Must read.

Time's Massimo Calabresi on administration officials learning of Wilson's wife's employment weeks before Wilson's July 6 oped:

...When Pincus' article ran on June 12, the circle of senior officials who knew about the identity of Wilson's wife expanded. "After Pincus," a former intelligence officer says, "there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others" about Wilson's trip and its origins. A source familiar with the memo says neither Powell nor Armitage spoke to the White House about it until after July 6. John McLaughlin, then deputy head of the CIA, confirms that the White House asked about the Wilson trip, but can't remember exactly when. One thing he's sure of, says McLaughlin, who has been interviewed by prosecutors, is that "we looked into it and found the facts of it, and passed it on."

It's commonplace among post-conflict peacebuilding experts to hear about the advantages of the way the British tend to conduct those operations compared to the American approach. Even in Bosnia and Kosovo where the security situation on the ground has been far more pacific than in Iraq, the British tend to walk the streets in two person patrols, while the US has in these situations tended to get hung up on force protection issues, moved around in large convoys, required troops to wear helmets and body armor, etc. So this oped in the NYT today about the British perhaps being too cool in Basra is interesting. The issue, their allegedly turning a blind eye to the penetration of the Iraqi police and security services by Iraqis loyal to hardline Shiite clerics like Moqtada al Sadr, and suggestion that some Iraqi police in the British sector have participated in sectarian killings ordered by the clerics they have vowed loyalty to. But this oped implies without saying as much that, by contrast, US troops are actively weeding out those Iraqi forces who are loyal to Shiite organizations from their sectors, which I haven't read anything about.

Condoleezza Rice at six months, here and here.

I don't know, getting kicked out of the Uzbekistan air base seems like it could be a wonderful opportunity for the US to get some clarity on the political situation there. I frankly don't see how greater instability in Afghanistan or further antagonizing Washington is good for Karimov, but he has asked to find out.

Bolton to get recess appointment. Writes reader J, "You put aside all of the other allegations and just focus on this most recent fact -- he lied to the Congress. Seven years ago, we impeached a President because he lied about a sexual act. Now, the Republican White House doesn't even bat an eye on recess appointing someone with contempt for the legislative branch."

Silver lining? Well, his term has an expiration date of a year and a half.

Bush administration ambassadorships are apparently for sale for a standard fee -- $100,000 to $300,000 in Bush fundraising.

GOP -- the "no accountability" party.

This latest Bloomberg piece has a few details on a State-CIA Inspector General investigation of the Niger docs fiasco. Was the IG investigation really requested by Roberts and Rockefeller? That's what I find most astonishing. Also because apparently Congressman Waxman was told he couldn't see it, as I remember.

Italian authorities have reportedly arrested the fourth London bombing suspect in Rome.

Spencer Ackerman:

...So, yes, an Iraqi civil war--which could be as bad as, or even worse than, Lebanon's civil war--really is the end of the debate about whether the decision to invade Iraq was justified....Sure, something would follow a civil war, but our enterprise won't and shouldn't be judged by that far-distant outcome. Instead, it should be judged by the path that led, under U.S. auspices, to widespread sectarian violence.

Also worth reading, what happens when the true believers stop believing?

Anonymous US embassy staffer in Baghdad recognized for his/her dedication, Al Kamen reports:

The State Department this week announced the winner of its annual Foreign Service National Employee of the Year award for 2005. And the winner is -- drum roll -- someone "from American Embassy Baghdad," the announcement said, "and for security reasons will remain anonymous."

The announcement explains why the "awardee," let's call him Mr. Anon , was selected from among the many thousands of non-American employees at embassies around the world. For example, "he helped to retain most of the [embassy] staff despite numerous death threats leveled against them." Anon's "life was at risk night and day," he had "many close calls personally and several friends were slain."

If that's not enough, "after a suicide bomber detonated [a] device within five yards of the dining table," the announcement says, Anon "limped in to the embassy and continued working despite suffering from shock and severe hearing loss. When a colleague was assassinated" and his U.S. supervisor sent home the following day, Anon "vowed to work 'even if no one was left.' "

And when the delegates to the Iraqi National Assembly met at a Baghdad hotel, he was "trapped in the elevator when a rocket slammed into the hotel," we're told. "Later that day, a Gurkha security guard standing a few feet away was struck in the head by shrapnel from an exploding mortar round," and Anon provided first aid...

Two London bomber suspects arrested. More. And a US fatwa against terrorism.

Judith Shulevitz muses from Jerusalem on the joys and panic of a day when all the stores are closed. And Alain Eklann's musings from Rome.

Rick Perlstein on a plan for Dems.

Stygius has the latest on Biden's questions about whether Bolton disclosed to the Senate Foreign Relations committee as required his being interviewed by various investigators. More here and here: "John R. Bolton...failed to tell the Senate during his confirmation hearings that he had been interviewed by the State Department's inspector general looking into how American intelligence agencies came to rely on fabricated reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa, the State Department said Thursday...

The latest disclosure about Mr. Bolton came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strongly hinted that President Bush would bypass the Senate when Congress adjourns this weekend and temporarily appoint Mr. Bolton to the United Nations post. Another Republican official said Mr. Bush could name Mr. Bolton as early a next week."

This is painful to read. Also interesting to note at the end, which Senator is reaching out to Iraqi war victims. For those who've read of Marla Ruzicka's work, this seems to be inspired by her.

A third administration source on Plame, not a 'partisan gun-slinger'....who? Hadley?

The WaPo has the latest on the Plame leak investigation. Senate Intelligence committee chair Pat Roberts may not be interested in administration influence on pre-war intelligence misstatements, but Fitzgerald apparently is:

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

Maybe the Senate Select Intelligence committee would like to outsource such investigations in the future to Justice Department prosecutors, if they are too busy or predisposed to do it themselves? Check out the Boston Globe's latest on Robert's efforts to free up committee time from such an investigation and devote it instead to exploring the nuances of why some CIA officers deserve less protection from being outted by US government officials than others.

Kevin Drum is spot on here:

...Until Patrick Fitzgerald finishes his investigation, we won't know everything that really happened here. In fact, we still might not know even then. But we've learned one thing already: when presented with even a hint of evidence that someone on their team has treated national security with cavalier disdain, conservative concern with national security gets thrown overboard without a second thought. Dealing with Plamegate as a factual matter — did someone in the White House expose Valerie Plame's identity to reporters? — is no longer acceptable, because, after all, when facts are involved, there's a chance they can turn against you.

Instead, for most conservatives, Plamegate has now turned into the public relations task of convincing the public that even if Rove did out Plame, outing a covert CIA agent is a perfectly acceptable thing for a White House aide to do.

Welcome to the modern Republican Party.

I confess, I haven't read What's the Matter with Kansas. As a former Kansan with aspirations of covering some aspects of political life, it's an inexplicable oversight. So prefaced by that disclaimer, I have through sheer osmosis picked up what the basic gist of it is, and this discussion on it led by its author today is interesting, mostly for Tom Frank's reasons for focusing on that subject, that social geography. I will say that my own observation upon periodic returns to Kansas is that Kansans don't vote Republican for economic reasons, but for the culture-war stuff, and that the transformation from moderate conservatism (think Nancy Landon Kassebaum, or her father, even Bob Dole) to ultra conservatism (think Sam Brownback or Pat Roberts) Frank writes of is not explained by economics. I think the phenonemon has more to do with the growing political organizing and involvement and savvy of the Christian far right, in particular in the Bible Belt, over the past fifteen years than anything else. A transformation Kansas has experienced in a big way. In short, the Christian far right very savvily runs someone for every single vacant seat, every primary, dog catcher, school board, you name it, again and again, whereas nobody I know from high school in moderate Johnson County is running for anything. [One person I know ran for Congress from Kansas City, Missouri, but that is a totally different ballgame politically, urban and Democratic.] One demonstration that the change is about 'values' issues is the recent cases that have seized Kansas since Christian conservatives won majorities in various state bodies, including the decision of the Kansas school board voting, twice now, to not require the teaching of evolution in the schools, a new proposal that would ban gay people from adopting, and other such imposition of religious values on public life. What's the matter with Kansas? It's a story of what's the matter with moderates not paying attention to the political organizing of the Christian right. One group that is doing work trying to mobilize Kansas moderates including church groups to promote tolerance and become more politically engaged as the far Christian right is the Mainstream Coalition...

Update: The corollary to my observations is that economic issues are neither the cause nor the solution to Kansans' representation by increasingly Christian conservative politicians. I think the answer is actually engaging and mobilizing Kansas' silent majority of moderate conservatives, and that the place for that largely to be played out is in (mostly Republican) primaries.

