NPR. I discuss the Pentagon's Iranian directorate and a recently arrived Iranian dissident with host Warren Olney, journalist Jon Sawyer, the Washington Institute's Patrick Clawson and NIAC's Trita Parsi on NPR's To the Point to air today.

AP: Republicans scale back spending on Weldon race.

The information about the various moves came from public records at the Federal Election Commission as well as experts in both parties who track television advertising and campaign strategy. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss confidential matters in public.

Weldon, a 10-term lawmaker, has become ensnared in a federal corruption investigation. It appeared that much of the advertising money the National Republican Congressional Committee had intended for his seat in the campaign's final days would be redirected to help Pennsylvania Reps. Michael Fitzpatrick and Jim Gerlach.

The two other races where Republicans are scaling back advertising include the Ohio district that convicted Rep. Bob Ney has represented, and the one Rep. Bob Beauprez vacated to run for governor of Colorado.

NYT:

In the Green Zone, a walled area where the Iraqi government and American Embassy are located, Mr. Hadley met with his opposite number, Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie. In a statement, Mr. Rubaie said the men discussed the work of a committee established by Mr. Maliki and President Bush to speed training for the Iraqi Army.

The talks felt far away to Officer Said, the police captain, who spent most of the morning gathering bodies in the square in Sadr City. He described a horrific tableau of staggering wounded victims and of bodies missing limbs. Some families lost several members. In one Sadr City hospital, four brothers were being treated. Two died and two others were wounded, with one losing his leg, said a visitor at the hospital.

A politician who supports Mr. Sadr, Nasir al-Saidi, was at the hospital and he spoke angrily against the American military and the Iraqi government as victims were rushed in.

Officer Said said the cordon actually hindered the authorities’ ability to move the victims to hospitals outside.

One of the wounded blamed the cordon for blocking the Mahdi Army, the grass-roots fighting force of Mr. Sadr’s supporters, and in turn making the neighborhood less safe.

The cordon “forced Mahdi Army members who were patrolling the streets to vanish,” said Ali Abdul Ridha, who was lying next to his brother in a hospital bed, The A.P. reported.

Others, though, said the militia was the reason why the bomb was planted.

The bombs kept exploding, killing Iraqis in small but steady numbers. Some of the Sadr City victims were taken to Yarmouk Hospital, and there a bomb went off around 2:30 p.m., killing one person and wounding five more. In the Bayaa neighborhood, 4 people were killed and 15 wounded. In Amel, a mixed area, three were killed and six wounded.

In another assassination, Raad Naem al-Jeheshi, a Shiite who led an organization of former Iraqi prisoners, was gunned down in Dora, a Sunni suburb that American troops had swept.

The militants’ use of government uniforms for deception continued in a particularly grim way on Monday, when a suicide bomber dressed as a police officer passed through two checkpoints in the police headquarters in Kirkuk, north of Baghdad. Three people were killed, including a 5-year-old, the child of a woman who works as a cleaner. Thirteen were wounded.

Total Iraqi deaths reported for the day was 81, The A.P. said, including bodies found in rivers near Baghdad.

NBC: How Washington helped enrich the Kyrgyz ruling family, since overturned in the Tulip Revolution.

San Diego Union Trib: Duncan Hunter considering long shot run for the White House.

With his prized committee chairmanship very much in peril, Rep. Duncan Hunter is poised to announce today that he is considering a long-shot run for the White House.

Duncan Hunter
The first signal of the Alpine Republican's interest in running for president came in an interview broadcast on the Fox News Channel yesterday morning, when he said his announcement at downtown San Diego's waterfront will be “about a national campaign in '08.”

Hunter's ambitions come as a surprise to other Republicans, none of whom had an inkling that he might look to jump into what is likely to be a crowded field for the GOP presidential nomination. But even more shocking is that he would do this a week before the midterm election that may shift control of the House to the Democrats and cost Hunter his chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee. Hunter is running for re-election Nov. 7.

“To say it's curious timing is quite an understatement. It is bizarre,” said Stuart Rothenberg, the editor of an independent political newsletter in Washington. “It does suggest he figures he's going to have some time on his hands, that he won't have to worry about running hearings and fashioning legislation. He must figure one of his Democratic colleagues will be taking care of that.”

Charlie Cook, another nonpartisan political analyst, was similarly baffled by the timing. “He may not be the only prominent committee chairman looking for something else to do after next week,” he said. “But this is very strange timing.”

Hunter could not be reached for comment after his appearance on Fox.

AP: From his home in London, Ahmad Chalabi urges the US to talk with Iran.

Weldon's hometown paper, the Delaware County Daily Times, endorses Sestak. The paper highlights firms Weldon has helped with earmarks that have retained his former staffers as lobbyists. More from McClatchy.

Wal-Mart fires Republican strategist behind anti-Ford ad.

WP: Rumsfeld: 'Back off' of Iraq timeline questions.

My friends Ari Berman and Eli Lake discuss Iraq and the campaigns on C-Span's Washington Journal this morning.

Just out: Crossed lines? E-mails allege congressman's staff sought information on his opponent from the Navy.

AFP: "Argentine prosecutors charged Iran and the Shiite militia Hezbollah with the 1994 bombing of a Jewish charities office in Argentina that killed 85 people and injured 300."

Newsweek funnies: White House courts amnesia vote.

FT: "Germany will on Wednesday adopt the most radical restructuring of its military since 1945, turning the Bundeswehr into an international intervention force, according to an internal cabinet strategy paper obtained by the Financial Times. The paper, which will be endorsed at a special cabinet meeting in the defence ministry, is the product of a review – the first of its kind since 1994 – begun by Angela Merkel, chancellor, after she won office last November. It will see Germany’s military officially abandon its primary postwar task of defending the country’s borders in favour of a more robust role for German troops on international missions. The military’s most sensitive international deployment since the second world war came this month when the German navy took control of patrolling Lebanese waters to stop weapons smugglers. The military has taken part in other international missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo, for example, but has largely avoided direct involvement in war zones."

Via Muckraker, the House Intelligence committee staffer whose clearance was suspended by chairman Hoekstra last week is fighting back, filing affidavits saying he did not leak the NIE to anybody. Roll Call:

Larry Hanauer, the Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee whose access to classified information was suspended last week by panel Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), is mounting a public-relations offensive declaring that he did not leak a classified intelligence document on Iraq to the media.

Hanauer, through his attorney, has gone as far as writing to The New York Times, asking the newspaper’s editors to publicly declare that he was not a source for a Sept. 24 article concerning a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

Hoekstra, at the request of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), suspended Hanauer’s security clearance on Oct. 17 because the staffer requested a copy of the Iraq NIE just days before the Times published its story. LaHood speculated that Hanauer may have given a copy of the report to the newspaper, although he has acknowledged that he had no proof such an exchange occurred.

Hanauer has denied the accusation, and Democrats, including Intelligence ranking member Jane Harman (Calif.), have complained repeatedly that Hoekstra had no evidence that Hanauer was the source of the leak and should not have suspended his security clearance.

Hanauer’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote to Hoekstra and Harman on Friday to declare his client’s innocence, and he repeated the assertion in another letter and a sworn affidavit by Hanauer sent to the two lawmakers on Monday. ...

Hanauer says that he provided the copy of the Iraq NIE to Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, but he denied leaking the document to the media.

“I affirm that I did not discuss, disclose, or cause to be discussed or disclosed, any information in the NIE with any person affiliated with the New York Times or in connection with any story reported in the New York Times,” Hanauer’s affidavit states. “I affirm that I did not serve in whole or in part as a source for the New York Times story.”

German media are reporting that the US had been torturing suspects at the Camp Eagle air base in Tuzla Bosnia since shortly after September 11th, among them a 70 year old man, and that German officials were aware of it. More here.

WP: Voting machines cut off James Webb's name on electronic ballots in Charlottesville, Falls Church and Alexandria to "James 'Jim'". You've got to be kidding.

IHT: Sismi chief Nicolo Pollari to be sacked, and possibly charged, a casualty of US extraordinary rendition policy.

The WP's Peter Baker on the Bush White House cutting and running from stay the course:

But the White House is cutting and running from "stay the course." A phrase meant to connote steely resolve instead has become a symbol for being out of touch and rigid in the face of a war that seems to grow worse by the week, Republican strategists say. Democrats have now turned "stay the course" into an attack line in campaign commercials, and the Bush team is busy explaining that "stay the course" does not actually mean stay the course.

Instead, they have been emphasizing in recent weeks how adaptable the president's Iraq policy actually is. Bush remains steadfast about remaining in Iraq, they say, but constantly shifts tactics and methods in response to an adjusting enemy. "What you have is not 'stay the course' but in fact a study in constant motion by the administration," Snow said yesterday.

