

[Meanwhile, a most humble request. Forever gratitude from War & Piece to the reader who can tell me how to create indentations in movable type.]

Has it ever occurred to this idiot White House that they wouldn't look half so terrible and desperate if they would agree the first time to do things like back the 9/11 commission, allow their officials to testify publicly like Clinton era officials, etc? Condoleeza Rice asking to meet privately with the 9/11 commission after Richard Clarke has already framed the debate makes them look terrible. All I can say is, I hope they keep it up!

Life is just better with Coldplay. I can listen to Clocks endlessly.

Of course, the 9/11 commission hearings and findings are becoming hugely politicized in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign. The tension is so extraordinary one finds oneself irresistably cheering Clarke and muttering profanities at the obnoxious attacks by Republican bullies on the commission at hearings where, as press, one knows one should just keep it to oneself. Fortunately the rest of the room seemed to be erupting in applause at the same time, so it hopefully goes unnoticed.

The partisan tension is so heated, sometimes it's hard to really burrow down and recognize some of the real substance of what the 9/11 commission investigation is finding. Serious findings about how the US government puttered along half dysfunctionally most of the time, where the failings were, were they systemic or the fault of individuals, or both, many many things that truly cross administrations and parties and agency cultures, etc. I hope as some of the high drama of the hearings subsides, to be able to look more closely at some of the substance of the commission findings and try to surface some of their important insights. I have some training and exposure to these issues that makes me feel as a journalist I should try to grapple with some of the more substantive findings in not just a topical way, but it will take some time I just don't have at the moment. It would be a shame for all of that to get lost in the focus on the personalities, and the politics of the moment.

My read, having attended two thirds of the 9/11 commission hearings over the past year and having tried my best to listen to the rest on C-span or read the transcripts, is that George Tenet may be in some serious trouble. Today the commissioners seemed headed by staff reports towards blaming Tenet and in particular his former Clinton-era director of operations Jim Pavitt for resisting repeated calls by Richard Clarke to arm the Predator drone and use it for attacking Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Apparently for various reasons the CIA was not willing to do this. If the plane was shot down, it didn't want to pay for it. Fear of covert operations in general. Disagreement between Tenet and Berger over whether CIA was authorized by the president to kill bin Laden, and fear by Pavitt (can you believe this?) that if the US had killed bin Laden, CIA agents around the world would be endangered (as if they aren't anyhow?). And intelligence was just so very poor under Tenet, they just could never have that high degree of confidence that a place they intended to strike would not be totally useless or worse, risk so many innocent bystanders killed, that it would erupt into a public scandal.

Then again, the CIA just doesn't come off half as bad as the FBI, which Clarke conceded was just useless. Clarke emphasized that even in the summer of 2001 with the enormous spike in intelligence chatter of an impending attack and he and Tenent raising the alarm across the US government, that the FBI never went through what its field offices had collected on Al Qaeda to recognize that it already had the Phoenix memo, the Moussaoui arrest, and awareness that two known Al Qaeda operatives had already entered the US. Because of the demonstrable inadequacies on the FBI in this regard, Clarke endorsed the idea of creating a domestic intelligence agency, with all sorts of protections put in place for civil liberties and privacy. I think this is a proposal that makes sense, and I am 100% sure this is a proposal the 9/11 commission will ultimately recommend.

Harrowing.

Bob Dreyfuss has a nice piece on Richard Clarke today, here.

Richard Clarke just rocked at the 9/11 commission hearings today. He was the only person so far who has said that not only the US government, but he personally had failed the families. He was the only official who has publicly apologized to the families. He conceded that the last time he registered to vote -- in Virginia in 2000 -- it was as a Republican, and that he had voted for Bush. He said under oath that he would never accept a position in the Kerry administration.

And when the Republican commissioners John Lehman (Reagan's former Navy Secretary who employed Richard Perle at his lobbying firm with its own whiff of scandal in the early 1980s, and whose brother Chris, Juan Cole notes, worked in the Office of Special Plans), Fred Fielding and former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson -- lined up, presumably with their faxes from the White House, to attack him, Clarke was unflappable. At one point Thompson tried to imply that Clarke lacked credibility because he had tried to highlight in an August 2002 background press briefing the White House's efforts to counter terrorism. [Copies of the Fox News report on Clarke's background (e.g. not for attribution) briefing were made plentifully available at the hearing today, a point which commissioner Bob Kerrey quipped showed just how "occasionally fair and balanced" Fox is]. Clarke calmly called Thompson's accusations that he lacked integrity for having tried to make the president he then worked for not look totally derelict in that briefing "politics." At which point the hearing room broke out in total sustained applause. Thompson got flustered and said he was just from the Midwest and had never worked for a president inside the Beltway, lah de dah, and ultimately fled the hearing room.

[For their part, the Democratic commissioners former Clinton-administration deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, former Congressman Tim Roemer, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben Veniste and former Sen. Bob Kerrey never missed an opportunity to remark on their sorrow that Dr. Condoleeza Rice had not been permitted by the White House to testify publicly at the hearings like her former Clinton administration counterpart.]

Word from friends of Clarke is his book is the number one bestseller in the US and has just gone for its fourth printing. That would be since Monday. And that "the White House is taking on water."

Post script: Slate's Fred Kaplan agrees, that Clarke dazzled at the hearings today. I feel like some major turning point has been crossed -- and the whole facade of the Bush administration's toughness in the war on terror is punctured.

Post-script II: As I just wrote a friend, as far as I am concerned, this is not really about Clarke as a person. I take Kaplan and others at their word that Clarke is an egotist who plays hardball with the best of them. But he clearly knows where the bodies are buried, quite literally. He's exposed with extraordinary credibility and insight the fact that the Bushies are totally incapable of understanding the post-Cold war world. That terrorism was not even on their radar. And that after 9/11, the only thing that occurred to them was all they knew - bombing iraq. And now they are stuck trying to hold it together before they lose the next election.

They are goners. Rice has all but resigned. Hadley has been exposed as a spineless pathetic nincompoop who unfailingly yields to Cheney's line. Rumsfeld may well be out next term. Wolfowitz is finished. Powell is out. Cheney is going to croak sometime. Tenet is out. Ashcroft is disgraced.

Joe Conason publishes an interview with Clarke, here.

In it, Clarke simply explodes attack after flailing attack the White House has fired at him since the publication of his book with devastating calm. This guy clearly has the truth on his side.

Conason: Why do you think Cheney -- and the Bush administration in general -- ignored the warnings that were put to them by [former national security advisor] Sandy Berger, by you, by George Tenet, who is apparently somebody they hold in great esteem?

Clarke: They had a preconceived set of national security priorities: Star Wars, Iraq, Russia. And they were not going to change those preconceived notions based on people from the Clinton administration telling them that was the wrong set of priorities. They also looked at the statistics and saw that during eight years of the Clinton administration, al-Qaida killed fewer than 50 Americans. And that's relatively few, compared to the 300 dead during the Reagan administration at the hands of terrorists in Beirut -- and by the way, there was no military retaliation for that from Reagan. It was relatively few compared to the 259 dead on Pan Am 103 in the first Bush administration, and there was no military retaliation for that. So looking at the low number of American fatalities at the hands of al-Qaida, they might have thought that it wasn't a big threat.

Conason: Dr. Rice now says that your plans to "roll back" al-Qaida were not aggressive enough for the Bush administration. How do you answer that, in light of what we know about what they did and didn't do?

Clarke: I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January [2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.

Two for two. Frankly, bring it on. This guy can clearly handle it. And just watching the White House meltdown in reaction is incredible. Here's their whole campaign strategy of using Bush's reaction to 9/11 melting down before our eyes.

Jamie Gorelick is the only 9/11 commissioner who has had the opportunity to read through all the intelligence briefings President Bush received before 9/11. And what she told the Times is that what she saw "would set your hair on fire."

This from the New York Times today:

The Bush administration has refused to discuss details of the Oval Office intelligence briefings in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The reports, known as the President's Daily Brief, are among the most highly classified documents in the executive branch.

But under an agreement with the White House last year, one member of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was allowed to read through a full library of the briefings, and two other commissioners were allowed a partial review.

Ms. Gorelick said at the hearing Tuesday that information in the documents "would set your hair on fire, and not just George Tenet's hair on fire," referring to the director of central intelligence.

Though barred under secrecy regulations from discussing much of what was in the reports, she said that there had been "an extraordinary spike" of intelligence warning about Qaeda attacks in the Daily Brief during 2001 and that "it plateaued at a spike level for months."

Ms. Gorelick's comments came as the commission released a staff report finding that Mr. Rumsfeld did not order the preparation of any new military plans against Al Qaeda or its Taliban sponsors during the seven months between his arrival at the Pentagon and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report said that despite the intelligence alerts throughout the year, there was an impression among specialists at the Pentagon that Mr. Rumsfeld and his new team were "not especially interested in the counterterrorism agenda."

A separate staff report on the government's diplomatic response to the terrorist threat found that Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and her deputies rebuffed a proposal by aides in early 2001 that the administration step up its support for anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.

Just what was Bush doing on vacation in Texas for a month in August 2001 given the extraordinary spike in intelligence warnings? Just why did this administration act as if it had forever to deal with this threat? That dealing with it could await a time of their own convenience? Was a three-year perfect plan really the way to deal with an organization that had struck US targets around the globe pretty much every year?

It's not often that one actually feels like the reporter of a New York Times article was moved by what he saw. But this piece by Todd Purdhum on the 9/11 commission hearing yesterday has that sense of having witnessed an important event for our democracy.

It's a joke....I think. [via Atrios]

Richard Clarke Nation. Here is one of the best cases for why Clarke is right, and why the Bush White House is running so scared, by Slate's Fred Kaplan. Does make one long to read George Tenet's book. As Kaplan cites Clarke about the early days of the Bush administration, "'Tenet and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration...We agreed that Tenet would insure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.'

"The problem is: Nothing happened," Kaplan continues. "It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited—not successfully, anyway—to rebut Clarke's charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was 'very close' to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke's book."

Though from the very first days of the Bush administration, Clarke urgently requested a Principals meeting of cabinet level secretaries to address the impending Al Qaeda threat, such a meeting did not take place until a week before the September 11 attacks. By contrast, how did the Clinton administration handle Al Qaeda threats? By instantly going to battle stations. As Kaplan writes:

"In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

"'In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.'

"That's what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush's inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all."

And also worth reading at Slate, William Saletan's analysis of how Bush's allergy to all things Clinton contributed to failure to take measures to prevent 9/11.

"Every once in a while, in the course of spinning the issue of the day, an administration accidentally betrays its broader mentality," Saletan writes. "Six weeks ago on Meet the Press, President Bush revealed his abstract notion of reality. Three weeks ago in his re-election ads, Bush displayed a confidence unhinged from facts and circumstances. This week, in response to criticism of its terrorism policy by a former Bush aide, the administration is betraying a third fundamental flaw: a categorical aversion to the ideas of the Clinton years.

..."In his book, Clarke recalls, 'In general, the Bush appointees distrusted anything invented by the Clinton administration.' Thomas Maertens, a Clarke ally who ran the National Security Council's nuclear nonproliferation shop under Clinton and Bush, tells the New York Times that while Clarke was 'saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S.,' the Bush team discounted his pleas because he had served under Clinton. 'They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration,' Maertens tells the Times. 'So anything [the Clinton aides] did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it.'"

It concludes with these thoughts:

"It's funny, in retrospect, that Bush ran for president as a uniter. To unite a country, you have to acknowledge and reconcile differences. Bush doesn't work toward unity; he assumes it. He doesn't reconcile differences; he denies them. It's his tax cut or nothing. It's his homeland security bill or nothing. It's his terrorism policy or nothing. If you're playing politics, this is smart strategy. But if you're trying to help the country, it's foolish. The odds are that 50 percent of the other party's ideas are right. By ruling them out, you start your presidency 50 percent wrong.

"Some of the resulting mistakes may be inconsequential. Some may cost 3,000 lives. Some may cost 2 million jobs. 'If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years … we would not have had the kind of job growth we've had,' Cheney bragged three weeks ago. That's the way this administration thinks: We do things differently. But being different doesn't guarantee you a better result—just a different one."

I'm pawing my way through Richard Clarke's new book, trying to get in some of the most salient points on a certain individual for an article.

It totally captures the petrified circa 1992 Cold War mentality of the Bush II administration's national security staff, and its members' utter lack of capacity to think and see and grapple with and get the realities of the post-Cold War world. And how the national security people around Bush and particularly Cheney and the Pentagon kept reinforcing each other's total myopia in this area.

[How fast can we return Paul Wolfowitz to academia? This guy is just beyond the bend. These are just not the people any American should want running the US government any time after 1992, where their thinking has sort of petrified, like sheetrock.]

All of that is highlighted in this long passage. I highly recommend getting your own copy. This is from pp. 230-232:

“I realized that Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm from when they had worked on the NSC [in the first Bush administration]…. Steve Hadley had also been an NSC staffer assigned to do arms control issues with the Soviet Union. He had then been an Assistant Secretary in the Pentagon, also concerned with Soviet arms control. It struck me that neither of them had worked on the new post-Cold War security issues.

I tried to explain, ‘This office is new, you’re right. It’s post-Cold War security, not focused just on nation-state threats. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have blurred. Threats to the US now are not Soviet ballistic missiles carrying bombs, they’re terrorists carrying bombs. Besides, the law that established the NSC in 1947 said it should concern itself with domestic security threats too.’ I did not succeed entirely in making the case. Over the next several months, they suggested, I should figure out how to move some of these issues to some other organization.

Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded. No longer would the Coordinator be a member of the principals committee. No longer would the CSG report to the Principals, but instead to a committee of Deputy Secretaries or have the budget review mechanism with the Associate Director of OMB. She did, however, ask me to stay on and to keep my entire staff in place. Rice and Hadley did not seem to know anyone else whose expertise covered they regarded as my strange portfolio…

Within a week of the Inauguration I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking “urgently” for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee…would not address the issue until it had been framed by the Deputies….The first meeting… did not go well.

…Steve Hadley…ask[ed] me to brief the group. I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with Al Qaeda. ‘We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator.’

Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. ‘Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,’ Wolfowitz responded.

I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could. ‘We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States.’

‘Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example,’ Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.

‘I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?’ I pointed at CIA deputy dirctor John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, ‘Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the US.’

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. ‘You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1`993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because the FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.’ I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I think it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: ‘Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the US. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states.’

Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it. ‘They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.’

Immediately Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. ‘I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.’

‘I wasn’t comparing the Holocaust to anything.’ I spoke slowly. ‘I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.’

To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. ‘We agree with Dick. We see al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority.’ The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.

Hadley suggested a compromise. We would begin by focusing on al Qaeda and then later look at other terrorism, including any Iraqi terrorism. Because dealing with Al Qaeda involved its Afghan sanctuary, however, Hadley suggested that we needed policy on Afghanistan in general and on the related issue of US-Pakistani relations, including the return of democracy in that country and arms control with India. All of these issues were a ‘cluster’ that had to be decided together. Hadley proposed that several more papers be written and several more meetings be scheduled over the next few months.

--Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004, pp. 230-232.