As a colleague just reminded me, the Next Hurrah has some great coverage of the Plame leak investigation, esp. blogger Empty Wheel. More on the investigation here and here, via Romenesko.

Armstrong: Vive the Tour, forever, goodbye.

On Face the Nation today (.pdf document linked), Alberto Gonzales said that he told Andy Card about the Justice Department investigation of the Plame leak at 8pm, and they determined not to notify White House staff to preserve all relevant documents until the next morning. Biden on the same program said, the normal thing to do would be to send out an email immediately, given that all White House staff carry Blackberries, etc. Frank Rich moved the issue forward in an interesting way overnight. More from the WaPo's Dafna Linzer.

Over at the Left Coaster, eRiposte is sifting through all the published reports on the Niger uranium claims.

NYT's John Burns:

One measure of the doubts afflicting American officials here has been a hedging in the upbeat military assessments that generals usually offer, coupled with a resort to statistics carefully groomed to show progress in curbing the insurgents that seems divorced from realities on the ground. One example of the new "metrics" has been a rush of figures on the buildup of Iraq's army and police force - a program known to many reporters who have been embedded on joint operations as one beset by inadequate training, poor leadership, inadequate weaponry and poor morale.

Officers involved in running the program offer impressive-sounding figures - including the fact that, by mid-June, the Iraqi forces had been given 306 million rounds of ammunition, roughly 12 bullets for each of Iraq's 25 million people. But when one senior American officer involved was asked whether the Americans might end up arming the Iraqis for a civil war, he paused for a moment, then nodded. "Maybe," he said.

How awful.

Fitzgerald surprised to learn Rove was Cooper's first source on Plame, the WaPo reports.

Worth reading at DailyKos, this and this.

Just when you're not paying attention for one second, look what happens. Cheney's office orders war plans to bomb another country! Well, as I've said before, a plan is not the same thing as a policy decision. I would be more surprised if we were to learn that the US has no such contingency plan for Iran. But still....

Does this hint at an explanation for Bandar's retirement? Update: Guess not. It has to do with (what else?) the State Department Wilson memo. More here.

Here we go. This NYT piece on the Plame leak case suggests that Rove and Libby may have been the White House officials involved in pushing back on Wilson to reporters, because they were simultaneously working on a PR effort to climb down from the 16 words in President Bush's State of the Union address on the uranium in Africa claim:

People who have been briefed on the case said that the White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr., were helping to prepare what became the administration's primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been included in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address six months earlier.

They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president's political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.

At the same time, they were grappling with the fallout from an Op-Ed article on July 6, 2003, in The New York Times by Mr. Wilson, a former diplomat, in which he criticized the way the administration had used intelligence to support the claim in Mr. Bush's speech.

The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement, during this intense period, had not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed the critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose his the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president's address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.

The special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has been examining this period of time to determine whether the officials' work on the Tenet statement led in some way to the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, according to the people who have been briefed.

It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected about Ms. Wilson as they worked on the Tenet statement.

The effort was particularly striking because to an unusual degree, the circle of administration officials involved included those from the White House's political and national security operations, which are often separately run. Both arms were drawn into the effort to defend the administration during the period.

The fusing of the WH's political, PR and national security operations is one of the most striking characteristics of this administration's post 9/11 behavior, and emerging as a real subtheme of this investigation. This accompanying NYT graphic is helpful.

Update: This is interesting too from the NYT piece:

In his disclosure form for his confirmation hearings, Mr. Bolton made no mention of being interviewed in the case, a government official said. In the week after Mr. Wilson's article appeared, Mr. Bolton attended a conference in Australia.

Democracy Arsenal's Lorelei Kelly has a post worth reading on Democrats and framing, inspired by Matt Bai's recent NYT cover story on George Lakoff.

What does it say about the thugs who run Khartoum that they roughed up members of the US delegation accompanying Sec. Rice? Update: This account is even more outrageous. More here.

London....copy cat attacks? It's miserable. Update: Possible suspect tracked to hospital.

Congressman Curt Weldon (R-Penn) went to meet his Iranian intel source in Paris over the weekend, and he brought with him an interesting guest: chair of the House intelligence committee, Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich). Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel reports.

More details on the State Department Niger/Wilson memo.

Foreign Policy Visionary to the Rescue. Via Tapped's Mark Goldberg, I see what my friend Ari Berman of The Nation had heard weeks ago, but on double super secret background. The Chicago Tribune reports that Illinois Senator Barack Obama has hired Pulitzer prize-winning human rights activist extraordinaire Samantha Power as his foreign policy advisor. Folks, a reason to live. I truly believe before we become dust that we'll see Obama as our president and with Power as his foreign policy advisor, it signals that he has the kind of foreign policy inclinations that would unite Americans behind a vision where human rights and genocide prevention are front and center of perceived national security interests. Wish them success.

I'm with Howard Gardner. Why Boston NPR affiliate WBUR would kill The Connection is utterly baffling. It's by far the best affiliate-produced NPR current affairs talk show, and living in Boston when Chris Lydon was its host it was world class, riveting, newsy, the talk of the town; even with his successor Dick Gordon, it had no rivals, esp. from the rest of 'BUR's local programming. I'm baffled. Only good news I hear from Boston friends is that Lydon finally has his own radio show again, Open Source, from WGBH/PRI.

On the eve of Gaza disengagement, reporter Rebecca Sinderbrand has a week of dispatches over at Slate on the American Christian evangelicals teaming up with an Israeli MP opposed to Gaza withdrawal, Israeli tourism minister Benny Elon:

Elon, along with about a dozen other elected officials spanning the political spectrum, is a member of the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus. In less than a year, the caucus—the only Israeli government body whose business is conducted entirely in English—has become an institution here...So far this year, the government has handed evangelicals their own plot of land near the Sea of Galilee, started a special outreach program to shore up support for Israel in African-American churches, and planned the committee's first stateside conference for American sympathizers in Fort Worth this September...

But Elon has spent years trying to marshal evangelical influence on thorny foreign-policy questions. His new book includes a pledge for believers to sign in support of Jewish control of Judea and Samaria—what he calls the "heartland of Israel." Evangelical heavyweights like Kay Arthur and Glenn Plummer signed the pledge earlier this year, when Elon made the rounds at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. A flood of believers followed their lead. "We have thousands of signatures already. We want millions. Then a congressional bill," says Elon.

This sort of vision has been a right-wing dream here for years...Meanwhile, Elon, like many anti-disengagement organizers here, is already starting to look past Aug. 17, the day the government starts evicting the remaining Gaza settlers. "The people I speak with in American churches, they are all against the withdrawal. They don't understand it. So, I'm trying to build, with patience, because we'll be back. In six or seven years, we'll be in Samaria again. … I don't think this is the end."

If he can maintain his current level of stateside success, says Elon, "Within two years, at least 200 representatives in America will understand that, for their constituents, Israel's claim to Judea and Samaria is non-negotiable. The Israeli prime minister will be able to visit America knowing that half of Congress understands this issue from our perspective. That is how I define success." ...

Go read Lindsay Beyerstein on a new draft Iraq constitution that would effectively make half of Iraq's population second class citizens in the small matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other individual matters. Under the current draft, for instance, women's court testimony would be worth only half that of men, and women could inherit only half as much money as their brothers. Sort of like in neighboring Iran. As Beyerstein asks, is this an achievement American troops should be risking their lives for? More from Suzanne Nossel.

Saudi Arabia's Aspen loving long time DC ambassador Prince Bandar quits. What's the back story here?

More on Seymour Hersh's Iraq elections piece from Eric Umansky and Democracy Arsenal's Michael Signer. As I wrote over in a comment there, given that the piece is also about the allegation that the Bush administration is increasingly moving delicate foreign policy decisions off the books, and evading Congressional reporting requirements, I am a bit astonished it hasn't generated more public comment, including in the blogosphere. Writes Hersh:

In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administration’s increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders.

Thoughts?

Friday Update: More from Eric Umansky.

Fun City, Baghdad. A sad little portrait of Iraq families trying to give their kids a bit of reprieve from the car bombings and kidnappings and power outages at a Baghdad amusement park.

Nice Murray Waas scoop.

Did St. Louis execute the wrong man?

Via Tapped's Mark Goldberg, I see that Smith College professor and noted Darfur expert Eric Reeves is blogging about Darfur all week at TNR's &c.. For those of us who don't follow the crisis there day to day, I am finding its brief summaries of how it started, the current humanitarian crisis, and other recent posts helpful as a primer.

