The Guardian:

British intelligence sources increasingly suspect that Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy killed with a radioactive poison, was the victim of a plot involving "rogue elements" within the Russian state, the Guardian has learned.

While ruling out any official involvement by Vladimir Putin's government, investigators believe that only those with access to state nuclear laboratories could have mounted such a sophisticated plot.

Police were last night closing in on a group of men who entered the UK among a large crowd of Muscovite football fans. The group of five or more arrived shortly before Mr Litvinenko fell ill and attended the CSK Moscow match against Arsenal at the Emirates stadium on November 1. They flew back shortly afterwards. While describing them only as witnesses, police believe their presence could hold the key to the former spy's death. [...]

Explaining the increasing belief that Mr Litvinenko's death involved Russian state elements, one official said yesterday: "Only the state would have access to that material".

Officials now go so far as to say that the involvement of individuals within the FSB in the affair is "probable". But they insist that it is far from definite and the evidence is still circumstantial.

Intelligence sources do not rule out the possibility that the perpetrators were "rogue elements" either still in the FSB or former members of it.

Friday update: Italian character Mario Scaramella who met with Litvinenko at a London sushi restaurant the day he fell ill tests positive for polonium poisoning.

Kommersant reports on the widening Litvinenko case, and in particular the three Russians who met with him in London's Millenium Hotel the day he fell ill:

Police turned their attention to the planes on which Russian businessmen Andrey Lugovoi, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, who met with Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel on November 1, arrived in and departed from London. Lugovoi, who is now undergoing medical examination in a Moscow hospital along with is family, told Kommersant that he arrived in London on October 31. Kovtun arrived from Germany the next day. Sokolenko was already in London. All three of them are graduates of the same military academy, worked in state security agencies and became bodyguards. Lugovoi was former Russian prime minister Egor Gaidar's bodyguard. Now he is engaged in business.

All three of them, Lugovoi said, came to London with their families and met to attend a soccer game on November 1. At about 4:00 in the afternoon, before the game, they met with Litvinenko in the lobby of the hotel. Litvinenko came to the hotel to make arrangements with Lugovoi and Kovtun for a meeting with British businessmen the next day, Lugovoi said. Lugovoi said the meeting lasted about 20 minutes.

Lugovoi and friends had drinks in anticipation of the game and invited Litvinenko to join them, but he declined. Litvinenko did not eat anything either. Lugovoi's eight-year-old son came into the bar as the meeting was drawing to a close, and Lugovoi introduced him to Litvinenko. ...

Lugovoi claimed that Litvinenko called him on the evening of November 1 to say that he would be unable to meet the next day because he felt unwell. He called again on November 2 and said that he would probably only recover “toward December.” Lugovoi did not know where the traces of radioactivity on the airplanes came from.

More here.

AP:

Doctors treating former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who fell ill in Ireland last week, believe he was poisoned, an aide said Thursday.

''Doctors don't see a natural reason for the poisoning and they have not been able to detect any natural substance known to them'' in Gaidar's body, spokesman Valery Natarov said. ''So obviously we're talking about poisoning (and) it was not natural poisoning.''

Gaidar, 50, was feeling better Thursday, Natarov said.

''His condition is stable and improving. Doctors say there is no threat to his life at the moment,'' the aide said.

Gaidar, one of the leaders of a liberal opposition party who served briefly as prime minister in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, began vomiting and fainted during a conference in Ireland on Nov. 29, and was rushed to a hospital's intensive care unit.

Gaidar's illness follows the poisoning of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London just one day before Gaidar fell ill.

Andrei Lugovoy, another former KGB spy who met with Litvinenko on the day he fell ill, served as Gaidar's bodyguard at one point.

Unbelievable.

KC Star: Pat Roberts to leave Senate Intel committee?

Reuters: "President Bush met Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan on Thursday to seek ways to stem sectarian carnage threatening to split Iraq. Their working breakfast began a day after U.S. officials insisted the Iraqi leader was not offended by a critical White House memo and had not snubbed the U.S. president in Amman."

Intelligence writer Thomas Powers in the NYT:

Simple realism — totting up the Congressional votes the president can count on to back or oppose him — suggests that a turning point has been reached in Iraq. Getting in is over, and getting out is about to begin. I am reminded of a similar moment 41 years ago, when Lyndon Johnson was facing the bleak but imminent prospect of his South Vietnamese allies’ collapse in Saigon. The year was 1965, and Johnson had just been overwhelmingly re-elected president over Senator Barry Goldwater on the oft-repeated campaign pledge not to send American boys thousands of miles away to fight a war that Asian boys ought to fight.

Johnson’s advisers put it to him straight: Saigon was going to lose, Hanoi was going to win, and there wasn’t much time to waste. The choice was clear: lose the war or expand the war, find a formula of words to mask failure or send more troops and increase the bet on the table. Johnson chose to expand the war.

Raising the bet was already a pattern. Just two years earlier, President John F. Kennedy had faced a similarly stark choice. The government of Ngo Dinh Diem, installed and sustained by the United States, was locked in a destructive battle with Buddhists in its own country, and though it was fighting the war erratically and ineffectively, it seemed impervious to American counsel. Even worse, from Washington’s point of view, the Diem government had entered into secret conversations with the Communists. Some American officials thought a deal was in the works.

At the end of a long period of crisis, Kennedy’s government backed a coup by Vietnamese generals who were being advised by a French-born C.I.A. operative named Lucien Conein. The Diem government was quickly removed and replaced, but in the process Diem and his brother were brutally murdered. The war went better for a while, and then didn’t, in a pattern that repeated itself many times.

About 20 years ago, a friend and I were picking up a takeout dinner from a Vietnamese restaurant in Washington run by Tran Van Don, one of the generals who organized the 1963 coup. Tran pointed out a portly, white-haired man at a table overlooking the room, dining alone: it was his old friend, Lucien Conein. In a sense, they were both exiles. I often think about the conversations they must have had. The war that followed their coup killed 57,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese.

My guess is this admin will put in the extra four brigades - 20,000 troops -- to Baghdad, as urged in the Hadley memo.

NYT: The Iraq Study Group recommendations.

The Guardian:

The investigation into the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko gathered pace dramatically yesterday as it emerged that a number of British Airways aircraft that fly between Moscow and London have been contaminated with radioactive material. Two BA Boeing 767s were grounded at Heathrow following tests ordered by Scotland Yard, and a third aircraft was being tested in Moscow after its pilot was warned not to take off.

Last night the airline appealed to around 800 passengers to come forward. They flew on four flights between London and Moscow in the days either side of Litvinenko's poisoning on November 1. ...

It is thought Litvinenko, 43, was not a passenger on any of the jets - he had been granted British citizenship after claiming asylum following his decision to become a whistleblower about the alleged activities of the Russian security services.

Aviation industry sources suggested other individuals connected to the police investigation had travelled on the aircraft. The police are particularly interested in a flight from Moscow to London on October 25. It is known Litvinenko met two Russian contacts, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, at the Millennium Hotel in London's West End on November 1, the day he fell ill.

Mr Lugovoi, a former KGB bodyguard who now runs a security company in Moscow, has said that he flew in the day before with his family and friends to attend a Champions League football match between Arsenal and CSKA Moscow and for a series of business meetings. As Litvinenko lay dying, Mr Lugovoi insisted he had been framed by someone who wished him to appear to be the poisoner.

"I have the feeling that someone is trying to set me up as the fall guy," he said.

So who's Dmitri Kovtun?

WP: Bush-Maliki meeting delayed. Holy mackerel.

Ahmadinejad writes another letter.

WP: Sadr bloc quits Iraq government. Update: Rather, suspends its participation temporarily.

The NYT got ahold of the Hadley Iraq trip report memo drawn from his recent trip to Baghdad. This Hadley trip report memo was the starting point for a discussion on an internal administration Iraq strategy review, which was launched at a two-day meeting of Bush's entire national security team conducted over Veteran's Day weekend, about which I reported earlier this month. The fault lines going into that meeting included Cheney's office and some in the NSC arguing for more aggressively backing the Shias, and in particular, Hakim. Note the Hadley memo's recommendation to press Hakim/SCIRI to support Maliki, and the overall concern about whether Maliki is up to the task.

As the accompanying NYT analysis suggests, "Many of the proposals appear to be based on an assumption that the White House memo itself calls into question: that Prime Minister Maliki can be persuaded to break with 30 years of commitment to Shiite religious identity and set a new course, or abandon the ruling Shiite religious alliance to lead a radically different kind of government, a moderate coalition of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish politicians." In other words, even those seemingly backing propping up Maliki believe he is not likely to be successful at the task. And then what? (This post has been updated).

Tom Ricks: View at the Pentagon, throw in our lot with the Shiites. This is something we are likely to be hearing more and more of.

NYT:

Specifically, the United States wants Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt to work to drive a wedge between the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has been behind many of the Shiite reprisal attacks in Iraq, a senior administration official said. That would require getting the predominantly Sunni Arab nations to work to get moderate Sunni Iraqis to support Mr. Maliki, a Shiite. That would theoretically give Mr. Maliki the political strength necessary to take on Mr. Sadr’s Shiite militias.

“There’s been some discussion about whether you just try to deal first with the Sunni insurgency, but that would mean being seen to be taking just one side of the fight, which would not be acceptable,” the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic practice.

But getting Sunni Arab nations to urge Iraqi Sunnis to back Mr. Maliki in the hopes of peeling him away from Mr. Sadr is a tall order under any circumstances, and it was made even taller last week after the killing of more than 200 people by bombings in a Shiite district of Baghdad, the deadliest single attack since the American invasion. The attacks led to violent reprisals; vengeful Shiite militiamen attacked Sunni mosques in Baghdad and Baquba.

“We’re clearly in a new phase, characterized by this increasing sectarian violence,” Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Estonia for a NATO summit meeting before Mr. Bush’s meeting with Mr. Maliki. “That requires us, obviously, to adapt to that new phase, and these two leaders need to be talking about how to do that and what steps Iraq needs to take and how we can support them.”

In return for helping on Iraq, the Sunni Arab countries have asked the Bush administration for a new push toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. Mr. Bush has largely shied away from that longstanding demand, but things may be changing.

So one last bid at keeping the Sunnis in, at national reconciliation under Maliki, with presumably the implicit threat to Sunni allies being that if they don't help make it happen, the US can let things take their course, and let the Shiites create the facts on the ground and in the government that the Sunnis will not be able to deny. In return, the US promised renewed effort on the Israel-Palestinian front. The message to Maliki: sideline Sadr and rein in the Mahdi army, while the US focuses on the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda. And if this doesn't work? What's Plan D?

WP: Cheney "summoned" to Saudi Arabia? "Saudi Arabia is so concerned about the damage that the conflict in Iraq is doing across the region that it basically summoned Vice President Cheney for talks over the weekend, according to U.S. officials and foreign diplomats. The visit was originally portrayed as U.S. outreach to its oil-rich Arab ally."

The WP reports on a bleak new Marine report, "State of the Insurgency in Al-Anbar." "'...Despite the success of the December elections, nearly all government institutions from the village to provincial levels have disintegrated or have been thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq,' or a smattering of other insurgent groups, the report says."

"Pick a winner." WP: "... In a sign of the discord in Washington, the senior U.S. intelligence official said the situation requires that the administration abandon its long-held goal of national reconciliation and instead 'pick a winner' in Iraq. He said he understands that means the Sunnis are likely to bolt from the fragile government. 'That's the price you're going to have to pay,' he said."

