Frank Rich: "The facts of Iraq are not in dispute. But the truth is that facts don’t matter anyway to this administration, and that’s what makes this whole N.I.E. debate beside the point. From the start, honest information has never figured into the prosecution of this war. The White House doesn’t care about intelligence, good or bad, classified or unclassified, because it believes it knows best, regardless of what anyone else has to say. The debate over the latest N.I.E. or any yet to leak will not alter that fundamental and self-destructive operating principle. That’s the truly bad news."

From the NYT: "Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said any [House] leader who had been aware of Mr. Foley’s behavior and failed to take action should step down. 'If they knew or should have known the extent of this problem, they should not serve in leadership,' Mr. Shays said. On Saturday night, the House Republican leadership issued a joint statement that characterized the communications between Mr. Foley and the former page as 'unacceptable and abhorrent.'" Perplexing then that so many in the House leadership seem to have known about Foley for months and done so little about it. More.

Excerpts from Woodward's State of Denial. Here's just one section:

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.

"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter and I sit down with him." (Scooter is I. Lewis Libby, then Cheney's chief of staff.)

The president met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw the situation through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.

In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.

In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."

He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.

Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.

He said the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn't have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That's why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.

In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.

"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."

To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.

"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.

The policy of "Vietnamization," turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. "It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers."

Two months after Gerson's meeting, the administration issued a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.

More here.

Reuters: "Iraq imposed a total daylight curfew on Baghdad on Saturday, banning all movement, as U.S. forces said they had foiled a possible suicide plot to attack the city’s sprawling 'Green Zone' government compound. U.S. troops on Friday arrested a security guard at the home of the leader of the main Sunni political bloc. The U.S. military said on Saturday the man was suspected of planning car bomb attacks on the fortified zone. 'Coalition force personnel detained an individual at the residence of Dr Adnan al-Dulaimi in Baghdad Sept. 29. The detained individual is suspected of involvement in the planning of a multi-vehicle suicide operation inside Baghdad’s International Zone,' the military said in a statement."

WP:

[Woodward's] book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they said, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

What a depressing photo.

Ashton Gardner, 6, of Ellsworth, Me., with a cutout of his father, Troy, who is stationed in Iraq.
(Credit: Linda Coan O'Kresik for NYT).

From a Hill veteran reader:

When historians look back on the 2006 midterms and the Democratic sweep of both the House and Senate, they will look back on Friday, September 29th as the day that sealed the GOP's fate:

-- The Mark Foley resignation is huge. It turns a safe GOP seat into a seat that is now a likely Democratic pickup, and will demand at a minimum party resources that Ken Mehlman would have wanted to deploy elsewhere. You take the Foley seat and add it to the Delay, Ney, and Kolbe seats, those are four seats where GOP incompetence and scandal has converted from sure GOP seats to likely Dem pickups (the Kolbe seat is where Jim Kolbe is retiring and a KKK symphathizer is the GOP nominee).

More importantly, as unfair as it is, this scandal will resonate along the lines of the House banking scandal and free ice deliveries that doomed the Dems in 1994. The party of family values had a Member in its leadership who was inveighing against Internet porn at day, but using it to communicate with minors at night. This is bad, bad, bad for the GOP image;

-- The Woodward book will suck up all the oxygen on TV and talk radio for the next week; a whole week of "free media" for the Dem argument that the Bushies have irrevocably screwed up Iraq; any GOP focus on terrorism next week will be lost;

-- Finally, rumors tonight (reported on NBC News) of a possible military coup in Baghdad, prompting the sudden imposition of a citywide curfew.

I was retaining skepticism on Dem prospects until today. But this is it -- the GOP is in for a shellacking on November 7th.

Update: The NBC Nightly News video has the report of an alleged Iraqi military coup plot, which supposedly did not get beyond the planning stage. Didn't we already know about this?

From a reader who covers the White House, "It's hard to overstate how frantically the White House has swung into damage control in response to the NIE on terrorism. It's the biggest deal here this week - not the escalation in Bush's rhetoric on terrorism, not Abramoff, not Bob Woodward's new book, not the housing picture. Bush has not discussed Iraq without trying to spin the NIE. For quite some time, we'd heard Bush use his speeches to challenge the idea that attacking Iraq had stirred up a "hornet's nest." And he'd been offering up variations on "some say Iraq made terrorism worse, I disagree." Now we know who "some" were: The US intelligence community."

Florida Rep. Mark Foley resigns over inappropriate messages to underage male pages. "Full details will be included in a report tonight on ABC World News with Charles Gibson." So what happens to his seat? More from Chris Cillizza.

WP: Sen. George Allen comments now offend the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The House Government Reform committee has released hundreds of emails from its Abramoff investigation. The investigation reveals 485 contacts between team Abramoff and the Bush White House. Via Muckraker, one email reveals Rove killed an interior department nomination at the request of Abramoff. Is that a quid pro quo? Or just a favor?

Update: Skimming these, this is shocking stuff. The buying of influence at pretty high levels of the White House. And so sloppy! Check out page 13 of the .pdf here. Abramoff to his staffer, Kevin Ring. "Dammit. It was sent to Susan [Ralston, Rove's aide] on her mc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system." Ring to Abramoff: "Your email to Susan was forwarded to .... She said it it is better not to put this stuff in writing in their [the White house] email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be law suits, etc. Who knows?" They seem to express knowledge of potentially improper or illegal activity as it was happening.

The email on page 16 is kind of funny. From Abramoff staffer Kevin Ring to Team Abramoff, subject line: Problem at White House. "Just wanted to let everyone know of a disturbing problem I just learned about at the White House. The Intergovernmental Affairs Office just had their ethics briefing and when it was all said and done, they concluded that they should NEVER call lobbyists anymore." Oops. "Will call tribes directly." Then Mr. Ring proposes a solution. "I am going to have lunch with Susan Ralston this week and will explain the problem to her. ..."

Ralston to Abramoff March 11, 2003: "We have some guests coming to town Fri, 3/28 and Sat 3/29. Anything going on at the MCI Center?" Abramoff promptly responds.

Email page 43, Ring gets some Camden Yards opening day tickets for White House staffers Jim Wilkinson (2), and Jennifer Farley (2). A few pages later, Farley while still at the WH lets Team Abramoff know she might be interested in a job.

Woodward via the Post: Card urged White House to replace Rumsfeld. Twice. The second time with the support of Laura Bush. "Card tried again around Thanksgiving, 2005, this time with the support of First Lady Laura Bush, who according to Woodward, felt that Rumsfeld's overbearing manner was damaging to her husband. Bush refused for a second time, and Card left the administration last March, convinced that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam and that history would record that no senior administration officials had raised their voices in opposition to the conduct of the war."

Kazakh prez at the White House. Borat is here too, according to Atrios, holding a press conference outside the Kazakh embassy. More.

Via Atrios, Woodward's new book, State of Denial:

The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq. [...]

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

And this:

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

And what is Cheney's source for coordinates for nonexistent WMD stockpiles in Iraq? Seriously, if you watched Cheney on Tim Russert the other week, you start to wonder if someone is briefing the vice president on intelligence reports that do not appear to be coming from the known US services. He seems to be being briefed from a totally different stream of intelligence. It's quite disturbing. He doesn't seem fully aware even now how much the public analysis of US reports contradicts what he seems to believe is true (for instance, he still seems convinced about Atta in Prague, even though, US intel services that we at least know about contradict that according to the new Senate Select Intel committee Phase II report).

More from David Sanger on what Woodward's book has to say about Cheney's personal role in the search for nonexistent WMD in Iraq:

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

The book will be excerpted in the Post starting Monday.

Update: Blogger Jonathan Schwarz sends this along. "This sounds like something that also appears in Hubris by Corn & Isikoff. Pages 303-4...":

Cheney's office wakes Kay up in the middle of the night, with a highly sensitive communications intercept that had captured a snippet of conversation between two unidentified people. Cheney's aides were reading raw transcripts straight from the National Security Agency. And a Cheney staffer who had gotten hold of this piece of unanalyzed intelligence thought that it contained a reference to a WMD storage site in Iraq, even though the captured exchange didn't specifically mention weapons. What made this intercept most promising was that it had come with geographic coordinates for one of the unidentified persons...The next morning, [Kay's] analysts checked the coordinates and discovered they referred to a site in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon—not anywhere in Iraq. This was no lead...[j]ust as Cheney and Libby had done before the war, the vice president's aides were rummaging through top secret, unprocessed intelligence in the hope of discovering what everyone else in the U.S. government had missed.

