Cheney's New Security Advisor

"Cheney's new security advisor linked to bogus information on Iraq," Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel report:

. . . On June 26, 2002, the INC wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff identifying [John] Hannah as the White House recipient of information gathered by the group through a U.S.-funded effort called the Information Collection Program. Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the letter and previously reported on it.

The letter, written by Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the INC's Washington office, identified 108 articles in leading Western news media to which it said the INC had funneled the same information that it fed to Hannah, as well as a senior Pentagon official.

The information included a claim by an INC-supplied defector, Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, that he had visited 20 secret nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities in Iraq. . .

Haideri, however, showed deception in a CIA-administered lie detector test three days before The New York Times article appeared, and was unable to identify a single illicit arms facility when he accompanied U.S. weapons inspectors to Iraq in January 2004, Knight Ridder reported in May of last year.

The White House background paper also cited INC-produced defectors' claims that Saddam ran a terrorist training camp outside Baghdad in Salman Pak where Iraqi and non-Iraqi Islamic extremists were schooled in assassination, sabotage and the hijacking of aircraft and trains.

After the war, U.S. officials determined that a facility in Salman Pak was used to train Iraqi anti-terrorist commandos. . .

More suicide attempts at Gitmo. "36 suicide attempts by 22 different detainees, including three in the past 20 months."

Nick Kristof on what Cheney knew and when he knew it.

Just learned that the Rocco Martino walk-in to the US embassy in Rome with the forgeries was in the fall of 2001. (He was thrown out by the CIA station chief at the time, along with the forgeries). The walk-in to the US embassy in fall of 2001 fits with the timeline of when he sold the forgeries to the British.

Just heard the Berlusconi-Bush press conference scheduled for later today has been cancelled.

Against Roe v. Wade, hostile towards immigrants, for race-based discrimination....I guess the right has gotten the court nominee it wants.

David Sanger:

...Officially, White House officials will not discuss whether they harbor any concerns about what Mr. Libby may talk about. The case is "so complicated and so layered," one of Mr. Bush's aides said this weekend, that no one knows if what happened on Friday was the investigation's climax, or its penultimate phase...

Rocco Martino himself brought the forgeries to the US embassy Rome

Just confirmed with a former US intelligence official who was briefed on it at the time that a surprising claim in this Washington Post story tonight is indeed true: that Rocco Martino was a walk-in to the US embassy Rome and tried to sell the Niger forgeries to them, months before the Italian reporter Elisabetta Burba brought them to the embassy at the direction of her editor at her Berlusconi-owned magazine. (My source thought he remembered Martino's walk in occurring in the early spring of 2002, but wasn't positive). The CIA Rome station chief reportedly threw Martino - and the forgeries - out.

In fact I'm a bit chagrined to realize that a source had already told this to me, but I had somehow dismissed it at the time as a slight misunderstanding of how the Niger forgeries got to the US embassy (as they later did from the Italian reporter Elisabetta Burba who was passed the forgeries by the same Rocco Martino). Apparently, when Burba brought the Niger docs in October 2002 to the US embassy in Rome, it was the Resident Security Officer, not the CIA station at the embassy, who met with her.

We know Martino sold the dossier to the French, and to the British. We now learn that he tried to sell them to the Americans directly -- and failed -- that's where the October 2002 attempt to sell them to Burba came in.

But it seems increasingly likely that he must have sold or given them to the Italians as well, likely some time between the October 15 2001 Sismi report to the CIA (which reported on an alleged deal between Iraq and Niger for the sale of uranium without many details), and the more detailed February 2002 Sismi report to the CIA (that described the bogus contract, as well as the communiques surrounding the then-Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican's 1999 trip to Niger, that later turned up verbatim in the forgeries). The whole Niger yellowcake claim was truly the work of this seemingly half-baked operation.

So what does it mean that a senior Sismi officer (Antonio Nucera) set up the ex Sismi officer Rocco Martino with a Sismi mole at the Niger embassy to put the scheme in motion? In the beginning, did Martino come to his friends at Sismi? Or did Sismi come to Martino?

Here's a transcript of Fitzgerald's press conference yesterday.

Pollari-Rice Meeting? and Berlusconi says he was against the war

Berlusconi's office says the September 9, 2002 meeting that Sismi director Nicolo Pollari attended at the White House was actually principally with then national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, and that Stephen Hadley just attended as her deputy. Which is pretty close to what the Berlusconi-friendly Il Foglio reported yesterday, saying that a delegation of other Sismi officials was also in attendance. Separately, have been told that the Sismi delegation did not visit Langley on the trip as would happen under normal protocol, but Il Foglio reported that a senior CIA official attended the meeting at the White House. The story gets stranger and stranger. Any other foreign country intelligence chiefs dropping in on the White House we should know about? Esp. when the White House is assembling discredited claims from those governments in making its case for war to the Congress and the American public? (Thx to reader T for the heads up).

Update: Berlusconi now says he was against the Iraq war:

In a television interview to be aired next week, Premier Silvio Berlusconi says he repeatedly tried to convince American President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq .

In the lengthy interview to be shown on private TV channel La7 on Monday, Berlusconi says that: "I was never convinced that war was the best way to make a country democratic and to bring it out of a bloody dictatorship .

"I tried many times to convince the American president not to wage war... I tried to find other ways and solutions, even through joint action with African leader (Libya's Muammar) Gaddafi .

"We didn't succeed and there was a military operation but I believed military action should have been avoided." The comments were released by La7 two days before Berlusconi was due to visit Washington. ...

TNR's Michael Crowley deconstructs one point of the Libby indictment, to identify, who at NBC was Libby complaining to Tim Russert about? And the answer? Apparently, Chris Matthews, who was blaming Libby for the 16 words. Writes Crowley:

...Who was the reporter drawing Libby's ire? It was almost certainly Chris Matthews. A Nexis search of Libby's name turns up an episode of "Hardball" from July 8, 2003--just two days before Libby vented to Russert--in which Matthews essentially blamed Libby for the faulty Niger uranium reference in the 2003 State of the Union address (emphasis added):

MATTHEWS: Why would the vice president's office, Scooter Libby or whoever is running that office--why would they send a CIA effort down in Niger to verify something, find out there wasn't a uranium sale, and then not follow-up by putting that information--or correcting that information--in the president's State of the Union? If they went to the trouble to sending Joe Wilson all the way to Africa to find out whether that country had ever sold uranium to Saddam Hussein, why wouldn't they follow-up on that?...

It sounds to me, Congressmen, like a hawk in the vice president's office, probably from Scooter Libby on down, got a hold of somebody like Steve Hadley and the NSC, and they put that in Mike Gerson's speech, and the president went along with it without thinking.....

I want to stick with -- Just to recap, here's what we know. Joe Wilson, a former ambassador in the United States government, was sent to Niger to establish there whether there was in fact an arms deal for nuclear materials between Saddam Hussein and the government of Niger. He came back and reported back to the CIA at the behest of the vice president's office, that there was no such deal. That office of the vice president, whoever is in there, Scooter Libby on down, or the vice president himself, never told the president that there was nothing to that, that that was a dry hole story. And yet, the president went on television, telling the American people it was true. Somebody's to blame here, and it's a very high level and it's not speculating.

Libby apparently didn't take kindly to Matthews's analysis.

Italian government stonewalling the FBI in the Niger forgeries investigation, Knight Ridder reports:

...The FBI has been investigating the clumsy forgeries, which first surfaced in Rome in October 2002, for two years, but has made little progress, four U.S. government officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation continues. Those officials blame a lack of cooperation from Italy. A spokesman for the Italian Embassy in Washington denied that.

But a weeks-long review by Knight Ridder has established that:

-Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, and people close to it, repeatedly tried to shop the bogus Niger uranium story to governments in France, Britain and the United States. That created the illusion that multiple sources were confirming the story.

The CIA had begun receiving intelligence reports based on the same forgeries in October 2001, but they could not be confirmed. Copies of the fake documents suddenly surfaced at a critical point in the White House's fall 2002 campaign to take the country to war in Iraq.

The CIA eventually determined that the earlier reports were "based on the forged documents" and were "thus ... unreliable," a presidential commission on unconventional weapons proliferation said in March.

-State Department intelligence analysts and some in the CIA discounted the uranium story. But White House officials, working through a back channel to one CIA unit, seized on the tale, and it was included in Bush's case for war...

...A CIA analytical unit known as WINPAC (Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control) said in a secret assessment that there was "fragmentary reporting" on Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from "various countries in Africa."

Sometime in late January, Robert Joseph, a senior White House staffer, and Alan Foley, the head of WINPAC, agreed that Bush could refer to the uranium claim in his State of the Union speech, but he should cite a public British report.

Libby's Replacement

Via Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped, news that Libby's replacement as chief of staff to the Vice President will be Cheney's general counsel, David Addington. And who is Addington? Among other things Garance points to, Addington is the lawyer who advised Cheney and Libby to not cooperate with the Senate Select Intelligence committee in turning over documents related to bogus intelligence they tried to get into Powell's speech to the UN. Murray Waas tells the story.

Sunday Update: More on Addington from the National Journal's Murray Waas and Paul Singer.

Official A

Can anyone figure out who Novak's other source was?

Frist

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R -Tenn.) said through a spokesman that the Senate won't investigate the CIA leak, reader DW reports.

In reading through the indictment and listening to the Fitzgerald press conference, one question immediately occurs: how in the world could Libby have lied so blatantly, have misled so blatantly, without realizing given the scope of this investigation that he would get caught? Did he think the investigation would go away? That his colleagues would participate in the cover up? It's hard to know what he was thinking, but Kevin Drum's 'bottom line' analysis of what happened sounds right to me: Libby invented a compelling false narrative and just stuck to it:

...Libby could have told the truth, but then he would have had to admit his role in outing a CIA agent in order to score political points against a critic of the administration. He didn't want that campaign to become public, so he invented a cover story, repeated it under oath, and stuck to it on multiple occasions.

It's serious stuff, and that's what this is all about.

WSJ Probe News tracker.

Libby was orally briefed on the State Department memo on Wilson's trip to Niger, and was faxed classified documents about Wilson from the CIA. From the indictment, point 4:

4. On or about May 29, 2003, in the White House, LIBBY asked an Under Secretary of State (“Under Secretary”) for information concerning the unnamed ambassador’s travel to Niger to investigate claims about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium yellowcake. The Under Secretary thereafter directed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report concerning the ambassador and his trip. The Under Secretary provided LIBBY with interim oral reports in late May and early June 2003, and advised LIBBY that Wilson was the former ambassador who took the trip.

5. On or about June 9, 2003, a number of classified documents from the CIA were faxed to the Office of the Vice President to the personal attention of LIBBY and another person in the Office of the Vice President. The faxed documents, which were marked as classified, discussed, among other things, Wilson and his trip to Niger, but did not mention Wilson by name. After receiving these documents, LIBBY and one or more other persons in the Office of the Vice President handwrote the names “Wilson” and “Joe Wilson” on the documents.

6. On or about June 11 or 12, 2003, the Under Secretary of State orally advised LIBBY in the White House that, in sum and substance, Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that State Department personnel were saying that Wilson’s wife was involved in the planning of his trip.

7. On or about June 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson’s trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip. ...

And what's this in Points 12 and 13 about a New Republic article?

12. On or about June 19, 2003, an article appeared in The New Republic magazine online entitled “The First Casualty: The Selling of the Iraq War.” Among other things, the article questioned the “sixteen words” and stated that following a request for information from the Vice President, the CIA had asked an unnamed ambassador to travel to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. The article included a quotation attributed to the unnamed ambassador alleging that administration officials “knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.” The article also was critical of how the administration, including the Office of the Vice President, portrayed intelligence concerning Iraqi capabilities with regard to weapons of mass destruction, and accused the administration of suppressing dissent from the intelligence agencies on this topic.

13. Shortly after publication of the article in The New Republic, LIBBY spoke by telephone with his then Principal Deputy and discussed the article. That official asked LIBBY whether information about Wilson’s trip could be shared with the press to rebut the allegations that the Vice President had sent Wilson. LIBBY responded that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure telephone line.

Libby indicted. From MSNBC:

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was indicted Friday on five charges that include obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury in the investigation into the leak of a covert CIA agent’s name.

The five-count indictment accuses Libby of lying about how and when he learned about CIA official Valerie Plane's identity in 2003 and then told reporters about it. The information was classified....

Update: Kevin reports that Libby submitted his resignation this morning.

Update II: The Post has more, including this tidbit about Rove, which Kevin highlighted:

Rove provided new information to Fitzgerald during eleventh-hour negotiations that "gave Fitzgerald pause" about charging Bush's senior strategist, said a source close to Rove. "The prosecutor has to resolve those issues before he decides what to do."

Update III: Here's the Indictment.

Point 4 is particularly interesting and has new information. On May 29, 2003, Libby asked Under Secretary of State for information concerning Wilson's trip to Niger. It doesn't name him but I believe* that was Marc Grossman. (Mark Goldberg at Tapped suggests it's Bolton. Hmm.) That led to the infamous State Department memo on Wilson's trip. . . . (still reading)

From the indictment, point 4:

4. On or about May 29, 2003, in the White House, LIBBY asked an Under Secretary of State (“Under Secretary”) for information concerning the unnamed ambassador’s travel to Niger to investigate claims about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium yellowcake. The Under Secretary thereafter directed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report concerning the ambassador and his trip. The Under Secretary provided LIBBY with interim oral reports in late May and early June 2003, and advised LIBBY that Wilson was the former ambassador
who took the trip.

5. On or about June 9, 2003, a number of classified documents from the CIA were faxed to the Office of the Vice President to the personal attention of LIBBY and another person in the Office of the Vice President. The faxed documents, which were marked as classified, discussed, among other things, Wilson and his trip to Niger, but did not mention Wilson by name. After receiving these documents, LIBBY and one or more other persons in the Office of the Vice President handwrote the names “Wilson” and “Joe Wilson” on the documents.

6. On or about June 11 or 12, 2003, the Under Secretary of State orally advised LIBBY in the White House that, in sum and substance, Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that State Department personnel were saying that Wilson’s wife was involved in the planning of his trip.

7. On or about June 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson’s trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip.

Reading this indictment quickly through, it sure sounds like a conspiracy to me that several people participated in. What's to come?

Atrios reports that Libby has been indicted on five counts. Could NPR not break into the Kojo Nnamdi show to report please?

I ran into the NSC spokesman at an event last night. This was the NSC spokesman who confirmed to me on Tuesday that Sismi chief Nicolo Pollari and then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley had met in Washington on September 9, 2002, as La Repubblica had reported Tuesday. In calling to get confirmation of the September 9 Pollari-Hadley meeting from the NSC Tuesday, which he confirmed, I asked the spokesman what had been discussed at the meeting. The spokesman replied that as a general rule, they don't disclose what was discussed. (I noted his comment in an update to this post on Tuesday). In a follow up call that day, I asked him, who else was there? "Nothing else I can do for you...We only keep track of the principals..."

Now, the rules seem to be changing. The NSC seems to be showing a new and welcome willingness to suggest what at least may not have been discussed. Or it may have been. Who knows from this?

"No one present at that meeting has any recollection of yellowcake being discussed or documents being provided," Frederick Jones, Mr. Hadley's spokesman, said Thursday, referring to a form of uranium.

Am also hearing some interesting stuff about who else may have been there.

I expect from all the comment suddenly coming from the NSC, the FBI, the Senate Intelligence committee, the Italian government, the Fitzgerald investigation, and the reporters chasing this story on two continents, that we will finally get to the bottom of this story soon.

Think Progress is all over the Niger forgeries story. And a very interesting story coming out of Italy too.

Italy has a small boutique newspaper called Il Foglio, edited by a flamboyant and extremely well-connected guy named Giuliano Ferrara, a former Berlusconi minister who's been described to me as Italy's only neoconservative. I struggle to read through the paper's interesting blog, Camillo, when I get the chance. In any case, Il Foglio pushes back today on the Pollari-Hadley meeting story in an interesting way today: by saying Condoleezza Rice was there too!

A friend in Rome sends word, "As I told you, this morning, Il Foglio, a daily newspaper whose editor in chief (Giuliano Ferrara) is a former minister of Berlusconi pushes back on the 9th september 2002 meeting. Quoting an unnamed intelligence source (I understand an "italian source", but the paper doesn't elaborate) they say:

...The meeting was attended also by Condoleezza Rice, with whom Pollari talked, a high ranking CIA officer, and some other members of the Italian delegation which was led by Pollari...

Is this misdirection? The truth?

Leak probe information at noon, Fitzgerald press conference at 2pm. Grand jury to be extended, or a new one convened?

The WSJ is reporting that Libby will be indicted, Rove has been informed that he is in jeopardy.

FBI investigating forged uranium reports, the NYT reports. No offense, but what's to show for the investigation two years on?

Mistakes Were Made...

From the archives:

..."The reason for not misleading the Congress is a very practical one," said Rep. Richard Cheney, R-Wyo. "It's stupid. It's self-defeating ... Eventually you destroy the president's credibility." ...

And this, Rep. Richard Cheney (R-Wyoming], vice chairman of the House committee, at the conclusion of public hearings on the Iran-Contra affair, as reported by the AP, August 4, 1987:

...Mr. Chairman, I think it's _ a couple of quick points I would like to make in closing. Questions have been raised about why we had these committees established. I think it was preordained that there would be such an investigation once it became clear the administration was trading arms to Iran. Congress clearly has a legitimate role of oversight in reviewing the conduct of foreign policy by the administration, and the president himself supported these activities and encouraged us to form these select committees.

I also think it's important that credit be given to the president. He's given his complete cooperation and support to our investigation throughout. He's provided administration witnesses without ever claiming executive privilege, provided thousands of pages of documents, classified and unclassified, provided access to his own personal diary, and given these committees and the nation an in-depth look at some of the most sensitive and excruciatingly painful events of his administration....

It takes a strong, confident leader to subject himself and his administration to the very thorough nature of this congressional investigation. And we are here today, concluding the public phase of our hearings, on time, in large part because of the president and his administration.

President Reagan has enjoyed many successes during his more than six years in office, clearly, this was not one of them.

As the president himself has said, mistakes were made...

Clearly, there is plenty of work to be done if Congress is going to equip itself to play a constructive role in the conduct of U.S. _ U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead. And I fervently hope that future presidents will take away from these hearings one important lesson, that no foreign policy can be effective for long without the wholehearted support of the Congress and the American people. It is often easier to develop a policy to be pursued overseas than it is to muster the political support here at home to sustain it. Covert action has its place in the kind of world we live in, but it is no substitute for the kind of effective political leadership that brings around a recalcitrant Congress and persuades the American people of the importance of supporting those who share our faith in democracy.

Read that, and then go read Murray Waas' piece tonight on Cheney and Libby, citing executive privilege, stonewalling the Senate Intelligence committee investigation of policymakers' use of Iraq intelligence.

Update: And ask yourself this. When Congress and the relevant committee leadership knows it's being stonewalled, when it doesn't say a word (until the eve of an investigation's anticipated indictments that could embarrass it), when it doesn't use its Constitutional powers and access to the American public to demand compliance, when it pretends that there's nothing even there to investigate, then who really is at fault? The stonewaller? Or the stonewallee? And would you call the problem stonewalling at all? Or collusion?

Heads Up from NPR to listen to All Things Considered this evening, when reporter John McChesney reconstructs through documents and witness interviews the final hours of the only Abu Ghraib detainee whose death at the hands of the CIA and Navy Seals has been ruled a homicide.

Update: Listening to this now. Just appalling. Whoever argues for the CIA to be exempt from any Congressional guidlines on detainee treatment is ... horribly misguided.

Caption: Sgt. Charles Graner poses over the body of detainee Manadel al-Jamadi in Abu Ghraib prison. ABC News/Charles Fredrick/Reuters/Corbis

A reader in Rome sends a translation of the official Berlusconi communique reacting to all the recent Nigergate news revelations. As he writes, "The communiqué was so hilarious, pompous, rhetorical that I had to translate it. ... Sounds like Silvio is in a 1930’s time warp. ..."

The last two articles published on the daily 'La Repubblica' fully confirm the government position firmly expressed and reiterated by Palazzo Chigi in the last communiqué diffused on October 24th, when once again it was reaffirmed that the government, and especially the SISMI, had utterly nothing to do with the “ false dossier on Nigerien Uranium” with regards to any hypothesis that directly or indirectly implicates the government. Although gripping and suggestive, the inquiry pays for quoting groundless and not detailed sources, which cannot be considered as reliable only because they're well reported. Truth itself expresses the powerful and indestructible force that fears no scrutiny or verification, but to the contrary can only come out with renewed vigour and, if ever, with a far more vast and acclaimed diffusion. The facts narrated, as well as the circumstantial elements concerning time, place, mode, and the people involved are not only false, but are disproved by punctual references, and, certainly, what counts most, incontrovertible documentation.