You read it here first. And within the Shiite camp that the US appears to be considering tilting further towards, Washington may be pressing Maliki to dump Sadr in favor of Hakim. McClatchy piece asks whether what the US does this week really matters. "We're not in control any longer," military analyst Andrew Bacevich tells the paper.

[Former DIA analyst] Jeffrey White described the multi-layered violence in Iraq this way: "(The) Sunni insurgency remains one of the engines of this civil conflict, this civil war. And there is militia violence now. And you have coalition violence. You have major Sunni-on-Sunni violence in Anbar province. ... And you have criminal violence, widespread Shia-on-Shia violence in the South."

"The elements of violence and resistance and just the bloodymindedness are so embattled it requires something major and enduring (by the United States) or just get out," he said.

A Yukos connection to the Litvinenko case? The Times of London:

A dossier drawn up by Alexander Litvinenko on the Kremlin's takeover of the world’s richest energy giant will be given to Scotland Yard today as police investigate the former KGB spy's secret dealings with some of Russia's richest men.

It emerged yesterday that Litvinenko travelled to Israel just weeks before he died to hand over evidence to a Russian billionaire of how agents working for President Putin dealt with his enemies running the Yukos oil company.

He passed this information to Leonid Nevzlin, the former second-in-command of Yukos, who fled to Tel Aviv in fear for his life after the Kremlin seized and then sold off the $40 billion company.

Nevzlin told The Times that it was his “duty” to pass on the file. “Alexander had information on crimes committed with the Russian Government’s direct participation,” he said.

“He only recently gave me and my attorneys documents that shed light on the most significant aspects of the Yukos affair.”

Investigators have told The Times that Litvinenko had apparently uncovered “startling” new material about the Yukos affair and what happened to those opposing the forced break-up of the company.

Several figures linked with Yukos are reported to have disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances while its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and others have been jailed.

Meantime, everybody is reporting that radiation has been found at several other London locations.

ABC: Rice advisor Philip Zelikow to resign. Woodward's account makes clear that Zelikow was a force for moderation in the Bush administration, nudging the administration away from the most controversial policies on torture and black site prisons that have so strained US alliances. More here and here.

Is all the recent progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front connected to the flurry of meetings US officials are having in the region? What might the US ask in return of Saudi and Jordanian leaders if it pressures Israel to make concessions, and in turn, what does Israel want if it goes along, as seems to be the case?

A superb Newsweek piece on Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army and the American dilemma from the beginning in how to deal with them:

... For now, Sadr and his Mahdi Army have the initiative. They can stir up trouble without much fear of retribution. A case in point: When kidnappers grabbed an Iraqi-American translator in Baghdad last month, U.S. soldiers sealed off the Sadr City neighborhood where they believed he was being held. But Prime Minister Maliki—who depends on Sadr for political support—quickly ordered the Americans to remove their roadblocks. Maliki has also forced the U.S. military to release men picked up during raids in Sadr City on suspicion of belonging to Shiite death squads.

When the U.S. fails to respond to provocation, it loses credibility. And when it does respond, it can also lose. Last week, before the massive car-bomb attacks, U.S. and Iraqi forces carried out a pinprick raid in Sadr City to get intelligence on the kidnapped military translator, Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie. Like so many other U.S. military strikes in Iraq, however, it came at a price. American forces captured seven militiamen, including one who might have information on al-Taayie. But police said a young boy was among three people killed in the raid. A member of Parliament from Sadr's movement promptly showed up at the morgue, and held the corpse of the boy in his arms as he railed against the American occupation. ....

A reader sends this link along, from the Philly Inquirer: "Subject of FBI probe tells of Weldon ties; lawyer John J. Gallagher says their dealings go back 30 years, with a mutual interest in Russia."

The WP's Sudarsan Raghavan on Iraq's Mahdi Army as being consciously modeled on Lebanon's Hezbollah.

The NYT gets briefed on a draft of the Iraq Study Group report.

Time:

Although Baker has said the commission will develop its proposals by consensus, there were signs last week that the group had hit some speed bumps. Sources say renewed pressure from both political flanks in the U.S. is making it difficult for the commission's center to hold. Emboldened by their takeover of Congress, Democrats have sent unmistakable signals that they favor some movement, if not reduction, of forces at the earliest possible date. Meanwhile, present and former government officials say Vice President Cheney intends to oppose any proposal that would make regional talks with Iran or Syria a key part of the U.S.'s Iraq strategy, even though Baker favors such an opening. As the commission broke for Thanksgiving, the partisan pincer movement was beginning to provoke some talk of stalemate. "The impulse toward consensus has diminished somewhat," a close panel observer told TIME. "Everything that is happening--the election, the postelection, the situation in Baghdad--makes it more difficult."

Baker and Hamilton held dozens of listening sessions this summer and fall, but members for the most part were careful not to stake out their positions. With a tentative mid-December deadline just a couple of weeks away, the decision-making process is just beginning. Commission members, said a close adviser, "are just now trying to make sense of what they heard, what the choices are and who stands where on those choices." While a Baker-led deal is still a good bet, several sources said, the odds that the commission will be unable to provide a clear user's guide for cleaning up Iraq are narrowing. And that means Gates may need to sort out the options on his own.

Via Atrios, this clip is worth watching.

McClatchy: "Followers of the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took over state-run television Saturday to denounce the Iraqi government, label Sunnis 'terrorists' and issue what appeared to many viewers as a call to arms. [...] Al-Maliki's administration acknowledged it was powerless to interrupt the pro-Sadr program on the official Iraqiya channel, during which Sadr City residents shouted, 'There is no government! There is no state!' Several speakers described neighborhoods and well-known Sunni politicians as 'terrorists' and threatened them with reprisal."

Regional Security. Could the administration be more cryptic about Cheney's meeting in Riyadh? The accompanying, grainy photo captured from Saudi TV is nominally more helpful. Isn't that David Addington in the left hand corner of the frame?

More from Reuters. "The United States wants Saudi Arabia to use its influence with Iraq's Sunni minority to help stabilize the country after more 200 people were killed in a Shi'ite stronghold near Baghdad on Thursday in the worst single attack since Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003. The Bush administration has also stepped up its efforts to seek help from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan in breaking a deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks."

Update: Meantime, check out Charlie Savage's chronicle of the philosophy and practice of imperial executive power espoused by Cheney throughout his career.

Shortly before his death, poisoned former Russian spy named alleged Russian agent in London, Viktor Kirov, as harrassing him:

Alexander Litvinenko, who died after mysteriously absorbing polonium210, a rare and highly toxic radioactive material, said in his last full interview from hospital that he knew he was an “active case” for Russian intelligence.

He named the agent in charge of monitoring him as “Viktor Kirov”. A man called Anatoly V Kirov worked at the Russian embassy in London, where he was listed as a diplomat, until late last year.

He is believed to have left the diplomatic service in October 2005 and returned to Russia. But Litvinenko claimed just days before he died that Kirov was an intelligence agent who continued to target him.

Yesterday, antiterrorist squad police requested that The Sunday Times hand over a tape of the interview in which Litvinenko named Kirov. Detectives from Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorist Command SO15 are on standby, if required, to travel to Moscow to interview people involved in the case.

The Guardian reports:

Privately, however, there is deep scepticism in Whitehall about whether the Putin administration would be willing to risk a crisis in British-Russian relations by directly authorising an assassination of a British citizen on British soil, particularly using a method that might involve other Britons being contaminated. The two countries are currently engaged in delicate negotiations over energy security.

Litvinenko apparently obtained UK citizenship in the past month.

More on the case from David Wise.

WP:

"This summit is an act of desperation. The White House doesn't know what it can do," said David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow and the author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power." "The situation is deteriorating more rapidly than anyone anticipated and to an unending depth.

"I don't think, in modern American history, there is another example of such egregious failure of policy and execution. We're really seeing something unprecedented here. Even Vietnam was a slower decline, and the military forces were more in balance. . . . I don't know anyone who thinks there is an outcome in Iraq now that is hopeful."

The crisis atmosphere deepened in Iraq yesterday when followers of radical Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr pledged to walk out of parliament and Maliki's cabinet if the prime minister attends the Jordan summit. Sadr's powerful political bloc has 30 members in Iraq's new parliament. It was also pivotal in backing Maliki as prime minister during heated months-long debate over the new government.

The Bush administration has been increasingly frustrated by Maliki's leadership, particularly his inability or unwillingness to rein in fellow Shiites, including militias such as Sadr's. But the White House has limited alternatives because the Iraqi leader was democratically selected and the next election is not due until 2009. Maliki is, for now, the only political game in town.

So what's Cheney telling Riyadh? What does Bush plan to tell Maliki in Jordan? On the Sunni front, how about this. You can see the writing on the wall. One last push for national reconciliation, which you (Riyadh, Amman), are encouraged to help succeed. If it fails, the Sunnis aren't expected to win. Meantime, Bush may be telling Maliki, bring in Hakim/SCIRI.

Sen. Chuck Hagel in the WP:

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government. ...

AP: Poisoned ex Russian spy dies in London.

Amid the deadliest attacks in Iraq since the war began, top cabinet officials and the US ambassador are meeting at SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim's house and calling for new security plans:

Top officials held an emergency meeting at the home of Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim apparently to discuss deteriorating security. President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni; and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad attended, an aide to al-Hakim said.

Afterward, the three Iraqi officials appeared on national television, with al-Hashimi reading a statement urging calm and calling on politicians to work hard to reduce tensions that have brought a surge in sectarian bloodshed over the past year.

''We call for a revision of the government's existing security plans for Baghdad to better protect innocent civilians,'' he said.

And where was Maliki? Hakim will apparently be in Washington on an official visit the first week of December.

Update: Cheney to discuss "regional issues" in Riyadh:

Vice President Cheney will fly to Saudi Arabia tomorrow and hold talks with King Abdullah on Saturday amid a flurry of diplomatic activity over Iraq that reflects the wider scramble to shape the war-torn country's future at a critical juncture.

The White House said Cheney will discuss regional issues but provided no details about the hastily organized mission to Riyadh. The trip, however, comes on the eve of a summit between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Jordan next week. It will also overlap with a weekend meeting in Tehran between the presidents of Iran and Iraq to which the president of Syria has been invited.

The United States has long been pressing the Saudis to use their tribal connections with Iraq's Sunni minority to get them to join reconciliation efforts, a key to weakening Iraq's escalating insurgency. Washington has few means of persuading the Sunnis to more fully support and engage in Iraq's fledgling government except through pressure from neighboring Sunni regimes with family or religious ties.

President Bush to meet Maliki next week -- in Amman.

Check out two interesting reader observations in the updates to the post on Col. H.R. McMaster, his book on Vietnam, and current participation in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Iraq military strategy review.

Destabilizing Lebanon. Incredibly ominous. "...Elias Atallah, a Gemayel ally, speculated bitterly that today's assassination was an attempt by pro-Syrian groups to reach 'the required third' and force the current government from power."

Worth reading: former CIA Soviet analyst Jennifer Glaudemans on Robert Gates and the politicization of intelligence:

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked me to testify at the confirmation hearings for Robert M. Gates, who had been nominated to be director of Central Intelligence.

I was asked because I had worked in the CIA's office of Soviet analysis back when Gates was the agency's deputy director for intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

More specifically, I was asked to testify because of my knowledge about the creation of a May 1985 special National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that had been used to justify the ill-fated deals known as Iran-Contra. ...