Charles Pierce on his encounter with a double-super-secret source.

Kurt Anderson in Aspen:

...I neither loved nor hated Clinton when he was in office, but I have to say, watching him onstage in Aspen, I was, like the rest of the audience, staggered by his display of the virtues his successor so manifestly lacks—detailed knowledge, lucidity, intellectual agility, easy humor, comfort in his own skin.

Is it corny or pointless to wish we had a president like that? Or like Colin Powell? They are wise men. Their equally nonideological raps were of a piece with the event’s prevailing spirit of nuance, candor, dignity, and sober-sided uncertainty. One could imagine, in the clear, dry air of Aspen, that informative, even constructive discussion and debate is not an impossible artifact of a bygone age.

Excellent Jonathan Alter column on Rove/Plame, and the cost of Rove's treating every national security issue as fair game for politicking.

New tidbits from the LAT:

Activities aboard Air Force One are also of interest to prosecutors — including the possible distribution of a State Department memo that mentioned Wilson's wife. Prosecutors are seeking to find out whether anyone who saw the memo learned Plame's identity and passed the information to journalists. Telephone logs from the presidential aircraft have been subpoenaed. Among those aboard was former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who has testified.

One of the sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday that prosecutors had obtained a White House call sheet showing that Novak left a message for Fleischer the day after Wilson's op-ed article appeared and the day Fleischer left with the president for Africa. Fleischer declined to comment for this article but has flatly denied being the source of the leak.

Wilson said in an interview Saturday he had known that Novak was interested in him a week or so before the column appeared. He said a friend who saw Novak on the street reported that Novak told him, "Wilson is an asshole and his wife works for the CIA."

As for the intensity of White House interest in him after the column, Wilson said: "I am sorry that 6,900 American soldiers have been injured and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and injured all because these guys sent us to war under false pretenses."

Wilson speculated in a book he wrote last year that it was Libby who was "responsible for exposing my wife's identity." Libby has indicated to investigators that he learned the identity of Plame from journalists.

Rove has told investigators the same, although a person familiar with his testimony said that the possibility that Rove learned the information from the journalists indirectly — possibly even through Libby — could not be ruled out. The person said Rove simply had no firm recollection.

There have been other indications of a concerted White House action against Wilson. Two days before Novak's column, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus was told by an "administration official" that the White House was not putting much stock in the Wilson trip to Africa because it was "set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction," according to an account of the conversation Pincus wrote for this summer's Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Pincus discussed the substance of the conversation with prosecutor Fitzgerald last fall under an arrangement where Pincus did not have to tell Fitzgerald who the administration source was.

And Fleischer also seemed attuned to a strategy of discrediting Wilson. Two days before Novak revealed Plame's identity, Fleischer questioned the former envoy's findings in remarks to reporters during a trip with Bush in Africa.

The transcript of that press gaggle (the term for an informal question-and-answer between reporters and the White House spokesman), which took place in the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria, has been requested by the prosecutors.

Seymour Hersh's "Get Out the Vote," subtitle: 'Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq’s election?' Read the whole thing, which peels through several layers of various plans to try to help out Allawi and prevent Iranian-backed Shiite parties from taking the store. This is a key graph:

In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administration’s increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders.

Update: Reaction to the Hersh piece from the WaPo's Dafna Linzer and a previous Times' report discussed here.
Reports Linzer:

...A U.S. official who was heavily involved in preparing for the vote said U.S. officials ultimately offered a variety of less organized Iraqi parties support in the form of "cell phones, printing billboards and pamphlets and poster bills advertising the electoral choices. That is what we eventually opted for, and the truth is, the effort ended up not helping the parties that we wanted to help most."

Larry Diamond of Stanford University, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation, said he urged the White House a year before the vote to "set up a transparent election fund to help not just Allawi, but a lot of parties that weren't being helped by the Iranians."

Diamond, whose book, "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq," was recently published, said he did not know how the administration handled the issue in the end.

"But I don't think we can simply take the administration's word for it. I think we need an independent congressional investigation to find out what really happened," he said.

Diamond said that details revealed in the New Yorker article would likely cause "significant damage to us and our credibility in Iraq. I also think it will do damage to Allawi because it will further the impression of Allawi as a U.S. agent and a U.S. pawn." Allawi was not reachable to comment, and much of the new Iraqi leadership was in Iran for a state visit...

Correspondent WA notes the irony of the last line, which echoes Hersh's own.

Jailed Iranian dissident writer Akbar Ganji is near death, the NY Sun reports based on interviews with sources in Iran. More here.

This Newsweek article on Rove moves some new information to the fore:

...In May, the State Department's intelligence unit had prepared a secret memorandum about the provenance of Wilson's journey and its classified results—including the curious fact that Wilson's wife, a CIA agent then working on weapons of mass destruction issues, had been involved in planning the mission, and had even suggested that her husband undertake it. Still, there had been no cause to criticize Wilson—let alone mention his wife.

But then Wilson went public. Some prominent administration officials scurried for cover. Traveling in Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had long harbored doubts, disowned the "sixteen words" about Niger that had ended up in Bush's prewar State of the Union speech. So did CIA Director George Tenet, who said they shouldn't have been in the text. But Cheney—who tended never to give an inch on any topic—held firm. And so, therefore, did Rove, who sometimes referred to the vice president as "Leadership." Rove took foreign-policy cues from the pro-war coterie that surrounded the vice president, and was personally and operationally close to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Soon enough, Rove had drawn a bead on Wilson. The diplomat was a Democrat who had worked on national-security issues in the Clinton administration; he had donated money to Al Gore in 2000. Now, Rove had heard, he was friendly with Sen. John Kerry. Wilson was trying to drag Cheney into the story for partisan reasons—to caricature him as the dark, secret taskmaster of the war. Cheney hadn't dispatched Wilson; the vice president hadn't had anything directly to do with it...

Beyond the legal drama, the story of the White House's response to the Wilson trip is offering the country that rarest of opportunities in the Age of Bush II: a glimpse of the inner workings of a White House under the management of Karl Rove, the most influential presidential adviser in memory. And while liberals who have long viewed Rove with fear and loathing are gleeful at his current political plight, Rove's own legions are rallying—which means, interestingly, that the harsh culture now pummeling him may in fact save him as Bush's Red soldiers take the field...

It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration. In the months after 9/11, the Republican National Committee, a part of Rove's empire, had sent out a fund-raising letter that showed the president aboard Air Force One in the hours after the attack. Democrats howled, but that was the Bush Rove was selling in the re-election campaign: commander in chief. Now Wilson was getting in the way of that glorious story, essentially accusing the administration of having blundered or lied the country into war.

How do you publicly counter a guy like that? As "senior adviser," Rove would be involved in finding out. Technically, Rove was in charge of politics, not "communications." But, as he saw it, the two were one and the same—and he used his heavyweight status to push the message machine run by his Texas protegé and friend, Dan Bartlett. Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was sent out to trash the Wilson op-ed. "Zero, nada, nothing new here," he said. Then, on a long Bush trip to Africa, Fleischer and Bartlett prompted clusters of reporters to look into the bureaucratic origins of the Wilson trip. How did the spin doctors know to cast that lure? One possible explanation: some aides may have read the State Department intel memo, which Powell had brought with him aboard Air Force One.

Meanwhile, in transatlantic secure phone calls, the message machinery focused on a crucial topic: who should carry the freight on the following Sunday's talk shows? The message: protect Cheney by explaining that he had had nothing to do with sending Wilson to Niger, and dismiss the yellowcake issue. Powell was ruled out. He wasn't a team player, as he had proved by his dismissive comments about the "sixteen words." Donald Rumsfeld was pressed into duty, as was Condi Rice, the ultimate good soldier. She was on the Africa trip with the president, though, and wouldn't be getting back until Saturday night. To allow her to prepare on the long flight home to D.C., White House officials assembled a briefing book, which they faxed to the Bush entourage in Africa. The book was primarily prepared by her National Security Council staff. It contained classified information—perhaps including all or part of the memo from State. The entire binder was labeled top secret.

Back in Washington, busying himself mainly with the task of sketching the outlines of Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, Rove—patient bird hunter that he is—waited in the duck blind of his West Wing office. His first chance to take a shot arrived on Wednesday, July 9, when he spoke to a journalist with whom he had done business since the 1970s—Bob Novak. In 1992, in fact, Rove had been banished from Bush I's re-election campaign after he was fingered (wrongly, both men insisted) as a source for a Novak column about Republican unrest in Texas. What did Rove make of the story, which Novak had gotten from what he later called a person who was "no partisan gunslinger," that Wilson had been sent to Niger at the behest of his wife, Valerie Plame?

