What else is there? The WP on Gonzales clarifying his past remarks on NSA warrantless domestic spying:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appeared to suggest yesterday that the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance operations may extend beyond the outlines that the president acknowledged in mid-December.

In a letter yesterday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration's original legal justification for the program was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.

At that appearance, Gonzales confined his comments to the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, saying that President Bush had authorized it "and that is all that he has authorized."

But in yesterday's letter, Gonzales, citing that quote, wrote: "I did not and could not address . . . any other classified intelligence activities." Using the administration's term for the recently disclosed operation, he continued, "I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President, the legality of which was the subject" of the Feb. 6 hearing. ...

It seems Mort Halperin is right.

The WP on what goes for silver linings in the White House these days:

The release of a new CBS News poll showing Bush's approval rating dropping to 34 percent, a low for him in that survey, sent tremors through Republican circles in Washington. Scott Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, called the results "pretty shattering." Most distressing to GOP strategists was that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent.

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

Bush shrugged off the poll numbers in an interview with ABC News yesterday. "If I worried about polls, I would be -- I wouldn't be doing my job," he said before leaving Washington for a trip to India and Pakistan. "And, look, I fully understand that when you do hard things, it creates consternation at times. And, you know, I've been up in the polls and I've been down in the polls. You know, it's just part of life in the modern era."

Yet at the White House, aides were decidedly downbeat, making dark jokes about the latest political trajectory and the Murphy's Law quality of life in the West Wing these days -- what can go wrong will go wrong. At least, some consoled themselves, Bush beat out Vice President Cheney, who was viewed favorably by just 18 percent in the CBS survey.

Army interrogator Anthony Lagouranis:

I HAVE never met Sgt. Santos Cardona or Sgt. Michael Smith, but we share similar experiences. In late 2003 and early 2004, both men used their dogs to intimidate Iraqi prisoners during interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison. They maintain that they were following legal orders. Now they both face impending court-martial.

From January 2004 to January 2005, I served in various places in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) as an Army interrogator. Following orders that I believed were legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's another story). Perhaps, I have thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted. But if that is the case, culpability goes much farther up the chain of command than the Army and the Bush administration have so far been willing to admit.

When the chief warrant officer at our interrogation site in Mosul first told me to use dogs during interrogations, it seemed well within what was allowed by our written rules and consistent with what was being done at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers. The dogs were muzzled and held by a handler. The prisoners didn't know that, though, because they were blindfolded; if they gave me an answer I didn't like, I could cue the handler so the dog would bark and lunge toward them. Sometimes they were so terrified they'd wet their jumpsuits. About halfway through my tour, I stopped using dogs and other "enhancements" like hypothermia that qualify as torture even under the most nonchalant readings of international law. I couldn't handle being so routinely brutal.

In training, we learned that all P.O.W.'s are protected against actual and implied threats. You can never put a "knife on the table" to get someone to talk. That was clear. But our Iraqi prisoners weren't clearly classified as P.O.W.'s, so I never knew what laws applied. Instead, a confusing set of verbal and written orders had supplanted the Geneva Conventions.

When an Army investigator asked Col. Thomas Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, how intimidation with dogs could be allowed under this treaty, he gave the chilling reply, "I did not personally look at that with regard to the Geneva Convention." Colonel Pappas later testified that he was taking his cue on the use of dogs from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who took over detainee operations in Iraq after running them in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

General Miller has denied recommending the use of guard dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogations in Iraq. He also recently said he would not testify in the courts-martial of Sergeants Cardona and Smith, invoking his right to avoid self-incrimination. As someone who voluntarily spoke at length about my actions in Iraq to investigators, without a lawyer present, I can't have a favorable opinion of General Miller. By doing the military equivalent of "taking the Fifth," he's decided to protect himself, apparently happy to let two dog handlers take the fall — a stunning betrayal of his subordinates and Army values. ...

More Iraq intelligence ignored by the White House, to our peril. And Defense Department IG reports the Bush administration had no plan for post-war reconstruction either.

Age of Frozen Scandal. Journalist Mark Danner speaks to Tom Dispatch's Tom Engelhardt:

Danner: The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as step one, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step two would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra, and others. And finally, step three would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, look we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.

TD: You get revelation and repetition.

Danner: Yes, R and R. It's been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there's been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished… [...]

That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It's gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It's gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we're doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the President declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it's not the information, it's the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It's very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return. [...]

New York mag: Why Cheney's more trouble than he's worth... but won't go:

Start with the fact that Cheney, irrevocably, has gone from being a figure of fear to being a punch line—and not just in the hands of Leno, Letterman, and Conan. “I’m really glad to be here,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the other day at a conference in San Jose. “My other invitation was to go quail hunting with Dick Cheney.” When someone as terminally unfunny as Gates can score laughs at your expense, you know you’ve crossed the pop-cultural Rubicon into Admiral Stockdale territory.

The mockery would be easier to shrug off were Cheney a broadly popular figure with the American electorate. But according to the most recent CBS–New York Times poll, the vice-president’s numbers—23 percent of voters view him favorably, 41 percent unfavorably—are even worse than Bush’s, a noteworthy achievement. Owing to his intimate involvement in a litany of policy cock-ups and politico-ethical scandals (Iraq, Halliburton, Plamegate), Cheney has long been, as Noonan put it last week, “the administration’s hate magnet.” Now he’s become a vivid symbol of its incompetence as well—the poster boy for the Gang That (Literally) Can’t Shoot Straight.

And let’s not forget that Cheney’s political albatrossity is only destined to grow more pronounced next year when the Libby trial commences. In the furor over Quailgate, it was easy to forget the recent disclosure that Libby had told the grand jury that his “superiors” had authorized some of his intelligence leaks to journalists. And it was easy to overlook Cheney’s startling suggestion in his interview with Brit Hume that, as vice-president, he has the power to declassify information unilaterally. Both revelations are ripe with legal import for Libby. And both are brimming with political implications for Cheney and Bush—none of them positive.

Meantime, the Wash Times' Insight magazine dreams Cheney's departure is a possibility. No chance, a source tells NY's John Heilemann:

Another explanation comes from a longtime friend and political adjutant to Bush, whom I e-mailed the other day. Wouldn’t the administration be better served politically, I asked, if Cheney were to be replaced?

“I hear you,” replied this person. “The answer is maybe, but it will never, ever, happen. In Bush World, loyalty trumps political gain every time.”

And then he goes on to suggest that perhaps Bush doesn't want to annoint a successor, because his brother Jeb may jump into the race.

National Review's Rich Lowry critiques Bill Kristol. He concludes, "For a while now, everyone in the US has been pre-positioning for what they will say in the event that the war really goes south. For one school of neo-conservatives, the line will apparently be that there never was an Iraq war, at least never a proper one."

AP: "Coast Guard Had Concerns About Port Deal" :

Citing broad gaps in U.S. intelligence, the Coast Guard cautioned the Bush administration that it was unable to determine whether a United Arab Emirates-owned company might support terrorist operations, a Senate panel said Monday.

The surprise disclosure came during a hearing on Dubai-owned DP World's plans to take over significant operations at six leading U.S. ports. The port operations are now handled by London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company.

''There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations, that precludes an overall threat assessment of the potential'' merger,'' an undated Coast Guard intelligence assessment says. [...]

Sen. Susan Collins, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee, released an unclassified version of the document at a briefing Monday. [...]

The document raised questions about the security of the companies' operations, the backgrounds of all personnel working for the companies, and whether other foreign countries influenced operations that affect security.

''This report suggests there were significant and troubling intelligence gaps,'' said Collins, R-Maine. ''That language is very troubling to me.''

Here's the Coast Guard memo.

From the New Yorker archives, a fascinating December 1978 dispatch from Iran on the eve of the revolution.

The Wichita Eagle on Pat Roberts "at the center of spying firestorm." And Roberts tells the Kansas State Collegian that, "This is war ... [therefore] the Geneva Convention does not apply." He may be interested to learn that the Congress has already ratified the Geneva Conventions, and did not have a loophole excluding perpetrators of torture of prisoners during wartime. From the Thomas summary of the "War Crimes Act of 1996," enacted into US law August 21, 1996:

H.R. 3680 created a new Chapter 118 of title 18 of the United States Code entitled `War Crimes.' The Chapter contains a new section 2441, providing that whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions in two specified circumstances shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

The two circumstances are (1) the person committing the breach is a member of the armed forces of the United States or a national of the United States, and (2) the victim of the breach is a member of the armed forces of the United States or a national of the United States. `Grave breach of the Geneva Conventions' means conduct defined as a grave breach in any of the four Geneva Conventions, or any protocol to the conventions to which the United States is a party.4

Maybe Roberts would want to consult with a legislative advisor who has read the US law on these matters before misinforming his constituents. (See also this, "In December, 2003, in an extraordinary repudiation of the Administration’s own legal work, the Office of Legal Counsel quietly withdrew the Yoo opinion. The new head of the O.L.C., Jack Goldsmith, a conservative legal scholar who now teaches at Harvard Law School, told the Pentagon that it could no longer rely on [Yoo's] legal analysis.")