...The signals intercept was not the only intelligence tip Cheney's office urgently passed on to Kay. On another occasion, the vice president's aides sent a message to Kay and the ISG: check out this overhead photograph. It showed what looked like the opening of a tunnel on the side of a hill in Iraq. This could be where the WMD were hidden, Cheney's office said—in caves.

When Kay and several of his analysts took a look at the photo, they burst out laughing. They knew exactly what was in the picture. It was a common practice for local farmers to use bulldozers to dig trenches into the sides of hills. Because the water table was fairly high, these trenches would fill with water and become sources of drinking water for cows..."Anyone who has spent any time on the ground in Iraq immediately would recognize these as cuts that the local population made to get to ground water for their animals," Kay said later. "We reported back that we had looked at it and it was not what you thought it was. There was no point humiliating them."

The Veep's office. Historians will have their hands full.

Can the House and Senate lay waste to the Constitution before recess? Can the same lawmakers berating HP for its leak investigation tactics be imposing them on the whole country?

NYT, Abramoff lobbied Rove, a lot:

Mr. Rove has described Mr. Abramoff as a “casual acquaintance,” but the records obtained by the House committee show that Mr. Rove and his aides sought Mr. Abramoff’s help in obtaining seats at sporting events, and that Mr. Rove sat with Mr. Abramoff in the lobbyist’s box seats for an N.C.A.A. basketball playoff game in 2002.

After that game, Mr. Abramoff described Mr. Rove in an e-mail message to a colleague: “He’s a great guy. Told me anytime we need something just let him know through Susan.” The message was referring to Susan Ralson, Mr. Abramoff’s former secretary, who joined the White House in February 2001 as Mr. Rove’s executive assistant.

Ms. Ralston, who did not return phone calls seeking comment Thursday, was lobbied scores of times by Mr. Abramoff and his partners, the report found, and was instrumental in passing messages between Mr. Abramoff and senior officials at the White House, including Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman.

Mr. Mehlman, now chairman of the Republican National Committee, was then a senior White House political strategist. A national committee spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt, said Thursday that in Mr. Mehlman’s White House job, “it was not unusual” that he “would be in contact with supporters who had interest in administration policy.”

In October 2001, the report said, Mr. Abramoff asked the White House to withhold an endorsement from a Republican candidate for governor of the Northern Marianas Islands, an American commonwealth in the western Pacific where Mr. Abramoff had clients; Mr. Abramoff was backing another candidate.

On Oct. 31, 2001, the report said, Ms. Ralson sent an e-mail message to Mr. Abramoff that read: “You win :) KR said no endorsement.”

In March 2002, the report said, Mr. Abramoff contacted Ms. Ralson to offer tickets to Mr. Rove and his family for use of a skybox during the N.C.A.A. tournament at the MCI Center in Washington.

“Hi Susan,” Mr. Abramoff wrote in an e-mail message.” I just saw Karl and mentioned the N.C.A.A. opportunity, which he was really jazzed about. If he wants to join us in the Pollin box, please let me know as soon as you can.”

Ms. Ralston replied: “Karl is interested in Fri. and Sun. 3 tickets for his family?” [...]

The report cited numerous e-mail messages in which Mr. Abramoff referred to Mr. Rove and his visits to Signatures, a Washington restaurant owned by Mr. Abramoff.

On learning in July 2002 that Mr. Rove planned to dine at Signatures with a party of 8 to 10 people, Mr. Abramoff wrote to a colleague: “I want him to be given a very nice bottle of wine and have Joseph whisper in his ear (only he should hear) that Abramoff wanted him to have this wine on the house.” In another e-mail message, Mr. Abramoff directed his restaurant staff to “please put Karl Rove in his usual table.”

More from the Post.

NYT: "The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated. [...] The legislation sets up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to prosecute high-level terrorists including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime. [...] Even some Republicans who said voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the habeas corpus provision, ultimately sending the legislation right back to Congress."

A British Ministry of Defense document obtained by the BBC reflects some of the grim analysis of recent US intelligence community reporting on Iraq and the global war on terror. Among the document's findings:

The Al Qaeda ideology has taken root within the Muslim world and Muslim populations within western countries. Iraq has served to radicalise an already disillusioned youth and Al Qaeda has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology to act.

British Armed Forces are effectively held hostage in Iraq - following the failure of the deal being attempted by COS (Chief of Staff) to extricate UK Armed Forces from Iraq on the basis of 'doing Afghanistan' - and we are now fighting (and arguably losing or potentially losing) on two fronts.

The West will not be able to find peaceful exit strategies from Iraq and Afghanistan - creating greater animosity...and a return to violence and radicalisation on their leaving. The enemy it has identified (terrorism) is the wrong target. As an idea it cannot be defeated.

The document, which the Ministry of Defense has told the BBC was written by a junior official and has sought to downplay, says that Pakistan's ISI supports terror groups and "should be dismantled."

Columbia U's Michael Roston says President Bush may use a presidential signing statement issued last year to authorize payment of a salary to UN ambassador John Bolton even after a second recess appointment.

The NYT reports on the timing of the release to Congress of the Iraq NIE. Update: Senators Reid/Schumer/Durbin letter to President Bush: "We are growing increasingly concerned about reports that your Administration is withholding important information about the war in Iraq from the American public. In order to succeed in Iraq and the war on terror, the Congress and the American people need and deserve the truth. We received an important part of the truth this week when you decided to declassify a portion of the intelligence community’s National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism. Congress requested a similar intelligence assessment on Iraq nearly three months ago. Given the stakes in Iraq, we believe the American people deserve to see the results of this assessment as soon as possible."

Soli Ozel: "Prelude to war, or Diplomacy? Reflections on the 'sixth war'."

WSJ: Cancel the NIEs.

WP: American commanders question political will of Iraqi prime minister. Ann Garrels on NPR: More suicide bombing attacks in Iraq last week than at any time since the US invasion. AP: "The bodies of 40 men who been tortured were found in the capital in a span of 24 hours, police said Thursday.[....] The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said Wednesday that murders and execution-style killings are the No. 1 cause of civilian deaths in Baghdad."

Newsweek: "White House ... mischaracterizes intelligence-community assessments in politically useful ways."

... Even yesterday, after four pages of the NIE were declassified and released, White House counterterrorism adviser Frances Fragos Townsend continued to insist that the NIE tracked with other public statements from the administration. ... Yet that [White House terrorism strategy] document too gave no hint that the terrorist movement was now judged by the U.S. intelligence community to be larger than it was five years ago. Townsend also noted that the White House-released terrorism strategy had stated that the 'ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry.' Yet the public national strategy document left out the more significant finding from the secret NIE: that the terrorists’ attempt to use Iraq for their own purposes had apparently succeeded and that by fueling resentment throughout the Muslim world had allowed them to cultivate new supporters.

And they say two more secret studies are coming down the pike, one on Iraq and one on Iran:

The potential for political misrepresentations may become even greater in the coming months as the U.S. intelligence community completes two more documents with a potential bearing on the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism and related national-security issues. One of the studies is a broad overview of the military and political situation in Iraq; the other is an up-to-date assessment of the progress—or lack thereof—that the government of Iran is making in its alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons. [...]

Indications are that whenever the new Iraq NIE is complete, it will not offer much optimism for Bush administration policymakers. Like the newly released NIE on terrorism, the upcoming intelligence estimate on Iraq is likely to contrast with public pronouncements of progress from the White House. In secret papers and briefings over the last 18 months, intelligence professionals have repeatedly portrayed a bleak picture in which disorder in Iraq appears to be growing rather than receding.

More from the NYT: "Dispute on Intelligence Report Disrupts Republicans’ Game Plan."

Zogby: "Republicans made some headway on Democrats in hotly contested Senate races, but the races are tight, while Democrats seem on track to reverse the balance of power in the statehouses." NYT: "Six weeks before Election Day, the Democrats suddenly face a map with unexpected opportunities in their battle for control of the Senate."

From a reader, this excerpt from the Monday hearing with General John Batiste, former chief military advisor to then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. North Carolina Republican Walter Jones is asking Batiste about the creation of the office of special plans:

JONES: I want to start with you, General Batiste, if I may. You were at the Pentagon, I think you said you left in 2002, is that correct?

BATISTE: Yes, sir, in June of 2002.

JONES: OK, I'm sure from time to time you might have had the occasion to meet or to interact or to have coffee with General Newbold.

BATISTE: Yes, sir.

