CJR's Douglas McCollam has a great review of the INC's campaign to influence the US media.

Slate's Eric Umansky asks, if the US may be mythologizing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to the point of building him up and giving him credit for attacks beyond his actual control.

Indeed, Zarqawi may be only a figurehead around whom Iraqi fighters are rallying, not someone directing operations there. "Most are not members of his group in a formal sense," one insurgent told Time. "But everyone, especially the foreigners in Iraq who share his ideals of jihad, considers himself part of Attawhid"...

The Bush administration has an obvious motivation to place an Osama-connected outsider at the center of the attacks. And it's possible that this analysis is correct. But one has to wonder: Even if Zarqawi is playing a key role in the Iraqi insurgency, is it wise for the United States to keep giving him credit for it?

Investigative journalist Jason Vest has the backstory on the famous "Anonymous" I guarantee you will want to read. The upshot? Anonymous doesn't want to be anonymous, and the CIA's story that his identity must not be revealed in order to protect his security is just a convenient cover story - convenient for the Agency, that is.

The WaPo's Edward Cody interviews Ahmad Chalabi. His arch nemesis Paul Bremer and Bremer's spokesman Dan Senor are gone, Chalabi points out, while he remains, and is urging some changes in how the US left things, specifically to the Iraqi intelligence services and finances:

A good place to start, Chalabi suggested, would be with the new Iraqi National Intelligence Service set up by the CIA to replace Hussein's much-feared services. The new intelligence apparatus, hundreds strong, was organized in secret without a known budget or statute, he said.

The director, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, was recruited by the CIA station in the Jordanian capital Amman after he fled Iraq in 1991, Chalabi said, and has been a favorite ever since. A member of Iraq's Turkmen minority, Shahwani reports directly to the prime minister but is closely supervised by CIA officers, Chalabi added. Under their guidance, the service has turned much of its focus toward neighboring Iran, he said.

According to a report prepared in April by knowledgeable officials for members of the now-disbanded Governing Council, the service roster is two-thirds Sunni Muslim and one-fourth Shiite in a country that is about 60 percent Shiite, giving rise to fears that the new service has incorporated many former members of Hussein's Sunni-dominated services.

"This won't fly here," Chalabi said.

Next, Chalabi said, the new government should grab control of the country's finances. Specifically, he said, it should demand a full accounting of how Bremer, who had check-signing authority, spent funds from the Development Fund for Iraq, a pool of cash from Iraqi oil sales designated to pay for reconstruction...

In addition, Chalabi said, the U.S. Embassy, which replaced the occupation authority on Monday, has sought power to disburse some of the funds even though political authority has been returned to the Iraqi government. Allawi's government should insist that the money flow exclusively through the Iraqi Finance Ministry, Chalabi said.

Isn't the Iraqi Finance Ministry still in INC hands? We have to turn to Iraq'd to find out.

UPDATE: Iraqd's Spencer Ackerman informs us that the Iraqi Finance Ministry is headed by the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He writes:

The Iraqi finance minister is SCIRI -- Adel Abdel Mehldi.

Yet he attended a Jesuit high school in Baghdad – who knew? – with Allawi & Chalabi.

Small world.

Is the US conflicted over conflict diamonds? My colleague working in Sierra Leone sends this Financial Times article, highlighting this passage:

"Alex Yearsley, of London-based Global Witness, alleges that the CIA and FBI long had tried to publicly minimize links between conflict diamonds and Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida. The U.S. security agents feared exposure of their own longtime links with Charles Taylor, the ousted Liberian leader who played a main role in West Africa's insurgencies and blood diamond trade, Yearsley said. Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001, Yearsley claimed in a telephone interview."

That is pretty explosive. No wonder Washington has been so wishy washy about pushing for Taylor's handover to the special court in Sierre Leone to face war crimes charges.

Read the whole article, here.

Karadzic arrest imminent? I have gotten my hopes up many many times only to have them dashed. And I am naturally then much more skeptical about such reports. But I am hearing it on pretty good authority that if the Bosnian Serbs don't handover notorious war criminal Radovan Karadzic within the week, they will be strapped with big economic sanctions. And I am hearing they are likely to turn him over. The jury is still out. Karadzic has slipped out of the noose many many times. But the victory of Boris Tadic in Serbia's presidential elections this past week augurs well for this long overdue move to finally happen. Keep your fingers crossed.

Monday Evening Update: The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum points to a recent Russ Baker article from that magazine on why Karadzic belongs in the Hague, as well as to a Reuters report today that Bosnia viceroy Paddy Ashdown sacked 60 Bosnian Serb officials.

The West's top peace envoy punished Bosnia's Serbs Wednesday for failing to arrest top war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic, dismissing 60 senior officials in the most dramatic such move since the 1992-95 war...

"In all, I am removing 60 people today, 11 will be removed indefinitely, 48 may return to public life once Radovan Karadzic is in The Hague," the veteran British diplomat [Paddy Ashdown] said.

Other measures against officials in the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia's two autonomous entities, included European Union travel bans as well as freezing of assets.

It's about time. Next month is the nine year anniversary of the massacre of more than 7,000 -- some reports say 8,000 -- Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the UN safe haven of Srebrenica, by Bosnian Serb forces.

The US has expelled two Iranian security guards with Tehran's mission to the UN, after the two were caught repeatedly taking video of the New York subway line.

According to the U.S. official, the first photographing incident took place in June 2002, the second in November 2003, and the third occurred recently, the official said.

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in November that two Iranian citizens were questioned while taking video images of the subway tracks on the No. 7 line in Queens.

He said the two men, stopped by a transit officer, claimed diplomatic immunity and were ultimately not charged with any wrongdoing. The commissioner declined to label their behavior suspicious, but called it "unusual."

Unusual, indeed. What could this have been about? Espionage, yes, but to what ends? Who knows. It's a bit unsettling this has been going on since 2002. It would seem that if what they were up to was harmless, it could have all been cleared up with a brief conversation and they would not need to bother to claim diplomatic immunity.

Meantime, this other story on Iran is also disturbing. Essentially, the US is accusing Iran of having used one now-razed Tehran site, Lavizan, for nuclear research. Iran says, it was being used for "military research & development." That sounds a bit ambiguous, doesn't it? From Agence France Press:

"Our inspectors went yesterday to Lavizan (the suspect site). The Iranians said it was a former R and D military site," International Atomic Energy Agency director general ElBaradei told reporters...

The Iranians said the site "was used as a physics institute and later on for biotechnology R and D ... for medicine," ElBaradei said.

Suspicion has surrounded the site since satellite images from a US commercial firm showed that buildings which had been there in August had been razed to the ground by March and that topsoil had been taken away.

The Washington think tank the Institute for Science and International Security(ISIS) said on its website that this set alarm bells ringing "because it is the type of measure Iran would need to take if it was trying to defeat the powerful environmental sampling capabilities of IAEA inspectors."

"I have to wonder if it is the whole story, particularly since they took down all the buildings and razed the site," ISIS scientist David Albright told AFP Tuesday, referring to Iran's claim there was no weapons work in Lavizan.

"Their declaration is rather vague and looks like it covers all the bases. Medical research has to be mentioned" to explain whole body count machines found at the site, machines which measure radiation contamination, he said.

Remember, Albright was not one of those crying wolf about Iraq's nuclear program before the war. Indeed, he was among the most skeptical about the administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear program, particularly, the aluminum tubes claim. Here, Albright indicates more reasons to be concerned.

MORE: More from Albright speaking on Mid East WMD proliferation at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy this past week.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman notices, that apparently we almost went to war with Iran last July. Isn't it a bit hard to believe that with thousands of international war correspondents all over Iraq last summer, and tens of thousands of troops, humanitarians, and others in the area, that somehow no one reported this til now?