Fascinating Eli Lake piece on the twists of the Chris Carney-Don Sherwood race in Pennsylvania. You've got RNC fliers accusing Carney, the Dem, and former member of the Pentagon's Policy CounterTerrorism Evaluation Group, of producing inaccurate evidence for the war in Iraq, and Richard Perle fundraising for him in New York. The normal partisan allegiances are all so reversed that you can forgive the Sun for calling Murtha the Pennsylvania "Republican" on page 2. (He's a Dem again).

More words:

President Bush gently admonished his father for saying he hates to think what life will be like for his son if the Democrats win control of Congress in the Nov. 7 election.

"He shouldn't be speculating like this, because -- he should have called me ahead of time and I'd tell him they're not going to [win]," a smiling Bush said during an interview broadcast yesterday on the ABC program "This Week."

It follows the recent release of a book, "State of Denial," by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, which says the 82-year-old former president, George H.W. Bush, was "anguished" over how the Iraq war has played out, although he has dismissed that account.

Earlier this month, the elder Bush was reported to have told the audience at a Republican fundraiser in a Philadelphia suburb that "if we have some of these wild Democrats in charge of these [congressional] committees, it will be a ghastly thing for our country."

He was also quoted as saying, "I would hate to think . . . what my son's life would be like" if their Republican Party lost its majorities.

The two men have rarely appeared together in public in recent years. But they praised each other at the Oct. 7 christening of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier being to be named the USS George H.W. Bush, after the 41st president.

This is hard to believe:

Sudan’s government on Sunday ordered the chief United Nations envoy to leave, saying he was an enemy of the country and its armed forces.

Secretary General Kofi Annan said that he was reviewing the letter from the Khartoum government and had asked the envoy, Jan Pronk, to return to New York for “consultations.” ...

Mr. Pronk, a blunt-spoken former Dutch cabinet minister, has been outspoken in reporting on the killings, rapes and other atrocities in Darfur, the region in the western part of the country where at least 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes. ...

Sunday’s action against him was apparently provoked by an entry he made in his blog (www.janpronk.nl) last weekend that said the armed forces had suffered two major defeats with extensive casualties against rebels in Darfur in the past six weeks. He also reported that generals had been cashiered, morale had sunk and the government had collaborated with the feared janjaweed Arab militias, which are held responsible for pillaging villages and killing and raping their residents.

The Sudanese armed forces on Thursday cited the blog entry in calling Mr. Pronk a threat to national security and asking that he be expelled.

The fact that one of its top officials has put delicate findings in a personal blog has embarrassed the United Nations. When the matter arose Friday, they resisted rebuking Mr. Pronk for the practice for fear that it would appear to be a vote of no confidence in the mission, rather than just a reprimand for his professional lapse.

Questioned Friday over whether the United Nations stood by the statements in Mr. Pronk’s blog, Stéphane Dujarric, Mr. Annan’s spokesman, said the opinions were Mr. Pronk’s “personal views.”

Mr. Dujarric indicated that this was not the first time the problem with Mr. Pronk’s blog writing had come up. “There have been a number of discussions with Mr. Pronk regarding his blog and the expectation of all staff members to exercise proper judgment in what they write in their blogs,” he said.

Not to be lost in the bizarre fuss over what the State Department official told al Jazeera about the US's foibles in Iraq is that he was giving the interview in Arabic. In an administration not always known for its diplomatic tact (Rumsfeld's "Old Europe", Bush seeing Putin's soul in Ljubljana) and for a host of misstatements and misjudgments directed mostly at the American people (Mission Accomplished, Last Throes, Rove and Libby were not involved in the leak of Plame's name, the 'sixteen words," etc.), the top dogs must know how these things happen, even in English. And by comparison, it's hard for any reader of the newspapers to understand what the diplomat got so wrong in any case.

Update: More from Mark Lynch, who demonstrates that Fernandez's words have been taken out of context:

... the parts of Fernandez's comments which have been quoted extensively are mostly a throat clearing preface to saying that Arabs need to move on and talk about Iraq's future instead of 'gloating' over American problems. This is a way of establishing credibility and a reputation for candor with Arab audiences - two things that almost all American spokespeople who stick to the administration's script lack. His humility treats those audiences with respect, rather than trying to force talking points crafted in Washington down the throats of skeptical listeners who live in the region and know better. At a time when everyone in America is talking about how and why the US failed in Iraq, and everyone in the Arab media is following those American debates, how credible could he be if he continued to whistle along and pretend otherwise? ...

As the American government has struggled to retool to act on this newfound understanding of the importance of engaging with the Arab media, Fernandez has been almost a one man show. Fernandez has conducted literally hundreds of interviews in Arabic with various Arab media outlets at a time when few American officials could be bothered or could perform effectively when they tried. In the first weeks of the Lebanon-Israel war, he was the only American official to appear on al-Jazeera, at a time when America desperately needed someone at least trying to defend it. What made him effective was not just his fluent Arabic, but that he is willing to argue, to get angry, to make jokes - in short, to offer a real human face and not just a grim diplomat reading from a script. He has established a strong reputation with Arab bookers and audiences not by "bashing America" but by being honest and candid, which has in turn made his defenses of American policy far more effective.

This kind of public diplomacy is by far the most effective kind of engagement with the media. But it's also dangerous for exactly the reasons currently on display. I've been told by all kinds of old public diplomacy hands that Public Affairs Officers live in fear of having some off-hand comment picked up, translated and sent back to Washington to kill their careers. That this has become ever more likely in the internet era (along with MEMRI and the blogosophere) has a chilling effect on would-be public diplomats. Discretion as the better part of valor is good career advice, but terrible for the country's public diplomacy. The partisan attack dogs who want to collect a scalp may care absolutely nothing about how this might affect the American national interest, but I hope that more serious people do.

The State Department, and especially Karen Hughes, must back Alberto Fernandez to the hilt in this StupidStorm. If he's fired, or transfered to Mongolia, the United States unilaterally disarms in the 'war of ideas' as currently waged in the Arab media. While we do have 'rapid reaction' units coming online in Dubai and London, and CENTCOM has its own media outreach team, the fact is that Fernandez has been single-handedly carrying the American flag on the Arab broadcast media for years. America simply can not afford to lose him over a silly partisan media frenzy. And if Fernandez is punished, it's safe to guess that nobody will be foolish enough to step up and take his place and do what he did. And that will be a major loss for America in a place where it can ill-afford any more losses at all.

Hilarious.

Worth reading: Michael Yon in the Weekly Standard about a Pentagon bureaucrat censoring Iraq.

The Sunday Times' Marie Colvin: US in secret talks with Iraq insurgency chiefs, in Amman, last week.

Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday: Rumsfeld will leave after the elections, the administration will change course in Iraq. Win or get out. Surge of troops to Iraq, etc. etc.

Update: Interesting on CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, former Reagan era Secretary of State Alexander Haig:

AL HAIG, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, first, I think that this is a conflict that's essentially political. It's not just purely military. It's political and religious and ideological. And it was driven by the so-called neocons that hijacked my party, the Republican Party, before this administration...

BLITZER: Name names, Mr. Secretary. Who are you talking about?

HAIG: Well, I'm talking about...

BLITZER: Because a lot of our viewers hear the word "neocon" and they don't know what you're talking about.

HAIG: Well, they're a group of people who are ex-Democrats. Many of them hovered around the Seattle Conservative Democrats some years ago, who...

BLITZER: Who specifically are you referring to?

HAIG: I'm talking about Wolfowitz. I'm talking about Richard Perle. I'm talking about some newly-made ones. I'm talking about the former editor of the Wall Street Journal.

These people are very, very deeply embedded in Yale and certain intellectual circles. And for years, they've been against NATO...

BLITZER: But did they hijack the strategy, the policy, from the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States?

HAIG: Yes.

BLITZER: The secretary of state, the secretary of defense?

HAIG: Well, no, not the secretary of state, but he sat there and had to be a passenger on a train that he wasn't driving?

BLITZER: Was Rumsfeld a neocon?

HAIG: I wouldn't say he was. I wouldn't say...

BLITZER: But was he in charge of the military strategy?

HAIG: No, no. The outcome of the strategy was to create democracy with a bayonet.

BLITZER: Is Cheney a neocon?

HAIG: I think so.

BLITZER: So he's part of that neocon conspiracy, or cabal, or whatever?

HAIG: Those around him were, if he wasn't.

BLITZER: And they could basically influence the president and dictate to the president what to do, in terms of going to war against Saddam Hussein?

HAIG: Well, I'm not here to talk about that. There were a lot of influences on the president, but he's the president, and he's responsible.

