SOTU: Kevin observes: "8:56 — Let's see, George Bush has already adopted John Kerry's Iran policy, and tonight he will apparently adopt Jimmy Carter's energy policy as well. "America is addicted to oil," we are reliably informed he will tell us. Let's keep a sharp eye out for FDR references too, shall we?"

Now we're onto Iran. "The nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons." Applause. Message: multilateral all the way. "America will continue to rally the world to counter these threats. Let me speak directly to the Iranian people. America respects you and your country. We respect your right to choose your own .... government. And America hopes some day to become the close friend of a free and democratic Iran." Applause. Mssg: consider rising up! win-win!

Now he's defending the "terrorist surveillance program." Watch this to become the "16 words" of this speech.

We are addicted to oil. [Our solution is an] Advanced energy initiative at the Department of Energy. Invest more in zero emission coal plants, [something else -- wind], and clean safe nuclear energy. Must also change how we fuel our automobiles. ... Goal to make competitive within six years." Replace 75% [?] of our oil imports from the Mideast by 2025.

...

Update: Lots of good live blogging and reaction analysis at Democracy Arsenal.

The Green Salt Project....given credence by the IAEA.

Suddenly, Rep. Doolittle doesn't have much to say.

Go read Kevin Drum and Jonathan Adler on the Newsweek revelations of an epic behind the scenes struggle among conservative political appointees to rein in White House executive power hawks.

The NSA, CIA and Pentagon are locating HQs for domestic spying programs in Aurora Colorado, Bill Arkin writes.

Iraqi girl died of bird flu.

Life advice from The Onion.

This criticism of the administration buried in an oped arguing for modifying the laws governing domestic surveillance is worth noting:

This is not to play down the damage done to our war aims by the executive branch's repeated appearance of an indifference to law. A president does have an obligation to assess the constitutionality of statutes, but when he secretly decides a measure is unconstitutional and neglects to say so (much less why), he undermines the very system of public consent for which we are fighting.

And on the issue of the epic struggle to contain the White House's efforts to expand its executive powers, I recommend again this Newsweek cover story.

Thoughts and prayers for Bob Woodruff, Doug Vogt, and of course, Jill Carroll.

Must-read Newsweek investigation, "Domestic Spying: Insiders Who Said No ... They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it." You really want to read the whole thing, but here's the shorter version: Cheney and his lawyer David Addington tried to subvert the Constitution sans debate. A few conservative political appointee lawyers at the Justice Department, NSC, and State, pushed back, and ultimately were forced out. One take away: the public has mostly been left in the dark about how high the stakes are.

The nature of the regime: What kind of administration tries to silence its top scientists?:

[The top climate scientist at NASA, James E.] Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents. [...]

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet." [...]

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

This is the kind of frankly threatening behavior towards scientists we might expect from the leadership of Russia, or China. Not from an advanced democracy.

More from Kevin Drum on a related WaPo Juliet Eilperin story about global warming and the approaching point of no return. Drum: "Step 1: Get rid of the nitwit in the White House who's convinced global warming can't exist because that would be inconvenient for the Republican Party's funding base. Step 2: Replace him with someone who can read a simple chart. Step 3: Pray."

"Spies, Lies and Wiretap," a NYT editorial worth reading:

... Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance. [...]

War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime measure." That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything. [...]

Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican.

Must read LA Times piece by Ken Silverstein about several firms with close ties to Congressman Curt Weldon hiring his Media PA real estate agent and acknowledged old friend as their lobbyist -- with great success in federal contracts to show for it:

...[Cecelia] Grimes, 40, who calls herself a longtime family friend of Weldon's, represents firms from as far away as California with business involving one or both of Weldon's House committees. Her services typically command a $20,000 annual retainer.

Weldon has taken steps to help at least three lobby clients of Grimes and Young, records and interviews show. And the representative of another company said he was referred to Grimes by a Weldon aide who said Grimes would "help our cause."

The congressman declined to be interviewed and referred all questions to his lawyer, who denied that the aide had recommended Grimes or that Grimes received any special treatment from Weldon's office. [...]

In 2000, Grimes was listed as Weldon's real estate agent in the purchase of his $440,000 two-story home in nearby Glen Mills, documents show. [...]

Among the most recent clients signed by Grimes and Young is Oto Melara, a subsidiary of Italian defense firm Finmeccanica. On June 1, the company agreed to pay Grimes $20,000 annually to lobby the House and Senate.

Oto Melara announced plans to open a new plant in Weldon's district in 2004, around the time the congressman began pressing the Navy to buy the firm's deck guns to install on new combat ships. A rival's weapon already had been selected.

Last year, Weldon supported an amendment to the defense bill requiring the Navy to study his proposal to switch deck guns, putting weapons made by Grimes' client on the next-generation of Littoral Combat Ships.

Weldon also has championed Oto Melara's parent firm, Finmeccanica. Last year, Finmeccanica's helicopter unit joined forces with Lockheed Martin Corp. to score an upset bidding victory and land a $1.6-billion contract to build the new presidential helicopter. [...]

An earlier client for Grimes was FSI Energy Inc. of Bryn Mawr, Pa. The firm is developing an ambitious natural gas project linking gas fields in Russia to North and South Korea and Japan. The massive KoRus pipeline project is backed by Weldon.

The congressman was a leading advocate for the project before his real estate agent friend signed on to represent FSI in June 2003. ...

Weldon is referring the paper's questions to his attorney (a former attorney for the House ethics committee).

Update: Also this from the article would seem to be one of those situations where it's what's illegal that's a problem? Can a congressman's office suggest what lobbying firm a company seeking a congressman's favors should use?

A representative from another company that has lobbied Weldon's office said a senior Weldon aide suggested the firm retain Grimes. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his company from retribution.

"He didn't flat out say to hire her," the official said, recalling the aide's advice. "But he said … it would be good to have her on our side."

The company did not retain Grimes because "the situation didn't feel right," the firm's representative said.

A reader asks, doesn't this all give the appearance that Grimes' lobbying firm in her Media PA home could be a vehicle for laundering bribes from these companies to the congressman in exchange for earmarks for federal contracts?

Iranian blog godfather Hoder -- Hossein Derakhshan -- has an oped in the NYT -- dateline Tel Aviv. You can find out more about his trip here.

"Spiritual Crises Among Intelligence Operatives," "Lessons from Abu Ghraib," "Assassination: The Dream and the Nightmare" and "The Perfidy of Espionage." All panels at a spy ethics conference this weekend, the NYT's Scott Shane reports.

Check out the quote Dewey Clarridge gave the paper on his opinion about such a conference:

"It doesn't make much sense to me," said Duane R. Clarridge, who retired in 1988 after 33 years as a C.I.A. operations officer and who will not attend the conference. "Depending on where you're coming from, the whole business of espionage is unethical."

To Mr. Clarridge, "intelligence ethics" is "an oxymoron," he said. "It's not an issue. It never was and never will be, not if you want a real spy service." Spies operate under false names, lie about their jobs, and bribe or blackmail foreigners to betray their countries, he said.

"If you don't want to do that," Clarridge concluded, "just have a State Department."

Coal miner videotaped the final minutes of his life in a Kentucky coal mine. NBC got the tape:

... The miners, in a space only four feet tall, work to shore up the timbers that brace a part of the mine's roof. The videotape shows one of the timbers broken, and bits of rock dribbling down. One miner nervously tests the roof with his hammer, aware they are working directly underneath a giant seam in the rock. The miners even joke about death. ...

Documents show that the company had been cited for more than 60 safety violations in five months before the accident, half labeled “significant and substantial.” One of the most serious was allowing miners to work under an unsupported roof, and included a $3,600 fine.

A former federal mine safety official who investigated Pennington’s death for the state says this tragedy underscores a widespread problem in mines across the country. He says fines are too small to induce companies to fix hazards, and the entire mine safety system has no teeth.

A Bush administration mine-safety official "walked out of Senate hearing this week," Knight-Ridder reported.

US military seizing Iraqi women -- and holding some for months -- to lure in their fathers and husbands, Knight-Ridder's Nancy Youssef reports. Update: Reader TS reminds us this is against the Geneva Conventions. More from Sullivan.

Bush's "weakest showing ever" in an LA Times' poll. "He received even lower marks for his handling of the economy, healthcare and Iraq — especially from women, who the poll found had turned against him on several fronts. And by a 2-1 ratio, those surveyed said the nation needed to change direction from the overall course Bush had set."

More from CNN: "Most think Bush is failing his second term":

A majority of Americans are more likely to vote for a candidate in November's congressional elections who opposes President Bush, and 58 percent consider his second term a failure so far, according to a poll released Thursday.

Fewer people consider Bush to be honest and trustworthy now than did a year ago, and 53 percent said they believe his administration deliberately misled the public about Iraq's purported weapons program before the U.S. invasion in 2003, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found.

And Mort Halperin doesn't hold back with what he really means (here), analyzing these polls: "There is no credibility left in this White House. ... Before Iraq, torture, and warrantless spying, during Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention, he proclaimed, 'If you give me your trust, I will honor it.' Clearly that promise was just as big a lie."

Democrats.com on Alito filibuster organizing.

FEC complaint against Wilkes (alleged co-conspirator #1 in the Cunningham plea) for making excessive campaign contributions, the San Diego Union-Trib reports.

LAT: "A secret U.S. military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to publish articles favorable to the American mission appears to violate a 2003 Pentagon directive, according to a newly declassified document released Thursday."

Abramoff prosecutor to step down immediately. Doesn't the timing of this look suspicious?

The WaPo's Eugene Robinson:

Once upon a time we had a great wartime president who told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Now we have George W. Bush, who uses fear as a tool of executive power and as a political weapon against his opponents.

Franklin D. Roosevelt tried his best to allay his nation's fears in the midst of an epic struggle against fascism. Bush, as he leads the country in a war whose nature he is constantly redefining, keeps fear alive because it has been so useful. His political grand vizier, Karl Rove, was perfectly transparent the other day when he emerged from wherever he's been hiding the past few months -- consulting omens, reading entrails -- and gave the Republican National Committee its positioning statement for the fall elections: Vote for us or die.

As the San Diego Union-Tribune pointed to in a report on Wednesday, Rep. John Doolittle received an enormous amount of campaign contributions from an alleged co-conspirator in the Cunningham case and his associates, and in turn, rewarded one of their companies with a multimillion dollar defense contract. Reports the Post tonight:

Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) told The Washington Post that he helped steer defense funding, totaling $37 million, to a California company, whose officials and lobbyists helped raise at least $85,000 for Doolittle and his leadership political action committee from 2002 to 2005.

"Increasingly, lawmakers have gone around authorizers and agency officials to finance pet projects in their home districts," the article goes on.

Update: Reader B writes:

Come on WaPo, connect the friggin' dots:

(1) Brent Wilkes hires the Alexander Strategy Group to lobby members of Congress, including John Doolittle, to earmark $37 million dollars for one of Wilkes's companies, Perfect Wave Technologies.

(2) Another congressional spouse, Julia Doolittle, wife of California Republican John Doolittle, helped Alexander with bookkeeping for one of its clients, according to Justice Department records.

How could they possibly leave that salient fact out of the story? If Doolittle is indicted for bribery, its going to be for the money that went to his wife, not the campaign contributions he got from Wilkes.

Slate's Jacob Weisberg on the "Power-Madness of King George": "The president's latest assertion that he alone can safeguard our civil liberties isn't just disturbing and wrong. It's downright un-American."