If there are conditions of serious concern which unfortunately exist, Palazzo Chigi finds it in the diffusion of information, other than being groundless, risks to gratuitously create serious damage to [our] primary interests, which does not appear lawful nor correct to jeopardize only in an attempt to fantasize. The image of our nation in the world, the credibility of our institutions that watch over the political correctness and the legitimacy of the Executive, and the stability of international relations are not arguments on which we are disposed to indulge. Just as we strongly avert [our] duty to safeguard the security and safety, as well as the dignity, of the SISMI functionaries exposed with sudden carelessness to grave risk both for their person and for their relations in a way charged with insidious deceit and dangers. That said, with calm and sober serenity, comforted by the awareness of acting in the tracks of authentic and straightforward truth, Palazzo Chigi is evaluating with responsibility the prospects of legally protecting its interests.” ...

In other words, Berlusconi is threatening to sue La Repubblica, for damaging Italy's reputation!

Notice that nobody is suing Rocco Martino, or the Sismi operatives that brought the Niger forgeries into circulation.

Update: Reader D adds:

...By the way, Berlusconi has lost every one of his lawsuits for defamation. In the most recent suit against the investigative reporter Marco Travaglio interviewed by the comedian, Daniel Luttazzi, on his popular- and now banned- RAI 3 program, Satyricon, the courts ruled that everything the two said was true. Berlusconi , Mediaset and Tremonti have been condemned to pay the court costs."

Cheney and Libby stonewalled the Senate Intelligence committee, in an unprecedented way, Murray Waas reports at National Journal:

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources. ...

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war. ...

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community. ...

A former senior administration official familiar with the discussions on whether to turn over the materials said there was a "political element" in the matter. This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq. "Nobody wants something like this dissected or coming out in an election year," the former official said. ...

But one also wonders, why has Pat Roberts not been on TV protesting this affront to Congressional oversight? Why has the committee let Cheney and Libby get away with it? Why are they colluding in not providing the answers the American public deserves about how policymakers in the Bush administration used and abused intelligence to make their case for war to Congress and the American public?

More fabricated intelligence the Bush administration cited to justify invading Iraq, the alleged al Qaeda-Saddam connection. Newsweek reports:

. . . In the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam's dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. (One cache of documents even claimed that six of 19 of the September 11 hijackers had been trained to fly in Iraq.)

Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that when officials at the Bush White House learned about the existence of documents linking Saddam to Al Qaeda, they became very excited and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly to validate and decipher them. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium...

Over at the Left Coaster, blogger eRiposte has an impressively encyclopedic understanding of the ins and outs of the Niger yellowcake claims, including the troubling question of why the British government won't climb down from its claim that it had a second independent source of the discredited claims.

Miers withdraws.

Exxon profits soar. A news alert from the WSJ:

Exxon Mobil's profit surged 75% in the third quarter amid high oil and gas prices. Revenue at the world's largest publicly traded oil company jumped 32% to $100.72 billion.

Steve Clemons has a bombshell:

...What I have learned is that the Office of the Special Counsel has signed a lease this week for expanded office space across the street at 1401 New York Avenue, NW.

Another coincidence? More office space needed to shut down the operation?

I think not. Fitzgerald's operation is expanding.

Update: Steve says that Fitzgerald is not expanding his office space.

Via Kevin Drum, Nur al-Cubicle has put online her translations of the Repubblica series:

Part I
Part II
Part III

You have an ex-Sismi agent (Rocco Martino), a current Sismi vice captain (Antonio Nucera), and a long-time Sismi mole in the Niger embassy Rome involved in assembling the Niger forgeries. You have a former Sismi agent (Rocco Martino) trying to selling them, to the French, to the British, to an Italian journalist. Sismi itself issued reports to the CIA and MI6 with the information on Iraq supposedly contracting to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake from Niger that turned up in the forgeries. You have the head of Sismi Nicolo Pollari admitting to Repubblica in an interview published Monday that Sismi knew what Rocco Martino was up to in 2001 and offering to show them a photo of Martino passing the dossier to British intelligence. I am not sure how the Berlusconi government can plausibly deny that Sismi didn't have a direct role in the Niger yellowcake claims to western intelligence, and a very cozily indirect role to the forgeries themselves. Unless it's the kind of denial that Rove and Libby meant when they told the grand jury that they hadn't told journalists about Wilson's wife or her place of employment.

Maureen Dowd, Bill Kovach, Tom Rosensteil, Geneva Overholser on the Miller case on WAMU's Diane Rehme now.

The AP is reporting that Sismi chief Nicolo Pollari has asked to be questioned by an Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the Italian intelligence services, concerning recent news reports that Sismi was behind the Niger yellowcake claims:

...Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman.

She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials and Britain's MI6 intelligence services a dossier it knew was forged.

The documents detailed a purported Iraqi deal to buy 500 tons of uranium yellowcake from Niger, a claim the United States and Britain used to try to prove Saddam Hussein was seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction and justify the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Italian government - a staunch U.S. ally - repeatedly has denied reports that SISMI passed on documents about the Niger affair. ...

When I was in Italy last year reporting on this story, I met with one of the two co-chairs of this Italian parliamentary committee (the Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the "services" has co-chairs from the left and right, Enzo Bianco on the right, Massimo Brutti on the left).

What's so striking to me having investigated this story both in Washington and in Italy is that -- just like our own Senate Intel committee, the Italian parliamentarians haven't exactly been very aggressive in getting to the bottom of this story that has been under their noses for over a year. On the contrary. They've known the gist of much of this for a while now, but have been very, strikingly, notably passive. (Part III of Repubblica's series out today, which I've just read a translation of, is bound to give them heartburn as well.)

Will Pollari be the fall guy in all this? Perhaps. But as in our own government, there's plenty of blame to go around.

I will have more on this later today.

Update: Chigi Palace reacts.

Steve Clemons has news.

Just out, my Italian Nigergate piece, La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed, at The American Prospect.

I'll have some further thoughts up here about the larger story soon. But one thing to keep in mind, is why Pollari, the Sismi chief, chose to speak with Repubblica at this time at all. (In the Repubblica piece, he denied liaising with anyone but Tenet in his formal relationship with the US; but the NSC has now confirmed to me that Pollari did indeed meet with Hadley on September 9, 2002 as Repubblica originally reported earlier today). Does Pollari have reason to think the Fitzgerald indictments are going to shake something loose about the specifically Sismi provenance of the Niger yellowcake claims? Something the Italian government has long denied? Or is Pollari concerned about something else?

Update: Yes, "Nigeria" not Niger in the first reference in my report to a September 2002 Panorama report on Iraq supposedly acquiring 500 tons of uranium, a little noticed story Repubblica unearthed yesterday. It is not a typo. Thanks, though, I appreciate and can often use the proofreading.

Update II: The Prospect has put on-line excerpts of the translation of Monday's Repubblica piece, about a 2001 break in in the Niger embassy Rome. And reader CM has pointed out some translations of Repubblica's Monday's piece and Tuesday's piece from Nur al-Cubicle and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, respectively.

The investigative reporting team at Italy's La Repubblica has an explosive story out today, on the Italian angle on the Nigergate mysteries. In it they report that Nicolo Pollari, the chief of Italian military intelligence Sismi, met with then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley in September 2002 -- just as the White House was assembling the evidence it would use to convince the American public and Congress of the need for war, in large part, the White House claimed, to prevent Saddam from reconstituting his nuclear arsenal. The meeting could help explain why despite numerous attempts by the CIA to get the White House to take out the Niger yellowcake claims from its speeches, the claims made their way back into Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech. The unusual meeting may also help explain the seemingly hysterical overreaction of the White House to Joseph Wilson's pushback on the Niger yellowcake claims, several months later. I'm reporting on the case over at The American Prospect and Tapped.

Update: An NSC spokesman has just confirmed to me the Pollari-Hadley meeting on September 9, 2002. Would not disclose what the topic of discussion at the meeting was, as a general rule.

So ... is today the day?

White House wants to exclude CIA from torture ban. More on what's expected to happen to the McCain amendment in conference at the hands of Ted Stevens (R-Al) from Marty Lederman at Balkinization: "...If Stevens (read: Cheney) is successful in this endeavor, and if the Congress enacts the Amendment as so limited, it will be a major step backwards from where the law currently stands. This can't be overemphasized: If Stevens is successful at adding his seemingly innocuous "augment[ation]," it would make the law worse than it currently is...."

Libby learned about Plame's identity from...Cheney, the NYT reports:

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers said the notes show that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Mr. Libby’s notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson’s undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent’s identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent’s undercover status.

It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government’s deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry....

Frank Foer got a photo of Judy Miller wearing a US military uniform in Iraq. Foer says there's nothing damning about it, but I disagree. And isn't there a law about who's supposed to wear a uniform during an armed conflict and what it means to be wearing one? Update: My friend Andras writes, "Well, there's one of the most famous war reporters of all, Ernie Pyle, who covered the war in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific..." My question, which other US reporters were in US military uniform during Operation Iraqi Freedom and the aftermath?

Reader NS adds, "I don't know whether the UCMJ has rules over the wearing of uniforms, but the most important issue is w/r/t the Geneva Conventions, which
state that 'journalists engaged in a professional mission in the areas of armed conflict shall be considered civilians' as long as they don't take steps to compromise that status. Such as wearing uniforms. More here."

Scary.

Is exposing Ralph Reed as a phony and willing paid stooge of Jack Abramoff part of McCain's revenge? Check this out from the second page of a Time profile tonight of Ralph Reed's Abramoff connection:

...But in at least one instance, Reed acknowledges he used his White House access for Abramoff. In December 2001 the lobbyist was eager to prevent Angela Williams from being appointed head of the Interior Department's Office of Insular Affairs, which oversees the government's dealings with the Northern Mariana Islands, an important Abramoff client. Williams is married to former Federal Trade Commissioner Orson Swindle, who was a Vietnam POW with Senator John McCain. The subject header of Abramoff and Reed's e-mail exchange (it is unclear who initiated it) contained a misstatement about Williams that is practically Freudian in what it reveals about their animosity toward McCain: "Were you able to whack McCain's wife yet?" Reed assured Abramoff he had "weighed in heavily" with the White House personnel office to block her appointment but had received no commitment. "Any ideas on how we can make sure she does not get it?" Abramoff asked. "Can you ping Karl on this? I can't believe they just don't get this done?" Reed replied, "I am seeing him tomorrow at the WH and plan to discuss it with him as well." Baron says, "Ralph passed the information on to the White House. He is confident the Administration's decision was based on the merit." As for Rove, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy tells TIME, "It is my understanding that Mr. Rove does not recall any of these incidents."

Williams didn't get the job. She and her husband wrote it off to hard feelings from the bruising 2000 Republican presidential primaries. "I just assumed it was my close friendship with Senator McCain and her being married to me," Swindle tells TIME...

Chalabi is coming to meet with Steve Hadley, Reuters reports:

...Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused of giving the Bush administration flawed information about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, will visit Washington in November amid speculation that U.S. officials view him as an acceptable candidate for Iraqi prime minister...

The November visit was first reported by Time magazine, which said in its October 31 edition that Chalabi is due to meet with national security adviser Stephen Hadley.

Time quoted unnamed administration officials as saying Rice and Hadley both view Chalabi as "a plausible and acceptable" candidate for prime minister in the next round of Iraqi elections due December 15.

The longtime Iraqi exile began attracting U.S. attention as a potential prime minister after Washington decided Iraq's current premier, Ibrahim Jaafari, had discredited himself by seeking overly friendly relations with Iran, Time said, quoting unnamed administration officials."...

Interesting WaPo piece about what the documents on Fitzgerald's website may indicate about interference with his probe early on:

Weeks after he took over the investigation 22 months ago into the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's identity, special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald got authority from the Justice Department to expand his inquiry to include any criminal attempts to interfere with his probe, according to a letter posted Friday on Fitzgerald's new Web site...

"The fact that he [Fitzgerald] asked for authority that he probably already had, but wanted spelled out, makes it arguable that he had run into something rather quickly," Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris said yesterday...

Jay Ackroyd makes an important point here.

It's pretty clear that the NYT and Miller aren't much longer for each other. Update: More such hints from MoDo.

With the Hariri report, what are these guys envisioning for Syria? A wag the dog scenario is not so easy to dismiss.

Desperate

Let me get this straight. The guys who demanded the impeachment of Clinton because he lied during an investigation into his sex life, want Fitzgerald to have the "courage" to not pursue obstruction of justice, perjury or criminal conspiracy charges in a case involving a White House conspiracy to out a CIA officer who was married to someone they wanted to shut up, endangering her past contacts, and engaging in a post-crime cover up? The hypocrisy knows no depths. Or is this just written as a gesture to remain a member in good standing of the Party?

Fitzgerald's New Website

Patrick Fitzgerald launches a website, Dan Froomkin reports. What does it mean? Fitzgerald's spokesman insists, perhaps nothing at all:

..."I would strongly caution, Dan, against reading anything into it substantive, one way or the other," he said. "It's really a long overdue effort to get something on the Internet to answer a lot of questions that we get . . . and to put up some of the documents that we have had ongoing and continued interest in having the public be able to access."

OK, OK. But will the Web site be used for future documents as well?

"The possibility exists," Samborn said....

David Ignatius on the perilous disaster of intelligence 'reform' under this administration makes for some scary reading. Update: More here on this issue from BASIC (pdf linked).

IS there any way to fire Michael Brown a second time? Anyone know if he's still consulting for FEMA? Update: Readers WA, JL and others sent word that Brown is indeed still on the FEMA payroll. From the Chicago Trib, "Andrews confirmed that Brown is still on FEMA's payroll as a consultant. She said he works from home, where he is "pulling all the documentation together" to aid in the investigations into the government's response to Katrina. His original 30-day contract was recently extended for another 30 days, she said."

Libby's Obsession with Wilson

Check out this LA Times front pager to discover the depths of Libby's obsession with Joe Wilson:

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson's television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.

Those efforts by the chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they continued into last year — well after the Justice Department began an investigation in September 2003, into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the CIA operative's identity, say former White House aides.

While other administration officials were maintaining a careful distance from Wilson in 2004, Libby ordered up a compendium of information that could be used to rebut Wilson's claims that the administration had "twisted" intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq before the U.S. invasion.

Libby pressed the administration to publicly counter Wilson, sparking a debate with other White House officials who thought the tactic would call more attention to the former diplomat and his criticisms. That debate ended after an April 2004 meeting in the office of White House Communications Director Daniel Bartlett, when staffers were told "don't engage" Wilson, according to notes taken during the meeting by one person present.

"Scooter had a plan to counter Wilson and a passionate desire to do so," said a second person, a former White House official familiar with the internal deliberations. Like other former White House staff, this person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal investigation...

Libby's anger over Wilson's 2003 charges has been known. But new interviews and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth and duration of Libby's interest in Wilson. They also show that the vice president's office closely monitored news coverage.

On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from traveling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president's daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper's coverage.

Libby "would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it," one former official said.

After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003.

The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson's statements that were divided into categories, such as "political ties" or "WMD."

The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney "a lying son of a bitch." It also highlighted Wilson's answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.

The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said...

Yet more evidence the obsession with Wilson was because his information threatened to collapse the Cheney-led White House propaganda to the American people that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

What prompted Judy Miller to suddenly find her notes from the June 23, 2003 meeting with Scooter Libby? Murray Waas reports:

When a prosecutor first questioned Miller during her initial grand jury appearance on September 30, 2005 sources said, she did not bring up the June 23 meeting in recounting her various contacts with Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Pressed by prosecutors who then brought up the specific date of the meeting, Miller testified that she still could not recall the June meeting with Libby, in which they discussed a controversial CIA-sponsored mission to Africa by former Ambassador Joe Wilson, or the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.

When a prosecutor presented Miller with copies of the White House-complex visitation logs, she said such a meeting was possible.

Shortly after her September 30 testimony, Miller discovered her notes from the June 23 meeting, and returned on October 12 for a second round of grand jury testimony. In this second appearance, Miller recounted details from her June 23 meeting with Libby, with the assistance of her notes...

More on Cheney's cold war against the CIA, its long history and possible relevance to the Plame case, from the LA Times' Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten:

...Leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Cheney worked with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, to challenge CIA findings that countered their expectations or that disagreed with information they had received through their own intelligence channels.

Cheney traveled from the White House to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a dozen times, most often to discuss Iraq's possible links to nuclear weapons and terrorism. Agency veterans have said that Cheney's visits were more frequent than those of any other president or vice president, including the first president Bush, a former director of the agency.

When Cheney visited the CIA, Iraq was his main focus, particularly in the months before the war. Unlike Libby and others working with the vice president, Cheney was reportedly always polite. But in his quiet way, he was insistent, sometimes asking the same question again and again as if he hoped the answer would change, according to people familiar with his contacts with the CIA.

Cheney's visits perked up agency analysts who often worked anonymously, said one former official. Many reportedly enjoyed the challenge of a smart questioner and appreciated his interest. But Cheney's visits and his clinging to certain views became noticeable and drew expressions of concern, according to the former official.

For example, CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks.

Nonetheless, the agency continued to receive dozens of inquiries on the topic from top officials — several times from Cheney himself. Despite the agency warnings, Cheney made reference to the Atta meeting as if it were a sure thing.

"It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack," Cheney said Dec. 9, 2001, on NBC's "Meet the Press." [...]

NATO airlifts for Pakistan quake relief:

..."Although UNHCR worked closely with non-combatant NATO forces in Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia during the Kosovo crisis, this is the first time the UN refugee agency and NATO have mounted a joint airlift of this size," UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond said at the agency's headquarters in Geneva.

Dozens of sorties by NATO aircraft will probably be required to move all of the supplies, which are being transferred from Iskenderun to Incirlik by Turkish-provided trucks and troops...

Miller seems to be stepping back a bit from earlier claims that she had a Secret security clearance from the Pentagon. Or is she?

...Some Pentagon officials and journalists questioned whether her arrangement was actually what many journalists covering the Iraq war had: a written agreement to see and hear classified information but treat it as off the record unless an ad hoc arrangement was reached with military hosts.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Ms. Miller said this so-called nondisclosure form was precisely what she had signed, with some modifications, adding that what she had meant to say in her published account was that she had had temporary access to classified information under rules set by her unit.

Ms. Miller said that under the conditions set by the commander of the unit, Col. Richard R. McPhee, she had been allowed to discuss her most secret reporting with only the senior-most editors of The Times, who at the time were Howell Raines, the executive editor, and Gerald M. Boyd, the managing editor.

When asked if she had ever left the impression with sources, including Mr. Libby, that she had access to classified information after leaving her assignment in Iraq, Ms. Miller said she could not recall. "I don't remember if I ever told him I was disembedded," she said. "I might not have." But she added, "I never misled anybody."

And earlier reports said Miller was distinguishing the clearance she had from that of other reporters, including the WaPo's Barton Gellman, reportedly telling Army officers, "I'm cleared for that, he's not." Granted, Gellman was a unilateral if I remember correctly from the William Jackson article. But the point was she seemed convinced that she was entitled to receive information that other reporters on the same beat were not because of her particular arrangement with the Pentagon.

Just how "modified" was the embed non disclosure form she signed? Is it possible that Miller thought she was getting some special status, that wasn't actually that different from other embeds? Or is that what she, and perhaps whoever arranged that status, would like us to believe now?

Tell us what you really mean, Larry:

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.

It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.

“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”

The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department...

The Guardian's Rory Carroll kidnapped in Baghdad. Update: The BBC reports that Carroll has been freed unharmed.

The WaPo provides a brisk, comprehensive wrap up of much that's known and still unknown about the Fitzgerald probe.

OK, we really need a diagram.

Newsweek on White House manipulation of the media:

...Libby’s comments do touch on what many believe is a larger issue raised by the case: whether the administration accurately represented the nature of what the U.S. intelligence community knew, and didn’t know, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs before the nation went to war.

When Miller met with Libby for two hours at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel on July 8, 2003, the vice president’s top aide provided an additional detail that was not contained in the white paper, according to Miller’s account published in last Sunday’s New York Times. The still-classified NIE, Libby told her, “had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium” for a nuclear bomb. [...]

But contrary to what Libby told Miller, the more detailed version of the NIE was hardly stronger. In fact, it revealed for the first time, in the very first paragraph—right after the sentence that “if left unchecked, [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade”—the fact that the State Department’s intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), had an “alternative view” of the matter.

That alternative view, relegated to a boxed footnote inside the document, stated that while INR believed that Saddam “continues to want nuclear weapons” and had a “limited effort” underway to acquire nuclear capabilities, the evidence does not add up to a “compelling case” that Iraq was pursuing a full-scale nuclear weapons program. “Iraq may be doing so,” the footnote read, “but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment.” [...]

As for the purported Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Africa, the NIE did indeed assert that Iraq had been “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellow cake.” It based that assessment on foreign government “reports” about attempted purchases from Niger and two other African countries.

But the NIE also included an INR written annex in which the State Department analysts concluded that claims of Iraq uranium purchases in Africa were “highly dubious.” [...]

