Am in the midst of an edit of a long article on the UN, and found that this piece in TNR by the Editors gets it just right: the Bush administration has only itself to blame for needing to rely so heavily in Iraq now on the UN and Lakhdar Brahimi.

Sudan Calamity: Glen Ford and Peter Gamble have a strong piece in TomPaine, on the Bush administration's failure to take a more aggressive stance against what they call a genocide-in-progress in the Sudan.

"At what point do we ask this uncomfortable question: Why does the United States seem to consider it acceptable for such genocidal acts to occur in Africa?" It was a rhetorical question, posed by Africa Action Executive Director Salih Booker on April 7 as the world marked the 10th anniversary of the genocide that left at least 800,000 Rwandans dead. Two weeks later, President George Bush answered Booker’s question in the usual manner: the United States has more pressing business at hand than ending a genocide-in-progress, this time in the western region of Sudan.

While U.S. diplomats feigned outrage at the UN Human Rights Commission's weak response ("grave concern") to massive ethnic cleansing of black Africans in Darfur—the committee could not bring itself to even whisper the terms "rape" or "forced removals"—Bush last week vouched for the Khartoum government’s good faith in ending a much longer campaign of genocide against blacks. As Newsweek reported:

President George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan's other civil war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president had withheld his signature, he could have unleashed severe economic sanctions against Khartoum. But a southern peace framework seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. "It's frustrating," says a senior State Department official, "but given all the progress, we couldn't say they weren't cooperating."

This is all too familiar - a US administration that sees no vital interests at stake in a third world conflict, Europeans doing nothing, a UN commission that brings no relief. As Ford and Gamble write:

The Europeans issued a statement on the crisis that scrupulously avoids asking anyone in particular to stop killing anybody:

The European Commission today launched a strong appeal to warring parties in the Darfur region of Western Sudan to secure "safe humanitarian access" so that the enormous needs of the population can be properly addressed....Speaking at the launch of the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office Annual Review ("ECHO 2003"), Poul Nielson, Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, highlighted the "tragic situation" in Darfur. Threats to the "humanitarian space" is the central theme of ECHO's Annual Review this year.

Having done their bit to save humanitarian "space," if not the human beings themselves, the EU got on with the business of... business.

The whole cri-du-coeur is here and well worth reading.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch's Carroll Bogert writes in the Los Angeles Times asking, where is the media on the Sudan calamity?

The international media don't send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries.

We've just finished a spate of front-page stories, television docu-histories and somber panel discussions on "Why the Media Missed the Story" in Rwanda, pegged to the 10th anniversary of one of the most shocking tragedies of last century, or any century. More than 500,000 people were killed in a small African country in only 100 days, and the world turned away.

But even as the ink was drying on the latest round of mea culpas, another colossal disaster in Africa was already going uncovered.

Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring Chad. They report that militias working with the Sudanese government have been attacking villages, ransacking and torching homes, killing and raping civilians. These armed forces are supposedly cracking down on rebel groups based in the Darfur region, but in fact they are targeting the population...

Reporters have begun trickling to the scene. The Los Angeles Times has a correspondent en route to Darfur, as does the New York Times. But the fact is, with or without a war in Iraq, American journalists are generally slower to cover mass death if the victims are not white. The Rwandan genocide is a case in point.

The tragedy in Darfur may not cross the genocide threshold, but should that really make a difference? Thousands of civilians have been killed, and the pattern and intent behind these massive crimes must be carefully mapped and loudly broadcast around the world if there is to be any hope of stopping them.

We need more information and more firsthand reporting. We need reporters at the scene, making this disaster real to their audience by telling the stories of individual victims.

It's the media's job to inform us. They should do it, and quickly — because 10 years from now there won't be any excuse for another round of hand-wringing.

Back in February 2001, six months before the September 11 attacks, Paul Bremer, then the head of the National Commission on Terrorism established by the Clinton administration, told a conference that the Bush administration was not paying attention to the terrorism problem. "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism," Mr. Bremer told the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, Reuters reports today. "What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, `Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' "

[Bremer's 2000 testimony to Congress was dead on target as well].

I am glad this is getting wider play. But I do believe the blogosphere had this first, more than a week ago.

This is interesting. The meeting to do a "work up" of Joe Wilson was called by senior Republicans as far back as March 2003 -- in other words, a full four months before his New York Times oped about what he did not find in Niger. And Newt Gingrich, of the American Enterprise Institute, was reportedly among those present.

Mr. Wilson writes that a White House effort to damage him began at a March 2003 meeting called to develop a critique of him for the vice president's office. Citing an unnamed source "close to the House Judiciary Committee," Mr. Wilson writes that "either the vice president himself or, more likely, his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to do a work-up on me."

Mr. Wilson writes that the meeting was attended by senior Republicans, possibly including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker. On Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Gingrich, Rick Tyler, said Mr. Wilson's account was a "complete fabrication."

Mr. Wilson says those in the meeting decided that "the strategy of the White House was to confront the issue as a `Wilson' problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in the State of the Union address."

Posted by Laura at 07:15 AM

More than 120 US soldiers have been killed in combat in Iraq since April 1. That is more troops killed just in the month of April alone than the total number of US soldiers who were killed in the whole six week US invasion of Iraq a year ago. Something is seriously wrong with Rumsfeld's formula, that the post-war a full year into the occupation is increasingly and considerably more lethal for US soldiers than than the war itself.

Post Script: The AP reports that 1,361 Iraqis have been killed in April.

Slate's Justice correspondent Dahlia Lithwick's piece on the Supreme Court hearing of the Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi case concerning whether US citizens can be declared enemy combatants and lose all of their Constitutional rights, is worth reading. She captures why this case is so utterly terrifying:

How you feel about the indefinite military detentions of Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla will turn largely on what you think life will look like when it starts. By "it," I mean the moment at which fundamental liberties are curtailed by well-meaning governments and the legal system becomes unable to offer relief. Never having seen "it" happen in my lifetime, I'm hardly an expert. German Jews who survived the Holocaust will tell you that it's hard to know at exactly which instant you've crossed the line into "it." Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American detained during World War II, knows what "it" looks like, and he says it looks a bit like this. Professor Jennifer Martinez, Padilla's oral advocate at the Supreme Court this morning, says we are at the line separating "it" from "not it" right now, today—as the court stands poised to decide whether "the government can take citizens off the street and lock them up in jail forever."

I am not as exercised as some people I know with concerns about things like no-fly lists (as flawed as they are) as the government tries to increase its information gathering on US citizens and foreigners to prevent terrorism; but this case concerning the detention, potentially forever, with almost no legal representation and due process of Hamdi and Padilla, and no real definition or criteria for what "enemy combatant" means, is truly beyond the pale. In particular because it is hard to escape the suspicion that the reason the government moved Padilla from the Justice system to a military enemy combatant status with no rights is because it just didn't have the evidence to prosecute the case. And if that is the case, it is even more horrifying to think of him locked in a windowless room with no contact with anyone, for the past two years, and potentially for the rest of his life.

The case of US soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners detained at Abu Ghraib prison is plenty disturbing on its own. But it's made even more so by the suggestion made by US Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez that the soldiers' supervisors seemed to condone the abuse; and secondly, by the suggestion of one of the accused soldier's attorneys that the soldiers were under orders to create conditions favorable for US intelligence operatives to interrogate the prisoners.

The soldiers "were provided no guidance on how to run the prison while they were there," [Gary] Myers, [the lawyer for one of the accused, Ivan Frederick,] said. "They came under the influence of the intelligence community, whose interests may not be necessarily consistent with good prison management. The prison was set up in such a fashion that the intelligence community had far too much influence.

"They were instructing or advising the MPs to create 'favorable conditions' for interrogation. . . . 'Favorable conditions' were conditions where the detainees were susceptible to providing intelligence information, and that process involved techniques of humiliation."

The soldiers were congratulated by their senior officers, he said. "These guys are being told they are doing a fantastic job for their country, that they are saving lives and to keep up the good work," Myers said.

During Frederick's hearing, three of his supervisors appeared, and all invoked their constitutional right against self-incrimination, Myers said.

Three of the soldiers involved have been recommended for court-martial, and several more are to face hearings to determine if they too should face court-martial. Perhaps just as important, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez has quite rightly recommended severe penalties for the soldiers' supervising officers.

A senior U.S. official said Thursday that Sanchez was surprised by the severity of the abuses and the apparent lack of response by the military police unit's officers.

"One of the things General Sanchez was concerned about was the fact that this was more than one bad apple, one bad incident," an aide to Sanchez said on condition of anonymity, because of the continuing investigation. "Why wasn't the chain of command involved? Why wasn't the chain of command aware?"

This case is so troubling not only because it makes one ashamed that the US led an invasion of a dictatorship only to have US soldiers abuse prisoners in a manner one would expect only in a dictatorship. But what is the atmosphere that leads to a culture among US soldiers running that prison where such cruelty and degradation was celebrated? Just how bad are things going in Iraq that at least this unit was letting off steam by abusing these people in such a cruel and ugly way? Is this how confident soldiers behave? Or is this rather more a sign of the anxiety of -- losing it?