Joel Achenblog helps our famously silver-tongued President out with some lingo here:

Questioned about warrantless eavesdropping, President Bush said this morning that he hasn't been "circumventing" the 1978 law that he has been ... well, circumventing. He admits he hasn't abided by the law, but "circumventing" is a word he's not ready to embrace.

"FISA's still an important tool. It's an important tool, and we still use that tool. But, also -- and I looked. I said, 'Look, is it possible to conduct this program under the old law?' And people said, 'It doesn't work in order to be able do the job we expect to us do.' And so, that's why I made the decision I made. And, you know, 'circumventing' is a loaded word. And I refuse to accept it, because I believe what I'm doing is legally right."

As a public service, we offer some alternative words that the president might use:

Flouting.

Scorning.

Ignoring.

Evading.

Dodging.

Breaking. ...

More here.

Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes? From the AP:

The top U.S. general in Iraq acknowledged Thursday that American forces are "stretched" but said troop withdrawals will be dictated by war strategy and not the strain faced by the soldiers.

Gen. George Casey's remarks contrasted sharply with statements made on Wednesday by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who disputed findings of an unreleased study conducted for the Pentagon that said the Army is overextended because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported that an unreleased study conducted for the Pentagon said the Army is being overextended because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and may not be able to retain and recruit enough troops to defeat the insurgency in Iraq.

A day later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld disputed that, asserting that "the force is not broken." ...

Pinochet's daughter seeks asylum in US. Wanted in Chile for tax evasion and false passport charges:

Lucia Pinochet and several members of her family are implicated in a scandal involving the now-defunct Riggs Bank of Washington. The bank provided diplomatic banking services for decades until a Senate investigation found irregularities in its operations.

Congressional investigators alleged that Augusto Pinochet, 90, worked with bank managers to set up phony offshore companies to hide the existence of about $8 million at the bank. He faces charges in Chile for financial crimes and human rights abuses committed during his 17-year rule, from 1973 to 1990.

A judicial investigation in Chile determined that Pinochet had deposited as much as $28 million in accounts in several countries.

The bank of the Saudi royals as well that sent those checks to the guys supporting the San Diego based 9/11 hijackers.

Speaking of problems with photographs. Check this out, from NBC. The US has spent a year and a half looking for a top Al Qaeda operative using the wrong photo. I kid you not.

A House Republican "Dear Colleague" letter (pdf) worth reading. Highlights:

Simply put, the current climate we [the Republican conference] face is the worst it has been since we seized the majority in 1994. Any Member of Congress who fails to understand that should read the polls. If we do not understand voters' anger and respond, we will suffer the consequences in November. [...]

Fairly or unfairly, the recent scandals are tarnishing our party's image, and threatening our majority in the House of Representatives. We must make a clean break and support real reform.

The recent scandals are taking a toll. Three times as many voters say corruption is a bigger problem among Republicans than Democrats. Of voters who associate Jack Abramoff with one party or the other, 15 times as many associate him with the Republicans Party (30 percent Republicans, 2 percent Democrats). According to a CBS News poll released on January 9, more than twice as many Americans believe that Republicans are more corrupt than Democrats (36 percent say Republicans are more corrupt, 16 percent say Democrats).

Quite a disconnect between these poll results and what the pundits have been saying that the public is turned off by both parties equally over the corruption scandals.

(Thx to JK).

Via Democrats.com, CNN is reporting that Kerry will attempt to lead Alito filibuster.

Ibrahim Rugova is buried in a ceremony attended by huge crowds.

The Commissar Vanishes. Sobering indeed. What was the Kundera novel that began with the Czech communists editing out the photograph of a Communist leader who had been purged? It is extraordinarily disturbing, the authoritarian tendencies of this group, their deliberate manipulation of reality, their false folksy populism mixed with demagoguery. We've seen these tendencies in history before. This goes beyond overreach to examples from regimes abroad that have not been remembered benignly in the history books.

Update: My friend Andras points us to David King's "brilliant" book, "The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia." And to the accompanying online exhibit, here.

(Left) Stalin with the Commissar Nikolai Yezhov -- and (photo on the right) with Yezhov removed, after he was shot in 1939/1940. (More on Yezhov here).

Update II: Matt Yglesias reminds us that the Kundera book is, appropriately enough, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

And no, it hardly needs to be said, I am not equating the Bush administration's behavior with Stalin's crimes, thank you very much. But the Bush White House's consistent efforts to manipulate reality, distort the truth, operate in secrecy, evade public scrutiny and Congressional oversight, subvert Constitutional checks on executive authority, to outright lie, and now to disappear photographs that would be politically damaging go beyond normal political public relations and spin. They are reminiscent of the propaganda tactics used by authoritarian regimes and driven by the same impulse: to deceive, to manipulate, all in the name of protecting, and as demonstrated in the NSA domestic spying story, expanding power -- power that increasingly is not being projected abroad, you'll notice, but here at home.

(Thx to AR, BH, and MY).

Mort Halperin says, Gen. Hayden lied outright to Congress.

Think Progress' run-down of the administration's crumbling facade on domestic spying is worth reading in full. Update: Paul Glastris is worth reading on this as well:

... The administration has shown, time and again, that it can’t be trusted to manage the power it has. Iraq, Katrina, the budget, mine safety, prescription drugs—each and every one a monumental screw-up. What possible reason do we have to presume that the administration hasn’t screwed up the NSA eavesdropping program? We have no real idea who the NSA is spying on. Could be al-Qaeda cells. Could be your wife’s cell phone conversations. We have no idea.

There’s only one way to make sure the Bush administration hasn’t blown this very important and delicate domestic spying activity. It’s the mechanism bequeathed to us by the Founders: Congressional consent and oversight. But the president doesn’t believe he needs Congress’ consent, and the Republican-controlled Congress doesn’t believe in tough oversight.

The ultimate answer, he suggests, comes this November.

More from the LAT: "Remarkable duplicity" on the administration's part, source tells the paper. "Incredible deception."

A harrowing story of how the WaPo's Jackie Spinner was almost kidnapped while covering a prisoner release from Abu Ghraib. One continues to hope for the safe release of her friend and colleague Jill Carroll.

Via Atrios, the Justice Department reported to the Senate Intelligence committee in 2002 that FISA was working well and that it "opposed a legislative proposal to change FISA to make it easier to obtain warrants that would allow the [NSA] to listen in on communications involving non-U.S. citizens inside the United States." From Knight-Ridder.

Update: From the Post:

"It's entirely inconsistent with their current position," said Philip B. Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who teaches law at Harvard University. "The only reason to do what they've been doing is because they wanted a lower standard than 'probable cause.' A member of Congress offered that to them, but they turned it down."

"Entirely inconsistent" is the polite, academic way of saying big fat liars.

Perhaps this is the whole point of the Bush administration invasion of Americans' privacy through things like demanding Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. turn over *all* search records, monitoring phone calls without warrants, etc. Not to root out illegal activity. After all, they didn't make such a big effort with Osama bin Laden, who's still out there, and from what I hear, some of the more pornographic problems the Justice Department might worry about should be focused on certain Republican members of Congress and the entertainment they enjoyed paid for by certain lobbyists -- entertainment which might be construed as bribery by other means. No, it's not aimed at stopping illegal behavior, of which there seems to be no shortage to be found in the serving and, shall one say, being served ranks of the GOP. No, it's to make ordinary Americans who are not breaking the law feel like they're being watched, so they curtail their normal behavior, so they are less political, less inquisitive, less vocal, less active, so they feel less free. Typical feature of the surveillance state.

Bush nominates Abramoff prosecutor to federal judgeship in New Jersey. Writes reader B, "Maybe this is what Abramoff wanted for the photographs?"

Is that illegal? Smear tactics, opposition research, dirty tricks -- Karl Rove, Inc.? There's just not many perks left for GOP operatives these days. They're threatening to take away the skyboxes, the golfing trips to Scotland with lobbyists, the free meals, the gambling wins, the yachts and houseboats, and now they want to take away the dirty tricks?

Ominous signs. From the Project on Government Oversight:

In a growing culture of caution and fear of dissent, a Congressional research agency has warned a senior analyst to avoid describing his research findings. The analyst specializes in separation of powers issues for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and has frequently authored reports which encourage the Congress to assert its Constitutional oversight authority over the Executive Branch.

The analyst was criticized by over a report and comments he made concerning the plight of national security whistleblowers. ...

Check here for more.

This just gets more absurd:

[Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales told his audience: “You may have heard about the provision of FISA that allows the president to conduct warrantless surveillance for 15 days following a declaration of war. That provision shows that Congress knew that warrantless surveillance would be essential in wartime.”

So, in essence, Gonzales is citing the FISA law to defend evading the FISA law?! The FISA law had flexibility built in -- so we broke it?

There is method to their madness.

Senate Intelligence committee Democrats write Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) -- for a second time in five weeks - to demand the committee investigate NSA domestic spying. "To date, our Committee has not announced its intention to thoroughly investigate the program, nor has it scheduled hearings to receive testimony about the program from former and current United States Government officials instrumental in the authorization and operation of the program." Sen. Roberts must be busy with that Phase II investigation.

An interesting story by the San Diego Union-Tribune about the increasing convergence of the DeLay and Duke Cunningham probes:

... Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle ...issued subpoenas to four men associated with Perfect-Wave, a company owned by Poway businessman Brent Wilkes, who has been identified as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

PerfectWave, which specializes in acoustical technology, won more than $40 million in federal contracts between 2003 and 2005, according to congressional budget reports. Meanwhile, it donated money to DeLay and other key Republicans overseeing the appropriations process in Congress, including Rep. Jerry Lewis of Redlands, who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Rep. John T. Doolittle, a committee member who represents a district in the Sierra foothills near Sacramento.

The money was not requested by the Navy but was instead inserted by the Appropriations Committee as part of the closed-door congressional earmarking process. ...

Interesting how that happens. The group involved in the Perfect Wave donations gave heavily to Roy Blunt, Tom DeLay, John Doolittle and their PACS -- particularly to Doolittle.

How Congress lets the White House get away with its reckless disregard for oversight is a crime against democracy. The latest: "White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers: The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response."

Domestic Spying. Matt Yglesias makes a crucial point here:

Meanwhile, I would add that talk of changing the burden of proof from "probable cause" to "reasonable basis" is largely a red herring. The important thing that changed was that the NSA shifted from a position where they needed to convince a judge that they had probable cause to one where they had to decide for themselves that they had a reasonable basis for initiating some wiretapping. There's a world of difference between a self-enforced standard and an externally-enforced one.

Blunt tie-in to Cunningham-Wilkes-DeLay deal.

NPR/WAMU has just broadcast the most upsetting story about a US soldier deployed in Iraq, last name Frederick, who was killed while schlepping to another base in Iraq to get another set of fingerprints made to please the bureaucrats at INS. His mother was just on saying that the INS/DHS told her basically that his being a soldier in Iraq was no excuse for his missing his appointment to get his fingerprints taken in Maryland. So she had to write a letter at their request explaining that he couldn't be in Maryland to get his fingerprints taken because he was fighting for the US in Iraq, and then they ordered him to report to some base in Iraq where his fingerprints could be taken by the DHS authorites. (His fingerprints on file with the Defense Department weren't good enough apparently for the geniuses at DHS). Another sign of DHS/INS' being without a brain.