JONES: My bringing this up is because I am just...I don't want to live in the past, I think Col. Hammett said that, we've got to move forward, and General Eaton, obviously...but.

The American people have a right to know how and why we got into Iraq...the truth.

Knowing what General Newbold has also told me, uh, meeting with him, when y'all saw the Office of Special Plans being developed...because it wasn't there inititially...I think at some time it was developed to be an advisory to Secretary Rumsfeld, and I have recently met...I cannot use his name, because he's active duty in the military now...but I recently met with a gentleman who was assigned to Secretary Rodman's (?) staff.

And how and why this manipulation of the intelligence uh, it was somewhat, the professionals were sending the intelligence and it was being re-written by this Office of Special Plans, uh, were you and others...professionals...I mean, were you seeing something like red flags, you know, "what in the world is happening here?", I mean, what was your impression when you started seeing and finding out the role of the Office of Special Plans, as an advisor?

BATISTE: Uh, it was disturbing, sir. Uh, there was a..a sense within the Department of Defense that the CIA had it wrong, uh, and wasn't gonna get it right. Uh, there was a fixation to find the connection between, uh, al Qaeda, uh, and Saddam Hussein. It went on relentlessly.

And I believe, my opinion, that that's the reason why Secretary Rumsfeld stood up this other office, uh, very dangerous thing, I think, for a Democracy, when we count on the Director of Central Intelligence to be that, that central point where all the intelligence is gathered and analyzed and there's some judgements made...uh, suddenly there's lots of people doing this, cherry-picking whatever they want, and there's an old saying, uh, "Liars figure and figures lie". So I think that one could justify just about anything he or she wanted to if you go out...go at it with zeal and a little bit of gusto, and that's exactly what in my view happened.

Recording of it here. Secretary Rodman, you'll remember, is assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs Peter Rodman, the guy below undersecretary of defense for policy Eric Edelman. And what falls under Rodman in the massive DoD org chart? As I earlier reported, the new Pentagon Iranian directorate, which is de facto overseen by Abram Shulsky, a special advisor to Edelman, and the former director of the Office of Special Plans. As I reported yesterday, according to the recently released Senate Select Intel committee Phase II report on the INC, Rodman also introduced one of the INC defectors to the DIA who later turned out to be a fabricator on quite a scale. "Source Five" as he's referred to in the Senate report (.pdf, page 92) "claimed publicly that Osama bin Laden had come to Baghdad."

The forthcoming NIE on Iraq is one that Ken Silverstein's reporting led to getting ordered, and Mark Hosenball has been reporting on for a few weeks.

Sad day. One of the best editors and just generally most decent human beings I've worked with, Mike Tomasky, is stepping down as editor of the Prospect, to write, articles and books. He'll be missed.

McClatchy: Pentagon Iran hawks complain US gov-funded Farsi language broadcasts not hardline enough. It's pretty incredible when the Broadcasting Board's Ken Tomlinson is the voice of ideological moderation.

Looks like the April NIE key judgments have been declassified (.pdf) and released.

Jonathan Landay, "Afghanistan, five years later: US confronts Taliban's return." More from the Independent.

Steve Clemons reports the Bolton nomination is dead.

MSNBC: Bush says he'll declassify parts of the April NIE.

Check out the brief, essential dilemma raised by the April NIE on terrorism.

Just out: They're back -- Iran Contra era intelligence peddler casts a new line into the Bush administration.

Senate Intel committee chairman Pat Roberts and vice chairman Jay Rockefeller call for declassifying April NIE on terrorism. (Via TPM).

The release last week of this House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence illustrated report, "Al Qaeda: the many faces of an extremist threat," shows how transparent Congress and the White House can be when they put their minds to it.

AP: "Retired Military Officers Criticize Rumsfeld at Hearing." Sneak preview. You can watch the hearing live at 1:30pm here.

Katie Couric's profile of Condi Rice on Sixty Minutes is a kind of case study in softball fluff job. How did this ever get on the air? Rice is graceful as always, but what was Sixty Minutes thinking? There is no tension, no anything, no narrative arc, just the same point made over and over again. I've never seen another serving official get such softball treatment from a serious news show. Rice was almost beaming with the Nerf-ball questions. How much of a true believer are you? Wonderful. So, you're really a true believer, aren't you? Tell me again how your life story has made you a true believer. ... Iraq is hard, but your life story is about overcoming hardship, isn't it? .... Would you like to get married? Agh!

David Ignatius finds some common language coming from Bush and Ahmadinejad during interviews he conducted this past week in NY.

Protecting their hide. Re: CIA pushing in the bureaucratic scrummage for continued authorization of harsh interrogation methods. Occur to anyone that CIA officers may have a legal reason to be concerned should the law not retroactively legalize what they've already been ordered to do? Check out those insurance policies.

Update: See this from Newsweek as well: "As many as 20 CIA officials and contractors could face legal charges in Germany for their alleged role in the abduction of Khaled el-Masri, a German national once wrongly suspected of involvement with 9/11 conspirators, German officials say. Amid new disclosures last week by a German TV show, a Munich prosecutor confirmed to NEWSWEEK that he is conducting a probe into the people who carried out the abduction—an inquiry that could soon lead to arrest warrants. The el-Masri case underscores continuing legal threats facing CIA officials overseas despite last week's deal on a bill that would authorize the agency to continue using aggressive interrogation techniques. The White House says the measure is needed to provide legal protection for CIA officials accused of violating the Geneva Conventions. But the bill may do little to protect officers involved in 'extraordinary renditions.'" But what about for those who had command responsibility? Who authorized their activities?

Interesting. Senate Majority leader Frist on ABC's this Week: has not read the April NIE on terrorism. Come to think of it, this was the standard response by Vice President Cheney to Tim Russert the other week when asked about conclusions in the new Senate Intel committee Phase II report that he might have found inconvenient. "Haven't read it."

Interesting Eat the Press interview with the NYRB's Michael Massing.

Go read DK's intro into this oped by former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman:

The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice. The urgent timetable has to do more than anything with the possibility that the next Congress may be controlled by Democrats, who will not permit such a provision to be adopted.

Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent. The president takes an oath of office to uphold the Constitution; that document requires him to obey the laws, not violate them. A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.

There's always travel abroad to consider. Unless they can get the whole world to change their interpretation of Geneva, isn't that a concern? It would seem the administration itself is at least a tad worried about legal liability for violating Geneva domestically, so has this crossed its legal minds? This from Newsweek would suggest such concerns are not abstract.

More from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, Balkinization, and Newsday.

McClatchy speculates on verity of bin Laden death claims. Time: no evidence he's dead.

Charlie Cook, "this cake isn't baked yet":

So, has this election changed or not? The conventional wisdom in Washington certainly seems to have changed in the last week or two, from "Republicans are toast" and the GOP majority in the House is history to, well, nobody's really sure.

There is no question that President Bush's approval ratings have ticked up a bit, from averaging 38 percent in July and August polls to 40 percent in those released so far this month.

But in terms of the generic congressional ballot test, there's no sign of net movement in the national polls. Three polls have the Democratic margin diminishing, three others show it growing, and the average hasn't budged at all.

Several Republican pollsters report that they have seen some closing in the generic ballot test in state and district-level polling, with "soft Republicans" coming home, though explanations vary.

Some see this as a product of partisan attacks by Democratic campaigns driving weak Republicans back toward their party.

Other explanations include an increased emphasis on terrorism around the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gasoline prices dropping and Republican campaigns finally engaging. Another pollster saw support from independents and religious conservatives ticking up a bit for Republicans.

But several Democratic pollsters claim they haven't seen movement in the generic ballot test and no one seems to see a pattern toward -- or against -- Republicans in the actual ballot tests in specific races. In some cases, Republicans are moving up, in others moving down, and others are pretty stable. No pattern is emerging.

It could be that the conventional wisdom swung too hard one way, but began to come back a little with Bush's 2-point gain.

On an actual seat count, not factoring in any national dynamics or turnout advantage for either party, the fight for the House is right about at the tipping point of 15 seats. It could be as little as 10 or as many as 20, but a seat count of 15 is at the top of the bell curve of likely outcomes.

But for me, and many other analysts who have seen other elections that demonstrated characteristics like this one (e.g., 1994, 1982 and 1974), the upper end of that range seems more likely (or even higher). Why? Republican voters seem to be considerably less motivated than Democratic voters, there's a strong chance that there will be no losses of seats currently held by Democrats to offset gains, and a diminished financial advantage by the national Republican committees over their Democratic counterparts, just to name a few. [...]