Wonder if the US and allies were wrong about Iraq, but right about Iran? Preemption has been discredited as a US foreign policy strategy, at least politically, if not strategically. The US is facing an incredible crisis of confidence in its very intelligence on WMD, its reliance on exiles with a certain agenda, its lack of human intelligence, the problem of the perception of the incredible politicization of US intelligence, and the uncertainty of interpretation of results gathered from signals intelligence, satellite imagery and foreign governments. Relying on diplomacy until the election at least seems to be the plan. From reporting in this area in recent weeks and months, and believe me, I am aware that I am no expert, I am convinced Iran is set to become the foreign policy priority for the US in coming months. I gather from experts coming from a range of of political inclinations however the sense that the Iran nuclear issue is a genuinely tough not to crack. If diplomacy fails, what options are open? I also wonder whether some people on this side of the pond have been persuaded there are people they would be prepared to work with on that end of the problem, and not just people from the opposition groups either; but some who may be very close to the leadership itself, but indicate they are prepared to chart a new course. Can they be trusted? And what is the consequence of US-Iran foreign policy being conducted almost entirely in secrecy, by proxy, and numerous back channels?

Look out your window. Are pink porcine farm animals soaring through the air? Because Bob Dreyfuss has found a point of hearty agreement with the neoconservatives: the time for NATO is past, Bob declares.

Finally there’s something I agree with the neocons about: NATO. That organization is a dinosaur of the Cold War whose extinction is long overdue. Now, the neocons—whose Iraq project ran afoul of old Europe—seem ready to get rid of NATO, too.

I couldn't disagree with both Bob and the neocons more. I think NATO is indispensable, and no where more than in the area of peacekeeping. In fact, I think NATO should be the successor to the mostly failed project of UN peacekeeping. NATO has shown in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan that it is a far more effective peace enforcement institution than anything else out there -- and places like Darfur are crying out for intervention.

If you are subscriber, or you snag a copy on the US Airways shuttle or something, see my article on UN reform that addresses some of these ideas in the current July issue of the American Prospect.

Why is Iran declaring its intentions to continue construction of nuclear centrifuges? Not clear, but the US is pushing the IAEA to formally report Iran's noncompliance to the UN Security Council. Meantime, the Sun story points to this explosive report:

Western intelligence officials believe Iran's Revolutionary Guards tried to cover up a nuclear accident triggered when weapons-grade uranium was being shipped from North Korea.

The accident allegedly caused Tehran's new international airport to be sealed off by Revolutionary Guard commanders within hours of its official opening on May 9.

The first scheduled commercial landing at the airport - an Iran Air civilian flight from Dubai - was intercepted by two Iranian air force jets and diverted to Isfahan, about 300 kilometres away, even though it was low on fuel. At the same time, trucks blocked the runway to prevent other landings...

In December 2002, according to officials with access to the airport, a North Korean cargo jet delivering nuclear technology, including some weapons-grade uranium, was being unloaded at night under military supervision.

A container slipped and cracked on the tarmac, and everyone in the area was taken away for thorough medical examinations.

Crews from the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, wearing protective suits, were brought in to clean up the spillage.

When trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime, one looks for two things: means, and motive. What do we think the motive is of those sources who would seek to discredit the testimony of an individual who is apparently prepared to tell the story of where he got some forged documents? The motive would clearly seem to be: to intimidate that individual, in order to prevent him from telling his story, and by extension, to attempt to prevent the truth from getting out. Who would want to prevent the truth from getting out? It would seem to me, only those who have something to fear from the true story getting out. In other words, those who have knowledge of the crime.

It looks to be a summer of many interesting revelations.

The BBC's Matt Frei pointed out tonight, that what NATO leaders are discussing vis a vis a NATO role in Iraq, is so minor, it is telling: whether NATO should conduct the training of Iraqi forces inside Iraq, or outside Iraq. The pro-US contingent at NATO is pushing for the training to be done inside Iraq. France and Germany are pushing for the training to be done outside Iraq. Either way, NATO's involvement in Iraq is set to remain symbolic at most.

Update: Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports Monday from the NATO summit in Istanbul, that the issue was never resolved.

The NATO statement on training indicated that it would be up to individual countries to decide whether to contribute instructors and whether they would teach inside or outside Iraq. NATO ambassadors are to work out details of a training scheme with Allawi's government "on an urgent basis," the statement said.

The lack of specifics reflected persisting differences over how deeply NATO should become involved in Iraq... French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said they would not send instructors to Iraq.

Good news from Serbia: a reformer, Boris Tadic, has won the presidential elections, making him Serbia's first democratically elected president since World War II. Tadic, 46, is a good guy, a true "liberal democrat," from the Democratic Party of assassinated former Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic. A Sarajevo born psychology professor at Belgrade University, Tadic has long been an advocate of sending war crimes suspects to the Hague. I got to know some of his staff from the bad old days when they were risking their lives in the opposition to Milosevic, and they were impressive, serious, young, pro-western, and pro-human rights. This is especially good news because Tadic's victory means the defeat of an ally of the notorious assassinated war crimes suspect and war profiteer, Zeljko Raznatovic, a.k.a. Arkan.

What a classy guy.

US parts found at suspected Iran nuclear site. So reports Reuters.

A radiation monitoring device spotted in Iran at a razed site where Washington suspects Iran conducted covert atomic bomb-related research was itself made in the United States and sold directly to Tehran, sources said.

A Western diplomat and an independent nuclear expert who follow the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told Reuters the radiation detection device -- called a "whole body counter" -- was identified as having been made by the Connecticut-based firm Canberra Industries, Inc.

The disclosure could prove embarrassing to Washington which has accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and has called on countries to crack down on exports of even seemingly innocent machinery that could be used in weapons programs.

Certainly the fact US industry might even unwittingly be involved in furthering the nuclear aspirations of a charter member of the axis of evil might be embarrassing for Washington.

And Matt is right. Iran may very well have emerged the winner of the US campagin in Iraq. Iran and the Iran nuclear issue also seem to be emerging as the predominant preoccupation of US foreign policy. Task forces at the Council of Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council (led by Brent Scowcroft), and elsewhere are currently working on position papers on what US foreign policy to Iran should be.

Yesterday, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who has been criticized by some in the past for being too pragmatic and pro-(oil) business friendly about Iran, sounded a note of real alarm about Iran's nuclear program in an oped in the Washington Post:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just rebuked Iran for failing to cooperate fully with international inspectors who are examining whether Tehran is meeting its nonproliferation commitments.

How concerned should we be about this development? What does it mean? By its own admission, Iran has been taking steps to develop the capability to enrich uranium...While Iran says its activities are solely for peaceful production of nuclear power and are permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, once enrichment capability exists, a major barrier to producing a nuclear weapon virtually vanishes. The IAEA condemnation is an indication that the world may be on the verge of a major breakdown of the nonproliferation regime, to say nothing of a huge new source of instability in a critically important region.

We are at a critical moment. Are we serious in our efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, or will we watch the world descend into a maelstrom where weapons-grade nuclear material is plentiful and unimaginable destructive capability is available to any country or group with a grudge against society?

What does Scowcroft propose?

Our goal instead should be to delegitimize the spread of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities to any country, because these capabilities are the linchpin of any program to develop nuclear weapons.

Hawkish undersecretary of state John Bolton discussed what he called the administration's "counterproliferation" program (he prefers that over the traditional "nonproliferation" he said) and Iran at AEI and on the Hill yesterday. You can read his AEI remarks here [note, link to .pdf file]. But given the report in Reuters yesterday cited above about US company parts being found at a suspected former Iranian nuclear site casts Bolton's remarks in a new light:

On February 11, at the National Defense University, President Bush gave what is arguably one of the most “wonkish” speeches ever delivered by a President. I liked it. He detailed a number of proposals that made clear the Administration’s overarching approach: the frontlines in our nonproliferation strategy must extend beyond the well-known rogue states to the trade routes and entities that are engaged in supplying the countries of greatest proliferation concern.

Trade routes and entities that include Connecticut, I take it?

MORE: As Tim Dunlop reminds us about the old joke about Iraq, we know they have weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts. They pick us up too.

Re: Hersh's story on Israel and the Kurds. This today from Ha'aretz:

Paper says Turkish FM leaked Mossad, Kurd story

By Zvi Bar'el

ANKARA - Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is the source of the
leak to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh that dozens of Israeli
Mossad agents are ostensibly in northern Iraq. The reliable Turkish
newspaper Cumhuriyet yesterday stated that Gul, along with two advisers and a spokesman, had a breakfast meeting with Hersh on May 27, on which occasion he gave the information to Hersh.