The cult of secrecy for secrecy's sake, described by the National Security Archive's Tom Blanton, in Slate. Get a peak here of the President's Daily Brief, from the Johnson administration, here. Lots of details on Sukarno's visit to an acupuncturist, and discussion of whether he only has the flu, here [.pdf linked].

O'Neill cleared, just in time to investigate Clarke, perhaps. [Via MPE]

Does Bush really want to make his reaction to 9/11 the centerpiece of his reelection campaign? His reaction, really closely examined?

Apparently, what we've been told about how Bush and other administration officials conducted themselves on 9/11 is fiction, according to this Wall Street Journal piece. And the truth is not very flattering to Bush at all:

"Just after 9 a.m. [on September 11th], Mr. Bush took a seat in front of students, most of them from a poor neighborhood. He listened as teacher Sandra K. Daniels pointed to an easel, and the second-graders read aloud lists of words.

"Then, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card strode into the classroom, leaned down and whispered in the president's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," Mr. Card has recounted.

"Both Republican and Democratic commissioners have said they are focusing closely on what happened next -- and whether mere minutes could have affected the outcome on Sept. 11. The panel's investigators are looking at questions such as the timeliness of presidential orders about intercepting the jet that at 9:37 a.m. plowed into the Pentagon.

"In a CNBC television interview almost a year later, Mr. Card said that after he alerted Mr. Bush, 'I pulled away from the president, and not that many seconds later, the president excused himself from the classroom, and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation.'

"But uncut videotape of the classroom visit obtained from the local cable-TV station director who shot it, and interviews with the teacher and principal, show that Mr. Bush remained in the classroom not for mere seconds, but for at least seven additional minutes. He followed along for five minutes as children read aloud a story about a pet goat. Then he stayed for at least another two minutes, asking the children questions and explaining to Ms. Rigell that he would have to leave more quickly than planned.

"Mr. Bartlett confirmed in an interview that the president stayed in the classroom for at least seven minutes. The spokesman said that as the president's staff was trying to learn more about the plane crashes, there was no need to talk to Mr. Bush or pull him away. The president didn't leave immediately after receiving the news of the second crash from Mr. Card because Mr. Bush's 'instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room,' the spokesman added. Mr. Bush's motorcade left the school at approximately 9:35 a.m., 32 minutes after he entered the classroom, according to a White House timeline and analysis of the uncut videotape.

President Aloft

"The president learned the Pentagon also had been hit as his motorcade sped just over three miles to Sarasota/Bradenton International Airport, where Air Force One was waiting. At 9:56 a.m., the presidential 747 was airborne. Determined to avoid any dangers at lower altitudes, Air Force Col. Mark Tillman, the pilot, climbed so steeply that officials aboard said in interviews that the jet seemed to go almost vertical. It quickly reached the relatively safe altitude of 40,000 feet.

"In the Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting, the President said he didn't begin to make major decisions about the emergency until he was back aboard his plane. 'I got on the phone from Air Force One, asking to find out the facts,' he said."

Cheney doesn't come off so well either. The mind games he plays on the American public he also seems to play on W.

"As Air Force One left Sarasota, the president intended to return directly to Washington, Mr. Bartlett said. Mr. Bush initially had ignored advice from Vice President Dick Cheney, calling while en route to a White House basement command center, that Washington appeared to be under attack and the president for his own safety should remain away, according to an official in the vice president's office. Once airborne, Mr. Bush spoke again on a secure phone with Mr. Cheney, who relayed a new message that changed the president's mind, White House officials later said. The vice president urged Mr. Bush to postpone his return because, Mr. Cheney said, the government had received a specific threat that Air Force One itself had been targeted by terrorists. Mr. Cheney emphasized that the threat included a reference to what he called the secret code word for the presidential jet, 'Angel,' Mr. Bartlett said in an interview...

"Although in the days after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and other administration officials recounted that a threat had been received against Air Force One, Mr. Bartlett said in a recent interview that there hadn't been any actual threat. Word of a threat had resulted from confusion in the White House bunker, as multiple conversations went on simultaneously, he said. Many of these exchanges, he added, related to rumors that turned out to be false, such as reports of attacks on the president's ranch in Texas and the State Department. As for the Air Force One code name, Mr. Bartlett said, 'Somebody was using the word 'angel,' ' and 'that got interpreted as a threat based on the word 'angel.'' (Former Secret Service officials said the code wasn't an official secret, but a radio shorthand designation that had been made public well before 2001.)

"The vice president's office gave an account differing from Mr. Bartlett's, saying it still couldn't rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made.

"Days after the attacks, Mr. Cheney had said word of the threat had been passed to him by Secret Service agents. But in interviews, two former senior Secret Service agents on duty that day denied that their agency played any role in receiving or passing on a threat to the presidential jet.

"An official in Mr. Cheney's office said in an interview that Mr. Cheney had been mistaken in saying the threat came to him via the Secret Service. The official said that instead, Mr. Cheney had received word of the threat from 'a uniformed military person' manning the underground bunker. The official said the vice president and his staff don't know who the individual was. And the official said that he couldn't say definitively whether or not a threat had been made..."

Sort of like the WMD in Iraq, and the Al Qaeda-Saddam connection.

Read the whole thing here.

As War & Piece's better half points out, Don't you think the fact that the Terrorism Czar "wasn't involved in most of the meetings of the administration" proves Clarke's point?

"Dick Clarke just does not know what he is talking about. He wasn't involved in most of the meetings of the administration," Rice told ABC's Good Morning America.

Honestly, it's like those old Road Runner cartoons. Al Qaeda suspects may have fled in tunnel.

Condoleeza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley should be fired. They have failed at their jobs from day one. Hadley's performance on 60 Minutes last night was just pathetic - there is no other word for it. Rice's revisionist oped in the Post today is even worse. If Rice had the courage of her convictions, she would be appearing at the 9/11 commission hearings this week to defend her actions in person. But she is a coward who represents a White House that knows it failed to take any steps to prevent 9/11 and that is why she refuses to appear.

We have two articles coming out this week on these issues, as well as a review of Clarke's new book, Against All Enemies.

Meantime, for anyone who missed it, here is the full transcript of last night's 60 Minutes Clarke interview:

March 21, 2004 Sunday

ANCHORS: LESLEY STAHL

LESLEY STAHL, co-host:

Right now a special presidential commission is investigating whether the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were preventable. There were few people in a better position to answer that question than Richard Clarke, the administration's former top advisor on counter-terrorism, who left the White House last year. Clarke has helped shape US policy on terrorism since the 1980s, when he got his first presidential appointment from Ronald Reagan. He went on to serve the first President Bush, then was President Clinton's terrorism czar, and was held over by President George W. Bush. In testimony before the 9/11 commission later this week, and in a new book to be published tomorrow, "Against All Enemies," Clarke will tell the story of what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after September 11th. He does so first tonight on 60 MINUTES.

(Footage of police car; employees; White House; policeman; policemen and employees; man)

STAHL: (Voiceover) When the terrorists struck on the morning of 9/11, it was thought that the White House would be the next target, and the building was evacuated.

Mr. CLARKE: It went from having hundreds of people in the White House complex, a hubbub of activity, to being totally abandoned.

(Footage of Richard Clarke and reporter walking)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Richard Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

Mr. CLARKE: Well, I kept thinking of the words from "Apocalypse Now," the whispered words of Marlon Brando when he thought about Vietnam, "The horror, the horror." Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows, people falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America.

(Footage of helicopter; George W. Bush; Clarke typing; book spine; Clarke and reporter; Clarke)

STAHL: (Voiceover) After the president returned to the White House on 9/11, he and his top advisors, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but was surprised that the talk quickly turned to another target.

You relate a conversation you had with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Mr. CLARKE: Well, Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And--and we all said, 'But no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' And Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.'

STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.

Mr. CLARKE: Oh, initially, I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in--inn Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.

STAHL: Now, what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, what I said was, you know, invading Iraq, or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else--you know, it's akin to what did Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Instead of going to war with Japan, he said, 'Let's invade Mexico.' You know, it's very analogous.

STAHL: Yeah, but didn't they think that there was a connection.

Mr. CLARKE: No, I--I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked for a connection, and there's just no connection.'

STAHL: And you told them that?

Mr. CLARKE: Absolutely.

STAHL: You personally?

Mr. CLARKE: I told them that, George Tenet told them that.

STAHL: Who did you tell?

Mr. CLARKE: I told that to the group, to the secretary of State, the secretary of Defense, the attorney general. They all knew it.

STAHL: You talk about a conversation you personally had with the president.

Mr. CLARKE: Yes, the president--we were in the Situation Room complex. The president dragged me into a--a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now, he never said, 'Make it up,' but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'

STAHL: Didn't you tell him that you'd looked and--and there'd been no connection?

Mr. CLARKE: I said--I said 'Mr. President, we've done this before. We--we've been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind, there's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq, Saddam--find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.

STAHL: You--in other words, you did go back and look?

Mr. CLARKE: We went back again and we looked.

STAHL: You did. And was it was a serious look? Did you really...

Mr. CLARKE: It was a serious look. We--we got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report, we sent the report out to CIA and down to FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report, and we sent it up to the president, and it got bounced by the national security advisor, or deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'

STAHL: Come on.

Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.

STAHL: 'Wrong answer'?

Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.

STAHL: Did the president see it?

Mr. CLARKE: I have no idea to this day if the president saw it, because after we did it again it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, Lesley, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer.

(Photos of Clarke and Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke was the president's top advisor on terrorism, and yet it wasn't until 9/11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to 9/11, this administration did not take the threat seriously.

Mr. CLARKE: We had a terrorist organization that was going after us, al-Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda, and it was pushed back and back and back for months.

STAHL: You're about to testify publicly before a committee that wants to know if the Bush administration dropped the ball. What are you going to tell the committee when they ask you that?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for--urgently--underlined "urgently"--a cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo wasn't acted on.

STAHL: Do you blame her for--for not understanding the significance of terrorism?

Mr. CLARKE: I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in--in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back, they wanted to work on the same issues right away--Iraq, Star Wars--not new issues that--the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.

(Footage of Clarke walking; Paul Wolfowitz)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke finally got his meeting to brief about al-Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or the cabinet, it was with the number twos in each relevant department. For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr. CLARKE: I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden, we have to deal with al-Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al-Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years.' And I turned to the deputy director of CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

STAHL: In eight years.

Mr. CLARKE: In eight years.

STAHL: Now explain that.

(Footage of Clarke; George Bush Sr. and man)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He explained that there was no Iraqi terrorism against the US after 1993 when Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate the first President Bush while he was visiting Kuwait.

Mr. CLARKE: We responded to that by blowing up Iraqi intelligence headquarters...

(Footage of bombed buildings)

Mr. CLARKE: (Voiceover) ...and by sending a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis saying, 'If you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won't just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it'll be your whole government.'

It was a very chilling message. And apparently it worked, because there's absolutely no evidence since that day of Iraqi terrorism directed against the United States until we invaded them. Now there's Iraqi terrorism against the United States.

STAHL: Was there any connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?

Mr. CLARKE: Were they cooperating? No.

STAHL: Was Iraq supporting al-Qaeda?

Mr. CLARKE: No. There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda ever.

STAHL: But, you know, you call certain people in the administration and they'll say, 'That's still open. That's an open issue.'

Mr. CLARKE: Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over.

(Footage of the White House; Bush and man)

STAHL: (Voiceover) By June 2001 there still hadn't been a cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though the US intelligence community was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA director warned the White House.

Mr. CLARKE: George Tenet...

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: ...was saying to the White House, saying to the president because he briefed him every morning...

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: 'A major al-Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead.' He said that in June, July, August.

(Footage of CIA seal; photo of Clarke and Bill Clinton; photo of cabinet meeting; photo of Clinton and Clarke; LA International Airport; photo of operative; photo of car; photo of explosives; Bush and man; Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) The last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of intelligence chatter was back in December 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says President Clinton ordered his cabinet to go to battle stations, meaning they were on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack at Los Angeles International Airport, when this al-Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before 9/11.

Mr. CLARKE: He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his national security advisor to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject.

STAHL: Why would having a meeting make a difference?

Mr. CLARKE: If you compare December '99 to June--June and July of 2001, in December '99 every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the attorney general, had to go to the White House and sit in the meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done...

STAHL: Hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: ...to stop the al-Qaeda attack.

STAHL: Hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: So they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees, personally, finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001 we might have found out in the White House, the attorney general might have found out that there were al-Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI at lower levels knew--never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI.

(Photos of operatives; Clarke and reporter walking)

STAHL: (Voiceover) The FBI and the CIA knew that these two al-Qaeda operatives, both among the 9/11 hijackers, had been living in the United States since 2000, yet neither agency passed that information up the chain of command or told Dick Clarke, as the White House terrorism coordinator.

Mr. CLARKE: And here I am in the White House saying, 'Something's about to happen. Tell me, you know, if--if a sparrow falls from the tree. I want to know if anything unusual is going on, because we're about to be hit.'

STAHL: No one told you.

Mr. CLARKE: The...

STAHL: No one told you?

Mr. CLARKE: The--the FBI knows they're in the country.

STAHL: Oh.

Mr. CLARKE: Lesley, if we had put their picture on "The CBS Evening News," if we had put their picture on Dan Rather, on USA Today, we could have caught those guys, and then we might have been able to pull that thread and--and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

(Photos of 9/11 hijackers; Clarke)

STAHL: (Voiceover) But as we all know, the al-Qaeda sleeper cell was left free to plan the 9/11 attack while Dick Clarke kept agitating for the high-level White House meeting he'd been seeking.

STAHL: You finally did get your cabinet-level meeting, finally. When did that meeting take place?

Mr. CLARKE: The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place, one week prior to 9/11.

STAHL: When Clarke got his meeting on September 4th, he proposed a plan to bomb al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan and to kill Osama bin Laden. It's the same plan he had tried to persuade the Clinton administration to adopt to no avail. When we come back, Clarke's view of the president's actions after 9/11, and the White House view of Clarke.

(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)

(Announcements)

(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)

STAHL: Richard Clarke was in the Reagan, Bush one, and Clinton administrations before he became George W. Bush's top official on counter-terrorism. In a new book, he says that the Bush administration should have and could have taken out al-Qaeda and its training camps in Afghanistan long before the attacks of September 11th. He also says the fact that Osama bin Laden is still at large is another major failure, made possible by what he calls the administration's sluggish response to 9/11. Clarke's book, in effect an indictment of the president's handling of the war on terrorism, arrives just as Mr. Bush is beginning to hit the campaign trail in earnest.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From campaign ad) I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message.

(Ad footage of 9/11)

STAHL: (Voiceover) The president's new campaign ads highlight his handling of 9/11. He's making it the centerpiece of his bid for re-election.

You're writing this book in the middle of this campaign. The timing, I'm sure, you will be questioned about and criticized for. Why are you doing it now?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me. But frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know.

STAHL: Does a person who works in a White House owe the president his loyalty?

Mr. CLARKE: Yes.

STAHL: Well, this is not a loyal book, I'm sorry.

Mr. CLARKE: No, no, I know. It just--up to a point. Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside. And the way he's...

STAHL: You think he risked people's lives?

Mr. CLARKE: I think the way he has responded to al-Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe, absolutely.