Live by spin, die by spin, writes Howard Fineman:

...In essence, the Bush-Rove campaign machine was redeployed in the service of selling of the Iraq war and, later, in defense of that sale. Did they go over the line in doing so? We’re about to find out.

In the meantime (and in another twist on the poetic justice them), the very discipline of the machine itself—its short internal supply lines, the consistently-followed talking points, the focus on feeding friends and obliterating enemies—could be helping Fitzgerald. Tightly-knit groups rise together, but they fall together. If the inner circle is small, it takes only one insider “flip” to endanger the rest.

The campaign sales structure for the political run up to the war was clear from the start. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card talked openly about new-car style “rollouts” in the fall of 2002; it soon became well-known that, among those in the so called “White House Iraq Group”—WHIG for short—were campaign honchos such as Rove, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and Mary Matalin.

People have long since gotten used to the idea of Rove in the White House. But, the fact is, in 2001, his presence was something novel. He was the first modern-era consultant with an office in the West Wing.

And there he was in the WHIG, along with several of the heaviest hitters of substantive foreign policy, including Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then-National Security Advisor Condi Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley.

What, if any, classified information was floating around at WHIG meetings? What, if any, of it was “put out,” as they say, or used in other ways? What, if any, info might some of the more enthusiastic WHIG members have tried to cadge on the side, perhaps for their own somewhat freelance use? Who leaked what to whom among the Judy Miller types in the national media?

These questions were not asked for the most part at the time, either by the media or the Democrats who now oppose the war. But in American politics we tend to replay every cataclysmic political issue in the courts: Nixon’s reelection in 1972 in Watergate, Clinton’s in 1996 in Monica Madness.

Now comes—again—the war in Iraq and, by extension, the reelection of the self-described “war president.”

Will Fitzgerald indict anyone? Well-placed insiders, including two I’ve talked to in the last two days, think that he will. And then the gods, or rather the law, will begin to speak.

The Missing Intelligence Report

One thing we know from the Fitzgerald investigation: the campaign to discredit Joe Wilson by saying he had only gotten the trip to Niger as a boondoggle from his wife, a CIA officer, was part of a larger, concerted effort by officials from the White House and the Vice President's office to construct an alternative narrative of who was to blame for the Iraq WMD intelligence fiasco. Not the White House, but the CIA. Rove and Libby weren't just telling reporters, 'Cheney doesn't know anything about Wilson's trip.' No. They created a fuller, alternative narrative: 'Cheney didn't know anything about Wilson's trip to Niger, because Wilson only got the trip as a boondoggle from his wife who works on unconventional weapons at the CIA.' It may seem like an almost random side note that has cost them considerable trouble. But it wasn't random at all. As we know from recent reports surrounding the Fitzgerald investigation, the Vice President's office was leading an all-out propaganda war -- every bit as choreographed as the pre-war propaganda campaign by the same officials -- to blame the CIA for the fact that there weren't any WMD to be found in Iraq after all, and the chief stated reason for the war was collapsing. And it enlisted not just leaks to reporters about Valerie Plame to conduct that war against the CIA. It also enlisted key Republican officials in Congress, to buck up its narrative, and literally divert attention from the role of the White House and executive branch offices in citing truly dubious Iraq intelligence - some, including the Niger yellowcake claims, not supported by the intelligence community at all. And Congress so far has gone along.

So who did the Vice President's office reach to for assistance in its campaign to blame all of Iraq on the CIA? Apparently, Pat Roberts, the chair of the Senate Select Intelligence committee, the committee that had promised to investigate how the US government got Iraq intelligence so wrong. Off and on the past couple months, I have been talking to staff on the committee, Republicans and Democrats, trying to figure out what's really happened with the promised Phase II SSCI report, that was supposed to examine US government officials' use of the intelligence. (The Phase I report, you'll remember, catalogued the intelligence community's role in the Iraq intel mistakes). Was Phase II totally dead and buried? Did it ever find anything before it was buried? Or was it still limping along, with an inkling of hope of ever seeing the light of day? Here's my piece on the missing report.

Earlier this week, as the piece was already at the printer, I was calling someone up for a quick question, and we got to talking about the latest Fitzgerald news from over the weekend. And I was told something that really stands out: that Roberts has literally been coordinating with Senate majority leader Frist and Cheney's office very closely on many aspects of the Senate Intelligence committee's supposed investigation of the intelligence, and in particular, working closely with Cheney's office on crafting the language defining the terms for the as-yet unfinished Phase II report. It hardly is surprising that Cheney took a big interest in what the Senate Select Intelligence committee might turn up in its investigation. But think about it. Here's the Congressional committee constitutionally mandated to provide oversight of all intelligence activities happening by the US government. And yet, here we have the Intelligence committee head coordinating to some degree with the Vice President's office, who we now know to be deeply involved in some of the most dubious of pre-war intelligence pronouncements, tasking, unconventional intel channels, and cherry picking, and at the forefront of a post-war campaign to slime Wilson and his CIA officer wife. When Congress is in cahoots with the administration in stifling oversight, who can investigate the investigators? Unfortunately, it's not in Fitzgerald's mandate.

Anyhow, this is all an introduction to tell you to check out my short piece on the matter.

Bush annoyed that Rove got caught, New York Daily News reports.

Bill Arkin on Scott Ritter's new book is really worth a read:

...To Ritter, who eventually became a vocal critic of the U.S. decision to abandon weapons inspections and go to war, Washington never had any intentions to let sanctions be lifted. To Ritter, since Washington never wanted to lift sanctions, it never wanted the U.N. to be successful. But on this score, Ritter is just dead wrong.

The weakness of Resolution 687, if one could call it a weakness, was that it was crafted by Cold War arms control experts who were completely focused on weapons of mass destruction, stung at the time by the failure of the International Atomic Energy Agency to curtail Iraq's gigantic nuclear weapons program, and embarrassed by the extent of U.S. ignorance about Saddam's various illegal weapons efforts.

Iraq was required to give up all of its biological, chemical, nuclear, and long-range missile programs along the Cold War model. Ignored were Iraq's conventional forces that were responsible for invading Iran and Kuwait in the first place. But most important, what the Resolution did was ignore Saddam Hussein and his regime. It wasn't until the mid-1990's that the human right aesthetic justified international action against such war criminals. In 1991, when Resolution 687 was passed, the conspiracy was that the United States was willing, as was the rest of the international community, to keep Saddam Hussein in power for grandiose geo-political reasons.

The U.S. approach to Iraq thus wasn't some conspiracy. It was a poorly conceived strategy followed by completely new territory. Sure over time (pretty quickly indeed) it became clear that Iraq would never voluntarily comply with the U.N.; over time all parties evolved to understand how difficult it would be to achieve disarmament with a non-cooperative party (the inspection regime was to have lasted a few months, at most a couple of years); and over time, the Clinton administration came to the conclusion that the only way Iraq would ever cease being a threat to the region would be if Saddam Hussein was gone.

Conspiracy theorists want to believe that some hidden hand understood and was maneuvering all of this from the beginning. I don't think that is true and Ritter doesn't produce the goods to prove his case.

From the very beginning, though, Scott Ritter had already reached his own conclusion, and it is one that in hindsight seems so prescient and so right, who could question his story.

Scott Ritter was convinced that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. C?

An interesting take on Miller from a colleague, Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who worked in Cairo with her twenty years ago:

...Judy’s great talent as a reporter is in gaining access. Full stop. She doesn’t always know what she has when she’s got it, and she isn’t always good at analyzing what she’s heard when she hears it. Indeed, that may be one reason so many very high level sources—kings, princes, dictators, presidents, politicians—have enjoyed confiding, through her, so many supposed scoops and secrets published in The New York Times.

My purpose here is not to defend Judy nor attack her, but to look at whatever it is the rest of us can learn from her case. There are not many really useful lessons, I think, in the kind of cannibalistic frenzy that’s erupted in much of the fourth estate. It ignores fundamental problems of the industry like shrinking budgets, small staffs, fractured markets, shorter public attention spans, a preternatural fear of lawsuits and persistent intimidation by right-wing ideologues. Because of all this, the business is increasingly driven by simple-minded celebrity reporting, even when those celebrities “won’t let their names be used because of the sensitivity of the subject.” And journalists who play the game well get to be celebrities themselves, writing best-selling books, making television appearances, joining the club, as it were, unless and until they betray those very special sources that got them in to begin with. Judy’s a symptom of all this, not the disease. But like witch hunters in the midst of a plague, a lot of my brethren are looking for someone they can burn at the stake, as if that could cure our chronic afflictions...

Given the way Judy takes notes, I’m not surprised that she can’t remember who first gave her the name of “Flame.” I’ve even seen speculation that it came from one of her other not-so-reliable sources, Iraqi exile leader (and now vice president) Ahmad Chalabi, who peddled so many of the WMD rumors that wound up as facts in the Times. Ahmad keeps close tabs on his enemies, and I know first-hand that he counted many people at the C.I.A. on that list. When I e-mailed one of Chalabi’s aides to ask point blank if Chalabi was Judy’s source for Plame’s name, the aide responded: “Come on Chris … get back to serious work.” That seemed like a non-denial denial, so I asked again. “I'm not going to dignify it any further,” was the reply. “It is utter rubbish and you really should know better than to even listen to such rehashed 'Chalabi is the root of all evil' claptrap.”

So, I don’t know if Ahmad was the source. But I do know this. His agenda was to get Saddam ousted at any price and position himself near the center of power, not protect the integrity of the American press or, for that matter, of the U.S. president. Chalabi’s secret was simple: he told the administration hawks whatever they wanted to hear.

In case you are trying to pace yourself, the NYT reports, and another colleague covering this story concurs, that there won't be anything from Fitzgerald this week.

No final report planned by Fitzgerald, the NYT reports.

Fitzgerald probe focuses on Libby, Murray Waas reports tonight at the National Journal:

...According to attorneys familiar with his testimony, Libby told the grand jury that at the meeting, he told Miller that Plame had something to do with Wilson's being sent on a controversial CIA-sponsored mission to Africa, but that he did not know that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA or anything else about her.

However, Miller testified and turned over notes from the July 8 conversation to the grand jury that showed that Libby had told her that Plame worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office.

Evidence indicating that Libby or his attorney may have tried to discourage or influence Miller's testimony is significant for two reasons, outside legal experts say. First, attempting to influence a witness's testimony might in and of itself constitute obstruction of justice or witness-tampering, said the experts.

More important, evidence that Libby might have tried to discourage Miller's testimony has put Libby's testimony in a worse light, according to government officials briefed on the matter. Potentially misleading and incomplete answers by Libby to federal investigators are less likely to be explained away as the result of his faulty memory or inadvertent mistakes, the sources said...

Hannah target letter? Here's Chris Nelson in the Nelson Report tonight:

Before we start, today’s hot gossip is that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald may have sent a “target letter”...an official warning of a likely indictment...to Vice President Cheney’s deputy chief of staff, John Hannah. According to sources which have been right from time to time, Hannah has told associates he has been forced to cut a deal, and that they think this includes testifying against his immediate boss, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Hannah’s name resonates to the insiders, since he is a samurai for UN Amb. John Bolton, detailed to the White House while Bolton was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs...in other words, an office with folks quite likely to have known the CIA connection which may form the basis of any criminal indictments in this case...

Fitzgerald offering one last chance for deals?

Raw Story says the cooperating senior official in the Fitzgerald probe is Cheney aide John Hannah. (Thx to JG and SS).

The Torture Question

PBS's Frontline tonight features Capt. Ian Fishback, the West Point grad who blew the whistle on torture at Camp Mercury to the Senate Armed Services committee and Human Rights Watch, after the Pentagon ignored his protests. The documentary crew got inside Abu Ghraib, and interviewed more than 30 key officials, including former Abu Ghraib commander Army Reserve Gen. Janice Karpinski. On most local PBS stations tonight at 9pm.

Hollywood on the Potomac, indeed.

E. J. Dionne on the "old conservative talking points" about rule of law becoming inoperative:

...Before he trashed Wilson to Miller in a July 8, 2003, meeting, Libby asked that his comments not be attributed to a "senior administration official," the standard anonymous reference to, well, senior administration officials. Instead, he wanted his statements attributed to a "former Hill staffer," a reference to Libby's earlier work in Congress. Why would Libby want his comments ascribed to such a vague source? Miller says she told the special prosecutor that she "assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson."

These cases portray an administration and a movement that can dish it out, but want to evade responsibility for doing so and can't take it when they are subjected to the same rule book that inconvenienced an earlier president. An editorial in the latest issue of the conservative Weekly Standard is a sign of arguments to come. The editorial complains about the various accusations being leveled against DeLay, Libby, Rove and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and it says that "a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives."

I have great respect for my friends at the Weekly Standard, so I think they'll understand my surprise and wonder over this new conservative concern for the criminalization of politics. A process that was about "the rule of law" when Democrats were in power is suddenly an outrage now that it's Republicans who are being held accountable...

Slate's Eric Umansky:

...Citing "lawyers familiar with the case and government officials," the Post's off-lead says the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case investigation has "zeroed in" on Vice President Cheney's office and that the tension between that office and the CIA "contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame." It sounds saucy, but the speculation isn't particularly new. Still, there might be an important puzzle piece buried at the end of the Post's story, namely a hint about how the White House might have seen a State Department memo that identified Plame. In any case, the special prosecutor's office hinted about the possibility of an announcement soon. In a rare public statement, the office said an announcement on the case will happen in D.C. rather than Chicago, where the prosecutor is based.

While we're on the Plame case, it's worth noting that while it's obvious Judith Miller left questions unanswered, it's unclear whether the NYT's leaders plan on trying to do anything about it. To take just one example, according to the NYT's big takeout, Miller would not "allow reporters to review her notes." Those are the same notes that ID'd Plame—or "Flame"—and that Miller shared with the prosecutor. Doesn't the NYT's publisher think Miller needs to also give her colleagues a peek? What's Bill Keller's position? There is of course another option: By staying silent, the Times' leaders can implicitly condone Miller stonewalling her own paper.

OK, on the puzzle piece Eric Umansky highlights above. We know that a State Department memo identified Joseph Wilson's wife (as Valerie Wilson) in a paragraph marked Secret as having a role in getting Wilson the trip to Niger. But lawyers for White House officials identified as telling reporters about Wilson's wife have always claimed that their clients didn't learn of Plame from any sort of classified memo, but that they heard about it just "around" perhaps even from a reporter. But what Swopa suggests, is that there is evidence now that the White House did learn about this memo early on in June. And that claims of faulty memories and they heard it from a reporter are -- well -- diversion.

Here's the Swopa post from last night whose signficance Eric Umansky caught:

Tonight, toward the end of an article whose primary focus is VP Dick Cheney, the Washington Post narrates the coup de grace:

Senior administration officials said there was a document circulated at the State Department -- before Libby talked to Miller -- that mentioned Plame. It was drafted in June as an administrative letter and addressed to then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who was acting secretary at the time since both Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage were out of the country.

As a former State Department official involved in the process recalled it, Grossman wanted the letter as background for a meeting at the White House where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush's inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger.

More on that memo, its mistakes, and purpose, in the last few graphs of the Post piece.

(Eric and Swopa (and the Post) get all credit for the legwork. This post has been updated).

Holy moly. From the NY Daily News:

A special prosecutor's intensifying focus into who outed a CIA spy has raised questions whether Vice President Cheney himself is involved, knowledgeable sources confirmed yesterday.

At least one source and one reporter who have testified in the probe said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing Cheney's role in the Valerie Plame affair.

In addition, at least six current and former Cheney staffers - most members of the White House Iraq Group - have testified before the grand jury, including the vice president's top honcho, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and two top Cheney national security lieutenants.

Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.

"They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

Cheney was questioned last year byprosecutors and has hired a private attorney, former colleague Terrence O'Donnell, who declined to comment when contacted by The News.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride only offered the standard canned response that her boss is cooperating.

Libby and President Bush's political mastermind Karl Rove remain the focus of the probe into whether Plame's cover was blown in a scheme to embarrass her husband, ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked claims that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

Libby is often described as "Cheney's Cheney," a loyal and discreet lieutenant who shares his boss's hard-line philosophy and bareknuckle attitude toward political enemies of the Bush administration.

Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president.

"Scooter wouldn't be freelancing on this without Cheney's knowledge," a source told the Daily News. "It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: 'This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'"

The News reported in July that Libby was "totally obsessed with Wilson." ...

Update: I will irresponsibly hazard a guess: Fleischer, or Grossman. A friend suggests Powell or Armitage. Or perhaps someone from Cheney's office, another reader suggests. I'm starting to quickly regret this update....Hadley? Hannah? Raw Story says it's Hannah.

The LAT reports that one of Miller's attorney, Floyd Abrams, believes she had a Secret security clearance. "Abrams, the lawyer, said he believed Miller had a 'secret,' but not a 'top secret' clearance." Maybe this can help those at the Pentagon narrow down their search.

So, did Novak have a clearance? Does Woodward? Can every agency issue them to their favorites?

What rodeo would Miller and Libby have possibly both been at in August 2003 in Wyoming? Was Cheney vacationing out there, or what?

Update: A reader/blogger writes with this WaPo link that says that Cheney was indeed vacationing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August 2003. So why would Judy have been so shocked to run into Libby at the rodeo?

Plame didn't work for WINPAC after all, as Libby allegedly told Miller. But did the State Department memo on how Wilson got the trip say she did? And what does the fact that Libby thought she did tell investigators about where he might have gotten the information about Plame?

From Tuesday's Washington Post: "Cheney’s Office Is A Focus in Leak Case; Sources Cite Role Of Feud With CIA."

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney’s office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. [...]

One former CIA official told prosecutors early in the probe about efforts by Cheney’s office and his allies at the National Security Council to obtain information about Wilson’s trip as long as two months before Plame was unmasked in July 2003, according to a person familiar with the account...

When I was a cub investigative reporter chasing the anthrax investigation story several years ago, I remember being confused about one aspect of the coverage of that still unsolved case. At one point in the winter/spring of 2002, it was becoming evident that the FBI was shifting its focus of investigation from foreign sources as the likely perpetrators of the anthrax attacks that killed five people in the fall of 2001, to US domestic sources, in particular those with a connection to the US government biodefense program (for a variety of reasons I won't go into here). But the NYT's Judith Miller, who was perhaps the country's leading journalistic authority on bioweapons, and who had recently won a Pulitzer prize for her book Germs, and who had established close ties with several members of the US government bioweapons and biodefense community for research for her book, simply wouldn't report out what was really happening with the investigation, e.g. that players in the highly secretive and compartmentalized US government biodefense program were becoming a main focus of the investigation. It was hard at the time to not wonder if her close relationship to her sources in the US government program hadn't steered her away from what the rest of us were finding and reporting.

As it happens, the story isn't as neat as that, because now the FBI is reportedly being interviewed by lawyers for a person who accuses former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI of outing him as a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation to the media. And strangely enough, who is one journalist who the FBI agents are reportedly being interviewed about whether they leaked to? That would be Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, who had written a column about the "person of interest" (using a pseudonym for the person, Z).

Fast forward a year. Kristof writes a column in May 2003 sourced anonymously by Joe Wilson that alleges Wilson checked out the Iraq-Niger yellowcake allegations and found them to be likely false. And Cheney's office orchestrates its retaliation. Miller is appealed to when she appears for an interview on the missing WMD with Libby.

There's a history here... It's kind of interesting. I think it's simply very hard for institutions to investigate themselves, given the hundreds of small personal histories such as this one that form any work place. Think about it. Do any of us think George Bush can launch an honest investigation of his administration's Katrina response failures? Of course not. No preaching here, just pointing out the human relationships that make up an institution as complex as the Times are not likely much different than those at any other institution that we wouldn't expect to tear itself apart investigating itself. Heck, the Republican-led Congress can't even seem to bring itself to investigate the GOP-led executive branch on matters of life and death, war and peace, its party loyalties being stronger than its Constitutional mandate to serve as a check and balance on executive authority.

But there's another element worth exploring here. And it is that it was genuinely disturbing to even someone like myself pretty early along in their career back then that Miller's relationship with her US government sources was a big determining issue in what she chose to share with Times' readers. I mean, whether or not she agreed with the focus of the investigation, the fact of what was being investigated by the US government in terms of a WMD attack that killed Americans for the first time in history was a story. And there was just very little from someone who had extraordinary access.

But the relationship was not all one way. Judy Miller did favors for her US government sources. But she expected something in return. A status different from the rest of her colleagues. Access far beyond anything afforded her colleagues. Whether or not a top Pentagon official actually granted her a "Secret" security clearance, and I am persuaded to believe that someone high up did, Miller was trying to forge just that kind of situation, which of course, was an impossible one.

The ranking Democrats on the House Judiciary and Armed Services committee write Rumsfeld a letter, asking for more information on Judy Miller's alleged Secret security clearance. "... In order to better understand the scope of the program under which journalists received security clearances, we would appreciate your prompt response to the following questions..."

Froomkin's wrap up.

Will Bunch has some interesting speculation about Fitzgerald's interest in both Cheney and Gerald Ford's 90th birthday party.