Official Turkish spokesmen denied the report in Jumhurriyet, dismissing
it as "a report by an opposition paper," but sources at the paper
insisted the report is "correct, verified, and approved by highly informed
sources."

Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani categorically denied Hersh's report on
Wednesday.

Turkish sources yesterday confirmed to Haaretz that despite the
denials, official Turkey still does not completely believe that no Israeli
agents are present in northern Iraq. According to these sources, Israeli
and Turkish officials held talks over the past year regarding the
possibility of cooperation with the Kurds. The Israeli side indeed declared
that any cooperation of this kind would only occur in coordination with
Turkey and not behind its back. However, "Turkish sensitivity to the
possibility that Israel would exploit an opportunity prevents the Turkish
government from relaxing. Perhaps that is why, if it was indeed Gul who
passed on the information, his sole purpose was to nip the idea in the
bud," they said.

In any event, Israel has made it clear to Turkey that Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon decided not to open a channel of cooperation with the Kurds.
For now, that decision is blocking proposals submitted by Israeli
intelligence officials to Sharon to try to reestablish the connection with
the Kurds.

Many interesting threads to pull from this. Turkey of course has long been anxious about Kurdish separatism; the fear that it would lead to greater autonomy for Iraq's Kurds and subsequently demands for autonomy by Turkey's Kurds was Ankara's principle hang up about a US-led intervention in Iraq. But for nearly a decade, Turkish-Israeli military to military relations have been very strong. So, what does the allegation that the Hersh story was sourced by the Turkish foreign minister indicate about how Ankara is viewing Sharon these days? Is there something to the allegations in Hersh's report about Israel covertly aiding Iraqi Kurdish militias, or is it all based in Turkish conspiracy theories and paranoia about US and Israeli intentions and Kurdish separatism? That remains to be seen, but surely the answer is to be found -- or not -- in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.

Let's hope Hersh comes through with a follow up clarifying all of this.

Meantime, what does the information in this Ha'aretz story say about the evolution of relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv? What had cemented strong relations between Turkey and Israel was a few shared strategic enemies, particularly Syria and Iran, as well as a shared principal ally: Washington. Particularly, Washington over Europe. All that has shifted, with improved Turkish-Syrian relations, somewhat improved Turkish-Iranian relations, improved Turkish-European relations, and deteriorating Turkish-US relations...as well as the rise of a (moderate) Islamist government in Ankara, and a more hardline Israeli government under Ariel Sharon. Neocons have long cherished the idea of a Washington-Turkey-Israel alliance, even over Washington's long-time alliances with NATO and certainly over Europe. But according to my Turkish sources, no one has done more to alienate Turkey from the US than the neocons, particularly Paul Wolfowitz who manages to alienate Turks with every public statement since the run up to the war. [According to Turkish sources, Wolfowitz had said something along the lines of, if what was keeping Turkey from joining the US-led alliance invading Iraq was Turkish public opinion, that Ankara should just disregard it. Not terribly democratic.]

It will be an interesting NATO summit in Istanbul this weekend.

One other point a contact raised with me yesterday. There are multiple reports of an Israeli presence in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. US diplomatic advisors have told me for instance of Israeli advisors to Kurdish Iraqi leaders, and Israeli involvement in the rise of a central bank in Kurdish Iraq. Whether there is some sort of covert relationship between Israel and Kurdish militias I have no knowledge of. But what this contact suggested to me yesterday was that if such contact exists, the real question to ask: is it private, or is it governmental? He hinted strongly that it was private.

Secondly, there's an interesting historical backdrop to this story that I was not previously aware of. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Israel was apparently very close to the father of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, a mullah. Apparently, Israel helped mullah Barzani flee Iraq when he was ill to get medical care in New York, where he ultimately died. Why this relationship? Two things. There were apparently lots of Jewish people from the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, many of them fled to Israel during Saddam's time, but there remains that tie. [In fact, some of them have the last name Barzani.] Secondly, as my contact explained the relationship between Israel and the Barzani family and the Iraqi Kurds to me, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

More: Here's a nice profile of Hersh from the Chicago Tribune (registration required). This is priceless:

[Hersh] inhabits a reality we can barely glimpse, crosscut by the chatter of encrypted satellite signals. For national security officials, leaking to Hersh is "generally better than writing a memo to the president," remarks his friend and competitor --Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus.

In recent months, The New Yorker editor David Remnick says, Hersh "seems to begin every phone call with the line, `It's worse than you think.'"

Phil Carter asks, why we should care about Sudan:

Why should we care about Sudan though? I could make the liberal internationalist argument that America should care about genocide wherever it happens because it's our obligation to care as a world leader. I could make a soft argument about the need for moral leadership, and how we should do here what we failed to do in Rwanda. (See Samantha Power's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Problem from Hell" for more on these arguments.) But instead, I'll point out one not-so-insignificant fact:

Q: What nation hosted Osama Bin Laden and allowed Al Qaeda to thrive during the 1990s when Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan didn't want him?

A: Sudan.

We let states fail, and failed states crumble, at our own peril.

And discusses what it would take to stop the fighting and genocide in Sudan, here.

Writing in the Washington Times, Joel Mowbray contends a June 3 NYT article saying that Pentagon officials were being polygraphed in connection with the Chalabi case is wrong. In fact, he says, the FBI has conducted polygraphs of officials, but in Baghdad, not at the Pentagon itself.

To a number of civilian employees at the Pentagon, a New York Times story on June 3 came as quite a jolt: Some of them apparently already had been polygraphed as part of an investigation into Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi.

But it never happened. Nearly three weeks later, it appears that the implicated civilian employees at the Pentagon have not been polygraphed...

In fairness to the Times, it appears that the FBI has initiated some sort of investigation, including limited use of polygraph testing — but on people who were based in Baghdad.
The June 3 article, however, makes no such allowance and, in fact, is quite clear in identifying polygraphed employees as being "at the Pentagon." The lead sentence is unambiguous in announcing, "Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon."

Further down in the article, readers are informed that "officials familiar with the investigation say that they are ... likely to interview senior Pentagon officials." Three weeks later, it appears that has yet to happen — but the taint from the smear lingers.

So, then, who is being polygraphed in Baghdad?

Famous for DC. Spotted Michael Moore, Wonkette!, Mark Shields, several senators at the DC premier of Farenheit 911. Human Rights Campaigners outside with great blue signs and rolls of stickers saying, "George Bush: YOU'RE FIRED" which everyone had pasted to their chests. Moore gave them the thumbs up.

H.G. Wells on Africa, 1918. Some things have changed -- the League of Nations for which Wells was consulting has become the UN, for instance; shockingly much has stayed the same. As he writes:

...A practical consequence of this disarmament idea must be an effective control of the importation of arms into...Africa. That rat at the dykes of civilization, that ultimate expression of political scoundrelism, the gun runner, has to be kept under and stamped out in Africa as everywhere. A disarmament commission that has no forces available to prevent the arms trade will be just another Hague convention, just another vague, well intentioned, futile gesture.

Cynicism about the effectiveness of Hague conventions banning arms trafficking dating back to 1918....

I love this TNR series.

Darfur, here, here, and here. Kristof is putting together suggestions for what one can do, in the meantime, he's pointing people here.

"EPA: Amount of toxins in air, water and land increased at record level in 2002," Knight-Ridder reports.

The amount of toxic pollutants in America's air, water and land jumped 5 percent in 2002 - the highest increase since the federal government started keeping track of toxins in 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

God, this is so depressing. We have got. to. get. rid. of. these. guys.

Juan Cole is brutal here on the issue of the two Shakirs.

There isn't actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Here's Hayes' take.

The WaPo's Glenn Kessler agreed to be questioned by the Plame special prosecutor on his two phone conversations witih I. Lewis Libby last July. Apparently, Lewis signed a waiver asking Kessler to testify because Libby says he did not mention Plame's name in the interviews. [Kessler's statement, via Romenesko].

Michael Ledeen writes, the Iranians want to defeat Bush.