BLITZER: So what do you think of this argument?

Because you hear it all the time, Dr. Brzezinski, that there were these group of of neoconservatives in there, like Paul Wolfowitz, who has the deputy secretary of defense; Richard Perle, who wasn't even in the government but he was an outside adviser, who were effectively shaping U.S. strategy.

Do you buy that?

BRZEZINSKI: I buy a great deal of that. I think Al Haig is absolutely right. We had, at the top a president, who was essentially uninformed about foreign policy, and then top policy-makers like Rumsfeld and, of course, Cheney who are, kind of, traditional, quote, end quote, "realists," hard nosed types.

But the guys who provided the strategy and made the argument that we have to go into Iraq, that we have to link the war on terror with an attack on Iraq, were the guys that Al Haig is talking about.

They provided strategy. They provided the argument that we would be greeted as liberators, that this would be a cake walk. And they have devastated American national interests as a consequence. ...

Philadelphia Daily News:

Throughout his re-election campaign, reporters who asked U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon about his daughter's lobbying/consulting firm got a stock answer - the House ethics panel had already looked into it and found no problems. But it was a hollow answer, according to authorities familiar with the panel ... Another question involves the date of the letter. When asked earlier about the Times disclosures, Weldon implied to reporters that he was cleared of any ethical problems long ago, in 2004. But [Weldon chief of staff Russ] Caso confirmed yesterday that the letter of exoneration from the ethics committee was dated Sept. 29 - just three weeks ago.

Update: An attorney who specializes in these issues speculates that what the letter likely says is the Ethics committee has been asked not to pursue the Weldon case while the Department of Justice completes its investigation.

New PIPA poll: Seven in ten Americans favor Congressional candidates who will pursue a major change in foreign policy.

Delco Daily Times: "Weldon's FBI 'informant' on Curt's Payroll."

While Weldon identified his source as Gregory Auld, he failed to mention that Auld has been on the campaign’s payroll since May.

Campaign finance reports filed this week show that Weldon Victory Committee has paid Auld & Associates Investigations $25,000 to conduct opposition research. [...]

Auld acknowledged his firm had a six-month contract with the Weldon campaign that runs through Election Day. He said pursuing the lead at the gym "probably was part of my responsibility" as a paid opposition researcher.

The Republican congressman has asserted that the investigation was timed to coincide with the Nov. 7 election. He said Auld’s discovery, if true, means the Justice Department was coordinating its probe with the Sestak campaign, a claim the campaign has dismissed as "laughable." ...

Much of Weldon’s story didn’t check out with Auld, who said he had heard through a man at a local gym that another man who frequently wore a Sestak shirt said three weeks ago that "something big was going to come down on Weldon" last weekend.

Auld, of Drexel Hill, said he spoke to the Sestak supporter Tuesday, but "he never said they knew" about the investigation before it hit the newspapers.

Administration moves to snuff court role in habeus corpus petitions of Guantanamo detainees.

WP: Major change expected in strategy for Iraq war:

The growing doubts among GOP lawmakers about the administration's Iraq strategy, coupled with the prospect of Democratic wins in next month's midterm elections, will soon force the Bush administration to abandon its open-ended commitment to the war, according to lawmakers in both parties, foreign policy experts and others involved in policymaking.

Senior figures in both parties are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration will be unable to achieve its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq within a politically feasible time frame. Agitation is growing in Congress for alternatives to the administration's strategy of keeping Iraq in one piece and getting its security forces up and running while 140,000 U.S. troops try to keep a lid on rapidly spreading sectarian violence.

AP: "A federal judge is ordering the Bush administration to release information about who visited Dick Cheney's home and office -- and fulfill a request from The Washington Post that was refused by the Secret Service. The request is an effort to determine how much access lobbyists had to the vice president. [...] The judge says the new request has to be honored by the end of next week, or at very least the Secret Service has to identify the records and explain why they're being withheld."

NYT: "The U.S.-led crackdown on violence in Baghdad has not succeeded, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said today in Baghdad."

Sally Quinn predicts Rumsfeld will step down after the midterms.

NYT: Tables Turned for the G.O.P. Over Iraq Issue

Four months ago, the White House offered a set of clear political directions to Republicans heading into the midterm elections: embrace the war in Iraq as critical to the antiterrorism fight and belittle Democrats as advocates of a “cut and run” policy of weakness.

With three weeks until Election Day, Republican candidates are barely mentioning Iraq on the campaign trail and in their television advertisements.

Even President Bush, continuing to attack Democrats for opposing the war, has largely dropped his call of “stay the course” and replaced it with a more nuanced promise of flexibility.

It is the Democrats who have seized on Iraq as a central issue. In debates and in speeches, candidates are pummeling Republicans with accusations of a failed war.

Rather than avoiding confrontation on Iraq as they did in 2002 and 2004, they are spotlighting their opposition in new television advertisements that feature mayhem and violence in Iraq, denounce Republicans for supporting Mr. Bush and, in at least one case, demand the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. [...]

Taken together, the discussion on the campaign trail suggests just how much of a problem the Iraq war has become for Republicans. It represents a startling contrast with the two national elections beginning in 2002 with the preparation for the Iraq invasion, in which Republicans used the issue to keep Democrats on the run on foreign policy and national security.

The development also suggests that what has been a classic strategy of Mr. Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove — to turn a weakness into a strength — is not working as well as the White House had hoped.

Weldon outdoes himself. CBS:

In his first local TV interview since Monday's FBI raids, Congressman Curt Weldon told CBS 3 he's uncovered new evidence indicating the influence peddling investigation -- is an attempt to sabotage his re-election effort. ...

Weldon said he had evidence of possible political motivation behind the investigation ...

"A retired FBI agent came to me and told me that one of Sestak's workers told him that two weeks ago he knew this was going to happen," said Weldon, adding, "That is absolutely a partisan political activity on the part of the Justice Department if it occurred."

Update: More from the Delaware County Daily Times:

... Speaking to reporters after a House Aviation Subcommittee meeting Wednesday afternoon, [Weldon] said the retired FBI agent, Gregory Auld, confirmed the night before that a Sestak worker "was bragging that three weeks ago they knew this was going to come down."

"That, to me, is absolutely outrageous," Weldon said. "If that occurred, it means that someone in the Justice Department was coordinating whatever was happening with a political campaign."

Except it didn’t happen, according to Auld, who told an entirely different story.

"No, that’s not what happened," he said in a phone interview, when asked about Weldon’s statements.

Auld, a retired FBI agent from Drexel Hill, said a man at a local gym - he refers to him as "Grumpy" because he doesn’t know his name - told him Tuesday that another man in a Sestak shirt said three weeks ago that "something big" would happen to Weldon last weekend. Auld then approached the Sestak supporter, who told him, "We kind of sniffed this out."

"I said, ‘You guys knew about this?’ and he didn’t say anything," Auld said, adding that it was the other man, "Grumpy," who said he had heard from the Sestak worker that "something big was going to come down on Weldon."

"He didn’t say, ‘We knew,’ he just said, ‘We sniffed it out,’" Auld said of his conversation with the latter individual.

Sestak spokesman Ryan Rudominer said, "The idea that our campaign has any influence over the FBI or the Republican-led Justice Department is laughable." He said the campaign had no prior knowledge of the investigation.

WP: Moderates in Kansas decide they're not GOP anymore.

Presumably, two carjackers who will soon be in a lot of trouble.

WSJ/NBC: Voter approval of Congress falls to 16%. 16%. "Fully two-thirds of the electorate rates this year's Congress 'below average' or 'one of the worst' -- the poorest showing on that question since it was first asked in 1990. As for the Republican Party, 32% of voters rate it positively and 49% negatively -- the highest negative ever for either party in the surveys. [...] By 48% to 26%, voters call Republican control of the White House, House and Senate 'a bad thing.'"

Russia's Kommersant on the Weldon investigation:

Kommersant’s sources believe the probe might bring trouble to many people in Moscow which Weldon visited “no less than 30 times”. The sources claim that “the congressman’s main contacts in Moscow were high-ranking law enforcement officials from Russia’s Defense Ministry and Federal Security Service, and deputies of the State Duma.”

This might be confirmed by the fact that Curt Weldon is the founder of the International Exchange Group (IEG) non-governmental organization. In 2005, IEG offered the project to guard six Russian sites for production and storage of biological weapons to the Pentagon. Together with Weldon, Alexander Kotenkov, Russian president’s representative in the Federation Council, heads the political council of IEG. The NGO’s trustees are the representatives of Russian State Duma committees on defense and security Viktor Zavarzin and Vladimir Vasilyev, Vice-Chair of the Federation Council committee on defense and security Alexey Alexandrov, Deputy Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexey Bortnikov, Russian General Staff Commander Yuri Baluyevsky, and Duma’s First Vice-Speaker Lyubov Sliska.