Miller's war against the UN.

Ain't it the truth! Marshall Wittmann (via Kevin Drum):

...All of the pack that relentlessly pursued Clinton will kvetch about the "criminalization of politics." They will see no irony or hypocrisy in their complaint because this is a fight about preserving power not maintaining consistency. The conservative standard is clear - when a Democratic President is the target it is about the "rule of law" and when the "victim" is a Republican it is about the "criminalization of politics." It is particularly rich that Tom DeLay, the relentless pursuer of Clinton, is making this claim. One wonders whether he agonized over this injustice with Casino Jack Abramoff and Righteous Ralph Reed as they jetted over the Atlantic on the way to their golfing outing in Scotland.

...When I was at the Christian Coalition, I witnessed first-hand the alliance of the deregulation, no-tax crowd with the religious conservatives. Ironically, the rank and file of the religious right are hardly the country club set. They are largely middle-class Americans who don't rely on trust funds or dividend checks for their livelihoods. But the leaders of the religious right have betrayed their constituents by failing to champion such economic issues as family leave or access to health insurance, which would relieve the stresses on many working families. The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment. The religious right has consistently provided the ground troops, while the big-money men have gotten the goodies.

The realization that the religious right had essentially become a front for the money men of the Republican Party was a primary source of my disenchantment with that movement. And without a doubt, the GOP has merely become a vehicle for unbridled corporate power. Such a party cannot provide a home for a movement that strives for national greatness...

Poynter's Jim Romenesko is posting some interesting letters on various aspects of the Miller/Plame/Fitzgerald case.

Bloomberg:

A special counsel is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent's name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.

The special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, has questioned current and former officials of President George W. Bush's administration about whether Cheney was involved in an effort to discredit the agent's husband, Iraq war critic and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, according to the people.

Fitzgerald has questioned Cheney's communications adviser Catherine Martin and former spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise and ex-White House aide Jim Wilkinson about the vice president's knowledge of the anti-Wilson campaign and his dealings on it with Libby, his chief of staff, the people said. The information came from multiple sources, who requested anonymity because of the secrecy and political sensitivity of the investigation.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who has now testified twice before a federal grand jury probing the case after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Fitzgerald, wrote in yesterday's New York Times that Fitzgerald asked her whether the vice president ``had known what his chief aide,'' Libby, ``was doing and saying'' regarding Wilson, a critic of the war in Iraq.

Fitzgerald has told lawyers involved in the case that he hopes to conclude soon -- the grand jury's term expires Oct. 28, although it could be extended -- and there is a growing sense among knowledgeable observers that the outcome will involve serious criminal charges. ``Fitzgerald is putting together a big case,'' Washington attorney Robert Bennett, who represents Miller, said on the ABC-TV program ``This Week'' yesterday...

Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokesman, declined to comment yesterday on whether the vice president, 64, has been contacted by Fitzgerald about his status in the case, except to say: ``This is an ongoing investigation, and we are fully cooperating.'' Randall Samborn, a Fitzgerald spokesman, declined to comment. Calls to Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, and Joseph Tate, Libby's lawyer, weren't returned.

There's no indication Fitzgerald is considering criminal charges against the vice president, who gave unsworn testimony to investigators last year. One option for Fitzgerald is to outline his findings about Cheney's role if he files a final report on the investigation.

Questioned Officials

Fitzgerald, 45, has also questioned administration officials about any knowledge Bush may have had of the campaign against Wilson. Yet most administration observers have noted that on Iraq, as with most matters, it's Cheney who has played the more hands-on role.

One lawyer intimately involved in the case, who like the others demanded anonymity, said one reason Fitzgerald was willing to send Miller to jail to compel testimony was because he was pursuing evidence the vice president may have been aware of the specifics of the anti-Wilson strategy...

Update: Note too the current job of former Cheney spokesperson, Jennifer Millerwise.

Former Carter arms control advisor William Jackson has published more on one of the more baffling aspects of this case, Judith Miller's Secret security clearance. Jackson was among the first to report two years ago that Miller claimed in Iraq to have a security clearance, and Miller has confirmed in her piece yesterday that she indeed had one. Jackson has also reported in the past, and reports again in this updated piece tonight, that Miller wore a US military uniform in Iraq. It seems the source for that is either the handful of other reporters who were on the same WMD hunt beat in Iraq, or the US military public affairs officers that Jackson interviewed. If it's true that Miller wore a military uniform in Iraq, that just blows one's mind.

The NYT's David Johnston reports tonight that, "Lawyers with clients in the case have said that the rapid flow of events and intensity of Mr. Fitzgerald's final push suggest that the prosecutor is preparing to accuse someone of wrongdoing. But it is not known who may be charged or what possible violations may be involved." His report focuses on the potential legal jeopardy of Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. And like the NYT, the Washington Post's Barton Gellmann and Walter Pincus report that Miller's lawyer Robert Bennett believes Libby may have a "problem" in the Fitzgerald probe:

..."If he said that he had not talked to Judy about these things or didn't talk about the wife, then he's got a problem," Bennett said, referring to CIA operative Valerie Plame, the woman at the center of the leak investigation. Miller told prosecutors that "to the best of her recollection she did not know of" Plame's employment at the CIA "before she spoke to Mr. Libby," he said.

Bennett would not speculate whether Libby was trying to steer Miller's eventual testimony -- an action that could be considered an attempt to obstruct justice, through an alleged suggestion by his lawyer and language in a personal letter sent to her last month that encouraged her to testify.

But he did call Libby's reference to part of the Sept. 15 letter to Miller "very troubling." ...

Update: The WSJ has a nice summary of the key new information learned over the weekend, including a brief interview with Miller.

Ralph Reed is the biggest fraud in recent American political history, this WaPo story on just the latest chapter in the Abramoff saga reveals as a mere side note:

...Abramoff quietly arranged for eLottery to pay conservative, anti-gambling activists to help in the firm's $2 million pro-gambling campaign, including Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Both kept in close contact with Abramoff about the arrangement, e-mails show. Abramoff also turned to prominent anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist, arranging to route some of eLottery's money for Reed through Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform...

In May, eLottery hired Abramoff's firm, Preston Gates & Ellis LLP, for $100,000 a month, according to lobbying reports. In the following months, Abramoff directed the company to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to various organizations, faxes, e-mails and court records show. The groups included Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition; companies affiliated with Reed; and a Seattle Orthodox Jewish foundation, Toward Tradition..

Checks and e-mails obtained by The Post show that Abramoff recruited Reed to join Sheldon in the effort to pressure members of Congress. Reed had left the Christian Coalition in 1997 and started a political consulting firm in Georgia.

Abramoff asked eLottery to write a check in June 2000 to Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition (TVC). He also routed eLottery money to a Reed company, using two intermediaries, which had the effect of obscuring the source. [...]

According to the e-mails, Reed provided the name and address where Norquist was supposed to send the money: to Robin Vanderwall at a location in Virginia Beach.

Vanderwall was director of the Faith and Family Alliance, a political advocacy group that was founded by two of Reed's colleagues and then turned over to Vanderwall, Vanderwall said and records show.

Vanderwall, a former Regent University Law School student and Republican operative, was later convicted of soliciting sex with minors via the Internet and is serving a seven-year term in Virginia state prison...

A colleague and reader pointed out something really chilling to me today, that a Nexis search confirms. Until Frank Rich mentioned it in his column today, the New York Times has never mentioned the White House Iraq Group. Not once. Nor as far as I can tell, referred to it, even once, without that name. As if it didn't exist. How is that possible?

Update: Kevin Drum writes to say, there aren't many mentions of WHIG in other newspapers either. But that's true and not true. A Nexis search the other day showed something like 57 mentions of the White House Iraq Group, from major news outlets, total. Two of those were in the Washington Post, one the definitive August 2003 Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus piece that goes into the WHIG for the first time at length, and its role. Sourced to senior officials who participated in the group, the piece says that a heretofore unknown internal White House working group, that included the top advisors in the White House, the Vice President's office, and the National Security Council, ran an Iraq task force whose policy function was seamlessly melded into a propaganda campaign (Andy Card's famous line that "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Shortly after Labor Day 2002, top Bush administration officials including Cheney went onto the Sunday talk shows to talk about the prospect of an Iraq nuclear "mushroom cloud"). The Los Angeles Times has three stories that mention the White House Iraq Group by name, two of them from March 2004 reporting on subpoenas issued by Fitzgerald requesting documentation from it relating to the Plame matter. The WSJ mentioned the WHIG in a story last week describing its members and activities as a focus of the Fitzgerald investigation.

The NYT considers itself and the Washington Post in a league of their own when it comes to national security reporting. And I just don't see how the NYT national security team couldn't not appreciate what Gellman/Pincus had reported. Perhaps I'm overblowing it, but Fitzgerald seems to have considered the activities of this group central to his investigation for more than a year. The thing we know about the Rove/Libby conversations with reporters about Wilson's wife, and the WH calls to six other reporters that July 2003 about Wilson's wife, is that they were coordinated. These conversations were not random, they were part of a campaign. Who or what was the coordinating entity? Remember, after Rove spoke with Time's Matt Cooper, he emailed then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley to tell him how he handled the call. Anyhow, the WHIG certainly seems worthy of at least a small mention, doesn't it?

Monday Update: A friend writes with a link to Elisabeth Bumiller's September 7 2002 NYT story about the White House's marketing campaign for war in Iraq, as it was being launched, that contained the famous Andy Card line about not introducing new products in August. But still, retrospectively, the effort was never described in its coordinated fullness -- that a White House task force with a consistent membership fused policy and propaganda functions in advance of and during the Iraq war to a startling degree, to sell the war to Congress and the American public. Nor any mention of the WHIG as Fitzgerald was specifically subpoenaing the group's documentation from July 2003.

This has obviously been speculated about for months on the blogs. But it's worth remembering, wasn't Bolton's acting chief of staff Frederick Fleitz wearing a second hat when he was working for Bolton? That hat was....wait....an analyst with the CIA's WINPAC bureau. The precise bureau Libby told Miller that Joe Wilson's wife worked for, Miller writes. Maybe Fleitz or Bolton supplied the name of Wilson's wife after Libby had pushed Miller to dig in that direction?

As blogger Empty Wheel helpfully found in the archives recently, here is Fleitz's description of his dual-role under Bolton and WINPAC, from his testimony during the Senate Foreign Relations committee Bolton nomination hearings:

FREDERICK FLEITZ: My name is Frederick Fleitz, I'm a CI [Counter-Intelligence] officer on detail to John Bolton's staff as a Special Assistant, I've been on detail since August 2001. I've been a CI officer for nineteen years, and I came the, a CI WINPAC, the Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. I've done some work in WMD, most of my work has been on international organizations, and I played a role in drafting the [Cuba BW] speech, and look forward to answering your questions. I also handled UN issues when he was the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, and he had asked that I be sent to him...

I'm the acting Chief of Staff for the T front office [the Under Secretary’s Office, which overseas four Assistant Secretaries], and I also have responsibilities with WINPAC and I perform liaison function for the Agency and Mr. Bolton.

Update: Kevin Drum has more. And he points out something interesting. Miller surely didn't get the misspelled "Valerie Flame" from Who's Who, as Novak has archly suggested it was available from. She heard it, or misheard it, from someone telling her the name. Drum also reminds us that "Valerie Plame" was the name Wilson's wife went by only at the Agency. She used her married name otherwise. Someone who knew of her by her Agency identity seems to have given the name to Miller (and Novak).

Former Carter arms control advisor William E. Jackson has been reporting for months that Miller claimed to have had a Pentagon security clearance while embedded with US military teams hunting for banned weapons in Iraq. Now that Miller has confirmed that is the case, it's worth revisiting Jackson's piece:

...An e-mail message to me from her [Miller's] PAO sergeant escort regarding a three-week trip with META in April stated: "She did not have a SECRET clearance." She was "high maintenance and came to the field badly prepared. The problem I had with her was that whenever other members of the press showed up, which they did as embeds from other units or as unilaterals, she would insist that I get rid of them and that the 75th's story was her story, exclusively. She didn't seem to have any idea that the Army needed as much coverage of the 75th's mission as possible and that excluding everyone else was detrimental to the credibility of what the 75th was trying to accomplish. Never mind that we didn't find a damn thing ... She could not understand why Michael Gordon, covering the war at ground force headquarters, could have his stuff read and cleared at any time of the day or night while she had to wait. She would talk about the 'news cycle' and how important it was, and threaten me or my boss with the wrath of the NYT or her buddies up at DoD."

Team leader Navy Cdr. David Beckett of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in a brief phone conversation, sarcastically dismissed the idea of her "supposedly having some sort of clearance." However, Colonel McPhee, the overall task force commander, is known to have said that Miller was "cleared at the secret level." Regardless, it was generally believed and commonly said in the field that Miller was cleared for information classified "secret." Either she pulled off a hoax, or a very unusual clearance for a journalist was granted by some Pentagon authority...

Cheney asked the Pentagon to find out about the reports of Iraq seeking uranium in Niger? From Miller's NYT piece:

...Mr. Libby said the vice president's office had indeed pressed the Pentagon and the State Department for more information about reports that Iraq had renewed efforts to buy uranium. And Mr. Cheney, he said, had asked about the potential ramifications of such a purchase. But he added that the C.I.A. "took it upon itself to try and figure out more" by sending a "clandestine guy" to Niger to investigate. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I thought "clandestine guy" was a reference to Mr. Wilson - Mr. Libby's first reference to him in my notes...

I think we can guess who at State. But who exacty at the Pentagon did Cheney's office task with finding out about the Niger reports? Was it Rumsfeld? Feith? Luti? Who? And what was the result? Who got tasked by Cheney?

Run, don't walk, to see "Good Night, and Good Luck" about CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow taking on Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

I have been away most of the day from the computer and am still going through this NYT article, but it seems pretty clear from the part I've read so far that Libby is in trouble, and that he may have suborned perjury (everyone remember that turn of phrase from another era?) or encouraged Miller to obstruct justice:

...Ms. Miller authorized Mr. Abrams to talk to Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate. The question was whether Mr. Libby really wanted her to testify. Mr. Abrams passed the details of his conversation with Mr. Tate along to Ms. Miller and to Times executives and lawyers, people involved in the internal discussion said.

People present at the meetings said that what they heard about the preliminary negotiations was troubling.

Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate had said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife.

That raised a potential conflict for Ms. Miller. Did the references in her notes to "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" suggest that she would have to contradict Mr. Libby's account of their conversations? Ms. Miller said in an interview that she concluded that Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.

According to Ms. Miller, this was what Mr. Abrams told her about his conversation with Mr. Tate: "He was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn't give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave me this, 'Don't go there, or, we don't want you there.' "

Mr. Abrams said: "On more than one occasion, Mr. Tate asked me for a recitation of what Ms. Miller would say. I did not provide one." ...

1) So, where did Miller get the name "Valerie Flame"? It's hard to believe she forgot! And that Libby forgot where he got it too. From the Times:

...And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today...

2) How did she suddenly discover the June 23 2003 conversation with Libby?
Check out how the Times doesn't deal with that here:

...On Sept. 29, Ms. Miller was released from jail and whisked by Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller to the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown for a massage, a manicure, a martini and a steak dinner. The next morning, she testified before the grand jury for three hours. Afterward, Ms. Miller declared that her ordeal was a victory for journalists and the public.

She testified before the grand jury for a second time on Wednesday about notes from her first meeting with Mr. Libby.

Update: Miller's piece on her testimony explains more about the June 23rd meeting with Libby.

I would dare to say that many reporters and editors would agree with me, that this stands out as totally suspect. From Miller's piece:

Our meeting, which lasted about two hours, took place over breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I almost certainly began this interview by asking about Mr. Wilson's essay, which appeared to have agitated Mr. Libby. As I recall, Mr. Libby asserted that the essay was inaccurate.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked about a notation I made on the first page of my notes about this July 8 meeting, "Former Hill staffer."

My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a "senior administration official." When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a "former Hill staffer." I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill.

Did Mr. Libby explain this request? Mr. Fitzgerald asked. No, I don't recall, I replied. But I said I assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson.

What I mean is, something can be technically true (Libby was a former Hill staffer), and yet, very very misleading (he's the last guy to talk to the last guy who talked to the president, as one reporter describes Libby). One has a responsibility in conveying a quote to be honest about the affiliation of the person speaking, as honestly as possible. Sometimes, one can't be specific at all. But you don't mislead about where they're coming from to describe their identity. You just make it more general.

Update: And Miller confirms that she did indeed have a Secret clearance from the Pentagon for a time:

In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

This is just creepy. From Miller's report:

...When I was last before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald posed a series of questions about a letter I received in jail last month from Mr. Libby. The letter, two pages long, encouraged me to testify. "Your reporting, and you, are missed," it begins.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me," Mr. Libby wrote.

The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.

The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.

Mr. Fitzgerald also focused on the letter's closing lines. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Mr. Libby wrote. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

How did I interpret that? Mr. Fitzgerald asked.

In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.

"Judy," he said. "It's Scooter Libby."

The Miller Case:

In a notebook belonging to Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, amid notations about Iraq and nuclear weapons, appear two small words: "Valerie Flame."

Ms. Miller should have written Valerie Plame. That name is at the core of a federal grand jury investigation that has reached deep into the White House. At issue is whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, an undercover C.I.A. operative, to reporters as part of an effort to blunt criticism of the president's justification for the war in Iraq.

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame's name.

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

Whether Ms. Miller's testimony will prove valuable to the prosecution remains unclear, as do its ramifications for press freedom. Yet an examination of Ms. Miller's decision not to testify, and then to do so, offers fresh information about her role in the investigation and how The New York Times turned her case into a cause.

The grand jury investigation centers on whether administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, whose husband, a former diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV, became a public critic of the Iraq war in July 2003. But Ms. Miller said Mr. Libby first raised questions about the diplomat in an interview with her that June, an account suggesting that Mr. Wilson was on the White House's radar before he went public with his criticisms.

Once Ms. Miller was issued a subpoena in August 2004 to testify about her conversations with Mr. Libby, she and The Times vowed to fight it. Behind the scenes, however, her lawyer made inquiries to see if Mr. Libby would release her from their confidentiality agreement. Ms. Miller said she decided not to testify in part because she thought that Mr. Libby's lawyer might be signaling to keep her quiet unless she would exonerate his client. The lawyer denies it, and Mr. Libby did not respond to requests for an interview...

VLWC

The recent troubles of Rove, Libby, DeLay and Frist are all part of a vast left wing conspiracy to criminalize conservative politics, suggests William Kristol. No mention of Abramoff.

This WaPo story advances the Plame investigation story in a few ways here: Fitzgerald has advised Miller that she is only being considered as a witness and not as a subject of his investigation; Miller is cooperating with the NYT report expected to be published Sunday; and Rove was pressed today on discrepancies between his testimony and that of another witness; and Rove's story to investigators has reportedly changed several times:

Rove, the mastermind of Bush's political career, who is considered the leading architect of White House political and policy plans, has emerged as a central figure in the investigation. In addition to his four trips to the grand jury, he spoke with investigators several times early in the probe.

His story has changed from the earliest days, when he told reporters he had nothing to do with the leak of Plame's name. Since then, Rove has testified that he discussed Plame in passing with two reporters, including Robert D. Novak, whose July 14, 2003, syndicated column first publicly identified Plame as a CIA operative married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. [...]

But Rove has maintained that he did not name Plame or disclose her covert status, and it is not clear whether his remarks amount to a crime.

The source close to Rove would not provide details of yesterday's exchange, other than to say the grand jury was very interested in discrepancies in testimony. Rove initially did not tell federal agents about his conversations with Cooper. In an earlier grand jury appearance, he testified that the purpose of their conversation was welfare reform, not Wilson or Plame.

Karl Rove leaves the courthouse after a fourth grand jury appearance in the CIA leak inquiry. (By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)

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Chris Cillizza joins washingtonpost.com as the author of a new politics blog called The Fix. Cillizza will provide daily posts on a range of topics, from the race for control of Congress in 2006 to scrutinizing the 2008 presidential wannabes.

Read The Fix

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But Cooper testified that he did not recall discussing welfare reform at all. He said he had detailed notes on their discussion about Wilson and Rove's passing reference to Wilson's wife.

There is also a mystery about a missing e-mail. The e-mail -- from Rove to a White House colleague -- shows Rove discussing his conversation with Cooper and saying he waved the reporter off Wilson's allegations. It did not surface until earlier this year, well after the investigation was in full swing...

Because Fitzgerald mandated secrecy in the case, the role of other administration officials remains unknown to all but the special prosecutor's staff. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, has not returned reporters' phone calls for several days. Neither has Ari Fleischer, the former White House spokesman who testified early in the case and was present on a July 2003 Air Force One flight on which a memo that included information about Plame was circulated...

Wilson's campaign caught the attention of Vice President Cheney's office nearly two months before Plame was unmasked, according to senior administration officials. Cheney's aides pressed the CIA for information about Wilson...