Sad to hear about the death Saturday of Theodore Draper, the author of the most superb Iran contra history, A Very Thin Line. From the LAT obituary, "'The Iran-Contra affairs are not a warning for our days alone,' he later wrote. 'If the story of the affairs is not fully known and understood, a similar usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group within the government may well recur before we are prepared to recognize what is happening.'"

The LAT's Alyssa Rubin on the intelligence the IAEA has acquired on Iran's nuclear program.

Worth reading: The Nation's Marc Cooper on Republican jitters at the conservative Restoration Weekend conference in Phoenix last weekend.

Riverbend on volatile days in Iraq.

WP: A broken White House message machine. "To anyone listening, it was clear that President Bush had a problem on his hands. But Bush was not listening. And his political team had its attention elsewhere. By the time they noticed, Bush's problem had grown a lot bigger. A behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the ports deal's rapid evolution from obscurity to uproar shows how Bush was blindsided by the same emotion-laden politics of terrorism that he used to win elections in 2002 and 2004. It also raises anew questions of why the White House message machine, so sharply effective in the first term, seemingly has gone dull in the second. [...] The political breakdown was partly a matter of timing. The controversy started to build when Bush's top aides were consumed with the fallout of Vice President Cheney's recent hunting accident. Some Republicans, however, think the episode highlights a structural problem: Without Bush's own reelection to worry about, White House aides are less alert to the political implications of fast-moving issues or unexpected events. Compounding problems, White House staffers have seemed exhausted in general for much of the year, according to people in close contact with them."

Go read Steve Clemons here.

Fred Barnes:

The surprise in all this and the most worrisome aspect for the White House was the eagerness with which congressional Republicans broke into revolt against Bush. Without checking with Bush or his aides, congressional Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, denounced the deal publicly and insisted it be reconsidered or blocked.

The revolt showed that Bush's strength in Congress has significantly eroded as he begins his sixth year as president. In effect, his Republican base is no longer secure.

More from Karen Tumulty:

It wasn't just the unthinkable possibility of appearing weak on national security next to Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy that drove Hill Republicans to take on the President. It was a feeling that he was treating them with contempt. Even as McClellan spoke about appeasement, there was grumbling that the White House still hadn't contacted Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert directly to talk matters through, and a House leadership aide noted that "with the veto threat and then the accusation that members were being xenophobic, [the President] alienated them even more."

Newsweek's Christopher Dickey interviews Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, running for reelection in a tight race:

His cabinet seems out of control and he is dogged by corruption scandals, and headlines about outrageous egotism, such as allegedly comparing himself to Christ. "It's not true. Absolutely not true," Berlusconi says. He'd been telling people he was tired at a fund-raiser, and called himself "povero Cristo." "You see, we say in Italian 'poor Christ,' when we mean 'poor fellow.' I stopped myself. I smiled. I said, 'Mamma mia, now they're going to say that I compare myself to 'Jesus Christ!'" says Berlusconi.

On his claim that he'd give up sex until after the elections: "Absolutely the contrary," Berlusconi says, claiming the press got it all wrong-again-saying he'd given up sex. "Naturally, many of my friends were concerned," Berlusconi told Newsweek, "to the point that Putin called me and said that both he and Bush were very worried about me."

Berlusconi says these stories are proof of a left-wing media conspiracy. ...

More on that last point here and here.

Associated Press:

In court papers, [Moussaoui] defense attorney Edward MacMahon objected to Rep. Curt Weldon's bid to quash a defense subpoena for testimony about his knowledge of a military intelligence project called Able Danger. The Pennsylvania Republican has said he saw a chart the unit developed in 1999 that identified some of the Sept. 11 hijackers as al-Qaeda threats.

Weldon claimed immunity from testifying under a constitutional clause that protects members of Congress from being questioned about their work for Congress. MacMahon said Weldon waived any privilege by discussing the matter on television and "in a book the congressman is selling for $27.95."

"It is difficult for the defense to fathom why the congressman would be eager to discuss these matters on Oprah, yet he would refuse to swear, in a capital case, that the same information is actually true," MacMahon wrote.

LAT: Iraq's Lebanon-ization.

Lawyer for prisoners on American gulag:

Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel mesh or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not seen sunlight for months — an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate. One prisoner told me, "I have spent almost every moment of the last three years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom." Other than the Koran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have been given books.

Every prisoner I've interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of U.S. captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his ribs. "Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing," he said he told his interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity, according to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to assert his innocence and to protest being imprisoned for four years without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against any accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard U.S. congressmen had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort with great food. "If I eat, I condone these lies," Fawzi said.

At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to force-feed him through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with his head held by many guards, which was even more painful.

By mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.

And the New York Times reports on the Afghan prison where the Bush administration is shifting detainees it wants to deny any legal status they might get to enjoy at Gitmo, and others dumped by the CIA after interrogation at black site prisons:

Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.

Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.

Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."

If it's possible, Bagram prison offers less legal recourse to those detained than the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. One of the main outrages of the extrajudicial prison system the Bush administration (Cheney, David Addington, Rumsfeld in the lead) is running is that there are no mechanisms for those wrongfully detained (not a small number) to demonstrate their case. They are not even allowed to know the charges against them:

The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.

Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.

As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.

The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.

The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. "The detainee is not involved at all," one official familiar with the process said.

An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.

"The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."

How is this compatable with any iota of American law or values?

In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.

Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.

"Out of sight, out of mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.

Cheney, looking for tips?

Vice President Cheney has grown increasingly skeptical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and shown interest in toughening the administration's approach. He summoned Russia scholars to his office last month to solicit input and asked national intelligence director John D. Negroponte to provide further information about Putin's trajectory, the sources said.

AP: "The number of Iraqi army battalions judged capable of fighting the insurgency without U.S. help has slipped from one to zero since September, Pentagon officials said Friday."

NSA warrantless domestic surveillance....netted the perps in the Moldovan Porn Scam:

While agreeing that data mining has a tremendous power for fighting a new kind of warfare, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that intelligence agencies had missed an opportunity by misapplying the technologies.

"In many respects, we're fighting the last intelligence war," Mr. Arquilla said. "We have not pursued data mining in the way we should."

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

"Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think," he said.

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. [...]

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

The Wade plea agreement details are interesting, but here's what I've been wondering for a few days, ever since the prosecutors' sentencing recommendations against Cunningham have been released. From that document, it's clear the Wade (co-conspirator #2) is the only of Cunningham's four alleged co-conspirators to have extensively cooperated with the investigation. So what of the other three, in particular alleged co-conspirator #1 Brent Wilkes, for whom Wade once worked and who taught him his way around bribing a congressman? What was interesting about Wilkes is he was not quite monogamous with Cunningham.

Something strange is happening in Italy. For months, the Berlusconi-linked press there has been pushing back on revelations emerging from the Niger forgeries scandal, trying to point away from the evidence that the Italian military intelligence organization Sismi was involved at some level in the scheme. But in the past few days, Milan paper Il Giornale, owned by Paolo Berlusconi (the baby brother of the Italian prime minister -- up for reelection in April), has been publishing selections from the leaked transcripts of those interviewed about the case by a Rome prosecutor, Franco Ionta. Roman blogger de Gondi has translated the Giornale transcript selections here.

What's so strange about it all? The more you read, the more even these carefully excerpted transcripts prove a direct Sismi connection to every single one of the acknowledged Niger forgeries principals. So why in the world is Il Giornale publishing these? I'm scratching my head. One theory is that they're trying to "contain" the story to the three figures who have already been identified and outted (incidentally all people who have recently "retired"): the Sismi asset from the Niger embassy in Rome, codenamed La Signora, and identified this past week by the WSJ to be named Laura Montini; forgeries middleman and former Italian intelligence agent Rocco Martino, and former SISMI colonel Antonio Nucera. I've written about the case recently here, and it suggests there were even more Sismi people involved in the background than that, some who still work for the organization. Here's my piece.