STAHL: Don't you think he handled himself and hit all the right notes after 9/11? Showed strength, got us through it. You don't give him credit for that?

Mr. CLARKE: He gave a really good speech the week after 9/11.

STAHL: You don't give him credit for anything? Nothing?

Mr. CLARKE: I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.

(Footage of Clarke; Stephen Hadley and reporter climbing stairs; Hadley and reporter talking)

STAHL: (Voiceover) That may be the most serious indictment yet of the administration's handling of terrorism, since it comes from the president's own former terrorism advisor. It's not a surprise then that the number-two man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees with Clarke. He says the president has taken the fight to the terrorists and is hardening the homeland.

Dick Clarke--he was the administration's top official on counter-terrorism. How would you describe the job he did?

Mr. STEPHEN HADLEY: Look, Dick is very dedicated, very knowledgeable about this issue. When the president came into office, one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and counter-terrorism group intact, bring them into the new administration really...

(Footage of Hadley; reporter; Hadley)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He says Clarke did a good job but is just dead wrong when he says the president didn't heed the warnings about al-Qaeda before the attacks on 9/11.

Mr. HADLEY: The president heard those warnings. The president got--met daily with his chief of intelligence--the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, and his staff, and they kept him fully informed. And at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of--of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al-Qaeda?'

(Footage of Hadley; Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, the president didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.

Mr. HADLEY: All the chatter was at--of an attack--a potential al-Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community, 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.' And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administrations, the FBI...

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HADLEY: ...saying, 'the--the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared, we don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore, preparatory steps need to be made.' So the president put us on battle stations.

STAHL: Now, he's the top terrorism official in this administration at that point. He says you didn't go to battle stations.

Mr. HADLEY: Well, I think that's just wrong, and the...

(Footage of Hadley; Hadley and reporter)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He also says Clarke was wrong when he said the president pressured him to find a link between Iraq and 9/11.

Mr. HADLEY: We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred.

STAHL: Now, can I interrupt you for one second? We have done our own work on that ourselves, and we have two sources who tell us independently of Dick Clarke that there was this encounter. One of them was an actual witness.

Mr. HADLEY: Look, the--I--I stand on what I said.

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HADLEY: But the point, I think, we're missing in this is of course the president wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.

STAHL: So he's not denying the president asked for another review, nor is he denying that Clarke wrote a memo stating once again that Iraq was not involved in 9/11. In fact, the White House showed us the memo dated September 18th. As Clarke said, it was bounced back. The notation reads: "Please update and resubmit," and it was written by Stephen Hadley.

Mr. HADLEY: I asked him to go--to go back, not "wrong answer." I asked him to go back and check it again a week or two later to make sure there was no new emerging evidence that Iraq was involved. That's what I was asking him to do.

(Footage of Hadley; photo of Bush and Colin Powell; photo of Condoleezza Rice; photo of cabinet meeting; Clarke and man walking; staircase)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Hadley says the whole issue about Iraq was moot by the time Clarke submitted his memo, since the president, at a meeting with his war cabinet at Camp David, had already decided to focus the US response to 9/11 on Afghanistan, which is what Clarke had been recommending. But Clarke says it was not moot, because the administration wanted to make Iraq phase two of the response no matter what happened in Afghanistan.

Pres. BUSH: (From file footage) You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.

(Footage of Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke contends that with statements like that, the president continually left an impression that Saddam had been involved in 9/11.

Mr. CLARKE: The White House carefully manipulated public opinion. Never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it.

STAHL: Yeah, but you're suggesting here they knew better, and it was deliberate.

Mr. CLARKE: They did know better. They did know better. They did know better. We told them, the CIA told them, the FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging September 11th, when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. I think for a commander-in-chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.

(Footage of Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) And he thinks the president to this day misinterprets the nature and the scope of the terrorist threat.

Mr. CLARKE: He asked us after 9/11 to give him cards with pictures of the major al-Qaeda leaders and tell us when they were arrested or killed so he could draw X's through their pictures.

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: And, you know, I write in the book I have this image of George Bush sitting by a warm fireplace in the White House drawing X's through al-Qaeda leaders and thinking that he's got most of them and therefore he's taken care of the problem. And while George Bush thinks he's crossing them out one by one, there are all these new al-Qaeda people who are being recruited who hate the United States in large measure because of what Bush has done.

(Photo of Saddam Hussein; burning American flag; protestors)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He says that the war in Iraq has not only inflamed anti-Americanism in the Arab world, it drained resources away from the fight to Afghanistan and the push to eliminate Osama bin Laden.

Mr. HADLEY: It's not correct. Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center in the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al-Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone, their sanctuary in Iraq is gone, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies in the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way to narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists.

STAHL: Don't you think that Iraq, the Middle East, and the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?

Mr. CLARKE: I think that...

STAHL: I mean, it's a widely held view that that's--he was a man...

Mr. CLARKE: Lesley, I--I think the world would be better off if a number of leaders around the world were out of power. The question is what price should the United States pay. The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it.

STAHL: What do you mean?

Mr. CLARKE: Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it--an oil-rich Arab country.' He'd been saying this. This was part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich, and occupy and oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al-Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al-Qaeda, have been greatly strengthened.

(Footage of Madrid train bombing)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Exhibit A, he now says, is the attack on the passenger trains in Madrid.

Dick Clarke worked for Reagan, Bush one, Clinton, and now here. He has a track record. Why do you think a man with those credentials would be so completely critical of the way this administration has handled the war on terrorism?

Mr. HADLEY: Well, I don't know. I have not read Dick's book. I don't know what he said about the prior administration, which, again, was in office and dealing with this problem for eight years. We were in office dealing with this problem for 230 days. At the time when he left us, the conversations I had with him was that he was pleased at the leadership provided by the president.

STAHL: He did tell you he was pleased when he left?

Mr. HADLEY: My--my belief was that he appreciated the leadership that the president had provided.

(Footage of Clarke and reporter walking; photo of Clinton and man; Clarke)

STAHL: (Voiceover) But there's no hint of that in his book or in our interview. When Clarke worked for President Clinton he was known as the terrorism czar. When George Bush came into office, though he kept Clarke on at the White House, he stripped him of his cabinet-level rank.

They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, frankly, if I had been so upset that the national coordinator for counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a cabinet-level position to a staff-level position, if that had bothered me enough I would have quit. I didn't quit.

(Footage of Clarke and reporter walking; Clarke typing; book spine)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Not for another two years. He finally resigned last year, after 30 years in government service. A senior White House official told us he thinks Clarke's book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.

Are you working to defeat Bush, and are you working to help Kerry get elected?

Mr. CLARKE: No, I'm not working for Kerry. I'm an independent. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign.

STAHL: We're here at Harvard right now. You teach a course at the Kennedy School with Kerry's national security advisor...

Mr. CLARKE: Mm-hmm.

STAHL: Rand Beers.

Mr. CLARKE: Mm-hmm. I have worked for Ronald Reagan, I have worked for George Bush one, I have worked for George Bush two. I'm not participating in this campaign, but I am putting facts out that I think people ought to know.

STAHL: Looking back on September 11th, the day itself, besides the attacks and the--and the horrible images of those planes hitting, what do you remember?

Mr. CLARKE: I remember trying very hard to keep my emotions in check. I knew people in the Pentagon, I knew people in the World Trade Center. I assumed that friends of mine had died, and, in fact, it turned out they had. I felt an enormous rage and anger against al-Qaeda, but also and anger against the US government that we hadn't been able to stop this.

STAHL: Well, I'll tell you something, some of that rage is in this book.

Mr. CLARKE: Well, it should be.

STAHL: Over the weekend we got a note from the Pentagon saying, 'Any suggestion that the president did anything other than act aggressively, quickly and effectively to address the al-Qaeda and Taliban threat in Afghanistan is absurd.'

Copyright 2004 CBS Worldwide Inc.
All Rights Reserved
CBS News Transcripts

Via Juan Cole, this is one of the best pieces of war reporting I have seen from post-war Baghdad. By Nir Rosen, in the Asia Times. It captures all of the confusion, the despair, and the frustration of US troops, Iraqi bystanders, and the reporters covering the aftermath of the total explosive destruction of a Baghdad hotel.

"...Furious survivors attacked cameramen, seeking someone to vent their fury on, neighbors stood crying, friends rushed to the scene looking for loved ones, terror on their faces. Two fat women in their night gowns began screaming at an American soldier angrily. Bewildered, not knowing what they were saying, he told them 'Everything's gonna be alright.' From atop their Humvees other American soldiers swiveled their machineguns, screaming and cursing at the Iraqis and journalists below them. An Iraqi policeman with his gun drawn pushed me away. All the while, the glowing orange inferno lit the scene as the fire spread to a nearby building.

"Journalists moved away to report on their phones in English, Turkish, Italian. Others stood still filming the scene. Arguments broke out between Iraqis who wanted the journalists to film and those who wanted them to leave. More and more bodies were carried out from the gaping wreckage of the flaming hotel building...

"A rumor spread among the crowd that an American missile had hit the hotel and the crowd argued over who was responsible. Tomorrow the local papers will blame a coalition of Jews and Americans who want to divide iraq. The Bush administration will no doubt blame it on Zarqawi, and it had already announced it was offering its prayers for the victims, adding it would not change US policy, whatever that is..."

OK, there are too many conflicts of interest in this tale to pass by. Isn't it unbelievably screwed up that the executive director of the 9/11 commission was actually one of the Bush administration advisors who was briefed by the outgoing Clinton folks that Al Qaeda and terrorism would be their biggest problem? [And my own conflict of interest here, in that I have worked and studied with Zelikow, and am basically a big fan.] But objectively speaking here, isn't it tough not to see that there's an essential conflict of interest here? [Via Atrios]

Housekeeping notes: Folks, the blog will be a little slow the next few days as I try to wrap up several writing projects that have been festering on my laptop here, and which require some sustained attention.

Secondly, heads up that Sunday night March 21, "60 Minutes" should feature a must-see interview with former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. The headline is that Clarke reveals that from the moment the Twin Towers were struck September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was advocating for bombing Iraq, rather than Afghanistan, because it offered more targets.

-"Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," Clarke tells CBS' Leslie Stahl, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the September 11 attacks].'"

-"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between Iraq and al Qaeda], but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.

But perhaps an even more important subtitle to this piece is how freaking crazy is Paul Wolfowitz. He has swallowed Laurie Mylroie's hogwash hook line and sinker to such a degree, it is really frightening this guy has a job of any responsibility.

-Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

-"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the Deputy Director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

-Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

-When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."

It's hard at this point to even be surprised at these revelations, but I am told that the book and the interview are both devastating for the administration.

Enjoy yourselves the next few days.

Last week's Observer has the story on the genesis of the coup plot that resulted in Zimbabwe impounding a US-sold planeload of mercenaries. And the story is heading awfully close to the founder of the well known but highly controversial private military company Executive Outcomes, Simon Mann. Apparently, Mann was being bankrolled by a Lebanese-born, London based tycoon named Ely Calil to essentially overthrow Equatorial Guinea's current dictator in favor of the exiled president currently in Spain. Lots of mining and oil rights at stake in the bargain.

While Pakistani troops pound Al Qaeda positions in the mountains for someone, increasingly unclear exactly who, it is increasingly clear that from an operational perspective, the Al Qaeda man to get is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is the current "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," and is believed to have been involved in organizing many of the recent major terrorist attacks -- in Madrid, Casablanca, Istanbul, and Iraq. [Meanwhile, Iraq militants have reported this week that Zarqawi is dead. Needless to say, no one should take their word for it.]

The Spanish bombing investigation has uncovered that the Madrid attacks are connected to previous ones in Casablanca Morocco, and Tangier.

"The officials said the militant at the center of the investigation, Abdelaziz Benyaich, a naturalized French citizen from Morocco who is in prison in Spain, met in April 2003 in Tangier with Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan who has been arrested in connection with the train bombings in Madrid on March 11 that killed 202 people and wounded almost 1,500," the Washington Post reports.

"The investigators also said Benyaich met on several occasions with Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian al Qaeda leader who is a prime suspect in several recent bombings directed at U.S. occupation targets in Iraq."

Many independent scholars and US authorities do take the Zarqawi letter CD found in Iraq, that threatens to try to incite a conflict between Iraq's Sunni and Shia, seriously, and do seem to believe it is authentic.

Zarqawi is also believed to have coordinated the November Istanbul attacks as well.

Do we really understand how much Al Qaeda has evolved? Do we even know if Zarqawi is alive? And if not, who has replaced him as Al Qaeda's chief operating officer?

Madrid on the mind. Letters from abroad:

From a friend in Norway: "Here is big fear of terrorist attacks, sometimes I am afraid to enter the bus, to sleep and ask my self would I wake up tomorrow. [f*****g] world...Who is going to be after Spain? Don't know really what is going to happen...this word is crazy. A friend of mine from Spain here is so unhappy. She says people are frightened there...I am going to anti-war protest today...I feel so confused these days."

Well, at least all that time with Serb officialdom wasn't totally wasted. A former diplomat friend currently in Belgrade writes, "Saw your buddy R. today...Also saw a very tired Kostunica, privately..."

It all reminds me of something that one used to see in the Clinton time but hardly ever sees any more. Real diplomacy. Why are ex diplomats doing so much more on a freelance basis than the current State Department? Because the Bush White House just doesn't give a rat's behind about diplomacy, and it shows.

Really, heavens help us.

Kosovo Albanian leaders are urging their people to calm down, friends from the region report. The situation may be calming. It may be too late however to quanch the exodus of Kosovo's Serbs.

Josh Marshall dives into the fine print of the recently released Pew poll on Arab and Muslim world attitudes to the US. I'm glad he did it because I found it too hard to understand what is really going on, except that an alarming number of Turks and Moroccans seem to find the idea of suicide attacks against Americans understandable.

Update: Absolutely nobody agrees with me here, except the stray blood relation. Perhaps I am going to too many AEI events [for research purposes, only, of course]. But I have to say, I am starting to think that the Iraq war was the right thing to do, for none of the stated reasons the Bushies did it. I think if we don't totally let it go to hell that it is good for the Iraqi people, I think it will positively affect the neighbors, and I think it was good to project American power and willingness to take serious casualties to all sorts of potential and current enemies, including Al Qaeda. The negatives are clear to me too, including seriously alienating US allies in Europe, and inciting even more hatred and suspicion of the US in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But still, I want us to succeed in Iraq, in spite of the fact that Bush deserves to lose the election for screwing it up so badly, among other crimes.

More disillusioned liberals. My good friend who analyzes these issues professionally has given me permission to anonymously post some of his thoughts on the Kosovo situation, from his perch in central Europe:

"I agree it is very sad -- but I had the feeling when I was in Kosovo in the summer of '99 that total separation would be the best solution for the future. In the end, I believe that what happened at the end of World War Two -- the massive population transfers, despite all the suffering, injustice and deaths that it incurred, were for the greater good. The proof is that Czechs and Germans, Germans and Poles etc..etc...can talk to each other today, live side-by-side and work together in a united Europe having largely put the past behind them.

"If the populations hadn't been separated and 3 million Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, for example, you'd have continuing conflicts today and the presence of international forces -- which of course would be absurd.