A great and much needed profile of the 9/11 commission staff, and their fearless leader, here. Do you think it's normal in Washington that staff reports are two and three page summaries, rather than telephone books?

In a series of stinging reports, the staff has produced fresh evidence of intelligence failures at the F.B.I. leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, miscommunication and poor coordination at the C.I.A., and signs of political inertia by the Bush and Clinton administrations in confronting Al Qaeda. Although the panel's final report is not due until July, its findings have already prompted President Bush to consider intelligence overhauls that he once resisted as unnecessary... The power of the committee staff members comes not only from what they are disclosing, but also from the manner in which they are publishing their findings.

In a culture in which government reports have the size and literary appeal of telephone books, the investigators have humbled Washington institutions with their series of easily digestible statements. (They are online at www.9-11commission.gov.) Unlike the final report of the Congressional inquiry, which took six months to declassify, the commission staff has taken pains to write the dozen succinct statements it has released so far in a clear narrative format that can be publicly released along the way.

"We get a lot more oxygen for these issues by doing it this way," said Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the commission.

The staff's aggressive investigation has surprised some critics who had questioned whether Mr. Zelikow's close ties to the Bush administration — he served on its transition team and had written a book with Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser — would prevent him from leading an effective investigation.

Mr. Zelikow put an emphasis on creating a staff with rich credentials and deep expertise. It includes established and rising academics, including Ernest May, a diplomatic historian at Harvard; Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service; and Alexis Albion, the former historian at the International Spy Museum. Top intelligence and law enforcement officials were also recruited, like Douglas J. MacEachin, who retired as the C.I.A.'s deputy director for intelligence, and Lloyd Salvetti, former director of the agency's research arm, the Center for the Study of Intelligence.

Read the whole thing here.

A thumbnail review of Amb. Joe Wilson's forthcoming Politics of Truth, out Friday, is the second item here.

Post Script: This longer article on Wilson's book has a couple surprises, and reiterates what I have recently heard from government sources: the FBI Plame probe is indeed moving fast and furious.

Bill Mitchell, the father of Staff Sergeant Michael W. Mitchell, who was killed in Sadr City Baghdad on April 4, writes that, "Hiding the death and destruction of this war does not make it easier on anyone except those who want to keep the truth away from the people." Here's Mitchell's letter to Hal Bernton, a reporter at the Seattle Times, which ran the Tammy Silico photo of flag-draped coffins being prepared in Kuwait for repatriation to the United States, via Editor & Publisher, and Romenesko.

Dear Hal --

I read with great interest your article regarding the woman who was fired for taking the pictures of the flag-draped coffins on 4/7/04. My son, SSG Michael W. Mitchell, was killed on 4/4/04 in the first day of the Shiite uprising in Sadr City. He was one of eight soldiers killed that day in that attack. I am quite positive that he was inside one of those coffins in the picture.

I am happy that you ran the story and showed the picture. I would like everyone to know the devastation that this event has brought upon Mike's family and friends. In fact, Mike's grandpa at 86 says that this is the worst thing that has happened in his entire life -- that says a lot right there!!!

Hiding the death and destruction of this war does not make it easier on anyone except those who want to keep the truth away from the people. I know that the current government policy has the bodies being flown in under the cloak of darkness. I also know that photographers are barred from the area so that pictures such as the one you ran in your newspaper cannot be shown to the people. Pictures such as these alter peoples' perception and awareness and they have to admit the reality of the situation that young men and women are being killed.

I do believe our government learned this lesson from the war in Vietnam and that was one of the influential factors in bringing about its end.

Things are getting worse in Iraq and if there is anything that I can do so that other parents can be spared the pain that is happening in my life, I will do it.

In fact, I would be willing to furnish you a picture of my son in his casket if you would like to run it in your paper. Sort of a follow-up story that would just take it one step further than the picture shown inside the airplane with a bunch of anonymous flag-draped coffins. I don't think I can be fired, as I do not have a job!!! I am currently in Germany taking care of my son's fiancee because officially, she is not recognized by the U.S. Army even though she was the reason that he re-enlisted twice; the last time being just 3 weeks prior to his death.

Hal -- I am just full of stories and if you and your newspaper are interested, just let me know.

Sincerely,

Bill Mitchell
Atascadero, CA

Good piece on Gen. David Petraeus' task to train an Iraqi security force at the Weekly Standard. From what I've read, Petraeus is one of those genuinely forward-looking entrepreneurial military officers who is due a bit of hagiography, and the WS is right to point out one of the instances where things go right and good people with an improvisational flair are put in charge.

More on the Office of Special Plans, and its original core team of two, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, [both proteges of Richard Perle], who saw hidden connections where the CIA and DIA did not.

When Mr. Perle was a top defense official in the Reagan administration, Mr. Maloof, a former journalist, worked as his investigator, assembling evidence that the Soviet Union was stealing Western technology. Mr. Wurmser, a Middle East expert who had written a book that attacked the Clinton administration and the C.I.A. for their handling of Iraq in the 1990's, had worked at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where Mr. Perle was a resident scholar. Mr. Feith had been Mr. Perle's deputy at the Pentagon. And while they were all out of government, Mr. Wurmser, Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle had signed a 1996 paper calling for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein to enhance Israel's security.

...Each week, they would brief Stephen A. Cambone, then Mr. Feith's principal deputy. By November 2001, as the Bush administration began war planning for Iraq, the unit had produced a slide presentation that they were told would be used by Mr. Rumsfeld in a NATO meeting.

The team's conclusions were alarming: old barriers that divided the major Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, were coming down, and these groups were forging ties with one another and with secular Arab governments in an emerging terrorist war against the West.

Their analysis covered plenty of controversial ground. The two men identified members of the Saudi royal family who they said had aided Al Qaeda over the years. They warned that Al Qaeda had operatives in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where they were establishing ties with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. They suspected Abu Nidal, an aging Palestinian terrorist leader living in Baghdad, of being an indirect link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, even though many other analysts believed that he was essentially retired and that his once-fearsome organization had been shattered. Mr. Nidal died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in 2002.

The Pentagon conclusions were at odds with years of C.I.A. analysis. The agency was skeptical that governments as diverse as those in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran could be linked to anything like a cohesive terrorist network. The C.I.A. and the D.I.A. believed that Feith's team had greatly exaggerated the significance of reported contacts among extremist groups and Arab states. The C.I.A. saw little evidence, for example, that the Sunni-dominated Qaeda and the Shiite-dominated Hezbollah had worked together on terrorist attacks.

And there was little proof that Mr. Hussein was working on terror plots with Mr. bin Laden, a religious extremist who viewed the Baghdad regime as a corrupt, secular enemy. "The divides do matter," a senior C.I.A. official said. "But if you work hard enough in this nasty world, you can link just about anybody to anybody else."

Perhaps even more controversial: that the Office of Special Plans began to collect raw, and what turned out to be false, "intelligence," directly from "defectors" provided by Ahmad Chalabi, rather than just analyze raw intelligence collected by other agencies.

At Mr. Maloof's request, Mr. Perle asked Mr. Chalabi, now a member of the interim government of Iraq, to have his staff provide Mr. Maloof information gleaned from defectors and others. The request was unusual, because Mr. Feith's analysts were supposed to review intelligence, not collect it. And Mr. Chalabi at that time had a lucrative contract to provide information on Iraq exclusively to the State Department, which would send it along to the intelligence agencies.

Mr. Maloof later met with member of the Iraqi National Congress's staff. As it turned out, Mr. Chalabi was a risky source: some of the information his group provided was incorrect or fabricated, intelligence officials now believe.

Mr. Wurmser now works for Dick Cheney, and Maloof has been suspended with pay, pending problems with his security clearance. [Wurmser's wife, an Israeli, heads an outfit called MEMRI which translates selected Arabic language media into English.]

Also interesting is the timing of this briefing the OSP team gave deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley and Cheney staffer Lewis Libby.

A few weeks later, on Sept. 16, 2002, Feith's team briefed Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, and I. Lewis Libby, a senior aide to Mr. Cheney. By that time, Mr. Cheney was already talking publicly about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In an appearance on "Meet the Press" just before the first anniversary of 9/11, he said that even without evidence of direct involvement by Baghdad in the attacks, the Hussein regime may have supported Al Qaeda.

"New information has come to light," Mr. Cheney said. "And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.

But even as the Al Qaeda-Saddam link is not one the Bush White House ultimately insisted upon (although I agree with Juan Cole that the lack of established link was deliberately never effectively communicated by the White House), it was in this same few week period, around September 2002, that the administration was settling on a party line on how it would sell the war to the American public. And the selling point of course was that Iraq was pursuing acquisition of nuclear weapons.

As Feith tells the Times, "One question was: Was Iraq involved in 9/11? We found no hard link. What about Iraq-Al Qaeda links in general? Well, there were some, but that wasn't the essence of the Saddam Hussein threat. The danger of Saddam's providing W.M.D. to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group — there you had a real problem, because his record on W.M.D. was indisputable."

Post Script: Others have expressed dismay at why Risen reported this now -- it's not exactly news about the Office of Special Plans' effort to connect Al Qaeda with Saddam, etc. But I am endlessly hungry for every scrap of information about what the OSP was doing, and think Risen by playing it straight makes fools of them just the same. The fact that Feith is quoted above saying the Iraq has WMD charge was "indisputable" again highlights just how totally wrong about everything they were, and begs the question, why haven't these people lost their jobs?