Rove's reply is in dispute. According to a later column written by Novak, Rove said, "Oh, you know about it." Rove's version, made public by a source close to him, is less solid: "I heard that, too." Whatever the exact words were, they were good enough to give Novak the confirmation he thought he needed. Citing two senior administration officials, he wrote a piece—with Wilson's wife's name—for release nationwide the next Monday.

Rove's next and last shot came in a brief, end-of-the-week call from Matt Cooper of Time magazine. As NEWSWEEK has reported, Cooper later wrote an e-mail to his bureau chief, saying that Rove had tried to wave him off the Wilson story—and mentioned Wilson's wife in the process: "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip," Cooper's e-mail read. Cooper would write about the matter online the following week, after the Novak article appeared. (Rove did not initially discuss the conversation with Cooper in his first interview with the FBI, a source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because of the ongoing investigation, told NEWSWEEK. But Rove later testified about it, the source said.) That weekend, the talk-show soldiers did their duty. Rumsfeld drew the fire on other issues; Condi did her best to distance the vice president from the Wilson trip.

Missions accomplished. Except for a few little details. Under a 1982 law, it's a felony to intentionally disclose the name of a "covered" agent with the intent to harm national security. Under another, older statute, it could also be a felony to willfully disclose information from a classified document—which the State Department memo and, apparently, the Condi briefing book were.

The classified Condi Rice briefing book aboard Air Force One would seem to suggest that the White House had the information about Wilson and his wife culled from the classified State INR memo, prepared in May and dated June 10, 2003, from sources inside the administration, and not from reporters.

Have been re-reading articles on the rather sudden coming apart of the administration's Iraq-Niger uranium claims in March 2003 literally as the US invaded Iraq, and on the evolution of the investigation of the outting of Valerie Plame, from when the Justice Department investigation of the leak was announced in late September 2003. The timelines in these two articles from back in the fall of 2003 are helpful for going back and tracing what caught the White House's attention about the Niger yellowcake claims unravelling. What's striking is it wasn't the facts of the case coming apart that seemed to get the administration most exercised, but what they perceived and responded to as not just a partisan attack, but a partisan attack on those claims coming from both Wilson and the CIA.

This WaPo article by Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung from March 22, 2003 is one of the first press deconstructions of the Niger uranium fiasco. A wave of stories in the US and Europe which followed added to the story of the crude forgeries. But it seemed to be not those reports on the facts of the case that most raised the administration's ire, but this oped by the NYT's Nick Kristof from May 6, 2003, anonymously sourced by Wilson, that led to the chain of events in which several Bush administration officials coordinated an effort to try to get the press to stop reporting on Wilson's claims, by telling reporters that Wilson was a partisan who only got the job as a boondoggle from his wife, a CIA operative on WMD issues. What's also remarkable is how much the administration seemed to perceive Wilson's comments to Kristof and Pincus and other journalists as a parallel effort to or a cipher for the CIA's perceived leaking to the press that it long ago expressed doubts about the Niger yellowcake claims. The administration wanted to target Wilson, but was his wife targeted only because she was Wilson's wife, or also because she worked for the CIA? Two birds with one stone?

The evidence that it was Kristof's May 6, 2003 oped on Wilson's trip that got things rolling in terms of an apparently coordinated effort from some people in the administration to target Wilson/Plame is coming to light in this past week's reports on the timing of the State Department INR memo on how Wilson got sent to Niger in the first place. In that May 6, 2003 oped, Kristof wrote:

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Kristof's column provoked this administration reaction on behalf of Cheney's office, as reported by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post June 12, 2003:

...The CIA's decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney's staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.

Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter, but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials, never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an administration official...

In a follow up column June 13, 2003, Kristof reports on administration reaction to his May oped on Wilson/Niger:

Condoleezza Rice was asked on "Meet the Press" on Sunday about a column of mine from May 6 regarding President Bush's reliance on forged documents to claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. That was not just a case of hyping intelligence, but of asserting something that had already been flatly discredited by an envoy investigating at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ms. Rice acknowledged that the president's information turned out to be "not credible," but insisted that the White House hadn't realized this until after Mr. Bush had cited it in his State of the Union address.

And now an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine. Hmm. I have an offer for Mr. Cheney: I'll tell you everything I know about your activities, if you'll tell me all you know...

Kristof's June 13 column appeared on a Friday, which would have put Rice's Meet the Press appearance that he referenced on Sunday June 8, 2003. And we now know from Saturday's NYT report that a State Department INR memo on Wilson supposedly getting sent to Niger because his CIA wife suggested him that is "of intense interest" to Plame-leak special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is dated on June 10, 2003. Writes the NYT:

The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memorandum was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the document on Friday.

When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.

It is not clear who asked for the memorandum, but in the weeks before it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an unnamed former diplomat's trip to Africa seeking intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program. On May 6, 2003, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times, wrote of a "former U.S. ambassador to Africa" who had reported to the C.I.A. and the State Department that reports of Iraq seeking to acquire uranium in Niger were "unequivocally wrong."

The memorandum was prepared at the State Department, relying on notes by an analyst who was involved in meetings in early 2002 to discuss whether to send someone to Africa to investigate allegations that Iraq was pursuing uranium purchases. The C.I.A. was asked by Mr. Cheney's office and the State and Defense Departments to look into the reports.

According to a July 9, 2004, Senate Intelligence Committee report, the notes described a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at C.I.A. headquarters on whether Mr. Wilson should go to Niger.

The notes, which did not identify Ms. Wilson or her husband by name, said the meeting was "apparently convened by" the wife of a former ambassador "who had the idea to dispatch" him to Niger because of his contacts in the region. Mr. Wilson had been ambassador to Gabon..

Newsweek reports today that in fact this State INR memo on how Wilson was sent to Niger was actually prepared in May -- perhaps after Kristof's first column on the Niger issue sourced anonymously by Wilson. Reports Newsweek:

In May, the State Department's intelligence unit had prepared a secret memorandum about the provenance of Wilson's journey and its classified results—including the curious fact that Wilson's wife, a CIA agent then working on weapons of mass destruction issues, had been involved in planning the mission, and had even suggested that her husband undertake it. Still, there had been no cause to criticize Wilson—let alone mention his wife.

But then Wilson went public...

About this classified State INR memo, we note not just its timing being written in the days after apparently Cheney's office became focused on Wilson's contention via Kristof's column that his office should have known about the findings of Wilson's Niger trip, and that its information about Wilson's wife's role in his trip is apparently fraudulent, but that it was apparently circulated or summarized to conservative news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Talon News' Jeff Gannon, in the days and weeks after the Justice Department announced its investigation into who leaked Plame's identity. Check out this WSJ article on the classified memo on how Wilson got the trip -- and how closely it seems to track with what Gannon was told too.

On this last point, correspondent EW notes this morning "One more point. Novak and now Cooper (in his Time story today) say Rove talked about declassifying something that would discredit Wilson (Novak mentioned a memo, Cooper only 'something'). But they never did declassify it. I wonder why, if they were willing to leak what is presumably the same memo later in the year?"

(And indeed Matt Cooper reports today, "The notes, and my subsequent e-mails, go on to indicate that Rove told me material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson's mission and his findings.")

It seems that the conspiracy to keep attacking Wilson, Plame and the CIA via leaks of classified material including summaries of this State INR memo continued even as the investigation into who leaked Plame's name got underway.

Ripples from the latest Seymour Hersh article, not even published yet:

The article cites unidentified former military and intelligence officials who said the administration went ahead with covert election activities in Iraq that "were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress." But it does not provide details and says, "the methods and the scope of the covert effort have been hard to discern."

Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, issued a statement saying that she could not discuss classified information, noting: "Congress was consulted about the administration's posture in the Iraqi election. I was personally consulted. But if the administration did what is alleged, that would be a violation of the covert action requirements, and that would be deeply troubling."

Despite the denials by some Bush administration officials on Saturday, others who took part in or were briefed on the discussion said they could not rule out the possibility that the United States and its allies might have provided secret aid to augment the broad overt support provided to Iraqi candidates and parties by the State Department, through organizations like the International Democratic Institute.

They said they were basing their comments primarily on the intensity of discussions within the administration about the potential adverse consequences of a victory by Iraqi parties hostile to the United States.