Froomkin has more fun with Scott McClellan:

...Even by recent standards, yesterday's press briefing was a doozy.

I have neither the time nor space to do it justice.

But first, McClellan tried umbrage as a way to deflect questions about the troop videoconference.

"Q Scott, why did the administration feel it was necessary to coach the soldiers that the President talked to this morning in Iraq?

"MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry, I don't know what you're suggesting.

"Q Well, they discussed the questions ahead of time. They were told exactly what the President would ask, and they were coached, in terms of who would answer what question, and how they would pass the microphone.

"MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry, are you suggesting that what our troops were saying was not sincere, or what they said was not their own thoughts?"

Then, when Hearst columnist and briefing room elder stateswoman Helen Thomas asked him about Iraq, he accused her of being soft on terror.

"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, the President recognizes that we are engaged in a global war on terrorism. And when you're engaged in a war, it's not always pleasant, and it's certainly a last resort. But when you engage in a war, you take the fight to the enemy, you go on the offense. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. September 11th taught us --

"THOMAS: It has nothing to do with -- Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you have a very different view of the war on terrorism, and I'm sure you're opposed to the broader war on terrorism. The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter."

McClellan then called on Terry Moran, but Moran jumped to Thomas's defense.

"MORAN: On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?

"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.

"MORAN: And speak for her, which is odd.

"MR. McCLELLAN: No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she's expressed her concerns -- "

"THOMAS: "I'm opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war."

He continued his stonewall on all matters even vaguely related to the CIA leak case.

And after a long and fruitless back-and-forth with CBS News's John Roberts, McClellan criticized Roberts' coverage of the Miers nomination.

At one point, CNN'S Bob Franken shouted out: "Scott, isn't the idea we ask the questions and you provide the answers?"

McClellan responded: "Yes, and I was providing the answer. Can I not say what I want to say? . . . Isn't it my right to talk and say what I want to?"

Panic. Dan Froomkin on the staged Bush video-link with the troops:

...But it's doubtful that anyone has had as much fun with this story as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who under the rubric "White House follies" last night paired what he called "the president's choreographed satellite back-slapping session with the troops" with "the press secretary's knee-capping session with the White House press corps."

"It's like watching the Jesse Ventura show," he said after showing extensive clips of the troop rehearsal, and the ensuing event.

Olbermann asked Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank to explain what happened.

"It really is inexplicable," Milbank said. "This was a White House that did everything right, in terms of imagery, and now they just seem to have completely lost their mojo on fairly simple things. . . .

"It is tempting to say that none of this would have happened if Karl Rove were still alive, but that is oversimplifying. . . .

"I think what you are seeing here is a White House now sitting at 38 percent in the polls, and it has never been there before, and there's a bit of a panic setting in. They don't really know how to get out of this. They have always operated being out in front before and they don't know how to run it from behind."

An Uzbek housewife, Makhbuba Zakirova, has told an Uzbek courtroom that Uzbek soldiers open fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians waving white flags in Andijan last May. Some 500 people were killed in the government putdown of the uprising. The BBC reports:

...Makhbuba Zakirova told the court that she saw soldiers shooting at people waving a white flag.

"Even Hitler did not do such things," she said.

Mrs Zakirova said that after speaking out in court, she feared for her life and freedom.

Correspondents say her statement undermines three weeks of testimony in what many foreign observers had dismissed as a show trial...

Rove testifies. Still there. Update: It's Rover, as Atrios says, 4 1/2 hours later. I wonder why Fitzgerald didn't call Libby back to testify about the notes from the June 23 2003 conversation Miller testified about earlier this week. Why did Rove get a chance to discuss any discrepancies in his testimony, and Libby not?

Katrina investigation fractures.

Good, well-reported Farhad Manjoo piece on Miller and the NYT.

Moral question: make more Tamiflu by sidestepping patents on an emergency basis which could save millions of lives in the event of a bird flu pandemic, or let the millions die and Roche enjoy rich profits and its patent?

Tamiflu, a pricey antiviral pill invented in a Bay Area lab and made in part from a spice used in Chinese cookery, has emerged as the world's first line of defense against bird flu should the deadly strain begin its feared spread among human beings.

As nations begin to stockpile the drug in anticipation of a flu pandemic, calls are mounting for countries to sidestep patents on the drug -- as Brazil first did for AIDS medications -- and make their own generic versions.

But Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Roche, which acquired rights to the drug from Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City in 1996, said Wednesday it had no intention of letting others make it.

"Roche ... fully intends to remain the sole manufacturer of Tamiflu,'' said company spokesman Terry Hurley.

The immediate problem is not the cost of Tamiflu, which runs about $60 for a 10-pill course of treatment, but a staggering gap between the sudden demand for it and the capacity of its sole manufacturer to produce it.

Although Roche has increased production of Tamiflu eightfold in the past two years, it will take $16 billion and 10 years to make enough of the drug for 20 percent of the world's population, said Klaus Stohr, director of the World Health Organization's Global Influenza Program, in comments to reporters in San Francisco last week.

"Something has to be done,'' said Ira Longini, an Emory University professor whose computer model of a potential avian flu pandemic shows that an outbreak could be snuffed out within a month by rushing antiviral drugs to the place where it started. "When you think of the potential damage a pandemic flu could do, and how little drug we have, the situation is quite absurd...

Update: Indian company to make generic version of Tamiflu, the NYT reports.

Update II: Reader Garrett, a public health expert, writes, "I'm no expert on patent law or intellectual property rights and drugs... but what Brazil and other developing countries have done over the last couple of years for AIDS drugs provides an important precedent to what India and I suspect other countries will be attempting to do very shortly to address the great shortfall in Tamiflu availability...

The TRIPS provision at the WTO enables any country to break a drug patent and produce generics in the time of an epidemic. I find it interesting that they are not discussing it that way yet. But given how hard the drug is to make (at least that is what Roche is suggesting) perhaps few companies will be able to produce the generic. Bush Admin is likely to ignore the WTO TRIPS provision and not break patent given that it would set a tricky precedent and risk for Big Pharma in the USA. Economic interests always appear to trump those of public health. These are some (of many) relevant links on the topic of IP, WTO, HIV and breaking patents in the time of an epidemic. Example of 1) Brazil and generic production of HIV treatments... AND a blog on this particular issue in the Qatar round of WTO negotiations. Hope this helps in the discussion."

The WaPo on second term scandals.

Human rights in N.O. Reader CB from Cincinatti Ohio writes:

...As a reader of many progressive blogs/websites including War & Peace, I’ve noticed it’s becoming harder to find independent factual reporting about the human rights nightmare that the reconstruction of the Gulf Region has become. I subscribe to The NewStandard who has one of their editors, Jessica Azulay, on the ground in the region and she is providing the kind of coverage that I think other visitors to War & Peace would benefit from. It’s such an important story please consider linking to her articles. She was the first reporter to interview Robert Davis, the 64-year-old retired elementary school teacher beaten by NO police and writes extensively about “Camp Amtrak”, an improvised jail in what used to be the New Orleans bus terminal in this article...

Knight Ridder:

...A number of other countries are ahead of the United States in preparedness. Britain finalized its plan in March, has created a Cabinet-level coordinating office, ordered enough Tamiflu for 25 percent of its population and put in place a system for rapidly producing and distributing a vaccine once one is developed.

Critics complain that the Bush administration has ordered only enough Tamiflu to cover less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, despite a 2000 recommendation by the U.N. World Health Organization that governments cover at least 25 percent.

Swiss-based Hoffmann-LaRoche, the sole maker of Tamiflu, says that with 25 other countries ahead of it, the United States must wait until the end of 2007 to buy enough of the drug to cover 25 percent of its population.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America says even that isn't enough; it wants HHS to stockpile enough Tamiflu to treat 50 percent of the U.S. public.

"Intense uncertainty" in the Bush White House, the NYT reports, as Karl Rove prepares to testify to the Plame grand jury for a fourth time Friday:

...These days, though, the leak investigation is almost never spoken of openly within the West Wing, and certainly not made light of, administration officials say.

Lawyers for most of the officials who have testified before the grand jury have by and large chosen not to share information with one another, leaving colleagues largely in the dark about what others are telling Mr. Fitzgerald.

There is a presumption inside the White House that anyone who was indicted would resign or go on leave to fight the charges, though it is unclear what planning has taken place for that possibility...

After appearing before the grand jury on Friday, Mr. Rove will get right back into political mode. He is scheduled to appear at a fund-raiser over the weekend for Jerry Kilgore, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia.

Propaganda Then and Now. Just read Louis Menand's New Yorker essay on some recent books on the politics of CIA covert support of art (Abstract Expressionism) and culture during the Cold War. What a different model than the Karen Hughes/Rendon Group PR/Swift Boat Veterans/Gitmo/Abu Ghraib propaganda model employed by the Bush warriors these days. Update: This is the kind of treatment that is surely inspiring good will for the US in Egypt.

A former CIA officer in Afghanistan who has some interesting things to say about Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora is wrestling with the CIA publications review board to get his book Jawbreaker published. Jason Vest reports:

...According to filings with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Gary Berntsen, the CIA's top officer in Afghanistan during al Qaeda's 2001 escape from Tora Bora, submitted his book to the CIA's Publications Review Board on May 17, 2005, one month before he left the agency after a nearly 23-year career. The book, to be published by Random House, is tentatively titled Jawbreaker, a reference to the code name for CIA Counterterrorist Center teams operating in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001.

Like all CIA employees, Berntsen is bound by secrecy agreements that mandate a PRB review of materials for publication. Though the PRB is supposed to return manuscripts with any necessary changes or redactions after 30 days, Bernsten, according to the filings, received nothing by June 17. On July 28, Berntsen and his attorney, Roy W. Krieger, sued the agency for release of the manuscript, and asked that the CIA be forced to respond to the suit within five days instead of the customary sixty.

That motion was denied, but on August 23, a full 98 days after the manuscript was submitted for review, Jawbreaker was finally returned to Berntsen---accompanied by a 22 page list of redactions desired by the PRB. Though much of the material the PRB wanted cut--everything, according to Krieger, from "single words to nine full pages of text"--has been previously declassified and has already appeared in other publications, Bernsten amended his manuscript, and sent it back to the PRB on Sept. 1...

Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has created a global blog of blogs, Global Voice, co-founded by a former Asia correspondent for CNN. The Liberian elections, South Asian earthquake blogging, a tour of Kurdish weblogs, Iranian bloggers on Iranian cinema, are some of the top lines today. Check them out.

Pinter?

An "assisted suicide" in Syria?

H5N1. Just caught a snippet of a BBC interview with a medical expert on the bird flu case in Turkey. But one thing he said in passing jumped out. Of 1800 birds on a farm in Turkey, 1700 had died of the bird flu, within a very short amount of time (I think he said a week). Sounds like pretty horrible odds. Update: Milbank pokes a bit of fun at the gloom and doom on Capitol Hill. "...Some people looked around: There were about 200 in the room, so about 50 would get the bug, and 25 would die. On the positive side, this level of mortality would have left enough chicken sandwiches for everybody at the event..."

If Iraq couldn't be done right, should it have been done at all? writer George Packer asks in the LA Times. Packer's new book, Assassin's Gate, is reviewed here.

Among the several stories out this morning noting the release of NYT reporter Judy Miller from further obligations to the Plame grand jury, this graph in the WaPo piece is interesting:

...As early as May of that year [2003], Cheney's office was actively seeking information about Wilson from the CIA, according to former senior administration officials. Libby was aware of the diplomat and his mission by the time he talked with a Washington Post reporter in early June. By then -- one month before Plame was unmasked -- the State Department had prepared a memo on the Niger mission that contained information in a section marked "(S)" for secret. Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, brought the memo on a trip to Africa by President Bush in the days before Novak's column was published.

Learning from China. What's the story here? Newsweek reports that the Bush administration is using secrecy to cover up its lack of preparedness for a flu epidemic, e.g. for political reasons only. And public health experts say, this secretive approach is the most dangerous thing of all.

Judy Miller's contempt order is lifted, the WSJ reports:

...Her appearance Wednesday, which lasted about an hour and 15 minutes, won her a judge's order releasing her from the contempt-of-court citation that landed her in jail. The contempt order was still in place until her testimony was complete.

"I am delighted that the contempt order has been lifted, and Judy is now completely free to go about her great reporting as a very principled and honorable reporter," said Robert Bennett, Ms. Miller's attorney.

The lifting of the order is significant, because it opens the door for Ms. Miller to disclose details of her story and her testimony to the Times, which has been criticized for not being more forthcoming on what it knows about its reporter's involvement in the case. Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, said on Tuesday that once Ms. Miller's "obligations to the grand jury are fulfilled, we intend to write the most thorough story we can...." ...

A new CIA review "rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq," USA Today's John Diamond reports:

...Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.

"In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right," they write...

Knight Ridder reporter Dion Nissenbaum, photographer kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen (via Romenesko). Update: They've been freed.

Don't miss Harold Meyerson's account of Andrew Card's talk on Harriet Miers and Article II of the Constitution last night at the Hudson Institute:

...Among the various defenses of Miers advanced in recent days, Card's achieved new heights of peculiarity. Before a crowd that was dense with conservative intellectuals, Robert Bork among them, Card defended the nomination as a breakthrough for women. Miers, he said, "was breaking glass ceilings before most people realized glass ceilings were even there." ("People," in this formulation, probably doesn't include women themselves.) He testified to Miers' intellectualism by reminding listeners that Miers had majored in math ("something Herman Kahn would have liked") and has counseled the president on any number of challenges -- "and by the way, that includes constitutional challenges."

At which point Card himself turned constitutional scholar. As White House chief-of-staff, he found the most intriguing article, he said, to be Article II, which established the presidency and the executive branch. Miers, he continued, understood Article II as well, and would defend it "when challenged by those given the power to challenge it by Article I [i.e., the Congress] and Article III [i.e., the courts]."

Thus ended Card's constitutional disquisition -- not a moment too soon, as he had managed to conflate Miers' duties as White House counsel with what he seemed to be saying was her judicial philosophy on executive power. He could not have meant to imply that Miers would see her first duty on the bench as defending Bush against all enemies, legislative and judicial, but that's what he managed to convey. At minimum, he suggested that Miers would be the staunchest proponent of executive power over that of the other two branches that the Court had seen in a very long time...

Perhaps my eyes are getting tired, but according to this CNN headline, Miller revealed she had a second source about Miller/Plame. But where in this report does it explain that? The news seems to be that she revealed a previously undisclosed (until late last week) June conversation with her same source, Libby. But I don't see in reading this where it explains about a second source? Did the headliner writers get it wrong or am I just missing it? Update: Headline writers seemed to get it wrong, everybody thinks.

I think Kevin Drum is asking the right question here: has Fitzgerald already subpoenaed the White House Iraq Group's documents and correspondence from June 2003? Newsday's Tom Brune reported on March 5, 2004 that Fitzgerald had subpoeaned WHIG documentation dating from July 6 to July 30 2003:

The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein...

The subpoena with the second production deadline sought all documents from July 6 to July 30 of the White House Iraq Group. In August, the Washington Post published the only account of the group's existence.

A little-known group

It met weekly in the Situation Room, the Post said, and its regular participants included senior political adviser Karl Rove; communication strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; policy advisers led by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen J. Hadley; and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Wilson alleged in September that Rove was involved in the leak but a day later pulled back from that, asserting that Rove had "condoned" it.

Hughes left the White House in the summer of 2002. Matalin, who left at the end of 2002, did not return a call for comment. Matalin appeared before the grand jury Jan. 23, the day after the subpoenas were issued.

The subpoena with the last production date repeated the Justice Department's informal request to the White House last fall for documents from Feb. 1, 2002, through 2003 related to Wilson's February 2002 trip to Niger, to Plame and to contacts with journalists.

It's worth revisiting WaPo reporter Walter Pincus' Nieman Watchdog report on the Plame investigation:

...On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.

I didn’t write about that information at that time because I did not believe it true that she had arranged his Niger trip. But I did disclose it in an October 12, 2003 story in The Washington Post. By that time there was a Justice Department criminal investigation into a leak to columnist Robert Novak who published it on July 14, 2003 and identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Under certain circumstances a government official’s disclosure of her name could be a violation of federal law. The call with me had taken place two days before Novak’s column appeared.

I wrote my October story because I did not think the person who spoke to me was committing a criminal act, but only practicing damage control by trying to get me to stop writing about Wilson...

An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.

The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Ms. Plame, a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA's Virginia headquarters. Soon after, midlevel CIA officials decided to send him, say intelligence officials...

According to current and former officials familiar with the memo, it describes interagency discussions of the yellowcake mystery: whether the reports of Iraq's uranium purchases were credible; which agency should pay for any further investigation; and the suggestion that Mr. Wilson could be sent to check out the allegations. Other officials with knowledge of the memo wouldn't say if it mentions Ms. Plame by name as the one who suggested Mr. Wilson, or if her identity is shielded but obvious because of what is known now about the mission...

More digging in the WHIG archives. This from Dan Froomkin's White House briefing in February 2004:

...Plame Watch

Tom Brune of Newsday has gotten a hold of the subpoenas issued in January as part of the probe over who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA officer.

"The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

"Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

"And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets."

I wonder, by the way, if the Justice Department should consider Googling before it subpoenas. The subpoenaed press gaggle transcript alleged to be "missing" from the White House Web site may not show up on the White House Web site's own (sometimes flaky) search. But, thanks to Google, I found it right here, sitting on the White House servers after all.

Brune points out, by the way, that the only previous account of the mysterious White House Iraq Group's existence came in a story by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post last August...

Karl Rove and the White House Iraq Group. Newsweek's Howard Finemand and Mike Isikoff in February 2005:

...Rove was a player on Iraq, too. In the run-up to the war, Rove was a full—and, colleagues say, impressive—participant in the colorfully named WHIG (White House Iraq Group). The panel members shed their cell phones and BlackBerrys to meet in a secure National Security Council conference room, sifting through classified evidence (much of it now discredited) for data that might win public support for Bush's hard line against Saddam Hussein. Rove seemed to come into the room knowing more than his political brief, said a fellow WHIG. "He'd say, 'I've got a feeling' about something, and he was usually right." ...

This whole Hardball transcript is worth reading. Esp. the point made, that it all comes back to how we got into Iraq:

...MICHAEL WOLFF, “VANITY FAIR”: Well, I—I mean, I think the whole White House in is turmoil over this.

And I would slightly disagree with Howard, that I‘m not sure it‘s so much of a division as lots of people running around and trying to protect themselves, because—because this could—this could wash over everyone. I mean, one of the—one of the reasonable questions here is—is, what were the guys in the Oval Office thinking?

I mean, Karl Rove comes in, theoretically, at least, we are given to understand, and says, oh, no, no, no, no, not me, not me. And we‘re also given to understand—and this is apparently at least what “The National Journal” reported the president said in his grand jury testimony—that they accepted this on face value. Karl said he didn‘t do anything.

MATTHEWS: Right.

WOLFF: Now, as we know, this is—I mean, when Karl Rove says, I didn‘t do anything, what you do immediately is say, what did you do, Karl?

(LAUGHTER)

WOLFF: Come clean, Karl.

And I think that that‘s where—we‘re in this situation in which—in which everybody was either—either just way too passive about this or they went out of their way not to confront him.

MATTHEWS: You know, sometimes, I like to try to figure out what‘s really important by pulling back and say, suppose this were happening in some other country we are vaguely familiar with, like England maybe or, I don‘t know, Israel or something.

And I go, what would it mean to me? Is this—let me go back to—you are good at this, because you write these cover pieces. Is this about the Iraq war and the case made to the middle-of-the-roader? I don‘t mean the fanatical “Let‘s go to war” type or the dove, but person in the middle who said, yes, I guess we better go to war with Saddam Hussein, because, if he has got nuclear weapons, that‘s one thing can‘t let be in his hands.

That person was convinced on Sunday television, in the newspapers by basically the vice president, his chief of staff. Then, when—his chief of staff, Scooter Libby. When the word gets back that there is a guy out there writing news articles and briefing the press, like you, and saying, it ain‘t true. There never was any uranium deal. There never was a nuclear threat. This thing about a mushroom cloud being a smoking gun was all B.S. It was really never there.

Who acted quick? Was it Karl Rove? I‘m not talking breaking the law. I mean the defense team. Did Karl Rove and Scooter and the vice president go out there and say, we have got to squash this guy like a bug?

[...]

FINEMAN: No, of course. Of course. Nothing would ever happen—if it were illegal, nothing would ever go on around here.

(LAUGHTER)

FINEMAN: I—I—I don‘t know what Dick Cheney said, but I know, from the way Karl Rove operates and the way the Bush family, political family, operates, that Rove would have taken it upon himself, even if not directly asked, to go out and take care of that situation, the situation of course being Joe Wilson. OK?

MATTHEWS: Somebody mouth him off.

FINEMAN: Yes. And the way he would do it is, he would talk to his—the people he deals with in the media. He would talk to friends on the Hill. He would talk to people in the conservative community, as, indeed, he was doing over Harriet Miers, trying to sell Harriet Miers to James Dobson. It‘s all of a piece. Karl is Mr. Fix-it. Karl is the salesman, the political operative.