Is neocon in training Michael Rubin at AEI, and no longer at the CPA, because he was the source of the memo that Jason Vest exposed in the Village Voice last week? So speculates the WP.

P.S. Rubin is now being represented by Benador, with many of the people who subscribe to the lunacies of Iraq crank in chief Laurie Mylroie.

Go read this. Craig Unger writes in Salon about James Bath, the other person in Bush's unit who allegedly failed to show up in 1972 for his National Guard physical, whose name was mysteriously deleted from the partially released George W. Bush military records.

Who was Bath? The Texan businessman who apparently brought the families of bin Laden and Bush together in the 1970s. And why would the White House tried to shield his name? Take a guess. Bath also seems to have done some favors for the CIA.

By 1976, bin Laden had appointed Bath to be his American business representative. Bin Mahfouz drew up a similar arrangement with him. Bath was more than simply someone who could provide the Saudis with an entree to political power brokers. But exactly what he did beyond that, in the intelligence world and elsewhere, is shrouded in mystery. When asked about his career, Bath downplays his importance. By his account, he is merely "a small, obscure businessman." It has often been said that he was in the CIA, but Bath denied that to Time magazine. Later, he equivocated. "There's all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA]," he told me. "It runs the whole spectrum, [from] maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve -- I don't think you're going to find them talking about it. Were that the case with me, I'm almost certain you wouldn't find me talking about it."

Worth reading.

More Onion than the Onion, from the Washington Times:

The Bush administration is scrapping plans to sponsor a major global health and reproductive rights conference that features liberal advocacy groups, including several pro-choice organizations and MoveOn.org, which is spending millions of dollars on negative ads to defeat President Bush. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will withdraw its support today, according to a senior government official... HHS spokesman Bill Pierce said, "After careful review, we determined that we were not going to fund this conference due to concerns we had about federal funds being used for lobby purposes."

Read Reuel Marc Gerecht on what's to be done in Iraq. He injects a bit of realism into the surrealism of the maddening parallel universe of AEI. Hopefully someone at the White House or at Bremer's CPA can copy this one down, print it and tape it to the wall.

Picked up for research purposes, and immediately became totally absorbed in, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, by CSIS writer in residence James Mann. It is the Rosetta stone for intellectual and psychological insight into the education and development of the worldviews of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell and Armitage. And, even just fifty pages in, it's full of both big and little surprises, particularly on Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, including: Rumsfeld's pushing Nixon and Kissinger to get out of Vietnam faster, an irritation that caused Nixon to consider firing Rumsfeld. ["Nixon was thinking of getting rid of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former congressman then serving on the White House staff. 'I think Rumsfeld may not be too long for this world,' he said, adding a few minutes later, 'Let's dump him.'"] The fact that Rumsfeld and Cheney got on so badly at their first meeting when Rumsfeld interviewed Cheney for a job, Cheney said "it was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life...the truth is, I flunked the interview. After half an hour, it was clear to both of us that there was no possibility I could work for him." And the well known fact, but richly described here, that the unlikely first place Cheney did in fact work for Rumsfeld was at the war on poverty program created by Lyndon Johnson, the Office of Economic Opportunity, which the Nixon administration had promised Republican governors like Ronald Reagan to gutt, but which Rumsfeld, ever conscious of how much turf he controlled, took an odd possessive championship of.

Vulcans is also just fascinating about the education of Paul Wolfowitz, in particular its portrayal that Wolfowitz's true "Straussian" conversion was second hand, via his Cornell house tutor Allan Bloom, "Professor Ravelstein" from Saul Bellow's eponymous novel. [Was also interesting to learn that Abe Shulsky, the director of the infamous Office of Special Plans, was also, with Wolfowitz, a member of the elite Cornell "Telluride" house under Bloom's tutelage in 1963]. Wolfowitz's father, Jacob Wolfowitz, was a respected professor of statistics at Cornell while Paul studied there, and relations between the elder Wolfowitz and Bloom, who had captured the imagination of his son, were tense, in part because the father wanted the son to stay in mathematics and away from the liberal arts. When Wolfowitz ultimately defied his father's wishes to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago with Bloom's mentor Leo Strauss, Wolfowitz and Strauss never became very close.

The professor was near the end of his career at the university, and left before Wolfowitz completed graduate school. Wolfowitz took two of Strauss's courses on political theory, one on Plato and the other on Montesquieu...Yet, Wolfowitz didn't talk much about Strauss in those days...As his own career progressed, Wolfowitz came to distance himself from any identification with Strauss.

In fact, from his earliest days in graduate school, Wolfowitz began gravitating toward a new field, nuclear strategy, and a new mentor, another University of Chicago professor named Albert Wohlstetter.

At the first faculty tea for new graduate students in the fall of 1965, Wohlstetter had asked him whether he knew someone named "Jack Wolfowitz." That's my father, Paul Wolfowitz replied. "I studied math with him at Columbia," said Wohlstetter. After his brief rebellion at Cornell, Paul Wolfowitz was on his way back into the fold.

And it is with Wohlstetter that Wolfowitz wrote a doctoral dissertation that argued against Israel getting US nuclear desalination technology, fearing it would lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

At one point in the late 1960s, Wohlstetter returned from a trip to Israel in a state of agitation about what he believed was the danger of nuclear programs' spreading into the Middle East...By the mid-1960s an Americanfirm, Kaiser Engineeers, Inc., was specifically proposing a major project for nuclear desalination in Isarel. Wohlstetter had brought back a collection of written material on the subject. He asked Wolfowitz if he could read Hebrew. Wolfowitz said he could. Those materials became the start of Wolfowitz's doctoral disseration.

Wolfowitz's doctoral thesis amounted to an extended argument against the idea of the nuclear-powered desalting stations, on grounds that the benefits were exaggerated and the risks of nuclear proliferation were too great. He wrote about the difficulties of conducting effective international nuclear inspections, the risk of clandestine diversion of nuclear materials and the dangers of helping a nation to improve its technological and scientific capability in the nuclear sciences...

What seems especially noteworthy, in retrospect, is that Wolfowitz's warnings about nuclear proliferation applied at the time to Israel as much as to the Arab states. Wolfowitz specifically argued against an Israeli nuclear waepons..."Israeli nuclear weapons would push the Arabs into a desperate attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, if not from the Soviet Union, then at a later date from China or on their own." Of course, in the early 1970s, after Wolfowitz's dissertation was written, Israel did develop nuclear weapons. Its Arab neighbors began to think of following suit, and one Arab government, Iraq, began a concerted drive to develop its own nuclear program, much as Wolfowitz had predicted. In public, at least, Wolfowitz in later years rarely, if ever, acknowledged his opposition to the Israeli nuclear program or the role it had played in spurring on other countries in the Middle East to match it.

His doctoral dissertation became another important step in the evolution of Wolfowitz's thinking. At the earliest stage in his professional career he had focused upon the dangers of nuclear weapons programs in the Middle East. At the time this was a relatively obscure subject, but was one that was to bedevil American foreign policy and to consume much of Wolfowitz's own time and energy for the next three decades.

I highly recommend the book, less for "oppositional research" purposes than for what Mann says is the book's aim: "...To try to understand how and why America came to deal with the rest of the world in the ways it did during the George W. Bush administration. Where did the ideas of the Vulcans come from? Why did these six Vulcans, in particular, rise to the top of the Republican foreign policy apparatus? What was it in their backgrounds and experiences that caused them to make the choices they made after taking office in 2001 and after the terrorist attacks of September 11?"

An obsessive line of inquiry I am sure I share with most of my readers.

Post Script: More revelations from the book: Richard Armitage was allegedly a member of the Phoenix program, the controversial CIA counterguerrilla program that assassinated thousands of Viet cong. [For his part, Armitage denies in an interview with Mann that he was a direct member of Phoenix, but several others cited in the book, including Fred Ikle say they understand that he was]. Vulcans paints a picture of a highly interesting and complex Armitage, one who learned fluent Vietnamese, volunteered for three one-year tours (and when he volunteered to stay on after the end of the US withdrawal and the Navy told him it was time to move onwards and upwards, he quit on the spot and became a civilian official for the US defense attache), brought his wife and children to Saigon, and two years after the US withdrawal, as Saigon fell to the North in late April 1975, personally saved the lives of some 20,000 South Vietnamese military officers and their families by leading them in a flotilla of unseaworthy vessels to the Philippines.

Armitage decided to try to sail the ships and the refugees to the Philippines, a distance of about a thousand miles. Most of the ships weren't seaworthy enough to make the voyage. At least sixty of the vessels were scuttled, in some cases with the help of gunfire. The 20,000 Vietnamese were packed into thirty-two boats...Armitage sent urgent cables to the Defense Department, which succeeded in getting food and water brought to the boats. From May 2 to May 7 [1975] Armitage's Vietnamese convoy...sailed to Subic Bay in the Philippines...When the ships reached [it], President Ferdinand Marcos and his Philippine government tried to stop the vessels, still carrying South Vietnamese flags....Once again Armitage played intermediary and translator...Finally, on May 8, a solution was reached: In formal ceremonies that Armitage helped arrange, the ships took down their Vietnamese flags and hoisted American ones. They then sailed into Subic Bay. For Armitage, after more than seven years, the Vietnam War was finally over.