"That's just the way it is -- there are, sadly, few places in the world where multi-ethnicity works -- America being one of them. But mankind is just too tribal -- we haven't really evolved much since caveman days in this respect, in my opinion.

"As for the Serbs of Serbia, I know this is highly un-PC, but I think they are a ticking timebomb for the continent -- they should have been occupied, thoroughly crushed and rebuilt from the ground up, just as we did with the Germans. They should have been denazified -- as it is, even if they make an economic recovery, they will continue to be a smoldering pit of noxious nationalism that will never be put out -- and that is something Europe can ill afford.

"Russia is Russia -- it's too big to be changed but Serbia is another matter -- it is Europe -- and it's a shame we didn't finish the job.

"As for Iraq, it's well on its way to turning into Lebanon -- biggest mistake for U.S. policy in 40 years. If Powell had [guts] he would resign -- but he's too much of a military man, used to taking orders I guess to see the big picture. Sad."

--Apologies to any Serb friends this might offend. I am not totally sure I agree with everything here. But I found it thought provoking and I know this is coming from one of the really smart and good progressives following these issues on a daily basis.

Kosovo's remaining Serbs are being run out of the province. Kosovo Polje, the site of the battle of 1389 in which Serbs were defeated by the Ottoman Turks, and more recently the site of Milosevic's 1989 speech that told Serbs "they would never be beat again" and which helped catapult him to power, is now a ghost town. The OSCE reports today, "The remaining Kosovo Serbs are seeking evacuation from the area. According to the UNMIK Regional Police Commander approximately 80% of Serbs have been evacuated from Fushë Kosovë/Kosovo Polje town." Other Serb enclaves around the province are also being evacuated or Serbs are seeking protection.

There is growing evidence these Albanian attacks to chase the Serbs out of Kosovo were organized, and not spontaneous.

I can't write about this now but will later. My feelings are so complicated, and the facts are not easy to come by. But it's clear the cruelty and abuse have really gone both ways, and it's hard except in some individual and very rare cases to find any great love lost between Kosovo's Serbs and Albanians, at least for the past several years. That said, nobody wants to be run out of their home, and from their land. It was horribly unjust when the Serbs did it to the Albanians in 1998-1999, and it is unjust when the Albanians do it to the Serbs today. But Kosovo is a place that eventually robs one of all sorts of illusions. Can the UN and NATO provide protection to keep extremists from both sides from harming each other for ever? Frankly, they have never done that good a job of it, as witnessed the past three days.

Here's the OSCE situation report from Friday.

UPDATE REPORT

GENERAL SITUATION

The general situation remains very tense. Burnings of Orthodox Churches
and K-Serbs dwellings continue. K-Serbs are beginning to be evacuated
from their minority enclaves. Confrontations continue between the
security forces and local demonstrators. UNMIK vehicles are being burnt
and tear gas has been used in many locations to disperse the crowds.

MITROVICA

In reference to the alleged attack in the OSCE external parking lot (see
last report), it now seems that the target was not the OSCE as very
little damage has been done. The OSCE Office in Mitrovica North has been
damaged but there is no final assessment.

A K-Serb village Svinjare, SW of Mitrovica has reportedly been evacuated
and burnt.

At 1850 hrs, the decision was made to evacuate all International
personnel (UN, OSCE etc) from Yugobank (UNMIK Regional HQ), some to
Belvedere (French KFOR base) and the remainder to Zvecan Municipality.

PRISHTINË/PRISTINA

There is heavy presence of police forces in various parts of
Prishtinë/Pristina City. Most of the forces are now in the center of the
city, in front of key government and International buildings. According
to KFOR sources, it appears that demonstrations organized today were
called by the leader of student union of University of
Prishtinë/Pristina.

LIPJAN/LIPLJAN

At 1500 hrs, according to the UNMIK Police Station Commander, some
200-300 people were located at the green market area in Lipjan town.
Before, they reportedly destroyed the monument in front of the municipal
building. The situation seems to be under control - for the time being.

At 1740 hrs, several explosions have been heard by OSCE personnel in the
center of the town. A K-Serb house was observed burning.

FUSHË KOSOVE/KOSOVO POLJE

Four K-Serb houses have been burned during the day. Two houses of OSCE
mission members who were residing in the town have been burnt. The
remaining K-Serbs are seeking evacuation from the area. According to the
UNMIK Regional Police Commander approximately 80% of Serbs have been
evacuated from Fushë Kosovë/Kosovo Polje town.

OBILIQ/C

Most K-Serb houses have been burnt and reports have been received that
all K-Serbs have been evacuated by KFOR through Plementina village to
Slimlines (KFOR Compound in Prishtinë/Pristina)

There are unconfirmed reports that the Serb school has been set on fire.

CAGLAVICA

150 UNMIK Police and KFOR vehicles are in the area. At 1500 hrs,
confrontation continued between riot police backed by KFOR and local
civilians. Tear gas was fired.

According to Media reports, a crowd of about 1000 "angry youngsters" are
currently outside Caglavica mostly just "standing around and watching,
occasionally throwing stones", but that situation is "completely under
control". However, this source pointed out that the situation might
change if this group gets bigger towards the evening. A K/Serbian
primary source from inside Caglavica confirms that the village as such
is calm at present.

GRACANICA

The main road is blocked by local K-Serbs. Tension is high and there are
reports of conflict between K-Albanians and KFOR on the outskirts of
Gracanica. The few internationals left in the community are not being
threatened.

The town is now receiving incoming Internally Displaced Persons from the
Caglavica, Fushë Kosovë/Kosovo Polje and Laplje Selo areas.

PRIZREN

At 1600 hrs, protesters attacked Police station in PZ proper. The
building is slightly damaged - 3 Police officers lightly injured. Later,
the crowd proceeded to downtown and was trying to break into the
municipality building, which they partially looted. KFOR and SPU arrived
on the scene at 1700 hrs. Tear gas and rubber bullets were used. There
were some explosions heard in Shadërvan area. Some SPU vehicles are
damaged. Through loudspeakers KFOR urged crowds to disperse.

At 1750 hrs, violent clashes with KFOR and SPU ceased and the crowd
dispersed after a handful of TMK/KPC Officers came on the scene and
literally ordered protesters to retreat. Still heavy presence of KFOR in
front of UN HQ and OSCE premises continues.

PEJA/PEC

According to the Head of Office the crowd in the center of the town
dispersed and the current situation is calm.

At 1700 hrs, in the K-Serb enclaves of Bica and Grabac, KFOR and UNMIK
Police are in control of the area. The crowd there is dispersing.

GJILAN/GNJILANE

The situation is serious. A crowd gathered at the Centre of town around
1300 hrs. It grew to 2500 participants and stoned the UNMIK building,
which was empty. Around 1600 hrs, a small fire was put out near UNMIK
building.

More houses are burning - possible Roma houses - as well as cars.
Another house, where a few K-Serbs stayed, reportedly was stoned. The
crowd split into two. One went up towards MEB Bank and smashed windows
and broke security bars. The Emergency Committee meeting has been
re-scheduled for 1800 hrs.

VUSHTRRI/VUCITRN

The Orthodox Church is on fire. Some minorities were brought to Kosovo
Police Service School (KPSS) for safety reasons from outline villages,
mainly Ashkalis. There is an increased alert in the School and many KPSS
instructors in riot equipment are assisting local police in crowd
control. Many of the staff have been recalled to duty. They are seeking
further assistance from KFOR to protect the Ashkali IDPs.

STRPCE/SHTËRPCE

Situation remains calm and quiet, with normal activity in the centre of
the town. Head of OSCE Office proposed to the Security Co-ordination
Board to hold a press conference at 1900 hrs, to inform the local
population of the current situation.

DECAN/DECANI

The crowd mentioned in the last report have dispersed and from 1430 hrs
everything is calm.

GJAKOVË/ÐAKOVICA

The situation is for the time being calm and no incidents reported
during the day. A demonstration was held at 1200 hrs. The demonstration
was peaceful.

RAHOVEC/ORAHOVAC

The situation is calm and no incidents reported during the day. A
demonstration took place at approx. 14:00 hours in the Centre, with the
participation of around 200 people. The majority of them were
youngsters, apparently coming from outside Rahovec/Orahovac. No
incidents or attempts were made to reach the upper part of town (the
Serb Quarter) or Velika Hoca. Here the KFOR checkpoint has been
re-installed.

FERIZAJ/UROSEVAC

UN Municipal Representative (MR) reported that all 17 K-Serbs have left
the town, and all K-Serb houses are burning. Extraordinary Municipal
Assembly session was held, during which a declaration against violence
was adopted. This was then publicised on local media.

DRAGASH

NTR

VITI/VITINA

KFOR has already evacuated all the remaining K-Serbs from Viti/Vitina to
the safe area.

PODUJEVË/O

According to media reports the Orthodox Church has been burnt.

SKENDERAJ/SERBICA

The Orthodox Church at Devic (815297) has been overrun and burnt. KFOR
has evacuated the K-Serbs by helicopter but they have not stopped the
perpetrators burning the church.

KACANIK

So far, quiet and calm.

MALISHEVË/MALISEVO

Iraqi journalists protesting the killing of two of their colleagues by US troops at a checkpoint yesterday have walked out of a press conference given by Colin Powell in Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, March 19 (Reuters) - Iraqi journalists walked out
of a Baghdad news conference given by U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell on Friday in protest at lack of security and the
killing of two Iraqi journalists by U.S. troops.
"We declare our boycott of the conference because of the
martyrs," Najim al-Rubaie of Iraq's Distor newspaper said in a
statement read at the start of the news conference as Powell and
Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer looked on.
"We declare our condemnation of the incident which led to
the killing of the two journalists...who were killed at the
hands of the American forces."

It's surely not going to help US public relations in the Arab world.

Holy Smokes. The team investigating his work found that former USA Today reporter Jack Kelley made up huge volumes of stories. I am shocked, and feeling pretty stupid. Really. The lies he told are much bigger and more outrageous than Jayson Blair's. How did this go on for 21 years?

Here are some of Kelley's lies:

He wrote that a Cuban woman he met and photographed had drowned with her son while trying to get to the US. USA Today has now found the woman and she is very much alive.

He appears to have made up most of the details of a pizzaria bombing he said he not only witnessed, but had noted the bomber of, in Jerusalem.

He faked tons and tons of witnesses, translators, etc.

Why would he do this??????? Is he a psychopath?

The UN has withdrawn from Kosovo flashpoint Mitrovica. But we needn't fear. "The UN Security Council has strongly condemned the violence - calling it 'unacceptable' - and demanded that it stop immediately." Well, that should do it.

In the midst of all the grim news, the fourth picture at this link is worth looking at.

Kevin Drum takes issue with Tom Friedman's oped. Warmongers vs. Appeasers, Drum complains, is the tone of Friedman's piece (and yes, Friedman does close with a quote from Churchill). But I find myself on Friedman's side here. The bulk of Friedman's piece is a smart, Kerry-esque critique of the Bush administration's "pig-headed" insistence on doing the Iraq post-war on the cheap -- and risking real failure. The second part -- that encourages the West to redouble its efforts at bringing stability to Iraq, vs. pulling out and dividing -- seems sensible enough.

I agree with Drum it's no good to criticize Spanish voters for rejecting the party that not only brought them into the Iraq war, but which tried to cover up who carried last Thursday's attacks. And I understand that the victorious Socialists' long-time policy platform was to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. But the point cannot be lost that if Al Qaeda's terror attacks are shown to be effective at getting targeted countries to retreat in some decisive way, it does set a precedent that could have dangerous consequences. Doesn't it? To be seen to be in retreat as a result of attack?

The following is not a perfect analogy. But it says something I feel is important about the way to deal with thugs, of all varieties. The Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic used to take UN peacekeepers hostage and handcuff them on airport tarmacs, to prevent NATO from conducting air strikes to try to stop mass slaughter of Bosnian Muslims. Diplomats would rush to meet him and negotiate and drink Slivovice with him and cajole him into behaving. But it only led to more intimidation of international peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers and slaughter of thousands of innocents. And you know what the West finally found was the only thing Mladic responded to? Beating the daylights out of the Serb forces. [This became more politely known as "Diplomacy Backed by Force."] Did advocating eventually for bombing Serb targets mean we were bloodthirsty warmongers? No, I really don't think so. If anything, it was advocating a little bit of violence to bring peace. Because we learned over four years of standing politely by while witnessing mass slaughter and abuse that justice and basic human decency demand that those with the power to do so stop these atrocities however we can. Atrocities which would include not just the slaughter of 7,000 people at Srebrenica, and the three year siege of Sarajevo, but the attacks that have in the past two and half years killed thousands of civilians in New York, Madrid, Istanbul, Bali, Riyadh, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Experience shows that real thugs like Mladic and Al Qaeda terrorists have to be countered with unblinking force. Accomodation only emboldens them. Perception of accomodation only emboldens them.

Fine, you say. Go after terrorists. But what does that have to do with western troops in Iraq? After all, the Iraq war has nothing to do with the war against Al Qaeda except in the minds of some discredited members of the Office of Special Plans and the Office of the Vice President and the editorial board of the Weekly Standard.

But here is where it gets really tricky. Because I believe, the political calculus has changed with the post-war itself. Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein may have had only the most limited contact in the past. Surely the core Al Qaeda leadership knows more cell phone numbers of members of the Saudi royal family and the Pakistani intelligence services than they did of Saddam's Mukhabarat.

But now, Al Qaeda affiliates do seem to be targeting among other countries, states that are seen to be cooperating with the US in Iraq. I think the Spanish are right to be suspicious that Aznar tried to cover up who perpetrated the March 11 Madrid bombing, precisely because he was afraid Madrid was targeted because of Spain's alliance with the US in Iraq. Poland's pro-American prime minister is also making noises now about withdrawing Poland's 2,000 troops in Iraq in order to reduce its exposure to threatened Al Qaeda attacks. And who could blame him, since it's his responsibility to protect his citizens?

So we have a contradiction here. Some of the very same Americans and analysts, including Tom Friedman, saying, Spain's being attacked has nothing to do with Iraq, are telling Spain that they should not withdraw their troops from Iraq because it would be a victory for Al Qaeda. So which is it? Did Spain's being targeted by Al Qaeda have anything to do with its participation in the Iraq coalition? Yes or no?

In other words, if governments start behaving as if they can avoid Al Qaeda attacks by getting out of Iraq, haven't the two wars, the Iraq war, and the war against terror, become enjoined in a way they weren't before? And if Al Qaeda is going through a hit list that targets governments cooperating with the US in Iraq, haven't the two campaigns effectively become connected even in some more fundamental way?

I think, yes.

So where does that leave us? The Iraq issue and the war on terror have become intertwined in some way that is deeply inconvenient and uncomfortable for everybody. Why is it uncomfortable? Because surely the Bush administration doesn't want to concede that participating in the Iraq campaign has caused its coalition partners to be "higher value" targets of Al Qaeda. And for that matter, surely the new Spanish government doesn't want to concede that withdrawing troops from Iraq is a concession to Al Qaeda. For that matter, American liberals don't want to admit that the war on terror has anything to do with Bush's Iraq adventure, because of our outrage that the Bush administration shamelessly exaggerated and manipulated pre-war intelligence on this issue.