The containment strategy is kind of interesting, since it only goes to prove that everyone involved was answering to Sismi at some level (the most interesting transcript in this regard is La Signora's who talks about her various Sismi handlers at various points, first Nucera, later someone else. Her relationship with Sismi was hardly casual). Also interesting, that when Rocco Martino worked for Sismi, his boss was a guy named Col. Mario Ferraro who was found strangled by his bathrobe tie in the 1990s after telling friends he feared his life was in danger (and who de Gondi reports was connected to the "Gladio" NATO secret stay-behind army in Italy). Also very interesting, Rocco Martino covertly taped almost all of his meetings. (Perhaps another intended message from the Il Giornale articles). But who was Rocco taping them for? For his own protection? Or could it be his masters at Sismi? And who leaked the package to Il Giornale? Prosecutor Ionta? Sismi? The Italian parliamentary committee that is supposed to oversee the services? And what about the portions of interviews that weren't leaked (or published)? Also revealing.

When all is said and done, the real question is this: where did La Signora get the forgeries that she passed onto Rocco Martino? The Il Giornale published transcripts obscure this. But the answer is in plain sight. She got them from officials at Sismi. Her interview makes clear that that is from whom she was really taking her orders. That is who set her up with Martino in the first place, for precisely that purpose. And it was Sismi which later sent the CIA and other allied intelligence agencies reports based on those forgeries.

Update: Always worth reading as well on this case is the Left Coaster's eRiposte, especially for detailed analyses of that last point.

Update II: A second speculative theory about why Il Giornale may be publishing these selected transcripts now. Prosecutor Ionta and the Italian and international press are not the only ones investigating the origins of the Niger forgeries. The LA Times has reported that the FBI has reopened its investigation on the matter after closing it last summer. One wonders if the containment strategy is not targeted at what they might be finding? Is this an effort to portray the scheme as the work of entirely "rogue," independent and anyhow retired Sismi agents and assets?

Why do articles like this stay just below the radar of wider public consciousness?

Let me just recommend again this FT piece on the Pentagon doing some Iran policy planning. I am not sure how Congressional oversight works when the intelligence unit of the Marines outsources a study on Iran's ethnic minorities and how they might be exploited against Tehran to a subisidiary of SAIC. I suspect there just isn't any. In terms of understanding the genesis of the idea of using Iran's non Persian ethnic groups to destabilize Tehran, where do you think that idea was hatched?

Go read Jonathan Schwarz on bad Iraq predictions.

Tom Friedman on Dubai ports and George Bush/Karl Rove: you reap what you sow.

An eye opening scoop by the FT on the US Marines probing Iran's ethnic groups. Would seem to imply destabilizing Tehran is being explored by elements of the Pentagon.

Malaysian government and intelligence targeting US Congressional delegations? Russian military intelligence fronted by energy concerns targeting US Congressmen? And the information on the Dutch "shell" company used by Abramoff for laundering covert money from the Russians is disturbing. This is not the first time counterintelligence implications of the Abramoff case have come up. Remember when he worked for an organization funded covertly by apartheid era South African intelligence? And the goal again was to promote apartheid South Africa with right wing Republicans. Talk about treason.

Bob Herbert: Justice eludes an innocent victim of US extraordinary rendition.

Greg Djerejian is worth reading on the Jane Mayer piece.

Lawmakers react to revelations of Cunningham "bribe menu."

Bob Woodward, "Democracies die in darkness." In related news, the trial of a New York Times Chinese researcher charged with exposing state secrets is scheduled for March.

After being denied for two weeks, force feeding at Guantanamo acknowledged. In other words, the Pentagon has been lying.

Pentagon recalls Jerry Lewis' appropriations staffer. (Thx to BK).

Libby's website.

Mladic arrested? Update. Wow. The facts aren't at all clear yet, but some sort of negotiations on his surrender seem to be underway. More here.

Serbian gov't and Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte are denying Mladic has been arrested. But, as my friend Andras writes, "There's still feverish speculation in the media. What fuels it is the credible threat on the part of the EU that if Mladic is not turned over within six days (by next Monday) the EU accession talks with Serbia will be postponed indefinitely. Not to mention the fact that Serbia's being in the doghouse internationally doesn't help its already weak position in the Kosovo final status talks, which began today in Vienna."

Late Update: The superb Belgrade journalist Dejan Anastasijevic is on NPR now saying that Mladic has definitely not been arrested or transferred to the NATO air base in Tuzla. Contact with him has been established with an eye towards negotiating his surrender.

Chinese fat cat, has 31-inch "waist":

More photos here.

As usual, Bill Arkin is wonderfully insightful, here on Rummy: "An unfortunate contradiction about Donald Rumsfeld, and a debilitating handicap for America, is that the Secretary of Defense thinks like a futurist and acts like a Neanderthal."

But the real problem for me is that Rumsfeld cannot see or is unwilling to acknowledge that his actions, and those of the Bush administration, have mightily influenced public opinion. To him, it is just a battlefield where the United States has been hamstrung by old institutions and technologies.

To compete in the future, Rumsfeld says, the United States will unleash (how many times have we heard that?) a new communications strategy.

The problem probably isn't technological. More on Rumsfeld, propaganda victim.

The Denver Post weighs in on Pat Roberts:

We hope Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts meant it when he suggested that the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program should be monitored by a special court. It is time for the administration to recognize that such an approach is the right thing to do. [...]

Illegal, warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency is not the way to solve the intelligence failures of the past.

Last week, officials announced that President Bush would support a plan by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, to exempt the NSA program from judicial oversight, while providing for congressional briefings on the program. Such a plan clearly does not provide adequate protection from government intrusion. [...]

We urge the president to work with Specter and other members of Congress who are intent on respecting the FISA law and preserving the freedoms on which this country was built.

They even use the "freedom" word, while arguing that DeWine's proposal for retroactive legal cover for the warrantless domestic spying would make a mockery of the law.

With some experience driving to Dodge City (where Roberts is from) from Colorado and then on to the eastern parts of Kansas, I can tell you that Dodge City is about as close to Denver (296 miles) as it is to Kansas City (301 miles). So let's just count the Denver Post as a Roberts hometown paper, once removed.

LAT: "Iraqi police tied to death squads." The question, how connected are they to Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a Shiite with close ties to the Badr Brigade. "After the suspected death squad was stopped last month, U.S. police advisors said, four members of the squad confessed to several sectarian killings. The highway patrol officers were asked, 'Who are you doing this for?' said a third U.S. military officer who is involved in training Iraqi troops and has knowledge of the interrogations of the suspected death squad. 'And they're telling us, 'Jabr.''"

It seems Santorum has been using his PAC to pay his family expenses, etc.

What's the Heritage Foundation doing serving as a lobbyist for the Malaysian government? And who's investigating? A reader in the lobbying world emails, "I guess the big question here is who at the Heritage Foundation told Malaysia to hire Abramoff?? And if Abramoff is a donor of the HF..?? And did Abramoff pay any of this money he received to HF..??"

Update: More from Matt Yglesias, Sam Rosenfeld and Paul Kiel: "It would take quite a while to untangle the relationship between Heritage, Alexander Strategy Group, and Abramoff, but suffice it to say for now that Alexander Strategy and the Heritage Foundation shared offices in Hong Kong. And they worked with Abramoff. This meeting was just one part of a long, entangled, and very sketchy relationship between the three and the Malaysians. No doubt the money worked its way through some back channels."

.

Erasing History. When several times a week some news report about our government makes one think Orwell, Kafka, Kundera, what to think about what's happening to our country? The latest example, and hardly the most outrageous, this Scott Shane story from the NYT Tuesday, "US Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review":

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous." [...]

It's not like this is the end of the world. After all, it's just documents in archives being removed. But the secret order to reclassify and remove the tens of thousands of historical government documents is just one more fact in the accumulation of recent facts that show how these guys choose to behave in ways absurd, bureaucratic and obsessed with secrecy to the detriment of the public's right to know even when there's no remotely good reason. To add insult to injury, the very reclassification order itself is classified, as Shane reports. Is this how a democracy behaves? It has little to do that I can see with partisan politics, nothing apparent to do with current national security concerns, and everything to do with these guys' basic lack of regard for the public, in favor of government operating with increasing powers and less opportunity for scrutiny or even reflection at home. Just one more glint of sunshine snuffed out with a quiet order.

Was Germany complicit in the US rendition of Khaled el-Masri, the guy who turned out to be innocent who the US picked up in Macedonia, rendered to Afghanistan, beat up and abused, held, and finally dumped on the Albanian border with a lot of cash? So German prosecutors are investigating, the NYT reports.

When Pat Roberts, Mike DeWine, David Addington and Andy Card get their ducks in a row, here's where things are headed if people don't step up to the plate: concocted retroactive legal cover for breaking the law, without any oversight or investigation.

Jane Mayer: The Torture Papers. More from Kevin Drum: "It's stunning. Not only did the Bush administration keep Congress and the American public in the dark, but they even deliberately lied to their own chief legal advisors." Here's the memo (.pdf)

What a title.