In 1985...Iran-Contra was in the planning stages then, a secret scheme in which the Reagan administration was going to sell arms to an enemy country, Iran, and use the proceeds to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua.

In order to justify these actions, administration officials felt they needed some analytical backing from the intelligence community. Those in my office knew nothing of their plans, of course, but it was the context in which we were asked, in 1985, to contribute to the National Intelligence Estimate on the subject of Iran.

Later, when we received the draft NIE, we were shocked to find that our contribution on Soviet relations with Iran had been completely reversed. Rather than stating that the prospects for improved Soviet-Iranian relations were negligible, the document indicated that Moscow assessed those prospects as quite good. What's more, the national intelligence officer responsible for coordinating the estimate had already sent a personal memo to the White House stating that the race between the U.S. and USSR "for Tehran is on, and whoever gets there first wins all."

No one in my office believed this Cold War hyperbole. ...

We protested the conclusions of the NIE, citing evidence such as the Iranian government's repression of the communist Tudeh Party, the expulsion of all Soviet economic advisors and a number of Soviet diplomats who were KGB officers, and a continuing public rhetoric that chastised the "godless" communist regime as the "Second Satan" after the United States.

Despite overwhelming evidence, our analysis was suppressed. At a coordinating meeting, we were told that Gates wanted the language to stay in as it was, presumably to help justify "improving" our strained relations with Tehran through the Iran-Contra weapons sales.

Military monitored and collected files on library gatherings of peace activists. If it turns out the White House ordered warrantless NSA surveillance of the same sort of thing, what will the reaction be?

Mark Goldberg on Natsios and Guehenno speaking on Darfur today.

McMaster. This really is interesting. One of the military thinkers, Col. H.R. McMaster, tasked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to, as part of a group of a dozen colleagues, crash-rethink military Iraq strategy, wrote Dereliction of Duty about the Vietnam war. From the Amazon review:

For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country's conduct in the war.

McMaster stresses two elements in his discussion of America's failure in Vietnam: the hubris of Johnson and his advisors and the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dereliction of Duty provides both a thorough exploration of the military's role in determining Vietnam policy and a telling portrait of the men most responsible.

Via Spencer Ackerman.

Update: Comment from a reader, a former Pentagon civilian staffer: "I'm very glad to see your mention of Col McMaster. His book was very much on my mind as we entered this war, given the controversial justification for the war. I wondered back then how history would judge the current JCS performance against McNamara's. I recall a few years ago, before the war, the Army chief of staff put Dereliction of Duty on his reading list for officers. I wondered for years when someone would bring up McMaster's thesis and compare the current state of affairs with the past. Certainly what we're dealing with is not something new and could have been avoided. IMHO the current JCS, and also Gen Myers, totally failed in the performance of their duties to provide sound military advise to the SECDEF. I think Col McMaster has a very bright future ahead of him, as he just completed a tour as the commander of the 3rd ACR in Iraq. I think he'll be Chief of Staff someday, or get command of a major combatant command."

Update II: From another reader, who has contributed research to McMaster. "McMaster's book on Vietnam is very important and thoughtful, but it's important to put it in perspective. Professor Ronald Spector (Geo. Washington University), in a very positive review of Dereliction of Duty (The New York Times, 7/20/1997) identified a significant weakness in the analysis:

Having drawn up a devastating indictment of Johnson and his principal civilian and military advisers, McMaster apparently believes he has explained the outcome of the Vietnam conflict. It was a war, he says, that was "lost in Washington . . . even before the first American units were deployed." The notion that a war like that in Vietnam, which began 14 years before the election of Kennedy and continued for six years after the end of the Johnson Administration, can be satisfactorily explained by reference to decisions made in Washington during late 1964 and early 1965 would seem at best questionable. Yet it is a view held not only by McMaster but by many of the authors who have preceded him. This preoccupation with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and their decisions displays some of the same ethnocentrism, the same assumption of American omnipotence, for which McMaster pillories the leaders of that era. It largely leaves out of account the ideas, plans and actions of the Vietnamese.

"If McMaster, or at least his book, overlooked such important lessons of Vietnam, can we be sure that his his evaluation of U.S. strategy in Iraq will not have significant analytical flaws?"

Michael Isikoff, Chinese Water Torture, Washington-style:

What was President Bush's personal role, if any, in giving a green light to harsh interrogation methods? That's never been clear, but now Democratic leaders are more determined than ever to find out. The CIA acknowledged last week, in response to a freedom of information lawsuit by the ACLU, that Bush signed a 2002 directive authorizing the creation of secret prisons overseas to hold and interrogate high-level Qaeda operatives. Key Democrats, infuriated that they had to learn about the document from a lawsuit, say they intend to demand a copy to determine precisely what it said.

"This will allow us to pull back the curtain on what the president knew and when he knew it," said one Democratic aide, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Friday fired off a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, seeking a copy of the 2002 directive.

Leahy and other Dems also want to see a still secret Justice Department memo approving the use of particular interrogation techniques; critics have long suspected the document includes references to waterboarding and other methods that may constitute torture. (Former deputy White House counsel Timothy Flanigan last year confirmed in Senate testimony that he and Gonzales, then the White House counsel, were briefed about particular interrogation methods by Justice lawyers, but declined to say what they were.) Leahy has sought to subpoena the Justice memo in the past--a good indicator that he may well do so again when the Dems take control of the Senate in January. ...

WaPo shakeup as two top political reporters leave to start online gig.

US News: Bye-bye to secret spy program?

Italy replaces Sismi chief Nicolo Pollari, under investigation for colluding with the Americans on the Abu Omar extraordinary rendition. The heads of Sisde and Cesis were replaced too.

More from the AP on the biographies of their replacements: "Replacing Pollari is Admiral Bruno Branciforte, a fleet commander and former head of navy intelligence. The 59-year-old officer's experience also includes stints as navy attache in Washington, and as Italian representative at U.S. Central Command in Tampa during the war in Afghanistan. Gen. Mario Mori, an officer from Carabinieri paramilitary police, was replaced at the helm of the civilian intelligence agency, SISDE, by Franco Gabrielli, a top anti-terrorism police official. Gen. Giuseppe Cucchi, a retired army officer with experience in local and international military politics, replaced government official Emilio Del Mese at the cordinating body CESIS."

What went wrong. Worth reading, in the NYT, three Iraqis who worked for the Americans in Iraq who have now sought political asylum in Scandinavia. Basim Mardan. Waddah Ali. Omar Ghanim Fathi: "... Now the problems of Iraq will not be solved without a long and very bloody civil war. The fragments that will emerge should practice democracy by choosing their own leaders, away from the influence of the Americans — even if those leaders are terrorists. But the people will not enjoy the democracy and liberty that was already given to them, because they refused it."

Bassett-Gibbons HPSCI Connections. Justin Rood points today to this Las Vegas Sun article about Nevada entrepreneur Warren Trepp, whose company, eTreppid, apparently has gotten earmarks from former House Intelligence committee member Jim Gibbons (R-NV), the governor-elect of Nevada.

I recently learned that Brent "Nine Fingers" Bassett, a former CIA officer who has been identified as one of the "Gosslings" in the mix of the Duke Cunningham/CIA corruption allegations, worked specifically on the staff of Gibbons, not as a professional staff for HPSCI itself. Some of the Gosslings, including Bassett and Dusty Foggo, have been alleged to have been at Watergate poker parties that brought together CIA officers, contractors seeking government earmarks, lobbyists and congressmen, including the Duke. Add the Bassett-Gibbons-HPSCI connection to your understanding of the Cunningham scandal org chart.

Seymour Hersh: The Next Act.

UN Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1676, November 2006.

WP:

The government of President Álvaro Uribe is being shaken by its most serious political crisis yet, as details emerge about members of Congress who collaborated with right-wing death squads to spread terror and exert political control across Colombia's Caribbean coast.

Two senators, Álvaro García and Jairo Merlano, are in custody, as is a congressman, Eric Morris, and a former congresswoman, Muriel Benito. Four local officials have been arrested, and a warrant has been issued for a former governor, Salvador Arana. All are from the state of Sucre, where the attorney general's office has been exhuming bodies from mass graves -- victims of a paramilitary campaign to erode civilian support for Marxist rebels in Colombia's long conflict.

The investigation, which has revealed how lawmakers and paramilitary commanders rigged elections and planned assassinations, has shaken Colombia's Congress to its core. One powerful senator from Cesar state, Álvaro Araujo, has warned that if he is targeted in the investigation, it would taint relatives of his in the government and, ultimately, the president, whom he has strongly supported.

The arrests and disclosures about the investigation, which is focusing on at least five more members of Congress, come weeks after prosecutors leaked a report revealing how paramilitary fighters have killed hundreds of people, trafficked cocaine to the United States and sacked government institutions while negotiating a disarmament with Uribe's government.

AP:

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who will chair the Senate Judiciary Committee next year, asked the Justice Department to release two newly acknowledged documents, which set U.S. policy on how terrorism suspects are detained and interrogated.

The CIA recently acknowledged the existence of the documents in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The first is a directive President Bush signed giving the CIA authority to establish detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees.

The second is a 2002 memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA's general counsel regarding interrogation methods that the spy agency may use against al-Qaeda leaders. ...

Leahy asked Gonzales to produce any revisions and analyses of those and other memos. He also requested agency documents that interpret the scope of interrogation practices permitted and prohibited by the Detainee Treatment Act or the Military Commissions Act. ...

NYT: The Baker group meets Syrian envoys, several times.

Overseeing the Overseers -- check out this Tapped post on a professional biographical detail about a prospective candidate to chair the House intelligence committee about which you probably were not aware:

One thing you may not know about Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tx), now being considered as a compromise candidate to chair the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), is that he joined his friend and colleague, outgoing congressman Curt Weldon at a meeting with infamous Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, against the advice of the Agency, and without informing the U.S. ambassador in Paris, as is proper protocol. The meeting took place at the Sofitel hotel on Rue Boissy D'Anglas around the corner from the US embassy in Paris on a Saturday morning, spring of 2004,*** according to two sources. (The US government was actually surveilling the hotel lobby that morning out of concern that Iranians might potentially try to harm the congressmen; Weldon apparently loudly asked the concierge for a room for a secret meeting). Ghorbanifar and his business partner were trying to entice the U.S. congressmen to take up the cause of trying to make Ghorbanifar a paid U.S. intelligence asset again on the Middle East, but the CIA would have nothing to do with him, given that he was deemed a fabricator and made the subject of two CIA burn notices in the 1980s...

Go read the rest. Reyes, Solomon Ortiz (who was also at the meeting) and Weldon, all on the Armed Services committee, are apparently buddies who enjoy traveling abroad together on Congressional delegations, including when they went to meet North Korea's Kim Jong Il and Libya's Moammar Qaddaffi.

***Correction: The meeting date was Friday August 29 or Saturday, August 30, 2003. Reyes, Ortiz and Weldon were returning from a Congressional delegation that included Russia, and Uzbekistan, on a "technical stopover" in Paris 28/29/30 August, to give the (US military) crew rest. Weldon had dinner the night before at the ambassador's residence, at which he told the ambassador, when asked, that he had no meetings planned in Paris. He and his group met as planned the next morning with his source Fereidoun Mahdavi who brought his business partner Ghorbanifar to the meeting in a corner of the mostly empty Sofitel lobby Saturday morning 9am. The US government had spotters on the corner outside and in the lobby out of concern that Ghorbanifar might try to set Weldon up. After Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar showed up, the spotter in the lobby was instructed not to linger.