Of course, it's worth noting that one of the most vigorous critics of the Iraq campaign, France, was this week reportedly threatened with a terror attack by an Islamist group because of France's decision to ban headscarves at public schools and public offices. Clearly there are many sins that can get one on Al Qaeda's hit list besides Iraq. But if you were Poland's or Britain's or Italy's prime minister, you would be especially worried. Friends in Europe are worried now, about riding trains, about all the things we worried about in the weeks and months after 9/11.

So, how should Europeans respond to the Madrid attacks? Should they feel compelled to keep their troops in Iraq? It's my conviction and experience that in the face of thugs, one has to stand one's ground. One can't blink.

As gratifying as it surely would be for several Europeans governments to see the Bush administration continue to fall flat on its face in Iraq, can Europe really afford for Iraq to go really really bad? Is that really in their interest? [For that matter, was it in the US' interest to let the Europeans fall on their face in Bosnia a decade ago? Ultimately, Washington decided it was in our interest to help]. Will that make them more or less vulnerable? I think, it's obvious, that it makes us all incredibly more vulnerable. The US and Europe and Turkey and members of western civilization are really engaged in the good fight here, and what's at stake is so much bigger than which political party leads our individual governments today or tomorrow. After all, as the situation in Spain shows, that can change overnight. [Heavens be willing, we will get a new government here come next January]. And I think that is the point of Tom Friedman's piece.

McCain runs defense for Kerry. You have got to love this guy. He is just about ten thousand trillion times more honest, and, what's the word? honorable, than anyone in the current White House.

They are going to get Osama or some of his friends, it seems. Note that this happened the same day that Pakistan was awarded special NATO status, at Washington's invitation.

Who lost Europe, huh? Now Poland is threatening to withdraw its troops from Iraq. It's pretty clear President Aleksander Kwasniewski is terrified that Poland could be hit next, as an Al Qaeda-affiliated group has threatened in an emailed letter to a London based Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Kosovo is burning, as are some people's remaining hope that Kosovo's Serbs and Albanians can live together. My Kosovar friend currently in Scandinavia writes, "My sister says that all population of prishtina is in front of government buidling, one serb has been killed in Gracanica but not confirmation yet, and in other cities people are all in the streets...I am so afraid of consequences." And from her previously today, "I got so upset...the Serbs are burning all mosques in Serbia, who cares for mosques, I don't know why they think the Albanians identified themselves wth mosques. It's totally a mess. My sister says the situation is like pre-war...the Albanians are eager to go to enclaves and kick them all out." My American friend working with the internationals in Kosovo writes now, "The situation is not good, and many of us are preparing our evacuation packs." I am extremely nervous and worried, this has blown up literally overnight. How was the tipping point so close to the surface, so instant?

Update: More from Kosovo: "I am too tired...as I told you, no more idealism and no more playing games...people just should live seperately..."

More from Belgrade: "We always thought the situation will radicalize that way having in mind unresolved status issue. Little is known how it started and who. However, it is worrying the way they handled things in Serbia. Last night burning of the two remaining mosques in Serbia proper, Nis and Belgrade, has nothing to do with violence in Kosovo. Mob also demolished Croatian Embassy and recently installed plaque with the name of Zoran Djindjic (the main downtown square was named after him) was smashed. The Government is trying to homogenize the country on Kosovo issue once again , media is giving them a hand, The whole atmosphere reminds that of 90s. It looks as if Kostunica is definitely pushing for partition. He has argument now: the two communities cannot live together. I am really sick of all this."

If you knew as I do that these two individuals are among the utterly least racist, most human rights oriented people in that region, you would realize how very sad these statements are. The consensus opinion seems to be that Kosovar Albanians and Serbs have been manipulated into a situation where they can no longer live together.

Then again, the past two days' violence took everybody by surprise and has many of the people who care about the region flustered and frustrated. Maybe tomorrow things will calm down. After all, NATO does have 17,500 troops there, which, for providing peacekeeping for a population of two million is not such a great ratio, but is far better than nothing. It's certainly enough to keep the Yugoslav army from returning. Let's hope people burn through their anger tonight and tomorrow looks better.

If I had to put my ten dollars on an outcome, however, I would say Kosovo is headed for ethnic partition. And that opens the whole Pandora's box, doesn't it, after all, Serbs in Bosnia wanted to take their part of Bosnia with them to join Serbia, same with the Croats, and then there's Macedonia. That's precisely why the US and the internationals never wanted to touch the Kosovo final status issue. But the lack of progress in this area is hugely contributing to the pent up violence that has just ignited.

Kosovo Situation: A friend working for the international administrators in Kosovo writes, "The whole place has just collapsed..."

--the airport is closed
--Kosovo-Macedonia border is closed
--mass demonstrations
--KFOR is sitting on its ass
--no plan to house the minorities/Serbs
--Kosovo Polje burned to the ground basically, and other places burning
--5 years of work down the drain

The BBC reports NATO is sending more troops to supplement the 17,500 peacekeeping troops already there. And Serbs in Serbia proper are burning down mosques.

Here's the OSCE Kosovo SitRep from 1400 Kosovo time today:

The general situation at 1400 hrs is very tense with the burning of
houses, churches, roadblocks and demonstrations. It has become
increasingly difficult to glean information from the minority enclaves
as the K-Serbs are reluctant to inform about their situation. They are
blaming the international community for not assisting them.

All OSCE members, both International and National, have been accounted
for.

Prishtinë/Pristina Airport is closed. All commercial flights are
cancelled until further notice.

The FYRoM Ministry of Interior reported that the traffic on Jazince and
Blace border crossings is normalized today at 07:30 hours. The flow of
vehicles and foot passengers is allowed.

MITROVICA

At 1145 hrs police used a tear gas against a crowd of approximately 400
people heading towards the main bridge in Mitrovica. As of 1207 hrs, a
crowd is gathering near the Orthodox Church in Mitrovica South. An
unsuccessful attempt was made to set the Orthodox Church on fire. Some
looting took place within the church but KFOR has now retaken the area.
The same group of people at 1400 hrs have approached the Habitat Office
and they are stoning it.

The demonstrators reportedly are also stoning the OSCE external parking
lot. No serious damages have been reported. It is also reported that
OSCE Office in Northern Mitrovica has come under attack from
demonstrators and is being looted. More to follow.

In the North of Ibar River, groups of K-Serbs have gathered waving
Yugoslav flags.

A security meeting has been held and full movement restrictions are
still imposed. A further meeting will be held at 1700 hrs.

PRISHTINË/PRISTINA

As of 1215 hrs, a demonstration has halted in front of government
building in Prishtinë/Pristina. There is no traffic in the streets
except a large amount of police vehicles outside police HQ and streets
have been cordoned off. The crowd dispersed at 1315 hrs.

LIPJAN/LIPLJAN

The UN Station Commander very briefly informed that they are expecting a
demonstration in town. KFOR vehicles from the nearby base and all police
are on the streets. As of 1348 hrs, a demonstration is taking place in
the center and no incidents reported.

FUSHE KOSOVE/KOSOVO POLJE

Three K-Serb houses have been observed burning in the past hour.

OBILIQ/C

A group of K-Albanians has now been reported to be heading to the center
of Obiliq/c.

CAGLAVICA

150 UNMIK Police vehicles deployed on the first line along with KFOR
vehicles.

GRACANICA

The main road is blocked by local K-Serbs.

PRIZREN

During the night: small Byzantine church in "Podkalaja" area, Saint
George's Cathedral in down town, Orthodox chapel in Shadrevan, Saint
Friday's church (300 meters from OSCE office) and compound and Church of
Saint Archangel's monastery were burned down. In addition, compound of
Orthodox Seminary in Prizren down town was put on fire and individual
houses of the part of remaining Serb in Prizren proper, among them the
house belonging to OSCE PZ staff member.

As of 1230 hrs, Mostly abandoned Serbian District of Prizren town
"Podkalaia" is again ablaze. Groups of looters are easily passing
through KPS patrol (2 officers), infiltrating compounds and after
stealing are setting them on fire. As of 1300 hrs, About 1000
protesters, primarily adult youngsters pass UN HQ peacefully. No
aggressive behaviour observed yet.

PEJA/PEC

The demonstration in the centre of Peja/Pec town is over. There were no
incidents reported so far. There were approx. 500-600 participants. No
roadblocks have been noticed or reported in the area so far.

According to the Police, approximately 800 people started in the
direction of Decani road, which actually leads to Bijelo Polje village.
Police is intending to lead the crowd to the transit road.

A group of 300 people have passed OSCE Office chanting UCK slogans.
Local staff did not recognize any of this group as being local.

In the enclaves of Bica and Grabac, the local radio has reported that
these two K-Serb enclaves have been attacked.

GJILAN/GNJILANE

Approximately 300 people are demonstrating in the center of the town. No
incidents reported.

VUSHTRRI/VUCITRN

The general situation is quiet. Few minutes ago, a dead body was
recovered. No further info.

STRPCE/SHTRPCE

Situation is calm, no demonstrations, and no roadblocks. There is very
high tension among the population and K-Serb Assembly members (only
Serbs) met at 10:00 and set up a "Security Co-ordination Board." They
also discussed the idea of arming the population. The members stated
that these events were the end of a multi-ethnic Strpce/Shtërpce and the
end of co-operation with the K-Albanians of the Municipality.

DECAN/DECANI

Police have reported that a group of K-Albanians has gathered and are
heading towards the Orthodox Monastery in Decani.

GJAKOVË/ÐAKOVICA

NTR

RAHOVEC/ORAHOVAC

NTR

FERIZAJ/UROSEVAC

There is an ongoing demonstration. No incidents reported.

DRAGASH

NTR

VITI/VITINA

There is an ongoing demonstration. No incidents reported so far. Two
Special Police Units (SPU) are at the scene.

This is bad, potentially really bad. After spending so many years there, I wish I had something more intelligent to say. But let me explain why it is so worrisome. Because the fighting has spread from the perennial hotbed Kosovska Mitrovica with its belligerant Serb half on the north side of the Ibar river and the belligerant Albanian population on the southern side of the bridge separated by some barbed wire and French troops, to cities around the province. Because "by nightfall the United Nations had lost control of several city centers, and mobs of Albanian men were attacking Serbian areas at will. In the provincial capital, Pristina, machine gunfire and explosions could be heard late into the night." It is bad because there is still so much pent up frustration that Albanian demands for Kosovo statehood have been stalled in no man's land for three years, and Serbia has been just as stalled in all its issues, including the assassination a year ago of its reform minded prime minister Zoran Djindjic. It's bad because NATO has been able to coast in the Balkans for the past several years, and the US has largely checked out. It's bad because neighboring Macedonia's president Boris Trajkovski, who was barely holding his country's mixed Slav and Albanian country together, was killed a few weeks ago in a plane crash. It's bad because the US ambassador to Belgrade was recently fired. It's bad because Iraq and Al Qaeda is absorbing everybody's attention, and nothing really has been resolved at all.

The Washington Monthly has a hot new website and new daily weblog, "Political Animal," moderated by Calpundit's Kevin Drum. It's instantly moved to one of my favorite pages.

One of the deans of Balkan analysts in the bad old war time days was Stan Markotich. His Serbo-Croatian is perfect, he comes from the gene pool to hang out for days and nights in Belgrade bars absorbing the chatter of war criminals and spooks undetected as a North American PhD scholar and writer, and he has now wisely moved back to one of the prettiest cities on the planet, his hometown of Vancouver, Canada. Today, Stan launches a website which will feature his analysis of Canadian foreign affairs, or as he says, the lack thereof. Check it out, here.

Next week, the 9/11 Commission will hear from some of the Big Guns, including Rumsfeld, Tenet, Cohen, Berger, Albright, Powell. [You might've heard that Rice refused to appear in public, right?] And next week's commission line up also includes former White House Counterterrorism Czar, Richard Clarke. Word from his friend has it that Clarke's forthcoming book, Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror- What Really Happened, is "absolutely going to skewer" this administration. Heads up also that Clarke is to appear on 60 Minutes this coming Sunday (March 21) to discuss the same. Maybe he can deliver Kerry some more helpful talking points.

Anyhow, back to the 9/11 commission "counterterrorism policy" hearing schedule. On March 23-24, on Capitol Hill (Hart 216), "the Commission will hear from current and former top-level administration officials. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet are scheduled to testify, as are former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, former National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger, and former National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard A. Clarke. In addition to witness testimony, four staff statements will be delivered during the course of the proceedings."

The commission has lots of interesting testimony from past hearings up on its website, at www.911commission.gov

I love the idea of a Kerry-McCain ticket. That is the only thing that might possibly get my neoconservative father to vote for someone other than Bush. But probably not quite enough. Would it alienate many Democrats? Who else are they going to vote for, Nader? Anyhow, it doesn't seem fated to happen.

Here's Sen. Joe Biden with Chris Matthews yesterday:

BIDEN: If John Kerry said that’s who he wanted, and McCain - I’d encourage McCain to say yes. I doubt whether John would do it. I doubt whether John McCain would do it. But, you know, we need some unity here, man. The red states and the blue states - we got to have something to coalesce around here.

Too true.

On the one year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, Kerry is ramping up his discussion of the Bush administration's misconduct of the Iraq war, and national security issues more generally. I'm pleased to see. I wish he would talk about these issues even more. But he's going to have to come up with a better response to the Republican slime than "it's a distortion."

What the hell is happening in Kosovo? I turned off my phone for three hours to attend a conference and came out and had received as many messages of several children killed in clashes between Serbs and Albanians and NATO. Former KLA leader Hashim Thaci is in Washington this week, speaking at the US Institute of Peace, strangely enough.

A new Pew Center for the People and the Press poll on international attitudes towards the US on the one year anniversary of the Iraq invasion was released today. And it's really depressing. [Or, as Wonkette might say, "They hate us, they really hate us!"]

"The latest survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project,
conducted from late February to early March in the U.S.
and eight other countries, shows that Muslim anger toward
the United States remains pervasive, although the level of
hatred has eased somewhat and support for the war on
terrorism has inched up. Osama bin Laden, however, is viewed
favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%)
and Morocco (45%). Even in Turkey, where bin Laden is highly
unpopular, as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against
Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable."

And Europe's almost as bad.

Read the poll results here.

Well, at least they weren't only lying to the government of the United States of America, the Pentagon, the White House, the Vice President's office, the DIA. Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress was also lying to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic Monthly, and the rest of the media.

I firmly agree with Andrew Sullivan on this one:

"In Europe, there are no bad guys, even those who deliberately murdered almost 200 innocents and threaten to murder countless more," Sullivan writes. "Ask yourself: If the Guardian cannot call these people 'bad guys,' then who qualifies? And if the leaders of democratic societies cannot qualify in this context as 'good guys,' then who qualifies? What we have here is complete moral nihilism in the face of unspeakable violence."