Officials and former officials familiar with the debate inside the White House last year said that after considerable debate, the president's national security team recommended that he sign a secret, formal authorization for covert action to influence the election, called a "finding." They said that Mr. Bush either had already signed it or was about to when objections were raised in Congress. Ultimately, he rescinded the decision, the officials said.

Among those who discussed the matter in interviews on Saturday were a dozen current and former government officials from Congress, the State Department, intelligence agencies and the Bush administration. They included some who said they had supported the idea of a covert plan to influence the Iraqi elections, and some who had opposed it...

The current and former officials interviewed Saturday amplified how Mr. Bush had initially approved the plan, and how the White House met objections as it notified Congressional leaders, as required by law.

I haven't seen the Hersh report yet upon which this NYT article is based, but the discussion of a draft presidential directive on Iranian-backed forces in Iraq of course brings to mind the FBI investigation of Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin. Franklin has been alleged to have leaked classified information on Iranian activities in Iraq in an effort to get AIPAC's support in trying to persuade the White House to sign off on what sounds like an earlier incarnation of this directive.

The most comprehensive take on the Plame case so far, from the WaPo's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. Update: What's really useful in this piece is the timeline.

State and the Valerie Wilson memo. Blogger Next Hurrah and I have been batting back and forth theories of the State Department memo on Joseph Wilson's fact finding trip to Niger reported on today in the NYT, and it's got me thinking. The IAEA declared in March 2003 that the Niger docs were crude forgeries. State which had forwarded the documents to the IAEA a few months earlier started trying to document the Niger-Iraq info's circulation through the US system. Hence, it makes sense that State's Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), headed by Carl Ford Jr. (who we know from the Bolton testimony) had overseen preparation of the memo, and that Powell/Armitage would have requested it when there started to be an increasing number of news stories anonymously describing Wilson's trip to Niger that had found the Iraq-Niger uranium allegations to be implausible. The memo's purpose might have been benign* -- e.g. not to leak to harm Wilson/Plame, but to explain how in the world the Niger forgeries had managed to corrupt US Iraq intelligence pronouncements, despite the fact the State INR analyst had found the documents to be likely forgeries from the moment they arrived in Washington. But as the State memo got distributed through the White House/NSC/Vice President's office, someone seems to have gotten an idea about pushback. That might explain why Rove emailed Hadley after he spoke to Cooper, and why the name of Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby keeps coming up in this affair. * Update: On second thought, perhaps not so benign after all.

The latest WaPo Kurtz/Leonnig story reports that two sources say Miller's source was Libby.

Can someone please find out if Judith Miller really had a Secret clearance from the Pentagon? And if so, who authorized that arrangement? And, was she really wearing a US Army uniform in the field? (Via Atrios).

How does State fit in the Plame outting mix?

Prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a C.I.A. officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said.

Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had read the memorandum, the people who have been briefed said, asking not to be named because the special prosecutor heading the investigation had requested that no one discuss the case.

The memo was sent to Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, just before or as he traveled with President Bush and other senior officials to Africa starting on July 7, 2003, when the White House was scrambling to defend itself from a blast of criticism a few days earlier from the former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, current and former government officials said.

Mr. Powell was seen walking around Air Force One during the trip with the memo in hand, said a person involved in the case who also requested anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about talking about the investigation.

Investigators are also trying to determine whether the gist of the information in the memo, including the name of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, Mr. Wilson's wife, had been provided to the White House even earlier, said another person who has been involved in the case. Investigators have been looking at whether the State Department provided the information to the White House before July 6, 2003, when her husband publicly criticized the way the administration used intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, the person said...

The memo was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memo was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the memo on Friday.

When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memo to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent the memo to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.

It is not clear who asked for the memo, but in the weeks before it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an unnamed former diplomat's trip to Africa seeking intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program...

The information contained in the State Department memo generally tracked the information Mr. Novak laid out for Mr. Rove in their conversation about the matter, according to the account of their exchange provided by the person briefed on what Mr. Rove has told investigators.

But it appears to differ in at least one way, raising questions about whether it was the original source of the material that ultimately made its way to Mr. Novak. In his July 14, 2003, column, Mr. Novak referred to Ms. Wilson as Valerie Plame. The State Department memo referred to her as Valerie Wilson, according to the government official who reread the memo on Friday.

The chain of custody of the Bush administration's information about Wilson's wife's identity gets more complicated. State brings to mind several interesting possibilities but they may be dead ends. What is worth noting here is the timing - the fact that State had prepared a memo about Wilson's fact finding trip to Niger and his connection to Plame a full month before Wilson's oped appeared.

Meantime this NYT piece explores the question of who told what to whom, raising the theory that has been ricocheting around the Internet this week tht the White House may have learned of Wilson's wife's work from reporters. The story above would seem to possibly cast doubt on that.

And stay tuned. Matt Cooper plans to tell his story in Time and on CNN on Sunday.

Truly interesting Hitchens review of Woodward's new book, and on leaks, Watergate, Plame, etc. This line really catches one's eye, "Counter-leaking against the C.I.A. has had the grotesque result of putting a reporter for this newspaper behind bars." That's a pretty startling contention that outting Plame was a right wing effort to push back against what they saw as leaking by the CIA about the dubiousness of the Niger docs.

Update: This makes some sense to me.

This NYT account, which describes Rove as Novak's second 'source' confirmation on Plame, begs the question, who was his first administration source? The "no partisan gunslinger?" The article seems to hint it was someone from Cheney's office:

Mr. Novak's July 14, 2003, column was published against a backdrop in which White House officials were clearly agitated by Mr. Wilson's assertion, in his Op-Ed article, that the administration had "twisted" intelligence about the threat from Iraq.

But the White House was also deeply concerned about Mr. Wilson's suggestion that he had gone to Africa to carry out a mission that originated with Mr. Cheney. At the time, Mr. Cheney's earlier statements about Iraq's banned weapons were coming under fire as it became clearer that the United States would find no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and that Mr. Hussein's nuclear program was not far advanced.

Mr. Novak wrote that the decision to send Mr. Wilson "was made at a routinely low level" and was based on what later turned out to be fake documents that had come to the United States through Italy.

So, hypothetically, could I. Lewis Libby count as a "no partisan gunslinger"?

Update: TB seems to have the inside skinny.

What Karl Rove told the grand jury:

Presidential confidant Karl Rove testified to a grand jury that he learned the identity of a CIA operative originally from journalists, then informally discussed the information with a Time magazine reporter days before the story broke, according to a person briefed on the testimony.

The person, who works in the legal profession and spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, told The Associated Press that Rove testified last year that he remembers specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a harsh Iraq war critic, worked for the CIA.

Rove testified that Novak originally called him the Tuesday before Plame’s identity was revealed in July 2003 to discuss another story. The conversation eventually turned to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was strongly criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq war policy and the intelligence it used to justify the war, the source said.

Link.

Just Out...A new piece on the FBI Franklin/AIPAC investigation, at the Nation.

There's a fascinating debate on now on C-Span 2 with Senators debating an amendment to homeland security legislation that would (as I roughly understand it, having come in late) revoke the security clearance of a government official who intentionally leaks the name of a CIA operative. Sen. Lautenberg (D-NJ) is invoking George Herbert Walker Bush's statement calling those who expose CIA operatives "traitors," accompanied by Russert-like posters of all the statements.

Meantime, Stygius alerts me to a comprehensive press round up of Rove stories by the WaPo's Dan Froomkin.

The brother of Iraqi blogger Raed of the famous blogging duo Salaam Pax has been arrested by Iraq's new secret police, a reader alerts me. She writes, "Khaled is no radical, he used to contribute to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video blogger."

Bush's honesty rating tumbles:

Furthermore, only 41 percent give Bush good marks for being “honest and straightforward” — his lowest ranking on this question since he became president. That’s a drop of nine percentage points since January, when a majority (50 percent to 36 percent) indicated that he was honest and straightforward. This finding comes at a time when the Bush administration is battling the perception that its rhetoric doesn’t match the realities in Iraq, and also allegations that chief political adviser Karl Rove leaked sensitive information about a CIA agent to a reporter. (The survey, however, was taken just before these allegations about Rove exploded into the current controversy.)

Fancy that. And that was before the Rove affair exploded.

British bombing mastermind identified. More from Praktike.

Cooper testified for two hours before the grand jury today. Editor & Publisher has published a transcript of his remarks afterwards. Cooper's attorney Richard Sauber also had some interesting comments given the recent published remarks by Rove's attorney implying that Cooper had "burned" Rove.