Is the clash of civilizations we need to be worried about here at home, between Red and Blue America? Perhaps, says David von Drehle, in this fascinating Washington Post piece. Among several interesting demographic and historical observations, is the thesis that Republicans and Democrats are choosing to live in increasingly politically segregated communities and districts, and subsequently find ourselves operating in increasingly parallel universes, reinforced in our separate world views by selecting the niche media that filters out the "cognitive dissonance" of opposing views:

More and more Americans in a highly mobile society are choosing to live among like-minded people. University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel has documented the rise of a "patchwork nation," in which political like attracts like, and ideologically diverse communities are giving way to same-thinking islands. A recent analysis sponsored by the Austin American-Statesman, comparing the photo-finish elections of 1976 and 2000, made this clear. While the nationwide results were extremely close, nearly twice as many voters now live in counties where one candidate or the other won by a landslide. Person by person, family by family, America is engaging in voluntary political segregation.

Bush and Kerry embody the role of mobility and personal choices in creating the Red-Blue nation. Two Establishment scions, similar in background and education, who parted ways after being at Yale University together, one headed to Red country and the other to Blue. Millions of voters have now made similar choices, which in turn echo and reinforce their initial beliefs and preferences...

After graduation, however, their paths diverged. Bush left New England to live in Midland, Tex. He entered the oil business -- in which extracting resources was valued above conservation, regulation was seen as an affront to enterprise and everything depended on the readiness of bold men to take big risks. Texas was part of the Wild West, the Old Confederacy and the Bible Belt.

In short, Bush immersed himself in a Red sea. Greenberg, author of "The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It," recently summed up the essence of that world.

"Faith in God and faith in entrepreneurs," Greenberg said. "The idea that faith should inform our public space, and that absolutes, rooted in the Bible, should guide us in our public life. The idea that America should be strong in promoting freedom and in control of our own destiny. Texas is actually a lot more complicated than that -- but not where Bush lives."

When Bush extols "entrepreneurs," insists on tax cutting and deregulation, and promotes drilling and logging; when he professes a born-again faith and appeals to traditional norms on issues such as marriage and cloning; when he disdains intellectual subtleties in favor of plain-spoken verities, he is carrying the flag for Red America.

Kerry went another way. After winning medals in Vietnam, he launched into the culturally progressive, antiwar politics of the East Coast. In Kerry's world, liberal values were worth paying for with higher taxes. There was less talk about celebrating entrepreneurs than about reining in "corporate interests." Kerry's Boston milieu was Yankee North and ivory tower, a magnet for the young and the wealthy, many of whom saw urban life as a model of multicultural America.

Worth reading. I will leave the political analysis to others more expert in the field, at the links on the left side of the site.

Don't underestimate the ability of Ahmad Chalabi to play a major spoiler role, warns Toby Dodge in this Los Angeles Times article:

If Chalabi were left out of the interim government, he might work to undermine it, said Toby Dodge, an Iraq specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who testified before the Senate last week.

"He's either outside the tent and creating mischief, or inside and creating more legitimacy problems," Dodge said.

Chalabi has accumulated a great deal of authority over the banking industry in Iraq and has been spending money and trying to build political support by forging political alliances, Dodge said. "He is underestimated at everyone's expense."

The article also details the battle of wills between Chalabi and UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

Meantime, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel report for Knight Ridder, Chalabi's INC is being investigated for having misused some of the $18 million in US taxpayer funds they have received, by lobbying for US action to overthrow Hussein. In the crosshairs? Long-time Chalabi aide, Francis Brooke.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear the case involving Dick Cheney's refusal to comply with lower court judgements that demand he turn over details of his energy task force on Tuesday, there is more evidence, via the Los Angeles Times, that Justice Antonin Scalia cannot be considered impartial and should be recused from the case.

It's turkey season in Mississippi, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was tramping through the countryside here this month in pursuit of the big birds.

His hunting partners, as usual, included Charles W. Pickering Sr., the federal judge who President Bush recently elevated to the U.S. court of appeals; and his son, Rep. Charles W. "Chip" Pickering, a four-term Republican member of Congress. For turkey hunters, this country is unrivaled...

In 2002, Mississippi was forced to merge Pickering's district with one held by a Democratic congressman. Just days before the deadline for resolving the matter, Scalia rejected an appeal from Democrats and cleared the way for a Republican-friendly plan to take effect.

The redistricting case marked at least the third time in three years that Scalia had participated in Supreme Court decisions involving friends he hunted with. Some argue that the practice raises questions about the appearance of impartiality at the nation's highest court.

Meantime, the Boston Globe has the goods on more malfeasance from Cheney's Energy Task Force:

The executive director of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, whose closed-door meetings with industry executives enraged environmentalists and prompted a Supreme Court showdown this week, became an energy lobbyist just months after leaving the White House, records show.

Andrew Lundquist, a native Alaskan who worked on Capitol Hill for both his state's senators, shepherded the development of the administration's energy policy as executive director of the National Energy Policy Development Group, a Cabinet-level task force chosen by President Bush and headed by Cheney.

When the task force completed its work, Lundquist stayed on at the White House as Cheney's energy policy director, leading the vice president's effort to turn the task force's work into law.

Then, a day after leaving government service, he opened a consulting business. Nine months later, Lundquist was a registered lobbyist for companies that stood to benefit from the energy policy he helped craft, according to 2003 lobby disclosure records reviewed by the Globe.

Lundquist's corporate clients -- who paid him more than $300,000 in 2003 -- included:

Japan's Toshiba Corp., which is seeking to build a small, new-generation nuclear reactor in Alaska and would benefit from the administration's proposed extension of laws reducing corporate liability for injuries or death caused by nuclear accidents.

British Petroleum, which stands to benefit from a $16.3 billion Alaskan natural gas pipeline that was promised government loan guarantees worth $2 billion in the pending energy legislation.

Kennecott Energy Co., a coal-mining concern in Wyoming that would benefit from a plan to loosen proposed mercury pollution rules for coal-fired power plants.

Duke Energy Corp., which helped secure a provision inserted in the energy legislation repealing a Depression-era law banning public utilities from making speculative investments, a law intended to protect rate payers from costly bankruptcies.

Lobby records show Lundquist served as the energy task force executive director from Feb. 1, 2001, to Sept. 30, 2001, then stayed on as Cheney's director of energy policy from Oct. 1, 2001, to March 26, 2002 -- during which time he worked with Congress as it drafted the landmark energy legislation, the nation's first comprehensive energy policy in more than a decade...

Lundquist's behind-the-scenes role as policy coordinator, vice presidential aide, and ultimately as a lobbyist for energy companies highlights some of the concerns that have led consumer groups to seek the opening of the task force's records.

Yes, it does highlight a few concerns. So does this.

Meantime, this NIMA oil industry map of the Persian Gulf region from March 5 2001 is really quite interesting. [note, .pdf file linked].

And so is this NIMA "Iraq Planning Map" of March 5, 2001. [Note, big .pdf file linked].

So what, back in March 5, 2001, was being planned for Iraq, that required these maps?

William Saletan has just a chilling op-ed in the New York Times.

Richard Clarke has an excellent oped in the New York Times. In it, he says we are losing the war on terror because our actions, particularly in Iraq, alienate the moderate Muslims we need to enlist and empower in their own struggle against Islamist radicals.

One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower — as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 — we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam — not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West — is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.

What we have tried in the war of ideas has also fallen short. It is clear that United States government versions of MTV or CNN in Arabic will not put a dent in the popularity of the anti-American jihad. Nor will calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet. The Bush administration's much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative, therefore, was dead on arrival.

Clarke also warns against the likely recommendations of the 9/11 commission for more structural reform of the intelligence and law enforcement community. And Clarke is the first person to convince me that it is better to focus on fixing and improving the CIA and FBI versus trying to create some new domestic intelligence agency to replace the FBI's counterterrorism function.

The second major lesson of the last month of controversy is that the organizations entrusted with law enforcement and intelligence in the United States had not fully accepted the gravity of the threat prior to 9/11. Because this is now so clear, there will be a tendency to overemphasize organizational fixes. The 9/11 commission and President Bush seem to be in a race to propose creating a "director of national intelligence," who would be given control over all American intelligence agencies. The commission may also recommend a domestic security intelligence service, probably modeled on Britain's MI-5.

While some structural changes are necessary, they are a small part of the solution. And there is a risk that concentrating on chain-of-authority diagrams of federal agencies will further divert our attention from more important parts of the agenda. This new director of national intelligence would be able to make only marginal changes to agency budgets and interactions. The more important task is improving the quality of the analysts, agents and managers at the lead foreign intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.

In addition, no new domestic security intelligence service could leap full grown from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, creating another new organization while we are in a key phase in the war on terrorism would ignore the lesson that we should have learned from the creation of Homeland Security. Many observers, including some in the new department, now agree that the forced integration and reorganization of 22 agencies diverted attention from the missions of several agencies that were needed to go after the terrorists and to reduce our vulnerabilities at home.