Here's how Weldon described the International Exchange Group in Congress March 9, 2005:

I want to say to you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member, 2 years ago the minister of atomic energy from Russia, Rumyantsev, and the leading nuclear scientists in Russia, my good friend Velikhov, who runs the Kurchatov Institute, told me that they could work on an arrangement where the United States and Russia would have joint ownership of any fuel going into Bashir. Why didn't we take advantage of that?

Those are the kind of questions we have to ask. I mean instead of that, we have gotten assurances from Russia, but now we have Russia supplying energy. So over the past 2 years, what we have tried to do with a group of Members of Congress, is establish a new relationship into the inner-circle of Putin's leadership team. It would be like dealing with Carl Rove and Andy Card.

I will leave for the record documents from the International Exchange Group, established by Putin's Plenipotentiary representative to the Duma and the Federation Council. His name is Alexander Kotenkov.

That relationship includes on its board the Deputy Director of the FSB, the Chairman of the Security Committee of the Federation Council, Aleksei Alexandrov, the Chairman of the Security Council of the Duma, Vladimir Vasilyev, and it includes the key people who are personally friendly with Putin.

Through that effort, I have proposed to the Administration that we take two of four actions, which I would like to outline briefly for you today, that I think can bring Russia back into the fold.

The first is we need to terminate Jackson-Vanik immediately. Every major Jewish group has come out and written me letters: National Council of Soviet Jewry, AIPAC, and Jinsa. ...

The second is, expand cooperative threat reduction. Nunn-Lugar is not enough. We need to go beyond Nunn-Lugar to get at sites that Russia has not been willing to give us access to in the past, both biological sites and nuclear sites.

Through this effort that I just outlined to you—the International Exchange Group—I took a delegation of two democrats, Soloman Ortiz and Silvestre Reyes, a year ago in August, to Krasnyarsk 26.

We went into the mountain in Siberia and went down to the site of the three largest plutonium-producing reactors. We had no help from the State Department, no help from the Energy Department, no help from the Defense Department. We did it directly with this Russian group that is close to Putin.

We need a new approach to getting access to sites that Russia has not been willing to give us access to. Right now in the Pentagon and the State Department, there is a proposal to do two pilot programs through the IEG.

One of them is to access six biological sites, some of which we have not been given access to in the past, out of 79 that Russia has identified to us.

We need to proceed and this Committee could help move that process along within the State Department. It is a low dollar item.

The second is—and that is the third initiative that I have in my document—expand cooperation with Russia on missile defense. When we moved out of the ABM Treaty, I was the author of that bill that passed the House. My statements were that we should do this only by cooperating with Russia to allay their concerns about trying to achieve a strategic superiority over them. ...

The fourth initiative I think is the most exciting. I proposed, and this Committee could be a big help here, that we empower our President and the Russian President to do something that is similar to the old Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Do you remember that in the Clinton era?

Now the current Administration doesn't like to talk about Gore-Chernomyrdin because it is not the in thing to talk about, but I think the model is a good model and what I have proposed is that we announce and establish a United States-Russian free energy trade agreement.

Russia has tons of energy. We have tons of need. Russia can't get their energy to the marketplace. We have the technology to get it to the marketplace and to help them extract it.

The Russian private energy industry is already investing in America. Lukoil, chaired by Alexperov, bought 2,000 Getty gas stations. When I was in Moscow in the fall, they cut a deal with Conoco Phillips to buy another 1,800 gas stations.

So Lukoil now owns 3,800 gas stations in America. They are already investing in our country. Itera, a Russian energy company, is based in Jacksonville, Florida, for 12 years.

What we need is a strategic Presidential-level task force on fossil fuel energy cooperation. That also sends a signal to Saudi Arabia and the Middle Eastern countries that we have alternative sources of energy that we can turn to, and it brings together a strategic relationship on energy that we can benefit from and that Russia can benefit from, but it has got to go beyond fossil fuels.

It has got to include nuclear energy. The peaceful use of nuclear power, bringing our energy ministry together with the Russian ministry of atomic energy and institutes like Kurchatov, linked up with Los Alamos and Sandias and Livermore and they are already doing some work, but in a strategic way so that we can do joint work on energy initiatives in the nuclear arena. ...

If we put together an outline, a vision of a strategic energy relationship, if we take the other three steps I have advocated, expanding cooperative threat reduction, joint missile defense cooperation and elevating Russia out of Jackson-Vanik, you have just given Putin a political homerun back in Moscow.

Charlie Cook sees blue.

Amanda Terkel: Baghdad residents are receiving only 2.4 hours of electricity/day, an all time low.

Here's the Philadelphia Inquirer on how the investigation is affecting Weldon's campaign in the district. Sen. Arlen Specter spoke at a fundraiser for Weldon last night, but Weldon did cancel a university appearance.

The Hill: Weldon "referred to meetings he suggested between Itera executives and former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey."

Chutzpah watch: a contact in Weldon's district writes, "BTW, Weldon campaign is claiming today that the raids are firing up their base."

WP: "Elections May Leave Bush An Early Lame Duck."

PolicyFutures' Alan Schwartz workshops scenarios for the insurgency in Iraq. (The group's website is almost comically spooky).

Just out: a piece on the Weldon case.

How is this not a violation of this church's tax status? Apparently the IRS has indeed received a complaint.

WP: "President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone 'hostile to U.S. interests.' The document, the first full revision of overall space policy in 10 years, emphasizes security issues, encourages private enterprise in space, and characterizes the role of U.S. space diplomacy largely in terms of persuading other nations to support U.S. policy. ... The new policy was applauded by defense analyst Baker Spring of the conservative Heritage Foundation. He said that he supported the policy's rejection of international agreements or treaties, as well as its emphasis on protecting military assets and placing missile defense components in space. He also said that he liked the policy's promotion of commercial enterprises in space and its apparent recognition that private satellites will need military protection as well." An ideologically driven space program.

Justin Rood points to the executive summary of the House intel committe's investigation into Duke Cunningham's alleged corruption of the committee, released by ranking Dem Jane Harman. Here's the report. More from SDUT/Copley.

Update: Intel committee chairman Peter Hoekstra's reaction:

"Today the committee's Ranking Member, Jane Harman, unilaterally and without the consent and authority of the full committee, released an interim, internal report by the committee's independent counsel into the actions of former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

"Cunningham's actions to enrich himself as a Member of Congress are reprehensible, but it is reassuring that the committee's independent counsel has found no instances of wrongdoing on the part of other committee Members or the committee's staff.

"That said, the unilateral decision by Harman to break our bipartisan, written agreement to review the Cunningham matter by releasing an incomplete, internal committee document that has not been reviewed by the other committee Members is disturbing and beyond the pale."

If you didn't see this WP report on the Weldon investigation last night, go read it immediately.

Key line: "A grand jury, impaneled in Washington in May, has obtained evidence gathered over at least four months through wiretaps of Washington area cellphone numbers and has scrutinized whether Weldon received anything of value, according to the sources."

How did Curt Weldon become the go-to congressman for Italian defense contractor Finmeccanica? As Ken Silverstein first reported, Finmeccanica subsidiaries Oto Melara and AgustaWestland hired the "boutique" Media-Pennsylvania based firm of Weldon's close friend, real estate agent and former kids' sports coach Cecelia Grimes as a lobbyist; Silverstein further reported that Agusta Westland had hired another Weldon daughter Kim in its public relations department. So how did Finmeccanica find its way to Weldon, family and friends? Here's the Italian ambassador, Curt Weldon, Oto Melara N.A. CEO Howard Goldberg headlning a US-Italy defense dialogue in Philadelphia last November. Finmeccanica features Weldon among its special podcasts it is offering on its website, along with podcasts from the CEOs of various of its divisions. Strangely enough, as at Itera's Jacksonville Florida offices, Finmeccanica's DC office telephone doesn't seem to work very well anymore. (This post has been revised).

That's interesting. Weldon has accused the 9/11 commission of having engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the alleged Able Danger findings. I won't go into the details here. In any case, it's interesting to note that 9/11 commission member John Lehman, now with his own eponymous investment company in New York, has given Weldon's PAC $1,000, in two payments in 2005 and 2006. It's odd because my sense was that the commission leadership and staff were genuinely irritated and troubled by Weldon's attacks on the commission's integrity. Apparently, not Lehman.

WP: "... A grand jury, impaneled in Washington in May, has obtained evidence gathered over at least four months through wiretaps of Washington area cellphone numbers and has scrutinized whether Weldon received anything of value, according to the sources. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation." Holy mackerel.