Reyes' spokeswoman Kira Maas denies Reyes has ever met with Ghorbanifar.

Then CIA station chief in Paris Bill Murray says in response to that: "Weldon, Ortiz and Reyes were part of a Congressional delegation which was in France in late August 2003 for a planned meeting that Weldon planned with his source. I was supposed to go to that meeting but had been given instructions not to after I had learned from my own sources that Ghorbanifar was going to attend the meeting. Therefore I called Weldon, I told him I wouldn't go to the meeting. I also told him his source's information was not very good. He told me that my superiors in Washington would not agree with that and had told him it was first class information. The meeting was held. Ghorbanifar attended."

Update II: Mahdavi remembers meeting Congressman Solomon Ortiz at that 2003 Sofitel meeting to which he brought Ghorbanifar. About Reyes: "It's possible. At the time, the whole effort of Weldon was to get me in contact with the CIA. I assume no one from the intelligence committee was there." He also tells me outgoing House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra brought a delegation of eight congressmen -- four Democrats and four Republicans - to meet with him last year. Mahdavi says he had dinner with the Congressional delegation led by Hoekstra at the Hotel Opera in Paris in the summer of 2005. He also says he has met with Weldon "several" times.

See the "In sum" graph here.

Al Kamen: Following Rumsfeld out, (or scheduled to leave anyhow).

Tilt. Just out: A reported oped in the LA Times, "Unleash the Shiites?"

AS SECTARIAN violence rises in Iraq and the White House comes under increasing pressure to revamp its strategy there, a debate is emerging inside the Bush administration: Should the U.S. abandon its efforts to act as a neutral referee in the ongoing civil war and, instead, throw its lot in with the Shiites?

A U.S. tilt toward the Shiites is a risky strategy, one that could further alienate Iraq's Sunni neighbors and that could backfire by driving its Sunni population into common cause with foreign jihadists and Al Qaeda cells. But elements of the administration, including some members of the intelligence community, believe that such a tilt could lead to stability more quickly than the current policy of trying to police the ongoing sectarian conflict evenhandedly, with little success and at great cost.

This past Veterans Day weekend ... almost the entire Bush national security team gathered for an unpublicized two-day meeting. The topic: Iraq. The purpose of the meeting was to come up with a consensus position on a new path forward. ...

Numerous policy options were put forward at the meeting, which revolved around a strategy paper prepared by Hadley and drawn from his recent trip to Baghdad. One was the Shiite option. Participants were asked to consider whether the U.S. could really afford to keep fighting both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite militias — or whether it should instead focus its efforts on combating the Sunni insurgency exclusively, and even help empower the Shiites against the Sunnis.

To do so would be a reversal of Washington's strategy over the last two years of trying to coax the Sunnis into the political process, an effort led by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. It also would discount some U.S. military commanders' concerns that the Al Mahdi army, a Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, poses as great a threat to American interests as that presented by the Sunni insurgency centered in western Iraq's Al Anbar province.

So what's the logic behind the idea of "unleashing the Shiites"? It's the path of least resistance, according to its supporters, and it could help accelerate one side actually winning Iraq's sectarian conflict, thereby shortening the conflict, while reducing some of the critical security concerns driving Shiites to mobilize their own militias in the first place. ...

Go read the rest. To be clear, this is not a policy I advocate. My purpose was to report on the signs that such a proposal is under consideration. And there are other clues in recent news reports that such a tilt is being considered, or perhaps is on the verge of being decided. From yesterday's NY Times:

Some officials say, though, that the problems among Iraqi leaders run far deeper than a rearrangement, even a sweeping one, can fix. Shiites and Sunnis are barely able to tolerate one another, and the tense relations make progress on improvements all but impossible. ...

“No matter how many new ministers, they are still going to have the same institutional problems,” said one American official in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to discuss the subject publicly. American policy is about to change, and the shift will emphasize effectiveness over sectarian balance, the official said. “Instead of having a rainbow coalition, they will have people who can get stuff done,” the official said. “I think the U.S. will take a more hands-off approach.”

See if you start to see clues to a shift in that direction of "effectiveness" over "sectarian balance." In particular, watch for SCIRI leader al Hakim to start getting more chits, from Maliki and the Americans, at the cost of Sadr, and the Sunnis.

Update: Spencer Ackerman sees more signs. Is there a hint of it here as well, or a slightly different analysis, of almost the atomization of the sectarian conflict?

NPR just reported that on President Bush's stopover in Moscow today en route to Asia, he and Laura Bush met with Russian President Putin, and offered Russia membership in WTO. My question: in return for Russian agreement to back sanctions on Iran?

More from the AP:

... Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin spokesman Alexei Gromov as saying the two presidents discussed the Iranian nuclear program, the situation in the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation.

Gromov also confirmed that a U.S.-Russian agreement on Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization was being readied for signing in Hanoi.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, talking to reporters aboard Air Force One after Bush left, said the president's get-together with Putin "was a social meeting, as we said it would be. This was a refueling stop."

But Hadley also said the two men "talked a little bit about proliferation generally" with regard to Iran and North Korea. He also said he had spoken with his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, about efforts to reach agreement on a new U.N. security resolution on Iran.

McClatchy: Hezbollah leader predicts collapse of Lebanese government.

NYT: "More than 700 Islamic militants from Somalia traveled to Lebanon in July to fight alongside Hezbollah in its war against Israel, a United Nations report says. The militia in Lebanon returned the favor by providing training and — through its patrons Iran and Syria — weapons to the Islamic alliance struggling for control of Somalia, it adds. The report, which was disclosed by Reuters on Monday, appears to be the first indication that foreign fighters assisted Hezbollah during the 34-day conflict, when Israel maintained a tight blockade on Lebanon. The report also says Iran sought to trade arms for uranium from Somalia to further its nuclear ambitions, though it does not say whether Iran succeeded." Update: Here is the original Reuters report, dateline Nairobi, that led to the NYT report. Still searching for the UN report upon which both are based, but have heard it suggested some of this is unlikely.

Walter Pincus: "The nomination of Robert M. Gates as secretary of defense has begun to ease concerns in the intelligence community about the rapid growth of Pentagon intelligence activities since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said experts inside and outside the government and on Capitol Hill. Gates, a former CIA director, has a long history of opposing expansive Pentagon intelligence activities. He has voiced unease about roles being taken over by Pentagon personnel, in part because more than 80 percent of all intelligence spending is now done by Defense Department agencies. ... In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post in May, Gates wrote that he and other CIA veterans were 'unhappy about the dominance of the Defense Department in the intelligence arena" at a time when "close cooperation between the military and the CIA in both clandestine and intelligence collection is essential.'"

The Institute for Science and International Security's David Albright, a former Iraq weapons inspector, and Jacqueline Shire assert (.pdf) that the "Flawed House [Iran] Intelligence Report Should Be Amended or Withdrawn."

Just out: Meet the Iran Enterprise Institute.

Wednesday Update: Iran Enterprise Institute does have an application into the State Department for funding.

"Rumsfeld: We can only lose the war in America," not Iraq. Former Rumsfeld friend and Defense Policy Board member Ken Adelman tells the New Yorker that Rumsfeld has been in "deep denial -- deep deep denial" about Iraq from the beginning.

... Within the confines of the policy board, Adelman became blunt about his disenchantment with the Pentagon’s management of the war. At the board’s meeting this summer, Adelman said, he argued that the American military needed a new strategy.

“I suggested that we were losing the war,” Adelman said. “What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, ‘What’s the alternative? Because what we’re doing now is just losing.’ ”

Adelman said that Rumsfeld didn’t take to the message well. “He was in deep denial—deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can’t lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, ‘Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.’ He got upset and cut me off. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went right on with it.”

While Rumsfeld may have been the only one to articulate it as such, one might observe that the administration has for years seemed to treat Iraq largely as a domestic framing opportunity/problem.

Also worth reading, Andrew Bacevich writing earlier this week in the LA Times on score settling.

For the Record: Jeet Heer and my article which for the first time revealed the identity of former Rep. Curt Weldon's Iranian intelligence source "Ali" (see "The Front," The American Prospect, April 2005, link: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=9361) as Fereidoun Mahdavi was reported entirely based on good, old-fashioned gumshoe reporting, nabbing an interview with Ghorbanifar, working Iranian exile sources -- and not even a whisper from any current or former CIA officers. Ghorbanifar himself originally told me in a telephone interview in August 2004 when I was working on a different story that he was talking and meeting with Weldon and Weldon's aide, former CIA analyst Peter Pry (he said this to prove his bona fides as if it was a rationale for why the CIA should again take him as an asset); he said I should call Weldon to ask him about it and that I should mention the name "Mahdavi." Later, in December 2004, I read a New York Sun article that said Weldon planned to write a book based on sensationalistic information he got from a secret Iranian intelligence source. As the New York Sun reported in December 2004, based on talking with Weldon (four months before Jeet and my article appeared):

Since February 2003, Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania has held a series of secret meetings in Paris with a former high-ranking official in the Shah's government who has correctly predicted, according to Mr. Weldon, a number of internal developments in Iran ranging from the regime's atomic weapons programs to its support for international terrorism, including Al Qaeda.

In other words, Weldon gave important clues away from the get-go, and I already knew from Ghorbanifar that Weldon had been meeting with him and a Ghorbanifar cut-out in Paris going by the name of Mahdavi. Based on Weldon's interview with the Sun, what Ghorbanifar had told me in the phone interview back in August 2004, and conversations with Iranians, I quickly determined that the former Shah-era Iranian government official was probably Fereidoun Mahdavi, the Shah-era Iranian Minister of Commerce, known to be a long time associate of Ghorbanifar. I then went to Paris in January 2005, where I spoke with Mahdavi, who told me he had met and talked to Weldon. "Ali" identified. As I have reported, Mahdavi also said that all of the information he had given to Weldon was from Ghorbanifar because, Mahdavi said, as a former Shah-era official, he was such an important personnage that he could not even call Iran. I went home and Jeet and I wrote the story, which came out in the April 2005 American Prospect.

I have since heard Weldon repeatedly accuse a former CIA officer of leaking me the information on the identity of Weldon's source. That is patently false. I had not even heard of this CIA officer when I worked on my story, indeed was not aware of his existence until weeks after our story was published, when I picked up the NY Times and Washington Post in late May 2005 that had articles about Weldon's new book. Ghorbanifar, Weldon and Mahdavi themselves gave away all the information to determine who Weldon's source was, and what the real source of the information was: Ghorbanifar, a subject of two CIA burn notices from the Iran contra period according to the history books. Whether future history books show that Ghorbanifar managed to rope the US government into buying his fables and fabrications again after all we know about him is still to be determined.

By the way, as one sign of the former congressman's character, I was the person who informed Mahdavi that Weldon was coming out with a book based on his information. I faxed him the Amazon notice. Mahdavi was truly shocked, angry and in disbelief when he learned. When he finally saw a copy of the book, he expressed further shock to see his own handwriting in the faxes Weldon's book reproduces by the dozens. (Weldon later told Mahdavi the book didn't make enough money for him to pay him, as he promised on Meet the Press last year). Weldon's desire to protect his source was overtaken it seems by his greater desire to promote himself.

The internal Pace-driven Pentagon Iraq review to powwow with the Iraq Study Group in coming days. WP:

Pace is scheduled to meet early next week with members of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission mandated by Congress to review the Bush administration's Iraq policy and propose changes, a senior defense official said. Pace's review and other military recommendations are expected to be merged with the work of the Iraq Study Group as part of a broad effort by the administration to redefine Iraq policy. "It will become part of something bigger," the source said.