Via Atrios, Bloomberg has this amusing lead into its latest Rove piece:

Karl Rove planned to become more visible in President George W. Bush's second term, though not as a subject in the first criminal investigation of the Bush presidency.

Karl Rove and the press, and his history with the Bush family:

[George W. Bush and Rove] came together during young adulthood, when an ambitious former Texas congressman, George H.W. Bush, held the job of chairman of the Republican National Committee. It fell to the elder Bush to investigate allegations that Rove had used dirty tricks in a campaign for president of the College Republicans. The RNC chairman eventually cleared Rove, and was so impressed by the young operative that he hired him as an assistant.

Although Rove was an advisor ostensibly working behind the scenes, his name continued to be associated with public controversy. During George H.W. Bush's second presidential campaign, Rove was fired from the campaign team because of suspicions that he had leaked information to columnist Robert Novak — the same columnist who first reported Plame's CIA role in 2003, citing anonymous administration sources.

At the time, Bush's campaign was in trouble, and there was concern that the president might not even win his home state of Texas. The Novak column described a Dallas meeting in which the campaign's state manager, Robert Mosbacher, was stripped of his authority because the Texas effort was viewed as a bust.

Mosbacher complained, expressing his suspicion that Rove was the leaker. Rove denied the charge, but was fired nevertheless.

And talk about executive branch lobbying. Get this:

Republican strategists credit Rove not only with his constant preparations for the next election but also with laying a foundation for GOP success in future campaigns. Critics say he has brazenly pushed his obsession with electoral politics into the deepest levels of the executive branch.

For example, he and Ken Mehlman, his onetime deputy who now heads the Republican National Committee, made a point of visiting nearly every Cabinet agency before the 2002 midterm elections, providing polling data and election priorities for top agency managers.

In early 2002, Rove personally addressed the 50 most-senior employees of the Interior Department at a retreat in West Virginia. He showed them a slide presentation summarizing presidential polling and key races. Then, from the podium, he mentioned upcoming Interior Department decisions that could influence the midterm elections.

At the time, Rove noted that Oregon's incumbent Sen. Gordon H. Smith, a Republican, faced a difficult reelection. The Interior Department was then questioning whether to allow drought-stricken farmers to pull more water from Oregon's Klamath River, endangering the state's salmon population. Farmers are a critical part of the Oregon GOP base.

An inspector general's report subsequently concluded there was no inappropriate pressure on the decision makers in the Klamath case. But the controversial decision to release water to farmers resulted in the largest fish kill in the West and still angers Indian fishermen and environmentalists. Smith won reelection.

In addition to mastering regulatory issues that can affect key races...

It's the politicization of absolutely everything, any principle, any independence, any value. Maybe it's a formula for winning elections for a certain time, but it seems the depths of their cynicism may finally be catching up with these guys - from DeLay and Abramoff to Rove and Bush.

Update: Reader J writes that the Rove/Mehlman efforts described in the LAT piece excerpted above would be illegal:

If Rove and Mehlman were going around in 2004 to all the departments and agencies and providing this type of campaign-specific information and exhortations, they were clearly breaking the law . . . There are very strict lines separating political activity from federal civil service employees -- the Hatch Act for one. Every four years, people in the bureaucracy become nervous because they are asked to summarize the achievements of the past four years. That just barely passes the muster -- but for Rove and Mehlman to brief civil service employees on taxpayer time on polling -- that's beyond the pale. And highly implausible.

Two top Abramoff aides suddenly decide to make aliyah, The Hill's Josephine Hearn reports.

Reporter Murray Waas has an interesting piece tonight, on Novak's testimony to the grand jury investigating the Plame leak. In it he asserts that one thing that caught prosecutor Fitzgerald's attention were phone records of a series of calls between Novak and Rove just after an investigation of the leak was announced. Writes Waas:

Also of interest to investigators have been a series of telephone contacts between Novak and Rove, and other White House officials, in the days just after press reports first disclosed the existence of a federal criminal investigation as to who leaked Plame's identity. Investigators have been concerned that Novak and his sources might have conceived or co-ordinated a cover story to disguise the nature of their conversations. That concern was a reason-- although only one of many-- that led prosecutors to press for the testimony of Cooper and Miller, sources said.

Lending credence to those suspicions was that a U.S. government official questioned by investigators said Novak specifically asked him whether Plame had some covert status with the CIA. The official told investigators that Novak appeared uncertain whether she was undercover or not. That account, on one hand, might lend credence to the claims by Rove and other Bush administration officials that they did not know Plame was a covert CIA officer. Conversely, however, the fact that Novak asked the question in the first place appeared to indicate that he might have indeed been told Plame was a covert operative, and was seeking confirmation of that fact.

Meantime, as Rove once targeted Wilson and Plame, he now seems to be similarly targeting reporter Mark Cooper. Incredible. And all in advance of Cooper's anticipated grand jury testimony tomorrow.

Reuters is reporting that Iranian police beat up students demonstrating today in front of Tehran university to demand the release of jailed journalist and dissident Akbar Ganji. Ganji, on a hunger strike for the past month, and in poor health, has published this letter from prison.

Radio Times. Here's a link to a radio interview I did today with NPR affiliate WHYY on the Iranian exile intelligence source for a recent book by a Republican congressman. Also interviewed on the program is the former CIA Paris station chief who met with the Iranian source, who my colleague Jeet Heer and I identified as a long-time business partner of Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in a recent American Prospect article and in a follow up piece here.

Bush's top independent intelligence advisor, James C Langdon Jr., has been lobbying for a Chinese energy firm to secure its Unocal bid, the WaPo reports.

The NYT tonight:

...Because of the powerful role Mr. Rove plays in shaping policy and deploying Mr. Bush's political support and machinery throughout the party, few Republicans were willing to discuss his situation on the record. Asked for comment, several Republican senators said on Monday that they did not know enough or did not want to venture an opinion.

But in private, several prominent Republicans said they were concerned about the possible effects on Mr. Bush and his agenda, in part because Mr. Rove's stature makes him such a tempting target for Democrats.

"Knowing Rove, he's still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan," said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. "But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there's a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people."

A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove's involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.

"The only fear here is where does this go," the aide said. "We can't know."

Go read Democracy Arsenal's Heather Hurlburt too, "...My better half sticks his head in and wonders, if Nixon was tragedy and Iran-Contra was farce, what is this?"

The White House on the defensive about its previous denials that Karl Rove had a role in outting Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA operative. More from the Post:

· Rove and his lawyer's denials that he was involved in telling reporters about Plame now appear to be at best based on Clintonian hairsplitting about whether he literally used her name and identified her as covert or he simply described her as the CIA-employed wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the administration critic that White House was eager to discredit at the time.

· President Bush and press secretary Scott McClellan's denials that Rove was involved in the Plame matter now appear to be at best based on the position that their responses to broad questions about Rove and Plame were met with narrowly constructed responses specifically about whether Rove leaked "classified information." Or is it possible Rove lied to them?

· And McClellan's frequent implication that, if Rove talked to reporters about Plame it was only after Novak's column had already come out, now appears suspect.

If Karl Rove, Bush's top political strategist, longtime friend and deputy chief of staff is actually indicted by Fitzgerald -- which now appears to be a possibility -- it would be an enormous blow to Bush's second term.

More here and a nice AP timeline of WH statements on Rove/Plame here (via Atrios):

...Oct. 10, 2003

Q: Earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

A: I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.

Q: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

A: They assured me that they were not involved in this.

Q: They were not involved in what?

A: The leaking of classified information.

The top story at Google News when I just checked was this arresting Reuters headline, "Democrats urge Bush to fire Rove in leak scandal." NRO insists this may have been a clever Rove exit strategy all along.

Another familiar name joins the Bush administration, reader J brings to my attention. The LAT has the story:

In 1987, Robert L. Earl told a grand jury that he had destroyed and stolen national security documents while working for Lt. Col. Oliver L. North during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Now, he sits in one of the most coveted offices in the Pentagon as chief of staff to Gordon R. England, acting deputy secretary of Defense. Earl has clearance to review the kinds of classified documents he once destroyed.

As England goes through his Senate confirmation process, his hiring of Earl has drawn criticism from government ethics watchdogs. But congressional sources said it was unlikely to affect support for England, who was popular on Capitol Hill but whose nomination was tied up over an arcane financial rule.

President Bush nominated England to replace Paul D. Wolfowitz, who left the deputy secretary's post this spring to head the World Bank.