We do not need another new agency right now. We do, however, need to create within the F.B.I. a strong organization that is vastly different from the federal police agency that was unable to notice the Al Qaeda presence in America before 9/11. For now, any American version of MI-5 must be a branch within the F.B.I. — one with a higher quality of analysts, agents and managers.

Rather than creating new organizations, we need to give the C.I.A. and F.B.I. makeovers. They cannot continue to be dominated by careerists who have carefully managed their promotions and ensured their retirement benefits by avoiding risk and innovation for decades. The agencies need regular infusions throughout their supervisory ranks of managers and thinkers from other, more creative organizational cultures.

Here, Clarke has offered some of the most cogent, constructive, realistic recommendations for how the US should best try to wage a long term counterterrorism effort, that is informed by decades of working in the bureaucracies that are part of the struggle. The recommendations aren't flashy, but when you read them you simply know that he is right that, for instance, creating a sparkling new domestic intelligence agency at this point will only distract from the counterterror effort, as creating the department of homeland security has almost certainly distracted its constituent agencies with the organizational turmoil of the merger rather than enhanced their counter-terror capabilities.

Most interesting for me in this piece however is Clarke's clean cut through the murk to articulate how the neocons have failed at what they consider their greatest strength: engaging in a war of ideas with the Islamic world [and moral relativists here at home]. Clarke recognizes that the neocons are engaging in a dialogue of the deaf, that there is no interlocutor on the other side, and the neocons are in some weird echo chamber of their own creation, believing they are advancing freedom and democracy on the strength of US military power; totally deaf to the reality that the US misadventure in Iraq has incited such enormous anti American hatred and violence, it has made it extremely difficult for our allies among moderate Muslims states and even Europe to believe what is the premise of neocon philosophy: that the world is made a safer place by the expansion and projection of American power.

That credo is seriously in doubt, not just among the US' enemies, but by our real friends. And who can blame them, after witnessing the slow-moving train wreck that is post-war Iraq?

Is Ahmad Chalabi really going to get the boot? Then again, he has all those files with which to blackmail people, presumably beyond those that have already been alleged to have been on Saddam's payroll. Bremer's office would do well to seize those archives and put them under more neutral control, before the June 30 handover. Maybe Chalabi can start anew as the head of an Iraqi NGO to investigate and ward against the insidious effects of nepotism in post-Saddam Iraq?

TNR's Michelle Cottle writes against the conventional wisdom on the 9/11 commission -- arguing that its hearings should not be televised and that its focus should be proscriptive and not diagnostic-- and gets it totally wrong, IMHO.

Cottle writes:

It's not that the hearings have failed to deliver plenty of drama--and even a bit of comedy. (Tom DeLay upset over "partisan mudslinging"? Stop it! You're killing me!) But a more productive approach to this whole business would have been to let the commission conduct its politically delicate mission away from the klieg lights while the rest of us obsessed about something even more important--like the fact that two and a half years after 9/11, we are still sitting ducks for another Al Qaeda attack.

But my office is proof that there is already a library full of the kinds of blue-ribbon task force reports that advocate intelligence community reforms and "eliminating barriers to aggressive collection of information on terrorists" and improved technology and information sharing at the FBI, that have gone not only unimplemented, but largely unread and undigested by the very political and technocratic and policy experts that need to be held accountable.

Indeed, Iraq czar Jerry Bremer led just such a commission, calling in testimony before the the Senate Intelligence committee in June 2000:

We also need more vigorous FBI intelligence collection against foreign terrorists in America and better dissemination of that information. The FBI's role in collecting intelligence about terrorists is increasingly significant...Yet, the Commission believes unclear guidelines for investigations and an overly cautious approach by the Department of Justice in reviewing applications for electronic surveillance against international terrorism targets are hampering the Bureau's intelligence collection efforts. We recommend improvements in both of these areas.

Once the information is collected by the FBI, technology shortfalls and institutional practices limit efforts to exploit the information and get it into the hands of those who need it--such as intelligence analysts and policymakers...

Dissemination of general intelligence information has not traditionally been an important part of the FBI's mission. They do a good job of sharing specific threat information but, otherwise, sharing information is not given a high priority. In fact, if the information is not specific enough to issue a warning or is not relevant to an investigation or prosecution, it may not even be reviewed. Information collected in field offices often never even makes it to headquarters.

The post 9/11 revelations about the "Phoenix memo" and the Moussaoui arrest and the FBI's failure to understand it had future 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Al-Midhar in the home of an FBI informant in San Diego make very clear that Bremer's recommendations above were totally on-target -- and totally ignored. Cottle's advice would have the 9/11 commission simply add its potentially similarly prescient recommendations to such a pile. What's more, Cottle frowns on the very media strategy that has put 9/11 commissioners all over the airwaves that is exactly what is needed to build momentum, public interest and political support for its findings and future recommendations.

If there's no clear map of individual professional accountability and system and agency and political failure, what's to really be the impetus for serious reform and restructuring? Do we really want another dry academic task force report that advocates some ideal counter-terrorism system and calls for a domestic intelligence agency to replace the FBI's counterterrorism function, rather than an intricately-researched diagnosis that makes the appropriate agency officials and political actors extremely uncomfortable? That spells out exactly how, as Cottle writes, "the most powerful nation in the world got its clock cleaned by a bunch of deranged holy warriors?"

The Bush White House still has only the foggiest idea of a plan for a handover to an interim Iraqi governing authority. But it has decided that it doesn't want the Iraqis to have real sovereignty, at least not the kind of sovereignty that entitles them to make laws and control their armed forces. Oh yes, that kind of sovereignty. Does the White House envision the Iraqi government as a kind of student council? Yes, that seems to be what the administration now prefers.

Asked whether the new Iraqi government would have a chance to approve military operations led by American commanders, who would be in charge of both foreign and Iraqi forces, a senior official said Americans would have the final say.

"The arrangement would be, I think as we are doing today, that we would do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account," said Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. But he added that American commanders will "have the right, and the power, and the obligation" to decide.

That formulation is especially sensitive at a time when American and Iraqi forces are poised to fight for control of Falluja.

In another sphere, Mr. Grossman said there would be curbs on the powers of the National Conference of Iraqis that Mr. Brahimi envisions as a consultative body. The conference, he said, is not expected to pass new laws or revise the laws adopted under the American occupation.

"We don't believe that the period between the 1st of July and the end of December should be a time for making new laws," Mr. Grossman said.

As envisioned by Mr. Brahimi, the caretaker government would consist of a president, a prime minister, two vice presidents or deputy prime ministers and a cabinet of ministers in each agency. A national conference of perhaps 1,000 Iraqis would advise it, possibly by establishing a smaller body of about 100 Iraqis.

In case you wondered as I did if the administration's current call for Iraq to have only limited sovereignty is a change of plan, it is:

Since last November, when the June 30 transfer of sovereignty was approved by President Bush and decreed by Mr. Bremer in Iraq, the United States has insisted that Iraq would have a full transfer of sovereignty on that date.

Mr. Grossman, however, referred in testimony on Wednesday to what he said would be "limited sovereignty," a phrase he did not repeat on Thursday, apparently because it raised eyebrows among those not expecting the administration to acknowledge that the sovereignty would be less than full-fledged.

The problem of limiting Iraq's sovereignty is more than one of terminology, several administration officials said in interviews this week.

The proposed curbs on Iraqi sovereignty are paving the way for what officials and diplomats say is shaping up as another potential battle with American allies as the United Nations is asked to confer legitimacy on the new government.

"Clearly you can't have a sovereign government speaking for Iraq in international forums, and yet leave open this possibility that we'll do something they won't particularly like or disagree with," said an administration official. "There's got to be something to be set up to deal with that possibility."

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations panel, and Senator Jon Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat, pressed Mr. Grossman on that point.

European and United Nations diplomats said that because the main task of the caretaker government would be to try to secure the support of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Iraqi Shiite leader whose supporters are unhappy with some of the laws enacted by the Iraqi Governing Council, there may have to be a change in these laws.

It's currently April 23. It's astonishing that just a whisper over two months away from now should occur what's seemingly set to become a mostly symbolic handover of power to the Iraqis, that the administration truly doesn't seem to have but the barest conception of where it's headed, or even what it wants. People put more time and planning effort into their weddings. This involves the governance of a country with 25 million people. This is just insane.

A genocidal nightmare is playing out in Sudan. Where is Bush's Sudan envoy John Danforth? It looks like he checked out in 2002.

Throughout the past year, it's been clear that the White House was trying to suppress pictures of dead American soldiers coming back from Iraq. Now, some 350 of such photos from Dover Air Force base have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. And it was a website, the Memory Hole, that initiated that FOIA request, which spread such photos on websites and blogs such as Drudge.

But a defense contractor who took a photo of coffins on a US military cargo plane that appeared in the Seattle Times Sunday has lost her job.

The sudden spread yesterday of the Dover photos of flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq came a day after Tami Silicio and her husband and co-worker, David Landry, were fired for the photo she took at Kuwait International Airport of caskets in an aircraft. The photo was published Sunday on the front page of the Seattle Times.