Simply put, if this election has reached an inflection point or a shift in momentum, there's not much evidence of it yet. There's been a 2-point increase in the president's approval rating, from 1 point below where President Clinton was in mid-August and early September 1994 according to Gallup polling (39 percent), to 1 point above it.

Rand Beers and Leslie Gelb introduce their new National Security Network at the National Press Club Tuesday morning at 930am.

From the NYT, Hezbollah chief leads huge rally.

Columbia University withdraws invitation to Ahmadinejad.

I've been briefly in NY on the sidelines of the UN-Ahmadinejad hoopla, at another West Wing-style hoopla, the Clinton Global Initiative, which has raised over $5 billion in commitments over the past couple days to support programs to reduce global poverty, protect the environment, and foster dialogue across religious and ethnic groups. Am under the gun at the moment so temporarily deferring to the many other news and blog accounts of the event -- including here, here, here and here.

"Senators Snatch Defeat From Jaws of Victory: U.S. to be First Nation to Authorize Violations of Geneva." Marty Lederman on Senate-White House torture compromise. More analysis from Lederman here, and from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings.

The Defense Department's Inspector General concludes (.pdf) that Able Danger never identified Mohammed Atta. The claim had been made by Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon. Update: "After the Pentagon debunked Able Danger, Weldon accused them of meddling in the congressional election," writes a contact in the district. More here and here. Weldon: "Acting in a sickening bureaucratic manner, the DOD IG cherry-picked testimony from witnesses in an effort to minimize the historical importance of the Able Danger effort."

NYT: the FBI spied on John Lennon. And the timing of the surveillance had an eerie tie-in to Nixon's electoral concerns:

The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics. At the time of the John Sinclair rally, there was talk that Lennon would join a national concert tour aimed at encouraging young people to get involved in the politics — and at defeating President Nixon, who was running for re-election. There were plans to end the tour with a huge rally at the Republican National Convention.

The F.B.I.’s timing is noteworthy. Lennon had been involved in high-profile antiwar activities going back to 1969, but the bureau did not formally open its investigation until January 1972 — the year of Nixon’s re-election campaign. In March, just as the presidential campaign was heating up, the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to renew Lennon’s visa, and began deportation proceedings. Nixon was re-elected in November, and a month later, the F.B.I. closed its investigation.

"Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds," the piece concludes. "They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power."
(More information on the film, opening next week, here).

Sound familiar? I reported the gist of this piece in May.

The head of the CIA's directorate studying political Islam recently retired after fifteen years, and granted his first interview to Harpers. To the question, what accounts for the failure of American policy in Iraq?, Emile Nakhleh replies:

The main reason for our failure in Iraq was not looking at the “morning after.” It was obvious that the military campaign would succeed, but there was also an ideological view among some administration officials that we would be received as liberators. Those people did not understand that just because the Iraqis hated Saddam, that didn't mean they would like our occupation.

Iraq was more complex than just Saddam. We should have learned from the experience of the British in the 1920s, when modern Iraq was created—namely, that bringing in outside leaders would not work. People expressed views about the need to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq, about the potential for sectarian violence and the rise of militias, about the fact that the Shiites would want to rise politically. These were not minority views in the intelligence community, but the administration ended up listening to other voices. The focus was on invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam, and after that everything would be fine and dandy.

Just out: a piece on the Curt Weldon-Joe Sestak race.

"Amateur hour." Thomas Ricks on the road to disillusion for one Army reservist and counterterrorism specialist in Iraq.

Ideology poor criteria for war planning and post-war reconstruction, it turns out.

Terry Gross's interview with Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, who believes Armageddon is coming soon, is extraordinary. Doesn't sound like Rice's "birth pangs of a new Middle East" was an improvised statement, but code meant to nod to these folks. He also believes that the people of New Orleans were punished by God with hurricane Katrina because the city was going to host a gay pride parade and was awash in sin.

Reuters: Faulty Canadian intel, US administration policies led to torture of innocent man. More here, and from the Globe & Mail. Writes LS, "The contrast between the way the Canadians are treating this case, and the way the US is treating comparable cases is stark and stunning." Update: Interesting timing for the Canadian revelations, given the debate on Bush's torture bill. From the NYT: "American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home."

"Prepare to deploy." Time reports on US naval preparations in the Persian Gulf. Such orders may in the short term have more to do with planning to prevent possible effort by Iran to close the straits of Hormuz, in the event of sanctions.

Interesting Warren Strobel/John Walcott piece on an eerie echo of phony pre-war Iraq intelligence from discredited exile groups and figures being injected into the system via unconventional US government offices, this time on Iran:

...The situations with Iran now and Iraq four years ago, when Bush and his aides were making the case for war, aren't completely parallel.

Even officials and foreign countries that were skeptical about Iraq agree that Iran is probably seeking a nuclear weapon. And there is widespread consensus that Tehran is the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

But there are sharp differences over Iran's capabilities and actions.

Some officials at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department said they're concerned that the offices of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney may be receiving a stream of questionable information that originates with Iranian exiles, including a discredited arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who played a role in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.

Officials at all three agencies said they suspect that the dubious information may include claims that Iran directed Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, to kidnap two Israeli soldiers in July; that Iran's nuclear program is moving faster than generally believed; and that the Iranian people are eager to join foreign efforts to overthrow their theocratic rulers.

The officials said there is no reliable intelligence to support any of those assertions and some that contradicts all three.

The officials said they fear a replay of the administration's mishandling of what turned out to be bogus information from Iraqi exiles in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, documented earlier this month in a Senate intelligence committee report.

And they nod to a piece I published in the LAT a couple months back -- that reported that a new "Iranian directorate" had been set up inside the same Pentagon policy shop that oversaw the Office of Special Plans, that produced much discredited intelligence. As I reported:

At the Pentagon, the new Iranian directorate has been set up inside its policy shop, which previously housed the Office of Special Plans. The controversial intelligence analysis unit, established before the Iraq war, championed some of the claims of Ahmad Chalabi. A number of assertions made by the former Iraqi exile and onetime Pentagon favorite were later discredited.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable declined to name the acting director of the new Iran office and would say only that the appointee was a "career civil servant." Among those staffing or advising the Iranian directorate are three veterans of the Office of Special Plans: Abram N. Shulsky, its former director; John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst; and Ladan Archin, an Iran specialist.

It's hard to imagine that this office would wittingly use Ghorbanifar directly for Iran intelligence; but you don't have to go far to find the model that is more likely to being employed. Check out how Ghorbanifar worked with Congressman Curt Weldon -- using a cut-out, "Ali," Ghorbanifar's longtime business partner. (Not that the cut-out routine was airtight. Ghorbanifar told me to check out his bona fides with Curt Weldon and his aide Peter Pry, using the name "Mahdavi" -- e.g. his business partner, "Ali."). And read the Chalabi section of the new Senate Intel committee Phase II report to see the pattern writ large -- the system by which almost a dozen fabricators were pushed forward by the INC to ply their wares on the US government, echoing and providing "confirmation" for the fabrications put forward by earlier INC fabricators; some of them have now totally disappeared, and it's not hard to understand why. Some were pushed forward by the likes of Jim Woolsey through his contacts in DOD. I would think that responsible parties in the US government, say at the National Security Council where Stephen Hadley should by now know about Ghorbanifar because he approved the original Pentagon meetings with him in 2001, would want to be very careful with what they're getting this time on Iran from places like DIA and DoD, and be pressing back hard to question the validity and chain of custody of the original sources. Update: One would also hope DNI Negroponte would be taking special care that the intelligence reports, sources and analysis generated from in particular the Pentagon gets particularly closely vetted, given the findings of the SSCI Phase II report. Negroponte needs spies -- inside the DoD.

Very interesting about Ney and Fat Man.

AP: Senate Armed Services committee rejects Bush's terror detainee plan.

Walter Pincus: CIA learned in '02 that bin Laden had no Iraq ties.

IAEA truth squads the House intel committee over its Iran pamphlet. Dafna Linzer:

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna. [...]

Yesterday's letter, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the committee's 29-page report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat." Spokesman Jamal Ware said yesterday that Hoekstra will respond to the IAEA letter.

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a committee member, said the report was "clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on." He agreed to send it to the full committee for review, but the Republicans decided to make it public before then, he said in an interview. [...]

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. [...]

"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

Sobering.

More from Kevin Drum. (Above link fixed).