Sullivan is totally right that this is not one of those morally murky cases, 'one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter' kind of thing. Mass killing of civilians for its own sake, even by Islamist militants, should not be confused with advocacy on behalf of improved human rights for Palestinians, Iraqis, or Saudis. [And yes, by the way, it is clearly greatly in our national interest to seriously promote improved human rights and democratization for Palestinians, etc. And no, such an effort is not going to stop Al Qaeda from trying to kill us. Intervening (eventually) to stop genocide against Bosnia's Muslims and to halt violent oppression of Kosovo's Albanian Muslim population was the right thing to do, but it did not apparently win us any brownie points from Al Qaeda. I honestly don't think that even if the CIA went in to Riyadh and dragged out the entire royal family and shot them by firing squad, that Al Qaeda would be satisfied.]

But many on the left here and in Europe apparently seem to think we should be doing more to placate Al Qaeda. I really don't think so. I think they are unplacatable. I agree with Fareed Zakaria, when he says for many terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, violence has become an end in itself. Those of us who enjoy the freedoms and values afforded by living in liberal democracies and who have seen that people in other countries, including Muslim-majority nations, aspire for the same, should especially understand the necessity of destroying, or at least neutralizing Al Qaeda, not trying to somehow accomodate their demands.

Matt Yglesias has a great piece on Bush's strangely hollow war on terror. "For all the big talk, then, 9-11 appears to have changed nothing for the Bush administration," Yglesias writes. "Their priorities remain the same as before the attacks: missile defense and Iraq, symptoms of a state-centric worldview incapable of really grasping global terrorism."

He also notes what I also thought was the strongest part of Kerry's speech on Bush's conduct of the war on terror yesterday. "John Kerry was on the right track in his Feb. 27 national security speech: 'I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the War on Terror; I believe he's done too little.' The sentiment is exactly correct, and needs to be repeated. Often. And with specifics," Yglesias writes.

Right on.

It's not just that Democrats have to be aggressive in beating down the Republican attacks, although clearly everyone has to be ready for that. It's that our candidate has got to talk about how he'll be aggressive in the war on terror. With, as Matt points out, specifics. Louder and more often. Kerry's got to be the candidate talking about how he'll conduct the war on terror. Frame this discussion, own it. The Bushies are using only images, propaganda, very little on specifics [after all, it's not like those scenes from Tora Bora of letting Osama get away are going to do the administration much good, nor of the proceedings of the 9/11 commission. Has anyone even ever seen a picture of the Homeland Security department? Does it even exist? Bush's war on terror has been largely rhetorical and invisible. Ashcroft thumping the Patriot Act is not exactly going to win over many swing voters. Nor are pictures of underpaid firefighters and border guards.] There is really a great opportunity to go on the attack here.

Here's one proposal I think Kerry could own [with images of lots of high tech computers and whizzy things, etc.]: the creation of a domestic intelligence agency, an American MI5. The 9/11 commission is clearly going to propose this, and the Bushies have dragged their feet out of bureaucratic convenience and loyalty to the FBI and CIA. Unfortunately, both agencies appear to be somewhat broken. This happens to be a proposal Edwards also endorses. But here's the story. Our intelligence agencies and security services are still under Bush fundamentally designed for the Cold War, and their valiant efforts to adapt to the post 9/11 situation are make-shift and ad hoc. It's time to really re-think America's security bureaucracies, and the creation of a glistening new US domestic intelligence agency, staffed by highly educated specialists and counter-terrorism analysts and people who speak languages and yes, privacy specialists and attorneys specializing in civil liberties, and computer geniuses like my friends Jeff Jonas and Jo Balderas and entrepreneurial FBI agents who think outside the box like Art Fierro, not just former beat cops and bureaucrats, is the core to build such a transformation around.

The Final installment of Perle Libel Watch. The statute of limitations has apparently passed, and Sy Hersh can sleep easy now. We'll miss the fun and games.

Letters: Reader and fellow blogger See Why, writes that he shares my discomfort with liberal commentators who seem almost to relish the prospect of Iraq descending into civil war:

"Still, I'm astonished sometimes that commentators can be so callous sometimes about the people of Iraq," CY posts. "...For example, read this piece on the collapse of talks about the temporary constitution in Iraq (which were salvaged shortly after the post). What happened was terrible, and Dreyfus doesn't seem very exercised by the fact that the collapse in talks was a setback for Iraqis as well as for Bremer and the Bushies."

Thanks for the letters and links, people.

Letters: Update to Boehlert blog mention, on why did Bush stop flying:

Reader R, an Air Force reservist pilot who seems to know his way around this subject pretty well, writes: "...As much as it pains me to defend the current occupant of the Oval Office, the Human Reliability Program (HRP), or Personnel Reliability Program (PRP), would not apply if the mission of your squadron did NOT include nukes. As far as I can tell, (Bush's) unit did not have anything remotely tied to nukes (Ellington AFB didn't have nuclear storage much less nuclear weapons). As an example, in my last active duty tour at Moody AFB we had three F-16 squadrons on base. Two of them had nuclear strike missions while the third was strictly a conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) unit. The pilots and maintenance troops in the two strike units were participants in PRP, the conventional troops were NOT. So HRP is not really germane to ANG interceptor squadrons during the period covered during GWB's abbreviated career.

"Hope this sheds some light on the topic. Oh, I still think GWB failed to meet his obligation, and is less than honorable; I'm just not anxious to get...sent to the sandbox for voicing my opinion," he writes. I hope identifying R by a single initial eliminates any chance of that.

Thanks for the letters, folks. I will post more soon.

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who helped expose the Bush administration's lie on Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger in 1999, has an oped in Salon. The magazine plans to serialize Wilson's forthcoming book, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity -- A Diplomat's Memoir," later in the spring.

Tony Blair makes the argument against offering concessions to Al Qaeda here:

"Blairites believe that [incumbent Spanish prime minister] Mr. Zapatero is a moderniser, albeit anti-American and surrounded by an 'unreformed party,' the Guardian reports. "In private discussions with colleagues and almost certainly with Mr Zapatero, Mr Blair is reiterating four key points:

· That al-Qaida and the Islamist terrorist attacks long predate the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington;

· That the twin towers were destroyed 18 months before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein;

· That the terrorists have no compunction about killing fellow Muslims;

· That for governments to make concessions is to allow the terrorists to dictate a state's foreign and defence policies."

I wish this guy were our president. Most of the British I know do too, or at least wish he wasn't their prime minister.

Friends, I should be writing an article that appears not to want to write itself, as I had hoped. I'm hoping a few more coffees and kind of laying out the Nexis transcripts on the desk does the trick. But meanwhile, procrastination can be served by noting an interesting speech Kerry gave to firefighters today, in which he took on the issue of Bush's conduct of the war on terrorism.

"I don't fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror, as some do," Mr. Kerry was cited by the New York Times. "I believe that he's done too little and done some things that he didn't have to. When the focus of the war on terror was appropriately in Afghanistan and on breaking Al Qaeda, President Bush shifted his focus to Iraq and to Saddam Hussein.

"He pushed away our allies at a time when we needed them the most," Kerry continued. "He hasn't pursued a strategy to win the hearts and minds of people around the world, and win the war of ideas against the radical ideology of Osama bin Laden."

I think this gets it about right, particularly the "I believe he's done too little and done some things he didn't have to."

Advancing a very interesting theory about the recent violence in Syria between Kurds and Ba'ath party supporters that has killed more than 80 people in recent days, Bob Dreyfuss. I think he is right on the mark here. Someone from outside seems to be egging these riots on in Iran and Syria. But who? And with what aim?

I have some informed speculation to post on this issue soon. It struck me as so incredible when I learned of it a few weeks ago I took it down from the site. But I think it's almost time to revisit. Just keep in mind what is located in the region of Kurdistan that is of perhaps supreme future security interest to regional players?

As Tapped's Matthew Yglesias points out, surely this Wall Street Journal opinion piece on the Valerie Plame affair today exposes more about the WSJ's hypocrisy than that of those Democrats demanding justice for Plame.

Salon's Eric Boehlert has an intriguing blog entry over at Salon's War Room exploring, why did Bush really stop flying?

Today's Progress Report, on the one year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, is must-read. Rumsfeld gets caught in yet another total bald-faced lie [note, .pdf file linked], on CBS' Face the Nation:

Host Bob SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If [Iraq] they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase `immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.
SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says `some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--`that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Honestly, there is almost no credibility left for these guys to leak.

Andy Card's cousin, the spy for Iraq. This is too funny, really.

Dear Reader, I cannot help myslf. Journalist, blogger and I hope still friend Bob Dreyfuss has struck back over at his blog, the Dreyfuss Report, saying the Spaniards' dumping of Aznar demonstrates their logical belief that if Spain pulls its troops out of Iraq, Spain will no longer be on Al Qaeda's hit list. And I am taking the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

After the September 11th attacks, "Americans get traumatized and exercise their blood lust in return," Bob writes. "In Spain, people say: Get us out of Iraq and they won't attack us anymore," Bob adds, admiring of the Spaniards' superior peaceful logic.

In other words, stop irritating those Islamist militants, and there won't be any more violence. Oh yeah? Should we really be so convinced that Al Qaeda is behaving in such a reasonable manner? Tit for tat?

Let's just remember that September 11th occurred before the US had done anything in Iraq, or Afghanistan. So what was our crime? Troops in Saudi Arabia? Intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop genocide against Muslim lives?

And Turkey was attacked in November, after its population and government had decided not to put troops in Iraq. Well, the thought had crossed their minds, so perhaps they were guilty there.

The Bali disco bombings killed more than two hundred people last year, after Bali had done precisely what to irritate those Ja'ama Islamiya folks? Provided venues for Australian tourists to dance and drink?

The Kenya hotel and plane was attacked, for what, having Jews stay there? the Morocco bombings, the same?

And in Riyadh, the series of suicide bombing attacks on housing compounds that killed mostly Muslims, starting last May, were a result of what, Saudi Arabia being such a staunch ally of the US in the war on terror? Yeah, right.

I think what is clear is that some of these were targets of opportunity, others targets symbolic of Islamist militant hatreds (the simultaneous attacks on Jewish synagogues in Istanbul, the British consulate, the Jewish community center in Casablanca, for instance), and others that may be indirectly linked to citizens of countries participating in the Iraq campaign. But in the end, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya and Indonesia, outright rejected participation in the Iraq campaign, and still suffered devastating recent Al Qaeda attacks.

Why is Bob so convinced that we should alter our behavior to appease Al Qaeda? That that is a reasonable course of action? And what excuse will there be if yet another country that rejected the campaign in Iraq becomes an Al Qaeda target? Wonder if Al Qaeda's demands never end? What are the consequences of Al Qaeda being delivered victory in the terms of western countries' reacting to their mass-killing by complying with Al Qaeda's perceived demands?

Secondly, I think Bob misses the possibility that what Spaniards were voting against Sunday is not just Aznar having taken Spain into the Iraq war, although that is surely true, but Aznar's government's reluctance to admit the likelihood that Islamist terrorists had been responsible for last week's attacks. Spaniards were voting against the lying. What people were screaming at Aznar when he and his wife went to the polls and at their demonstrations was "manipulators," and "liars" and "peace." But the "manipulators and liars" part is just as important as the peace part, surely.

Most of all, I am perplexed why Bob, who has written two blog entries the past few weeks saying Democrats should downplay the threat posed by Al Qaeda and terrorism, won't concede being wrong on two fronts: the continuing threat posed by Al Qaeda, and the political salience of the terrorism issue in elections, as demonstrated by recent events in Spain. What was the first thing Spain's new incumbent Socialist prime minister told voters today? That fighting terrorism will be his government's number one priority. Bob has been advising Democrats that they should make fighting terrorism a lower priority. Does that really seem so wise in retrospect?

Here's an interesting story that hasn't quite made it past the transom of American news consciousness yet. Ever since Iraq approved its interim constitution last week, Kurds in countries around the region have been demanding more rights - and serious violence has ensued in Iran and Syria. Violence between Kurds and members of the Syrian Ba'ath party killed more than 80 people in northern Syria over the weekend. The violence broke out after a soccor game, but the back story is that several dozen Kurds were arrested earlier in the week in Damascus after demonstrating for more rights. It's gotten so bad Turkey has sealed the Turkey-Syrian border. Meantime, Kurds have also carried out an uprising in Iran, although reports are very thin and sketchy. US military commanders also noted yesterday that violence in Iraq and attacks on US troops have ramped back up to earlier levels after a brief lull. What is going on? All this from the constitution?

Did Spain's Jose Maria Aznar lose Sunday's elections because his government seemed to deny increasing evidence Al Qaeda carried out the Madrid attacks? Or because he led Spain into the unpopular Iraq campaign that Spaniards believe made them a target of Thursday's attacks? And why was Aznar's government initially denying Al Qaeda's potential role in the attacks, in favor of blaming ETA? "Outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and his wife were booed and jostled as they arrived to cast their votes," the BBC reports. "As he tried to address supporters, he was drowned out by cries of 'manipulators,' 'liars' and 'peace.'"

Voter turn out was extraordinary. "More than 77 percent of the country's 35 million eligible voters cast ballots, compared with 55 percent four years ago," the Times reports.

Well, if Team Bush is counting, it appears to have just lost one of its few staunch European allies. Now Spain's incumbent prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has vowed to pull Spain's 1,300 troops out of Iraq.

Abdul Qadeer Khan's Pakistani nuclear proliferation mart included a company in Salem, Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reports. The shipments of high speed electrical switches from Salem-based PerkinElmer to Pakistan's nuclear program were brokered by a nefarious Israeli middle man, Asher Karni, who is now in US federal custody. Also involved, Zeki Bilmen, of Giza Technologies, a New Jersey based company, who helped 'launder' the shipments via South Africa. A glimpse into the very ugly, and multi-ethnic world of (nuclear) arms and parts smuggling.

"You love life and we love death," said Al Qaeda's self-declared military chief in Europe in a videotape claim of responsibility for the Madrid attacks. That about says it all, doesn't it? With that, and the arrest Saturday by Spanish authorities of three Moroccans and two Indians, it does increasingly appear undeniable that an Al Qaeda-affiliated cell carried out the Madrid attacks. See Juan Cole.

I am having a hard time suppressing my anger both at these life-hating, evil thugs, and at those on the far left of US politics, who seem determined to "see no evil" as far as Al Qaeda is concerned. Why do some people on the American left seem to lack any capacity to see the truth before their very eyes? Just blow these terrorists up wherever they are, throw everything we have at them, and shoot them twice to be sure, as far as I am concerned.

For instance, some on the left have recently published some advice to the Democrats that they should downplay the threat of terrorism, because the US hasn't seen any terrorism since 9/11. Such commentary implies that Al Qaeda is almost a phantom threat, and that the September 11 attacks were a one-time event.

Well, to be blunt, I wish those people would grow up. Al Qaeda is not looking like such a phantom threat anymore, at least to the families of the two hundred dead in Spain, or the 1,500 wounded in last week's attacks.

Honestly, who am I more afraid of, the American far-left, or the American right? I would honestly, and unhappily, say the left. At least the right will attempt to afford our country the security to continue the debate. And if I, a pro-choice progressive internationalist registered Democrat who lived and studied for ten years in the People's Republic of Cambridge Massachusetts am feeling this way, what are real centrist Americans in swing states like Missouri and Michigan thinking about their electoral choices come next November?