No Limits. Kevin Drum has organized the relevant questions concerning warrantless NSA domestic spying and executive privilege: "But why not also monitor calls within the United States? Last month General Hayden said simply that "that's where we've decided to draw that balance between security and liberty" — in this case "we" meaning the president and the NSA. This rather strongly implies that George Bush believes there's nothing stopping him from ordering 100% domestic wiretapping if he feels like it, and nothing Congress can do about it if he does. So much for Article I Section 8."

Worth reading: Flynt Leverett in the NYT about a proposal for a nuclear free Gulf. And Christopher Dickey in Newsweek about the IAEA track.

Journalist Raffi Khatchadourian profiles the US military's hunt for Ammari Saifi, "the bin Laden of the Sahara." From the Village Voice:

For the Defense Department, Saifi's activities became the central and most vivid justification for expanding the U.S. military presence in the Sahel. In 2004, American Special Forces and Marines visited Mauritania, Mali, Chad, and Niger to train local armies how to bring order to the desert, and that program will grow this year. Meanwhile, covertly, the American military experimented with a new form of battle. Some analysts call it "netwar"—an innovative melding of U.S. intelligence and manpower with local forces. Netwar, according to its proponents, promises to be an effective way to fight terrorists, but it also risks causing political chaos, or worse, lethal military confusion. The hunt for Saifi may be one of its most important modern prototypes.

Iraq was a "one-off" -- at least as reflected in the new QDR, which does not call for an overall growth in troops. From the LAT:

Iraq "is clearly a one-off," said a Pentagon official who is working on the top-to-bottom study, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. "There is certainly no intention to do it again."

For more than two years, Army officials have been fending off questions about whether they have enough troops to complete their mission in Iraq and racing to get armor plates bolted onto Humvees and supply trucks to defend against homemade bombs. [...]

Regarding the Iraq war as an anomaly is in some ways convenient for Pentagon civilians and uniformed officers. An armored assault across miles of desert is hardly the vision that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's civilian team laid out when it took over the Pentagon five years ago. At the same time, the human and financial costs of the war have made many senior generals eager to turn the page on Iraq. [...]

Many Pentagon officials say privately that the military's ability to take on another "major combat operation" besides Iraq in the near future is limited. While a large force could be assembled for a military operation of short duration, they say, another open-ended occupation without significant support from allies would likely break the all-volunteer military.

More special ops, more foreign language training, and more peacekeeping and irregular warfare training.

Update: "China tops Iraq and Osama," writes Defensetech's Noah Shachtman, in his analysis.

White House had Katrina early warning.

Hold the sauteed calf's liver. Lobbying expense account slump here in the nation's capitol in the wake of les affaires Cunningham and Abramoff.

EJ Dionne dissects Rove's game plan and what it means for Democrats:

What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must challenge the terms under which Rove and Bush would conduct it. Imagine, for example, directly taking on that line about Sept. 11. Does having a "post-9/11 worldview" mean allowing Bush to do absolutely anything he wants, any time he wants, without having to answer to the courts, Congress or the public? Most Americans -- including a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans -- reject such an anti-constitutional view of presidential power. If Democrats aren't willing to take on this issue, what's the point of being an opposition party?

Democrats want to fight this election on the issue of Republican corruption. But corruption is about the abuse of power. If smart political consultants can't figure out how to link the petty misuses of power with its larger abuses, they are not earning their big paychecks.

And, yes, the core questions must be asked: Are we really safer now than we were five years ago? Has the Iraq war, as organized and prosecuted by the administration, made us stronger or weaker? Do we feel more secure knowing the heck of a job our government did during Hurricane Katrina?

Truth Teller, one of the Iraqi bloggers featured at the New York Times this month, writes today about being shot at January 14th seemingly randomly by a US patrol while driving home from work:

While I was driving slowly on the service road, an American patrol, which consisted of three armored-car Strykers, passed by on the main street, moving in the same direction as I was. When the first Stryker passed me, a soldier riding on top fired two shots in my direction. One bullet came in through the half-opened driver's window and hit the window of the opposite door, smashing it to pieces. Thank God, somehow it missed me. [...]

In the chaos of this occupation, innocents are killed by all sides. But don’t we have the right to hate the people who are now occupying our country. Shall we celebrate the freedom and democracy brought to us by the occupation in spite of the perils our citizens face?

Gen. Hayden admits to Knight Ridder that the administration did not seem to feel it could meet the standard of probable cause of the FISA court, so they invented the extra legal concept of "reasonably believe" -- as deemed reasonably believable by a group of people who thought better of submitting their practice to oversight or review. More from Kevin Drum.

Iraq reconstruction fiasco, new US government report concludes:

The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft copy of the document dated December 2005. ...

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding. "It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."

This kind of epic Katrina-level incompetence, lack of transparency and graft is typical of how third world regimes behave, not countries ruled by even semi-competent leaders.

Halliburton served US military contaminated water, then tried to cover it up. From the AP: "Troops and civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq were exposed to contaminated water last year, and employees for the responsible contractor, Halliburton Co., could not get their company to inform camp residents, according to interviews and internal company documents. Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, disputes the allegations about water problems at Camp Junction City, in Ramadi, even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails."

Who's shopping the photos of Abramoff with Bush? ThinkProgress suggests Abramoff. There's a weirdly blackmail-ish tone to the commentary coming from the source showing the photos. As if they are trying to tell the administration a message. If you don't do x, we'll release these to Nat'l Enquirer. It's bizarre. What would Abramoff's side be able to get from the administration at this point? Update: Or is all this teasing just to drive up the price? Abramoff's version of an auction?

Andrea Mitchell blogs deputy director of national intelligence Michael Hayden's efforts to defend warrantless NSA domestic surveillance at the National Press Club today. More from the NYT: "The standard laid out by General Hayden - a 'reasonable basis to believe' - is lower than 'probably cause,' the standard used by the special court created by Congress to handle surveillance involving foreign intelligence." From Christopher Pyle: "It's time we go after the real terrorists instead." And Juliette Kayyem: "The options for response then are that this is an impeachable offense (Gore), unlawful and the President should seek changes to FISA (McCain, some Dems), or that it is totally legal (the Administration). That's it. Choose." Bush takes questions at Kansas State University -- but wishes he didn't have to.

Bush's approval ratings fall back to 36%, all time low. Writes reader B: "I certainly hope Republicans follow Karl Rove's advice and run on Bush's record."

Turkey drops charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk.

FSB outs alleged British spies on Russian TV. More from the NYT.

What to do about the President's unwillingness to follow the law on NSA domestic spying? Marty Lederman writes:

So, what to do? Even if Congress kicks and screams during next month's hearings -- even if it passes another statute saying "FISA -- WE MEAN IT!" -- the President will continue with business as usual.

My friend David Barron has come up with the simple but ingenious idea that Congress should vote for a statute that would confer statutory standing on certain persons to file a cause of action in federal court seeking declaratory relief that the NSA program is unlawful -- say, for example, persons who have a reasonable basis for claiming that they are chilled by the spying program because their employment regularly requires them to make overseas calls in connection with academic or journalistic work related to the war on terrorism.

That way, the Supreme Court could resolve the question, particularly if the plaintiffs could sue for injunctive as well as declaratory relief.

Of course, the President could veto such a bill conferring standing to challenge his program. But I think there'd be some chance of an override (see, e.g., the overwhelming majorities for the McCain Amendment); and, in any event, presumably such a veto would be politically dicey.

Via Kevin Drum, I think she should sue. Horrifying.

Sebastian Mallaby gets this critique of Condoleezza Rice's blind spot just right:

...In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic "realist" position: American diplomacy should "focus on power relationships and great-power politics" rather than on other countries' internal affairs. "Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, particularly human rights and the promotion of democracy," she acknowledged. But the priority for U.S. foreign policy was to deal with powerful governments, whose "fits of anger or acts of beneficence affect hundreds of millions of people."

Even six years ago, this was an outdated position. [...]

Fast-forward to 2006. Rice gave two speeches last week calling for "transformational diplomacy," meaning diplomacy that will transform undemocratic societies: The internal affairs of other countries turn out to be important after all. ...

Well, that's quite a turnaround. But it's not a completely satisfying one, because the debate has recently moved on. Rice has caught up with the 1990s consensus that powerful states may pose less of a problem than disintegrating weak ones and that the best hope for peace in the long term is a world of stable democracies. But she's only half-acknowledging the next question: Yes, weak and autocratic states are a problem, but can we do anything about them?

Go read the whole piece.

The Post checks out the "travel agency to the lobbyists." More from Sam Rosenfeld.

Hmm. The Bush administration has just named a lobbyist as deputy director of intelligence in the homeland security department. Good news for the Philly Pops and the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

Bush-Abramoff photos. Time has seen them:

...TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. ... In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.

A must-read LA Times piece on Bob Ney's long and cozy ties to lobbyists, including his purchase of a houseboat from one. And more scrutiny of his well timed $34,000 gambling win accompanied by a Cyprus based Lebanese wheeler dealer interested in having US sanctions relaxed on Iran so he could sell Tehran US plane spare parts:

Another lobbyist — who employed a former Ney aide convicted in the Ohio bribery scandal — negotiated the sale of a family boat to Ney in 1999. The lobbyist, Afsoun Kuhnsman, ran a firm that was then representing a healthcare group with business before Congress.

Ney bought the 54-foot houseboat on the Potomac River from Kuhnsman's father, according to U.S. Coast Guard records. She handled the transaction, her father said in an interview.

Rhodes Prince, a former lobbyist at Kuhnsman's firm, said he had talked several times with Ney's staff on behalf of the healthcare group. Prince said Kuhnsman also had been in regular contact with the congressman.

Kuhnsman did not respond to requests for comment. Ney lawyer William Lawler said Kuhnsman never lobbied the congressman, although he acknowledged that Ney and the lobbyist were acquainted.

Spokesman Walsh said the congressman paid about $132,000 for the 1988 Hilburn custom fly-bridge houseboat, though he declined to provide documentation. (Coast Guard documents show he financed the purchase, which included a coveted boat slip on the Potomac, with a $105,000 loan.) Ney sold the houseboat for $103,000 five years later, according to the buyer.

"The bottom line is, so what?" Walsh said. "It was a fairly rundown houseboat. I have never heard anything remotely inappropriate about the houseboat."

In 2003, Ney was again doing business with someone working with a former aide, records show.

Cyprus-based FN Aviation (later renamed FAZ) was seeking U.S. approval to sell aircraft parts to Iran and hired Ney's former chief of staff on the Hill, Dave DiStefano, according to federal lobbying disclosure forms.

In February 2003, the company flew Ney to London.

Ney's host on the trip was FN partner Nigel Winfield, who, according to court records, was sentenced to jail for six months in 1982 and fined $10,000 for his involvement in an earlier scheme to swindle Elvis Presley on an aircraft lease-purchase deal.

The congressman's companion and benefactor also was jailed for failure to pay income taxes, and New York state records show he was barred from owning racehorses in that state because of past involvement with organized crime figures.

Records in Washington show Winfield owes about $30 million in past-due taxes and penalties. Florida racing officials also barred him from owning horses in that state, citing the New York action, records show.

Winfield's partner in FN Aviation, Fouad al Zayat, accompanied Ney to a London casino during a second trip to London in 2003. Ney has said he paid his own way.

Al Zayat, known in gambling circles as "The Fat Man," gained notoriety in England a year earlier when he was sued by London's Ritz Casino for bouncing checks worth about $3 million.