So the Iranians seized some British "warships" yesterday, and arrested eight British naval officers...

Why?

...Because they were planning to attack (or have their surrogates attack) the oil terminals, silly. And why attack the oil terminals? Because they want to defeat President Bush in November, and they figure if they can get the price of oil up to around $60 a barrel, he'll lose to Kerry.

Frankly, it seems the Bush administration has given the mullahs a pretty good deal. Its chosen Iraqi pet Ahmad Chalabi was allegedly providing them sensitive US intelligence, the Americans removed their life-long enemy Saddam and have delivered them a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and the Bush administration has so overstretched the US military in Iraq that it hardly has the military resources, international (or domestic) credibility, or intellectual capacity to deal with Iran's or North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Why would they want to defeat him?

UPDATE: Gregory Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch has more.

The Anaconda Strategy. David Ignatius has an inside source on how the administration's grand designs for Iraq devolved in the past few months into an effort to find a way to get out.

I'm told the NYT's Douglas Jehl is going to reveal the identity of Imperial Hubris author Anonymous in the coming days.

Update: Well, partially identify him, as "a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999."

Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda...

In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a "sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities." Another new book, "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike.

More: Reader JM writes, "If Steve Coll's 'Mike,', who headed the Bin Laden or 'Alec' Station from 1996-99 is, in fact, Anonymous, then this excerpt about him from James Bamford's just published "A Pretext For War" becomes interesting":

Increasingly under Mike ____, its CIA chief, Alec Station began taking on the feel of the king's executioner. After the decision against blowing up the Tarnak Farm and the hunting camp, Mike unleashed a blast of angry e-mails to an assortment of officials.

Some saw him as an unkempt, tactless, annoying manager who had little understanding of the international ramifications of some of his suggestions. Killing innocent women, children and members of the royal families in harebrained, and likely to fail, cruise missile assassinations was the best way to increase, not decrease, hatred and terrorism directed against the United States.

Complaints began coming in, even from the White House. Mike later acknowledged that many even within his own agancy believed he and his unit had gone off the deep end. "The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic" he said. In 1999, after three years as head of Alec Station, Mike transferred to another job at CIA headquarters.

-- from p.216, James Bamford A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, Doubleday, 2004.

Reader BH points out that Anonymous' "first book also says that Anonymous 'trained as a professional historian specializing in the diplomatic history of the British Empire.' (p. 277)."

I'm told he is one of the few high ranking CIA people to have served in both the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence.

Wolfowitz on Chalabi. Testifying at the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted Tuesday that the Ahmed Chalabi's organization provided information that helped U.S. forces in Iraq, but conceded that some of the Iraqi politician's recent behavior was ``puzzling.''

Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, denied that Chalabi was ever a favorite of the Pentagon, as he has been widely described...

``There's a mixed picture there,'' he said. ``We know from our commanders that some of the intelligence that his organization has provided us has saved American lives and enabled us to capture some key enemy targets.''

Responding to questions from Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee's top Democrat, Wolfowitz would only say that many Iraqi exiles opposed to Saddam Hussein had contacts with Iran, Iraq's enemy in the 1980s.

``Nothing in Iraq is black and white. I don't think I know of any figure we're dealing with who hasn't had in one way or another to compromise with the incredibly difficult circumstances of the last 35 years of that country's history,'' Wolfowitz said. ``It's not surprising that many of them - and Chalabi's not the only one - made contacts with countries like Iran or Syria or others.''

Chalabi has blamed the CIA for his problems and denied wrongdoing. The CIA and Chalabi have been at odds for years.

``I am surprised that he seems to be the target, for many years, of particular animus from some parts of this government,'' Wolfowitz said. ``But on the other hand, there are aspects of his recent behavior that are puzzling to me.'' He did not elaborate on what those activities were.

Vast majority of Iraqis still alive, the Onion reports, via Eric Umansky.

Kim Sun II, who was killed today by his terrorist captors in Iraq, was, the Post reports:

an evangelical Christian who had majored in Arabic, English and theology with university scholarships. [Kim] was working as a translator for a private South Korean contractor providing clothes and food to the U.S. military in Iraq, hoping to save enough money to fulfill his dream of becoming a missionary, his family said. "How could it have come to this?" a distraught neighbor, in tears, shouted at reporters as she consoled Kim's parents. "How can we have faith in the world anymore?"

Seeing this news and the grim picture of his parents one feels the same. But it also makes one angry. Kim's terrorist captors are reportedly associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist the Bush administration failed to kill when it got the chance almost two years ago. Why has the Bush administration been so ineffective at targeting the real terrorists now flourishing in Iraq, since the war?

The facts speak for themselves. Iraq was not cooperating with al Qaeda or its offshoots like Zarqawi in a serious way before the war, certainly not to the degree that members of the Saudi and Pakistani security and intelligence services were. Zarqawi of course was mostly operating in northern Iraq, in terroritory under the control of the US no fly zone - a fact the Bush administration would like us not to remember. By any reading of the news, Iraq today must certainly rank the world HQ for Islamist radical terrorists, and is certainly one of the most insecure places in the world, a misery for its citizenry and foreign occupiers alike.

The State Department's radically revised numbers in its re-released Patterns of Global Terrorism report for the year 2003 make it impossible to show how much terrorism increased in Iraq itself in the year the US invaded and conducted a disatrous post-war turned-back-into-a-war. [And, ridiculously to my mind, the State Department keeps post-invasion Iraq in the list of "state sponsors of terrorism," even as Iraq by May 2003 was under US-led occupation and (incompetent, insecure) administration. Nevertheless, the graph here, of the Total International Attacks by Region, 1998-2003, shows the spike in the number of incidents of terrorism in the Middle East overall in the past five years. And do note that the State Department does not count attacks that wound and kill military personnel, including bombings of buildings and vehicles that kill US troops, for instance, reports of which we hear nearly daily from Iraq, as incidents of terror.

[Many thx to KD for explaining how to post graphics, and to DL for formatting suggestions.]

I think Daniel Pipes gets this wrong, but he's asking an interesting set of questions.

The Iranian government learned recently that American intelligence has deciphered its codes and can read its mail...Who is to blame for this development?...

[Perhaps] Chalabi did tell them that Washington had cracked the code. In which case:

· Perhaps he made this up and just happened to be right. (Plausible: Chalabi reportedly took steps in 1995 to trick the Iranians.)

· Or he thought he was providing disinformation but actually was telling the truth. (Unlikely: Too convoluted.)

· Or he knowingly divulged classified information. (Unlikely: Why should the Americans give Chalabi, a British subject known to be in close contact with the Iranian regime, a crown jewel of U.S. state secrets?)

Perhaps the question to ask is not, "Why should the Americans give Chalabi...a crown jewel of US state secrets?" as if it were a deliberate policy. But rather, how did one American without, presumably, authorized access, learn this information? Is what existed not a conspiracy, but more of an accident, born of a chaotic atmosphere that lacked the discipline of the home office? Of course, this theory would only explain how Chalabi allegedly might have learned the news, not why he allegedly passed it to the Iranians.

How right Matt Yglesias is, when he writes, regarding the al Qaeda-Iraq canard, that "Bush’s words may be semantically secure, but his intent has always been to mislead." Check it out.

Seems 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman may have his names mixed up. [Given that Lehman was apparently getting his information from allies of Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, what does this indicate about how scrupulous was the OSP's intelligence analysis? All those foreign names?]

This from the WaPo, via Atrios:

An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein's private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said yesterday.

Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda." Although he said the identity "still has to be confirmed," Lehman introduced the information on NBC's "Meet the Press" to counter a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."

Yesterday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar-sounding names.

One of them is Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, identified as an al Qaeda "fixer" in Malaysia. Officials say he served as an airport greeter for al Qaeda in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, at a gathering for members who were to be involved in the attacks on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Iraqi military documents, found last year, listed a similar name, Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, on a roster of Hussein's militia, Saddam's Fedayeen.

"By most reckoning that would be someone else" other than the airport greeter, said the administration official...He added that the identification issue is still being studied but "it doesn't look like a match to most analysts."