Kerry simply has to take head on the national security issue because he can win it. I believe Kerry has to tell Americans over and over again how the US government under his leadership is going to detect, hunt, and eliminate terrorists better than George W. Bush does. Kerry has to tell us how he is going to use America's security services and intelligence and technological and military strength, and that of our allies, to target and destroy the true refuges of Al Qaeda and its offshoots. [Whatever the virtues of getting rid of Saddam, and perhaps of showing American determination to take on a difficult fight in the center of the Arab world against a horrible dictator, it's clear the war on terror has not been advanced by the Bush administration's foray into Iraq, and indeed, that it has drained significant intelligence, linguistic and military resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and against Al Qaeda's real refuges.]

I truly believe Kerry would fight the war on terror more effectively than Bush. Just one sign? The membership on Kerry's campaign team of Rand Beers, the former White House Director for Combating Terrorism who last April resigned in frustration with how Bush's Iraq campaign was leaving the US terribly vulnerable to terrorist attack, he believed. But although a genuine war-hero, Kerry will be fighting his toughest battle yet to gain the trust of an American public that simply trusts Republicans more on national security issues -- in no small part due to the see no evil, "America deserves whatever it gets" drivel of the American far-left.

House intellectual. Laura Secor is one of the most talented journalists covering the world of foreign affairs ideas today. She can write circles around most of the rest of us, and the collection of profiles of some of the leading international policy intellectuals and foreign affairs thinkers, focused in particular on the 'clash' between Islamic and Western civilizations, she has published over the last year at Boston Globe Ideas section has been rivetting. Here's her latest, on Iranian reform movement "house intellectual" Abdolkarim Soroush.

I used to be able to take it or leave it. But the New York Times Sunday magazine has gotten really good of late. Two weeks in a row it has featured extremely compelling pieces on Saudi Arabia, last week on 'The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why,' by Elizabeth Rubin, and this week on the American lawyer suing the Saudis for 9/11, by Jennifer Senior. This week too features a worthwhile essay by Michael Ignatieff re-confirming his liberal interventionist support for the Iraq war -- even after the post-war has shown no sign of WMD.

And who is the mystery high level White House official being dispatched to Iraq to crack heads to attempt to form an interim Iraqi government? My old professor, Bob Blackwill, apparently. [Yeah! I won the bet on this over coffee and newspapers this morning.] All I can say is, Iraqis thought Saddam Hussein was a hard-ass...

Millions of Spaniards have taken to the streets in Madrid to protest the terror attacks, one of the all time worst in European history. [Check out this incredible photo.] What does this mean for the recently-discussed theory that Democrats should downplay the threat posed by terrorism? I think it shows that there is no more politically salient issue in countries around the world today, no matter who carried it out, and that Democrats would do well to steer clear of any such advice. If they want to win, that is.

Are lots more people dying in Spain every month of Aids and lung cancer and car accidents? Surely. Do those deaths inspire such mass national collective outrage that millions of people take to the streets about them? No. Do Spaniards know a thing or two about living with terrorism? Yes. Does that mean they are going to vote now for the candidate who tells them at their massive rally today, "Folks, let's just put terrorism in perspective from other risks?" Are you kidding? That person would be lynched.

Seriously, how vulnerable would any candidate be who tried to downplay the threat posed by terrorism if say an attack G-d forbid occurred? Extremely.

What really went on in the Office of Special Plans? Read this to discover what Congressional Republican staffers are pushing. This piece seems at first glance to be awfully one-sided in favor of Doug Feith's view, as pointed out by reader JR, and Juan Cole.

Now I happen to know that the writer here, Dana Priest, is close with Wes Clark. She and Clark were putting their heads together a lot in 2001 when she and I were both associated with the US Institute of Peace, and Clark was often around promoting his first book on Waging Modern War, and engaging in some lively discussions with Lakhdar Brahimi on why the UN isn't the institution to do the kind of international interventions that Clark had led NATO in. And I took it that Clark and Priest had provided a friendly set of eyes to each other's manuscripts. So I don't understand why in this piece she seems to be schilling for the Feith crowd. Maybe we should read it a bit more closely. I think she may be telegraphing what that office is saying about its purpose for more oppositional purposes, not out of conviction or support.

Could ETA and Al Qaeda have cooperated in the Madrid attacks, wonders terrorism expert Jessica Stern, in this Prospect interview. Possibly. And who is one of the "bridges" between AQ and ETA? Italian investigative journalist Paolo Fusi reports, a man named Monzer Al-Qassar, "a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who lives in Marbella, and who has very good connections to ETA. During the 1990s, Al-Qassar delivered Osama Bin Laden in Sudan through Italy...Al-Qassar is a partner of Youssef Nada," who the US Treasury Department has determined is a financier of Al Qaeda, and who is also a cousin of Yasser Arafat. "After September 11 Al-Qassar, living in Marbella and operating from Madrid, disappeared," Fusi reports. "Most think because of the inquiry of Balthazar Garzon, the judge in Madrid who discovered that the most important base of Al-Qaida in Europe was in Spain."

Al Qaeda claims responsibility for the Madrid bombing, Intellibridge reports, via the London-based Al Majallah magazine.

UPDATE: I WAS SO WRONG ON THE BELOW. Shame on me. I was stupid and I am entirely shocked at how enormous and horrifying and psychopathic Jack Kelley's lies are.

Resigned USA Today reporter Jack Kelley's career, described here. I honestly don't know what the answer is, he certainly seems to have been genuinely present at some incredible scenes. He also seems to have made a few mistakes, unwitting and perhaps witting. Having been contacted by USA Today's team investigating his stories, to try to verify aspects of his work in 1996, because of some expense report he filed with my name on it I guess years ago, I honestly am not sure they are ever going to be able to get at the absolute truth here. Could I easily verify the existence of his Sarajevo translator? No, but that means absolutely nothing. I can't find a few of my own very good Sarajevo friends from those days either. It was a war zone for G-d's sake, people were in total motion. A lot of people didn't have working telephones and no email, weren't living in their real apartments or had moved to safer parts of the city. Many of the Bosnians who had the language and other skills to be fixers for western journalists very naturally found themselves having opportunities to move to the West for a better life. People got married, changed their names, moved, died. What's more, a lot of people who one drank coffee with after a press conference on a weekly basis, I am not even sure of all of their last names, or even their given real names, since everyone in the Balkans uses a nickname.

That's just one tiny fact in a sea of facts the team is now trying to verify, and I wish them well. And I do hope their investigation shows that Kelley's work was as solid as he apparently believes it to be. It's awful to see someone's career trashed, especially someone so well meaning, even if someone did make mistakes. A real pattern of persistent deceit would be one thing, but I think the team would have already uncovered that were it true. Remember how easily Jayson Blair's stories came undone. Kelley's case is much much more complicated.

Honestly there's some novel in this, with a flawed tragic hero witnessing lots of other tragic stories around the globe, and trying to tell those stories, and realizing how very murky the truth can be in many of these cases. Surely ever war reporter has had that experience of looking back and understanding how shallow and one dimensional was one's early understanding of the conflict, the players, the agency of it all. Does that mean those early reports were deceptive or untrue? No, of course not. But twenty years of such experiences could certainly affect a certain type of reporter, an idealist and a story teller, who is aware that even news stories are crafted, that there is an undeniable degree of shaping, even manipulation, around a motif or symbol or quote or event or personnage in order to grab the reader back home's attention and compel her understanding. If anything, I believe that is what happened to Jack Kelley. Perhaps knitting the story around a certain key event in a compelling way became more important than trying to accurately portray the actual amorphousness of real news 'events.' He was an old fashioned story teller in a post-modern world where the truth isn't always so easy to capture.

Is that to excuse him if Kelley consciously concocted "facts"? Said he saw things he didn't? No. But the guy's already lost his job, and what's at stake here is not if he's going to get it back, but whether the bulk of his professional life is going to be redeemed, or if he will go down as a footnote under a list of world-class shameless journalistic fabricators with whom I do not feel he belongs.

So, are all the pop up ads all over the place announcing the DVD to Schindler's List a coordinated campaign to counter anti Semitism springing from The Passion? Or is it just coincidence? It's getting a bit morbid, people.

Shocking and terrible. One of the worst terrorist attacks in European history. Looking more and more like a case of Al Qaeda terrorism than ETA.

A Takoma Park woman who formerly worked as a spokesperson for Carol Moseley-Braun, and a former journalist, has been arrested for spying for Iraq, CNN reports.

Certain names keep appearing again and again associated with the many controversies surrounding the manipulation of Iraq intelligence before the war: the Plame outting, the failing to alert the NSC and White House leadership of caveats in the National Intelligence Estimate, the approval of controversial secret meetings held by Pentagon staff members and a notorious Iranian arms dealer and swindler. Why hasn't Stephen Hadley been fired?

From the LA Times piece yesterday on Tenet's testimony about the Office of Special Plans bypassing his leadership of the intelligence community to brief the NSC and Office of the Vice President on Iraq intel issues:

--It has been reported previously that the so-called Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group presented its findings to the CIA in August 2002. But in a letter to [Virginia Senator John] Warner released Tuesday for the first time, [Undersecretary of Defense for policy Doug] Feith said the group's briefing "was also given to National Security Council and Office of Vice President staff members."

--[Michigan Senator Carl] Levin asked Tenet whether it was "standard operating procedure" for intelligence analysis to be presented to the White House without his involvement.

--"I don't know," Tenet replied. "I've never been in the situation."...
--Levin said the committee had obtained copies of the Pentagon group's written briefing material, and that the version presented to the White House included material omitted from the briefing for the CIA. He declined to elaborate, saying the documents were classified.

--A government official familiar with the briefings said the presentation for the White House included a slide sharply critical of the CIA for failing to recognize evidence pointing toward collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That slide was excluded from the briefing at CIA headquarters at Langley, Va.

--The government official said those briefed at the White House included the staff of Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff.

...

Advancing and unravelling the extremely interesting story about the Kansas-originated mercenary plane impounded in Zimbabwe....Josh Marshall....AllAfrica.com....the Guardian...the New York Times.

I haven't begun to figure it all out yet. But it seems like this is one story that explains a very ugly, common and extremely underreported phenomenon of western oil and mining companies flying in rented muscle to seize countries, governments, and land that enable them to rob Africa blind of its mineral resources, leaving endless conflict and truly millions of dead Africans in their wake. That it seems to have the odd ex CIA, MI6 connection, with some implausible deniability, is also very disturbing.

George Bush's friends in Saudi Arabia. I feel like I have already read this story. But still eager to read more.

How to sue the CIA: hire this woman, Janine Brookner. But first you have to find her unlisted phone number.

Holy Smokes.Who would ever donate a body anywhere anymore? Who's the culprit here, Tulane or Ft. Detrick? Ft. Detrick, where I've spent a bit of extraordinarily unpleasant time, is a friggin creepy place, that has certainly been involved in more harm than good. Have they ever produced a vaccine, a treatment to save anybody? Disgusting place, disgusting morbid campus of death. UGH. Experiments on live and dead bodies, on the witting and unwitting, volunteers and the enlisted, engaged in production of weapons of mass destruction, and according to my "sources close to the investigation," the most likely original source of the anthrax in the letters that killed five people back in 2001. Who needs Iraq when you have Ft. Detrick? In David Kay's own backyard, no less?

Must-read Dreyfuss blog entry on Feith-based intelligence, and the link to the Los Angeles Times piece as well.

Once again, investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss tells Democrats that the way to fight the war on terror as a campaign issue is by exposing how much the White House is exploiting the issue. And once again, in the absolute friendliest of spirits, I strongly disagree.

And I am going to let Bob do the work for me. As he points out in his excellent blog post Exploiting Fear today, "A new Gallup poll reports that Americans rank terrorism as the most critical threat to the United States. Ninety-two percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats said terrorism was the No. 1 danger facing America."

Those are pretty overwhelming numbers. Seventy seven per cent of Democrats and ninety two percent of Republicans don't agree on very much. This is maybe the only area at all where you would see such almost unanimity of strongly felt public opinion.

So should the strategy be, change the minds of all those people -- or as many as you can -- to convince them that there is really nothing to be afraid of? Or should you convincingly demonstrate to them why the Democratic candidate is going to protect America better than Bush (perhaps by targeting the right countries for a change)?

I would just say, my own gut instinct, which I think is utterly typical of my countrymen, is to vote for the person who will fight smarter, not deny the threat. I would be extremely uncomfortable, even hardpressed to vote for someone who tried to downplay the threat posed to the US by terrorists. No matter what their TV ads showed.

But Bob disagrees. Democrats "need to quietly educate Americans about how to put terrorism in perspective," Dreyfuss writes. "Compared to the threats that can really hurt us—say, car crashes, tobacco, environmental pollution, AIDS—terrorism isn't that big a deal."

Remember Michael Dukakis/Willie Horton? I really think this is such an emotional issue, that if played the way Bob suggests, could totally ruin Kerry's chances of election victory come November. [Fortunately, I don't think it's likely Kerry, or Hillary Clinton, or Joe Lieberman, are going to take this advice].

I think the Dems would do better to take this issue head on and hammer home what is in fact true: that Kerry genuinely has the superior national security experience, and indeed war-fighting experience, as well as the intellect and internationalist worldview, to fight the war on terror smarter and better than Bush. [This is not to say that Kerry shouldn't continue to brilliantly highlight the utter hypocrisy of Bush making the centerpiece of his re-election campaign his administration's response to 9/11 -- when he has dragged his feet every step of the way in cooperating with the 9/11 commission, denied the homeland security department real teeth or brainpower, impeded genuine inquiry of the intelligence failure surrounding the Iraq WMD debacle, etc.]

I think what Bob and I disagree about is not fundamentally the threat posed by terrorism to the US, but about the psychology of voters -- the psychology of people really. In the end, what is the one most fundamental contract between a citizen and the president: to make decisions on when and how to use the country's military strength to protect you. And I think Bob's strategy doesn't take into account how primal -- and irrational -- fear can be as a determinant in national security thinking. Having lived in a few war-time and post-war societies, I can tell you, fear trumps rationality every time. Every time.

And it is a shame. For surely Bob is right that AIDs, tobacco and car accidents kill many more hundreds of thousands of people than terrorism. But we are not entirely dependant on the government, and in particular the choices made by the President of the United States, to protect us from those other threats, the way we are to protect us from terrorism.

Imagine if you had been assigned to work in the Pentagon bureau that housed the Office of Special Plans, and got a bird's eye view of the characters and alarming developments in the year before the Iraq war. And then you retired. You might be talking too. Here's retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski's take on what she saw.

Meantime, for what it's worth, looks like Sidney Blumenthal is going to be lining up some very interesting Washington coverage for Salon.

Damn, that is interesting. Mercenaries, Americans planes, foreign arms, African countries, deposed dictators. Who's paying the bills, do we suspect, on this one?

Saw Richard Perle yesterday at his first public appearance since his resignation from the Defense Policy Board leaked. He spoke on a panel at the American Enterprise Institute on Pakistani proliferation issues. But he began with a joke that had me slumping in my chair I was laughing so hard, given the context:

So Robert Strauss ran into Bob Novak.
And Novak asked Strauss, "Why do you think people take such an instant dislike to me?"
Bob Strauss thought about it for a second.
"It saves time."