After the 2003 trip, Ney reported in his annual financial disclosure statements that he won $34,000 at the Ambassador's Club, a private London casino at which Al Zayat was a member. That disclosure coincided with another change in Ney's financial statements: He stopped reporting about $30,000 in credit card debts.

Walsh, Ney's spokesman, has said the congressman played only two hands of cards.

The information that Ney speaks fluent Farsi and lived in Iran (and as the NYT reported earlier, in Saudi Arabia as well) is also interesting.

Condolences to Kosovo, upon the death of Ibrahim Rugova. I had the chance to interview the Sorbonne educated Shakespeare scholar many years ago when Kosovo was still under Serb occupation and a very grim place and Rugova was leading a nonviolent movement to seek the province's independence. That movement was over time sidelined by those who believed that armed resistance was the only way to get the international community's attention. But Rugova experienced a political resurgence in the wake of the 1999 Kosovo war, and was elected Kosovo's first president in 2002. UN-led negotiations on Kosovo's future status, due to start Sunday, have been put on hold.

Via the Corner, the UN denies Pakistani human rights activist Mukhtaran Mai (aka Mukhtaran Bibi) a chance to speak, after Pakistan protests. Shameful and disgusting is right.

Editor & Publisher has an update on efforts by colleagues of Jill Carroll to gain the abducted reporter's release.

A really interesting Democratiya interview with Kanan Makiya. (Thx to DP).

I find it extraordinary that DeLay is in the running to replace Cunningham on the defense appropriations subcommittee. Isn't this like getting Richard Scrushy to run Enron after Ken Lay had to step down? And beyond his Abramoff troubles, DeLay is being investigated in a case that has direct links to the Cunningham one.

Iran is moving its hard currency from European banks, anticipating possible sanctions. $20 billion, according to the BBC.

Worth reading: David Ignatius on containing Iran. Among the details in his report is the information that US Iran policy is currently in the midst of an informal review led by Sec. State Condoleezza Rice and national security advisor Stephen Hadley. Also, the perception of Iran's growing - not diminishing - radicalism and instability:

An intellectual benchmark in the Iran debate was a briefing given to officials last fall by Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University who is an expert on revolutions. He argued that Iran wasn't conforming to the standard model laid out in Crane Brinton's famous study, "The Anatomy of Revolution," which argued that initial upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation and eventual stability. Instead, Ahmadinejad illustrated what Goldstone called "the return of the radicals." Something similar happened 15 to 20 years after the Russian and Chinese revolutions -- with Stalin's purges in the late 1930s and Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Goldstone explained. He argued that Iran was undergoing a similar recrudescence of radicalism that, as in China and Russia, would inevitably trigger internal conflict.

"What has intrigued policymakers is the argument that Ahmadinejad's extremism will eventually trigger a counterreaction," Ignatius adds. "Unless the Iranian president moderates his line, wider splits in the regime are almost inevitable, officials believe." More from Slate's Fred Kaplan.

Bill Arkin reports that the Pentagon says "it's sorry" for abuses committed in its domestic spying programs. "The Pentagon's willingness to make changes does stand in stark contrast to the administration's insistence not only as to the legality of the NSA program but also to its continuation," Arkin concludes.

Fourteen prominent constitutional law scholars write a letter about warrantless NSA domestic spying.

Why Slate's legal expert Dahlia Lithwick would vote no on Alito: "...All that nice jurisprudential wallpaper simply falls away where it really matters: the constitutional limits of the war on terror. When it comes to the reach of the president's authority to pursue this war with a warrantless wiretap in one hand and a cattle prod in the other, there is almost no statutory authority or court precedent. Judges, specifically the justices of the Supreme Court, will in the end be making up the law more or less as they go. ... In a new era, fighting a new kind of war unlimited by time or place, with guidance only from World War II- and Civil War-era cases and sloppily crafted statutes, judicial promises of modesty and humility offer little comfort."

DeLay prosecutors "dig deeper" in California. From the Austin American-Statesman:

... On Thursday, Travis County prosecutors dug deeper into the Southern California connections to DeLay and Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee, subpoenaing a second round of records of any "negotiations or agreements" that prompted the donation. They also asked for any communications about pending federal legislation that would have affected the firm.

DeLay and his co-defendants, John Colyandro of Austin and Jim Ellis of DeLay's Washington staff, have been indicted on a charge of conspiring to launder corporate money given to Texans for a Republican Majority into political donations. State law generally prohibits corporate money being spent in connection with campaigns.

The indictments charge the men with making a $190,000 donation to the Republican National Committee which, in turn, gave the same amount to Texas legislative candidates. DeLay's lawyers, who defend the $190,000 exchange as two separate, legal transactions, dismissed Thursday' subpoenas as a fishing expedition.

The $15,000 from PerfectWave came at about the same time $190,000 was given to the national Republicans. ...

More from the Houston Chronicle:

The subpoena also asked for records relating to any negotiations between Adams and other ADCS executives relating to Perfect Wave giving $15,000 to TRMPAC two days later and making a $25,000 donation to a Tribute for Heroes event honoring Cunningham two weeks later.

The Tribute for Heroes was sponsored by Wilkes' family foundation.

Subpoenas also sought records from Perfect Wave and ADCS executives Paul E. Smithers and Max Gelwix.

At the time of the donations, Perfect Wave was seeking funding in the Defense Appropriations Act for the military to buy its high-tech communications equipment.

Michael Lipman, a San Diego lawyer representing Wilkes and ADCS, did not return calls for comment. Adams also did not return calls.

The subpoenas also sought records on a wire transfer that was made to Perfect Wave Technologies on Oct. 24, 2002, by the Atlas Mining Co. in Osburn, Idaho.

William T. Jacobson, president of Atlas Mining, said his records showed no checks or wire transfers to Perfect Wave in October 2002.

Remember as well that Ohio Congressman Bob Ney inexplicably entered praise of Wilkes' San Diego based Tribute to Heroes Foundation into the Congressional Record on October 1, 2002, as reported here.

(Thx to reader B).

My friend Ari Berman has a timely new piece in The Nation on the non-functioning House Ethics committee:

One lawmaker, Pete Stark of California, placed a $500 ad on NationalJournal.com in June against disgraced Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham. But Stark didn't file an ethics complaint. Stark says that he was "informally advised by colleagues that this wouldn't be a good idea" and was assured that the Ethics Committee would "get to Cunningham in its own time," so "throwing rocks wouldn't do any good." Of course, Stark notes, "the committee didn't get to him, the prosecutors did."

WaPo Baghdad reporter Jackie Spinner, a friend of kidnapped CSM reporter Jill Carroll, is answering questions about Carroll in a live chat.

You know, it's a crying shame the Bush administration hasn't managed to capture or kill this guy.

Via Atrios, David Broder worth reading:

...The other cases Gore cited are more troubling. The Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, for which only low-level military personnel have been punished, traces back through higher and untouched levels of command to the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House, all of which failed in their duties to ensure that the occupation forces were adhering to recognized international standards for the treatment of prisoners.

Similarly, the administration's resistance to setting and enforcing clear prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism raises legitimate questions about its willingness to adhere to the rule of law. ...

Gore's final example -- on which he has lots of company among legal scholars -- is the contention that Bush broke the law in ordering the National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone calls without a warrant from the court Congress had created to supervise all such wiretapping. If -- as the Justice Department and the White House insist -- the president can flout that law, then it is hard to imagine what power he cannot assert.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has summoned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to a hearing on the warrantless wiretap issue, and that hearing should be the occasion for a broad exploration of the willingness of this administration to be constrained by the Constitution and the laws.

The committee should keep the attorney general on the witness stand as long as it takes -- as long as it spent examining the qualifications of Judge Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, if it comes to that. The stakes for the country are that high. ...

The Post's Richard Leiby profiles Lawrence Wilkerson, and how his speaking out has led to an estrangement with his boss and friend, Colin Powell:

...Revelations about Abu Ghraib and the skirting of the Geneva Conventions added to Wilkerson's anger. He came to see Powell as the administration's lone voice of reason -- but Powell was being shut out.

"Combine the detainee abuse issue with the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq, wrap both in this blanket of secretive decision-making . . . and you get the overall reason for my speaking out," Wilkerson says.

"It never became personal for Powell, because he believed in the process," says Robert Charles, a former assistant secretary of state who worked with both men. "I believe it was harder for Larry, because he felt such great empathy for the boss, the most seasoned military officer he had ever served with."

[... snip ...]

Larry and Barbara Wilkerson, married for 39 years, live frugally in a Falls Church townhouse. She works at a Hallmark card shop. Their son is an Air Force navigator who's done duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their daughter, now a homemaker, served in the Army. Departing from government after Bush's second inauguration, Wilkerson had to decide: Would he speak his conscience or remain the quiet man like Powell?

"My wife said to me: 'You have two choices, my man. You can think more about him or you can think more about your country. I suggest you do the latter.' "

Powell has not done his country any favors with his silence and overcautiousness.

Bob Herbert on authoritarianism.

USA Today on Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Ca) protecting a $160 million Navy contract for a firm whose investors contributed $110,000 to him at a fundraiser he attended the day before:

On July 7, Lewis traveled to New York for a fundraising dinner with Cerberus executives and their spouses, lawyers and business associates. They gave the Future Leaders PAC more than $110,000 that night and more in the following weeks, bringing the total to nearly $133,000 that month. [...]

The day after the [fundraising] dinner, the House passed Lewis' defense spending bill that preserved all of the funding for the Navy project. And two months after receiving the Cerberus money, Lewis led House negotiators working out a House-Senate compromise on the Pentagon bill that finalized the $1.6 billion for the Navy project.

There are signs as well that Lewis, now chair of the House appropriations committee, could be a subject of inquiry in the Duke Cunningham probe as well. More here and here.

"Inconsistent with the law" concludes a new CRS report on the Bush White House's limited briefings of only a few Congressional representatives sans discussion or review on its warrantless domestic eavesdropping, the NYT reports. And a new group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, also plans to sue over the program.

Via Chris Nelson's Nelson Report, former deputy secretary of defense and CSIS president John Hamre on administration strategy on Iran:

... For the past twelve years the rulers of Iran have been largely conservative— that is conserving their personal power and wealth leading an increasingly corrupt and inefficient economy and society. Washington has concluded that this new president is a radical, not a conservative. Intelligence and policy analysts believe he intends to take Iran back to an active role as a destabilizing force in the region.

The Administration has quietly been sending senior representatives around the world with an ominous warning—“either you are with us or against us” on this coming crisis with Iran. It is important to note that the public posture is measured and careful. The President is pursuing diplomacy as the primary mode of response. But where does this go next?

Russia and China are the key unknowns in this drama. Both have a wider range of interactions with Iran and do not have our history of distrust and antipathy. Both are struggling with an irresponsible Iranian leader who is unifying European and American opposition. They know that the U.S., and now likely the European triumvirate (Germany-France-UK) will be demanding a hard stand, and they are trying to calibrate what they will have to do to balance their Iranian and Western interests.

This is a drama that will be played out (for some time, I suspect) on international playing fields. Europe and the U.S. would like to increase pressure by taking Iran immediately to the Security Council. Russia and China prefer to keep this controversy at the level of the International Atomic Energy Agency. They don’t rule out a subsequent move to the Security Council, but feel strongly that the IAEA is the appropriate venue for the time being.