In an interview yesterday, Lehman said it is still possible the man in Kuala Lumpur was affiliated with Hussein, even if he isn't the man on the Fedayeen roster. "It's one more instance where this is an intriguing possibility that needs to be run to ground," Lehman said. "The most intriguing part of it is not whether or not he was in the Fedayeen, but whether or not the guy who attended Kuala Lumpur had any connections to Iraqi intelligence. . . . We don't know."

Still possible that Azzawi might, in the great scheme of probability in the universe, be affiliated with Iraqi intelligence? That would be the triumph of fantasy over probability. He might also be a billion other things. What does Lehman want Azzawi to be? Iraqi intelligence of course. Does that make it true? No.

Spencer Ackerman has more on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, [not to confuse matters, but that would seem to actually be the same identity as the Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col. described in the WaPo piece above, Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, who is not to be confused with Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, the al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia. For future reference, Ackerman refers to the Iraqi Fedayeen colonel in his post as "Shakir"].

But because he is working from the background on Shakir provided by the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, Spencer would seem to be repeating the mistake that Hayes and indeed Lehman made. Conflating the identity of Shakir the Iraqi, and Shakir Azzawi, the al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia.

Indeed, it is confusing. Good for Pincus for clearing it up.

Here's Newsday's Knut Royce's take:

The CIA concluded 'a long time ago' that an al-Qaida associate who met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia was not an officer in Saddam Hussein's army, as alleged Sunday by a Republican member of the 9/11 commission...

The claim that the Iraqi officer and al-Qaida figure are the same first appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial on May 27. A similar account was then published in the June 7 edition of the Weekly Standard, which reported that the link was discovered by an analyst working for a controversial Pentagon intelligence unit under Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

As correspondent R writes, "Did the OSP get *anything* right?"

Here's a handy guide:

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a.k.a. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad = Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col.

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi = al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir does not = Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi

Update: Spencer Ackerman points to this report by Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay on the issue of Shakir's identity, and it offers new information I hadn't seen in the other pieces: Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, the al Qaeda "greeter" in Kuala Lumpur, was an Iraqi, who "was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer."

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer as a "greeter" or "facilitator" for Arabic-speaking visitors at the airport at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In January 2000, he accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al-Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000.

There's no evidence that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir attended the meeting. Four days after it ended, he left Kuala Lumpur.

Several days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Qatar in possession of highly suspicious materials that appeared to link him with al-Qaida.

The Qataris inexplicably released him, and he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was arrested again. The Jordanians freed him under pressure from Iraq and Amnesty International, and he went to Baghdad.

That would seem to offer more credence to Lehman's suspicions. What's more, as Ackerman points out, twice, "This is something we probably can know. We have three individuals in custody who either were directly present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting or pulled its strings: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Kuala Lumpur attendees Khallad bin Attash and Yazid Sufaat."

If it's knowable, why don't we know it?

And finally, why in the world did Amesty International push for Ahmad Hikmat Shakir's release from Jordanian custody? After all, while people may be quibbling over whether he had any connection to the Iraqi security services, no one argues that he was not affiliated with al Qaeda.

Post Script: I think Ana Marie Cox gets this just about right.

More: Reader N writes Wednesday:

From what Amnesty said at the time, I don't think they 'pushed for his release' so much as asked the Jordanians for confirmation that he was being humanely treated and whether charges would be brought:

[See this Amnesty report.]

There's something a little bathetic about the final comments, given what we now appear to know, but in context it seems like form-letter stuff rather than, say, a protracted letter-writing campaign for a prisoner of conscience. So I think the K-R report, written well after the fact, overstates Amnesty's role here...

Thanks much for the letters.

William Safire is, true to form, out of control. He tries to portray the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda did not indeed engage in meaningful cooperation as the marginalized opinion of the commission's [Republican] staff director, Philip Zelikow, and says the commission's co-chairmen have walked back from that conclusion.

The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow. After Vice President Dick Cheney's outraged objection, the staff's sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton.

"Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?" Kean asked himself. "Yes . . . no question." Hamilton joined in: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections . . . we don't disagree with that" — just "no credible evidence" of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attack.

The Zelikow report was seized upon by John Kerry because it fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks (which, as Hamilton said yesterday, modifying his earlier "no credible evidence" judgment, was "not proven one way or the other.")

Excuse me. Safire is here saying not only that there is evidence of meaningful cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and not only that the 9/11 commissioners buy into that conclusion [contrary to everything they have been reported to have said on the matter, with the exception of commissioner John Lehman, whose brother Chris worked in the Office of Special Plans]. Safire is out there with the Laurie Mylroie die-hards saying that there is evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks. What's more, he's saying the 9/11 commissioners haven't ruled that out.

That more than contradicts what the commissioners themselves are reported saying, to say the least. From the Times Monday:

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, reiterated Sunday that the inquiry turned up no evidence that Iraq or its former leader, Saddam Hussein, had taken part "in any way in attacks on the United States."

But Mr. Kean said that conclusion, made public last week, did not put the commission at odds with the Bush administration's contention that links existed between the terrorist group Al Qaeda and Iraq.

In an interview on the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Kean said, "All of us understand that when you begin to use words like `relationship' and `ties' and `connections' and `contacts,' everybody has a little different definition with regard to those statements."

Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview on Friday that "the evidence is overwhelming" of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Asked if he had information that the commission did not have, he replied, "Probably."

Mr. Kean said Sunday that if such information exists, "we need it — and we need it pretty fast."

Any normal person who would read this would conclude, the 9/11 commission's chairman Thomas Kean is challenging Cheney and the Bush White House to hand over any 'evidence' they continue to cite that would support such out-there conclusions. That Kean does it in the diplomatic language that would allow the administration to save face while doing so is true to form. Kean has consistently, even while protesting the Bush White House's stonewalling of the commission, always been strategically polite in his public statements about the administration. What he could have said is "Cough it up, or shut up."

But Safire does something else insidious here, which is to portray the commission's conclusion to date as being the opinion of one person, the staff director, who Safire implies must be working for Bush 43's political opponents. What is Safire talking about? If Zelikow is not getting attacked by the left for his having served with Condoleezza Rice in the first Bush administration's National Security Council, he is getting attacked by the wing-nuts on the right like Safire for not endorsing their most conspiracy-minded fantasies. Safire the wordsmith needs to reacquaint himself with one word missing from his endless propagandizing on behalf of the Mylroie-conspiracy crowd, a five letter word beginning with "t."

Post Script: Another take on 'Cheney vs. the NYT.'

Israel and the Kurds. Seymour Hersh reports this week on Israel's development of a "Plan B" after concluding that the US had lost the post-war in Iraq: building up a covert alliance with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and with Kurdish groups in Iran and Syria as well. For what strategic purpose? To counter the strength of Iraq's Shiite majority and a potentially nuclear armed Iran in the near future.

Hersh reports:

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan...

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war.

The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do—penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey.”

The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way—as balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration.”

Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes.

For what it's worth, I too have heard reports from former American diplomats consulting in northern Iraq that Israel is behind the creation of a Kurdish central bank in Kurdish northern Iraq, of mysterious Israeli American advisors to Iraqi Kurdish leaders, of Israelis buying property located around southeastern Turkey's GAP dam, and other developments that would seem to give credence to this report.

But one contrary thought: it is quite clear that a significant part of the pro-Israel professional lobbying community in Washington is among Turkey's greatest supporters in Washington. Is this covert Sharon policy of backing the Kurds even to the point of separatism that is clearly so alienating to Turkey dividing those who count themselves among Israel's greatest supporters?

This leads to another observation which is probably obvious to those who cover Israel in more depth. The alienation of Israel's national security establishment from the Sharon government and Likud foreign policy, very similar to the alienation of the US national security establishment (CIA, State Department, elements of the uniformed military) from neocon policies and Bush foreign policy.

More on this all soon.

[Ed. note: this post has been revised.]

Zakaria, Anonymous, and the war on terror. Fareed Zakaria takes readers on a grim tour of Saudi Arabia on the brink, and asks if the country is doomed by the extremism its own political leaders have long cultivated.