"We need to give ourselves a good, honest scrub about what is working, what is not working, what are the impediments to progress, and what should we change about the way we're doing it," Pace said in an interview yesterday with CBS News.

"We'll make the changes that are needed to get ourselves more focused on the correct objectives," Pace said, adding in a later interview that the U.S. objectives are themselves in question. ...

Pace's comments also could foreshadow a reassertion of influence by senior officers in the wake of this week's resignation by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to military officers and analysts. Moreover, some military officers have voiced concern in recent days that if they do not assert a greater role in formulating a future course in Iraq, that course will be defined for them by the resurgence of congressional Democrats, many of whom favor a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

More.

Counter-ISG operations. Former CIA officer and Baker-Hamilton advisor Reuel Marc Gerecht preemptively nixes the direction of the ISG's likely recommendations:

As will soon be apparent, the Iraq Survey* Group, of which Mr. Gates is a member and to which I'm an adviser, has not discovered any way for the U.S. to exit Iraq -- except under catastrophic conditions. Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn't exist.

If one works through the different scenarios, they all return quickly to a Rumsfeldian position that the U.S. needs to do more in Iraq with less -- a position that has been proven flatly wrong since the spring of 2003. This is why Washington has not been able to draw down even though the president, his defense secretary and his generals have dearly wanted to do so. Any meaningful reduction of U.S. forces is very likely to collapse the Iraqi Army into Shiite and Sunni militias and bring on massive carnage, the likes of which the Middle East has not seen since the Iran-Iraq War. If Mr. Gates signs off on the ISG's recommendations, which will probably be completed before he assumes office, he will be party to a doomed strategy -- and everyone in Washington and abroad will recognize it as a failure as soon as they start to work through it -- before he even sets foot in the Pentagon. It may not be easy for Mr. Gates to recover from this initial flop.

However, when the ISG bombs, the Bush administration may finally get serious about correcting its mistakes in Iraq. It's a decent bet that when this happens, America's military officers may start to miss Donald Rumsfeld. He was the best cover any failing general could ever have.

Is at least a temporary troop surge off the table?

Here's a guess for a consensus way forward being cobbled together: Something like a limited time, last-ditch troop surge to Baghdad (people are talking about needing 30k over the 15k recently there), followed by a redeployment to a half dozen bases in (or alternatively some outside of) Iraq, with occasional counterinsurgency operations in al-Anbar, beefed up training of Iraqi forces, and logistics/support, drawing down to about 60k US troops in Iraq over the coming year; or variations thereof. Efforts to mitigate/prevent a civil war from becoming a regional war (some sort of conferring with the meddling neighbors, if that becomes politically acceptable here).

Apparently the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Peter Pace has recently brought together twelve people with extensive experience in Iraq, including three former Iraq commanders, among them H.R. McMaster (yanked back from London) and Peter Mansoor, at the Pentagon for sixty days to brainstorm options -- a kind of parallel, internal-Pentagon ISG.

(*A reader notes: Iraq Study Group, not Survey Group.)

"Who's Rumsfeld?" C.J. Chivers brings us this Borat-worthy scene:

Hashim al-Menti smiled wanly at the marine sergeant beside him on his couch. The sergeant had appeared in the darkness on Wednesday night, knocking on the door of Mr. Menti’s home.

When Mr. Menti answered, a squad of infantrymen swiftly moved in, making him an involuntary host.

Since then marines had been on his roof with rifles, watching roads where insurgents often planted bombs.

Mr. Menti had passed the time watching television. Now he had news. He spoke in broken English. “Rumsfeld is gone,” he told the sergeant, Michael A. McKinnon.

“Democracy,” he added, and made a thumbs-up sign. “Good.”

The marines had been on a continuous foot patrol for several days, hunting for insurgents. They were lost in the hard and isolating rhythms of infantry life.

They knew nothing of the week’s news.

Now they were being told by an Iraqi whose house they occupied that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, one of the principal architects of the policies that had them here, had resigned. “Rumsfeld is gone?” the sergeant asked. “Really?”

Mr. Menti nodded. “This is better for Iraq,” he said. “Iraqi people say thank you.”

The sergeant went upstairs to tell his marines, just as he had informed them the day before that the Republican Party had lost control of the House of Representatives and that Congress was in the midst of sweeping change. Mr. Menti had told them that, too.

“Rumsfeld’s out,” he said to five marines sprawled with rifles on the cold floor.

Lance Cpl. James L. Davis Jr. looked up from his cigarette. “Who’s Rumsfeld?” he asked.

The accompanying Joao Silva photo is haunting. (Thx to a correspondent.)

WP: In letter, radical cleric details CIA abduction from Milan, Egyptian torture:

...In his letter, Nasr described how his health had badly deteriorated. He had lost hearing in one ear from repeated beatings, he said, and his formerly pitch-black hair had turned all white. He said he was kept in a cell with no toilet and no lights, where "roaches and rats walked across my body."

He also gave a graphic account of Egyptian interrogation practices, including how he would be strapped to an iron rack nicknamed "the Bride" and zapped with electric stun guns.

On other occasions, he wrote, he was tied to a wet mattress on the floor. While one interrogator sat on a wooden chair perched on the prisoner's shoulders, another interrogator would flip a switch, sending jolts of electricity into the mattress coils.

Will there be, finally, Congressional hearings on torture and extraordinary rendition?

Roll Call: Out of work Congressional staffers scrambling for K Street jobs.

Official reality. Given the turn of events the past few days, I am reminded of what someone told me for a long piece I wrote earlier this year in Mother Jones:

... To many who saw the Iran-Contra scandal unfold, it all adds up to a familiar picture. Jonathan Winer worked for a Senate committee led by John Kerry that, in the mid-1980s, probed rumors of the secret arms deals and of the funneling of the profits to Nicaragua’s right-wing Contra rebels. For years as the investigation continued, critics—led by then-congressman Dick Cheney—“called us conspiracy nuts,” says Winer. The committee kept hearing tips about private individuals secretly carrying out the government’s business, he recalls. “Officials tell you none of it is true, because there’s no record that any of these things took place. It creates a situation where oversight is practically impossible because official reality is completely misleading, and unofficial reality—which is the truth—does not exist.” In the end, the scandal was uncovered after control of Congress shifted to the Democrats and, simultaneously, more and more evidence was revealed in Iran-Contra-related lawsuits and media investigations.

“What has to happen is, you have to have the press and Congress and the courts all playing their constitutional role for the truth to come out,” Winer says. “If any of those components don’t function, you can wind up with serious problems.”

LAT: Democrats mull the power to investigate.

Worth reading: James Mann on Robert Gates' misunderstood political pedigree; the NYT on the dump-Rumsfeld plans in the works for months.

Negroponte as deputy Secretary of State? So a reader notes buried in Ignatius' column yesterday. Reader: "He is well respected among the Foreign Service, knows the Department inside and out due to his long career at State, and would be a fairly safe choice -- Dems don't have a problem with him. No idea who would replace him at DNI -- it's not exactly all that attractive a position."

CQ on the priorities of incoming Chairman of the Senate Intel committee Jay Rockefeller.

Sen. George Allen to concede.

NYT:

The White House political strategy to embrace Iraq was set early last year. To make the case of the war’s political power, Mr. Rove would typically draw a pie chart — often on a napkin — that showed that while the country was polarized on the issue of the war, there was a sliver of independents who had once supported it, and later soured on it, but who could be brought back into the Republican camp.

The extent of that miscalculation became clear in New Jersey earlier this campaign season as Republicans conducted a poll to use against Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, who was battered by accusations of corruption and who was running against Thomas Kean Jr., an initial supporter of the war. Respondents were given a choice between a candidate with a history of corruption, facing possible indictment, versus a candidate who supported the war. Each received 40 percent, a sobering finding for Republicans.

This interesting too: "'You could say the guy is going to raise taxes, increase spending, he hasn’t done a particularly good job,' said Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist whose campaigns included that of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland, who was defeated Tuesday. 'They would just say, uh huh, we know that but this year I’m going to vote Democrat.’”

More from the Post on GOP fingerpointing: they made moderate suburban voters see them as extremists.

We knew this was coming. Maureen Dowd, "A Come-To Daddy Moment":

...The defense chief got hung out to dry before Saddam got hung. The president and Karl Rove, underestimating the public’s hunger for change or overestimating the loyalty of a fed-up base, did not ice Rummy in time to save the Senate from teetering Democratic. But once Sonny managed to heedlessly dynamite the Republican majority — as well as the Middle East, the Atlantic alliance and the U.S. Army — then Bush Inc., the family firm that snatched the presidency for W. in 2000, had to step in. Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes.

Mr. Gates, already on Mr. Baker’s “How Do We Get Sonny Out of Deep Doo Doo in Iraq?” study group, left his job protecting 41’s papers at Texas A&M to return to Washington and pry the fingers of Poppy’s old nemesis, Rummy, off the Pentagon. ...

AP: Democrats take control of the Senate.

Update: Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid statement on news that Democrats have won control of the United States Senate: "The American people have spoken clearly and decisively in favor of Democrats leading this country in a new direction. In Iraq and here at home, Americans have made clear they are tired of the failures of the last six years. The days of the Do Nothing Congress are over. From changing course in Iraq to raising the minimum wage to fixing the health care crisis to making this country energy independent, we’re ready to get to work. Now it is time for Democrats and Republicans to join together and make Congress work for every American.”

Via CNN, AP projects Webb wins Virginia, Dems take the Senate.

NBC too.

Re: today's events, I think my oped in the Globe from last week holds up pretty well. "But what started perhaps as a campaign gimmick has turned into foreign-policy reality: ... A campaign to manage public perception of the White House's handling of the Iraq quagmire in advance of the November polls has led to the administration recognizing the need for a genuine policy shift, even as it sounds increasingly uncertain about what it should do. [... ] Foreign policy is an outgrowth of domestic politics. This administration is governed by the shrewdest, most sophisticated political operatives in history. And what's happening right now is stunning: Amid a difficult midterm election environment, the Bush team's central foreign-policy convictions are being transformed by domestic political realities -- right before our very eyes."

Can we expect other departures from the Pentagon? Cambone?

NPR's Mary Kay Magstead: Gates had been Bush's first choice to be intelligence czar. He refused, thinking the position was a bad idea.

Fred Barnes' elections post-mortem:

THIS ONE IS PRETTY EASY TO EXPLAIN. Republicans lost the House and probably the Senate because of Iraq, corruption, and a record of taking up big issues and then doing nothing on them. Of these, the war was by far the biggest factor. Unpopular wars trump good economies and everything else. President Truman learned this in 1952, as did President Johnson in 1968. Now, it was President Bush's turn, and since his name wasn't on the ballot, his party took the hit.

The defeat for Republicans was short of devastating--but only a little short. The House seats the party lost in New York and Connecticut and Pennsylvania will be hard to win back. Just as Republicans have locked in their gains in the South over the past two decades, Democrats should be able to solidify their hold on seats in the Northeast, as the nation continues to split sharply along North-South lines.

What should worry Republicans most, however, is erosion of its strength in the West and in two states in particular: Colorado and Arizona. Fours years ago, Colorado was solidly Republican. Since then, Democrats have won a Senate seat, two House seats, the governorship, and both houses of the state legislature. At the state level, that's realignment.