"We have terminated two employees in Kuwait who violated Department of Defense and company policy by working together to photograph and publish the flag-draped caskets of our servicemen and women being returned to the United States," said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the Colorado Springs-based military contractor that employed Silicio and her husband.

According to the Times, Silva said the firing decision was made by the company but the military had "very specific concerns" about the photo. The Pentagon has said that only individual graveside services give the full context of a soldier's sacrifice.

Silicio, a cargo worker who often loaded coffins on military planes bound for the United States, shot the photo in early April, as twin uprisings in Iraq led to a spike in American war dead. She snapped a digital photograph of an aircraft packed with caskets and told her best friend that her photograph of coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq would allow parents of the dead to see that "their children weren't thrown around like a piece of cargo."

Losing her well-paid job in Kuwait was something that Silicio had been very worried about before the photo was published, according to Barry Fitzsimmons, a photo editor at the Times. "She has a mortgage to pay, and she really needs the job," said Fitzsimmons, who said he had a dozen phone conversations and exchanged 40 e-mails with Silicio before the photo was published. He and the newspaper's senior editors wanted to make sure she understood the possible consequences of publication.

A few months back for a Nation story, I interviewed several photographers and journalists in Iraq who were convinced the US military was trying to interfere with their ability to take photos of bad news, going so far as to threaten them at gunpoint and destroy their digital film disks. These are people who cover the military regularly and have quite a bit of sympathy for the troops, and they were quite disturbed by the sometimes blatant efforts to block the American public from seeing images of the real cost of the war in human life.

UnFreakingBelievable. The woman who should get the Pulitzer prize for her photograph of flag draped US coffins coming home from Iraq aboard a US military cargo plane that ran this past weekend has been fired. This from Romenesko.

Woman loses job over coffins photo that appeared in paper Seattle Times Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers ran last Sunday in the Seattle Times, has been fired for violating U.S. government and Maytag Aircraft regulations. Silicio says she hoped publication of the photo would help soldiers' families understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home, reports Hal Bernton. > Earlier: Powerful photo offers chance to tell an important story

If the Washington Post or New York Times are smart, they would snap up this photographer in a second.

Post Script: Well, apparently, Silico isn't a professional photographer, but a recently fired defense contractor in Kuwait. But still it is appalling that she and her husband lost their jobs because she was showing Americans very respectful photographs of soldiers who died fighting for our war. These images shouldn't be forbidden. What does it mean that our government is so intent on preventing people from seeing images of the human cost of the war? There is no way the Pentagon can use the privacy argument because you can't tell who is who inside of flag draped coffins. The families cannot tell either. So what is the rationale for suppressing these images except a type of political calculation?

"The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq," the Washington Post's Mike Allen reports.

Pentagon officials omitted the discussion of the meeting from a transcript of the Woodward interview that they posted on the Defense Department's Web site Monday. Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he may have used the phrase 'take that to the bank' but that no final decision had been made to go to war...

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: "I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

The transcript made it clear that the foreign dignitary Woodward was discussing was Bandar, although Rumsfeld would not say that. "We're going to have to clean some of this up in the transcript," Rumsfeld said in the omitted passage. "We'll give you a -- I mean you just said Bandar and I didn't agree with that so we're going to have to -- I don't want to say who it is but you are going to have to go through that and find a way to clean up my language too."

All told, the Pentagon transcript omits a series of eight questions and answers, some of them just a few words each. Yesterday Rumsfeld described the deleted passages as "some banter."

Some banter, my foot. Remember when the Pentagon did the same thing with comments Wolfowitz made to Vanity Fair about the administration's justifications for the war?

What does the Pentagon think, this is like an army psyops propaganda thing that it can just revise the public record? Apparently, so.

This has been out for a while, I guess. Somehow I missed it. In case you did too, George Packer has written what I think is an absolutely must-read piece in the New Yorker asking why the Democrats have failed to articulate a coherent, passionate, internationalist vision for foreign policy in the wake of September 11th, here.

...Biden told me these stories in answer to a simple question: Why hasn’t the Democratic Party played a serious role in shaping the national debate about foreign policy since September 11th? Biden has been one of the few Democrats to try. His views defy Party orthodoxy. He has criticized the Administration relentlessly, not for doing too much in the war on terrorism but for doing too little, and in the wrong way—for failing to understand that this war has to be waged on many fronts, the most important of which is ideological. The fate of the schoolgirl in Kabul is as critical to ultimate victory as the next generation of unmanned aircraft.

Biden’s own party has all but forfeited the chance to make this case. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th era.

Several smart people have been grappling with just this issue of late, and we can expect to see much interesting writing and debate on this crucial question in the coming weeks and months, both as the election season matures and the Iraq situation evolves, and potentially, further unravels. As this article makes clear, the Bush administration, and its sometimes allies the neocons, may be rhetorically championing democratization in the Middle East (as Orwellian as that may sound to many in the Arab world). But their demonstrated contempt for all US foreign policy tools except military force and their contempt for multilateralism means in practice their efforts to bring more democracy and human rights to the Arab world falter, and, as we have seen in Iraq, potentially may backfire spectactularly, leading to a dramatic increase of anti-American hatred and violence in the world. But it's still important to ask, as Packer does, where have the Democrats been while Richard Perle and George W. Bush called for more democracy and human rights in the Arab world, an idea that would seem to belong to a progressive Democratic agenda? Why have the Democrats seemingly become the party of expedience and reluctance to have bold foreign policy ideas? Why are we so conflicted about what the role of the US should be in the world? [a conflicted state that is not exclusive to Democrats by any means].

Packer writes:

If you’re paying attention, you can hear the sound of Democratic leaders straining to pry the Party away from its long aversion to America’s world leadership. The ghosts of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy are frequently summoned. These leaders have a thankless job, and, politically, a difficult one. Whatever they thought of the Iraq war, the struggle there is now the epicenter of the war of ideas, and leading Democrats have to show more commitment to the new Iraq’s success than they did in opposing the Administration’s reconstruction package.

One problem Biden and other pro-democracy Democrats identify? Their ideas --and what they recognize is needed to get the job done -- are just not as flashy as the bumper sticker "freedom" that the Bush White House relentlessly repeats.

A broader approach to the war includes a willingness to fight—and, for Democrats out of power, it’s all the harder to persuade a skeptical public that they will fight. But this approach also demands an ability to make judgments about when and where and how to fight—or not. Compared with “axis of evil,” “efficient multilateralism” is a pallid phrase...Biden admitted, “This is a place where the President’s bragging to me, ‘Mr. Chairman, I don’t do nuance’—where he has an advantage.”

I asked Thomas Carothers, an expert on democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to name one project that might help change the political culture of the Arab world. He mentioned a nonprofit group, the Center for International Private Enterprise, that is working to spread the idea among Arab business associations that transparency and the rule of law will attract foreign investment. Carothers has studied democracy-building programs for two decades...His experience has left him wary of the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days....

“It’s long-term, it’s not flashy, it’s not expensive,” Carothers said. “All of our programs now are showy, expensive, big-impact. And maybe we need to do that, but we also need to do things for fifteen to twenty years down the line.”... The President, Carothers said, has failed to make the struggle to liberalize the Muslim world the concern of ordinary Americans—to take one small example, by creating high-school exchange programs. “He’s unable to connect it to us in any way other than fear,” Carothers said. “And I don’t think that’s going to do it.”

Here's the whole piece.

[Thanks to J who studied writing with Packer at Harvard way back when for the heads up -- however belated. The magazines have been piling up by the chair as I work on other projects the past few months and have been unable to keep up.]

When one writes something about the Mideast situation, one kind of holds one's breath and braces expecting the floodgates to open and to be bombarded with hate mail. But that hasn't happened. Instead I got some thoughtful emails, including this one from Haggai Elitzur, who blogs here:

I have a lot of respect for what Cole writes about Iraq, but I don't think he's terribly reliable on Israel. My most recent blog post points out a surprisingly obvious flaw in an analogy he recently made about the Rantisi killing. He asked, "why couldn't the Israelis arrest Rantisi? They pulled off Entebbe." Uh, except that in the Entebbe hostage rescue, *all of the terrorists were killed*! If Israel had tried to arrest the likes of Yassin and Rantisi (with no hostage rescue in the picture this time), the large cadres of bodyguards that those guys employed would most likely lead to huge firefights. Considering how densely populated Gaza is, that would almost certainly result in more Palestinian deaths than the missile strikes that did happen. There are various arguments to made about those assassinations, but saying that arresting those guys is a better option doesn't strike me as a very serious or well thought-out argument.

Regarding the spillover into Iraq that Cole attributes to the Yassin killing, while it would be very naive to claim that the Israel/Palestinian situation is totally unrelated to Iraq, isn't it almost as dubious to claim that an Israeli assassination is as crucial to the Iraq situation as Cole makes it out to be? Think about it--would the recent disastrous events in Iraq have been completely avoided if Israel *hadn't* killed Yassin? I find that very hard to believe, but it seems to be the logical conclusion of Cole's reasoning on this point. Is it all that controversial for me to claim that what's happening on the ground in Iraq has far more to do with what the US has been doing on the ground there for the past year, than it does with what Israel is doing at this moment on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza?