The problem is that we have few major pressure points on Iran in this controversy. Iran has deeply insinuated itself in Iraq and can complicate our lives there considerably. Iran can use its links with Hezbollah (Israel is convinced they never severed those links), which has served as a covert operational arm for dirty tricks in the past. We have scattered reports that some of the roadside bombs in Iraq have Hezbollah-like design features. The West needs Iran’s oil, something demonstrated yet again two weeks back, when Russia temporarily cut off gas shipments to the Ukraine, which in turn squeezed Europe.

The primary asset we have in this battle is a diplomatic one—but that requires an absolutely unified front among the Europeans, Americans, Russians and Chinese. ...

The military options against Iran are always there, but not terribly attractive. We can’t plausibly end Iran’s nuclear program by force without a full scale invasion and overthrow of the Iranian government. Given the serious strains we are experiencing with Iraq—a country one third the size of Iran—that option is not plausible for some time to come. Air raids are an option and the plans have been drawn. But air attacks will unify Iranian public sentiment in support of their radical young leader, and at best will simply delay their weapons program.

For the time being, diplomacy is the only and best answer to this growing crisis. ...

America will confront China and Russia with this matter and demand a firm response. We will push as hard as we can, without rupturing the unified front we will need for the next phase of this standoff. Don’t mistake the subdued nature of the public debate. This crisis is real and growing by the day.

NYT:

A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.

Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.

The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. ...

But the intelligence assessment itself - including the analysts' full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim - was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times. ...

The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

A Bush administration official, who requested anonymity because the issue involved partly classified documents, would not say whether President Bush had seen the State Department's memo before his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003.

How did Curveball's fabrications get through? Newsweek reports that a source put forward by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress vouched for his intelligence, and a "burn notice" on Curveball's source mysteriously got mislaid. Wonder who was responsible for that? And it turns out that Curveball is related to one of Chalabi's bodyguards. Update: Reader PC writes, "The corroborating source was most likely Maj. Mohammad Harith, a defector linked to the INC. According to RS, his burn notice was lost due to a technical glitch."

It goes without saying that one desperately hopes for the safe release of abducted Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll. The latest news is alarming.

Authoritarianism, secrecy and incompetence. Josh Marshall is spot on here:

...The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.

The president's critics are always accusing him of law-breaking or unconstitutional acts and then also berating the incompetence of his governance. And it's often treated as, well ... he's power-hungry and incompetent to boot! Imagine that! The point though is that they are directly connected. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this. ...

Hillary unplugged.

NYT: "Two groups plan lawsuits over federal eavesdropping." As a reader writes, you will want to check out the list of plaintiffs -- pro-Bush administration writer Christopher Hitchens, Hoover Institute scholar and presumably ex friend of Sec. of State Condy Rice Larry Diamond, Prospect editor Tara McKelvey, NSA writer James Bamford, etc.

Meantime, check out this NYT piece on the "virtually all" dead ends resulting from the warrantless surveillance program:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

More on the "calls to Pizza Hut," from Garance Franke-Ruta.

Gore's speech today. More from the NYT. (Thx to reader S).

Via Paul Kiel, an interesting Record Searchlight article on Rep. Wally Herger (R-Chico, CA), and his lobby-inspired international travel:

Rep. Wally Herger's political action committee has received tens of thousands of dollars from companies whose lobbyists have ties to a group that sent him on trips to Italy and Scotland, Federal Election Commission records show.

The Chico Republican's campaign fund, the Wally Herger for Congress Committee, has received at least $42,000 from the political action committees representing Altria Group Inc., the parent company of tobacco giant Phillip Morris, Amgen Inc., American Express, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Rail Corp., General Motors Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Pfizer Inc.

Press reports indicate these companies have ties to the lobbying firm Kessler & Associates. The firm's founder, Richard Kessler, sat on the governing board of the Ripon Educational Fund -- the moderate Republican think-tank that sent Herger and his wife, Pamela, on two all-expense-paid overseas trips.

One was a $9,050 trip to Italy for nine days in 2000. The other was a $12,286 excursion to Scotland for 16 days in 2001. Kessler is currently the president of the Ripon Society.

Herger, who admits to meeting with lobbyists on the privately funded junkets, defended the trips, saying they were designed to encourage trade and were part of his official duties as a member of the House Committee of Ways and Means and Subcommittee on Trade.

He said any money he has received from Ripon-connected companies was donated because he's known for being a strong, pro-business conservative, who's staunchly supported limited government during his 20 years as congressman.

"The money follows the ideology rather than the ideology following the money," Herger said last week.

House Ethics Committee guidelines prohibit lawmakers from receiving money or favors, including trips, directly from lobbying groups or from corporate interests. ...

More on who paid for what Herger travel here. Check out the Lexington Institute-sponsored $2,502 trip to Havana (last item).

The Accountant. Fascinating Dallas Morning News story on Richard Chichakli, the American accountant and business partner of blood diamonds arms dealer Victor Bout. Until recently, Chichakli has been working as an accountant in Richardson Texas, lately he's been holed up in Moscow -- where Bout is believed to reside. Best read as a companion to the recent piece by Doug Farah and Kathi Austin on Victor Bout's work for the Pentagon. Bout devotees can almost always find more discussion on these issues at the Yorkshire Ranter, Kathryn Cramer, and Doug Farah's site. Oh, and Chichakli has his own website.

Shorter WaPo: Ralph Reed, con artist.

NRCC donation earmarks dictated by whom to benefit Ney? From Time:

"Lobbyist Jack Abramoff's Oct. 23, 2000, e-mail to his business partner Michael Scanlon was, as usual, not subtle. "Would 10K for NRCC from Suncruz for Ney help?" Scanlon shot back: "Yes, alot [sic]! But would have to give them a definate [sic] answer--and they need it this week ..."

(Thx to WIG).

Ney "personally lobbied" Powell to relax sanctions on Iran, Newsweek reports. Who asked him to? Read this.

Niall Ferguson argues for another go at preemptive war.

North Korea's Kim Jong Il in China? No one's saying, but the Chinese authorities cleared out an 850-room luxury hotel in the bustling port city of Guanghzou:

Kim on Thursday was visiting Guangdong's capital, Guangzhou, and staying at the five-star White Swan Hotel, the South China Morning Post reported on its front page.

The paper's reporter in the city said that the hotel ordered all its guests to leave and the staff said it was booked until Monday for "an important meeting". Traffic was blocked off around the hotel as a convoy of minibuses, limousines and police cars drove up to the hotel, the paper reported.

A receptionist at the hotel told The Associated Press that all rooms were full until at least Monday. She said she "wasn't sure" whether Kim was visiting.

The State Department's Christopher Hill is also in China this weekend. It's hard to keep state visits a secret in a country with 1.2 billion people.

NYT: "Mr. Bush ... seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous 'signing statement' on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program. Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. ... The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade."

Nancy Pelosi in the WaPo: "Gap in Intelligence Oversight":

... Congress is not an afterthought in assessing intelligence activities; federal law requires that it be kept informed of all such activities. But despite that clear statutory directive, the Bush administration consistently acts as though it alone owns intelligence information. ...

The executive branch provides notice of some especially sensitive intelligence information only to the chairman and the ranking member of the minority party of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and to the leaders of Congress. This is how I came to be informed of President Bush's authorization for the NSA to conduct certain types of electronic surveillance. ...

Only a few members of Congress were aware of the president's surveillance program, and they were constrained from discussing it more widely. That limitation must change.

In the executive branch, decisions about who should have access to intelligence are made on a "need to know" basis. Congress must adopt a similar principle. ...

We all recognize that our efforts against terrorism or other threats require new, more flexible approaches. But in a democracy, those approaches cannot be fashioned unilaterally by an administration with a disturbingly expansive view of the powers of the president.

Check out Julian Sanchez's interview with NSA whistleblower Russel Tice:

REASON: Some polls suggest that most citizens aren't terribly concerned about these programs.

Tice: People think it's not going to affect them. They think it's against the bad people, it's to protect our national security. Maybe it's against the law, but it's just the bad people, just to keep the terrorist from blowing up my neighborhood dam. But if those people find out it was hundreds of thousands or millions, and they were swept up into it and the government was listening to their conversation of their doctor.... Now all of a sudden it affects them personally. Right now I don't think people see how it affects them. Though even if it were just these few thousand people that have been talked about, nonetheless it's wrong. There's no reason the two thousand warrants could not have been done through the FISA court. The question is: Why wasn't it done?

(Thx to S.)

The Independent: "Berlin admits giving US bombing targets in Iraq." More Kremlinology here. (Via Informed Comment).

Worth reading: Iraqi blogger Riverbend on the translator for kidnapped CSM reporter Jill Carroll, Alan, killed by Carroll's kidnappers.

More from Iraqi bloggers here.

Doug Farah and Kathi Austin on blood diamonds arms dealer Viktor Bout and his work for the Pentagon.

Just Out: Check out my new piece from the February American Prospect on the overlooked security implications of the Duke Cunningham scandal.

Clinton Foundation AIDS treatment deal cuts costs of rapid HIV tests by half. "Another four companies - three from India and one from South Africa - will make the antiretroviral drug efavirenz for as little as $240 per patient per year. One of the Indian companies, Cipla, will also make the antiretroviral abacavir for $447."

More on the mysteries of Thomas Kontogiannis, aka alleged co-conspirator #3 from the Cunningham plea agreement. From a 2001 Queens Press cover story, sent by a reader:

...Court papers filed by District Attorney Richard Brown in a civil lawsuit against Kontogiannis, Miller and others accused in the alleged computer scam, indicated that Kontogiannis is a "high profile real estate developer with extensive contacts and business interests not only in America but in Greece, Eastern Europe, Georgia, Russia and the Ukraine."

Questions also surround the presence of the New York Asylum Office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on the 3rd floor of 1 Cross Island Plaza.

According to the INS’ website, the New York Asylum Office has jurisdiction for asylum related matters over the State of New York excluding the jurisdiction of the Albany Sub Office, the Buffalo District Office, and the boroughs of Manhattan and The Bronx.

But it remained unclear at presstime if federal officials were aware of what a Nov. 20, 2000 New York Post article called Kontogiannis’ running "afoul of the law."

"He [Kontogiannis] and an official at the U.S. Embassy in Athens were arrested by the FBI for taking bribes to provide phony U.S. visas. Both pleaded guilty, and Kontogiannis was sentenced to five years’ probation," the article stated.

A lot of these stories have a hint that Kontogiannis was perhaps not unfamiliar with organized crime. Not Sopranos style local waste management stuff, but more international. An old Greek Navy man, Kontogiannis knew boats, how to move and launder money, set up front companies, and seemed to have some transport and logistics companies. But here's the thing: when Kontogiannis was confronted with the law in the two cases we know about -- his 1994 guilty plea for visa fraud after he was arrested by the FBI with an official from the US embassy in Athens, and his 2002 guilty plea in the pretty large Queens school district bid rigging scheme, he escaped jail both times. His sentences always seemed pretty light. I am starting to get the sense of someone who may be protected. It occurred to me reading the above article and others as plausible that Kontogiannis might have been useful for a faction of the US government at one time or another. It's pure speculation, but you could imagine that his skills might come to be useful for some things. One theory -- could Kontogiannis have been used by some US government agency (let's say the CIA -- again, pure speculation), even while being simultaneously investigated by another (the FBI, etc.)? Might someone from that agency have intervened to protect Kontogiannis in his encounters with the law? Could it be that Kontogiannis, the old Greek Navy guy who knows his way around Eastern Europe, Greece, the Balkans, Ukraine and Georgia and their gray markets, who knows how to launder money and create front companies, who knows who to bribe, may have proved useful to the Pentagon or the CIA at certain points, that one of his companies was perhaps used for laundering or moving money or shipping or logistics or financial transfers? (Total speculation: Perhaps even that he might have been a contact of Wilkes' friend at the CIA, who did a long tour doing logistics and administrative tasks for the Agency in those regions?)