From tomorrow's WSJ Plame article:

...There are signs that prosecutors now are looking into contacts between administration officials and journalists that took place much earlier than previously thought. Earlier conversations are potentially significant, because that suggests the special prosecutor leading the investigation is exploring whether there was an effort within the administration at an early stage to develop and disseminate confidential information to the press that could undercut former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Central Intelligence Agency official Valerie Plame. [...]

Mr. Fitzgerald's pursuit now suggests he might be investigating not a narrow case on the leaking of the agent's name, but perhaps a broader conspiracy. [...]

Until now, Mr. Fitzgerald appeared to be focusing on conversations between White House officials such as Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser, after Mr. Wilson wrote his op-ed. The defense by Republican operatives has been that White House officials didn't name Ms. Plame, and that any discussion of her was in response to reporters' questions about Mr. Wilson, the kind of casual banter that occurs between sources and reporters. [...]

Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group. Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. Rove and Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to Mr. Wilson's claims...

...The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it. [...]

Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."

In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.

The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

The first days of September would bring some of the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.

A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most prominent.

'A Mushroom Cloud'

The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and nearly all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi nuclear bomb. ...

Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the image of "a mushroom cloud." A Sunday New York Times story quoted anonymous officials as saying the "diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the tubes -- precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts -- showed that they were "intended as components of centrifuges."

No one knows when Iraq will have its weapon, the story said, but "the first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud." ...

Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the tubes and said "increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked listeners to "imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction," which would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children." ...

In its initial meetings, Card's Iraq task force ordered a series of white papers. After a general survey of Iraqi arms violations, the first of the single-subject papers -- never published -- was "A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons."

Wilkinson, at the time White House deputy director of communications for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of intelligence reports and press clippings.

Wilkinson said he conferred with experts from the National Security Council and Cheney's office. Other officials said Will Tobey and Susan Cook, working under senior director for counterproliferation Robert Joseph, made revisions and circulated some of the drafts. Under the standard NSC review process, they checked the facts.

In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with production of a National Intelligence Estimate and its unclassified summary. But the WHIG, according to three officials who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.

The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post. White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice decided not to publish it. Wilkinson said Rice and Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough."

The document offers insight into the Bush administration's priorities and methods in shaping a nuclear message. The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the president and top officials. A senior intelligence official said last October that the president's speechwriters took "literary license" with intelligence, a phrase applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the white paper's most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere.

The draft white paper precedes other known instances in which the Bush administration considered the now-discredited claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." For a speechwriter, uranium was valuable as an image because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return again and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and three other Bush administration statements that month.

Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims were repeated, or had their first mention, in the white paper.

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Update III: The NYT reports that Miller found notes from her June 23 2003 meeting with Libby concerning Wilson in the NYT's Manhattan offices:

...Ms. Miller's meeting with the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, focused on notes that she found in the Times newsroom in Manhattan after her appearance before the grand jury on Sept. 30. She took the notes during a conversation on June 23, 2003, with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

...In another development, four senior House Democrats wrote to Mr. Fitzgerald in a letter dated Oct. 12, urging him to issue a final report to Congress when he concludes his inquiry. Such a report, they said, should address "all indictments, convictions and any decisions not to prosecute."

The letter was signed by the top Democrats on their respective committees: John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Judiciary Committee; Jane Harman of California, Intelligence Committee; and Tom Lantos of California, International Relations Committee. The letter was also signed by Rush D. Holt of New Jersey, the senior Democrat on the intelligence panel's policy subcommittee.

A report, the letter said, would assure the public that "the investigation of this serious matter has been undertaken with utmost diligence and has been free of partisan, political influence."

The representatives said Mr. Fitzgerald had the authority to issue such a report under the terms of his appointment as special counsel at the Justice Department.

Baseless. Bill Arkin:

...Talking about clearing the air, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice thanked U.S., French and Spanish troops at Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan this week for their hard work in the war on terror. Her whirlwind trip through October 13 also includes stops in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

Rice denied that her trip was designed to seek out new bases to shore up the situation with the U.S. evacuating Uzbekistan.. "The United States is not increasing its base structure anywhere in the world," she said, dismissing questions about seeking new permanent bases as "misplaced."

Not increasing because, with a foothold in Afghanistan and Iraq, with forces and headquarters in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, with secret bases in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, with a growing presence in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, with a base in Kyrgyzstan, with none of these actually "bases," and none of them U.S. at all -- they're all "coalition" bases -- how much more could it increase.

And, of course, none of this is permanent. As if anything is.

"Libby did not tell grand jury about a key conversation," Murray Waas reports in National Journal:

In two appearances before the federal grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's name, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, did not disclose a crucial conversation that he had with New York Times reporter Judith Miller in June 2003 about the operative, Valerie Plame, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of his sworn testimony.

The new revelations regarding Libby come as Fitzgerald has indicated that he is wrapping up his investigation and making final decisions as to whether criminal charges will be brought in the case.

Libby also did not disclose the June 23 conversation when he was twice interviewed by FBI agents working on the Plame leak investigation, the sources said.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald apparently learned about the June 23 conversation for the first time just days ago, after attorneys for Miller and The New York Times informed prosecutors that Miller had discovered a set of notes on the conversation. ...

Meanwhile, in recent days Fitzgerald has also expressed significant interest in whether Libby may have sought to discourage Miller-either directly or indirectly through her attorney-from testifying before the grand jury, or cooperating in other ways with the criminal probe, according to attorneys familiar with Miller's discussions with prosecutors...

It just never ends. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Camp Mercury. When is Rumsfeld going to answer for this?

Dan Froomkin's White House briefing is back from vacation, and just in time.

Atrios digs through the archives to remind us of the White House campaign to deliberately leak Plame's name and occupation to reporters, in order to retaliate against her husband. This from the WaPo's Dana Priest and Mike Allen from September 28, 2003:

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility. They alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."

A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game."

The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said there was no indication that Bush knew about the calls.

Michael Maloof, one of the original two analysts hired by Doug Feith to find connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the progenitor to the infamous Office of Special Plans, has a frankly astonishing article in the Washington Times yesterday. Ostensibly a defense of Able Danger, in the oped Maloof says that before his work for Feith, he got hired by Weldon to datamine open source material to find Chinese tech proliferators on Weldon's behalf:

...Following the initial DoD turndown, Ellen Preisser and this writer then data-mined unclassified information to report to Mr. Weldon on possible Chinese front companies in the United States seeking technology for the People's Liberation Army.

It showed how Chinese front companies in the United States listed as U.S. corporations were acquiring U.S. weapons technology from U.S. defense contractors, and improving China's military capability. Such access to U.S. technology then would allow the Chinese over time to duplicate U.S. military systems down to the widget.

Indeed, a June 27, 2005 article in The Washington Times reported U.S. investigators were concerned with China and its middlemen increasingly and illegally obtaining "sensitive or classified U.S. weapons technology" from U.S. companies.

Reaction to the study on Chinese front companies in the United States from the Army and the General Counsel's office in the Office of the Defense Secretary was immediate. In November 1999, they ordered the study destroyed, but not before Mr. Weldon complained to then Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki.

Mr. Weldon also wrote a letter to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh requesting an espionage investigation. Mr. Freeh never responded to the Weldon request...

...Cyber-sleuths working for a Pentagon intelligence unit that reportedly identified some of the 9/11 hijackers before the attack were fired by military officials, after they mistakenly pinpointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks, The Post has learned.

The private contractors working for the counter-terrorism unit Able Danger lost their jobs in May 2000. The firings following a series of analyses that Pentagon lawyers feared were dangerously close to violating laws banning the military from spying on Americans, sources said.

The Pentagon canceled its contract with the private firm shortly after the analysts — who were working on identifying al Qaeda operatives — produced a particularly controversial chart on proliferation of sensitive technology to China, the sources said...

And under what authority does a public official have to hire people like Maloof to conduct their own counterintelligence investigations? Who's paying for this stuff? Several people have told me Jim Woolsey sat in on their presentations to Weldon of their datamining projects, and that his role was described as being a consultant to Weldon. It's worth noting that Maloof was fired from the Pentagon after he lost his security clearance.

Disturbing story from Taishi, southern China. More from China matters, who notes, "A human rights observor described Lu's beating as going 'far beyond anything that has happened before.' The fact that it was committed in full view of a foreign correspondent was also unprecedented. And, perhaps, no accident."

Terrible loss of life from Kashmir quake. Tragic and horrifying.

Two articles out Sunday that suggest the quest for democracy in Iraq will exacerbate the insurgency and the forces of dissolution. From the LAT:

Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.

The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.

But within the last two months, U.S. analysts with access to classified intelligence have started to challenge this precept, noting a "significant and disturbing disconnect" between apparent advances on the political front and efforts to reduce insurgent attacks.

Now, with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency...

As recently as July, there was still a very cautious optimism within the ranks of Iraq experts here that the Land of Two Rivers would emerge from its current quagmire as a strong and free country.

But the rush to adopt what is universally seen as a highly imperfect constitution, which nevertheless goes to the voters on Saturday, has raised for some the specter of Iraq's dismemberment and possibly full-scale civil war.

Many lay the blame at the feet of the U.S. government, which insisted in August that the constitution be completed despite pleas from its drafters that they be given the extra six months allowed in the interim constitution that was approved in March 2004.

Even ardent Iraqi nationalists such as former ambassador-designate to Washington Rend Rahim and noted Republican war-backer Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute are publicly expressing their grim disappointment with the document.

At the Pentagon, Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who in the spring was predicting a substantial pullout of U.S. troops within a year, recently refused to reaffirm his prediction, citing the constitution's failure to be accepted as a "national compact."

"Sectarianism and ethnic self-interest" have led to the writing of a document that divides Iraq along ethnic lines, "perhaps even dealing the death blow to the idea of Iraq that had sustained the opposition for so many years," Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor and Iraqi exile, said at a conference in Washington last week...

Iraq's problems, driven by the relentless insurgency, have produced "so many dashed hopes and fledgling dreams" that they may have destroyed "the very idea and the very possibility of an Iraq," Makiya said.

Rahim, once the public face of the new Iraq in Washington, said at the AEI-sponsored conference that she agrees with Makiya. The new constitution is so full of ambiguities and creates such a weak central government that it may "spin the state out of control," she said. [...]

Pletka, perhaps the leading Washington voice outside the government who favors the war, said in an interview that she is "shocked and a little bit depressed by sectarianism" in Iraq and that the concept of federalism "has been corrupted in a revolting way." She said the U.S. should not have rushed the Iraqis. [...]

Phebe Marr of the U.S. Institute of Peace, considered by many the leading U.S. expert on Iraq, said in an interview that the creation of a "Shiastan" region of the nine provinces in the south could lead to "an arc of instability" through the Sunni center and the eventual dissolution of Iraq...

"I was cautiously optimistic, but I don't feel that way anymore," said Marr, a historian who is married to an Iraqi and has been following developments in the country for 50 years.

Despite Pentagon claims of an emerging Iraqi military force that will soon be capable of taking over the nation's defense, "there is no integrated army. What is there is [ethnic] militias," she said...

Banana republic. ThinkProgress has the video.

Miller "finds more notes" -- from a JUNE 2003 conversation with Lewis Libby. Reports Reuters:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller discovered notes from an earlier conversation she had with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and turned them over the prosecutor investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity, legal sources said on Friday.

Miller's notes about a June 2003 conversation with Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, could be important to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's case by establishing exactly when Libby and other administration officials first started talking to reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson.

Update: Who's leaking Miller's discovery of more notes? Probably not Miller's attorneys. Libby's? That doesn't seem right either. Fitzgerald's office?

Update II: The significance of the timing of this conversation is really very interesting. Remember, Miller worked out an agreement with Fitzgerald where she only has to turn over notes related to the Plame matter, and then, only those sourced to Libby. So the fact she and Libby were already discussing the Plame issue in June 2003 - a month before Wilson went public in her paper - is interesting. The NY Observer says the notes may concern a conversation as early as May 2003 (when Kristof's column about the unnamed diplomat's Niger trip appeared)? We know Pincus was talking to Libby in June 2003 about Wilson's trip. But the allegation that Wilson's wife had a role in his getting the trip wasn't in Pincus June 12 2003 report. However, we do know that the State Department had a memo from May/June 2003 identifying Wilson's wife as having a role in sending him on that trip. Who knew about that memo?

"Rove Assured Bush He Was Not Leaker," Murray Waas reports at National Journal:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.

During the same conversation in the White House two years ago-occurring just days after the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into the unmasking of Plame as a covert agency operative-Rove also assured the president that he had not leaked any information to the media in an effort to discredit Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Rove also did not tell the president about his July 2003 a phone call with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, a conversation that touched on the issue of Wilson and Plame.

But some 22 months later, Cooper's testimony to the federal grand jury investigating the Plame leak has directly contradicted Rove's assertions to the president. Cooper has testified that Rove was the person who first told him that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, although Rove did not name her. Cooper has also testified that Rove told him that Plame helped arrange for Wilson to make a fact-finding trip for the CIA to the African nation of Niger to investigate allegations that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium with which to build a nuclear bomb.

In his first interview with FBI agents working on the leak probe, Rove similarly did not disclose that he had spoken to Cooper, according to sources close to the investigation,

But in subsequent interviews with federal investigators and in his testimony to the grand jury, Rove changed his account, asserting that when the FBI first questioned him, he had simply forgotten about his phone conversation with Cooper. Rove also told prosecutors that he had forgotten about the Cooper conversation when he talked to the president about the matter in the fall of 2003.

In his own interview with prosecutors on June 24, 2004, Bush testified that Rove assured him he had not disclosed Plame as a CIA employee and had said nothing to the press to discredit Wilson, according to sources familiar with the president's interview. Bush said that Rove never mentioned the conversation with Cooper. James E. Sharp, Bush's private attorney, who was present at the president's interview with prosecutors, declined to comment for this story.

Sources close to the leak investigation being run by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald say it was the discovery of one of Rove's White House e-mails-in which the senior Bush adviser referred to his July 2003 conversation with Cooper-that prompted Rove to contact prosecutors and to revise his account to include the Cooper conversation....

Timothy Flanigan withdraws. The Bush administration's nominee for deputy attorney general had revealed that the lobbyist he hired to help Tyco keep its off shore tax benefits, Jack Abramoff, promised he would lobby Rove on Tyco's behalf. From the NYT:

...President Bush's pick for the second-ranking position at the Justice Department abruptly withdrew his nomination today after facing weeks of questions over his ties to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his role in formulating torture policies, officials said.

The nominee, Timothy Flanigan, was scheduled to face yet another round of questioning next week from senators who had grown increasingly skeptical about his nomination as deputy attorney general.

Of chief concern to Democrats and some Republicans was Mr. Flanigan's role at Tyco as general counsel in overseeing the lobbying work of Mr. Abramoff in pushing for Tyco and other companies to maintain their tax-exempt status.

Officials say Mr. Flanigan's withdrawal reflects the fact that Mr. Abramoff has become so tarnished that anyone connected to him risks significant political damage in Washington, including Tom Delay. . .

A letter from a reader, EP, about bird flu:

...I've been watching the bird flu science news for over a year. I think the main reason it has blossomed in the last two weeks is because Indonesia started having unexplained cases cropping up. The link to birds was hard to find, so there was concern that HN51 had finally reached the stage where it could move from person to person. I think I saw that they had managed to find a bird-human transmission route, and decided that the final throes were not actually upon us. But, there was panic in Indonesia, and people in the know were panicking elsewhere. It's about time we took the issue seriously. If indeed the Indonesian outbreak had been human-human contact, millions of people would be sick by now. We dodged a bullet.

The pro-torture Senate contingent sputters their excuses. As a colleague writes, "What a bunch of sanctimonious bullc**p."

What do the geniuses in the Bush administration public health bureaucracy DO ALL DAY?! From the NYT:

As concern about a flu pandemic sweeps official Washington, Congress and the Bush administration are considering spending billions to buy the influenza drug Tamiflu. But after months of delay, the United States will now have to wait in line to get the pills.

Had the administration placed a large order just a few months ago, Roche, Tamiflu's maker, could have delivered much of the supply by next year, according to sources close to the negotiations in both government and industry.

As the months passed, however, other countries placed orders that largely exhausted Roche's production capacity this year and next...

Update: Reader LL points to this Tapped post about Bush's point man at HHS on bioterrorism and public health emergencies (from a TNR story on Bush hacks):

According to his official biography, Stewart Simonson is the Health and Human Services Department's point man "on matters related to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies." Hopefully, he has taken crash courses on smallpox and avian flu, because, prior to joining HHS in 2001, Simonson's background was not in public health, but ... public transit. He'd previously been a top official at the delay-plagued, money-hemorrhaging passenger rail company Amtrak. Before that, he was an adviser to Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, specializing in crime and prison policy. When Thompson became HHS secretary in 2001, he hired Simonson as a legal adviser and promoted him to his current post shortly before leaving the Department last year. Simonson's biography boasts that he "supervised policy development for Project BioShield," a program designed to speed the manufacture of crucial vaccines and antidotes. "That effort, however, has by most accounts bogged down and shown few results," The Washington Post reported last month.

Writing at Democracy Arsenal, the very distinguished Mort Halperin contributes his Iraq plan, in which he suggests that some 50,000 US troops should stay, but change course:

...There is now agreement among many progressives and much of the American military that our current force posture and military strategy in Iraq is doing more harm than good and that the Army cannot sustain it in any case. My colleagues at the Center for American Progress have advocated a "strategic redeployment" of U.S. forces to relieve the burden on the military and enhance our ability to confront threats to U.S. national security not just in Iraq, but also around the world.

Yet I see no reasonable prospect that indigenous military forces can prevent the potential terrible outcomes from becoming reality and I fear that it is far too late to bring in other foreign forces, although we should try. Therefore I differ with many progressives in believing that we need to keep a significant force in Iraq for some extended period of time to prevent Iraq from becoming a divided, foreign-controlled failed state that serves as a hotbed of regional violence.

That is why we need to keep a significant number of troops, perhaps 50,000, in Iraq for the foreseeable future. These troops would have a much smaller footprint and would not engage in offensive operations. They would continue to train and support Iraqi military and police forces and prevent the establishment of terrorist training camps or a radical government in Baghdad. By their mere presence they would reduce the chances for terrible outcomes...

It was a tragic mistake to go into Iraq and it has made the struggle with al-Qaeda far harder, but that does not mean that Bush is wrong when he warns of the consequences of our complete withdrawal any time soon. I see no choice but to change the course and stay.

From the WSJ, "The Base: Radicals in Iraq Begin Exporting Violence, MidEast Neighbors Say":

...Al Qaeda's efforts in Iraq resemble the way Osama bin Laden and other Islamic leaders used Afghanistan in the 1980s to promote global jihad. In both cases, Islamists prosecuted the wars as part of a broader propaganda operation to rally the world's Muslims. Both theaters of war, meanwhile, have given extremists new training in military technologies and tactics.

And the tactics in Iraq are getting more sophisticated, some say. Militants fighting there "are not like the mujahadeen 20 years ago, trained in guerrilla warfare, handed an AK-47 rifle and a satchel of grenades," says Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp. who consults for the U.S. government. "Rather, these people have been trained in urban warfare, in ambush and sniper tactics, in the use and placement of improvised explosive devices."

Driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. after Sept. 11, top Islamists established bases for operations elsewhere. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a leader of the Iraqi insurgency, passed across Iran and set up shop in Kurdish northern Iraq.

One goal for al Qaeda, after losing its Afghan haven, was to bring its struggle to multiple fronts that would stretch American forces thin, according to statements released by al Qaeda. Mr. Zarqawi and other foreign militants in Iraq are believed to have formed a loose alliance with members of the former ruling Baath party and with Sunnis who fear being marginalized in a Shiite-dominated Iraq.

U.S. military officials say al Qaeda-linked elements conduct fewer than 10% of the insurgent military strikes in Iraq but provide the vast majority of suicide bombers and cause a large percentage of U.S. casualties. "Zarqawi is in no shape or form the head of the insurgency," says a senior Pentagon official in the Middle East. But al Qaeda "is very good at field craft and creating high-casualty events."

Terrorist strikes in the region, such as recent ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are on the rise, and according to Middle East intelligence officials, most are either ordered or inspired by Mr. Zarqawi and other al Qaeda figures. The officials view Mr. bin Laden's threats against the royal family in his native Saudi Arabia -- and Mr. Zarqawi's desire to attack targets in his native Jordan -- as more ominous when al Qaeda fighters are next door in Iraq rather than farther away in Afghanistan.

In addition, violence in Iraq between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam risks spilling over to other Arab lands, worries Adnan Abu Odeh, a former adviser to Jordan's late King Hussein. "I think the significance of what's been set off in Iraq will play out for decades," he says.