This at the very end interesting too, given the timing: "Four people listed in corporate records as Itera officers or directors wrote checks totaling $8,000 to Weldon's campaign on April 20, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a Web site that tracks campaign contributions." Among them, some $4000 from VP of Itera Theodoros Kavalieros and his family member Nikolaos, and two thousand from director of government relations Lazar "Lonya" Finker.

More on Itera chairman's Jacksonville Florida digs from Will Bunch.

NYT: "Law enforcement officials said the investigation of Mr. Weldon had been under way for several months. The officials said authorities did not confirm the existence of the investigation or conduct the searches, until after news organizations learned of it. It is not known how McClatchy Newspapers, which first reported the inquiry on Saturday, learned of it."

The WP report touches on that: "Prosecutors are usually loath to conduct raids against a public official so close to an election. But some involved in the investigation debated whether holding off could also appear to have been influenced by the election, sources said."

A savvy reader writes, "Who ratted out Weldon? Hmm, which Washington lobbyist who represented Russian energy interests would know if Curt Weldon had hit up a Russian energy company for a job for his daughter? Oh yeah:

ABRAMOFF, JACK
WASHINGTON,DC 20006
GREENBERG TRAURIG/ATTORNEY
5/21/2003
$1,000
Weldon, Curt"

Here's the key bit from the Reuters report: "A U.S. law enforcement official said the government investigation went beyond the 2004 allegations. He said the Justice Department had received additional information that 'has renewed interest in this issue.'"

The last graph of this excerpt from a Reuters piece on the investigation into potential help lobbyist Karen Weldon may have received from her father is interesting:

Weldon said in a statement: "I have received confirmation that the Justice Department has opened a preliminary inquiry into items previously reported on by the L.A. (Los Angeles) Times in 2004."

He said he would provide investigators all documents and information they sought.

"I am confident that investigators will reach the same conclusions as the House Ethics Committee, which looked into these allegations in 2004 at my request, and found that I had engaged in no wrongdoing," Weldon said.

Weldon accused Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a public advocacy group that requested a Justice Department review of the matter two years ago, of engaging in "the politics of personal destruction."

Weldon said the group is closely tied to his Democratic challenger, "and now, just weeks before my re-election word that the inquiry is occurring has mysteriously trickled out."

A spokeswoman for the group denied political motivation in its actions, noting it sent its letter to the Justice Department in 2004.

A U.S. law enforcement official said the government investigation went beyond the 2004 allegations. He said the Justice Department had received additional information that "has renewed interest in this issue."

Philly Inquirer: FBI raids homes of daughter of Curt Weldon and her business partner, Delaware County GOP vet Charlie Sexton. Six locations raided (Sexton's home, Karen Weldon's home, the law offices of Philadelphia lawyer and Weldon associate John Gallagher, the offices of Weldon and Sexton's public relations firm, and two locations in Jacksonville, Florida- presumably, related to Solutions' client Russian energy firm Itera having its North American headquarters there). Press conference at 430pm, Weldon to respond to allegations. More here and here.

Kissinger reviews a biography of Dean Acheson:

Acheson implicitly believed that situations of strength would be self-enforcing, and he played down the importance of diplomatic engagement with the adversary. Kennan raised the question of how to gain Soviet acquiescence in the process and urged negotiation, even while the ultimate structure was being built. Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement. How to merge the two strands so that military force and diplomacy are mutually supportive and so that national strategy becomes a seamless web is the essence of a continuing national controversy.

Beisner shows how the failure to do so with respect to the Korean War was the cause of the single greatest error of Acheson’s tenure: initially, the placing of Korea publicly outside the American defense perimeter (though this was conventional wisdom at the time) and, later, the inability, after the United States crossed the 38th parallel, to correlate military operations with some achievable diplomatic objectives.

For someone like myself, who knew Acheson, Beisner’s portrait does not always capture the vividness of his personality, which emerges too much as a list of eccentricities. Acheson’s relationship with the Nixon White House, and to President Nixon himself, is too cavalierly dismissed as the result of ego and an old man’s vanity. As a participant in all these meetings, I considered that relationship an example of Acheson’s generosity of spirit. Nixon had made essentially unforgivable attacks on Acheson during his 1952 campaign for vice president. But when he reached out to Acheson, it was received with the consideration Acheson felt he owed to the office, as a form of duty to the country. Acheson dealt with the issues Nixon put before him thoughtfully, precisely, without any attempt at flattery, in pursuit of his conception of national service and, unlike some other outside advisers, without offering advice that had not been solicited.

AP:

The FBI is investigating whether Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., used his influence to secure lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, two people familiar with the inquiry said Saturday.

The inquiry focuses on lobbying contracts worth $1 million that Weldon's daughter, Karen Weldon, obtained from foreign clients and whether they were assisted by the congressman, they said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the confidentiality of the criminal investigation.

Weldon, a 10-term Republican from the Philadelphia suburbs, long has denied any wrongdoing, and his top aide Saturday said no one had notified him of an investigation.

"I think if there was an investigation, somebody would have contacted us," said Russ Casso, Weldon's chief of staff.

Casso said Weldon and his staff were "100 percent caught off guard" when they learned of the investigation, first reported late Friday by McClatchy Newspapers. This account cited two individuals with specific knowledge of the existence of the investigation; they declined to be identified because of the confidentiality of criminal investigations.

Casso, whose boss is in a tight race for re-election on Nov. 7 against Democrat Joe Sestak, tried to cast doubt on reports of the investigation. "Unidentified sources mean nothing," Casso said. "There's no substance in that story. It's a flimsy story."

Two people familiar with the investigation told the AP on Saturday that the inquiry was being handled by agents from the FBI's field offices in Washington and Philadelphia and was being coordinated by the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the FBI declined comment Saturday.

Those two people familiar with the investigation confirmed that federal agents were examining Weldon's work between 2004 and 2004 to help two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers connected to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. They had hired Solutions North America Inc., a company operated by Karen Weldon and Charles Sexton, a Republican ally of the congressman.

The Philadelphia Inquirer also hears that Curt Weldon is being investigated:

The FBI is investigating whether U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) used his influence to help his daughter win consulting contracts, sources say, a development that could influence his close race for reelection.

Weldon's campaign denied that an investigation was underway. "Our attorney tells us it is preposterous," said Michael V. Puppio Jr., his campaign manager.

"The allegation in a tight race like this does the damage," Puppio said last night. "You owe a duty to dig a little deeper."

Weldon, who has served 10 terms in Congress, is running neck and neck with retired Navy admiral Joe Sestak.

The investigation, based in Washington, has progressed beyond the preliminary stages, people familiar with the case told The Inquirer yesterday. ....

Every investigation is different, but it is not uncommon for agents probing alleged corruption, drugs and organized crime to spend months, even years, working covertly on a case before the suspects learn that they are under scrutiny.

This WP reports on White House efforts at damage control to counter the revelations from the forthcoming book by former White House faith based initiatives official David Kuo.

University of Minnesota political science professor Jeff Lomonaco reports in The American Prospect on Cheney's centrality to the CIA leak investigation:

... More dramatically, deep in one of the hearings last spring during the discovery phase, Fitzgerald came closer to indicating that he believes, and may argue at trial, that Libby was acting on more explicit directions from Cheney to disclose Plame's CIA status to Miller -- on the basis of Libby's own notes.

Fitzgerald explained that Libby's notes contain an instruction from Cheney to "tell information to Ms. Miller on July 8." Libby's position is that "the instruction reflected in his notes to tell … Judith Miller refers to the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate]. He says he did not discuss Mr. Wilson's wife that day. To our understand[ing] both were discussed."

In other words, Libby claims he was instructed by Cheney only to disclose to Miller portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD. Fitzgerald suggested that Libby was directed to tell Miller about Plame as well, which is what he went on to do.

You open the Washington Post this morning, and on one two-page spread: Ney pleads guilty, Weldon being investigated, a Foley story, and Kolbe Grand Canyon trip probed. Sigh. Our Congress. Then you turned to the Iraq page: US deemed responsible for killing British reporter, Iraqi police behind death squads, etc.

The Post analyzes the president's increasing declaration of things "unacceptable." "Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush's rising frustration with his declining influence."

Headache, indeed. McClatchy reports that Curt Weldon (R-Pa) is under federal investigation to determine whether he "traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry. [...] The official said that the FBI recently sought the assistance of federal prosecutors in pressuring an unidentified person to provide evidence about the 59-year-old congressman. The attempt to 'squeeze' this individual appeared to be an early step, the two sources said." Much of the investigation seems an outgrowth of what was originally reported by Ken Silverstein, here. The article also provides yet another depressing demonstration of a cartoonish House ethics committee that only seems to get woken up from its self-induced stupor after the FBI has sprinted by. McClatchy:

The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

The FBI, which opened an investigation in recent months, has formally referred the matter to the department's Public Integrity Section for additional scrutiny. At issue are Weldon's efforts between 2002 and 2004 to aid two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers with ties to strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a federal law enforcement official said.