England's chief of staff is the latest figure from the Iran-Contra scandal to play a role in the Bush administration.

Al Kamen on the Axis of "please help us":

Great news from Iraq last week. Iran appears to have agreed to become the first member of the Axis of Evil to join the ever-dwindling Coalition of the Willing.

The U.S.-led coalition once included three dozen nations, but in the past year, more than a dozen countries have withdrawn or announced plans to leave. Ukraine and Poland have announced they will pull out by year's end, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said last week that Italy will begin withdrawing this fall.

So the news Thursday that Iraq and Iran have reached an agreement -- the precise contours were unclear -- for Iran to help train Iraqi troops appears to make Iran eligible for inclusion as one of the "willing." After all, a lot of teensy countries made the list while contributing nary a thing.

A State Department spokesman said Friday that "we certainly would encourage Iran to play a positive and productive role in helping the Iraqis, as we are trying to do, to establish a free democratic system and to build a prosperous and peaceful country."

There was some chatter that Iran has offered to train Iraqi police and military personnel before and may have done some training of Iraqi diplomats. No doubt the Iranians would not want to be formally inducted into the coalition and would just help out on a bilateral basis.

Iran's offer to help is especially timely given that apparently the US is considering following Britain and Italy out of Iraq early next year.

David Rohde returns to Srebrenica for the ten year anniversary of the massacre there:

About 500 Bosnian Muslim men set out on foot at 7:30 a.m. Sunday from this quiet farming village in eastern Bosnia on the third and final day of their re-enactment of the "march of death" a decade ago this week.

Bearing Bosnian and Bosnian-Muslim flags, the men completed their solemn retracing of the route taken by an estimated 15,000 Muslim men during the war in Bosnia. They had fled the town of Srebrenica in panic in July 1995, after lightly armed United Nations peacekeepers failed to protect them from advancing Serb forces. The Serbs killed more than 7,000 of the fleeing Muslims in ambushes and mass executions that war crime judges later declared genocide.

On Sunday, the column of Muslims marching through the woods here were again surrounded by hundreds of armed Serbs, but on this day the Serbs were police officers assigned to protect the marchers . . .

Change was evident. When skull fragments were found at a spot where the column stopped to remember those killed in a large ambush, Muslim men came forward to photograph the remains with the cameras in their cellphones. Along most of the route, rebuilt homes and mosques, and newly planted fields, abound in what was a deserted no man's land of burned houses in 1995.

But the reality of what occurred here, and Bosnia's continuing struggles, sunk in as the march ended. The march stopped by a partially exhumed mass grave near Srebrenica. Staring down at exposed femurs, skulls and tibias, some of the exhausted marchers wept.

Despite raised hopes a month ago that recent videotapes of the massacre found and aired in Serbia signalled political groundwork being laid for the arrest of the massacre's chief architect, former Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, both Mladic and former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, indicted for genocide, remain at large.

A young Bosnian boy prayed over one of nearly 600 coffins stored at a battery factory for burial Monday, 10 years after the Srebrenica massacre. Credit: Andrew Testa, for the New York Times.

Up to 30,000 refugees are thought to have fled Srebrenica. Source: BBC, 1995.

Two more from tomorrow's papers on Rove/Plame, from the WaPo and the NYT.

Newsweek's Mike Isikoff has gotten ahold of Time's Matt Cooper's emails revealing Rove as his original source on Joe Wilson's wife working for the CIA:

It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA...

In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "

I find it fascinating that Rove was not only campaigning to discredit Wilson, but that he was pushing so hard to legitimate the bogus Iraq-Niger uranium information, just days before the administration capitulated and said it shouldn't have used that language in Bush's SOTU.

Go read Kevin Drum on the scoops you won't be reading about, in large part as a result of the Fitzgerald/Cooper/Miller decision.

Gone fishing. Back on the weekend.

Hosenball and Isikoff on Cooper, Miller and the White House:

...But with today’s developments, the political atmosphere could change. For openers, Cooper would inevitably have to tell the grand jury exactly which “government official” had “noted” to Time that Plame worked for the CIA, as his original article put it. That could well produce some level of nervousness. Assuming the official works for the White House, and Fitzgerald’s probe has focused heavily, if not exclusively on White House staff members, it means there will be direct testimony from a reporter that somebody on the president’s staff did something that was publicly denied—a potential political embarrassment. For another, the specter of Miller being carted off to jail means she is going to jail to protect somebody else in the president’s employ—another situation that in other respects might be viewed as politically untenable...

London explosions. It's still hard to figure out what's going on, except that it seems buses and the underground were both targeted in at least seven coordinated explosions. Blair speaking before departing the G-8 for London sounded incredibly upset. Huge sympathies to our British friends.

More from the BBC, CNN and on the al Qaeda group claiming responsibility, and a blog round up from Fistful of Euros. Slate's David Plotz was in the BBC's offices in London when the news came in.

1145am Update: It seems there were four explosions, three underground and one on a bus. British authorities say they will get the Tube running again this evening. Condolences to all with friends and loved ones affected. But in some ways it seems striking that with a transport system that reportedly carries 3 million people a day, the casualty counts are in the low hundreds.

Walter Shapiro:

...The Bush White House has been the most locked-down in history for reporters. And future administrations, even Democratic ones, are likely to emulate this nearly impenetrable Karen Hughes-inspired, message-discipline approach, under which even innocuous unauthorized conversations with the press can be potential firing offenses. As a result, the only way that even a glimmer of truth can emerge from places like the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA will be if government officials trust reporters to keep their identities secret. That means that reporters must stand their ground amid the predictable frenzy of leak investigations. It is not an appealing bargain if a reporter promises to protect a source ... as long as it is convenient.

There have been acrobatic efforts to distinguish between good leaks (say, the Pentagon Papers) and bad leaks (Plame's CIA position). But who is going to make these hair-splitting distinctions? And on what grounds? Those who scream "national security" or even (hysterically) "treason" over the flaming of Plame should recall that these very same arguments were brandished by the Nixon administration against the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Moreover, if so-called bad leaks are those motivated by personal malice or a political agenda, that standard would apply to a high percentage of Washington whistle-blowers. Where in the journalistic handbook does it say that reporters should only obtain confidential information from saintly figures? That would certainly have ruled out Deep Throat (aka Mark Felt), who had authorized unlawful FBI break-ins against the anti-war movement.

Amen.

The Post house editorial gets it right too.

Howard Kurtz gets this strange moment right:

...A White House that routinely whispers sensitive information to reporters continues to decry the practice of leaking, even as the probe raises questions about the involvement of the president's top political adviser...

A media establishment that swears by the sanctity of shielding sources turns on one of its own as the nation's oldest newsmagazine bows to a relentless prosecutor and surrenders a reporter's confidential notes.

This is a strange moment in the sometimes polarized, sometimes interdependent relationships among politicians, prosecutors and the press...

What makes the spectacle even more surreal is that Miller never wrote a story about Plame after two senior administration officials passed the information to columnist Robert D. Novak two years ago. Some, including Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, have suggested that she was identified in retribution for a Times opinion piece he wrote in July 2003, charging the administration with twisting intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Identified in retribution, by whom? By someone hostile to her paper for publishing Wilson's original oped? [Wild guess....could it have been Novak?]

And the point Cooper makes here deeper down in the Kurtz piece is worth reading:

In an interview earlier this year, Cooper said: "The same law that could force a journalist to betray a confidence about a 'bad' leaker could be used to cudgel a reporter into outing a 'good' leaker."

NYT's Adam Liptak:

....Mr. Cooper's decision to drop his refusal to testify followed discussions on Wednesday morning among lawyers representing Mr. Cooper and Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser, according to a person who has been officially briefed on the case. Mr. Fitzgerald was also involved in the discussions, the person said.

In his statement in court, Mr. Cooper did not name Mr. Rove as the source about whom he would now testify, but the person who was briefed on the case said that he was referring to Mr. Rove and that Mr. Cooper's decision came after behind-the-scenes maneuvering by his lawyers and others in the case.

Those discussions centered on whether a legal release signed by Mr. Rove last year was meant to apply specifically to Mr. Cooper, who by its terms would be released from any pledge of confidentiality he had made to Mr. Rove, the person said. Mr. Cooper said in court that he had agreed to testify only after he had received an explicit waiver from his source.

Richard A. Sauber, a lawyer for Mr. Cooper, said he would not discuss whether Mr. Cooper was referring to Mr. Rove, nor would he comment on discussions leading up to Mr. Cooper's decision...