Jordan, sandwiched between Iraq and Israel, could be particularly vulnerable. Roughly 60% Palestinian, Jordan has long had to deal with radicalism focused on Israel. But Mr. bin Laden's late mentor, Abdullah Azzam, hailed from Jordan, as did Mr. Zarqawi. "Zarqawi used to swear in prison that he'd get his revenge" against the Amman government and intelligence services, says Abdullah Abu-Romman, a journalist who served in prison with Mr. Zarqawi in the 1990s. "He'll try again." ...

Kuwait also faces threats from the Iraqi insurgency next door. In January, Kuwait's Security Services uncovered a bomb-making operation on the outskirts of Kuwait City. In a low-rent apartment in a district known as Jaber Ali, security officials say they found nine complete explosive devices, packed into sacks ready for transportation into the capital.

In this and other raids, Kuwaiti police say, they found diagrams of military installations and shopping-mall complexes. The plans, say these security officials, reflected the same tactics used by Iraqi insurgents, using light weapons and car bombs. The officials say interrogation of some of those captured reveal they had orders from a Saudi-based al Qaeda cell linked to Mr. Zarqawi to target military installations and shopping malls.

The neighboring countries potentially destabilized by extremists in Iraq include Syria -- even though President Bush yesterday said Syria has been one of the insurgency's biggest boosters by letting funds, fighters and weapons freely cross its borders. The problem for Syria is that the regime of President Bashar Assad is avowedly secular, and some radical Islamists view its leaders as infidels.

Militants with ties to Iraqi insurgents are already waging a campaign against the Assad government, says Eyal Zisser, a Syria expert at Tel Aviv University. He says the campaign is waged by a group called Jund Al Sham, or Soldiers of the Levant, and that fighters caught or killed in the campaign show it is transnational. "This is a major problem for the Syrian regime and a clear result of the anarchy in Iraq," Mr. Zisser says.

A longer-term impact of the Iraq conflict could come from foreign fighters who train in Iraq and later return home. U.S. officials estimate that foreign fighters who have entered Iraq so far number in the very low thousands -- nowhere near the 20,000 who went to Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion 25 years ago. They also say most Middle East governments don't support their citizens going to Iraq, in contrast to overt Arab financial underwriting of the earlier, anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency. Still, al Qaeda and other Islamist groups have developed a steady pipeline of recruits heading to Iraq from North African countries such as Morocco and Algeria, from the Arabian Gulf and from Europe, say U.S. and Middle East officials...

Many governments in the region worry that this network of Islamist recruits could reverse, bringing battle-hardened extremists back home someday. Twenty-one Kuwait men now are on trial in Kuwait accused of fighting in Iraq and recruiting others. In Jordan, seven suspects went on trial in August, accused of taking part in the Iraqi insurgency.

Germany is concerned with an Iraqi Kurdish group, Ansar al-Sunna, that has worked closely with al Qaeda and Mr. Zarqawi. Last December, German police broke up a plot by Ansar members to assassinate Iyad Allawi, then Iraq's prime minister, during a visit to Berlin. The group has an underground railroad for Iraqi fighters that runs through Italy, Sweden, Syria and other countries, according to a dossier compiled by Italian judicial authorities...

A new paper on Democratic strategy urges the party to the center.

More on Pentagon domestic spying. A Senate Intel committee staffer assures me the optics are worse than the reality of the language in this bill. But I'm troubled by the lack of public debate and total darkness surrounding this issue. Some of the revelations from the Able Danger controversy involved a related classified compartmentalized Pentagon data mining project that apparently identified Condoleezza Rice and Bill Perry as likely China spies. The Pentagon just doesn't seem like the appropriate agency to do this sort of domestic intelligence work esp. as Pentagon intel work by its nature falls in an oversight black hole between the Senate Intel and Armed services committees. Hoping someone who knows more comes out with more on this whole issue soon.

Rove to Testify Friday

The NYT describes Rove as being summoned by Fitzgerald, and not the other way around, and says things aren't looking good for the White House:

The special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case has summoned Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, to return next week to testify to a federal grand jury in a step that could mean there will be charges filed in the case, lawyers in the case said today.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has held discussions in recent days with lawyers for several Bush administration officials suggesting that that he is considering whether to charge them with a crime over the disclosure of an intelligence operative's identity in a 2003 newspaper column.

But some of the lawyers said Mr. Fitzgerald indicated that he had not yet made up his mind about whether to accuse anyone with wrongdoing and would use the coming weeks before the grand jury expires on Oct. 28 to decide the issue.

Mr. Fitzgerald's conversations with lawyers since late last week have left an ominous cloud hanging over the inquiry, sweeping away assurances from a number of officials and their lawyers that Mr. Fitzgerald was unlikely to find criminal wrongdoing.

In coming days, Mr. Fitzgerald is likely to request that several White House officials return to the grand jury to testify about their actions in the case - appearances that are believed to be decisive as the prosecutor proceeds toward a decision on whether to file charges.

Mr. Fitzgerald is also re-examining grand jury testimony by I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, the lawyers said, but it is unknown whether he too has been asked to appear again before the grand jury. His lawyer, Joseph Tate, did not respond to telephone messages left at his office today.

Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, said Mr. Rove has not received a target letter. Target letters are sometimes used by prosecutors to advise people that they are likely to be charged with a crime. Mr. Luskin said today that "the special counsel has said that he has made no charging decision."

Mr. Luskin has said he had offered for Mr. Rove to return to the grand jury if needed to clarify any questions that were raised by the testimony in July by Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, who was questioned about a conversation that he with Mr. Rove regarding Mr. Wilson's trip in July 2003.

"Karl's consistent position is that he will cooperate any time, any place," Mr. Luskin said.

Several lawyers expressed surprise and concern over the recent turn of events and are increasingly convinced that Mr. Fitzgerald could charge someone with a crime for discussing with journalists the identity of an undercover officer of the Central Intelligence Agency...

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove will testify tomorrow morning for a fourth time before the federal grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame matter, according to sources close to the investigation.

Rove will appear voluntarily, but during tomorrow's session, Rove will be pressed about issues as to why his accounts to the FBI and grand jury have changed, or evolved, over time. He will also be questioned regarding contacts with other senior administration officials, such as then-deputy National Security advisor Stephen J. Hadley and I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney in the critical week before the publication of columnist Robert Novak's column on July 14, 2003, which outed Plame as a covert CIA operative.

Rove is also likely to be asked more detailed questions about his conversation with Time magazine Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, in which Cooper himself has testified to the grand jury that Rove had told him that Valerie Plame was employed by the CIA, and had played a role in having her husband, ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, selected to go on his controversial fact-finding mission on behalf of the CIA. Rove's previous grand jury appearances had occurred prior to Cooper's own testimony to the grand jury.

...The last-minute testimony from Rove adds to a growing list of woes for the White House, and coincides with a period in which Rove has been much less visible. He is currently away on a family trip, Luskin said today.

Rove's appearance before the grand jury would occur as the panel nears the end of its term under the guidance of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Among other avenues, Fitzgerald has been investigating whether White House officials, including Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, were fully forthcoming with investigators about their knowledge of Plame and how her name became public...

In Washington, talk of imminent indictments — of Rove alone or with others as part of a conspiracy — was overheard in the corridors of the FBI, Justice Department and White House, according to several officials. One Bush administration official who was in a meeting with Rove this week said he seemed "his usual self." ...

At the Justice Department, officials said that the wall between their prosecutors and Fitzgerald has kept even the slightest details about the investigation compartmentalized.

But in recent days, speculation at the department has grown regarding Fitzgerald's plans as the probe appears to be drawing to a conclusion. There have been indications that the prosecutor plans to initiate some proceedings soon.

Today, that speculation increased significantly with reports of Rove's reappearance before the grand jury, which one Justice Department official said was clearly an ominous sign for Rove and the White House.

"Certainly, it's not particularly good," said the Justice Department official. "What, exactly, the significance is, I can't say. But it can't be good."

Rove to testify to Plame grand jury, at his request:

Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th hour testimony in the case of a CIA officer's leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won't be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.

The persons, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not made any decision yet on whether to file criminal charges against the longtime confidant of President George W. Bush or others.

The U.S. attorney's manual requires prosecutors not to bring witnesses before a grand jury if there is a possibility of future criminal charges unless they are notified in advance that their grand jury testimony can be used against them in a later indictment.

Rove has already made at least three grand jury appearances and his return at this late stage in the investigation is unusual.

The prosecutor did not give Rove similar warnings before his earlier grand jury appearances.

...Rove offered in July to return to the grand jury for additional testimony and Fitzgerald accepted that offer Friday after taking grand jury testimony from the formerly jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller...

E&P.

Roberto Calvi - "God's Banker" - murder trial begins in Rome.

Creeping Police State Provisions Snuck into Intel Bill

Newsweek on domestic spying by the Pentagon:

...the Senate Intelligence Committee recently approved broad-ranging legislation that gives the Defense Department a long sought and potentially crucial waiver: it would permit its intelligence agents, such as those working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to covertly approach and cultivate “U.S. persons” and even recruit them as informants—without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the U.S. government. The Senate committee’s action comes as President George W. Bush has talked of expanding military involvement in civil affairs, such as efforts to control pandemic disease outbreaks.

The provision was included in last year’s version of the same bill, but was knocked out after its details were reported by NEWSWEEK and critics charged it could lead to “spying” on U.S. citizens. But late last month, with no public hearings or debate, a similar amendment was put back into the same authorization bill—an annual measure governing U.S. intelligence agencies—at the request of the Pentagon. A copy of the 104-page committee bill, which has yet to be voted on by the full Senate, did not become public until last week.

At the same time, the Senate intelligence panel also included in the bill two other potentially controversial amendments—one that would allow the Pentagon and other U.S. intelligence agencies greater access to federal government databases on U.S. citizens, and another granting the DIA new exemptions from disclosing any “operational files” under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “What they are doing is expanding the Defense Department’s domestic intelligence activities in secret—with no public discussion,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil-liberties group that is often critical of government actions in the fight against terrorism...

Senate Defies White House on Torture

Senate votes 90-9 for Interrogation Limits. Dares the White House to veto it. Forty-three Republican Senators joined forty-three Democratic Senators to sign the bill:

...Senate GOP leaders had managed to fend off the detainee language this summer, saying the Congress should not constrain the executive branch's options. But last night, 89 senators sided with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who led the fight for the interrogation restrictions. McCain said military officers have implored Congress for guidelines, adding that he mourns "what we lose when by official policy or by official negligence we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget . . . that which is our greatest strength: that we are different and better than our enemies." ...

The Senate's 90 to 9 vote suggested a new boldness among Republicans to challenge the White House on war policy. The amendment by McCain, one of Bush's most significant backers at the outset of the Iraq war, would establish uniform standards for the interrogation of people detained by U.S. military personnel, prohibiting "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment while they are in U.S. custody...

In its statement on the veto threat, the White House said the measure would "restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bringing terrorists to justice."

But as new allegations of abuse surface, the chorus of McCain supporters is broadening. McCain read a letter on the Senate floor from former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, who endorsed the amendment and said it would help address "the terrible public diplomacy crisis created by Abu Ghraib." Powell joins a growing group of retired generals and admirals who blame prison abuse on "ambiguous instructions," as the officers wrote in a recent letter. They urged restricting interrogation methods to those outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation, the parameters that McCain's measure would establish.

McCain cited a letter he received from Army Capt. Ian Fishback, who has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Over 17 months he struggled to get answers from his chain of command to a basic question: What standards apply to the treatment of enemy detainees?" McCain said. "But he found no answers. . . . The Congress has a responsibility to answer this call."

Despite his victory last night, McCain has two major obstacles remaining: House GOP leaders object to attaching it to a spending bill, and Bush could veto it. However, senior GOP Senate aides said they believe the differences could be bridged, either by tweaking the measure or by changing the field manual.

The Maryland and Virginia senators voted for the McCain amendment...

Update: A friend says the resolution will get weakened in committee (Alaska's Ted Stevens asserts as much here). Jeff Sessions (R-AL) voted against the bill. Who are the other eight? Here we go, from reader N:
Allard (R-CO)
Bond (R-MO)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Stevens (R-AK)

As a friend points out, "Look at who these people are! Chairmen of Intelligence, Defense Approps, Environment and Public Works committees. The Chairman of two major Judiciary subcommittees and the transport subcommittee of EPW. These are senior ...people."

Thursday Update: More from the End Torture campaigners at Human Rights First.

A spy in Cheney's office has been arrested, ABC News is reporting:

Both the FBI and CIA are calling it the first case of espionage in the White House in modern history.

Officials tell ABC News the alleged spy worked undetected at the White House for almost three years. Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, was a U.S. Marine most recently assigned to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"I don't know of a case where the vetting broke down before and resulted in a spy being in the White House," said Richard Clarke, a former White House advisor who is now an ABC News consultant.

Federal investigators say Aragoncillo, a naturalized citizen from the Philippines, used his top secret clearance to steal classified intelligence documents from White House computers.

In 2000, Aragoncillo worked on the staff of then-Vice President Al Gore. When interviewed by Philippine television, he remarked how valued Philippine employees were at the White House.

"I think what they like most is our integrity and loyalty," Aragoncillo said.

Officials say the classified material, which Aragoncillo stole from the vice president's office, included damaging dossiers on the president of the Philippines. He then passed those on to opposition politicians planning a coup in the Pacific nation.

"Even though it's not for the Russians or some other government, the fact that it occurred at the White House is a matter of great concern," said John Martin, who was the government's lead espionage prosecutor for 26 years.

Last year, after leaving the Marines, Aragoncillo was caught by the FBI while he worked for the Bureau at an intelligence center at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

According to a criminal complaint, Aragoncillo was arrested last month and accused of downloading more than 100 classified documents from FBI computers.

"The information was transferred mostly by e-mails," said U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie at the time of Aragoncillo's arrest.

Since that arrest, officials say Aragoncillo has started to cooperate.

Aragoncillo began working at the White House in 1999. Officials are now trying to learn how he landed the job, when he started spying, and how he escaped detection for so long.

"Of course, it is a source of embarrassment when you find out that this kind of activity has been carried out literally right under your nose," said Martin, the former espionage prosecutor.

According to friends, in addition to his work for Cheney and Gore, Aragoncillo claimed he also worked with President Clinton and Condoleezza Rice when she was the national security advisor.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday night that it has expanded a New Jersey espionage investigation in an effort to determine whether one of its own agents, charged last month with spying for the Philippines, may have also had improper access to classified information while working in Vice President Dick Cheney's office several years ago.

The F.B.I. agent, Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, of Woodbury, N.J., an American citizen who was born in the Philippines, was charged Sept. 12 with passing classified information to government officials in Manila.

The charges filed against Mr. Aragoncillo relate only to classified information that officials say Mr. Aragoncillo took from F.B.I. computers after joining the agency in July 2004.

But the investigation is widening, government officials said, in light of the fact that he had worked for several years prior to joining the agency as a Marine in the vice president's office under both Al Gore and Mr. Cheney. A former administration official said that Mr. Aragoncillo had briefly worked as an aide in Mr. Cheney's office, as a holdover from Mr. Gore's staff. Military aides frequently rotate through those offices and usually hold security clearances.

ABC News reported Wednesday night that Mr. Aragoncillo had also stolen classified material from White House computers at the vice president's office, including information damaging to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

On Wednesday night, government officials said they had no corroboration that any material had been taken from the vice president's office, but they acknowledged that investigators have been focusing on Mr. Aragoncillo's work at the White House.

"As a result of this recent situation, they're going back to look at his earlier work to see if other stuff may have been compromised," said a government official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

The White House refused Wednesday to comment on the case.

"It is an ongoing investigation and, as such, all questions should be directed to the F.B.I.," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "We are cooperating fully with the investigation."

Richard Kolko, an F.B.I. special agent, said, "We're going to do a full investigation of the entire time he had access to any classified or sensitive information, and in the course of the investigation, we will do all due diligence to determine if any other improper activity occurred."

Also charged in the case last month in New Jersey was a friend of Mr. Aragoncillo, Michael Ray Aquino, 39, of Queens, who was deputy director of the Philippines National Police under the government of the former president, Joseph Estrada.

The complaint accused Mr. Aragoncillo of passing copies of classified documents about the Philippines to Mr. Aquino between February and August of this year, after he joined the bureau, by using cellphone text messages and e-mail messages.

Mr. Aquino was arrested in March on immigration charges for overstaying his visa. Investigators began looking at Mr. Aragoncillo after he sought to intervene on his friend's behalf and agents became suspicious, according to the complaint.

A search of F.B.I. computer records showed that Mr. Aragoncillo had conducted extensive keyword searches on agency computers for information related to the Philippines and had printed or downloaded 101 classified documents on the subject. More than three dozen documents were classified secret.

...ABC News reported last night that Aragoncillo had admitted taking classified documents while he worked in Cheney's office...

Former Philippines president Joseph Estrada, who was forced from office four years ago by mass demonstrations, has acknowledged receiving documents from Aragoncillo while the suspect was still in the U.S. Marines. Estrada told a Philippine newspaper last month that Aragoncillo had passed on material while visiting him at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center in Manila, where the former president was receiving treatment while being held on corruption charges from 2001 through 2003. Part of that stay would coincide with Aragoncillo's time in Cheney's office. Estrada remains under house arrest...

Aragoncillo retired in 2004 after 21 years as a U.S. Marine and began working for the FBI as an intelligence analyst. Reports apparently based on the classified material allegedly downloaded by Aragoncillo are being published in the Philippines. The reports reveal not only sources of sensitive U.S. information but include frank and unflattering assessments of Philippine leaders.

In once such report published in a Manila newspaper, comments attributed to diplomats at the U.S. Embassy described Arroyo as weak and overbearing with little popular credibility. Her vice president was called inept and unfit to take her place. Clandestine discussions among dissident soldiers were detailed and the president's chances of surviving a coup were weighed. [...]

According to the criminal complaint, federal investigators first took an interest in Aragoncillo after he tried to intervene on behalf of Aquino, who had been arrested in March for overstaying a tourist visa.

Aquino had come to the United States almost four years earlier and settled in New York. When he left his homeland, he was under indictment in the Philippines for involvement in the kidnapping and murder of a public relations executive, who had quarreled with Estrada, and the man's driver.

After Aragoncillo contacted U.S. immigration officials this spring, identifying himself as an FBI employee and Aquino's friend, the FBI launched an audit of its internal database, which offers access to documents from various government agencies.

Investigators discovered Aragoncillo had used his top-secret clearance to download and print information relating to the Philippines although the material was outside his area of assignment, the complaint alleged. He then allegedly forwarded the information by e-mail, telephone and text message to the officials in the Philippines.

Federal prosecutors have charged the men with conspiracy and acting as unregistered agents under the direction of foreign officials. Aquino's lawyer has denied the allegations. Aragoncillo has offered no public statement.

A U.S. official familiar with the investigation said Aragoncillo was paid to steal the information he obtained, but e-mail messages cited in the complaint also portrayed him as having a interest in shaping the politics of his birthplace...

The WaPo on Franklin's plea.

Bird flu panic. Is this like shark attacks or what? Response from reader RC: "No, because, in direct contrast to sharks, 'bird flu' has the very real potential to kill millions of people world-wide and bring large chunks of our civilization crashing down. (Read up on the havoc caused by the 1918 flu pandemic, if you haven't done so already..) Also, even if the pandemic never happens, it gives BushCo another way to curtail a few more constitutional liberties." Right, but why did the official panic start all of a sudden, in the past couple weeks?

Who is more polarizing: Cheney or Hillary? Woodward predicts '08 will prove the test.

Fate of McCain's detainee treatment amendment could be decided tonight. From GovExec:

...Warner's two amendment packages did not include a controversial amendment filed by Armed Services Airland Subcommittee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., that would standardize treatment of detainees. Warner has said he continues to support the McCain amendment, despite veto threats from the White House should either defense bill include the language.

Initially intended for the stalled defense authorization bill, McCain has filed his detainee amendment to the appropriations bill. The Arizona Republican has said he will do whatever is necessary to get his amendment passed.

The Frist aide said he expects a unanimous consent agreement Wednesday to set aside time for the McCain amendment, with a vote tonight...

AU on Darfur: "Collusion between [government of Sudan] forces and the Janjaweed/Arab militia":

However, in the light of our experience in the past fourteen months we must conclude that there is neither good faith nor commitment on the part of any of the parties. I also believe that there is a clear need to review the rules of procedure and of especially the JC. I am making this observation by way of introduction to explain why we have taken the unprecedented step of calling a press conference to address the series of violations of ceasefire that occurred in Darfur since the conclusion of the 5th round of the Abuja Peace talks.

The extent of collapse of the security situation in Darfur during this period is even more ironic and regrettable given the high hopes for an early resolution of the Darfur crisis...

It is against this background that we find it utterly incomprehensible that the [Government of Sudan] GOS Forces which had hitherto not only shown restraint themselves, but used their considerable and known influence on the Arab/Armed
militia to restrain them as well, suddenly decided to abandon such responsible behaviour and posture and resorted to the violent destructive and overwhelming use of force not only against the rebel forces, but also on innocent civilian villages and the IDP camps.