Need a laugh? Byron York delivers big time. Update: And Jonathan Schwartz has more on the source of the Saddam tapes. "Tierney is the only former UNSCOM member who also put in some lengthy protest time outside Terry Schiavo's hospital."

Late Update: More here and here.

Dana Milbank goes out on a limb and predicts, the Vice President will not shoot anyone this week.

Via Atrios, the White House Civil Liberties Oversight Board you've never heard of because it's never met. And given the qualifications of the board appointed by Bush, our liberty may be in peril even if they do ever convene: "The board chairwoman is Carol E. Dinkins, a Houston lawyer who was a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. A longtime friend of the Bush family, she was the treasurer of George W. Bush's first campaign for governor of Texas, in 1994, and co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney, which recruited Republican lawyers to handle legal battles after the November 2004 election. Dinkins, a longtime partner in the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, where Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales once was a partner, has specialized in defending oil and gas companies in environmental lawsuits." Sounds like the kind of Texas GOP stalwart who keeps the cops at bay when Cheney accidenally shoots someone on her ranch.

Rumsfeld and torture. Pentagon lawyers who warned that senior Pentagon officials could be prosecuted for abuses and torture have been suddenly taken off the review list of approved interrogation procedures. More from the AP.

Francis Fukuyama, "After Neoconservatism." (Via Belgravia Dispatch). Thoughts on the piece from Matt Yglesias.

More on the handmaiden to obstructing Congressional oversight, from the WaPo:

The second White House flurry occurred last Thursday, as the Senate intelligence committee readied for a showdown over a motion by top Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.) to start a broad inquiry into the surveillance program. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. -- who had visited the Capitol two days earlier with Vice President Cheney to lobby Republicans on the program -- spoke by phone with Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), according to Senate sources briefed on the call.

Snowe earlier had expressed concerns about the program's legality and civil liberties safeguards, but Card was adamant about restricting congressional oversight and control, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing office policies. Snowe seemed taken aback by Card's intransigence, and the call amounted to "a net step backward" for the White House, said a source outside Snowe's office.

Snowe contacted fellow committee Republican Chuck Hagel (Neb.), who also had voiced concerns about the program. They arranged a three-way phone conversation with Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).

Until then, Roberts apparently thought he had the votes to defeat Rockefeller's motion in the committee, which Republicans control nine to seven, the sources said. But Snowe and Hagel told the chairman that if he called up the motion, they would support it, assuring its passage, the sources said.

When the closed meeting began, Roberts averted a vote on Rockefeller's motion by arranging for a party-line vote to adjourn until March 7. The move infuriated Rockefeller, who told reporters, "The White House has applied heavy pressure in recent weeks to prevent the committee from doing its job."

Hagel and Snowe declined interview requests after the meeting, but sources close to them say they bridle at suggestions that they buckled under administration heat. The White House must engage "in good-faith negotiations" with Congress, Snowe said in a statement.

Roberts, reacting to Hagel and Snowe's actions, told the New York Times on Friday that he now supports bringing the NSA program under FISA's jurisdiction in some manner, a stand that could put him at odds with the administration. The White House has praised a plan by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) to draft legislation that would exempt the NSA program from FISA, while providing for congressional oversight.

Roberts' home town papers seem to be catching on to the series of blank checks the Senator has been writing his political masters in the White House. And guess what? The home town papers don't like it: "Roberts' credibility on the line."

Senate Intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts accused of writing the White House a "series of blank checks" in one of the major hometown papers, the Wichita Eagle: "Roberts' credibility on the line:

... From Abu Ghraib abuses to secret CIA detainee prisons to the Valerie Plame affair, critics say, Roberts has become a dependable shill for the White House, ever ready to shield Bush policy from criticism and ever willing to compromise Congress' legitimate oversight role.

A prime example: He has dragged his feet on a promised but long-delayed Senate investigation into whether the White House cherry-picked and amplified prewar intelligence to fit its preconceived goal of invading Iraq.

This week, Roberts sidetracked a Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry into the possibly illegal National Security Agency wiretap program, saying the White House had agreed to brief lawmakers more regularly and to work with him on a behind-the-scenes "fix" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. [...]

What's bothering many, though, is that Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law.

That's not oversight -- it's looking the other way.

Indeed. And the Kansas City Star is running an AP story today that shows Roberts backtracking from the NYT article Saturday saying that Roberts may seek to put the warrantless domestic spying program in compliance with FISA. More flack for Roberts from a KC Star columnist Saturday, "But there was some good news for this president. Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, Intelligence Committee chairman, promised harsher punishment for leakers. Why investigate scandal when you can sweep it under the rug — right, Senator?"

(Thx to reader LL).

The LA Times jumps on Mr. Cover Up: "THAT THE UNITED STATES Senate has a body called the Intelligence Committee is an irony George Orwell would have truly appreciated. In a world without Doublespeak, the panel, chaired by GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, would be known by a more appropriate name — the Senate Coverup Committee." More here.

Jonathan Alter on Cheney: More power, less accountability.

Eye-opening Newsweek profile of Cheney's world. The last page sticks out:

... Around 9:35 on the morning of 9/11, Cheney was lifted off his feet by the Secret Service and hustled into the White House bunker. Cheney testified to the 9/11 Commission that he spoke with President Bush before giving an order to shoot down a hijacked civilian airliner that appeared headed toward Washington. (The plane was United Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field after a brave revolt by the passengers.) But a source close to the commission, who declined to be identified revealing sensitive information, says that none of the staffers who worked on this aspect of the investigation believed Cheney's version of events.

A draft of the report conveyed their skepticism. But when top White House officials, including chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, reviewed the draft, they became extremely agitated. After a prolonged battle, the report was toned down. The factual narrative, closely read, offers no evidence that Cheney sought initial authorization from the president. The point is not a small one. Legally, Cheney was required to get permission from his commander in chief, who was traveling (but reachable) at the time. If the public ever found out that Cheney gave the order on his own, it would have strongly fed the view that he was the real power behind the throne.

Cheney spent much of his time after 9/11 in his "undisclosed location." The threat seemed terribly real. Cheney spent a great deal of time working on a "decapitation plan"—i.e., shaping a fill-in government in a horrific event in which he and the president and other top leaders were taken out by a terrorist chem-bio or nuclear attack. After the suspected anthrax attack, a gallows humor permeated the veep's office. Watching Cheney load his hunting guns into his car as he prepared to leave the mansion on a trip that fall, an aide cracked, "I hope it's not that bad." Actually, Cheney was getting in plenty of hunting—in upstate New York, South Dakota, southern Georgia and Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Cheney unquestionably exerted enormous influence on Bush in those early days. But Bush's aides say that the president has become less dependent on Cheney for advice, particularly in foreign affairs. The two men still have private lunches, but no longer every week. There are signs now that Bush listens to more-moderate voices on national security. On a range of foreign-policy crises, from Iran to North Korea, Cheney's forward-leaning posture has given way to the mainstream, multilateralist approach advocated now by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It was possible to dimly discern Cheney's shakier footing last week in the ongoing dispute with Capitol Hill over warrant-less eavesdropping. Uneasy about the administration's disregard for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court warrants to eavesdrop on communications into the United States, three Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee were agitating for greater oversight. Cheney, who has been the most aggressive defender of the administration's power to wage war (including spying) without congressional approval, went up to the Hill to quell the rebellion. For several hours on Tuesday, he met behind closed doors in the intelligence committee's secret hearing room with the senators. Two days later intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts, a staunch Bush ally, was able to put off a vote on whether to open an investigation.

It appeared that Cheney, though pale and obviously distressed by his hunting accident, was still capable of quietly exerting influence. But then Roberts began showing some restlessness. He began suggesting that perhaps the wiretapping program should be brought under FISA after all. His remarks came after the White House seemed to soften a little and suggest that it would be willing to disclose more information about the program and talk to senators about changing the law. Suddenly, Cheney no longer seemed so all-powerful, so sure of getting his way.

Doolittle speaks.

Via Suzanne Nossel, Rumsfeld aide Steve Cambone's FOIA'd 9/11 notes at outragedmoderates.org:

The released notes document Donald Rumsfeld's 2:40 PM instructions to General Myers to find the "[b]est info fast . . . judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time - not only UBL ...

Finally, these documents unveil a previously undisclosed part of the 2:40 PM discussion. Several lines below the "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at same time" line, Cambone's notes from the conversation read: "Hard to get a good case."

All the FOIA'd notes are at this link.