Must-read: Mark Hosenball on Atta in Prague:

... Uncensored portions of the Senate report say that by January 2003, the CIA had issued two assessments questioning whether the Prague meeting occurred. In these assessments, the agency said that neither it nor the FBI were able to confirm the meeting happened.

A former senior intelligence official who was in active service at the time confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the White House on multiple occasions had proposed inserting the Atta-in-Prague anecdote in speeches by both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney. The official said that the CIA usually objected to the White House proposals. Although Bush never mentioned the Atta anecdote, Cheney referred to it on several occasions—most recently in a TV appearance last weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press” during which he conceded that the claim that Atta had a pre-9/11 meeting with an Iraqi spook had never been confirmed.

After the Czech intelligence report first surfaced, it became a holy grail for Bush administration hard-liners seeking evidence to justify a possible U.S. war in Iraq. Cheney and his aides in particular badgered intelligence officials for evidence confirming the Prague meeting and for other proof connecting Saddam to 9/11 and Al Qaeda, according to several former intelligence officials. [...]

Democrats also publicly report that an internal CIA watchdog known as the “politicization ombudsman” had looked into complaints that the administration was pressuring intelligence analysts to come up with intelligence connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda. According to the Democrats, the ombudsman told committee investigators that he felt the “hammering” that intelligence analysts got from administration policymakers on Iraq intelligence was, in the Democrats’ language, “harder than he had previously witnessed in his 32-year career” at the CIA. The Democrats also report that former CIA chief George Tenet told the committee that analysts had felt pressured by policymakers and that “The issue where there was intense focus and questioning where the analysts felt pressure was Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in a significant way before the war, as the recent Senate Intel committee Phase II report sections reiterate, but as CNN's Michael Ware's report from al Anbar made clear today, it is there now.

From Rockefeller's office:

Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV today urged his colleagues in the Senate not to support legislation codifying the NSA warrantless surveillance program until the Congress is fully briefed and can answer critical questions about the programs effectiveness and legality. ...

“As one of the few members who have received the most detailed information to date, I can say that the Administration has not been able to document convincingly the benefits of the program,” Rockefeller said, adding, “I support all efforts to track down terrorists wherever they are – using all of our best technology and resources. But, it must be both effective and legal, and it must be conducted in a way that protects the rights of all Americans.”

“For the past six months, I have been requesting without success specific details about the program, including: how many terrorists have been identified; how many arrested; how many convicted; and how many terrorists have been deported or killed as a direct result of information obtained through the warrantless wiretapping program.

“I can assure you, not one person in Congress has the answers to these and many other fundamental questions,” Rockefeller stated emphatically.

What explains the administration's refusal to date to brief apparently anyone in Congress on metrics to measure the success of this program? Principle, or they don't have as much to show for it needing to bypass FISA, or something else? More here. Update: White House-proposed wiretap legislation passes committee.

What to make of Bob Novak's latest on Armitage and what he says was Armitage's very deliberate role in telling him about Plame? I'll take a shot at it. Novak's message is that Armitage is a far more canny and calculating bureaucratic infighter who sought to curry favor with the Bush administration (by discrediting Wilson for talking on background with Kristof), even while not a true believer in the cause of the war intelligence or the war. Novak wants this exposed, to salvage his own reputation on the right, which wants to delegitimize the whole Fitzgerald investigation, prompted by his column. I do remember reading somewhere years ago that for a time Armitage hoped to be appointed the top dog at the Pentagon or CIA under Bush (maybe in James Mann's excellent Rise of the Vulcans). More from EmptyWheel.

I don't know if CNN domestic shows the same report as CNN International, but Michael Ware's report from Anbar Province today is just devastating. To see Marines choked up with tears for their miserable task and loss of one of their own as al Qaeda deepens its hold over al Anbar is devastating.

Walter Pincus:

Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee are complaining that the National Security Agency has played politics in support of the secret program to intercept phone calls between alleged terrorists in the United States and abroad.

On July 27, shortly after most members of the committee were briefed on the controversial surveillance program, the NSA supplied the panel's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), with "a set of administration approved, unclassified talking points for the members to use," as described in the document. ...

The cleared statements included "I can say the program must continue" and "There is strict oversight in place . . . now including the full congressional intelligence committees" ...

One element particularly troubling to the Democrats was the statement that there was "strict" congressional oversight of the program, because, as one senior Democrat said yesterday, committee members are still awaiting requested documents such as the original authorization by President Bush that initiated the program.

More here, "House GOP leaders fight wiretapping limits."

House Intelligence committee vice chairman Jane Harman at odds with chairman Peter Hoekstra over subpoeanaing former member Duke Cunningham. The committee is investigating how Cunningham's bribery deal might have affected the committee's work;

Harman strongly supports subpoenaing Cunningham, the San Diego Republican who resigned from Congress last November after admitting taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors and others. But Hoekstra has not agreed.

A congressional staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said that Hoekstra wanted to hear from Cunningham but was not interested in subpoenaing him only to have him invoke Fifth Amendment protections and refuse to testify, as his attorney has reportedly warned the committee he would do. [...]

Harman declined to reveal contents of the report, but congressional officials have told AP that the document concludes that Cunningham took advantage of secrecy and badgered congressional aides to help slip items into classified bills that would benefit him and his associates.

As the last point indicates, one issue raised by the Cunningham case and investigation: how many secret appropriations recommendations are coming out of the intelligence committee. Until last year, Cunningham chaired the committee's subcommittee on terrorism and human intelligence.

Am abroad for a brief reporting trip. How I managed to coincidentally book my flight to the Middle East (from Newark) on the fifth anniversary of September 11th was a small oversight, although I have to say the scariest part of the trip was Newark airport late at night. In any case, a quick perusal of the blogs suggests President Bush's September 11th speech, which I missed due to flight times, kept to the usual themes.

On the road, back online soon.

WP: "CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others with knowledge of the program. The new enrollments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the officials said. [...] The insurance policies were bought from Arlington-based Wright and Co., a subsidiary of the private Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association created by former FBI officials. The CIA has encouraged many of its officers to take out the insurance, current and former intelligence officials said, but no one interviewed would reveal precisely how many have bought policies."

WSJ: President Bush tells Paul Gigot he personally approved Khatami's visa. "I was interested to hear what he had to say," Mr. Bush responds without hesitation. "I'm interested in learning more about the Iranian government, how they think, what people think within the government. My hope is that diplomacy will work in convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions. And in order for diplomacy to work, it's important to hear voices other than [current President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's." More here. Meantime, families of kidnapped Persian Jews are trying to sue Khatami in US court. Human rights groups, including one receiving funding from the US government to track Iran human rights abuses, dispute claims made by some opposed to Khatami's visit, including Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

WP: trail for bin laden cold, and the choices that let him get away:

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2001*.

White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment on the specific allegation.

[* think they must mean 2002].

Phase II: The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the INC (.pdf).

Postwar findings about Iraq's WMD program and links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments (.pdf).

Update: Some analysis here.

Via Romenesko, this from National Journal's William Powers is interesting:

So let's assume the latest oracular visions are correct and the GOP suffers a major defeat, something approaching if not matching the stunning Democratic losses of 1994. That would be the political equivalent of an earthquake. But would it have any implications for the media? Would it change the dynamic between the Bush team and the journalists who cover them?

Absolutely. And if the media are true to form, the most dramatic shift would not be in political journalism per se, but in coverage of the most important story of this moment: the Iraq war.

Journalists like to think they are reporting just the facts, straight and unaffected by circumstance. The story is the story is the story. In fact, news is a highly atmospheric product: The way a story is presented, framed, and played (up or down) depends heavily on matters beyond the facts themselves. In Washington, the balance of power between the parties on one hand and between the administration and the media on the other is a hidden but immensely important factor in determining how the news reads and sounds. ...

A November defeat for the Republicans will change everything. If Bush suffers a major political setback, the media will feel freed up to tear into this war as they have never done before. Again, it will not be a conscious, orchestrated decision -- there will be no covert meeting at which senior editors and producers conspire to declare Iraq an epic failure. But the pack will change direction, as it always does when it smells blood.

Eric Umansky made a similar point in a piece in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review about media coverage of the detainee treatment abuse/torture issue. That the relative lack of Congressional investigation or opposition to the policy contributed to a mutedness to the coverage, as the media seek instinctively a degree of cover in the political tensions that in this case were missing:

As a result of the administration’s stonewalling, the abuse story has been deprived of the oxygen it needs to move forward and stay in the headlines. There are still occasional revelations, but without the typical next steps — congressional hearings, investigations, resignations — the scoops themselves start to lose their pop and the story grows cold. The abuse story has become what Mark Danner, writing in The New York Review of Books, memorably dubbed a “frozen scandal.” Revelations are only followed by more revelations, and readers’ attention, and a news organization’s resources, ultimately drift to other stories. The pack moves on...