Since the Shaeria incident, a number of coordinated offensive operations have been undertaken by the GOS and the Janjaweed Arab militia. On 18 September 2005, simultaneous attacks at Khartoum Djadeed, Sandego, Khasantongur, Tary, Martal and Djabain resulted in the death of 12 civilians, 5 seriously wounded, and the displacement of about 4,000 civilians...

As you are probably aware on 28 September 2005, just four days ago, some reportedly 400 Janjaweed Arab militia on camels and horse back went on the rampage in Arusharo, Acho and Gozmena villages in West Darfur. Our reports also indicate that the day previous, and indeed on the actual day of the attack, GOS helicopter gunships were observed overhead. This apparent coordinated land and air assault gives credence to the repeated claim by the rebel movements of collusion between the GOS forces and the Janjaweed/Arab militia.

This incidence, which was confirmed not only by our investigators but also by workers of humanitarian agencies and NGOs in the area, took a heavy toll resulting in 32 people killed, 4 injured and 7 missing, and about 80 houses/shelter looted and set ablaze.

The following day, a clearly premeditated and well rehearsed combined operation was carried out by the GOS military and police at approximately 11 am in the town of Tawilla and its IDP camp in North Darfur. The GOS forces used approximately 41 trucks and 7 land cruisers in the operation which resulted in a number of deaths, massive displacement of civilians and the destruction of several houses in the surrounding areas as well as some tents in
the IDP camps...During the attack, thousands from the
township and the IDP camp and many humanitarian workers were forced
to seek refuge near the AU camp for personal safety and security...

This is pretty funny. From the Corner: "Via the Adam Smith Institute, comes this remark from Sir Digby Jones, Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, eye-witness to the talks between EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandleson and his Chinese counterpart, held in Beijing at the height of the nonsenical 'Bra Wars' garment quotas dispute":

"One of them was an unaccountable, unelected politician from a sprawling bureaucracy who was promoting protectionism. And the other was Chinese."

Illegal aliens being recruited into the Marines in Miami-Dade County, Florida, the Village Voice reports:

On Wednesday, a general court martial is to begin at Parris Island, South Carolina, for a U.S. Marine recruiter accused of selling and delivering counterfeit documents to illegal aliens in order for them to join the service.

Gunnery Sergeant Hubert A. Lucas, 35, is one of four suspects named in a report by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, part of which was obtained by the Voice...

According to the report, investigators found 23 recruits who may have fraudulently entered the Marine Corps. Twenty suspect alien registration numbers, along with Social Security numbers for all 23 recruits, were queried through federal databases. It turned out that every single one was “either completely fraudulent or assigned to a different person.” The investigation later identified three more alien recruits suspected of fraudulently enlisting.

A Bosnian Serb commission "identified more than 17,000 people who had taken part directly and indirectly in the Srebrenica massacre."

"Congress neglects oversight," the WaPo reports:

...Government scholars and watchdog groups say the decline of congressional oversight in recent years has thrown out of kilter the system of checks and balances the Founding Fathers created to keep no one branch of government from becoming too powerful. Whether the Pentagon or the Environmental Protection Agency, if a department does not think Congress is paying attention, it could be more apt to waste money or allow problems to go unaddressed...

Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, has a harsher assessment. "This Congress doesn't see itself as an independent branch that might include criticizing an incumbent administration. Meaningful oversight, because it might imply criticism, has been pushed off the table altogether."

Off the Record on the NYT and the Plame case. Money quote:

...But a lawyer familiar with the case said it was Mr. Fitzgerald who seemed to be getting desperate.

“It was coming close to the end of the term; obviously, his putting her in jail had not worked. And I think he really badly needed any sort of arrangement by which he could wrap up his investigation, and keeping her in jail longer was not really a good solution for him. I think he was in a position, and he was anxious to get some sort of arrangement going.”

The lawyer added: “I think it’s fair to conclude from the number of calls he placed that it was clear he was getting impatient. And it was clear that he was really looking to initiate, that he was willing to compromise and to make the arrangement he ended up making.”

Remember all that talk after 9/11 about the need for information sharing? Would be good if the feds could talk to the state and local and all that? Well, under the Bush administration's Putin-style approach, there has been a virtual shutdown of communications between DHS and big city police departments, according to CQ Weekly. This via UPI:

Relations between the Department of Homeland Security and some key big-city and state police forces have sunk to a new low, CQ Weekly reports.

The magazine's "Spy Talk" column, says the flow of intelligence data between the department and many local forces has been at a virtual standstill since May.

At the center of the row is a previously undisclosed May 7 letter to the department from Ed Manavian, chairman of the Joint Regional Information Exchange System, or JRIES -- a state and local police intelligence and information-sharing network.

In the letter, addressed to the director of the Homeland Security Operations Center, retired Marine Gen. Matthew Broderick, he called the decision to cut ties "unfortunate."

"[W]e must inform you that the Board unanimously voted to discontinue our relationship with the (Homeland Security Operations Center)," wrote Manavian, who is also chief of the California Department of Justice's Criminal Intelligence Bureau. The letter added it was a "difficult, but necessary, decision."

"The consensus of the Board is that the (Homeland Security Operations Center) has 'hi-jacked' the system and federalized a successful, cooperative, federal, state, and local project," Manavian wrote. "The failures . . . are a direct result of ignoring the concerns expressed by this Board on numerous occasions."

Broderick has yet to answer the five-month old letter, according to CQ Weekly.

The magazine reports that some of the most frustrated police officials are responsible for jurisdictions "thought to be among al-Qaida's top targets, such as New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C."

From Romenesko, Judy Miller is to appear on Lou Dobbs tonight at 6pm. Meantime, the NY Sun has made available a letter from Patrick Fitzgerald concerning Libby. It may help explain why Libby's attorney Tate has been so aggressive at insisting that they allegedly made clear to Miller's attorney a year ago that he had waived her and other reporters from their pledge of confidentiality. Reports the Sun:

...The turn of events appears to have been triggered, at least in part, by Mr. Fitzgerald's September 12 letter to Mr. Libby's attorney, Joseph Tate of Philadelphia. In the letter, the prosecutor noted that while Mr. Libby personally released another reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine, from any obligation of confidentiality at Mr. Cooper's request, Mr. Libby did not appear to have done so for Ms. Miller, even as she passed her days behind bars.

"I had assumed that Mr. Libby had simply decided that encouraging Ms. Miller to testify was not in his best interest," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote. He also noted press accounts that suggested that Ms. Miller and her attorneys were not satisfied with the generic written waiver that Mr. Libby had signed. The prosecutor said his conclusion was also supported by the fact that Mr. Libby had apparently not reached out to Ms. Miller, despite the fact that several congressmen called on the White House aide to make such an effort.

Kevin Drum highlights this worthy piece by Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk calling on Congress to defy the Bush White House threat of a veto and pass guidelines regulating detainee treatment and banning torture. It's incredibly depressing that Congress has let itself become so neutered that it even has to be encouraged to act on this one. Maybe if and when those new Abu Ghraib photos are released, they'll be falling over themselves once again to act -- to act like they're not the bunch of useless cowards they've proved themselves to be.

Paul Hackett to run for Senate against DeWine.

GSA head Stephen Perry -- Safavian's former boss -- resigns.

From Time:

...Miller had spent nearly two months in jail on civil contempt-of-court charges when negotiations between the two camps resumed. Another Miller lawyer, Robert Bennett, picked up the phone on Aug. 31 to call Tate. Bennett told TIME that the Miller camp had received an indication from a third party that it might be a good time to approach Libby with a new request to personally waive the confidentiality agreement...

More on arguments between Miller's and Libby's attorneys from the Post.

The NYT says, a story on the Miller-Libby-Plame issue is coming.

MSNBC Breaking News: "Texas grand jury indicts U.S. Rep. DeLay on charge of money laundering." Here's the AP on the new charges.

A new beach head? The neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC) has launched a new transatlantic effort, "Committee for a Strong Europe," Liberation journalist Pascal Riche reports.

Arianna Huffington hears the inevitable.

Via the Hotline blog, a Texas Supreme Court justice, Nathan Hecht, who claims to know Miers well, says she "belonged to a 'fundamentalist' church back in Dallas and has views on abortion that evangelicals will be very comfortable with."

Bill Kristol's reaction to Bush's SCOTUS pick is pretty stunning. If Democrats resist her, it sounds like conservatives will be only too happy to go along, and force Bush to pick someone else.

Update: Just out, a wrap up of reaction.

The memo.

Howard Kurtz reports on internal Washington Post debates over transforming the paper, or not. FWIW, I think the Post has done great things with its website, perhaps the best of any of the major papers. The addition of several blogs, including Dan Froomkin's White House briefing, Bill Arkin's Early Warning, and a new one today on politics, provide real value added and have become must-read.

Anyone have any fail-safe kugel recipees? Update: Got four from readers' relatives that sound great, many thanks. Give a shout if you need a compilation.

Democracy Arsenal's Suzanne Nossel has a very interesting round up of shifting national security priorities and trends among the foreign policy elite. Among them:

...The Decline of Europe - This was a more controversial point, but many of those present were convinced that Europe is near the start of an irreversible decline in global importance. Grounds for the conclusion included the defeat of the EU constitution, the EU's inability to act in concert as a major global power, the internal divisions in the alliance, economic stagnation in Germany, and the geopolitical rise of the East in general. Though the meeting was too short to fully work through the implications, if this is true, or if its simply a serious enough possibility to warrant contingency planning, the implications for US policy are profound. Bottom line is we will badly need something we lack today: a bigger bench of allies from around the world willing to step up to confront threats, rebuild failed states, spread norms like democracy and free trade, etc.

American Unipolarity Waning - Probably the most notable change in the tenor of this meeting from the 2004 session was the universal sense that America's position in the world has weakened sharply as a result of all the factors we talk about here all the time: Iraq, military over-extension, frayed alliances, lapsed moral authority, plus China's growing economic power and increasingly effective use of diplomacy and other forms of influence. Whereas a year ago, before the 2004 election, the sense seemed to be that - - depending on who was in the White House - - things might go back to Clinton-era US dominance, the sense now was that the unipolar moment may be at the beginning of its end, and that its unlikely to come back as it once was.

The Importance of Non-Political Threats - A leading expert on global pandemics and related threats attended the conference both years and made a compelling case that the threat of avian flu or similar could kill many more than any terrorist attack, and that insufficient steps are being taken to prevent and prepare for such a threat. The difference this year, which I attribute to Hurricane Katrina, was that participants understood very clearly that a "natural" disaster or epidemic could well become the next major foreign policy crisis, and that, particularly if we are as poorly prepared for it as we are today, the social and political ramifications could easily rival those of a major war.

Iraq as a Lost Cause - Iraq barely featured in the major presentations during the meeting. This was partly because of a deliberate focus on long-term issues and threats. Though opinions were divided, the majority of those I spoke to favored the US withdrawing the bulk of its troops in 2006. It was not that they disagreed on the potentially devastating consequences of Iraq becoming a failed state, nor that they had any confidence that the country would hold together. They were just convinced that the continued American presence was doing more harm than good. (Personally, having seen nothing that makes me confidence that the glaring holes in the US's strategy and approach in Iraq are being filled, I am slowly coming to the view that withdrawal may be the best among lousy options - more on that another time)...

Shooting of Knight Ridder reporter in Iraq was fine, says US military. More.

Russ Hoyle's thoughts on what Miller may really be protecting are definitely worth a read:

...It may be time to admit that we’ve probably been asking the wrong questions about Judith Miller. The chattering classes so far have completely ignored the possibility that what Miller is so determined to protect may have nothing to do with the Plame case.

It may, however, have plenty to do with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice-president’s chief of staff, whom Miller met with on July 8, 2003 and spoke with at least once more that week, along with other unnamed officials, after her return from Iraq and the unsuccessful U.S. search for Saddam’s weapons. And it may have everything to do with protecting the White House officials who leaked classified intelligence – not about Valerie Plame to Robert Novak in the summer of 2003 – but to Miller herself about Iraq’s allegedly reconstituted nuclear weapons program in September 2002...

Bush picks his lawyer, Harriet Miers for Supreme Court. Not a judge. Interesting how he tends to pick these White House advisors to run agencies, etc (Rice, Gonzales, Spellings, now Miers, etc.). Update: Jack Balkin's thoughts on Bush choosing a trusted colleague over an ideologue.

NYT:

Lawyers for inmates in Louisiana say that prison guards have abused some of the nearly 8,000 prisoners who were evacuated from flooded jails in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina.

The allegations are contained in affidavits filed by lawyers who have interviewed thousands of inmates in recent weeks. The complaints include accusations that some guards left prisoners locked in their cells while floodwaters rose to their necks, and that others engaged in regular beatings and other abuse.

The lawyers also estimate that as many as 2,000 people arrested for minor crimes just before the hurricane are still in prison five weeks later. They said that under normal circumstances, such low-level offenders would have seen a judge and been released within days. State and local officials say flooding has destroyed much of the court system and legal records in New Orleans.

On Friday, lawyers for the inmates filed papers requesting that the federal Department of Justice immediately seize control of a temporary holding facility in Jena, La., where more than two dozen inmates have complained of beatings, racial slurs and sexual taunts.

"We were concerned about stopping them from being abused," said Phyllis E. Mann, a Louisiana defense lawyer who led the effort to interview prisoners and who filed the papers. "We've had no response."

Officials from the Justice Department did not respond to a call requesting comment.

Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said the department had received no complaints of abuse at the Jena facility. Ms. Laborde said all prisoners had been evacuated safely from jails affected by the floods. But she said her department would send a team on Monday to investigate the reported beatings there.

Ms. Laborde said in a statement that tactical teams of corrections officers responded to a disturbance at Jena on Sept. 2 and that 60 inmates were removed from the facility. She said there were no reports of significant injuries to prisoners.

Lawyers said that interviews with the 450 prisoners in Jena produced complaints that guards had been beating them, stripping them naked and hitting them with belts, shaving their heads, threatening them with dogs, shocking them with stun guns and assaulting them after they attempted to report the abuse.

The inmates said prison guards from Louisiana, as well as New York City corrections officers sent to the area after the hurricane, had participated in the abuse...

Reuters is reporting that Patrick Fitzgerald refused to let Miller cut a deal a year ago to limit her testimony only to Libby:

...Some lawyers involved in the case said prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's decision to reject the deal a year ago -- only to agree last week to limit the scope of Miller's testimony to the subject of Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- suggested Libby may have become increasingly important to wrapping up Fitzgerald's case...

The Miami Herald has a profile of Adam Kidan, former George H.W. Bush campaign volunteer, College Republican, and the Gambino-linked business partner of Jack Abramoff. If you can believe it, Kidan stole the reward money his stepfather put up to get tips on the murder of Kidan's own mother:

...One of his bagel partners, Michael Cavallo, was an associate of a New York crime family, according to New York law enforcement. Cavallo, now dead, was dating one of Kidan's sisters.

That business was the basis of Kidan's longtime friendship with Gambino crime associate Moscatiello, who owned a Howard Beach catering service.

''I had advice from him occasionally because he was in the food business,'' Kidan said in the 2001 deposition.

But New York City police said Moscatiello, who grew up in the same neighborhood as the late Gambino boss, John Gotti, worked in loan-sharking.

Kidan's next brush with the mob was deadly.

His mother, Judith Shemtov, was murdered in her Staten Island, N.Y., home in 1993 during a botched robbery by a Bonanno crime crew with an infamous South Florida connection.

Former South Beach club impresario Chris Paciello -- legal name Christian Ludwigsen -- eventually pleaded guilty to driving the getaway car for the crew, who raided the home after getting a tip that Kidan's stepfather had $200,000 stashed in a safe.

The following year, Kidan's stepfather sued Kidan and his law partners.

Sami Shemtov accused his stepson of stealing $250,000 of his money from the sale of an electrical company. He also contended that Kidan ripped off another $15,000 Shemtov put up as a reward for information leading to the arrest of his wife's murderer.

Kidan lost the case -- then his New York law license.

Reader JH notes, that Newsweek is reporting that Fitzgerald intended to impanel a new grand jury, "a move that could have kept Miller in jail for another year and a half." Also this:

...Tate acknowledges that Libby did indeed tell Miller that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wife (Plame) had arranged for Wilson to take a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa to probe reports that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear bomb. But he says Libby did not know Plame's real name nor her undercover status at the CIA. Nor, he says, did Libby talk to Robert Novak, the columnist whose story outing Plame prompted the criminal probe in the first place...

Update: And, given the theory that what Fitzgerald is aiming for is a criminal conspiracy charge, not the Identities Protection Act, does it matter if Libby knew Plame's name or not, but was nevertheless involved in pushing the story that Wilson got the Niger gig because of his wife, who works for the CIA? If there was a conspiracy, involving Rove, Libby, and others in the White House to out Wilson's wife to reporters in order to retaliate against Wilson, it wouldn't seem to matter whether Hadley knew her name or status. They were clearly encouraging reporters to go dig it out.

This theory of a criminal conspiracy charge from the Plame investigation as described in this WaPo piece comes from lawyers who have been dealing with Fitzgerald:

...But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.

Lawyers involved in the case interviewed for this report agreed to talk only if their names were not used, citing Fitzgerald's request for secrecy.

One source briefed on Miller's account of conversations with Libby said it is doubtful her testimony would on its own lead to charges against any government officials. But, the source said, her account could establish a piece of a web of actions taken by officials that had an underlying criminal purpose.

A reader suggests that the NYT is going to have a big Able Danger story on Sunday. Update: Don't see it. Readers send this from yesterday's Times and this from Newsday on September 28th.

Tech help for reader. I got a letter from an elderly reader who is having trouble seeing the text of my posts, because of the ads on the site running over it on her screen. She writes that she has web TV, or msn TV and a keyboard. I don't know how to help her. Anyone have any ideas? Update: Thanks for the tips, she got it working.

OK, I rolled my eyes when someone wrote me about this encoded message business, but reading the last graph of Libby's letter to Miller over at the next hurrah, I am almost ready to get out the tinfoil:

You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover--Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work--and life.

...The apprentice, who came from a village farther north, had arrived only that fall, before the deep winter snows had buried the inn halfway to its eaves...

Turning from the sink, the youth saw the woman Matsuko just leaving the kitchen with a tray of sake for guests. As she closed the door behind her, he caught a glimpse of the dim glow from the firepit...

"The lacquer has cracked," she said. The crack and its shadow ran along the edge of the tray...

Update: Mickey Kaus is on the case.

LAT:

Pentagon intelligence operatives would be allowed to collect information from U.S. citizens without disclosing their status as government spies under legislation approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and publicly released this week.

The bill would end a long-standing requirement that military intelligence officers disclose their government ties when approaching an American citizen in the United States -- a law designed to protect Americans from domestic intelligence activities by the Department of Defense.

The provision is one of several sections that would roll back privacy-related protections as part of an effort to improve U.S. intelligence agencies' ability to detect and prevent domestic terrorist plots. Another provision would make it easier for U.S. spy agencies to gain access to sensitive records on U.S. citizens that are held by the government and generally prohibited from being disseminated under privacy laws.

The changes are part of an intelligence authorization bill that calls for what officials described as a "significant" increase in funding for U.S. spy agencies, and would shift money away from controversial satellite programs that many lawmakers consider outdated and unnecessary. ..

Although the bill was endorsed unanimously by committee members, two Democrats expressed concern with the privacy provisions in written comments attached to the legislation.

Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said they considered the military intelligence provision a mistake. Pentagon operatives "should be required to tell United States citizens in the United States who are not suspected of any wrongdoing that they work for the government," the senators wrote.

They added that they "intend to support changes to this authority as the legislation moves forward."

If you're not reading Bill Arkin's Early Warning blog at the WaPo, you're missing some of the most revelatory investigative national security reporting out there. Arkin gives the bigs a real run for their money, filing practically every day. His latest entry on Pentagon information operations is no exception.

NSC meeting on Syria action today, Knight-Ridder reports.

Interesting Scott Ritter piece on the Iraq coup that wasn't.

Why haven't the police arrested this girl's stepfather for abandoning her in the middle of Queens? Whether or not he murdered her mother, he's clearly a criminal who risked the life of a four year old in his care. Update: The step dad has now been charged with murdering the poor little girl's mother.

The Bush administration disseminated "'covert propaganda' in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban," investigators with the Government Accountability Office have determined, the NYT reports:

...The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education...

Congress tried to clarify the ban on "covert propaganda" in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government's role is openly acknowledged.

Bush administration nominates another political hack for a position that requires a professional.

Why there won't be any accountability of detainee abuse issues during the Bush administration. Because the Bush White House refuses to countenance any investigation to address it, as Bush's threat to veto the defense bill over this issue makes starkly clear. And the Republican-majority Congress has as yet shown no leadership to demand accountability and oversight. It's that simple. Let Bush veto the bill that would call for such an investigation, just to have him show exactly where he stands. Let him bankrupt the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why let him get away with it?