The Politics of Darfur Targeted Sanctions List. The American Prospect's Mark Goldberg writes, "Yesterday, I obtained the confidential annex to the January 30th Security Council report on Darfur. The annex identifies 17 high level individuals recommended for targeted sanction for violating Security Council resolution 1591. I just posted a piece on it on the Prospect’s website. [...] [Sudanese intel chief] Salah Gosh made the list. The question now is whether the sanctions committee, which operates by consensus, keeps his name there." The issue: whether the US uses its sway to try to protect Gosh, who the LAT's Ken Silverstein earlier reported has been on recent secret trips to Washington.

Update: US troops for Darfur? Bush calls for doubling of the 7,000 African Union troops there, put under UN command, with NATO participation.

All this chatter on the right about if Cheney goes and who Bush would pick to succeed him is inexplicable. Like his pal Rumsfeld, whose arrogance and incompetence have long aggravated many on the right, Cheney is not going anywhere.

LAT: "Niger Uranium Rumors Wouldn't Die." More on the case from eRiposte.

Mr. Cover Up. For those who haven't been paying close attention to the chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, the NYT argues today that Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan) is a White House toady. And this related Post piece on some legislation Roberts is considering reintroducing? It's worth remembering its fine pedigree. Originally proposed by Roberts' predessor Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) in 2001, the anti-leak legislation had an interesting coda, when it was determined that Shelby himself was the one who leaked highly classified NSA intercepts to the media, according to several reports. (See Washington Post, "Investigators Conclude Shelby Leaked Message.") Glass houses, and all that. Maybe Roberts would do better to prepare an internal memo to his Republican colleagues, and see if he can't get it leaked to Fox News.

Update: The NYT reports Saturday that Roberts may be changing his mind on whether the NSA warrantless domestic spying needs to be brought in line with FISA.

Time focuses in on a lobbyist in and out of the office of the chair of the Appropriations committee, Jerry Lewis.

Suborning withholding information from Congress?

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has opened an internal investigation into the department's role in approving the Bush administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, officials said yesterday.

In addition, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales signaled in an interview with The Washington Post yesterday that the administration will sharply limit the testimony of former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and former deputy attorney general James B. Comey, both of whom have been asked to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the program.

Why does Congress let them get away with it? More from Glenn Greenwald.

Jacob Weisberg: "Dick Cheney's Assault on the Public's Right to Know."

Gotta love Sylvia Poggioli (second item).

For me, this is one of the saddest results of the past five years of the Bush administration's blunders at home and abroad. Losing Turkey and Turkish hearts and minds.

More Abu Ghraib abuses and torture documented in photographs released by Australian TV. More from the NYT.

Go read Kevin Drum on extensive reporting now that the evidence against many people held to this day as enemy combatants at Guantanamo was faked, and what's more, the US military knew it was faked.

David Ignatius, "Arrogance of Power."

From Romenesko: "Fitzwater: I'm 'appalled' by handling of Cheney shooting"
Editor & Publisher
"Former White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater tells Joe Strupp: 'What [Dick Cheney] should have done was call his press secretary and tell her what happened and she then would have gotten a hold of the doctor and asked him what happened. Then interview [ranch owner] Katharine Armstrong to get her side of events and then put out a statement to inform the public. They could have done all of that in about two hours on Saturday. It is beyond me why it was not done this way.'"

CNN: "Man shot and wounded by Vice President Cheney suffers 'minor heart attack' after birdshot becomes lodged in his heart, hospital spokesman says." Update: Cheney's office did finally release a statement this afternoon.

Sad... Paul Hackett forced out of the Ohio Senate Democratic primary race, by Dem establishment.

Froomkin:

[ABC's Charlie] Gibson then spoke with Kathryn Garcia, the reporter for the Corpus Christie Caller-Times who first broke the story .

Gibson: "So you're just in on a Sunday and the phone rings, right?"

Garcia: "Yeah. Actually that's kind of how it worked. I was incredibly surprised. I got a phone call from Katharine Armstrong. . . . She was explaining to me what happened, giving me the details, and she kept saying the vice president did this, the vice president did that, we were all hunting. And at the end -- I mean, it's a Sunday morning, it's supposed to be slow at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times -- and . . . I said, are we talking about Vice President Cheney? And she laughed a little bit and said yes, absolutely. And I thought, oh, my God, you're going to have to repeat that story one more time."

Gibson: "She told you, I know, that Mr. Whittington didn't follow protocol, and came up from behind the vice president and didn't sort of announce that he was there, having gone off to fetch a quail. But we've talked to hunters who say there's no protocol like that and the real problem is the shooter has to be aware of where anybody in his hunting party may be. Do you know anything about hunting protocol?"

Garcia: "I don't know that much, I'm not a hunter myself, but I do know a little bit, and I do know you're supposed to look before shooting."

Garcia also described calling the White House.

"I . . . got the switchboard . . . I said, you know, I'm going to need to talk to some sort of public relations office. . . . She said, no, unfortunately it's going to be open on Monday morning. And I said, no, that's not going to work and I tried to be as absolutely dramatic as possible to get the most attention and I said: Vice President Cheney has apparently shot someone accidentally and I need to speak with someone and I need a statement. She got somebody straight away for me. It was very interesting."

How the White House and the Vice President's office are responding to Cheney's accidental shooting of his hunting companion twenty times sure speaks a lot about this White House, doesn't it? It says everything. Delay, obfuscation, defensiveness, the man responsible too cowardly, having so little character, to make a statement. The Vice President's office had the gall to release a statement about Cheney not having a proper license to hunt quail, but he hasn't released a statement to explain what happened when he shot someone repeatedly and to apologize once again to the family? What a guy.

Update:

At the White House, Mr. Cheney made no statement on Monday and remained out of public view. At the beginning of a meeting with Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, Mr. Bush laughingly told Mr. Cheney that reporters would later enter the room; the vice president left before the journalists arrived.

And the lobbyists witnesses that Karl Rove put forward to talk about the case? They of course are in perfect agreement that it was Mr. Cheney's victim who was at fault:

Ms. Armstrong and Ms. Willeford said the accident was largely the fault of Mr. Whittington, who had reappeared alongside two of his hunting companions without giving proper warning. Mr. Cheney, who was carrying a 28-gauge shotgun, had already begun to fire and sprayed Mr. Whittington.

"He got peppered pretty good," Ms. Armstrong said. "He fell with his head toward me." She said she ran over to Mr. Whittington, who had fallen, but stayed out of the way while Secret Service agents tended to him.

"There was some bleeding, but it wasn't horrible," she said. "He was more bruised."

Ms. Willeford, whose husband was also at the ranch, said in an interview after visiting the victim at the hospital that Mr. Whittington accepted responsibility for the accident. "He understands that he could have handled it better," Ms. Willeford said. "Harry should have let us know he was back there."

Wouldn't you know that just when Cheney's office decides to stop leaking, it's to fail to mention to Bush that Cheney was the one who shot the member of his hunting party?

McClellan also said Monday, according to The Associated Press, that "Bush and senior aides were told Saturday night by the staff of the White House Situation Room that somebody in the Cheney's hunting party was shot, but he said he was not told until Sunday morning that Cheney was the shooter. He said he contacted the vice president's office and everyone agreed they needed to get the information to the public quickly."

I am not sure I buy this version of events, but it's extraordinarily funny considering everything we've learned about Cheney the past few weeks. I mean, the cover story to protect Cheney now has cover stories to protect Bush.

Update: Bush knew, of course. It was McClellan who apparently wasn't informed that Cheney had been involved in the incident until Sunday morning, the AP reports. More from Atrios.

Just another partisan hack...masquerading as an ideologue. Read this.

AP: Cheney "accidentally shoots fellow hunter":

Harry Whittington, 78, was ''alert and doing fine'' after Cheney sprayed Whittington with shotgun pellets on Saturday at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Armstrong said Cheney turned to shoot a bird and accidentally hit Whittington. She said Whittington was taken to Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital by ambulance.

More from CNN.

The Sunday Green Room (annotated by Reddhedd).

Amen, Glenn Greenwald [scroll down]. (Via FDL).

Bush and Abramoff photos here and here.

LAT:

According to the secret notes of the meeting, as paraphrased in [Phillipe] Sands' book and then quoted directly by Channel 4, Bush told Blair that "the U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colors. If Saddam fires on them, he would be in breach" of U.N. resolutions.

Bush also was quoted as saying an Iraqi defector might make a public presentation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there was a small possibility the Iraqi leader would be assassinated. [...]

"The documents … indicate very clearly that neither man considered that the British or American governments had enough evidence," Sands said. "Why would the U.S. president and the British prime minister spend any time concocting ways of provoking a material breach if they knew they could prove Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?"

What was that, about loose lips?