Worth reading the whole Umansky piece.

WP:

Shackled and hooded, 14 men in secret CIA custody were gathered one by one from locations across the world last weekend and flown to a rallying point to await one more flight. For some of the prisoners, it was their third or fourth journey to yet another unknown destination since President Bush approved a covert plan for them to disappear into CIA facilities hidden throughout Eastern Europe and Asia.

On Sunday night, the men -- three Pakistanis, two Yemenis, two Saudis, two Malaysians, a Palestinian, a Libyan, a Somali, an Indonesian and a Tanzanian -- were sedated and placed together onto a flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They arrived Labor Day morning, an unusually quiet time at the Pentagon-run facility.

The arrival of the prisoners, witnessed by few beyond the CIA officers accompanying them, marked the end of a five-year effort by the Bush administration to conceal as many as 100 al-Qaeda suspects from the world and to shield the agency's interrogation tactics and facilities from public scrutiny. It was also the result of nearly two years of debate within the Bush White House, touched off by a personal plea from British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the release of British citizens in U.S. custody.

The debate divided the president's key advisers and kept open the CIA's "black sites" until President Bush himself, under the advice of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, ordered the facilities emptied for now, and possibly for good. ...

Definitive piece on the two years of internal administration deliberations on the move. "Policymakers including Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales who were heavily invested in the detainee program were losing ground. Meanwhile, State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III and counselor Philip D. Zelikow pushed for a major overhaul of detainee practices. ... A turning point in the debate, senior administration officials said, came 10 months later, when The Washington Post reported the existence of the secret CIA prisons in November 2005."

"Okay, fine, we admit it" -- the Weekly Standard reconsiders, as imagined by Vanity Fair.

Warren Strobel: With permission from Fitzgerald, Armitage reveals that he was a source of Plame leak.

Two sections of the Phase II Senate Intel committee report out tomorrow. Statement from vice chairman Sen. Rockefeller: "Ultimately, I think you will find that Administration officials made repeated prewar statements that were not supported by underlying intelligence." More from the Post. "One chapter has concluded that Iraqi exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, who were subsidized by the U.S. government, tried to influence the views of intelligence officers analyzing Hussein's efforts to create weapons of mass destruction."

Bolton vote postponed. Reuters: "[Senate Foreign Relations] Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, did not explain why the vote on whether to send Bolton's nomination to the full Senate was removed from the day's agenda and did not say if or when it would be taken up again. Given Democratic opposition to Bolton's nomination, all Republicans on the committee would have to back him in order to send his name to the Senate with a full endorsement. Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who is locked in a tight re-election bid, has not publicly said how he would vote." Mark Goldberg predicted the nomination was in trouble. Update from the WP: Vote postponted until at least after Chafee's primary next week.

Major policy shift as secret CIA prison detainees sent to Guantanamo. GOP v. GOP argument over White House-proposed legislation that would make admissable evidence obtained under duress in military tribunals. CIA would be able to continue harsh interrogation techniques, while new Army field manual prohibits them.

Spencer Ackerman writes: "Should [KSM's] probable trial reflect the legal doctrine of the 'fruit of the poisoned tree'--that is, will evidence obtained through torture be admissible in the military tribunals or not? McCain's Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 says 'of course not!' but Bush indicated in his infamous 'signing statement' that he thinks he has the right to torture whoever he pleases. Now Congress will face a very unpleasant question: Unless it rejiggers the military tribunals to bless torture/coercion, KSM and other Al Qaeda figures might in fact be set free by the courts. Is Bush so cynical as to force Congress into the odious position of either setting the stage for murderers to walk out of Gitmo or blessing torture? Of course he is!"

Marty Lederman writes:

As I explain below, however, that's only half the story, because the draft Administration bill would (i) retroactively legalize all the unlawful acts that were approved and performed from 2001 to the present day... ; (ii) would cut off all judicial review of U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions ... ; and, most importantly, (iii) would authorize the CIA -- and, for that matter, other agencies, including DoD itself -- to engage in what the President today euphemistically referred to as the CIA's "alternative set of [interrogation] procedures." Those procedures include many techniques that today's Army Field Manual would purport to prohibit for the military. ...

The Administration draft bill would effectively authorize these techniques by conspicuously excluding them from the list of techniques that would constitute war crimes violations of Common Article 3... and also by purporting to provide -- unconvincingly -- that compliance with the McCain Amendment's "shocks the conscience" standard will satisfy the U.S.'s obligations under Common Article 3 ...

But the draft bill would not actually identify these techniques. Such obfuscation would allow the Administration (and Congress) to nominally continue the pretense of U.S. compliance with our treaty obligations, while at the same time immunizing conduct that would appear by any reasonable account to violate the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on all "cruel treatment and torture."

On this score, Dana Priest has a very intriguing article in tomorrow's Washington Post. Priest reports that in addition to the techniques listed above (e.g., waterboarding), the CIA "alternative" techniques may also have included "extreme isolation, slapping, . . . reduced food intake, and light and sound bombardment." ... The most important part of Priest's article is this passage:

In the past year, the CIA has studied more closely the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques that it and other agencies have used and concluded that some of those were worth discarding. CIA officials have eliminated some of those techniques and, within the past two months, have begun to consult for the first time with the full Senate and House intelligence committees about creating a new list of techniques. . . . The administration will ask the intelligence committees to give it guidance to draw up a separate, shorter list of harsh techniques it might still employee under certain circumstances. The point, said one senior official, "is to make the program more durable" and not "subject to the pendulum swings" of Congress or the president.

More here.

Remember the al Qaeda "number two" in Iraq arrested the other day? Well, he was actually arrested in June:

The U.S. military said Wednesday the arrest of al-Qaida in Iraq's second in command took place in June and was the most significant blow to the terror network since the death of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said the arrest of Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, also known as Abu Humam or Abu Rana, was captured on June 19 -- not a few days ago, as the Iraqi government had initially announced.

Iraq's national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, announced al-Saeedi's arrest on Sunday, saying it had occurred a few days earlier. But Caldwell said that it was only the permission to announce the arrest that had been given a few days earlier.

CNN interviews Mohammad Khatami. Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney announces he won't provide state police protection for Khatami when he speaks at Harvard. Khatami also will appear at Georgetown and National Cathedral here in DC this week.

You may not be surprised to learn that partisan political considerations are prompting the Senate to cede its intelligence oversight responsibilities:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, wary of giving Democrats an opportunity to revisit contentious issues relating to the Iraq War, is not going to bring an intelligence authorization bill to the floor this month and may shelve the measure entirely, senior leadership aides say.

Frist has decided not to put the fiscal 2007 authorization bill — a potential Pandora’s box for Republicans in the run-up to the November midterm elections — on the September calendar, the aides said. ....

If the bill does not come to the floor before the end of the year — a possibility that looks increasingly likely — it would mark the second year in a row that the Republicans have shied away from completing the legislation after an unbroken skein that began in 1978.

Like last year, Senate Democrats are prepared to push amendments that would demand that President Bush give Congress closely held information on the Iraq War and his terror suspect detention practices. But Frist does not want to give them the platform to do so, because he considers a rehash of the war to be a waste of the Senate’s time, according to the Tennessee Republican’s chief of staff.

The failure to pass an authorization bill for two consecutive years would further neuter the Intelligence panels. Without it, the House and Senate committees would have no say in providing the intelligence community with strategic and financial guidance.

It's kind of extraordinary that an election in which the theme of terrorism is not a minor one is preventing the Congress from doing such tasks as overseeing the government agencies waging the fight against terrorism.

From the Nelson Report tonight:

Polls over the next week are not expected to dramatically alter trends in place for the past several months...namely, that far from a toss-up, this November is looking like a land-slide, for the Democrats, at the state and national levels.

Not only do staunchly Republican newspapers agree with the private comments of Republican lobbyists...the Dems will re-take the House, the only debate is by how much; they also agree that the Democrats have a chance at recapturing the Senate, as well. Probably not, but maybe...that’s the assessment of increasingly worried Republican insiders. ...