The Russian companies and a Serbian foundation run by the brothers' family each hired a firm co-owned by Weldon's daughter, Karen, for fees totaling nearly $1 million a year, public records show. ...

In 2004, The Los Angeles Times published a lengthy report that described the meteoric rise of Solutions North America, the consulting firm set up by Karen Weldon and Sexton.

The Times tracked Weldon's parallel efforts on behalf of the firm's three foreign clients, quoting Weldon and his top aide as denying any impropriety.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a Democratic-leaning watchdog group, responded to the report by calling on the House ethics committee and Attorney General John Ashcroft to open investigations.

When the ethics panel did not act, Weldon insisted that the committee look into the allegations to clear his name. ...

[Weldon attorney] Canfield said the panel conducted an informal inquiry and apparently dismissed the matter because he's heard nothing in more than two years. A spokesman for the committee, which rarely talks about its inquiries, did not respond to a request for comment.

What caused Karen Weldon to set up a lobbying firm is unclear. The Times reported that Philadelphia lawyer John Gallagher, who has worked with Representative Weldon on building relations with Russia, took credit for delivering Sexton and Weldon their first client: the Moscow-based Itera energy group.

According to the Times, Justice Department filings, congressional records and interviews by McClatchy Newspapers:

Rep. Weldon and a bipartisan congressional delegation had visited Itera in May 2002 during an official trip to Russia. Itera was drawing scrutiny at the time because of allegations that it had bought assets from a state-run energy giant for hundreds of millions of dollars below their true value.

Two months before Weldon's visit, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency scrapped plans to award an $868,000 grant to Itera to study gas deposits in Russia because the firm refused to identify all of its owners.

But Weldon, at a news conference after returning from Russia, called on the Bush administration to release the grant. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2004 that Weldon also complained to presidential adviser Karl Rove and to then-energy secretary Spencer Abraham about the company's treatment by the U.S. government. The grant was never approved.

On Sept. 30, 2002, Itera signed a $500,000, one-year contract with Solutions North America, a deal that included a $170,000 payment up front. It also gave Solutions a 10 percent "finder's fee" for any sales it generated, an arrangement barred by federal contracting regulations.

On Sept. 24, 2002, six days before Solutions got the contract, Weldon introduced a House resolution encouraging "improved cooperation with the Russian Federation on energy development issues." That night, assisted by his daughter's firm, he hosted a dinner at the Library of Congress honoring Itera's chairman - an event attended by nearly 30 members of Congress and 18 members of the Russian Duma, that country's parliament.

On Jan. 10, 2003, Solutions landed a second client: a one-year, $20,000-a-month contract to represent a Russian firm that had designed a "flying saucer" drone to deliver supplies to war zones. Payments, however, would start only if Solutions landed some business for the firm, Saratov Aviation Plant. Another 10 percent finder's fee was included.

The congressman visited Saratov in Russia later that month, reportedly accompanied by his daughter. ...

Solutions got its third foreign client, the Serbian Karic Foundation, after Weldon took on the unpopular job of seeking a U.S. visa for Dragomir Karic and reportedly, one for his brother, Bogoljub.

In the early 1990s, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control had listed the Karic brothers among parties whose U.S. assets were frozen because of their close ties to Milosevic, who died in his cell last spring while facing war crimes charges stemming from the genocides in Bosnia. Recently, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs issued an international warrant for the arrest of Bogoljub Karic as part of a tax evasion investigation.

The Karic Foundation agreed to pay Solutions $20,000 per month, to assist with its humanitarian work, including setting up a U.S. branch.

Solutions later paid more than $2,300 for Mike Conallen, who was Weldon's chief of staff at the time, to travel to Belgrade, Yugoslavia - a trip approved by Weldon, records show. ...

Worth reading: David Ignatius on what's behind recent Baghdad coup rumors.

NBC: Feds probe trip that Kolbe made with pages.

Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News. NBC News first reported on the camping and rafting trip on Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington said that the U.S. attorney in Arizona has started a "preliminary assessment" of the trip, after an unidentified source made allegations about the congressman's behavior on the expedition.

James Baker is nothing if not a GOP loyalist. So how coordinated is his book roll out (Comedy Central, Meet the Press, NPR this morning) with the White House in advance of the November election? My sense: totally coordinated. Is it not a very deliberately timed reach out and wink and nod to GOP realists -- see, we are listening to you? The adults are in the house? Cheney has been confined to the attic? With Kissinger? Safely reviewing 1969 Vietnam memorabilia? Baker with his mock naive, never thought of it before, well, it would be too political to release our Iraq recommendations before the elections, I'm just an independent reasonable foreign policy steward doing my own thing? Seems Baker is a witting campaign prop being coordinated by the White House to communicate the message, the realists will be in charge of foreign policy the next two years. Without the White House having to say it, or it necessarily being true.

Update: From reader JR: "Well said ... This James Baker ploy is a subtler version of Kissinger's Oct 1972 appearance at which he touched the breast pocket of his suit and said, about Vietnam, that the Nixon Admin had a plan for peace ('...peace is at hand.'). Shortly after the election, the Paris peace talks broke down and two months later, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong began ... Baker seems that he, too, is attempting to insinuate that the Bush Admin has a plan. Its just that there is no one actually left in the Administration (as was the case, sort of, with Kissinger in 1972) with the credibility to have such an assertion taken seriously." Adds another reader: "I think you're exactly right: it's like a secret plan for victory in Vietnam aimed specifically at uneasy GOP realists." More on Baker here.

Update II: Reader J. writes, "Just read your interesting post, but I disagree. The Washington insider crowd is picking up on the signals that Baker is sending, but it is not permeating the campaign trail. In the hothouse of Senate and House campaigns, the debate is rarely getting beyond 'stay the course' and 'cut and run' options, whatever those caricatures really mean. The 'GOP realist' faction may matter here in Washington -- and does it actually extend beyond Brent Scowcroft, Larry Wilkerson, and Jim Baker? --, but I doubt any average voter defines him/herself accordingly. If I were in charge of the GOP congressional campaigns, I would want to paint the world in black and white terms -- stay the course, no change, no surrender. If you have GOP candidates saying the same things that Baker is hinting at, you concede the argument to the Dems and hand them the Iraq issue. What may be happening here is that the White House is setting the stage for a withdrawal plan in 2007 and is seeking to innoculate itself against the charge that it lied to the American people before the election. They can say, well, we are just following the Baker Plan, and Jim Baker was very publicly saying before the election that withdrawal was a real option."

This WP article on a new Senate report accusing five conservative non profit organizations of perpetrating fraud notes that one of them is a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation:

The Senate report released yesterday states that the nonprofit groups probably violated their tax-exempt status "by laundering payments and then disbursing funds at Mr. Abramoff's direction; taking payments in exchange for writing newspaper columns or press releases that put Mr. Abramoff's clients in a favorable light; introducing Mr. Abramoff's clients to government officials in exchange for payment; and agreeing to act as a front organization for congressional trips paid for by Mr. Abramoff's clients."

The report bolstered earlier revelations that Abramoff laundered money through the nonprofits to pay for congressional trips and paid Norquist to arrange meetings for Abramoff's clients with government officials including White House senior adviser Karl Rove.

The groups named in the report are Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which was co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton before she became secretary of the interior; Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Center for Public Policy Research, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation; and Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based religious group founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin.

The LA Times reports on the forthcoming book of a former White House faith-based initiatives official who says the White House conspired to use the program to get evangelicals to turn out and vote for Republicans in the 2002 and 2004 elections:

A new book by a former White House official says that President Bush's top political advisors privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as "nuts" and "goofy" while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.

The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a nonpolitical effort to support religious social-service organizations, was told to host pre-election events designed to mobilize religious voters who would most likely favor Republican candidates.

The assertions by David Kuo, a top official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to persuade evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP. [...]

In the book, Kuo, who quit the White House in 2003, accuses Karl Rove's political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives idea for electoral gain. It assails Bush for failing to live up to his promises of boosting the role of religious organizations in delivering social services. [...]

The book says that before the 2002 elections, then-White House political director Ken Mehlman issued "marching orders" to use the faith-based initiative in 20 House and Senate races, according to MSNBC. To avoid appearing overtly political, Mehlman said his staff would arrange for congressional offices to request visits from the faith-based program officials.