The depth of this created culture of extremism is most evident regarding tolerance for non-Muslims...Even last week, as the regime was issuing fatwas against the killing of Paul Johnson, one could see forces that fueled his execution. A prominent cleric, Sheik Saleh bin Abdullah al-Humaid, explained that "killing a soul without justification is one of the gravest sins under Islam; it is as bad as polytheism." So polytheism is akin to murder? Is it any wonder that the leader of the recent terrorism in Khobar explained his killing of Westerners and Indians thusly: "We purged Muhammad's land of many Christians and polytheists"?

Why doesn't the regime take on the religious establishment more frontally? There is little danger that it would lose. Between state and mosque, there is really no contest. Every imam in the country is on the government's payroll...And yet the regime is extremely cautious about clipping the wings of these bureaucrats.

The key to the kingdom is not religion but politics. To understand why, you only have to drive through Riyadh, large parts of which are decaying, and then around the perimeter of the royal court. Rising on one side is an extension of the king's palace, a fantastical set of buildings, with a vast domed Renaissance extravaganza. When I commented on it, a government official nervously said to me, "Well, the French have Versailles." (I couldn't help but note, "Yes, and then they had a revolution.") Actually, Versailles doesn't capture it. Only Las Vegas compares...

But the reason corruption is so debilitating for Saudi Arabia today is this: the only way to effectively take on religious extremism—whether by terrorists or government clerics—is for the government to have its own source of credibility..."The fear is that if they take on the religious folk, the imams will stop preaching about infidels and start talking about decadence," said a journalist who asked not to be named.

That's from Part II of the Zakaria piece.

Meanwhile, over at Talking Points Memo, Imperial Hubris author Anonymous tells Spencer Ackerman something unexpected about why he thinks we're losing the war on terror, given his critique of the US's war in Iraq. We can't defeat Islamist extremist terrorists by engaging in a war of ideas, or by pushing for democratic reform in the Islamic world, Anonymous argues. We have to take them on with war, and with war with no political goal of democratization on the other side. Ackerman writes:

But Anonymous doesn't really consider it possible for the U.S. to answer bin Laden in a battle of ideas throughout the Islamic world: U.S. support for what many Muslims may see as unjust policies has drained us of our credibility, he argues. He combines that critique with a rejection of anything resembling democracy promotion...Insisting on democratic reform in the Muslim world then becomes naïve futility...

Without the option to work for reform, a large portion of what Anonymous advocates is essentially a policy of brutal and unforgiving war.

[From Imperial Hubris:]

To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing …

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. … [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

[Ackerman continues]: While military force will surely be necessary in the war on terrorism, a scorched-earth policy of warfare, especially in the age of Al Jazeera, seems tailored to play into Bin Laden’s arguments about U.S. desires to destroy Islam, to say nothing of transforming the U.S.'s war on terror into something resembling Russia's dirty war in Chechnya...I asked him about this.

ANONYMOUS: The war we need to conduct is simply to protect America. It's to stop the enemy, to have him cease and desist from attacking us. It is not--I hope it's not--to make them democratic, or to make them become libertarians or whatever...

Go read the interview. But I have to say, Anonymous' scorched earth, nihilist "final solution" to the crisis posed to western civilization by al Qaeda considerably weakens his other arguments in my eyes. That kind of uber-realism seems as morally bankrupt and of a type that generated some of the very Cold War policies that led to al Qaeda's emergence in the first place. I don't think this spook has the answers.

Iran has seized three British navy vessels and arrested eight British sailors, the BBC reports. A British Ministry of Defense spokesman says the British navy was "assisting the Iraqi water police in the area." So, is this some post IAEA meeting hard-ball?

Just out, at long last, my piece on why the Democrats are hesitant to embrace the issue of UN reform. It is subscription only, but here's the top.

The woman who knew too much....

What went wrong. An overall devastating Iraq report card on the eve of the handover by the Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran. But I found these observations among the most interesting:

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who want to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

...Over the course of the occupation, the relationship between the CPA and the military has become increasingly bitter. Soldiers have blamed civilians for not performing enough reconstruction to pacify the country, while civilians have blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding...

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

The piece goes on to offer reflections from Paul Bremer and other CPA officials on what went wrong.

Don't miss Spencer Ackerman's interview at Talking Points Memo with the anonymous US intelligence official who next month will release his second book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. [The book is also discussed here by Kevin Drum.] Ackerman interviewed Anonymous, a veteran intelligence official who's tracked radical Islamism going back to the 1980s, on the subject of the brutal killing of Paul Johnson by Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia yesterday, and what that event says about the US's war on terror. Don't miss it.

Laurie Mylroie, phone home.

The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.

"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said that, in particular, they wanted any information available to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either...

"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about."

Good to see the commission calling Cheney's bluff. Maybe they can duke it out on Meet the Press this Sunday.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a very interesting post on (what else?) Chalabi and the allegations of espionage for Iran....Here's the source she cites, Bruce Schneier at Cryptogram. They also both point to an earlier instance when the US had apparently broken Iran's communications codes. More on this later.

I've taken an interest in this company, Peninsula Investment Company SA. And in the fate of its former adminstrator, Tariq (or "Tarik") Mohsen and his wife Patricia Mohsen, who are Swiss nationals. Here's an interesting story about the Swiss subsidiary of a Saudi oil company, Delta Services SA, that they were involved in, that was outted recently as allegedly profitting from Saddam's oil for food program. But these folks are also very connected to people, I am told, who would be uncomfortable being revealed as benefitting from Saddam Hussein's regime.

From Friday's New York Times:

For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration's response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.

Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.

Intelligence failure. Lying defectors, defectors to the UK never interviewed by the CIA, mis-read satellite intelligence, the failure of allied intelligence services. Not a single high level intelligence source in Saddam's inner circle. Do we have reason to believe we're doing any better in Iran or North Korea? No. [Via Kevin Drum.]

Just had the second surreal meeting of the past eight days. This one involved drinking beer in the afternoon at Kramerbooks with the Iraqi National Congress's Washington advisor Francis Brooke, his wife Sharon, and my colleague Spencer Ackerman, of the New Republic. [Ackerman is guest blogging at Talking Points Memo this week while its boss slacks off on a tropical paradise somewhere.]

What was surreal about it? Well, Francis Brooke is an unusually open, pleasant and forthcoming person for someone whose long time political partner Ahmad Chalabi is facing US allegations of spying for Iran, and who himself is facing an Iraqi arrest warrant for allegedly obstructing the US-Iraqi raid on Dr. Chalabi's compound last month. Brooke says the charges are ridiculous, and he intends to return to Baghdad next week, surrounded by as many members of the US press corps and TV cameras as he can round up to accompany him. As Spencer points out, Brooke says his preferred route may have him flying to Tehran [to whom his boss Dr. Chalabi and his business partner, INC intelligence chief Aras Habib Kareem are accused of passing US intelligence] and then convoying into Baghdad. A provocation not lost on Brooke.

Brooke was telling me in some detail about the corporation he, Kareem, and US accountant Margaret Bartel, set up as a vehicle to receive first State Department and later Pentagon money to operate the Information Collection Program. [A "gentleman's agreement" between the Pentagon and them prevented them from previously discussing it much earlier - but Brooke promises much transparency about such mechanisms in the coming days. After all, their Pentagon funding runs out at the end of the month.] Brooke detailed for me the organization chart of the ICP, its funding mechanisms, number of agents and activities. He insists that the ICP's director Aras Habib Kareem, who has been reported to have fled to Tehran, is in fact in Iraq, although "he travels", and that Brooke has spoken by phone with Kareem more than once since the charges were brought against him. That Kareem has gone into hiding to evade an arrest warrant Brooke does not deny.

Brooke told me he was aware as early as March about the possible espionage charges coming down the pike [he first heard whispers of it from other journalists well briefed by US intelligence sources, shortly after Chalabi made another public visit to Tehran where he was greeted by a color guard, met with Khatami, Khamenei, and others]. Brooke is the first to admit that Chalabi and he himself have met with the Iranian intelligence official in charge of operations inside Iraq, Suleimani, to whom Chalabi is alleged to have passed the information that the US had broken the Iranian intelligence's communications code. [Brooke denies Chalabi passed any such intelligence to the Iranians, or indeed, that Chalabi even had access to sensitive US intelligence.] That Chalabi and Kareem had such liaison relationships is no secret, Brooke says, and indeed, was ostensibly part of what they were paid by the US to do. [The INC had such liaison relationships with many countries, Brooke asserts, including Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey.]