Perhaps more realistically, the professionals set 4 key factors to watch:

First, the Republican’s traditional superiority in organization and, second, redistricting, feeds number three, the tendency of well-known candidates to “close” the race right at the end (see the currently very endangered Republican senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania). And, can all this be facilitated by, four, a Republican Leadership-designed Congressional agenda focusing, very selectively, on “terrorism” and “security”.

That is, perhaps the GOP can keep voters focused on “terrorism” and “national security” in a way favoring the GOP by keeping people worried in general. If so, the Dems at a minimum won’t retake the Senate, and perhaps the House won’t be so bad. No one, at this point, thinks the Republicans can hold the House...the only question is how close, or how bad, will it be? ....

So that’s why the White House is trying to shift the focus significantly...or, rather, shift the definition of the focus...it wants the voters to think “terrorism” when they think “Iraq”, and not just to fixate on the rising US casualties, and the apparently unstoppable Iraqi domestic violence.

Afghanistan? Iran nukes? N. Korean nukes? Record opium poppy harvest? Resurgent Taliban? Listen to what we say, not what they do...

That in a nutshell is what’s behind the increasingly strident, historically dubious, campaign of DOD Secretary Rumsfeld, VP Cheney, and, more subtly (everything being relative) President Bush, to link Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Islamic terrorists, where ever and whomever they may be, into one big black cloud hanging over the heads of Democrats. ...

Nelson points to this Washington Times article today: "One of the reasons for the Democrats' reticence -- with nine weeks until the elections -- is a recent tightening in the polls." This Newsday/Tom DeFrank piece worth reading too. "President Bush and the Republicans expect a stinging defeat in November, but they're betting the terror card saves them from an electoral debacle."

Check out Eric Umansky's long narrative piece at CJR, on press coverage of the detainee abuse and torture issue.

LAT: "The number of killings in the Iraq capital escalated last week despite an American-led crackdown, with morgue workers receiving as many bodies as they had during the first three weeks of the month combined. At least 334 people, including 23 women, were slain in Baghdad between Aug. 27 and Sept. 2, according to morgue figures provided by Ministry of Health officials. Most of the victims had been kidnapped, tortured, hogtied and shot."

WP on the stepped up Sudanese sweep of Darfur: "Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor who closely monitors Darfur, said the Sudanese government is working to drain the region of witnesses as it moves into a final battle against the rebels and their civilian supporters. 'No A.U., no humanitarian groups, this is a genocidal black box,' said Reeves, speaking from Northampton, Mass. 'We're not going to get any observers.'"

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer introduces readers to Junior, America's top al Qaeda informant. He lives in the US witness protection program. "[Junior] has occasionally had trouble keeping his identity and whereabouts a secret. Once, after being stopped for speeding by a state trooper, he tried to get out of the situation by announcing that he knew Osama bin Laden personally." The FBI declined his request for a second wife. The US government sources for the piece make the point to Mayer that one of them, former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonin, made to my friend Jason Vest in a related piece a couple years ago. "Anticev, Cloonan, and Coleman—three men who have spent countless hours debriefing Al Qaeda operatives—all take issue with the kinds of rough interrogations that have characterized the Bush Administration’s approach since September 11th. Anticev says, 'Just building a relationship with a person, and knowing your subject matter, is what works.'”

Fareed Zakaria: Can everyone please take a deep breath?

It's 1938, says the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, evoking images of Hitler's armies massing in the face of an appeasing West. No, no, says Newt Gingrich, the Third World War has already begun. Neoconservatives, who can be counted on to escalate, argue that we're actually in the thick of the Fourth World War. The historian Bernard Lewis warned a few weeks ago that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could be planning to annihilate Israel (and perhaps even the United States) on Aug. 22 because it was a significant day for Muslims. ...

To review a bit of history: in 1938, Adolf Hitler launched what became a world war not merely because he was evil but because he was in complete control of the strongest country on the planet. ...

Iran does not even rank among the top 20 economies in the world. The Pentagon's budget this year is more than double Iran's total gross domestic product ($181 billion, in official exchange-rate terms). America's annual defense outlay is more than 100 times Iran's. Tehran's nuclear ambitions are real and dangerous, but its program is not nearly as advanced as is often implied. Most serious estimates suggest that Iran would need between five and 10 years to achieve even a modest, North Korea-type, nuclear capacity.

Washington has a long habit of painting its enemies 10 feet tall—and crazy. ...

One man who is greatly enjoying being the subject of this outsize portraiture is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. ....

Iran is run by a nasty regime that destabilizes an important part of the world, frustrates American and Western interests, and causes problems for allies like Israel. But let's get some perspective. The United States is far more powerful than Iran. And, on the issue of Tehran's nuclear program, Washington is supported by most of the world's other major powers. ... We can contain Iran.

Rick Santorum, Bob Casey and Tim Russert on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: But, but stay on Iraq, Senator.

SEN. SANTORUM: I’m coming back to it. But we can’t—you can’t ignore the fact that we are, we are fighting this war on multi-fronts, and Iraq is simply a front. And Iran, which is, which is the principal stoker of this, this Shia/Sunni sectarian violence, would love nothing more to see than the Iraqi democracy fail because of that. This is a tactic of Iran to disrupt the—our, our efforts in Iraq by, in fact, trying to defeat the Sunnis. So there’s, there’s no question, this is a very complex war.

But understand, at the, at the heart of this war is Iran. Iran is the, is, is the problem here. Iran is the one that’s causing most of the problems in, in Iraq. It is causing most of the problems, obviously, with Israel today. It is, it is the one funding these organizations. And is the, is the country that we need to focus on in this war against Islamic fascism.

MR. RUSSERT: So Iran now has more influence in Iraq than they did before Saddam Hussein?

SEN. SANTORUM: Just understand.

MR. RUSSERT: Is that true?

SEN. SANTORUM: I would say that they have influence in, in, in a free country where you have an opportunity to express yourself, if you will. Yes. You can probably do more...

SEN. SANTORUM: ...in that country than they would within a dic—a totalitarian regime. ....

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Santorum, leading up to the war. In October of 2002, this is what Rick Santorum said, “Saddam Hussein’s regime, is a serious and grave danger to the safety of the American people.” “Given the threat posed to he world by his weapons of mass destruction programs...” Would you now acknowledge that that was not correct?

SEN. SANTORUM: What I would say is that we have found weapons of mass destruction, they were older weapons, but we have found chemical weapons. The report was just released not too long ago that, that said that there were over 500 chemical weapons found in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator, the president has accepted the report of his two task force and said, “That the chief weapons inspector has issued his report. Iraq did not have the weapons our intelligence believed were there.”

SEN. SANTORUM: Well, there were all sorts of weapons that our intelligence believed were there. They thought that they were new weapons. So far we, we did not—we have not found any new weapons. But we have found old weapons, weapons from the Iran/Iraq conflict, and we found over 500 and the report says that there were more.

SEN. SANTORUM: That’s the—that’s a fact.

MR. RUSSERT: Was Saddam a serious and grave danger to America?

SEN. SANTORUM: I believe that Iraq was a serious and grave danger to America. I believe...

MR. RUSSERT: Based on what?

SEN. SANTORUM: Well, based on the fact that they were working—and we have certainly lots of information about the fact that they were working with other terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, and that they were, in fact—had camps that they were—while they were training Baathists, they were also training terrorists to be used. The...

MR. RUSSERT: President Bush said that Iraq had “nothing to do with September 11th.” Do you agree with that?

SEN. SANTORUM: As far as we know, that’s, that’s the case. ...

This excerpt interesting too.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me pursue that, because when President Clinton took troops into Kosovo, this is what you [Santorum] said. “President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill defined objective and no exit strategy. He is yet to tell Congress how much this operation will cost. And, he has not informed our nation’s Armed Forces about how long they will be away from home.”

Do you believe you should have the same standard for President Bush? He should give a defined objective, he should give an exit strategy, he should give a cost, and he should give a timeline for Iraq, just as you were demanding President Clinton give for Kosovo?

SEN. SANTORUM: No. Because, because Kosovo and, and Slobodan Milosevic were never a security threat to the United State of America. No way. There—I mean, it wasn’t even close.

MR. RUSSERT: But these are men and women at war.

SEN. SANTORUM: We had, we had—excuse me—we had no business, in my opinion—and I felt this today—we had no business going in—into that area. We had no national security interest. We are up against an enemy that every single day in the streets of Iran they’re out talking about how they want to destroy the United States, how they want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. We can sit back and say they’re not a real threat, we can sit back and play games and, and, and pick apart the administration’s strategy, or we can focus... ....