Throughout the 2002 and 2004 campaigns, faith-based officials would meet with lawmakers in some places in an effort to generate publicity for them, while also hosting conferences in battleground states attracting hundreds of pastors and community activists eager to learn how to apply for federal grants.

In any case, Kuo will be on Sixty Minutes Sunday.

Pamuk.

Newsweek: "An unsolicited remark from Porter Goss, then chairman House Intelligence Committee, led a British journalist to unravel many of the details of the CIA’s controversial 'extraordinary rendition' program, according to a new book. The disclosure of this highly sensitive operation later prompted a major leak investigation that roiled the agency."

Hotline:

MSNBC's Olbermann had a preview of a new book from the former No. 2 man in Pres. Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. David Kuo's "Tempting Faith" will be out 10/16.

Olbermann: "Kuo cites one example after another of a White House that repeatedly uses Evangelical Christians for their votes while consistently giving them nothing in return."

More Olbermann: "According to Kuo, Karl Rove's office referred to Evangelical leaders as the 'nuts.' Kuo says, 'National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ridiculous, out of control and just plain goofy.' So, how does the Bush White House keep the 'nuts' turning out at the polls? One way, regular conference calls with groups lead by Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ted Haggard, and radio hosts like Michael Reagan. ... They did get some things from the Bush White House, like the National Day of Prayer. ... Or 'Little trinkets like cufflinks or pens or pads of paper were passed out like business cards. Christian leaders could give them to their congregations or donors or friends to show just how influential they were.'"

Olbermann: "When cufflinks were not enough, the White House played the Jesus card, reminding Christian leaders that 'The knew the president's faith' and begging for patience. ... The office was literally a taxpayer funded part of the Republican campaign machinery. In 2002 Kuo says, 'The office decided to hold roundtable events for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders. Using the aura of our White House power to get a diverse group of faith and community leaders to a 'nonpartisan' event discussing how best to help poor people in their area.'"

More: "White House Political Affairs Director Ken Mehlman, 'Loved the idea and gave us our marching orders. There were 20 targets.' Including Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, and John Shimkus in Illinois. Mehlman devised a cover-up for the operation. He told Kuo, 'It can't come from the campaigns, that would make it look too political. It needs to come from the congressional offices. We'll take care of that by having our guys call the office to request the visit'" ("Countdown," 10/11).[EMILY GOODIN]

Small plane crashes into NYC high-rise apartment building. FBI says no evidence of terrorism. Update: Via NPR, NY Yankees' pitcher Cory Lidle on board the plane and plane registered to him. Two died. Plane went into 40th story of 50 story building on the Upper East Side.

So Robert Kaplan and Fareed Zakaria participated in a 2001 secret meeting convened at the request of then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz that produced a policy memo for the President and Vice President recommending the US overthrow Saddam Hussein. And apparently the writers signed non disclosure agreements about the meeting. Kaplan says he had the approval of his Atlantic Monthly editor, the deceased Michael Kelley. Zakaria says he didn't realize a report was being produced from the meeting. Still. That doesn't seem to answer the real issue, that someone identified as an independent journalist would agree to help a Pentagon official brainstorm on how to sell a war, and would agree to not disclose their involvement. More here and here.

Update: Woodward's account is actually more troubling. At Wolfowitz's request, American Enterprise Institute president Christopher Demuth "recruited a dozen people. [Bernard Lewis, Mark Palmer, Fareed Zakaria, Fouad Ajami, James Q. Wilson, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Steve Herbits among them]. He later said they agreed to serve only 'if I promised it would all be kept secret.' ... On Thursday night, November 29, 2001, Demuth assembled the group at a secure conference center in Virginia for a weekend of discussions ... DeMuth was surprised at the consensus among his group. He stayed up late Sunday night distilling their thoughts into a seven page, single-spaced document, called 'Delta of Terrorism.' ... 'The general analysis was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia ... were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important...' But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with... But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable... 'We concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. ... We agreed that Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed.' ... Copies of the memo, straight from the neoconservative playbook, were hand-delivered to the war cabinet members. In at least some cases, it was given a SECRET classification. Cheney was pleased with the memo, and it had a strong impact on President Bush ..."

If I'm not imagining things, I believe these two reports hint that Kolbe may have had a too friendly relationship with pages. From NBC:

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) took two male pages with him on a three-day camping trip in 1996, former congressional pages and National Park Service officials have told NBC News.

The pages, who were 17 at the time, went rafting and camping with Kolbe in the Grand Canyon over the July 4th holiday that year.

A spokeswoman for Kolbe confirmed the overnight trip but said that the pages did not travel alone with Kolbe.

... In interviews with The Post last week, multiple pages identified Kolbe as a close friend and personal confidante who was one of the only members of Congress to take any interest in them. A former page himself, Kolbe offered to mentor pages and kept in touch with some of them after they left the program, according to the interviews.

Kolbe once invited four former pages to make use of his Washington home while he was out of town, according to an instant message between Foley and another former page, Jordan Edmund, in January 2002. The pages planned to attend a first-year reunion of their page class. But because of a snowstorm, they did not take Kolbe up on his offer, according to one of the four pages.

Cline said one of the youths invited was a former page of Kolbe's. Because the congressman frequently travels on weekends, either to his Arizona ranch or abroad, the house is often available to friends, constituents, staffers and former staff members, such as a former page, she said.

Dana Milbank notes Bush addressing the issue of school safety never once mentioning the word "gun."

NYT: "Hastert Vows Accountability in Page Scandal: The House speaker said today that any staffers who hid information on the Foley case would be fired."

Hotline on call analyzes three recent polls: "Pres. Bush's approval ratings are solid, though improvable, with Republicans -- he gets the support of four out of every five. They're solid with evangelicals, who are as psyched to vote as elements of the Dem base are. They're fairly solid with men. The problem area for Republicans: married women, a constituency won by Pres. Bush by more than 10 points in 2004." Not today. "Today they favor the Democrats, by 53 to 42 percent, a key feature of the Democratic lead." This interesting too: "Think North Korea helps focus the mind on threats to the security? The NYT/CBS poll (.pdf) shows that just 32 percent of Americans think Pres. Bush is handling foreign policy well. The same question, re: Iraq: Bush receives the approval of 30 percent of Americans. His terrorism number hovers the mid-forties, about where it was in May."

McClatchy: North Korea's intentions become clearer.

So just how much is Jim Baker being brought online?

WP: "Democrats have regained a commanding position going into the final weeks of the midterm-election campaigns, with support eroding for Republicans on Iraq, ethics and presidential leadership, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Apparent Republican gains in September have been reversed in the face of mounting U.S. casualties and gloomy forecasts from Iraq and the scandal involving Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who was forced to resign his congressional post over sexually graphic online conversations with former House pages. Approval of Congress has plunged to its lowest level in more than a decade (32 percent), and Americans, by a margin of 54 percent to 35 percent, say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with the biggest problems the nation is confronting. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said congressional Democrats deserve to be reelected next month, but just 39 percent said Republicans deserve to return to office."

NYT: "Seventy-nine percent of respondents said House Republican leaders were more concerned about their political standing than about the safety of teenage Congressional pages."

Richard Byrne has a very interesting piece about reading Azar Nafisi in Iranian diaspora academic circles:

... "An Iranian writer said to me, 'Why are you so angry with Nafisi? All she did was write a book,"' [Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi] deadpans. "But all I did was write an essay. She wrote a book. I write an essay."

Ms. Nafisi did indeed write a book. But she is determined not to engage with Mr. Dabashi in a debate about it.

"This kind of behavior, it cuts off debate," she told The Chronicle in an interview.

She was more expansive when it came to discussing her views about the often fraught relationship between literature and politics.

In particular, Ms. Nafisi resents any attempts by the left or the right to pigeonhole her personal politics or place her in a political camp. She dismisses the notion, for instance, that one can label her as a neoconservative by invoking her friendships with the noted historian Bernard Lewis and the World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz. ...

"I resent the fact that they create guilt by association," says Ms. Nafisi of her critics. "I will never denounce my friends. I have conservative friends. I have radical friends. I have more radical friends in my acknowledgments to the book than conservatives. ... I can definitely disagree with their politics. That's one reason I am in this country, so I won't be stigmatized for conversing with people who are politically different from me. So I feel a great anger that I come here and I face the same dilemma."

Ms. Nafisi does drop certain facts that suggest she may have been misrepresented by her critics. She did, in fact, oppose the invasion of Iraq. Her relationship with the neoconservative speakers bureau Benador Associates — which represents prominent neocons including Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, and James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence — ended more than three years ago. (She is now represented by the Steven Barclay Agency, which also represents the poet Adrienne Rich and the novelist Michael Chabon, among others.)

"I didn't want to be with an agent who is political. I wanted to be with an agent who is literary," says Ms. Nafisi.