Poor Porter Goss. ... He writes an op-ed piece decrying intelligence leaks in The New York Times on Friday, the exact same day as a story appears identifying today’s biggest leaker of antiterrorism secrets in Washington—President George W. Bush. For crass political reasons ... the president chose to use a speech to the National Guard Association to disclose details of a 2002 “shoe bomb” plot to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower ... While the plot had been revealed in general terms in the past, the White House this week arranged for Bush’s counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, to explain to reporters in a conference call exactly the kind of details that Goss claimed on the op-ed page helped the enemy. [...]

Let’s be clear on what this was: a deliberate effort to use declassification for partisan purposes.

Update: On that last point, there seems to be a lot of the reverse going on as well -- White House refusal to make available to the Congress information for investigation because it would make the White House look bad. Can classification and obstruction of justice and obstruction of Congressional oversight be used for wholly partisan/derriere covering/political purposes, e.g. not to protect national security, but to protect the White House politically? Along the same lines, can the military be recruited wholesale for GOP political events? How far will the White House be allowed to go in transforming the mission of federal government staff and agencies from serving the country to serving as an arm of the RNC?

Along the same lines as the thinking the Vice President is expressing here, 2006 GOP hopefuls shouldn't run away from the Plame matter, but run on it. They should run on the virtues of leaking classified information for partisan attack, and more manipulation and politicization of intelligence, and frankly, they should just run on deceiving the Congress and the American people to do what the White House wants and the public really has no business to be concerned with. They should run on launching whole satellite systems to spy on vegans. I don't know why Rove hasn't thought of this. Calling Bill Kristol. Update: Well that seems to be the gist of Ken Mehlman's latest.

Another scoop from Murray Waas' blog -- last Friday. President Bush briefed on Wilson's trip to Niger in his President's Daily Brief? Apparently, yes:

In court papers made public late last week, Fitzgerald revealed that there was information regarding Wilson’s mission to Niger contained in at least one PDB, or possibly more, although the special prosecutor provided no specifics of the specific intelligence information that was contained in the ordinarily highly classified briefing materials.

In a letter that Fitzgerald sent Libby’s attorneys on January 9, 2006, and filed in federal court late last week, Fitzgerald wrote: “As you are well aware, the documents referred to as Presidential Daily Briefs (“PDBs”) are extraordinarily sensitive documents which are usually highly classified. We have never requested copies of any PDBs. However, we did ask for relevant documents relating to Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife; Valerie Plame Wilson... and the trip undertaken by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in 2002... from the Executive Branch of the President and the Office of the Vice President.

“We also sought from the Central Intelligence Agency documents relating to the same item.... relating to the same items, with the exception that the CIA was not requested to produce documents in the files regarding Valerie Plame and Wilson that were not related directly or indirectly to Ambassador Wilson’s travel to Niger in February 2002.

“In response to our requests, we have received a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs. We have provided to Mr. Libby and his counsel (or are in the process of providing such documents consistent with the process of a declassification review) copies of any pages in our possession reflecting discussions with Joseph Wilson, Valerie Wilson and/or Wilson’s trip to Niger contained in (or written on) copies of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) in the redacted form in which we received them.” [...]

A White House spokesperson said they would have no comment because Fitzgerald’s criminal investigation is still an ongoing matter. ...

Via Dan Froomkin.

Re: "White House warned on levee breach on night of storm".... Doesn't this all sound so familiar?

Worth Reading: Walter Pincus on former CIA Near East and South Asia national intelligence officer Paul Pillar truth-squading the administration on pre-war intelligence uses and abuses in the upcoming Foreign Affairs:

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. "Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention."

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . . [They] felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

Here's Pillar's Foreign Affairs piece which seems to have jumped its embargo date from the looks of its circulation across the web.

NJ's Murray Waas: "Cheney Authorized Libby to Leak Classified Information." You have to admit this doesn't do much for the White House's case that we should just trust them on the NSA warrantless domestic spying all going for a legitimate, non-politicized cause, you know? If Cheney authorized disclosure of classified information to journalists in order to hurt a political foe, as contended here, isn't that the MO we should expect defines the White House standard practice?

Vintage 1985. Lorelei Kelly on the administration's latest defense budget.

More from David Broder on Republican Senators breaking ranks with the White House on warrantless domestic spying and concerns about lack of external oversight.

WaPo:

In a gag on this city's never-ending spin cycle, Hoyer (D-MD) played off the Bush administration's renaming of its controversial wiretapping program, which it recently dubbed the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Hurricane Katrina, he said, had become the Terrorist Submergence Program, and K Street would be renamed Anti-Terror Avenue. Bush poll results would henceforth be described as terrorist propaganda. As for his own party, he said it would describe close elections as moral victories and that his side of the aisle would be renamed the Party Formerly Known as Democrats.

NYT: "Cartoon fury solidified in Mecca."

AP:

Reversing course, the White House has agreed to brief congressional intelligence committees on highly classified details of President Bush's controversial monitoring program as part of a newfound openness with lawmakers.

Senior Bush administration officials spent weeks insisting they would not provide the program's details to more than a select group of eight lawmakers. [...]

But the administration changed direction, offering new operational details to the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. A comparable Senate briefing was scheduled for Thursday.

The shift came as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced he was drafting legislation that would require the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the constitutionality of the [program] ... It also came as Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., chairwoman of a House intelligence subcommittee that oversees the NSA, broke with the Bush administration and called for a full review of the NSA's program, along with legislative action to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. ....

More from the WaPo on FISA judges' concerns about the program and whether some of the warrants they authorized were built on cases made using illegal surveillance.

True Believer. Rivetting, eye-opening Rolling Stone profile of Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), who plans to run for president in 2008. Had no idea that Brownback is a recent convert to Opus Dei. Brownback, whose human rights inclinations are sincere and who has shown independence from the White House on some issues, wants to overthrow America's secular system and lead a Christian theological one. But also disturbing is the article's delineation of the sub-terra network of elitist, conservative Christian Masonic lodge-type power-brokering clubs (the Fellowship) doling out power inside Republican Washington, of which Brownback is a beneficiary and the Christian right's chosen 2008 presidential candidate.

Only getting to it today, but this Jo-Ann Mort look back at 1963, the year that saw publication of both Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique and Doris Lessing's also extraordinary The Golden Notebook is worth reading.

Newsweek's Michael Hirsch reports that John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness lives on - as Topsoil. And, Hirsch argues, Topsoil's sophistication and capabiliites may represent one of the few bright spots in a piece that opines it's not Big Brother so much as NSA incompetence and outmodedness we should be worried about. Update: For more on the NSA's technology problems, particularly with the Trailblazer program, see this piece by the Baltimore Sun's Siobhan Gorman.

Dinosaurs. Tom Friedman really lays into Cheney. This is just the end:

... Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.

"Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of "The Case for Goliath." "We have a Marshall Plan. It's our energy policy. It's a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators."

How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.

Steve Clemons has an interesting, insidery take on McCain and his advisor Mark Salter in another dustup -- this time with the director of Why We Fight, in which apparently McCain appears. What happened to the Straight Talk Express?

What They've Learned -- check out this infographic.

Must read: Mort Halperin on the President and the Attorney General deceiving the American people and the Congress regarding warrantless domestic spying:

The president was asked about roving wiretaps. He defended them and then turned to the more general question of electronic surveillance and assured his audience that no such surveillance took place without a warrant:

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.

Even if you believe it passes the "do not lie" injunction, you cannot possible argue that it passes the "do not deceive" test.

This same point is highlighted in the exchange between Senator Feingold and Gonzales:

SEN. FEINGOLD: I — Judge Gonzales, let me ask a broader question. I’m asking you whether in general the president has the constitutional authority, does he at least in theory have the authority to authorize violations of the criminal law under duly enacted statutes simply because he’s commander in chief? Does he — does he have that power?

...

MR. GONZALES: Senator, this president is not — I — it is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.

This is even worse since there could not be any doubt what Feingold was asking. Even if the AG picked his words very carefully and did not actually lie (judge for yourself) he could not have had any doubt about what the Senator was trying to ascertain and what (wrong) conclusion he must have drawn from the answer.

Halperin's conclusion: "This exchange constitutes a crime and the Judiciary Committee should refer the matter to the Justice Department and ask for the appointment of a special counsel. ... Beyond the legal requirement of government officials not to deceive the Congress is the question of trust ... When an Attorney General defends carefully crafted answers which deceive, he destroys that trust."

Worth reading: Dafna Linzer on Iran nuclear intelligence (compelling, but circumstantial) and Roger Cohen on the Bush administration coming perhaps too late to Iran diplomacy. (I hadn't realized until reading the latter that the US's ambassador to the IAEA is Greg Schulte, a very competent professional who worked at the NSC during the Clinton administration heading a task force on the Balkans). Linzer's conclusion echoes Cohen's theme:

The history of Iran's P-2s, the laptop documents and the metal casting stand out as the most troubling for IAEA inspectors, the U.S. government and its allies.