Check out this as well:

...The confidential informant who assisted in this investigation described a party at the home of Thomas Kontogiannis in early 1996. In addition to our source and Kontogiannis, in attendance were Celestine Miller, her husband William Harris, and an iinfluential United States Congressman. Talk turned to the Presidential election.

According to our informant, the partygoers agreed that if the Republicans won in November, Miller stood a good chance at being named this country’s education Secretary.

However, although the Democratic candidate was elected and that appointment failed to materialize, Miller’s political aspirations lingered. When she decided to seek the United States congressional seat which was unexpectedly relinquished by the Reverend Floyd Flake, it was no surprise that her computer contract cronies came to her financial aid. ...

Who was the "influential US Congressman" already hanging around with Kontogiannis back in 1996?

(Editor's note: This post has been slightly revised).

Senate Minority leader Harry Reid statement on conclusion of the Alito nomination hearings: "I have followed the Alito hearings closely. ...Unfortunately, Judge Alito’s responses did little to address my serious concerns about his 15-year judicial record. I have not forgotten that Judge Alito was only nominated after the radical right wing of the President's party forced Harriet Miers to withdraw. The right wing insisted that Justice O'Connor be replaced with a sure vote for their extreme agenda. Four days of hearings have shown that Judge Alito is no Sandra Day O'Connor. Senate Democrats will meet next week to discuss the nomination.”

For Cunningham case afficionados, alleged co-conspirator #3 from the Cunningham plea agreement, Long Island based, Greek-born developer Thomas T. Kontogiannis, is something of a mystery. As I've written before, we know what alleged co conspirators #1 and 2 from the plea agreement - defense contractors Brent Wilkes and Mitchell J. Wade -- got for their alleged bribes to Cunningham: a few hundred million dollars in defense contracts for their companies.

But what was Kontogiannis' motivation for allegedly being involved in the bribery scheme? What did he get? It's not immediately apparent how the Rosedale NY companies he owns or are affiliated with -- construction, development, real estate -- could have benefited from his alleged $300,000 bribe to Cunningham via overpaying for Cunningham's boat. And by allegedly facilitating the use of a mortgage company run by his wife's nephew for Wilkes and Wade to "launder" their bribes to Cunningham.

Checking out Mr. and Mrs. Kontogiannis' political contributions in 2003-2004 raises more questions. The couple -- mostly through Kontogiannis' wife, Georgia Kontogiannis, described in FEC documents as a "housewife" -- gave some $23,000 to Republican candidates in 2003-2004. And who are the candidates they gave to? A reader more versed in this stuff tells me, "These are all ROMP [Retain Our Majority Party] candidates -- House Republican candidates that the House Republican Majority leadership - especially Tom DeLay - ordered lobbyists to contribute to." You can check out the list yourself. Thomas Kontogiannis also gave at several points to the National Republican Congressional Committee. All legal contributions as far as I can tell, I don't mean to imply anything else.

But the question remains, why is Kontogiannis behaving like a lobbyist? Who or what is he lobbying for? What interests does he have -- as yet unrevealed -- that might have benefited from his arrangement with Cunningham?

Update: Readers have found some very interesting things. Among them, that a Kontogiannis family-owned company, Duocash Public Ltd., would seem to be involved in online payments for gambling. A hint of the circles Gus Boulis ran in? Another Kontogiannis company, Olympic Corp., with offices in Rosedale NY and Athens, built theme parks (apparently). And there seems to be a connection (e.g. a $300,000 plus settlement against TK) between Kontogiannis and the Montreal-based company Bombardier Equity, parent company of the Bombardier Business Jet Solutions Inc., which also owns a stake in? -- that private jet that Brent Wilkes' company Group W partially owns and has flown lawmakers like DeLay and Cunningham around in. Was that the plane that flew Cunningham to Saudi Arabia? And what about the Olympic Petroleum Engineering company located in the same building in Rosedale New York that several other Kontogiannis family corporate properties are located in? Is that a reason Kontogiannis would have wanted to tag along with Cunningham to Saudi Arabia? Red herring?

From Nexis:

DUOCASH PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY
Registration No.: 05062943
EXECUTIVE LIST:
John Thomas MICHAEL
Christopher Michael BERTMAN
Evangelitsa Christine KONTOGIANNIS
BROUGHTON SECRETARIES LIMITED (Resigned Secretary)
PLATINUM NOMINEES LIMITED (Resigned Director)
STEELCOURT NOMINEES LIMITED (Resigned Director)
...

Michael is alleged co-conspirator #4 in the Cunningham plea -- and Kontogiannis' wife's nephew. Evangelista Kontogiannis appears to be Kontogiannis' daughter. The company was started in 2004, officially headquartered, it seems, in London, and was dissolved December 6, 2005 -- just eight days after the Cunningham plea.

Reader CA writes, "The Post article today gives some information but leaves others information in the dark. In most cases, taking article 31, the UCMJ equivalent of the 5th amendment, protection against self-incrimination would mark an end to a senior officer's career. A general officer is expected to do nothing to be incriminated for, and regardless of any presumption of innocence, use of article 31 is a mark that the person has something bad to hide and can't be fully trusted in their high level position. ... The point in the article that Miller may be shielding people above him seems logical. After all, he was beholden to 'senior officials' at DOD for not punishing him as recommended in an earlier case."

More from Bill Arkin: "Different spanks for different ranks."

NYT: "Army officials said Wednesday that they had decided to send additional body armor to Iraq to protect soldiers from insurgents' attacks. ... The officials spoke after a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee, held after The New York Times reported last week that a Pentagon study had found that extra armor could have saved up to 80 percent of the marines who died in Iraq from upper body wounds."

DeLay threatens to sue Houston TV stations that run an ad. Kevin Drum has the details.

NSA whistleblower outting himself as source for NYT NSA domestic spying story.

Law professor Jonathan Turley in USA Today: "Troubling Times, a Troubling Nominee."

One thing I have not been able to figure out regarding the Cunningham case. We know what Wilkes and Wade got for their alleged bribes to Cunningham. Their companies got a few hundred million dollars in US government contracts. Two million dollars in bribes for a few hundred million dollars in contracts -- not bad.

But what did alleged co-conspirator #3 Thomas T. Kontogiannis get for the $300,000 he kicked in via massive overpayment for Cunningham's boat along with the services of the mortgage company belonging to his wife's nephew (alleged co-conspirator #4) to launder the alleged bribes from Wilkes and Wade? Cunningham wrote a letter to try get him a pardon for his 2002 bid-rigging guilty plea. But Kontogiannis abandoned his efforts early on to get a pardon after he spoke with a couple lawyers that Cunningham put him in touch with. And yet Kontogiannis remained central to the bribery scheme for years after he abandoned efforts to get a pardon through Cunningham.

So what was Kontogiannis' motivation? What was he getting? And what does it mean that we don't really know?

Here's my guess. Kontogiannis was getting something substantial we don't know about. And what that could be is worrying. Is he a middle man for other interests that got served by Cunningham? More appropriatons recommendations for defense and intelligence contracts to companies that are as yet unrevealed? Sensitive contracts? In a way, it doesn't appear that Cunningham had another obvious way to repay the favor.

My best guess. We are likely to hear about some other companies and figures in the mix soon. (Cunningham is due to be sentenced February 27th; his sentence depends on the degree of his cooperation).

Now, there are a lot of defense contractors in the district that Cunningham formerly represented in San Diego. (Look who else has a third house in Duke's old neighborhood Rancho Santa Fe -- pop. 3000 -- the CEO of the Carlyle Group! And he gave a few thousand to the Duke too. It's the Sunnyvale of defense contractors!) Remember, Cunningham wrote a letter to execs from a dozen such firms on February 8, 2001, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, after he was put on the Intelligence committee, bragging about his new ability to influence "black contracts." Are there other execs besides Wilkes, one of the recipients, who got the message?

Update: It's also worth noting the handful of maximum contributions given to the "Duke" from Rancho Santa Fe, esp. those that all occurred on May 5, 2004 -- a couple weeks after he got back from the Middle East. Who arranged that fundraiser?

Former Ney chief of staff Neil Volz has resigned from his law firm. Writes a reader: "He'll either plead or be indicted by the end of the week. Probably the former. When he does, the jig is up for Ney."

DeLayism. Some people might consider this evidence of a quid pro quo.

Go read Dahlia Lithwick on the Alito hearings, "Did anyone vet this statement? Because if you parse it closely, it looks like he's maybe saying this":

After I graduated from high school, I went a full 12 miles down the road, but really to a different world when I entered Princeton University. (Damn snobs.) A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. (And as I shall now illustrate, I was not.) But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed. And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. (Ideas, love 'em. It's the people I hate…) But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. (Damn hippies.) And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. (Smart and privileged people who went on to become yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate.) And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community. (And so that is why I joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton and why, moreover, I am still so inflexible and judgmental today!)

Update: Listening to Ted Kennedy questioning Alito now, I am baffled why he has so much conservative support - this is a guy who at every turn has decided in favor of suppressing individual rights at the hands of government powers and abuse. There's nothing conservative about it, just authoritarian. Now Kennedy is asking Alito about the torture ban Bush might have annotated with a signing statement. Kennedy: "Mr. Alito, you referred to 'unitary executive theory' as the gospel. ... The president claims the powers to ignore the powers of the other branches of government." Alito: "Who within the executive branch controls executive power. Constitution says the president. Not some inherent power."

Milosevic's Bosnian Muslim friends in trial-detention at the Hague. Somehow I don't find this surprising in the least.

Cunningham did wear a wire-- but who was he taping? Congressional Randy "Duke" Cunningham's attorney's very specific statement -- that the "Duke" didn't tape "any public official" -- is quite revealing:

The press, citing unnamed sources, continues to report that Duke Cunningham wore a tape recording device, or wire, to surreptitiously gather evidence on behalf of the government. This story is false.

"Duke has never worn a body wire during any conversations with his former congressional colleagues or any other public official, and he has not surreptitiously gathered evidence against any public officials."

Blalack, contacted at his Washington, D.C., office, declined to clarify whether Cunningham may have gathered evidence against those who are not public officials, such as lobbyists or military contractors.

But a source close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Cunningham had worn a recording device but provided no further details.

Quite a story about one of the Germans kidnapped in Iraq in November and released before Christmas.

Scandal closes Alexander Strategy Group.

Shafer on Peretz's 15 year grudge.

It's a great comfort to know that Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham - of the bribery scandal - and Congressman Ken Calvert, both (R-CA), didn't see fit to bring Thomas Kontogiannis, a.k.a alleged co-conspirator #3 in the Cunningham plea agreement, along with them for their classified briefings in Saudi Arabia. Reports the North County Times today in a story on Kontogiannis:

And while Kontogiannis did participate in some of the meetings that he and Cunningham had with Saudi ministers, Calvert said that Kontogiannis "wasn't involved in any classified or high-level information as far as I can recall."

"If I had known his background, I wouldn't have felt very comfortable, but I didn't know," he said.