In Arizona, Republicans dropped two House seats and Republican Senator John Kyl got a mild scare. Kyl, by the way, may be finest and most able senator in Washington. He's certainly in the top five. Meanwhile, Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano cruised to victory.

The bottom line is this: Colorado and Arizona may not be there for Republicans in the 2008 presidential race. Of course, everything depends on the actual candidates, but these two states start out as presidential swing states. This is a new development.

More confirmation for Tom Schaller's theory that the Dems can win without the South?

(Also, for future reference, Barnes notes, Larry Sabato's elections predictions were apparently almost perfect.)

Barnes' conclusion is interesting too: "Conservatives won't want to hear this, but the Republican who maneuvered his way into the most impressive victory of the election was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, he's sui generis. But he won a landslide victory after moving to the center, while holding onto conservatives by not hiking taxes. Just think if he were eligible for the White House in 2008. Even (some) conservatives would be clamoring for him to run."

Knowledgeable Iraq policy hand on Gates coming/Rummy going: "I don't know much about Gates personally, but the fact that he is on the Baker-led Iraq Study Group is big. The Rummy resignation is part olive branch to the Dems and part an effort to convince the public that a new Iraq strategy is coming. In this context, Gates can be seen as a down payment on 'changing the course' and using the ISG to forge a bipartisan way ahead. Now we'll see what they actually do . . ."

Mulling over the Bush press conference with a correspondent: is the White House embracing Baker Hamilton to push the Dems to embrace "cut and run"?

NPR: John Tester wins Montana. Dems have 50, GOP has 49. All eyes on Virginia.

CNN: RUMSFELD TO RESIGN. "Breaking News 12:53 PM ET: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Intends to Resign, Republican Officials Told the A.P."

1pm Update: Don Rumsfeld live from Pentagon.....any moment....

Speculation Watch: Who to replace him? Gordon England is safest bet. Who would want it? Who can get confirmed?

1pm: Live to the president: Put the elections behind us and work together with the Democrats on the great issues facing this country. I also spoke to the Democrats. I told them, regardless of the final outcome, we could work together in the final two years.

Shared with [Pelosi] name of some interior decorators who can help her decorate ....

Looking forward to hear views of bipartisan Iraq Study Group....meet with them early next week.

Election does not change my main responsibility to protect the American people from attack.

Don Rumsfeld has been a superb leader during a time of change. Also appreciates value of bringing in a fresh perspective in time of war. Trusted advisor and friend.

I have asked Bob Gates to serve as Secretary of Defense.

(WOW. Didn't see that.).

Former [Bush 41] CIA director, served six presidents. Served as member of Baker-Hamilton commission.

(Initial impression: White House is moving to embrace Realism with a big R.)

Certainly going to be new leadership in the Pentagon. Bob Gates bring a fresh perspective. Also great managerial experience. Good talk with him on Sunday in Crawford. Took me a while to sit down and visit with him and found him to be of like mind. Understands we are in global war. Important to be fresh perspective and so does Sec. Rumsfeld.

?: Last week you said Rumsfeld would be staying on.

Bush: My answer was they were goin to stay on. Didn't want to inject question about war in final days of the campaign.

I hadn't had a chance to visit with Gates yet and hadn't had my final discussion with Rumsfeld yet. He understands that Iraq not working well enough fast enough. I am assessing all the time, by myself, tactics, do we have the right strategy, and that requires constant assessment. He and I agreed in meeting yesterday that requires a fresh perspective. (So Rummy and Bush decided yesterday before the elections outcomes that Rummy would go -- Bush says).

What's changed today is the elections is over and the Democrats won. And secondly the Democrats are going to have to make up their mind about how they are going to conduct their affairs. We will begin consultations with the Demoratic leadership starting Thursday Friday and Saturday.

?: Full speed ahead on Iraq? Or listening to voters?

Bush: I believe Iraq had a lot to do with the elections but I believe in other factors as well. People want Congress to be honest and ethical. In some races that was the factor. But no question Iraq was on people's minds. As you have just learned, I am making a change at Sec of Def to bring a fresh perspective to achieve what I think most Americans want which is victory. We will work with members of Congress, we will work with the Baker-Hamilton commission.

(Total embrace of the Baker-Hamilton commission - very very interesting. Who else did he meet with at Crawford?? Bush pere? James Baker? Scowcroft?)

?: Did you know when you told (the press) that you would be replacing Rumsfeld?

Bush: No, I didn't know.

I had made the decision I wasn't going to be talking about hypothetical troop levels of command decisions coming down the last stretch. I think that sends a message to troops if commander in chief is constantly changing tactics. It was the right decision to make. Secondly, I hadn't visited with Bob Gates yet. Secondly, didn't have my last conversation with Don Rumsfeld, which I had yesterday. (Last? So, they've had ongoing discussions, presumably, about his departure?)

Rutenberg: Should we expect a different leadership style from you?

Bush: Uh. I really haven't ... I still am going to try to speak plainly about my priorities... You will see a lot of meetings and discussions with Democrats. In terms of the elections, no question Iraq had something to do with it. The amazing thing about this election is that the economy is strong. And yet, obviously there was a different feel out there for the electorate. Good news about the economy (overshadowed) by toughness of the war. I am going to continue to make decisions based on what I think is right for the country. Never been one to fashion my decisions based on short term popularity. I do understand the frustration of the people. I wish this had gone faster. So does Sec. Rumsfeld. The reality is it's a tough fight. And the only way we are going to win the fight is if we finish the job.

I think we are going to have to work with the Democrats just like I think we have to work with the Baker-Hamilton commission. I have vowed we are not going to fail, we are not going to leave until the job is done.

Institutionalize to extent possible steps necessary to make sure future presidents are capable of waging this war. Because Iraq is part of this war. I think back to Harry Truman - Eisenhower continued it. I would hope that is the spirit going forward. This enemy is not going away after my presidency. And I truly believe that Congressman Pelosi and Harry Reid care about the security of this country like I do. No leader in Washington is going to walk away from protecting the country. Have different tactics. But spirit is such that want to protect America.

(Gates' instant Wikipedia entry -- not only does it by 115pm already have his new appointment, it's already the top entry on Google for "Robert Gates." How is that possible with out a little manipulation??)

?: Avoid gridlock?

Bush: We had some success (earlier in my administration) with "Democrat" votes. ... But we now got to show what people are capable of doing. You are right. People are skeptical. The way you defeat skepticism is perform (man his whole tone is different. more like George W Bush campaigning in 2000 than the man we've heard for six years; maybe he should fire Rove next?) I do believe we can get some things done.

...

Jackson (?): On immigration, many Democrats had better things to say about (your plan) than Republican candidates.

Bush: Thank you, yes, I meant to put that on my list. Yes, I think we have a good chance (for comprehensive immigration reform). ... Hope we can get something done, and believe we can find some common ground with the Democrats.

...

Thank you all for your time, I appreciate your interest.

From a correspondent in Minneapolis: "I went to the early morning event on assessing the election, which was great, and [former Congressman and White House advisor] Vin Weber said a lot of interesting things... Asked whether ... he thought the Dems had won both Houses of Congress ... He said yes, that's what he thought the outcome would be. And I presume he's in a position to know."

Time's Mike Allen on Rummy's future: "One move that could buy the President good will with the Hill and the public would be the departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and many people close to Bush hope that happens sooner rather than later. 'He has screwed the President,' said a loyal member of the Bush team who rarely speaks so bluntly. The President said when asked last week that Rumsfeld would serve the rest of the term, but officials say Bush really could not have said anything else, and that is in no way a guarantee that Rumsfeld will still be running the Pentagon at noon on Jan. 20, 2009, when Bush's successor takes office." (Via Rich Lowry).

Who lost Congress? The internal GOP debate. Peter Wallsten: "White House allies suggest there is little reason to think Bush and the Democrats will work together. Bush has tied himself closely to conservative movement leaders who bitterly disagree with Democrats for their opposition to tax cuts and to privatizing Social Security — two of the administration's top goals. ... Norquist said the Republicans' primary goal for the next two years should be making the case for GOP control — not bipartisanship. ...Norquist predicted that Bush would now govern largely through executive orders rather than working with Congress on legislation. The president could, for example, use orders to lighten the load of capital gains taxes by changing how they are calculated, Norquist said."

For his part, David Brooks concludes the opposite: "an end to base-mobilizing politics and a victory for the center." Not if the Norquist/Rove wing of the GOP has its way, it sounds like. More here from the NY Sun anticipating the internal GOP debate over "who lost Congress" -- the Iraq war champions, or the corruption tinged?

Rove's defeat. The LAT's Ron Brownstein:

For six tumultuous years President Bush has provoked intense opposition while mobilizing passionate support for an ambitious conservative agenda.

On Tuesday, that perilous strategy crumbled — and triggered his party's abrupt fall from power. ...

In the long run, the reversals raise fundamental questions about the viability of the strategy Bush and his chief political advisor, Karl Rove, have pursued to build a lasting Republican political majority.

Bush and Rove placed their main emphasis on unifying and energizing Republicans and right-leaning independents with an agenda that focused squarely on the goals of conservatives.

But Tuesday's broad Democratic advance underscored the risks in that approach: In many races, Republicans were overwhelmed by an energized Democratic base and a sharp turn toward the Democrats by moderate swing voters unhappy with the president's performance.

"The story line really is that the Democrats are winning the middle," said Democratic pollster Al Quinlan. ...

The results suggested that socially moderate, upscale voters were breaking clearly for the Democrats.

In Pennsylvania, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum six years ago carried all three of the large suburban counties outside Philadelphia by a combined total of nearly 100,000 votes. But on Tuesday, the overall victory margin for Democrat Bob Casey Jr. in these counties exceeded 120,000 as he cruised to victory.

The same trend was evident in Virginia. Webb pulverized Allen in the affluent suburbs outside Washington, amassing imposing margins that gave him a slender lead at night's end.

Democrats also made gains among more socially conservative, economically strained swing voters, who have provided critical votes for Republicans in recent years. ...

John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, said the erosion Republicans faced among affluent and working-class swing voters underscored the risks of Bush's decision to push an agenda opposed by nearly half the country on even his best days.

"The Bush people chose to put up with a very high level of conflict," Green said. "They didn't try to build a large consensus majority."...

From a political scientist friend: "And the House... I just can't believe some of the results. I saw you mentioned Ryun in KS losing. WY-At large (Cheney's old seat!) must be headed for a recount. DeLay's seat picked up by a Dem. Ney's seat goes Dem. Nancy Johnson lost in CT. Northrup lost in KY. Leach in IA. Pombo in CA. Hayworth in AZ. Shaw in FL. Kelly and Sweeney and more in NY. Weldon and Sherwood and Hart in PA. Bass AND Bradley in NH. And the list goes on." I had not seen that Pombo lost....

WP on the Webb-Allen race, headed for a recount. "With more than 99 percent of the votes tallied by about 2 a.m. today, Webb claimed victory with a lead of about 7,800 votes among the more than 2.3 million cast -- a difference of three-tenths of a percent. Some absentee ballots in Loudoun County, Richmond and Virginia Beach were still being counted in the early morning."

Latest races at WP: Gibbons (R) wins rizona Senate seat, Chris Shays (R) holds onto his Connecticut House seat. Nick Lampson (D) wins DeLay's old House seat. (corrected).

Waiting for Virginia and Montana on the Senate. As of 2:45am/NPR, Dems have won 27 seats in the House.