For two years, the White House has sought to convince allies of Iran's guilt. "They say, 'Yes, we agree Iran's activities violate treaties, and, yes, it does seem like they are interested in nuclear weapons,' " a senior administration official said. The differences still to be worked out, between Washington and the world, are over "the proper course of action," the official said.

NASA's George Deutsch resigns. Not because the Bush political appointee insisted NASA literature add "theory" following every mention of "Big Bang," but because it turns out he didn't graduate from college as he had apparently indicated in his NASA resume.

NYT:

A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.

Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

Knight-Ridder's Warren Strobel: "State Department political appointees have sidelined career weapons experts who don't share their animosity to arms control agreements and have placed less experienced political operatives in key slots, according to 10 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder. ... The reorganization [of the department's arms control and international security bureaus] was conducted largely in secret by a panel of four political appointees. A career expert was allowed to join the group only after most decisions had been made. Its work was overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser to former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of arms agreements and international organizations. [...] Thomas Lehrman, a political appointee who heads the new office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism, advertised outside the State Department to fill jobs in his office. In an e-mail to universities and research centers, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, he listed loyalty to Bush and Rice's priorities as a qualification. Lehrman reportedly recalled the e-mail after it was pointed out that such loyalty tests are improper." Link.

Reporter Jill Carroll has been held for one month.

Kevin Drum has the most depressing chart. The bright side? While they hate us in Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Finland, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Australia, China and South Korea, we seem to be doing something right in the Philippines and Afghanistan, and not too bad in Nigeria either.

This point made by Think Progress about Gonzales' appearance at the Senate Judiciary committee yesterday struck me too:

Gonzales was given repeated opportunities to put to rest any fears that the administration may be using the wiretapping program for improper uses. At each instance, Gonzales failed to alleviate those concerns. Feinstein asked whether the program was being used to "influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media." Said Gonzales, "Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible." Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) asked for assurances that no one other than al Qaeda or suspected terrorists are being eavesdropped upon. Gonzales answered, "Sir, I can't give you absolute assurance." Given that there are numerous accounts claiming the administration has spied on its political opponents, they have the burden of putting those concerns to rest.

Biden's question could not have been more direct. Gonzales' response made clear he is not committing himself on the key issue of whether the warrantless domestic spying program is limited to suspected terrorists. Doesn't that defy everything the administration has claimed about it until now?

It seems Insight on the News, the magazine affiliated with the Washington Times, has become pretty hostile to the Bush White House. Check this out:

... Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.

"It's hardball all the way," a senior GOP congressional aide said.

The sources said the administration has been alarmed over the damage that could result from the Senate hearings, which began on Monday, Feb. 6. They said the defection of even a handful of Republican committee members could result in a determination that the president violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such a determination could lead to impeachment proceedings.

A few articles readers have sent me recently from this mag (which I thought was on the way out?) are pushing the impeachment angle on Bush, so much so that I couldn't believe this was the same Insight, but some sort of left wing spoof or take over of Insight. But it appears to be one and the same. Watch out, The Nation! Update: More from Greg Sargent.

Tristero leads in to this Thomas Powers'/NYRB review of James Risen's State of War. The more you read, the more disturbing this whole issue becomes. What kind of administration advances its power by stealth by constantly championing a terror threat to the nation? And by doing so unravels the system of rules and laws we all understood that held our country together? The heart of the issue is not whether the terrorist threat is real and that the government should do what it can to protect the country, but that it does so in a way that protects the system of government that makes our country our country. When the administration has the choice to pursue "the program" and be subject to laws and oversight, why does it choose to insist that it is not subject to oversight or laws? And to constantly subvert a system of real oversight for sham oversight? It's hard to escape the sense that what they really want to pursue is the goal of testing their conviction that the White House is above the law, Congressional oversight, and consent of the governed, above the Constitution itself.

Update: This WaPo article on a split among GOP party liners and conservatives over the issue is interesting too.

Also check out this Spencer Ackerman piece, and Sen. Feingold here as well.

An exchange from yesterday's hearing worth highlighting. From the LAT:

Several Democrats argued that if the use-of-force resolution could be read to authorize warrantless electronic surveillance, it could open the way to warrantless physical searches of homes, people or property.

"If the president has that authority, does he also have the authority to wiretap Americans' domestic calls and e-mails under this authority if he feels it involves Al Qaeda activity?" asked Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).

"I've said that that presents a different legal question, a possibly tough constitutional question," Gonzales replied. "And I am not comfortable, just off the cuff, talking about whether or not such activity would, in fact, be constitutional."

Leahy pressed him: "Are you doing that?"

"I can't give you assurances," Gonzales said. "That is not what the president has authorized for this program."

Leahy noted that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had been amended repeatedly since 2001 at the administration's request.

"We have given you five amendments under FISA because you requested them. But you never came to us with this," Leahy said. "At least we have a press that tells us what you are doing, because you are not telling us."

In response, Gonzales gave a half-smile.

And this:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the administration's reluctance to fully brief Congress' intelligence committees on the program suggested that officials had something to hide.

"I can only believe — and this is my honest view — that this program is much bigger and much broader than you want anyone to know," she said.

As the hearing drew to a close, Specter said he remained unpersuaded by Gonzales' arguments, and he urged the administration to seek advice from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judges about what legislation would be needed to authorize the program.

He also urged members of congressional intelligence panels to review details of the program.

"The Al Qaeda threat is very weighty, but so is the equilibrium of our constitutional system," Specter said.

Nick Kristof invites Bill O'Reilly to Darfur. And we can help:

After Mr. O'Reilly denounced me in December as a "left-wing ideologue" (a charge that alarmed me, given his expertise on ideologues), I challenged him to defend traditional values by joining me on a trip to Darfur. I wrote: "You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared ... and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause."

A few days ago, I finally got my answer. Mr. O'Reilly declared in his column: "I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio. There's no way I can go to Africa."

No need to give up so easily, Bill. With a satellite phone, you can do your show from anywhere.

But maybe Mr. O'Reilly's concern is cost, so I thought my readers might want to give him a hand. You can help sponsor a trip by Mr. O'Reilly to Darfur, where he can use his television savvy to thunder against something actually meriting his blustery rage.

If you want to help, send e-mail to sponsorbill@gmail.com or snail mail to me at The Times, and tell me how much you're willing to pay for Mr. O'Reilly's expenses in Darfur. Offers will be anonymous, except maybe to the N.S.A. Don't send money; all I'm looking for is pledges. I'll post updates at nytimes.com/ontheground.

(Note: pledges cannot be earmarked. It is not possible to underwrite only Mr. O'Reilly's outgoing ticket to Darfur without bringing him home as well.)

"Imagine the furor Mr. O'Reilly could stir up if he publicized the hundreds of thousands of rapes, murders and mutilations in Darfur," Kristof writes. "He could save lives on a grand scale."

In the current warrantless domestic spying controversy, echoes of the Church committee hearings, Washington veterans tell the NYT's Scott Shane:

To read through the documents of the earlier era is to spot many themes from the current controversy: the cooperation of major telecommunications companies with the N.S.A.; the challenges of fast-changing communications technologies (then the expansion of satellite communications, now the Internet explosion); the legal rationale as laid out in detail by the attorney general (then Edward H. Levi, now Alberto R. Gonzales, who is to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Government documents from the 1970's eavesdropping controversy were posted over the weekend on the Web site of the National Security Archive, a research center at George Washington University.

The N.S.A. revelations of 30 years ago were unearthed simultaneously by the Church Committee, two House committees and the press, focusing on two programs code-named Minaret and Shamrock.

Minaret was a watch list kept between 1967 and 1973 of Americans whose international communications — phone calls and telegrams in and out of the country — were collected by the security agency

The names were mostly submitted to the N.S.A. by other agencies because of targets' suspected involvement in four kinds of activities: terrorism; drug trafficking; threats to the president; and civil disturbances with "possible foreign support or influence," as Lt. Gen. Lew Allen Jr., then the N.S.A. director, told the Church Committee. That program ended up targeting some Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists. ...

Senator Church emphasized to General Allen that he did not question the value of using electronic spying to catch terrorists, drug dealers or potential assassins, only "the lack of adequate legal basis for some of this activity."

Mr. Levi, the attorney general, acknowledged that the law on such spying was "ill-defined" but said courts had upheld the president's power to order surveillance for foreign intelligence without warrants.

Two Republican senators, Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and John G. Tower of Texas, fought unsuccessfully against open hearings on sensitive N.S.A. matters, particularly the three companies' cooperation. "I must state my firm opposition to this unilateral release of classified information," Mr. Tower said at one point. ...