And isn't it wonderful to know that Cunningham, who has admitted to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors working through companies affiliated with Kontogiannis, sat on the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 Attacks? I mean, Cunningham could never have been bought off by Saudi interests, could he have?

Let's revisit Cunningham's remarks about Saudi Arabia that he placed into the Congressional Record on October 4, 2004:

The Government of Saudi Arabia has implemented a number of political and economic reforms to encourage political participation, promote economic growth, increase foreign investment and expand employment opportunities. The Kingdom has been updating and modernizing its academic curricula, and monitoring its religious schools. ...

It sure sounds like it was written by a Saudi PR firm. Not likely that Cunningham's staff wrote that -- it was a staff-free trip. Couldn't be, could it, that Cunningham was so indiscriminate in his bribetaking that he let Saudi interests influence his remarks, the way he let say $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors influence his defense appropriations recommendations?

And you know, it's not like anyone from San Diego such as former Rep. Cunningham and Rep. Calvert should be concerned about Saudi connections to the two Saudi 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego for several months before the attacks, right? Sponsored by members of the Saudi community in San Diego? Definitely nothing to look at here, I would think.

Update: One other point. Presumably former "defense contractor" Mitchell J. Wade, one of the alleged co-conspirators from whom Cunningham has admitted taking bribes, had a security clearance. After all, he formerly was an assistant to a Defense Department undersecretary during the first Bush administration, and 80% of the people in his former firm MZM had security clearances to work on some of the highly classified programs for which they had government contracts. So, apparently that clearance process didn't weed out the fact that Wade had bought a yacht that a Congressman was living on while steering contracts to Wade's firm. Nor that he had bought the same Congressman's house in Del Mar California, and sold it a month later for a $700,000 loss. One wonders what else might have been overlooked in such a security clearance process. For instance, who might Wade really have been working for? Might he himself have received what could be construed as bribes from someone? Did he in effect get reimbursed for his bribes to Cunningham by somebody else? Who might be interested in all of those counterintelligence contracts Wade's MZM was getting? And not just for their monetary value?

An interesting profile of the US Attorney in San Diego, Carol Lam, overseeing the Duke Cunningham case.

Attorney General Gonzales asked to testify on NSA spy program. And Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) says he's "troubled by the legal arguments" the Bush administration has employed. "There was no discussion in anything that I was around that gave the president a broad surveillance authority with that resolution," Brownback tells the AP.

NYT editor-reporter killed in robbery in DC.

Worth reading: Mort Halperin on the danger of a president who does not consider himself obliged to follow the law:

While signing the bill containing the McCain anti-torture amendment this week, President Bush made explicit his view of the constitution. It is a frightening position which threatens the separation of powers which is at the heart of our government.

In short, the President asserts that he can decide which laws he should obey. If he believes that legislation violates what he calls the unitary presidency he will not veto the bill, but rather he will simply ignore the law. Sometimes he does that publicly and on other occasions he pretends to be following the law while secretly operating in defiance of it.

Presidential signing statements were, in fact, invented by Judge Alito, whose hearings for a Supreme Court seat starts on Monday. ...

Go read the whole post. More from Knight Ridder, "Bush using a little-noticed strategy to alter the balance of power."

New Congressional corruption scandal on the horizon? The LAT reports:

In a case that echoes the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, two Northern California Republican congressmen used their official positions to try to stop a federal investigation of a wealthy Texas businessman who provided them with political contributions.

Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz, documents recently obtained by The Times show. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was seeking $300 million from Hurwitz for his role in the collapse of a Texas savings and loan that cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. ...

Former DeLay aide Tony Rudy "reportedly working with federal investigators probing Abramoff's web of corruption," the Houston Chronicle reports.

DeLay to step down. (Thx to MD).

Update: "Officials focus on a second firm tied to DeLay," the NYT reports:

The firm, Alexander Strategy Group, is of particular interest to investigators because it was founded by Edwin A. Buckham, a close personal friend of Mr. DeLay's and his former chief of staff, and has been a lucrative landing spot for several former members of the DeLay staff, people who are directly involved in the case have said.

Although the firm's name has circulated in connection with the case for many months, prosecutors' questions about Mr. Buckham and Alexander Strategy - which did not respond to requests for comment - have intensified recently, participants in the case said.

The firm openly promoted the idea that it could deliver access to Representative DeLay, the former majority leader. The firm paid Mr. DeLay's wife $115,000 in consulting fees, while conducting business with Mr. Abramoff's firm. Mr. Abramoff helped Mr. Buckham set up his firm.

In overseas trips and domestic meetings, Mr. Buckham and at least one member of his firm worked with clients who, prosecutors suspect, helped funnel money and perks to Mr. DeLay, his fund-raising operations and other lawmakers in ways intended to curry favor with the Republican leadership and could have directly led to "official action" in Congress, a potentially criminal act. ...

But its web of contacts on Capitol Hill reach well beyond Mr. DeLay, and in ways that prosecutors suspect could have criminal implications for other lawmakers. Alexander also did lobbying work for a defense firm tied to former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, in a separate corruption investigation, putting the firm in the crosshairs of two grand jury probes. ...

One element prosecutors are trying to understand is what role Mr. DeLay played in funneling business to the company. There is evidence, one participant in the case said, that it was "you hire these guys because Tom DeLay tells you to."

Mr. Buckham also ran the U.S. Family Network, a self-styled grassroots organization tied to Mr. DeLay that, according to a report in The Washington Post, was financed almost entirely by clients and associates of Mr. Abramoff. People involved in the case said they expected investigators to examine whether Mr. DeLay cast a vote in Congress related to the International Monetary Fund in exchange for the donations to the organization. ...

Congressman Rush Holt, a member of the House intelligence committee, says he was actively misled about the NSA domestic eavesdropping program:

One congressman said he was actively misled. In a letter released Friday, Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, complained to the N.S.A. over what he described as deception by its director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander of the Army.

Mr. Holt, a physicist who has worked as an arms control specialist at the State Department, visited the agency on Dec. 6 for a briefing by General Alexander and agency lawyers about protecting Americans' privacy. The officials assured him, Mr. Holt said, that the agency singled out Americans for eavesdropping only under warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

After the program was disclosed, Mr. Holt wrote a blistering letter to General Alexander, expressing "considerable anger" over being misled. An agency spokesman, Don Weber, declined to comment on the letter.

Homeland Security department opening the mail. I think the time has come for our era's MASH.

Congressional Research Service report finds Bush White House rationale for warrantless NSA surveillance legally dubious. Former 9/11 commission chair, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also doubts the program is legal:

Thomas H. Kean, the former chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said he too doubts the legality of the program. Weighing in for the first time on the controversy, he said in an interview that the commission was never told of the operation and that he has strong doubts about whether it is authorized under the law.

Federal law under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, created in 1978, "gives very broad powers to the president and, except in very rare circumstances, in my view ought to be used," said Mr. Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey. "We live by a system of checks and balances, and I think we ought to continue to live by a system of checks and balances."

Cunningham wore a wire. "Wonder how well Depends are selling in the House Stationary Room?" one reader writes.

Update: Who did Cunningham spend those last few days with before his plea agreement was announced?

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, called Cunningham a friend and colleague in a statement Tuesday that emphasized his accomplishments as a fighter pilot.

"We, his remaining friends, have spent the last day with Duke praying and talking about a new chapter in Duke's life, a chapter of service to God," Hunter said.

Hmm.

L'Affaire Cunningham: More than Meets the Eye? Also check out Bloomberg's focus on the Alexander Strategy Group's nexus at the center of three corruption scandals.

Risen, unspoilt. Eats four times a week at Subway.

David Ignatius on "Cheney's Cheney," David Addington.

David Ensor via Atrios on NSA/Amanpour Andrea Mitchell question. I'm fairly convinced that we haven't heard the last of this. NBC didn't mean to publish that part of the transcript, but at the same time Mitchell doesn't seem to have been asking Risen about Amanpour randomly. So the question is, what was the basis for Mitchell's even preliminary reporting to inform that question? More from TV Newswer, which suggests the source was not Amanpour or CNN.

Bill Arkin on paranoia.

We have been so conditioned to expect so little even pantomime listening by this White House that perhaps many of us don't even notice, what an incredible headline this is: "Bush Listens to Suggestions on Iraq." Update: He listened for all of ten minutes, and then headed for a final photo opportunity with his guests.

Pat Robertson, via JTA: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being punished by God for dividing the Land of Israel.

Iran is really behaving as an out-of-central casting rogue state. No show today for planned talks with the IAEA. And can it be true what Risen reports here? that the CIA gave Iran some altered Russian suitcase bomb designs in a kind of sting gone terribly awry? Update: Whoops, read that too fast. What Risen reports is that the CIA gave the Iranians "technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a 'firing set', for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon."

Stan Brand, responding to NPR's Diane Rehme's question, whether the Abramoff affair will have larger implications (sounding incredulous): This is just the beginning. We'll be in this all year. At the end, we'll see half a dozen members indicted, half a dozen former staffers indicted. There is a 40 person task force, empowered with grand jury powers....

Did it work? asks Newsweek's Mark Hosenball, of the NSA warrantless domestic surveillance, coming out skeptical (and highlighting the controversial Patriot Act library provision as something that may have proved more decisive). He digs deeper into the two cases cited by the Bush administration as a threat averted by the program, including the case of Iyman Faris, who allegedly planned to burn through the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension cables with a blowtorch. This is really worth reading, esp. because it hints that those who closely followed the legal cases of Faris and others almost certainly got indications of communications surveillance coming from a secret program.

A transcript of Faris’s October 2003 sentencing hearing, before Judge Leonie Brinkema in Federal Court in Alexandria, Va., makes cryptic references to two separate sources of intelligence that helped the federal investigation. Prosecutor Neil Hammerstrom Jr. told the judge that on March 19, 2003, two FBI agents and an officer from an antiterror task force went to interview Faris in Ohio following what the prosecutor described as “a call that was intercepted in another investigation.” Hammerstrom said he didn’t want “to get into too many details in open court.”

The justice system, if not the Justice Department, may be one early source of the NSA story after all. Secondly, it's impossible to understand why the Bush administration did not run to get a FISA warrant on Faris, so that it could get legally admissable evidence on him to use in a court case. Wonder if it falls apart because his defense appeals on the grounds that the evidence obtained against Faris was gotten illegally?

President Bush has decided to donate $6,000 he received from Abramoff to charity, but as Newsweek points out, Abramoff raised more than $100,000 for Bush, and by the way, served as a member of Bush's Presidential Transition Team:

Yet Abramoff's ties to the administration extended well beyond campaign checks. In 2001, Bush tapped the lobbyist as a member of his Presidential Transition Team, advising the administration on policy and hiring at the Interior Department, which oversees Native American issues. Abramoff's former top aide, Susan Ralston, currently serves as the top aide to Karl Rove, one of the president's closest political advisers. Still, the White House has moved to put distance between Bush and Abramoff. On Wednesday, McClellan called Abramoff's actions "outrageous" and reiterated to reporters that Bush was not friends with the lobbyist and does not recall ever meeting him-though he said it was possible that Bush met Abramoff at a fund-raising function or at a White House holiday party. (According to McClellan, Abramoff was a guest at three White House Chanukah receptions.) When asked about Abramoff's contacts with other White House officials, McClellan said, "I don't keep track of staff."

It's unsurprising McClellan's memory is foggy on the fine details. Update: And it looks like even McClellan's most reliable press corps allies have abandoned him.