NPR: Arizona first state to reject same sex marriage ban, South Dakota ballot initiative close. Update: SD's abortion ban overturned, 55 to 45. WP: SC, VA, Wisconsin ban gay marriage.

NPR projects Dem Claire McCaskill wins Missouri Senate seat from incumbent Jim Talent. 2:30am Update: CNN reports that Talent concedes defeat.

Kansas Republican Jim Ryun loses to a Democrat, Nancy Boyda-- a surprise. Kansas has experienced a phenonemon - its state Republican party has gotten so in the grip of Christian conservatives (including those who oppose teaching of evolution), that some Republican moderate politicos are registering and running as Dems. Those moderates appear to have won. Former Republican turned Dem Paul Morrison appears to have handily beat ultra-conservative Phil Kline for Kansas AG; Kline is the guy who lost his court battle to access everybody's medical records.

One of the most moderate Republican foreign policy hands Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), a 30 year veteran of the House, loses. "U.S. Rep. Jim Leach conceded defeat this morning after Democratic challenger Dave Loebsack shocked the 30-year congressman."

WP: Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

So Dems take House, Senate looks 49-48 in favor of the GOP, with Missouri and Montana to count, and VA to recount but leaning for Webb?

JPod: "Allen's Done. MSNBC reports that there are 33,000 uncounted ballots in Fairfax County, which will presumably break for Webb." It looked awfuly close, less than 2,000 votes, from the CNN TV screen I was watching with friends and colleagues at Adams Morgan. But McCaskill/Talent was sihfting just as I was leaving in McCaskill's favor, with about 60% of precincts reporting.

NRO's James Robbins: "My guess is that any high ranking official at DOD who was around in 2003 is going to be spending most of the time getting ready for hearings, investigations, maybe worse. The more recent appointees at the top four or so levels may avoid the worst of it, though they too will be kept busy. But those on hand for the Iraq invasion are going to be facing non-stop Congressional interrogations. I suppose we'll see an exodus from the Building shortly."

CNN projects that Chafee loses Rhode Island.

930pm: Casey beats Santorum, Sherrod Brown beats DeWine, Menendez holds NJ, Lieberman wins Connecticut.

NPR just reported projection that Ted Strickland will beat Ken Blackwell for Ohio governorship.

NPR/WAMU: Ehrlich (R-MD) campaign acknowledges that campaign fliers handed out today that say Ehrlich/Steele are Democrats were paid for by their campaign.

Roll Call free to nonsubscribers today.

Harold Meyerson: "LUGAR AND SANDERS WIN. We now have one Republican and one socialist elected to the Senate."

Via NRO, a report from old town Alexandria elections today.

Remember Mahir "Who is want to come TURKEY I can invitate ... She can stay my home" Cagri, the Turkish Internet celebrity? He says he's the inspiration for Borat.

Check out Paul Glastris on the Maryland GOP voter guide bamboozle: "The GOP is handing out blatantly misleading campaign literature in heavily African American Prince George's County, Maryland. It' comes in the form of a pamphlet urging voters to support the two "Democrats" at the top of the ticket, Bob Ehrlich and Michael Steele (both, of course, are Republicans). Our reporter in PG County, Jesse Singal, got his hands on one of the pamphlets. It was given to him by a homeless guy from Philly bussed in by the GOP. Check out Jesse's report here."

Rich Lowry hears from anti-Rummy cons. ... "Subject: Rumsfeld Doctrine. We need to rescind the above. This is the doctrine that espouses sending just enough troops not to win."

NBC: FBI probing allegations of voter intimidation in Virginia. Update: Ezra links to a voice recording of one of the voter intimidation calls. It seems likely that people are going to go to jail for this. 1) Fraud for impersonating the Virginia Elections Commission. It can't be too hard to trace the calls. But given the anecdotes of the sheer scale of what's going on, what about charges of conspiracy to tamper with the vote? Experts?

Ballots in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville VA do not list Webb's last name on the ballot. (According to a caller to NPR's Diane Rehm show in Alexandria, they say "James H 'Jim.'") How can that be possible, legal, acceptable? How could it have been more important to get his nickname but not his last name on the screen? (And it's not like Jim is so counterintuitive a nickname from James?) What's more, since elections supervisors knew this was a problem two weeks ago, how was it not fixed? Will we not know the outcome of Virginia tonight? More here. "In Alexandria, summary page cutoffs affect every candidate in some fashion. There's a James T. running against a James P. and James T. Hurysz isn't happy. He told The Washington Post, 'There's enough voter confusion as it is.'"

Update: Two readers say the problem is due to a programming error. See here for more.

This site, canivote.org has information linking to your state to check voter registration, polling locations, ID required, etc. Update: Experience problems: you can call the Election Protection Coalition at 1-866-OUR-VOTE. According to the Center for American Progress, "the group runs the 'only national hotline that offers voters immediate assistance from volunteers trained to provide state specific information, identify issues that compromise the administration of elections, and respond to problems.' Also, know about provisional ballots. ... 'If your name does not appear on the polling site's registration list, or there are other questions about the validity of your registration, you have the right to cast [a provisional ballot.] To cast a provisional ballot, you must fill out a form at the polling site, listing your name, address and party affiliation. Your sealed ballot is placed inside the form. If officials find you are indeed registered to vote, your sealed ballot goes into the voting box. If you're not registered, election officials use your information to register you for the next election.'"

WP:

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

Pamela Lorenz, a retired nurse in Roseville, Calif., called her own experience "harassment as far as I'm concerned" and said, "If I were voting right now, the opponent who's doing this, he'd be off my list for throwing that much trash."

Hour after hour and day after day for two weeks, Lorenz's home has received the same NRCC recorded message attacking Charlie Brown, the Democrat who is challenging Rep. John T. Doolittle (R) in a hard-fought battle in northeastern California. "It is a recorder calling," Lorenz said. "I can't call it back to get them to stop."

Lynne Cheney's lesbian-themed novel Sisters going for $500-$700 bucks used on Amazon.

The top reader review is hilarious, especially if you heard Mrs. Cheney's recent interview with Wolf Blitzer, in which she seemed to condemn Jim Webb for the sexual content of his novels: "This story of a Washington wife who leaves her powerful husband to join a womyn's commune is charged with the kind of eroticism you just don't expect from the Second Lady of the United States of America. I was amazed at how graphically Ms. Cheney details the commune's daily 'massage classes' and their predictable free-for-all aftermaths, while at the same time delivering a devastating critique of phallocentric discourse in modern culture. I can't wait for the sequel, in which the Sisters declare war against the male-dominated multinational corporation that is threatening to foreclose on their commune. Four Stars!"

Update: RT sends a link to the whole book.

Cook Political Report update today:

Going into Election Day, we see a 20-35 seat gain for Democrats in the House, a four to six seat gain for Democrats in the Senate and a six to eight seat gain for Democrats in the governor's races.

All Monday there was considerable talk that the national picture had suddenly changed and that there was a significant tightening in the election. This was based in part on two national polls that showed the generic congressional ballot test having tightened to four (Pew) and six (ABC/Wash Post) points.

Seven national polls have been conducted since Wednesday, November 1. They give Democrats an average lead of 11.6 percentage points, larger than any party has had going into an Election Day in memory. Even if you knock five points off of it, it's 6.6 percentage points, bigger than the advantage that Republicans had going into 1994.

Furthermore, there is no evidence of a trend in the generic ballot test. In chronological order of interviewing (using the midpoint of field dates), the margins were: 15 points (Time 11/1-3), 6 points (ABC/Wash Post), 4 points (Pew), 7 points (Gallup), 16 points (Newsweek), 20 points (CNN) and 13 points (Fox).

In individual races, some Republican pollsters see some movement, voters "coming home," in their direction, and/or some increase in intensity among GOP voters. All seem to think that it was too little, too late to significantly change the outcome. However, it might be enough to save a few candidates. None think it is a major change in the dynamics of races, and most remain somewhere between fairly and extremely pessimistic about tomorrow's outcome.

More at the link. Here are Bob Novak's predictions.

AP: US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad to quit. Tensions between him and Maliki. "Other U.S. officials have said Khalilzad will probably return to an academic or private sector job in the United States. His replacement in Baghdad may be Ryan Crocker, a senior career diplomat who is currently U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, those officials said. Crocker was a top U.S. representative in Baghdad for several months in 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein." Or, suggests a reader and Hill veteran, "The Deputy slot at State has been vacant for a long time .... Does this pave the way for Khalizhad to take over?"

As to this story on the theft of secrets at Los Alamos by a contractor, one obvious question is, who was the contractor? Any of the companies we've been hearing about in connection with the wider Duke Cunningham corruption case with contracts to digitize government contracts? Newsweek:

...A quick check revealed that Quintana had until recently been employed by a contractor at Los Alamos. A file clerk who worked in the lab's document-storage vaults, her job was to scan aging paper documents into a modern digital format. The police called the FBI, which discovered another cache of nuclear documents: 456 paper pages, many stamped SECRET—RESTRICTED DATA.

Unnamed co-conspirator one in the Cunningham case, Brent Wilkes, has ADCS, automated document conversion systems, which digitizes paper documents for the Pentagon, among other agencies, and co-conspirator Mitchell Wade's MZM, now Athena Innovative Solutions, was doing some work for DoE, although I don't remember document digitization being its specialty. (Thx to a reader.)
Update: A colleague has checked into this. "Have the name of the company written down somewhere. Did not have time to check it out but it was not one of the companies known to be linked to Wilkes."

McClatchy's Greg Gordon:

The new chief of the FBI's Criminal Division, which is swamped with public corruption cases, says the bureau is ramping up its ability to catch crooked politicians and might run an undercover sting on Congress.

Assistant FBI Director James Burrus called the bureau's public corruption program "a sleeping giant that we've awoken," and predicted the nation will see continued emphasis in that area "for many, many, many years to come."

So much evidence of wrongdoing is surfacing in the nation's capital that Burrus recently committed to adding a fourth 15- to 20-member public corruption squad to the FBI's Washington field office.

In the past year, former Republican Reps. Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney have pleaded guilty to corruption charges. FBI agents are investigating about a dozen other members of Congress, including as many as three senators. The Justice Department also is expected to begin seeking indictments soon after a massive FBI investigation of the Alaska Legislature.

If conditions warrant, Burrus said, he wouldn't balk at urging an undercover sting like the famed Abscam operation in the late 1970s in which a U.S. senator and six House members agreed on camera to take bribes from FBI agents posing as Arab sheikhs.

"We look for those opportunities a lot," Burrus said, using words rarely heard at the bureau over the last quarter century. "I would do it on Capitol Hill. I would do it in any state legislature. ... If we could do an undercover operation, and it would get me better evidence, I'd do it in a second." [...]

The FBI does appear to be stepping up its use of electronic surveillance and has conducted stings of state politicians. Bureau agents secretly taped Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., before finding $90,000 in his freezer during a raid last May. Cell phones were wiretapped for four months in an investigation of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., government sources say.

As long as this Congress has given the White House carte blanche to tap pretty much everyone without warrants or oversight, it's kind of delicious to think of the lawmakers squirming under the additional investigatory scrutiny, especially when so many of them apparently have reason to squirm.

The Washington Post's Crystal Ball election predictions are out. "Nine out of 10 contestants this year project that Republicans will keep control of the Senate. Eight out of 10 say that the GOP will lose control of the House. This consensus suggests that there may be at least some method to the exercise, not just voodoo." Kevin Drum is taking bets here.