Haggai

Thanks for the letters, and for the civilized discussion, people.

Bob Dreyfuss is upset to see no daylight between the positions of John Kerry and W. on W's recent wholehearted embrace of letting Ariel Sharon do whatever the hell he wants to the future borders of a Palestinian state. [At least while Kerry was making a campaign stop in Florida, with Joe Lieberman. Hmm. Wonder who he was trying to keep on board.]

David Adesnik at Oxblog asks if the apparent lack of Hamas' ability to strke hard in Israel in retaliation for Israel's recent killing of two Hamas leaders indicates that Israel's counterterror strategy is working, and that it has essentialy won on the battlefield?

But as I pointed out a few days ago, Juan Cole says, don't look for the response from Hamas only in Israel. It's been internationalized, he writes, and US troops are seeing Hamas sympathizers' response even in Falluja.

I just don't know.

Hot off the presses. Jason Vest's scoop on an internal CPA memo outlining how US actions portend massive failure in Iraq. Tolerating massive corruption and cronyism, handpicking people for the Iraqi Governing Council and leaving some groups unrepresented (such as the Kut loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr -- heard of him?), virtually meaningless border control enabling among other things, Iranian infiltration of the country, the CPA press operation led by Dan Senor consistently focused on winning Bush's reelection and creating images of American leaders announcing decisions made in Iraq to beam back into American living rooms, versus of Iraqis making decisions to beam into Iraqi living rooms, are just some of them.

Here's the link to the redacted memo the story references.

This is the funniest thing I've read in a while. [Via TNR's &c. which got it from Brad DeLong]:

Verbatim from TNR's Etc.:

DEPT. OF IT'D BE FUNNY IF IT WEREN'T SO SAD: Brad DeLong has an absolute must-read testimonial about George W. Bush's fitness to be president, from the Carlyle Group's David Rubinstein:

[W]hen we were putting the board together, somebody ... came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he'll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.

I said well we're not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don't think he adds that much value. We'll put him on the board because--you know--we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us.

We put him on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years--you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.

And I said, thanks--didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things...

Priceless.

Indeed.

Science has shown there really is no such thing as race. But it apparently now shows that there are startling differences between the brains of Republicans and Democrats! No joke:

The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend.

But isn't it more than a little creepy that political consultants are using magnetic resonance imaging to understand what political ads citizens will respond to? Ugh.

The Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Jackson on Kerry's "Any But Bush" Trap:

It is clear Bush has no shame and should be held to account for what he's done and failed to do. But [James] Carville's raging letter and the ''Middle-Class Misery Index'' still leave Kerry himself an enigma. The ABB crowd circled around him as the anti-Bush. No amount of circling the wagons will protect Kerry in the fall if the lead message of his campaign is merely that Bush is a misleader. He can win only if the lead message is how he himself will lead.

Point well taken. Polls discussed below only amplify this. [Thanks to JB for the heads up.]

Perhaps it's time for a UN humanitarian intervention...here. If Tony Blair had any mercy, he would just invade us. Please.

The New Republic revives a literary series, which it now calls Lost and Found, which "will present short essays on behalf of books, records, paintings, sculptures, dances, buildings--any cultural production of any sort--that is, in the view of the writer, in danger of oblivion. Impassioned defenses of beloved things."

Franklin Foer kicks it off with an appreciation of The Road to Mecca, a book that chronicles what sounds to be the extraordinary life of "Muhammad Asad [who] started life as a Galician Jew":

At his bris in Lemberg (as the Jews called Lviv) in 1900, he was Leopold Weiss. This descendent of the distinguished rabbis of Chernovitz soon joined the trajectory of Jewish modernization. During his twenties, Weiss worked as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitgung...His father had adopted Reform Judaism, but Weiss went even further in the world, fully immersing himself in the secular lifestyle of the café intelligentsia and marrying "a pure 'Nordic' type," as he describes his first wife. A visit to an uncle in Palestine in 1921 changed all that. And here's where the story takes its strange turn: Instead of swooning for Zionism, he became enraptured with the desert Arab lifestyle. For the next decade, this Galicianer Lawrence traveled through the bazaars, deserts, and mosques of Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. In the process, he became a Muslim himself, a confidant of King Ibn Saud, and a leading proponent of Islamic statehood in Pakistan. The road from Lviv became the road to Mecca.

Looks like a highly worthwhile new feature, and a nice change of pace from all of TNR's blogs, these days. With four of them, it's hard to keep up.

What was that, about certain foreign leaders supporting a certain US presidential candidate?

And is anyone capable of being disturbed or surprised at this point that it is the country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers which killed 3,000 US citizens on September 11th? [Hint: it ain't France].

There is some mystery surrounding exactly which US security company the four Italian men abducted and killed in Iraq this past week worked for. The Italian press has widely reported that the four men worked for a US-based company called DTS Security LLC that is based in Nevada. But the guy who runs the Nevada office of DTS, Jay Ray, knows so shockingly little about the company he works for, it really raises one's eyebrows. Check this out:

A representative of a Lake Tahoe-based security company said Wednesday that he had no new information on three Italian employees kidnapped by militants in Iraq.

Jay Ray, resident agent and consultant for DTS Security LLC, said he had been advised by the company of "a problem" in Iraq but couldn't comment further unless authorized to do so by DTS officials.

The three missing employees and another Italian are among at least 21 foreigners from 12 countries taken by kidnappers in Iraq...Three of the Italian hostages work for the Nevada-based security company, and the fourth works for a company based in the Seychelles, Frattini said...

Ray said he had been in e-mail contact with a DTS company officer, but didn't expect to hear from that person again until Thursday.

Ray said he had scant information on the company.

"I'm not privy to their day-to-day-operations," Ray said, adding his job is to ensure the company meets Nevada's business filing rules.

"They could be on the moon. They could be next door. I don't know," he said.

Ray said he could not provide additional details on the company because of the state's laws ensuring privacy for LLC's, or limited liability companies, that file in Nevada.

"If I tell you anything, I'm in violation of Nevada law," Ray said. Paperwork filed with the secretary of state's office has little detail and "you'll end up chasing your tail" in looking for more information, he said.

Intriguing, huh? "They could be on the moon, they could be next door"? "You'll end up chasing your tail" if you look for more information? Doesn't it seem to suggest, if not scream, multiple front companies, and hidden, spooky activities?

Ray was right. Chase his tail is pretty much exactly what happens to the intrepid Las Vegas Sun reporter, Brendan Riley, investigating the company. He further reports that Nevada's "records on DTS Security LLC show that its incorporation papers were filed March 11. The resident agent has another name, Headquarters Company, which has an address next to the Douglas County sheriff's substation at Stateline, Nev., on Lake Tahoe's south shore. The address lists a "suite" that turned out to be a 12-by-6-by-18-inch mail box at a UPS Store, located in a building behind a Burger King fast-food restaurant. Linked with Headquarters Company in management of DTS Security LLC is First Genesis Limited, located at the same address. Headquarters Company also is resident agent for more than 160 other companies that aren't tied to DTS. They include other security firms, consultants, private investors, and companies dealing in films, financing, equipment rental, art and auctions."

Again: Intriguing, huh?

An Italian contact of mine told me today that the four Italian men hooked up with DTS Security after reading an ad in Soldier of Fortune.

This blog also pulls this string. One interesting find? A subsidiary, bastard child of DynCorps and CSC called DynCorps Technical Services LLC (DTS).

This company, DTS Security, in Virginia, insists that it is not that DTS Security:

We, at DTS, have been overtaxed with inquiries regarding the precarious situation of the four Italian Nationals being held captive in Iraq.

Unfortunately, we are not able to provide any details regarding the men. The men being held hostages are not DTS personnel. DTS has no operations that are active in Iraq or its surrounding neighbors.

We are currently investigating the false reports and will advise of any developments...

So, will the real DTS Security LLC please stand up? And if not, why not?

Woodward on 60 Minutes, on the Bush White House lying to Congress:

Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.

”Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible,” says Woodward.

“Gets to a point where in July, the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. …Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."

Woodward says there was a lot happening that only key Bush people knew about.

”A year before the war started, three things are going on. Franks is secretly developing this war plan that he's briefing the president in detail on,” says Woodward. “Franks simultaneously is publicly denying that he's ever been asked to do any plan.”

For example, here's Gen. Franks’ response to a question about invading Iraq, in May 2002, after he's been working on war plans for five months: “That’s a great question and one for which I don’t have an answer, because my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that.”

Hearings, anyone?

Juan Cole has a really important and extremely disturbing article in Salon, that persuades that the links between the recent insurgency the US is facing in Iraq and the one that the Sharon government has helped escalate by the excesses of its occupation and its assassination policies, are far more direct, and far less metaphorical, than I realized.

Indeed, Cole says that the four American military contractors killed and burned in Falluja were killed in direct retaliation for Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, which is pretty startling assertion in and of itself. As Cole writes:

Hamas is a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist party, deriving from the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. Sheikh Yassin's extremist writings are widely read among fundamentalists, including those in Iraq. His murder provoked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. Some of them determined to take revenge on the closest ally of the Israelis, the Americans who were occupying them...