Bill Gertz: "NSA Whistleblower asks to testify."

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

"I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency," Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

You will be shocked to learn that the wedding between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes may be off.

Bush bolsters his cronies-r-us credentials.

So the NBC Amanpour-was-spied-on-by the Bush administration statement which I noted this morning was not random, it was information gathered in the course of reporting that NBC doesn't currently feel ready to report just yet? Jesus.

Ha'aretz's Aluf Benn: "One can cautiously say that it appears that the era in which Sharon stood at Israel's helm came to a tragic end on Wednesday."

Going through DeLay's reported travel, a few entries stand out, including this one: Why in the world did Fox News Sunday pay more than $13,000 for DeLay to go from Sugarland Texas to DC in October?

Sponsor(s) - FOX News Sunday
Dates - October 1, 2005 - October 2, 2005 (2 days)
Location(s) - Washington, DC

Purpose - Officially connected travel
Notes - Sugar Land, TX - Washington, DC - Sugar Land, TX

Travel Cost - $13,998.55
Lodging Cost -
Meal Cost -
Other Cost -
Total Cost - $13,998.55

And should a news show - even Fox - be paying thousands of dollars to congressmen for travel? And what kind of public servant would accept such favors? (Well we know the answer to that).

AP: Ariel Sharon suffers "significant stroke."

Reading all of these Abramoff stories the past 24 hours, one of the most intriguing aspects of the case is that Abramoff has been cooperating already to some degree for the past 18 months. As Anne Kornblut reports:

Mr. Abramoff has been in talks with prosecutors for some 18 months, his lawyer in Washington, Abbe D. Lowell, said. According to people involved in the case, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the broader investigation is continuing, Mr. Abramoff at times offered guidance to investigators as they pursued other targets.

According to participants in the case, he has shared information about David H. Safavian, a former Bush administration official indicted last year, and Tim Flanigan, the Tyco executive who withdrew his nomination as the second-in-command at the Justice Department after his ties to Mr. Abramoff came into question.

Amazing, as Flanigan himself was to become the number two at the Justice Department pursuing the Abramoff investigation, until he suddenly withdrew a few months ago.

From the WaPo chat with Abramoff reporter Susan Schmidt:

Fredericksburg, Va.: Hi Susan, great stories so far. How is it the Abramoff could be broke? He had zillions of dollars, it seemed. What gives?

Susan Schmidt: I keep wondering the same thing. We do know he spent millions of dollars on his two restaurants, that he bankrolled a religious academy that educated his children, that he was sending money to settlers on the West Bank for a sniper school. He also lived extravagantly, flying by private jet and buying expensive cars. But that's an awful lot of money to go through. And there is hardly anything left for the lawyers!

Seriously, where did all the money go?

Sadness and outrage outside Sago mine. Cannot imagine a more heartbreaking situation. Sounds like those mine owners should be prosecuted for negligent homicide.

Ignatius on shifting alliances in Syria worth reading.

The Washington Realist on global political risk for 2006. Topping the list, Iran. (Via BD).

LAT: "Lobbying Plan Was Central to GOP Strategy." His high school years in Beverly Hills.

Risen's State of War. Andrea Mitchell interviews Risen on NSA story. (Mitchell seems to ask in a not very hypothetical way if CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour may have been spied upon.) LAT reports some of the revelations in the book. The NY Observer has the story on the story.

Late Update: NBC has now apparently removed the Amanpour question from the Risen interview transcript. Stranger and stranger.

Milbank, "Lessons of the Fall."

House Speaker Dennis Hastert decides to give money from Abramoff to charity.

DCeiver, standing in for Wonkette, helps out with some Beltway translations, re: Abramoffukah. More: "Still, you have to wonder, with the intricate webs of distrust so clearly on display within the Congress, between members and aides and lobbyists, isn't it just awesome that it will be these people who will try to decide who gets to wiretap who?"

This Hill story from the archives about the wireless company that Abramoff helped win a fishy deal to provide wireless service inside the House and Senate is worth revisiting, in light of today's plea deal.

I share Frank Foer's questions here (from a few days ago):

...Abramoff's rise is amazing. But it says less about the man than the conservative movement. How did this obvious thief become one of the most powerful men in Republican Washington? What made the G.O.P. so vulnerable to his tricks and charms? That's the story that I want to read in the paper.

Breaking News: Abramoff Plea:

Jack Abramoff will plead guilty to three felony counts in Washington on Wednesday as part of a settlement with federal prosecutors, ending an intense, months-long negotiation over whether the Republican lobbyist would testify against his former colleagues, people involved with the case said.

Mr. Abramoff, 46, is pleading guilty to fraud, public corruption and tax evasion, setting the stage for prosecutors to begin using him as a cooperating witness against his former business and political colleagues. In exchange, Mr. Abramoff faces a maximum of about 10 years in prison in the Washington case.

After entering his guilty plea in United States District Court in Washington, Mr. Abramoff will also announce a plea agreement in a related Florida case, in which he was indicted last year. In that case, he is pleading guilty to fraud and conspiracy in connection with his purchase of the SunCruz casino boat line, and will face a maximum of about seven years' prison time.

Mr. Abramoff has been talking to investigators in the corruption case for many months, participants in the case said, giving them a full picture of what evidence he could offer against other suspects. His participation in Washington has taken place mostly below the radar...

Now, after more than two years of investigations, prosecutors have developed a list of at least a dozen lawmakers, congressional aides and lobbyists whose work appears suspect and who are now at the core of the case. With Mr. Abramoff's cooperation, the Justice Department will have a potentially critical witness to alleged patterns of corruption or bribery within the Republican leadership ranks, which in some cases they believe also took the form of campaign donations and free meals at Mr. Abramoff's downtown restaurant, Signatures.

Already, prosecutors have a key witness in Michael Scanlon, once press secretary to Mr. DeLay.

Concluding line, "...One person involved in the case said: 'When some people hear about this, they will clamor to cut a deal of their own.'"

Is the White House reneging on the McCain anti torture amendment? Check out Mike Roston, Marty Lederman and Eric Umansky (last few graphs here).

Writing in Slate, Shane Harris and Tim Naftali report that elements of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping on US communications preceded the September 11th attacks:

A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails.

Like the pressure applied to ITT a half-century ago, our source says the government was insistent, arguing that his competitors had already shown their patriotism by signing on. The NSA would not comment on the issue, saying that, "We do not discuss details of actual or alleged operational issues."

Beyond the legal arguments, what's interesting about this is, it didn't work. The NSA getting access to all of this domestic telecommunications information from private companies ahead of September 11th didn't stop the big terrorist attack.

Update: No harm done? Don't miss this Mort Halperin post.

Feith's shop cooking the intel specially for the White House? Meet Mohamad Atta's brother:

Administration critics have long suspected that a secret briefing on an alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection, prepared by the Pentagon in 2002, helped keep the tale alive.

NEWSWEEK has obtained declassified copies of slides made for the briefing. There are three sets: a version for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one for the then CIA Director George Tenet and one shown at a White House session attended by the then deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff at the time. The White House materials include a slide, not part of the other briefings, devoted to the alleged Atta meeting. (Rumsfeld and Tenet were told there was "one indication of Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11.") The White House slide, dated September 2002, cites publicized allegations from a post-9/11 Czech intel report that Atta met the April before 9/11 with Iraqi spy Ahmed al-Ani, and asserts the United States had "no other" intel contradicting the report. The slide offers purported details about Atta's activities in Prag ue (including two earlier, confirmed visits). It says that during one visit al-Ani ordered an Iraqi intelligence officer to "issue funds to Atta." The slide also includes previous unpublished allegations that Atta met the Iraqi Embassy charge d'affaires and that "several workers at Prague airport identified Atta following 9/11 and remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta."

Four former senior intel officials who monitored investigations into Atta's alleged Iraqi contacts say they never heard the airport anecdote. [...] In June 2004, the 9/11 Commission staff said it did "not believe" the April 2001 meeting had occurred. The next day, Cheney said that while the report of Atta's Prague visit had "never been proven, it's never been refuted." Cheney's office didn't respond to queries about the Pentagon briefing.

One awaits the DOD Inspector General's review of Feith's offices activities with great interest.

Ukraine-Gazprom Row.

Look who forgot to disclose to the NYT that the Lincoln Group was paying for his travel to Iraq when he commented on Lincoln's covert propaganda programs to the NYT:

Lincoln has also turned to American scholars and political consultants for advice on the content of the propaganda campaign in Iraq, records indicate. Michael Rubin, a Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research organization, said he had reviewed materials produced by the company during two trips to Iraq within the past two years.

"I visited Camp Victory and looked over some of their proposals or products and commented on their ideas," Mr. Rubin said in an e-mailed response to questions about his links to Lincoln. "I am not nor have I been an employee of the Lincoln Group. I do not receive a salary from them."

He added: "Normally, when I travel, I receive reimbursement of expenses including a per diem and/or honorarium." But Mr. Rubin would not comment further on how much in such payments he may have received from Lincoln.

Mr. Rubin was quoted last month in The New York Times about Lincoln's work for the Pentagon placing articles in Iraqi publications: "I'm not surprised this goes on," he said, without disclosing his work for Lincoln.

Imagine the NYT's surprise when they learned of his undisclosed affiliation after his comment had appeared.

Der Spiegel asks, is Washington planning a military strike against Iran? The fact that there have been stepped up US and NATO visits to Ankara is one sign the reporters are looking at. What they don't take into account? '06 mid-terms. I think most signs are in fact pointing the other way, to more diplomacy, and kicking the Iran can further down the road.

Go read Steve Benen on Ashcroft, James Comey and DOJ jitters on the NSA warrantless surveillance program. More from Newsweek:

...At the Justice Department, it was a former prosecutor, James Comey, who forced the White House to back away from the so-called Torture Memo, which appeared to give intelligence agencies a license to use any interrogation method that did not cause the extreme pain associated with organ failure. Comey was the No. 2 man at the department at the time. Although the details are unclear, it appears that Comey's objections were also key to slowing the warrantless-eavesdropping program in 2004 for a time. According to several officials who would not be identified talking about still-classified matters, Comey (among other government lawyers) argued that the authority for the program—the 2001 "use of force" resolution—had grown stale. It was time to audit the program before proceeding in any case, Comey said.

But in March 2004, White House chief of staff Card and White House Counsel Gonzales visited Ashcroft, the seriously ill attorney general, to try to get him to overrule Comey, who was officially acting as A.G. while Ashcroft was incapacitated. Ashcroft refused, and a battle over what to do broke out in the Justice Department and at the White House. Finally, sometime in the summer of 2004, a compromise was reached, with Comey onboard: according to an account in The New York Times, Justice and the NSA refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether "probable cause" existed to start monitoring someone's conversations.

Bureaucrats frustrated by their political bosses have one time-honored weapon: the leak. Though it is unclear exactly how the NSA eavesdropping story made its way to The New York Times (last week, the Justice Department launched a formal leak investigation), the sources were probably officials disgruntled for reasons of morality and public-mindedness and possibly less-noble motivations (turf battles, score settling).

The implication this leak may have come from Ashcroft's Justice Department itself is quite interesting. And it's well worth reading the concluding few graphs here as well for more historical perspective.

Happy 2006! Some funnies from the WaPo Out/In The List:
Out: Fitzmas, In Abramoffukah,
Out: Pope Benedict, In: Deviled Eggs, etc.