MR. RUSSERT: ...but what is wrong with asking—what is wrong with asking for a defined objective, an exit strategy, a cost estimate and a timeline? [...]

SEN. SANTORUM: And again, I go back to Iran. What—a big problem I have with this administration is it hasn’t been tough enough on Iran. It should not have let Khatemi come into this country and be at Harvard today. It should not have negotiated with the Iranians on their nuclear program. They’re stringing us along and they’re going to continue to string us along. We need to pass the Iran Freedom of Support Act, my bill that I introduced two years ago. I offered that on the floor of the United States Senate.

MR. RUSSERT: Should we launch a military attack against Iran?

SEN. SANTORUM: No, I think what we have is an opportunity—and again, my bill says this—to go after them by using pro-democracy forces within Iran, also pro-democracy forces outside, and to do something to crack down on that regime with additional sanctions. That’s the one-two punch. The administration so far has opposed me on that.

Beyond the to-the-right of the White House themes of WMD in Iraq and the hint that perhaps the truth is still out there on Saddam's role in 9/11, Santorum's language on an Iran strategy at the end here is interesting. Not we will "support" Iran's pro democracy forces, or we will "fund" or "train" or "assist" the pro-democracy forces, as unwelcome as even those statements may be to actual dissident forces suffering the regime's wrath in Iran, but we will "use" the pro-democracy forces, in and out of Iran. "We will go after them [the regime] by using pro-democracy forces within Iran," Santorum says. And keep in mind what Newt Gingrich, who is a member of the Defense Policy Board, said earlier this week.

Khatami in Chicago.

WP headline of AP piece: "Iranian President Wants Talks, Annan Says"

LAT headline of same AP story, "Iran Snubs Annan Over Nuclear Program"

NYT: "Iran Tells Annan It Won’t Suspend Nuclear Efforts"

The Institute for Science and International Security's David Albright and Jacqueline Shire report (.pdf), "Despite Iran failing to meet U.S. Security Council demands to halt enrichment, progress at Natanz is slower than expected."

Iran has made limited progress at its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, installing and operating fewer gas centrifuges than expected. Senior Vienna-based diplomats have confirmed to ISIS that Iran may be either delaying deliberately the pace of its work while diplomatic efforts are underway, or is experiencing technical problems with its centrifuge program. ...

Iran has also failed to install as many cascades in the Natanz pilot plant as expected. In April 2006, U.S. government and IAEA officials expected Iran to have installed five cascades ... It now appears that Iran has not begun to operate the second and third cascades at the pilot plant, although they may be close to completion. ...

It is possible that Iran's leadership has deferred installation out of concern that the facility would be a target of military strikes should diplomacy fail to resolve the nuclear issue. It is also possible that Iran has prepared undisclosed facilities for research and development of uranium centrifuges and deployment of additional cascades, although no evidence of such facilities currently operating has emerged from IAEA inspections.

The ISIS August 31 issue brief is available here.

Mark Hosenball reports on the forthcoming NIE on Iraq, expected to be released in some form to the public:

The contents of the report may have been foreshadowed in a recent series of closed-door briefings given to Congress by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon's intelligence arm painted a scenario in which Iraq could dissolve into civil war if Iraqi security forces don't soon get their act together. One official familiar with the briefing, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive subject matter, said that the picture it painted was dire, although another official—who requested anonymity for the same reason—insisted it was not entirely despairing, since Iraqi security forces were beginning to improve.

Harper's Ken Silverstein's reporting on the fact that there had been no NIE on Iraq for more than two years prompted Congressional demands for a new one. One problem, Silverstein has reported: according to CIA sources, the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte didn't want to order up an NIE that would declare Iraq on the verge of civil war.

NYT: New Jersey GOP Senate hopeful Thomas Kean Jr. calls for Rumsfeld to resign. "What compelled [Kean] to advocate publicly for a 'fresh face' leading the troops, Mr. Kean said, were Mr. Rumsfeld’s recent remarks chiding critics of the war for 'moral and intellectual confusion,' and comparing them to those who advocated appeasing Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. 'By engaging in that kind of rhetoric, this secretary has stepped over the line,' Mr. Kean said." Also, Frank Rich recalls when Rumsfeld cozied up to Saddam Hussein. NRO's Larry Kudlow: It is too late for Bush (and Rumsfeld) to make this sale. "Unfortunately, there is no political value-added between now and the election for this rhetorical Iraq offensive."

The Troublemaker. Go read recent British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray on some of the alleged human rights depravities and fictions construed in the name of the war on terror. According to Murray, the Bush and Blair administrations have been only too willing to overlook Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov ordering boiled alive all of those pro democracy activists up until Karimov put his foot down on the US using an old Soviet air base anymore. He also alleges the US has been more than willing to consume dubious intelligence procured by such methods, as Karimov justified it as countering the Islamist threat. The Post reprints some of the British diplomatic traffic concerning Murray's reports on alleged Uzbek human rights abuses that the British government has tried to suppress from publication.

WP:

The next 30 days will be critical, as many voters who have been paying only passing attention will focus on their choices. ....

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told one associate last week that he believes that the climate has begun to turn in a way that will help Republicans preserve their majorities, and GOP officials will spend the coming weeks trying to boost the president's approval ratings and frame the contest.

A pivotal moment will come next week, with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Last Thursday, the president began a series of speeches on terrorism that Republicans hope will focus attention on the one issue that offered them a decisive advantage in 2002 and 2004.

Some GOP strategists believe that the terrorism issue has lost some of its potency, in part because of the miscalculations and setbacks suffered by the administration in the Iraq war. One pollster who has surveyed the issue said, "That dog won't hunt again." But Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's campaign in 2000, is not so sure: "September 11 shifted something inside the American people, and there are some lingering doubts [about Democrats' stance on terrorism] Republicans know how to exploit."

Over the next month, Democratic challengers will also feel the heat from millions of dollars' worth of negative GOP ads. Normally, incumbents wait until the final weeks of their campaigns to launch their attacks, but party strategists are warning that to wait that long could be fatal. Democrats promise to be just as aggressive in responding, but there is a window in which Republicans have a chance to plant doubts about little-known challengers.

A Republican strategist privy to much of the polling conducted in House districts said that, at this point, it is not difficult to count enough vulnerable districts to show how Democrats can take control. But he offered a cautionary point: "I don't know of a single target race," he said, where the Republican candidate "has spent more than 20 percent of what they intend to spend. The battle is just beginning. That's what people really forget."

Given the climate, Republican candidates will be forced to fend for themselves over the next two months. "They can't realistically look toward the president, the leadership in the House or Senate, congressional action, or the situation in Iraq," one GOP strategist said. "Other than money from the national parties, they're kind of on their own."

For many Republicans who were lifted by support from Bush in the previous two elections, this is a delicate new challenge. They must use their political wits to connect with loyal Republicans while also showing that they have sufficient detachment from Washington leaders to appeal to sour-minded independents, who will probably decide the balance of power in Congress.

Via Atrios, prospective GOP 2008 presidential candidate and AEI fellow Newt Gingrich calls for supporting regime change in Iran:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich this week moved a step further toward casting himself as the conservative alternative to Sen. John McCain in a possible run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

In an impromptu speech during a Mediterranean cruise that hosted scores of conservative donors and activists, the Georgia Republican expressed unexpected skepticism about prospects of military intervention to halt Iran's nuclear program.

"I am opposed to a military strike on Iran because I don't think it accomplishes very much in the long run," said Mr. Gingrich, who supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has been a strong defender of Israel.

"I think if this regime [in Iran] is so dangerous that we can't afford to let them have nuclear weapons, we need a strategy to replace the regime," Mr. Gingrich said. "And the first place you start is where Ronald Reagan did in Eastern Europe with a comprehensive strategy that relied on economic, political, diplomatic, information and intelligence" means.

Also on the Freedom Alliance Mediterranean cruise with Gingrich was Oliver North, the piece goes on to note.

JTA: The head of Germany's BND arrives in Beirut, to negotiate prisoner release.

Michael Gordon: New Pentagon report finds rising violence in Iraq.

Iraqi casualties soared by more than 50 percent over the roughly three-month period ending in early August, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains “potent and viable,” the Pentagon noted today in an comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.

"The Pentagon distributed the report on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend, a common time for government officials to put out bad news," Gordon adds. "A Pentagon officials denied that this was the intent and said the report was issued when it completed."

Worth reading: this piece on what happened to Canadian-Iranian writer/philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo upon his release from Evin prison earlier this week. More here.