Mr. Sauber said Mr. Cooper's agreement to testify was limited to a single conversation with a single source.

"It's not open season on Matt's sources," Mr. Sauber said, noting that Mr. Cooper had testified in the investigation on similar terms once before, after receiving the permission from I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney...

In her statement in court, Ms. Miller said she had received no similar permission from her sources.

Grim day. This case was useful precisely because so many people don't find Miller a sympathetic reporter. This is just grim. This week Miller, next month, who knows, it could be the Seymour Hershes of this world who expose Abu Ghraibs, My Lai and controversial US foreign entanglements based on relationships of trust with anonymous sources. More from Kevin Drum. His sixth bullet point is especially worth thinking about.

Let me add a little more here. Every time a newspaper like the New York Times publishes a leaked Iraq war plan, or the like, one could claim that the reporter who has been leaked such information has technically been witness to a crime (unauthorized disclosure of protected US information from their anonymous source). Does it really serve the American public interest for such leaks to dry up? Does the public have an interest in knowing? Or will US prosecutors now feel they have a right to call on reporters as witnesses to these crimes right from the get go? If you appreciate that kind of reporting, you might recognize what I believe has just gone up in smoke here. Would it be better if Seymour Hersh decided to garden? I just can't believe that's what the US needs at this time.

Jack Abramoff's table.

A progressive case for (cautious) optimism? Democracy Arsenal's Heather Hurlburt may be on to something here.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, resigns. Update: Reader B alerts me that the AP reports that Rowhani denies he's resigned. There's some serious Kremlinology to be done here, I'm sure.

Is it Rove? Not so fast, argue David Corn and Murray Waas. President Bush's top political advisor probably never expected from the liberal media such a defense of waiting to hear all the facts first concerning his being outted as one of Cooper's sources, but there you go. More doubts from the other side of the aisle. Check out the update here too.

Wednesday Update: Bob Kuttner is worth reading here.

Over at The New Republic, Spencer Ackerman reports in detail on the US failure to disarm mostly Shiite and Kurdish militias in Iraq, and suggests that the decision might have contributed to "entrenching Sunni support for the insurgency and contributes significantly to the unraveling of Iraq."

Getler is worth reading here. Update: This is madness.

This is just pathetic. Montenegro is not the Hindu Kush. If they wanted Karadzic, they could get him, it's hard not to believe. More from Die Tageszeitung's Erich Rathfelder, translated by my friend Andras here.

Kristof on Africa aid and the G-8 summit this week:

...And while Mr. Bush has done much more for Africa than most people realize, there's one huge exception, because anything with a whiff of sex in it makes some conservatives go nuts. Mr. Bush's decision to cut off funds for the U.N. Population Fund means that more African girls will die in childbirth. Even more tragic is the administration's blind hostility to condoms to fight AIDS - resulting in more dead Africans.

Mr. Bush has another blind spot as well: while he is right that aid is not a cure-all, sometimes he seems to use legitimate concerns about aid as an excuse for stinginess. Aid has shortcomings, but Mr. Bush himself has shown that it can be used effectively to save lives by the millions.

Yet Mr. Bush is resisting the G-8's calls for further help for Africa; he thinks the sums are better spent on cutting the taxes of the richest people on earth than on saving the lives of the poorest. Come on, Republicans! You need to persuade Mr. Bush to be more generous this week, because his present refusal to help isn't conservative, but just plain selfish...

An interesting piece on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by journalist Amir Taheri. Interestingly, Taheri believes Ahmadinejad was almost certainly not involved in the US Embassy hostage episode, but does believe he was involved in assassinations of three dissident Kurdish leaders in Austria in 1989. UPI reported over the weekend that the State Department also has determined that the bearded hostage taker in the photo floating around last week is not Ahmadinejad.

The NYT's Scott Shane profiles Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson.

Rumsfeld's growing intelligence operations:

Another new, little-known Pentagon initiative is the Partnership to Defeat Terrorism, which brings together a worldwide collection of think tanks, academics and private business leaders to try to develop an information-sharing base that could be used to protect the world's critical infrastructures -- including buildings, roads, industrial plants and computer systems related to financial institutions -- from terrorist attacks.

It has been placed under the Defense Department's Strategic Command, as part of the new missions given to that Pentagon unit by Rumsfeld. Senior officials in other intelligence agencies have questioned whether this function belongs in the Pentagon or elsewhere.

The Pentagon has been generous in providing one- and two-star officers to help staff the new DNI offices, senior administration officials said. Hayden confirmed that Defense has been "offering good talent" and that "the trick for us is to balance" the DNI staff among personnel from the 15 agencies that make up the intelligence community...

The Counterterrorism Center, now a DNI agency, has also been assigned to plan strategic operations at home and abroad. After some internal discussions in which Pentagon officials attempted to get the strategic planning function removed from the NCTC, Negroponte has decided to put an Army officer, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, at the head that office.

If I'm reading this right, is the army now going to be in charge of the CTC, formerly under the control of the CIA?

New details on coordination of Srebrenica massacre.

New Iraqi anti-insurgency forces using tactics reminiscent of the kinds of regimes that need to get overthrown. From the Observer:

...The Observer has seen photographic evidence of post-mortem and hospital examinations of alleged terror suspects from Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle which demonstrate serious abuse of suspects including burnings, strangulation, the breaking of limbs and - in one case - the apparent use of an electric drill to perform a knee-capping.

The investigation revealed:

· A 'ghost' network of secret detention centres across the country, inaccessible to human rights organisations, where torture is taking place.

· Compelling evidence of widespread use of violent interrogation methods including hanging by the arms, burnings, beatings, the use of electric shocks and sexual abuse.

· Claims that serious abuse has taken place within the walls of the Iraqi government's own Ministry of the Interior.

· Apparent co-operation between unofficial and official detention facilities, and evidence of extra-judicial executions by the police.

Nice review by Slate's David Edelstein of HBO's Girl in the Cafe, which I also found moving, for its glimmer of idealism not entirely snuffed out in hardened political apparatchiks long used to compromise.

Real hell on earth.

Swopa's got me thinking. Is "Wilson's wife" the same thing as "Valerie Plame"? Rove's attorney said Rove "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA." But did he tell Cooper that "Wilson got the job because his wife works for the CIA?" The "knowingly" is key here too. But I seriously doubt the theory that Rove would have directed Cooper to Miller. Reporters just don't seek each other out as sources on a story on which they are direct competitors.

Milanese extraordinary rendition subject Abu Omar apparently had a previous career -- as an informant to the virtually CIA-run post-communist Albanian intelligence service. Nice coup by the Chicago Tribune.

Iran's President-Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad linked to the 1989 assassination of an Iranian Kurdish resistance leader in Vienna? Austrian authorities are investigating, based on a tip from an Iranian journalist based in Paris to an Austrian Green Party leader.

Rove? So.....now what?

Update: More from Lawrence O'Donnell at Huffington Post (via Kevin Drum).

CPB's Ken Tomlinson should be fired.

Over at a private journos' listserv I'm on, we've been arguing this morning about whether or not if Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was some sort of chief to interrogators of some US hostages held in Evin prison in 1979 even matters. I can't believe that it doesn't, but mostly for a debate occurring internal to the Bush administration more than anywhere. US-Iranian (lack of) relations have been long been driven in part by an element of emotionalism, not pragmatism. A big part of the emotional approach comes from the history of US-Iranian relations, including the trauma of the Iranian seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis that even those who were young children at the time can remember, in particular the moment they were released minutes after Reagan was inaugurated. Indeed, the Iranian hostage crisis can arguably be said to have impacted the outcome of the 1980 US presidential election itself. Clearly the Bush administration has been torn internally over the past several years over how to deal with Iran -- between those who think the US should come to some sort of pragmatic arrangement with Tehran and those who think the US should push for democratic regime change (not through invasion but through suppport to democratic forces, and perhaps some covert funny business on the side). To my mind, those arguing for the US backing regime change have just seen their hand grow stronger, if there's credibile evidence that the new leader of Iran -- however symbolic the position -- is well known to the former American hostages as the boss of their Evin prison interrogators. Then again, as one of the other people on the list pointed out, some of the current crop of Iranian dissidents the US is interested in getting to know also played leading roles in the Revolution, and some people suggested Rafsanjani might have been acceptable to work with had he won the presidency. But those dissidents have renounced their former activities, and Ahmadinejad could hardly can hardly be seen as a dissident. What do you think, are Ahmadinejad's current positions the only thing that matters? Is the whole issue irrelevant? More from Democracy Arsenal's Michael Signer.