Brooke himself says he has talked with US intelligence officials who have parroted back to him recordings of conversations of his the NSA had "ping'ed."

He adamantly denies that Chalabi or Kareem would have been spies for Iran, I should point out. He also says that the INC's intelligence was so good that they knew days before the raid on Chalabi's compound that it was coming, informed their DIA colleagues to relocate, and stored elsewhere much of the sensitive information they had collected.

Brooke's cell phone rang from Baghdad throughout the meeting. He says he talks to Dr. Chalabi every day, who is doing very well. [He also revealed that NSC Iraq envoy Bob Blackwill lives across the street from him in Georgetown, and that Brooke has been disappointed in his performance in Iraq, as well as with Blackwill's memo on sidelining Chalabi.]

Brooke tells me that he hopes to finish up his work in Iraq soon, and to work in the future in the US, with perhaps the US government as his client. What would he like to do? Perhaps show them how to set up more innovative intelligence operations in other places on the cheap, as he feels he and the INC have done in Iraq. [He mentioned India-Pakistan, or Korea, as being places where Washington is desperately in need of more such HUMINT. We laugh over Iran.] He points out that US intelligence for all its budgets and heft had almost no human intelligence coming from Iraq except that provided by the INC, and that what the ICP managed to do for $340,000 a month, including helping enable the capture of Uday Hussein [who went to college at Baghdad University with fugitive INC intel chief Aras Habib Kareem, 36, Brooke says] and half of the 55 people on the US's most wanted list, shows what can be done with such an operation. [As for the three Iraqi defectors the INC provided to US intelligence who allegedly had information on Iraq WMD, Brooke went into some detail about two of them, can't remember the third, and I will report it out in a forthcoming piece.]

More soon.

Which Iraqi exile leader boasted of a powerful network inside Iraq that could overthrow Hussein that never materialized, coached defectors who provided bogus intelligence to the CIA, and is accused of having anti-democratic tendencies? Ahmad Chalabi, you say? How about Iyad Allawi, reports the NY Sun's Eli Lake.

"Rumsfeld ordered prisoner held off the books: Iraqi terror suspect hidden from International Red Cross," NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held “off the books” — hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else — in possible violation of international law.

It’s the first direct link between Rumsfeld and questionable though not violent treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

The Iraqi prisoner was captured last July...Shortly after the suspect’s capture, the CIA flew him to an undisclosed location outside Iraq for interrogation. But four months later the Justice Department suggested that holding him outside Iraq might be illegal, and the prisoner was returned to Iraq at the end of October.

That’s when Rumsfeld passed the order on to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep the prisoner locked up, but off the books.

And then what happened? The military forgot about the guy and seemed to have lost track of him! This important Ansar al Islam terrorist who Rumsfeld ordered had to be held off the books, because he had such potentially important intelligence information!

Once the prisoner was returned to Iraq, the interrogations ceased because the prisoner was entirely lost in the system.

Honestly no one accused Slobodan Milosevic of being incompetent, just brutal. But Rumsfeld -- should he be fired for incompetence or tried for war crimes?

Spencer Ackerman has figured out the dark secret about the so-called "independent" 9/11 commission...

The neocons are still in the saddle, undersecretary of defense Doug Feith taunts in a recent interview with the LA Times' Jacob Heilbrunn:

No doubt neoconservatives have been put on the defensive in recent months. When I met Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy, for an interview at his home recently, he was eager to discuss the attacks on him and his neoconservative associates. Sitting in his library surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East, Feith stated that his critics "are being shabby with the facts, cherry-picking evidence — doing things they're accusing us of."

But Feith was adamant in saying that the neoconservatives had not been sidelined. They remain influential, he said, and will remain so as long as ideas remain important in the administration. "Bush is not some empty vessel that we're pouring this stuff into. He's [been] underestimated the way critics underestimated Reagan."

Heilbrunn cites other evidence of the neocons holding on: chiefly, that none of them has been thrown overboard yet.

The truth is that, currently, the neocons are the only ones with any ideas in the administration. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell bridles at any drafts from his speechwriters that he considers too theoretical. Feith, by contrast, filled his office with neocon intellectuals.

So far, no neoconservative has been thrown overboard. Despite charges that his homemade intelligence network at the Pentagon relied on bogus intelligence from Chalabi, Feith remains firmly in place at the Defense Department. David Wurmser, the architect of the pro-Chalabi strategy, is Cheney's Middle East advisor now. Mark Lagon, a neoconservative who worked for Jeane Kirkpatrick, has been promoted at the State Department. A host of younger neocons remains embedded in other agencies.

Embedded, huh? Talk about needing James Jesus Angleton to smoke 'em out.

I do think Heilbrunn makes a good point. While the neocons may not be the only ones with interesting foreign policy ideas, it's not like they are getting much competition from the leading Democrats. John Kerry could do a better job of articulating a broad foreign policy vision...

Heilbrunn predicts, if Bush loses, a blood bath within the right, with conservatives gaining prominence over the neocons. But if Bush wins? Syria and Iran are next, Heilbrunn predicts, and Lord help us, John "Cuba has a biological weapons program" Bolton may be the next head of the CIA.

Addendum: I am not sure I agree with Heilbrunn that the neocons are not in trouble within the administration. Richard Perle was thrown overboard, more or less, in February. It is highly unlikely Feith or Wolfowitz would be promoted in any Bush II administration, or even be retained. The ousting of Chalabi does seem to indicate a shifting of gravity within the administration, benefiting pragmatists at State and CIA over Chalabi's neocon supporters in the Pentagon, and the office of the Vice President. And while the neocons might have dreamed of pursuing wider regime change in Syria and Iran, where would the US troop strength come from? And is there any sense the US public or the Congress would be able to be brought along this time, with the amazing discontent with the administration's conduct of the Iraq post-war? And mistrust of the administration's credibility on intelligence issues? [I don't believe Tenet's resignation had much to do with l'affaire Chalabi, it's been coming down the pike for months.]

Post-Script: Don't miss the priceless description, above, of Feith in his library, "surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East." No doubt, most of them by Bernard Lewis.

I really like this blog, Belgravia Dispatch. Must be because of its author's many years in the former Yugoslavia.

No Prague Meeting. Here's one more neocon/Cheney canard the blessed independent 9/11 commission puts to rest: Mohammad Atta never met with any Iraqi agent in Prague. This from MSNBC:

Hijacker never met with Iraqi agent:

In a second report released Wednesday, the commission staff said that Mohamed Atta, the pilot of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center and leader of the 19 hijackers, never met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic. That purported meeting also has been cited as evidence of a possible al-Qaida connection to Iraq.

“We do not believe that such a meeting occurred,” the report said.

Matt Yglesias is right. Dick Gephardt is a terrible choice for Kerry's running mate. Now, a question: Matt has about three posts a day over at Tapped, several posts a day on his own site, and about two articles a week at the Prospect. So, when does Matt sleep? Are we sure there is only one of him?

Commissioner Tim Roemer just asked US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is testifying at the 9/11 commission, if he has anything to say about the Plame investigation. I'm listening on the radio so couldn't see Fitzgerald's reaction, but everybody laughed. Nice try, Tim!

Over at Slate, journalist Alan Berlow says White House counsel Alberto Gonzales has been torturing international law for a long time; first in Texas, where as legal advisor to then Gov. Bush, Gonzales created legal justifications for the state of Texas killing foreign nationals on death row.

Berlow writes:

Although the president said he's only approved actions consistent with U.S. and international law, that hasn't settled the matter because the main thrust of the memos crafted by Gonzales as well as Justice, Defense, and intelligence agency lawyers, seems to have been to come up with justifications for torture within the law...