Things are getting just a bit surreal in town this political season.

Now this would have been worth seeing. Bob Novak impersonating Joe Wilson in a song and dance routine at the Gridiron dinner. "Dressed as Wilson in top hat and cutaway coat, Novak sings of himself: 'Novak had a secret source ... so he outed a girl spy the way princes of darkness do. ... Now John Ashcroft asks Bob who and how, could be headed to the old hoosegow.'"

...

Iraq has almost slipped below the radar of American public consciousness. But not quite. I frankly don't like the tone of some liberal commentators almost gleeful about indications of a possible coming civil war. Anyone who could celebrate what that would mean not just to the Americans and the fortunes of the Bush administration, but to the Iraqis can't have thought things through.

But Juan Cole's post on this yesterday, "Anger is Everywhere," is not that:

--Time Correspondent Phil Zabriskie let down his hair with a high school classroom, and let them know exactly what he felt about Iraq after 10 weeks there (he had reported from Vietnam in the old days.)

--“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It is easily the most unpleasant place I’ve been. There is anger everywhere.” Iraqis are angry for many reasons, Zabriskie said. They’re angry because they’ve been oppressed for so many years. They’re angry because the dictator they feared didn’t fight back when captured. And they’re angry that American troops haven’t done more to keep the peace since Saddam’s regime fell, Zabriskie said. “The U.S. leadership has not had a consistent plan . . . In my opinion, it should not be as bad as it is right now.” He believes U.S. leaders ignored warnings and were not adequately prepared to deal with Iraq after the initial war. As a result, they have left room for Iraqi religious leaders to organize support and have left the American troops in a bad position. “They have been put in a terribly difficult situation, made worse by political decisions in Washington,” Zabriskie said. “There was not a whole lot of love for Americans to begin with.” The biggest fear in Iraq now, he said, is that a civil war will break out between the religious groups. '

--"Sometimes I talk to or read a correspondent who spent a few weeks in Iraq," Cole writes, "and I don't recognize the Iraq he or she reports back. Max Boot went embedded last summer and came back with tales of bustling bazaars and a quick return to normal. Since he had not seen the bazaars the year before, he had no grounds for judging whether they were more or less bustling. Nor do bustling bazaars mean everything is hunky dory. (When I was in Beirut during the civil war, people shopped. It was just that some of them got sniped at while they were in line.)..."

The link to the whole post is here.

Fareed Zakaria says Islamic radicals are targeting a new old enemy: other Muslims:

"The persecution of Shiites has been the dirty little secret of the Islamic world. If you ask most Muslims, they will tell you that the Sunni and Shia live harmoniously. This is true in a day-to-day sense. You could live in a Muslim country and be unaware of who is a Sunni and who is a Shia. But this peace is partly the result of the comfortable dominance of the Sunnis, who make up over 85 percent of Muslims worldwide."

Zakaria's conclusion offers the tiniest glimmer of optimism: "Islamic extremists are losing the battle against modernity...So militants are searching for new divisive tactics...But it is unlikely to work."

The Prospect's Murray Waas has quite a scoop on the Plame investigation: Karl Rove's grand jury testimony.

Zbigniew Brzezinski offers genuine praise and a thoughtful critique of the White House's proposed Greater Middle East Initiative. While crediting the administration with pushing democracy in the Mideast, at least rhetorically, he notes the reasons the proposal has been greeted with such suspicion in the Arab world. "For starters, the democracy initiative was unveiled by the president in a patronizing way: before an enthusiastic audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington policy institution enamored of the war in Iraq and not particularly sympathetic toward the Arab world." Read the whole thing here. We share Brzezinski's reluctant admiration of the White House for coming up with just the kind of initiative we think progressive internationalist Democrats should be inventing. But don't seem to be. Granted they have no power. But they do have the odd think tank post. Where are the bold ideas, guys? Are the Democratic foreign policy people just too cautious and polite for their/our own good?

The New Republic's Michael Crowley has a strong piece on why the Homeland Security Department won't protect us. In short, because the President's advisors designed it to be a toothless, brainless shell, and left real power in the hands of the two agencies that performed so well before 9/11, the FBI and CIA.

David Corn on how Bush helped his marriage.

"As Bush spoke, my confusion did turn to clarity. After all, how could our marriage survive and thrive if the very definition of marriage was iffy? Two weeks ago when I woke up in the morning, looked at my wife and thought, 'I’m married to this woman,' I knew exactly what that meant. But these days, when I do the same, I encounter an unsettling feeling. Am I married to her the way Dad was married to Mom? Or am I married to her the way Roger is now married to Roger? I never bargained for this kind of uncertainty when I said, 'I do.'"

Read the whole thing here.

A really fascinating article on the rise and fall of Italy's Parmalat, and its founder Calisto Tanzi, who apparently is an old rival of Silvio Berlusconi.

Italian investigators are now reportedly widening their probe of Bank of America's involvement in the Parmalat missing billions.

The Washington think-tank CSIS has been holding a series of discussions on US and Italian efforts to fight terrorism, sponsored by Parmalat, that seem fated to find a new sponsor.

Hans Blix gets the last laugh here.

Spies. Now this is really interesting, for an old Balkan hand like myself. A few months ago, Rade Bulatovic, a tall dark haired Montenegrin secret policeman, was in jail under suspicion for being involved in the assassination a year ago of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic. Now, the AP reports today, Kostunica has appointed him to be his secret police chief.

When I met him in 1998, Rade Bulatovic was Belgrade's secret police guy in Istanbul. At the time, I didn't know it. I just thought he was with the Yugoslav consulate. [A contact just confirmed for me that Bulatovic was with the foreign affairs wing of the SDB, the Sluzba Drzavne Bezbednosti, the state security service [civilian intelligence], as opposed to say with the Foreign Ministry, as he was portrayed to be]. We met for tea in the spring of 1998 at at an Istanbul cafe, where I asked him for help getting a visa, which he came through with. Later, in Belgrade, I happened to become friends with friends of his, and we would occassionally run into each other at parties. Our mutual Belgrade friends, seeming liberal type in their early 40s infected with a deep Yugo-nostalgia, seemed like good enough guys, who truly harbored no racism against the Croatians, Bosnians, etc. [It did however occassionally cross my mind that perhaps one in particular may have been sent to keep a friendly eye on me, as improbable as it seemed to me at the time. It hardly seemed worth keeping an eye on Salon's freelancer in the Balkans, but I could never shake some Belgraders' persistent suspicion that I was working for someone else entirely.].

It's pretty incredible how much the Serbian police state structure -- refined and prettied up a bit perhaps -- survives the fall of the men who seemed to run it. [This is something human rights activist Sonja Biserko has been saying for years, but it's now become more evident just how much the man who overthrew Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president and soon to be Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica has actually come to power supported by the very same political constituency that originally supported Milosevic -- security services, the Serbian Orthodox Church, etc.]

What was the ideological motivation of men like Bulatovic, who worked for Milosevic's secret police, but seemed to be heavily networked in with Kostunica's anti-Milosevic opposition group? It's difficult to determine. Kostunica's own political transformation may be instructive however. He has recently come back to power in Belgrade by forming a coalition with none other than Milosevic's Socialists. Perhaps after Belgrade's de facto loss of Kosovo in 1999, Kostunica appeared to men like Bulatovic as a more able steward and acceptable face for the Serbian/Yugoslav project they felt entirely legitimate. What's that project? Something perhaps approaching Serbia assuming the mantle of Tito's Yugoslavia, minus the communism [but not minus the communist police state structure, apparently], and minus the massive bloodletting [but perhaps not minus some targeted bloodletting, as in the assassination of Djindjic]. I have no way of knowing whether Bulatovic had anything to do with the assassination of Djindjic. But he was indeed under investigation this past year because he had allegedly been Kostunica's emissary to the Zemun mob group which has been implicated in the killing. That Djindjic and Kostunica despised each other is certainly no secret.

It's truly a maddening hall of mirrors. Just when you think you've grasped the real interlinking of players and events, uncovered the real hidden political alliances, you get some new new bit of information that forces you to question and revise everything you thought you knew. Was the overthrow of Milosevic a real revolution, or just an illusory changing of the guard? Recent reporting in another area leads me to believe this kind of constantly-unpeeling onion universe is not one unique to Belgrade, either, but is one Americans are for various reasons uniquely innocent of seeing.

But one other reason this story continues to fascinate me, beyond the geopolitics of the Balkans, which hardly matter any more to the post-9/11 world except to die-hard Balkanistas like myself. It is trying to get one's head around the presence that was so strong there at that time of people who were not what they seemed to be. Or whose motives I just couldn't be sure about, or in retrospect question. I mean, I don't think for the over year of Sundays I spent in Belgrade, despite the extraordinary amount of alcohol, cigarettes and coffee that was consumed in superficially convivial surroundings until many 3ams, could I ever really let my guard down more than once or twice, and I wasn't one who really had anything to hide. Learning in the years since how very much people who I took at face value were not what they seemed to be has been quite instructive. And more than a bit disturbing, certainly. It was a truly morally corrupting place, of a type described so very well by Robert Kaplan in his description of World War II era Bucharest in Balkan Ghosts. And perhaps a little like Washington. But with more war criminals.

Hotel Sarajevo: Now that she is safely gone, I feel free to say, I've been so honored to have as my house guest this past week former Yugoslavia's leading human rights activist, Sonja Biserko. After being acquaintances in the Balkans thru the 1990s, and fellow associates of the US Institute of Peace in 2001, Sonja and I spent a stunned 9/11 together in Dupont circle, just sitting outside some cafe on that crisp fall day, trying to get calls through on our cell phones to family. But on our visit together this past week, I felt like 9/11 had been this gulf that had opened up between the world where the Balkans still mattered to Washington, and the post 9/11 Iraq-obsessed world. I just couldn't get myself to care any more about US policy towards Belgrade, which is one of Sonja's real and legitimate preoccupations.

For her part, Sonja Biserko is the real deal. Single minded. Life-risking. Human rights all the time. She is a Nobel prize laureate in the making, she has devoted her entire life to this enterprise, and she definitely has the angels on her side. In the extremely morally corrupting atmosphere of Belgrade, Sonja remains singularly uncorruptable. More on all this later.

After Sonja left, we received a visit from old friends and their parents from Moscow, who were very generous to a group of American students who ended up in Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We used to muse back in those days about what it would be like for Marina and her husband to see Safeway. Now with grandkids of their own in New Jersey, and more friends up and down the eastern seaboard than we have, it's hard to remember how improbable that all seemed back then.

Political reports from Belgrade and Moscow are pretty grim. But just remembering now that things are more normal how dark some of those days were, it's fairly astonishing how interconnected all of our worlds have become.

Take just the telephone situation. When I first moved to Moscow in 1991, I used to head to the Central Post and Telegraph office once a week to put in an order to call my parents. After a wait, the operators would summon you into a phone booth when your international call had been placed. Later, when a trio of us had our own apartment there, it took us more than three months to recognize that we simply could not make an international call on our home phone. We just assumed it was a bit of a struggle to get a dial tone. Three months of never having get a call past St. Petersburg had not deterred us yet.

When I first moved to Bosnia in 1996, I literally had to go to a Sarajevan friend's cousin's house that had a working land line to get the network to call me there to be able to report. Hrvoje's parents had died during the war, and the apartment he had inherited from them, though frequently filled with his friends, was ineffably sad, a college kids' party apartment when the parents are away with no parents coming back.

When I checked out of the Belgrade Hyatt after covering anti Milosevic demonstrations for three months in 1996-1997, my phone bill was nearly eleven thousand dollars. For phones where sometimes you would literally run into the tapper in the hotel hallway, coming out of a hotel room with wires and pliers and his little toolbox. [This was the same hotel where you would occasionally get helpful phone calls from the front desk reminding you it was time to report to the police to deal with your visa. When I showed up at the Belgrade police in late 1996, some terrifying civilian dressed spook suggested I had to give him blood right then and there, a thankfully idle threat but one that shook me for a bit, as it was designed to. Days after Milosevic fell in 2000, I sat in the same guy's office again, with his paper open to a headline describing Milosevic's fall from power. He was much friendlier, but it was still surreal].

When I first reported from Kosovo in 1997, one had to call in written articles over a sat phone to be transcribed by the paper back home. M like Mary, I like India, L like Libya, etc to spell Milosevic. You can only imagine. Interestingly, it was the pro-Belgrade Serb state propagandists that in 1998 provided journalists in Kosovo with a smoky little media center with Internet access and international phone lines that helped facilitate our reporting of growing Serbian atrocities and oppression of the Kosovars [the better to keep track of us, I suppose] - right up until they kicked us out during the NATO bombing campaign that ultimately overthrew them.

I seriously wonder if the rise of cell phones during the late 1990s helped bring down Milosevic. Can dictatorship survive with cell phones? I don't think so. You can have a Putin or a Kostunica, but you can't have North Korea, Hussein or Milosevic.

It's all going to come tumbling down, it seems. Check this out.

He won't give up to me the real reason Perle 'resigned' from the Defense Policy Board. But even when you wonder about who he works with, there is no one better on Iran than Reuel Marc Gerecht, and this piece in the Weekly Standard on the temptations of the realists' approach to Iran is no exception.

Can the 9/11 commission cite people for being such crappy liars? Referring to his previous opposition to granting the 9/11 commission an extension, Dennis Hastert told the Times he had changed his mind last week "after it became apparent that they couldn't get their work done."

What does it say about the administration and its supporters in Congress that their PR-efforts are increasingly so tone-deaf, crude and faltering? It's like Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union.

The commission's staff director Philip Zelikow is a former favorite professor and more recently boss of mine. He is one of the most gifted and decent individuals you could ever meet, and one I know to be deeply committed to and capable of getting at the truth here. But doing so while having to manage diplomacy with this most obstinate, closed, and secretive of administrations is a chore that must continuously challenge his patience.

Seymour Hersh reveals the back story to the painfully unconvincing charade between the Bush administration, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, and nuclear proliferator and Pakistani national hero AQ Khan last month. "It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital," Hersh writes of Khan's TV confession and his instant pardon from Musharraf.

As I have written many times before here, read Bernard-Henri Levi's flawed but brilliant and utterly horrifying book on who killed Daniel Pearl, to really grasp the magnitude of the threat posed by the nexus of Pakistani intelligence groups, radical Islamist groups of which Al Qaeda is only one of many, and Pakistan's nuclear scientists.

As CIA non proliferation consultant Bob Gallucci tells Hersh, "Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That’s the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this—that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons."

Henri-Levi's book is utterly persuasive that this is not some remote possibility but a frighteningly realistic scenario.

Amb. Joseph Wilson to name names in his book, due out in May. Will he get scooped by the FBI?

A few days ago I asked, what is really going on with all the reports coming from Iran and Pakistan that the US is close to capturing Mr. Big. I wondered if Musharraf owes Bush another al Qaeda suspect, after his nuclear scientist sent those weapons designs to Libya, Iran, etc.

Well, seems that may be exactly what's happening. See Calpundit, and Seymour Hersh.