The group that killed the four American civilian security guards in Sunni Arab Fallujah on March 31 identified itself as "Phalanges of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin," calling the grisly killings a "gift to the Palestinian people."

Cole describes the growing perception of almost total equivalency between the US and Israel in the Arab mind:

Combined with the American military assault on Fallujah, Bush's embrace of Sharon's position succeeded in making America, in Arab eyes, virtually indistinguishable from Israel. The Egyptian daily al-Jumhuriyyah spoke for many Arabs when it observed in the wake of the Bush-Sharon accord, "the victims being killed daily in Palestine and Iraq are due to the continuation of the occupation ... Violence and extremism have increased as a natural response to the brutality of the occupation."

Before Bush endorsed Sharon's plan, much of the Arab press and popular opinion had stopped short of such an equation. Many, even those opposed to the U.S. invasion and critical of the occupation, were prepared to acknowledge that not all of those fighting the Americans were noble freedom fighters. Now, the rhetoric and sentiment are swinging the other way.

How horrifying. Do Americans really want to live with the consequences of a foreign policy being led by an administration that so totally embraces the suicidally destructive policies of Ariel Sharon? A world of endless horror, indeed. We've got to get rid of these utterly insane people. I mean, this is exactly what the Likudnik wing of the neocons has always wanted, and indeed, they've made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[And, by the way, could the Bush administration be more obviously fishing for the Jewish vote with this?]

Big news day. While appearing that the UN is set to take over management of the handover, it seems to me the US has basically laundered its transition-to-Iraqi-interim-government plan via the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi, if you read between the lines of this graph from the New York Times coverage of the "agreement":

In addition, Ms. Rice's chief deputy for Iraq, Robert Blackwill, has been working side by side with Mr. Brahimi in Iraq to come up with the plan proposed on Wednesday, several officials noted. The surge of violence in Iraq in recent weeks effectively forced President Bush's hand, administration officials said. They acknowledge that any new plan had to be proposed by the United Nations and bear no obvious stamp of American influence.

But maybe not? And what does it all mean for the fortunes of Ahmad Chalabi?

Some American officials say that they expect Ahmad Chalabi, an exile favored by the Pentagon, could be marginalized as a result of the new plan. Aides to Mr. Brahimi make no secret of the envoy's disdain for Mr. Chalabi. Mr. Rumsfeld is described by knowledgeable diplomats as still favoring a major role for Mr. Chalabi in Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that since the Brahimi plan was deemed "a reasonable one" by State Department and White House officials, "the odds favor a model something like what Mr. Brahimi announced."

My take? I don't think we should rule out the possibility that this was mostly a laundering process, and that Chalabi, the NSC and the Pentagon are still very much in the mix. And that the expanded UN role is more about optics than substance. I could be wrong. But it's clear the UN is rightfully still very skittish about taking on a huge role in an Iraq that is worlds less stable than it was when 20 of its staff were blown up last August.

Juan Cole on Iran in Iraq. Honestly, it doesn't sound like even he understands exactly what is going on there. I'm mystified as well. What's the back story to how the US and Iran came to this arrangement?

Post Script: More from Cole, on how the US is like Iran:

I have concluded that the Bush administration is like Iran. The Iranian government has two of everything. It has a relatively liberal president, and a hardline supreme jurisprudent. The reformists control the foreign ministry, the hardliners control the military. The reformists have some parliament representatives, the hardliners control the Guardian Council, which has the power of judicial review over parliament. You never know with the Iranian government who is on top or what a policy means, since it could be coming from either competing section of the same government.

Likewise, in the Bush administration, the Pentagon has its own foreign policy, which competes with and often trumps the foreign policy of the State Department and the National Security Council. Thus, Gen. Myers is pointing fingers at Iran and Syria and making all sorts of wild accusations at them, darkly hinting they will be overthrown if they don't shape up. And Colin Powell is writing them polite letters about bilateral relations and could they please use their good offices to help the Americans in Iraq. It is bizarre, and the urbane, canny leaders in Damascus and Tehran (who have long experience of residence in the UK and Germany respectively), must be scratching their heads in wonder at this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde American hyperpower that rages about an axis of evil and goes about preemptively invading countries on the one hand and then comes politely, hat in hand, to request selfless assistance on the other.

Posted by Laura at 03:19 PM

This is truly unforgiveable. How did this not come out 'til now?

The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.

Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."

And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.

This is unforgiveable. Bush and Rice should just fall on their swords. Bush's handlers, chief among them Rice, have attempted to portray a total outright lie to the American people. When Bush was on vacation for a whole month in August 2001 during the unprecedented terror threat, he was never briefed by Tenet once, as Rice has tried to portray.

And you know what? Now that he's in Crawford again on vacation while American soldiers die in Iraq, he's not getting briefed by Tenet either. Tenet, by the way, is in Washington, doing his job. Where is the freaking president?

Here's more:

A USA Today story, written right before Bush took off, reported that the vacation—scheduled to last from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3—would tie one of Richard Nixon's as the longest that any president had ever taken...

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)
[Italics added]

The outrage factor has been so high of late, we're experiencing total outrage overload meltdown. But how often do veteran CIA operatives who have written 40 PDBs smack their forehead and say 'Holy Smoke?' Why doesn't Bush take his job more seriously? And since he clearly doesn't care, why are people trying to install him to do it again? Isn't there anyone hungrier for this job?

Bin Laden's reported taped offer of truce to Europe looks to be authentic, the CIA says. Incredibe. Is this guy becoming like an Al Qaeda elder statesman or something? Since when did he negotiate jihad? And can we really not catch this guy?

Department of We Only Have Time for Headlines. This looks to be a Very Important Story. Top graphs:

By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."

The intelligence included reports of a hostage plot against Americans. It noted that operatives might choose to hijack an aircraft or storm a U.S. embassy. Without knowing when, where or how the terrorists would strike, the CIA "consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil," according to one of two staff reports released by the panel yesterday.

"Reports similar to these were made available to President Bush in the morning meetings with [Director of Central Intelligence George J.] Tenet," the commission staff said.

It seems to me the 9/11 commission is doing more to defeat Bush than the Kerry campaign.

Shutters are still down as I finish this piece today, lord willing. Not only am I not posting anything about President Bush's rare press conference last night, I admit to not even taking the time to watch it, and I don't feel any great loss about that either. Hilarious commentary on Bush's performance, his appearance, and his tie, can be found at Eschaton. Smart commentary on his performance can be found at Tapped, The Dreyfuss Report, and the Washington Monthly, and the other brilliant usual suspects at the links on the left side of the site. Happy Wednesday.

Meantime, Atrios gets the absurdity of this exactly right:

Axis of Please Help Us

Could we really be begging Iran for help? Weird.
[via Atrios]

More on the US asking Iran for help with dealing with Moqtada al-Sadr, here. Washington's and Teheran's insistence that they are not talking directly to each other has the ring of "she doth protest too much," doesn't it? Are our apparent back channel discussions with the "terror masters" in Teheran giving the neocons a heart attack yet? [Then again, the neocons seem to have their own back channel negotiations with the terror masters too.] Thanks to Bob Dreyfuss for the heads up on this.

Dept. of Complaints: Reader Y writes that she doesn't like my posting of Neal Pollack's 9/11 smoking guns. Frankly, we were desperately in need of some comic relief and found them terribly funny. But I do apologize if it offended anyone. Thanks for the comments.

Dept. of Revised Complaints: Y. writes back that it was funny, but it was my presentation of Pollack's 9/11 smoking guns as "news" that was confusing, and I agree. Apologies from the editorial department. We'll put our public editor right on it.

Here's a few more dots the feds didn't connect, as revealed by Pollack:

--A CIA agent, posing as a Florida flight instructor, said that several 9-11 hijackers showed great proficiency in all areas except one. According to the agent, the hijackers said, “we’re not going to land the planes anyway, so why bother?”

--In April 2001 one of the hijackers was caught on videotape, at a convenience store manned by the FBI, asking what the odds would be of him surviving if a plane he were piloting were “shot down over Western Pennsylvania.”

--In a 1999 Project For the New American Century “position paper,” Richard Perle and Dick Cheney wrote that the U.S should be prepared for a day when 19 men of Arab descent, armed with box cutters, would board commercial airline flights with the intent to crash the planes into major U.S. buildings.

After studying this for some time, I've determined that Pollack's comic genius is in his brilliant use of quotation marks.

Reader W., a veteran whose daughter serves with US forces in Afghanistan, writes:

...I think your instincts as to the lack of seriousness and, by implication, honor [or lack of] on the Bush Administration's conduct hits a homerun...

Dear Mr. President:
When you're conducting operations that by any definition may be called 'war' I expect you to be present for duty, 24x7. Soldiers are; there are no weekends in a combat zone. Also, when asked by the media about measures you might've taken prior to September 11th, please don't use that big wide Texas grin and say, "dontcha think I would've moved mountains?" If you're truly bothered by any assertion that you haven't got the best interests of the country's security at heart, please show some righteous indignation. It's the least our first responders, soldiers, and their families deserve.

Thank you for the letters, in particular from those of you who understand the current conflicts first hand. I really admire your insights.

NPR is broadcasting the 9/11 commission hearings live.