The president also said he couldn't remember if he'd seen legal opinions written by Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers. But it may prove more difficult for him to deny having seen a January 2002 "Memorandum for the President" in which Gonzales argued that the Geneva Conventions were "obsolete" and that by disregarding them the administration would substantially reduce its vulnerability to "criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," which he noted could incur a death sentence.

Curiously, it was in his role as legal counsel to then-Gov. Bush that Gonzales penned yet another memo pertaining to international law, only in that case his advice was designed not to avoid death sentences, but rather to expedite them on Texas' heavily populated death row. On June 16, 1997, Gonzales first showcased his proclivity for torturing international law when he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that, "Since the State of Texas is not a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, we believe it is inappropriate to ask Texas to determine whether a breach … occurred in connection with the arrest and conviction" of a Mexican national. Or, put another way, he asserted that an international treaty just didn't apply to Texas.

Look where compassionate conservatism got us.

No link or meaningful cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda, the 9/11 commission reports. Someone tell Dick Cheney.

In fact, bin Laden explored using Saddam's Iraq for training camps, but Saddam "never responded."

This from the AP:

In a report released this morning and based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader's secular regime.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, the panel found, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

Here's the .pdf of the 9/11 commission staff report released today, "Overview of the Enemy." Here's the text version of the report.

Here's the "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," commission staff report No. 16, in .pdf format. Here's the text version, thanks to MSNBC. Very interesting. The commission got to question Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the plot mastermind, and review other US government agencies' interviews with him. Among other interesting facts uncovered, was that the 9/11 plan was originally to involve more pilots, more planes, and more targets:

As originally envisioned, the 9/11 plot involved even more extensive attacks than those carried out on September 11. KSM maintains that his initial proposal involved hijacking ten planes to attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States. He claims that, in addition to the targets actually hit on 9/11, these hijacked planes were to be crashed into CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State. The centerpiece of his original proposal was the tenth plane, which he would have piloted himself. Rather than crashing the plane into a target, he would have killed every adult male passenger, contacted the media from the air, and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport. He says he then would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers.

KSM concedes that this ambitious proposal initially received only a lukewarm response from the al Qaeda leadership in view of the proposal’s scale and complexity. When Bin Ladin finally approved the operation, he scrapped the idea of using one of the hijacked planes to make a public statement but provided KSM with four operatives, only two of whom ultimately would participate in the 9/11 attacks...

According to KSM, al Qaeda intended to use 25 or 26 hijackers for the 9/11 plot, as opposed to the 19 who actually participated. Even as late as the summer of 2001, KSM wanted to send as many operatives as possible to the United States in order to increase the chances for successful attacks, contemplating as many as seven or more hijackers per flight. We have identified at least nine candidate hijackers slated to be part of the 9/11 attacks at one time or another...

Also very interesting, and very tragic too, that the commission uncovered, is the fact that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, part of the "Hamburg Group," seemed to seriously consider dropping out of the plot, in large part because of his attachment to his Turkish girlfriend in Germany [Two others who KSM originally identified for the plots were prevented from participating by their families in Saudi Arabia, the commission found]. KSM was preparing to replace Jarrah with Zacarias Moussaoui, the commission believes, if need be. But ultimately, Jarrah decided, or was coerced, to proceed with the suicide attacks.

Wolfie's in Baghdad, correspondent J writes. Why don't they just keep him, he asks.

Interesting that Wolfowitz met today with, among those you would expect, Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah Hassan al-Nakib. That was the agency to which the eight DynCorp contractors who participated in the raid on Chalabi's home last month said they were assigned.

The coming reports. The CIA is trying to suppress publication of up to 40% of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war intelligence blunders, according to the NYT.

The Central Intelligence Agency has ruled that large portions of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that is highly critical of the agency includes material too sensitive to be released to the public, Congressional and intelligence officials said Tuesday.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the material in a 400-page report was deleted by the C.I.A. in a version that was returned to the committee on Monday as approved for public release, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the 9/11 commission, which holds its last hearings today and tomorrow, featuring among others US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald who also happens to be heading the Valerie Plame investigation, has concluded the 9/11 hijackers were originally planning their attacks for May or June 2001. They were reportedly delayed because ringleader Mohammad Atta wasn't ready, the Post reports.

Bush and war crimes, by William Pfaff.

Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.

Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

...The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions ... were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed.

Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities.

High U.S. administration figures reportedly lingered - with delectation? - over what exactly was to be done to the unfortunate prisoners - for how long, in what position, with what pain inflicted...

And when all this began to come out, what did the administration have to say? The president said on May 24 that "a few American troops ... disregarded our values." Civilians in the Pentagon, speaking informally to the press, blamed the Abu Ghraib scandals on "a few hillbillies."

. . .This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil.

[Via Atrios.]

Meantime, WaPo editorial writer Anne Applebaum says political will is draining from the Hill to fully connect the dots linking the White House to the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and beyond.

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it...

They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it ... Unfortunately, Congress has no real motive to find the answer either. After a bit of obligatory spluttering, the House has gone silent... Meanwhile, Sen. John Warner's Armed Services Committee, conducting the only active investigation on Capitol Hill, is moving at a leisurely pace...

If the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all. Edmund Burke, a conservative philosopher, wrote, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

The Post house editorial also says torture was the policy of the Bush White House:

SLOWLY, AND IN spite of systematic stonewalling by the Bush administration, it is becoming clearer why a group of military guards at Abu Ghraib prison tortured Iraqis in the ways depicted in those infamous photographs. President Bush and his spokesmen shamefully cling to the myth that the guards were rogues acting on their own. Yet over the past month we have learned that much of what the guards did -- from threatening prisoners with dogs, to stripping them naked, to forcing them to wear women's underwear -- had been practiced at U.S. military prisons elsewhere in the world. Moreover, most of these techniques were sanctioned by senior U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Iraqi theater command under Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.

The Post calls on the Senate to pass an "amendment to the defense authorization bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), [that] would reaffirm the commitment of the United States not to engage in torture, and it would require the defense secretary to provide Congress with guidelines ensuring compliance with this standard."

At the very least. But what about trials of Bush and Rumsfeld on war crimes? How can this just remain a matter for editorial writers?

A couple days back, Salon ran a very interesting interview with intelligence historian and author, Thomas Powers. Powers is the author of the newly released Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Powers describes in the interview the Bush administration conducting a virtual coup against US government agencies, particularly the intelligence community, in its efforts to mobilize the US to invade Iraq.

Salon: It seems like there has almost never been direct acknowledgement by the White House of any policy problems.

Powers: Yes, but they've done something else which troubles me more than anything. They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.

President Bush used the intelligence system as a blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along -- the Congress was in an almost impossible position. When the president uses the maximum power of his own office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta listen to the guy. At least once.

Worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Powers' book is being released at the same time as James Bamford's A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, described below, which sounds to offer a very similar analysis.

Looks like John Ashcroft has at least one friend in his Paranoia tree house club.

Check out Bob Dreyfuss' "Investigation Summer" post today at TomPaine. Between the FBI Valerie Plame investigation, the forthcoming 9/11 commission report, the Senate Select Intelligence committee report on pre-war intelligence, the multiple counterintelligence investigations of who leaked US intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, and multiple panels investigating the Abu Ghraib abuse, it looks set to be a summer of non stop revelations of Bush administration scandal. As Bob Dreyfuss writes, "John Kerry, who specialized in investigations in the Senate . . .must be marveling at the irony: official investigators are going to help elect him this summer."

This is so unbelievably disturbing. I cannot believe this is my country. Via Salon. Between Ashcroft permitting torture and deporting British journalists, . . . he really should spend some time in a totalitarian prison. Will 60 Minutes please do a story on this?

Halliburton's sweetheart deal. It's becoming pretty obvious that the office of undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith consulted with the office of vice president Cheney before secretly awarding Halliburton an uncontested $1.9 million contract to develop secret plans for Iraq's oil industry back in October 2002. [The first contract helped make way for Halliburton to be positioned to receive more than $2.4 billion in US-government-funded Iraq oil contracts later on.] As the NYT reports today:

In the fall of 2002, in the preparations for possible war with Iraq, the Pentagon sought and received the assent of senior Bush administration officials, including the vice president's chief of staff, before hiring the Halliburton Company to develop secr