Ultimately, however, she argues that the best path to discovering her politics and principles is through her writing. "The one way that you can see where people stand is to go and read them," she says. "All you have to do is read."

Dana Priest reports that not only was former CIA director Porter Goss's pick for the #3 slot at the Agency wrapped up in the Duke Cunningham corruption saga, but Dusty Foggo served Goss as censor in chief, trying to prevent retired Agency hands from publishing their books.

Bloomberg: Anna Politkovskaya, journalist and Putin critic, is shot dead in Moscow. More from the BBC.

Monday update: WP, "According to Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya was about to publish an exposé of torture and kidnappings by forces allied with Chechnya's prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, a frequent subject of her work."

Just out: a piece on an Iranian dissident recently embraced by Washington, who may not be what he seems; from the forthcoming November issue of Mother Jones.

NYT: "Susan B. Ralston, a former aide to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who went on to work for the presidential adviser Karl Rove, has resigned from the White House in the wake of a report that she served as a conduit between the two men. Ms. Ralston submitted her resignation to President Bush on Thursday night, saying the time had come to pursue other opportunities.' But administration officials acknowledged that she quit as a result of a Congressional report, released last week, that documented hundreds of contacts between Mr. Abramoff and the White House. [...] Yet Ms. Ralston herself was never accused of any wrongdoing. The Congressional report suggested she merely passed along messages from Mr. Abramoff to Mr. Rove, who sought basketball tickets from the lobbyist and dined at his restaurant, Signatures (where, White House officials said, Mr. Rove paid for his own meals). Today, Representative Henry Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, which issued the report, accused White House officials of 'trying to make Susan Ralston the scapegoat.'”

"

Time:

Two-thirds of Americans aware of the congressional-page sex scandal believe Republican leaders tried to cover it up — and one quarter of them say the affair makes them less likely to vote for G.O.P. candidates in their districts come November. Those are among the findings of a new TIME poll conducted this week among 1,002 randomly-selected voting-age Americans.

The poll suggests the Foley affair may have dented Republican hopes of retaining control of Congress in November. Among the registered voters who were polled, 54% said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress, compared with 39% who favored the Republican. That margin may be fueled by the rolling scandal over sexually explicit e-mails sent to teenage pages by Republican Representative Mark Foley. Almost 80% of respondents were aware of the scandal, and only 16% approve of the Republicans' handling of it. ...

Iraq, meanwhile, is continuing to be a problem for the Republicans. Only 38% of respondents in the TIME poll now support President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, down from 42% three months ago.

Walter Pincus: Waterboarding historically controversial:

... On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were covered by a cloth. The picture, taken four days earlier near Da Nang, had a caption that said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk."

The article said the practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."

The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said. ...

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods. ...

When questions began to be raised last year about the handling of high-level detainees and Congress passed legislation barring torture, the handful of CIA interrogators and senior officials who authorized their actions became concerned that they might lose government support.

Passage last month of military commissions legislation provided retroactive legal protection to those who carried out waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques.

An interesting NYT piece on how the White House views the Foley matter from a campaign/PR perspective.

Rice's surprise trip to Baghdad. "A military transport plane that flew Rice and her party into Baghdad Thursday had had its landing delayed by 35 minutes by 'indirect fire' – either from mortar rounds or rockets – in the airport area, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters."

Fox: "While internal GOP polls show trouble for Republicans, the newest AP/Ipsos poll also showed that half of likely voters say the Foley scandal will be 'very or extremely important' when it comes time to vote on Nov. 7."

Roll Call reports, Louis Freeh is coming out of retirement to oversee the page probe. The Hotline remembers who oversaw the '83 page scandal: " a young DoJ official named Rudy Giuliani." Update: Pelosi nixes Freeh.

WP: "Fordham says his warnings to Hastert's office dealt with a different matter: reports of Foley's troubling interest in male pages working in the Capitol Hill complex. He says he implored the highest ranks of the GOP leadership to intervene to thwart behavior that he had been unable to stop after multiple confrontations with his boss. Sources close to the matter say a meeting took place between a senior Hastert aide and Foley before Fordham's January 2004 departure, probably in 2003, in a small conference room on the third floor of the Capitol. But the matter appears to have been dropped."

Via the Corner, where's Denny? Hastert fails to call into 6:20pm Chicago radio interview. Staff calls in to say he's on a conference call with the leadership. Leadership says he's not on the phone with them. More.

Allawi: Coup rumors "nonsense."

AP, via Hotline: Fordham told House leadership about Foley two years ago. Update: This latest AP report says Hastert's office was informed three years ago:

...Fordham said he was serving as Foley's chief of staff when he was told about the lawmaker's inappropriate behavior toward pages more than three years ago. He said he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene" at the time.

Fordham declined to identify the officials in Hastert's office he spoke with.

Two members of the GOP leadership say they told Hastert this past spring they had heard Foley had sent overly friendly e-mails to a page. Hastert said over the weekend he does not recall those conversations, but has not disputed they took place.

NYT:

Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, suggested today that talks with Iran over its nuclear program have all but reached a dead end, saying the matter would be referred to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions unless Tehran agreed quickly to suspend uranium enrichment work.

Underscoring the divide, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeated his position today that Tehran is willing to continue to talk but not to consider halting nuclear enrichment work for even one day.

Mr. Solana told the European Parliament, according to a statement released by his office, that despite negotiating for “endless hours,” Iran has still not made a commitment to suspend its nuclear enrichment work, the “key point” in the talks.

“Dialogue could not last forever,” Mr. Solana said. Referring to the possibility of sanctions, he said, “It is up to them to decide whether the time has come to follow the second track.” ...

The tone of his remarks today was more negative than earlier statements, which have rankled other European officials who have seen him as grasping for straws of progress.

Together, the remarks by Mr. Solana and Mr. Ahmadinejad appeared to signal the winding down of four months of what have amounted to talks about talks.

Howard Fineman on the GOP searching for dirt on Dems:

The Foley Scandal is a missile aimed at the heart of the GOP's most important base constituency: evangelical, Bible-believing Christians, who were already upset with the administration on a host of issues-including spending and immigration.

It's going to get uglier from here. The GOP will respond by unearthing old stories of sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. I know that the search is on for complaints, however old, about unnamed Democrats who might have come on too strong to male or female pages.

Bob Novak says Tom Reynolds encouraged Foley to run even after he know about the emails. From the NY Post:

In another stunning development, Robert Novak today reveals in his column - published in PostOpinion on Page 31 - that even after House GOP leaders knew that Foley had written an inappropriate e-mail to a 16-year-old former male page, they were still urging him to seek re-election.

Novak writes, "A member of the House leadership told me that Foley, under continuous political pressure because of his sexual orientation, was considering not seeking a seventh term this year but that Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), talked him into running."

"Rome". This isn't getting any better for the House leadership.

Via Kevin Drum, this rather depressing analysis shows that women aren't getting published very often in general interest magazines. Even more depressing and surprising, is who has the worst record. For shame, Harper's, with a ratio last year of seven male bylines for every one female byline.

NBC: Hastert says he won't resign.

Go read Glenn Greenwald on Foley and Tom Reynolds sharing a key staffer.

McClatchy: The small town German lawyer who's helping an innocent man Khaled al Masri pursue justice for being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan.

The July 10, 2001 Tenet/Black/Rice meeting. I'm raising the white flag. Each account contradicts the last. The one which seems to reconcile the different accounts and memories best is this one from the Post. More from McClatchy, which points out that Rice's spokesman is pointing fingers at Rumsfeld and Ashcroft.

According to Bob Woodward's new book, one US official who has been pushing Iran contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar's information is none other than the vice president. I've written about it here.

Woodward on Rumsfeld.

More Woodward excerpts from Newsweek: How the SecDef blew it.

Newsweek on Rumsfeld watch: "Democrats as well as a few Republicans will renew their calls for Rumsfeld's head, but it is doubtful that Bush will dump his Defense secretary before the elections. That might be seen as a concession to the 'Defeatocrats,' as the GOP likes to call the opposition. (Rumsfeld himself had no comment about Woodward's book.) But a senior White House official, operating under the usual cover of anonymity, gave a less than airtight guarantee of Rumsfeld's job security. The president, normally one to rely on his inner circle, has been consulting outsiders. The official did not say which ones, but it is known that Bush speaks on occasion to Henry Kissinger and to his father's former secretary of State, James A. Baker. The counsel of the outsiders, says this official, 'so far has been that Rumsfeld should stay. But I can't predict the future.'"

Amazing piece by Aram Roston on Syrian arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, based in a palazzo in Marbella Spain, and supplier to many of the world's baddies. (Link fixed).