But in the end, the committee reached a broad consensus on most of its findings, including on the critical recommendation of banning eavesdropping in the United States without warrants, Mr. Schwarz said.

Director of the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center resigns. Update: Some thoughts on the departure from Larry Johnson.

Does the Bush administration blame the law for 9/11? I think Bill Arkin is spot on here:

...When 9/11 came, the Bush administration reacted by blaming the intelligence and government catastrophe on legislative and procedural constraints that constrained the national security establishment. This is a central point in understanding why the President felt justified circumventing the law in the September-October 2001 timeframe.

In the minds of the Bush administration, the law prevented the CIA from speaking to the FBI, the law stopped NSA from eavesdropping on targets that might have saved the day, the law created a wall between intelligence and law enforcement, laws made the CIA "risk averse," laws stood in the way of assassinations, renditions, interrogations, etc.

This is an elaborate self-justification that dis-obligates anyone in office on 9/11 from actually taking any responsibility for failure. Shackles on the government are blamed for the event; the poor CIA and FBI were prevented from doing their work. No wonder then that the President as commander-in-chief is made perfectly justified ordering the secret agencies to PROTECT AMERICA archaic laws and procedures be damned. ...

Arkin has a different diagnosis of the problem. "I would argue that the failure to connect the dots prior to 9/11 was caused by massive incompetence on the part of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, by excessive secrecy born of government power struggles and arrogance, and finally by a massive failure on the part of either the Clinton or Bush administrations to really make counter-terrorism a priority."

Gonzales/NSA domestic spying hearing underway. Live Video here (via the Post). Related USA Today story.

Update: Glenn Greenwald is liveblogging the hearing.

Modify the FISA law if needed, argues the Post:

...Why not at least get behind closed doors with lawmakers and try? The administration's answer seems to be: Why bother? But there are two good reasons to bother. First, outside oversight -- the kind of careful, reliable review that the FISA court has provided in other cases -- is critical. The administration assures the public that it has put ample safeguards in place. But history shows that, without outside oversight, surveillance tends to fall prey to sloppiness and insensitivity to civil liberties. Second, as much as this administration resists any incursion on its autonomy, a congressionally sanctioned, judicially reviewed program of warrantless surveillance would enjoy far more public confidence.

Cunningham sentencing delayed.

An interesting Boston Globe interview with public radio host Chris Lydon, that touches on the issue of the paradox of a more democratic Internet media coexisting with what seems to be an almost shortcircuiting of real democracy. Lydon: "...The rise of blogging comes with the still mysterious collapse of traditional voices around the war in Iraq, the inexplicable silence in Congress and big media around what had folly written all over it. Where are the grownups, I wondered, the people with memory? It will take more than our lifetimes to see, in perspective, whether the blossoming of individual voices was associated with the corruption of public space. I don't know. The great paradox of our time is that the information age is also the age of Fox News, and the mass herding of idiots."

Worth reading: The LAT's David Savage on the power of a president in a democracy. Clip from letter of fourteen legal scholars to the president cited in the piece: "One of the crucial features of a constitutional democracy is that it is always open for the president — or anyone else — to seek to change the law," they said. "But it is also beyond dispute that in such a democracy, the president cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable."

WaPo: Number of warrants sought as a result of the approximately 5,000 US persons spied upon without a warrant? Fewer than ten. Legal standard for probable cause? One out of two. "The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be 'right for one out of every two guys at least.'" Update: Specter believes the program illegal. (Fixed link).

Saudi Arabia behind cartoon outrage campaign? More pointing a bit away from this theory.

The San Diego Union-Tribune on the modus operandi of alleged Cunningham co-conspirator #1, Brent Wilkes. And Wilkes' biggest financial beneficiarcy of legal campaign contributions wasn't Cunningham. It was John Doolitte.

Newsweek: Plame was still covert.

New Libby papers released and Libby defense fund detailed.

The Nation's Jeremy Scahill on more connections between Cunningham alleged co-conspirator Brent Wilkes and the DeLay-connected Alexander Strategy Group:

...A Nation investigation has revealed that, before Wilkes hired ASG to help him grease the Congressional wheels, he enlisted the services in September 1999 of a rookie lobbyist named Patrick McSwain. It was an interesting choice. Until August 1999 McSwain was Duke Cunningham's trusted chief of staff. It is a federal crime for a departed senior Congressional staffer to lobby his former boss for one year after leaving. A review of Congressional lobbying records indicates that the day after leaving Cunningham's staff, on August 9, 1999, McSwain registered as a lobbyist for defense giant General Dynamics, which received $33.2 billion in contracts from 1998 to 2003--mostly no bid contracts. On the registration form, McSwain specifically indicates his intent to lobby on the Defense Appropriations Bill of 2000. Cunningham had enormous control over that bill, serving not only on the Defense and Appropriations committees but also on the conference committee reviewing the bill. Alex Knott, head of the Center for Public Integrity's LobbyWatch, says, "There's a strong chance" McSwain violated federal law. "It would have been extremely hard to lobby on a bill that went before Representative Cunningham in so many areas and not have any correspondence with him or his staff," he says. A month after his departure from Cunningham's office, McSwain signed up, as his second client ever, Wilkes's ADCS. And it was that same year, 1999, that Wilkes, flush with contracts won largely through his greasing of Cunningham, came into serious money, buying two new homes, one for $1.5 million. Did his new lobbyist--former chief of staff to his sugar daddy--have anything to do with this? ...

The NYT's Scott Shane on what the nation's top intelligence officials may not have shared with Congress:

Mr. Negroponte's careful recitation of the threats facing the nation, including terrorism, Iran and North Korea, included few surprises. But as soon as senators were permitted to question him and his colleagues, an emotional debate quickly ensued over the conduct of the intelligence agencies and the proper degree of public and Congressional knowledge of their activities.

In one pointed exchange, Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat, asked Mr. Negroponte whether there were any other intelligence programs that had not been revealed to the full intelligence committees.

The intelligence chief hesitated, then replied, "Senator, I don't know if I can answer that in open session."

A similarly revealing sparring session came when Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, pressed the intelligence officials about whether a controversial Pentagon data-mining program called Total Information Awareness had been effectively transferred to the intelligence agencies after being shut down by Congress.

Mr. Negroponte and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, both said they did not know. Then came the turn of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who headed N.S.A. for six years before becoming the principal deputy director of national intelligence last spring.

"Senator," General Hayden said, "I'd like to answer in closed session."

I thought intelligence activities not being reported to the proper Congressional oversight committes constituted an unauthorized covert action?

More from ThinkProgress and Noah Shachtman.

Ari Berman has a newsy article on Abramoff, Guam and the DOJ.

"Nevermind" on the "addicted to oil" bit. Energy Secretary via Knight Ridder: "One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally."

Traveling, posting will be a bit sporadic.

Oh, That Memo. Murray Waas has another little blockbuster, on Cheney, Iraq and Niger yellowcake:

Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that the allegations were untrue.

The campaign against Joseph Wilson continued even after the CIA concluded that Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger.

CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly classified memo on June 17, 2003, "We no longer believe there is sufficient" credible information to "conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad." The memo was titled: "In Response to Your Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on Iraq's Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad."

Despite the CIA's findings, Libby attempted to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims, which he concluded were baseless. ...

Update: eRiposte of the Left Coaster has comment and analysis on this piece:

... the SSCI Report actually misled on who exactly was briefed on the CIA memo. The SSCI Report said it was a CIA internal memo that got no distribution outside the CIA. As I discussed last year, you had to look at one of the hundreds of footnotes in the Robb-Silberman report to find out that Congress was also briefed on it.

Second, Waas’ article does not mention when exactly Libby was briefed. It says “only days after” – and may leave some ambiguity about what he knew when he spoke to Judith Miller on the validity of the uranium claim. However, if you look at Miller’s write-up it becomes clear he was peddling the validity of the uranium claim to Miller, well after when he must have been briefed on the CIA memo. ...

The Hill:

The staff member who tracks defense appropriations for Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is a military officer on the Pentagon’s payroll, an apparent violation of House rules and a possible conflict of interest.

Marine Lt. Col. Carl Kime works as an appropriations associate in Lewis’s personal office, according to his business card. The aide’s service appears to violate two provisions of the House members’ congressional handbook: that detailees are supposed to serve committees for only one year and that they are not allowed to be assigned to members’ personal offices.

Amazing how anomalies like this are discovered only now. And it makes one wonder about Cunningham's staff as well, particularly on the Appropriations and Intelligence committees.

Check out Slate's Dahlia Lithwick on "what's so scary about Bush's signing statements."