Rumsfeld's new crisis rapid response communications team responds to the forthcoming Army Times editorial tomorrow calling for Rumsfeld to go:

...Attack on Secretary Rumsfeld

CLAIM: “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.”

FACTS: Defense Secretaries in times of war are always subject to sometimes harsh criticism. The Secretary has helped oversee two conflicts while also transforming a mammoth bureaucracy, overseeing sweeping humanitarian missions across the globe, and helping to protect the American people at home.

When Rumsfeld has to get his staff to go on the defense department's website to defend him from the military newspapers (which, "for the record" reminds us, are owned by a private company, Gannett -- there goes your next trip with Rummy, USA Today), it is hard not to see the whole exercise as deeply pathetic.

The White House has got to be loving House intelligence committee chairman Hoekstra today.

House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra criticized the Bush administration on Sunday for its handling of a trove of once-secret documents from Saddam Hussein's covert nuclear program disclosed on a federal Web site.

Hoekstra, R-Mich., complained the U.S. intelligence community hadn't properly declassified the documents.

"Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up," he said on CNN's "Late Edition."

President Bush's director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, ordered the documents posted on the site last March, at the request of Republicans in Congress who wanted to show Saddam was a real threat.

Put on the web at the request specifically of people like -- oh yeah: Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and Rick Santorum. From Saturday's follow up in the NYT:

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release. [...]

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community.

So Hoekstra is content to let Negroponte take it on the ear on this one, not for the first time. What's the word for going on national television to blame others for what he specifically is most responsible for in all of Washington? It seems to be becoming an epidemic.

Chalabi, Iranian asset? Dexter Filkins in the NYT:

Tehran, November 2005

Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran.

The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does.

“He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.”

Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.

“Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.”

Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries.

In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world.

An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared.

More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks.

Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser.

I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.”

Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room.

At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together.

As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless.

Outcomes are even more telling.

AP: Saddam sentenced to death.

The knives are out. As Vanity Fair reports that the neoconservatives blame President Bush and his national security team for the failures in Iraq, Editor & Publisher previews the Sunday NYT magazine cover story: "Ahmad Chalabi Says, 'The Real Culprit is Wolfowitz.'"

So, Ahmad Chalabi, what went wrong in Iraq in the war you helped to sell? “The Americans sold us out,” he tells longtime Baghdad reporter Dexter Filkins in a lengthy cover story in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, reviewed by E&P.

Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who worked -- via everyone from Paul Wolfowitz to Judith Miller -- to convince America to topple Saddam in 2003 (not that many in the administration needed much convincing).

Now, in an interview in his London home, Chalabi, betraying what Filkins calls “a touch of bitterness,” declares, “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” the former assistant secretary of defense, whom he still considers a friend. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out…The Americans screwed it up.”

It's no secret that Chalabi thinks the US should have simply installed him in power after the invasion, and split, an idea that Richard Perle has also supported in various forms. Experience would suggest the next time Richard Perle has a dissident he's eager to promote who has a regime change agenda, American policymakers would be wise to be wary.

Hotline on call's Saturday brunch: Cheney looking shell-shocked.

This may be the closing weekend from hell for the White House. First, the mainstream media is savoring the Ted Haggard controversy; it led network newscasts last night.

Then, those brave neo-cons who pined for a war with Saddam Hussein essentially regurgitate all over the entire Bush national security team in Vanity Fair. Vice President Cheney, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday, looked shell-shocked.

Then the Los Alamos security breach.

Then, of course, the news that the four independent and influential newspapers that serve the branches of the military will jointly call on Monday for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld in an editorial entitled "Time For Rumsfeld To Go."

Cheney, on ABC, said it was "full speed ahead" with the admin's Iraq policy.

"It may not be popular with the public — it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing," Cheney said. "We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."

So: the context for tomorrow's expected Saddam Hussein verdict will be all of the above.

They're forgetting the atom bomb recipees being put on line by the administration at the behest of Congressional Republicans, Pat Roberts, Rick Santorum, and the Weekly Standard.

Delco Times: "Two days after launching a new advertisement, U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon has canceled some of his TV time, fueling speculation Friday he was throwing in the towel and saving money for a legal defense fund." (Via DK).

WP: Rice cozies up to right-wing radio in advance of Tuesday elections.

As national security adviser during Bush's first term, Rice drew fire for giving speeches around the country in crucial battleground states shortly before the 2004 election, a practice none of her predecessors had done. The White House at the time noted that Bush had directed the secretaries of state and defense to avoid getting enmeshed in the presidential campaign. But the White House defended Rice's speeches, saying "part of the job today of national security adviser is to discuss our nation's national security policy."

During her confirmation hearings for the current job, Rice was asked in written questions about her speeches during the 2004 presidential campaign and was asked to confirm she would abstain from activity that might be construed as partisan. "If confirmed as secretary of state, I intend to continue the tradition in that position of not actively participating in public campaign or political events," Rice wrote back to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Colin L. Powell and Madeleine K. Albright, Rice's immediate predecessors, made only infrequent appearances in the media in the two weeks before elections, according to the listing of their interviews on the State Department Web site.

Cook Political Report's Amy Walter: "Predicting a Democratic gain of 20 seats -- an outcome that looked impossible just a few months ago -- now seems cautious."

Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, and Marine Corps Times Monday editorial calls for Rumsfeld to go. "Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go."

WP: "The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the 'alternative interrogation methods' that their captors used to get them to talk." So the administration tortures, but how it tortures is something the victim cannot discuss? Not even with a lawyer?

Via Atrios, Bush, we never knew you. In hindsight, Richard Perle would not have invaded Iraq. Ken Adelman calls Bush national security team "most incompetent" in post-war. About Rumsfeld, Adelman says, "I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

"PoliticsPA has learned from local sources that the RNC is pulling the plug on 72 hour operation in Delaware County. This is a clear indication that the national committees have written off Congressman Weldon."

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Ca) snuck a provision into a Pentagon budget that fires the Iraq inspector general investigating waste and fraud.

Tom Friedman will keep Rumsfeld's new rapid response crisis communications team busy with this.

WP: Foreign lobbies took guise of nonprofits.

Via Will Bunch, from the NYT: "Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to 'leverage the Internet' to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb. Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended 'pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.' Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts 'were shocked' at the public disclosures." As I remember, people including the chairman of the House intelligence committee pushed hard, at the behest of places like the Weekly Standard, to make these captured Iraqi documents public, imagining they would prove Iraq somehow really had WMD when the US invaded. In the end, did they instead potentially teach rogue states how to make a nuclear bomb? Meantime, the chairman of the House intel committee has yanked the clearance of an apparently innocent Democratic staffer in retaliation for the vice chairman's release of a totally insensitive, nonclassified document about the corruption of jailed House intel committee member Duke Cunningham, in the business of selling intelligence contracts. This is truly what one party Congressional intelligence oversight has come to: pushing for the release of documents that contain nuclear secrets in the vain hope it will justify a catastrophic debacle in Iraq, while trying to make a partisan crusade out of the release of the executive summary of an unclassified document detailing the corruption of one of its own.

Ralph Peters in USA Today: "Iraq could have turned out differently. It didn't. And we must be honest about it. We owe that much to our troops. They don't face the mere forfeiture of a few congressional seats but the loss of their lives. Our military is now being employed for political purposes. It's unworthy of our nation."

From Chris Nelson's Nelson Report:

IRAN SANCTIONS...remember not to entirely fixate on the N. Korea situation...Loyal Readers with friends at Treasury say the Department is very pleased with itself for discovering what it sees as a more effective way to talk to international bankers about Iran.

Apparently the dialogue goes something along the lines of “gosh, we’re afraid you fellows are running some inherent risks doing business with Iran, and maybe you need to think a little harder about it...we’re just offering some friendly advice! You know, it may just be that the nice Iranian company you are dealing with isn’t so nice? Say, like, Bank Sederat’s ties to Hezbollah?”

Apparently, the international bankers receiving this little homily are deeply moved by Treasury’s concern for their well being, and some big players, such as UBS, HSBC, Credit Suisse, and Standard & Charter have announced a halt in their Iran business.

Concerns about a new wave of US sanctions on Iran, the above story would seem to indicate, are misplaced. Rather, look for the US to continue applying Treasury’s gentle hand in meetings with foreign regulators and bankers, with the goal of urging greater diligence in any Iran business. That means look to see Treasury continuing to cooperate with State and the EU-3 up at the UN on multilateral sanctions.

Of course there’s always the chance Congress will decide that Iranian bank business still allowed in the US, something called “U-turn transactions”, needs to be stopped, some observers warn.

Holy moly. Update: Rocky Mountain News: Rev. Ted Haggard steps down as pastor of Colorado Springs' New Life Church and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals amid allegations by a gay male escort that the two had a three year relationship. Haggard has said the escort is lying. "I hope to be able to discuss this matter in more detail at a later date. In the interim I will seek both spiritual advice and guidance." (Via DK).

Friday Update: Haggard apparently admits to some of the escort's claims. "The church's Acting Senior Pastor, Ross Parsley, tells KKTV 11 News that Pastor Haggard has admitted to some of the indiscretions claimed by Mike Jones, but not all of them. "

Editor & Publisher: U.S. Soldier Killed Herself After Objecting to Interrogation Techniques. Alyssa Peterson, a devout Mormon and Arabic-language interrogator "objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed….”

In three years, Rumsfeld has never been able to get the security aspect of Iraq right, almost everybody in the universe would agree. So what's his solution? Bring in the heavy guns -- to do more crisis public relations.

Regarding this passage describing a leaked memo from the Pentagon Pr chief:

In an Oct. 3 memo released this week, J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, outlined four focus areas for his department: distributing information on newer media forms like podcasts and YouTube; increased television and radio bookings; better assistance to military analysts and other "surrogates"; and the rapid-response group.

Who are their surrogates*, how formal is the arrangement, and will the media be careful to identify them as such?

Here's the link to the site where Rumsfeld gets to critique the media reports he finds objectionable. You must read it to believe it.

The Pentagon today asked the New York Times to correct an editorial, which claimed that “There have never been enough troops, the result of Mr. Rumsfeld’s negligent decision to use Iraq as a proving ground for his pet military theories, rather than listen to his generals.” Whether the Times believes there were (or are) enough troops in Iraq, it is demonstrably untrue that troop levels in Iraq are the result of Secretary Rumsfeld’s “not listening to his generals.”

It concludes with this bloggy "UPDATE: The New York Times has declined the Pentagon’s request to correct its editorial."

* Kevin Drum appears to have identified one of the possible surrogates.

Guardian: "Tony Blair will attempt to revive the Middle East peace process with a personal visit to the region scheduled before Christmas. Downing Street confirmed the visit after admitting that Nigel Sheinwald, the prime minister's chief foreign policy advisor, held secret talks with the Syrian President, Bashar Al-Assad, and its foreign minister, Walid al-Moualem, in Damascus on Monday. The prime minister's spokesman declined to give any details of the outcome of the meeting but said Syria faced a choice between engagement or isolation and the sponsorship of terrorism. Retaining the status quo in the Middle East was not an option, the spokesman said, but he did reveal that Mr Sheinwald's visit had occurred with the knowledge of the US. ... Mr Blair - who visited the region in September - is convinced that Syria could hold the key to peace in the Middle East, in that it has great influence over Hamas, the democratically elected government of Palestine, as well as over Hizbullah in Lebanon, and some of the Shia insurgency in Iraq. ... The prime minister also believes Syria can stop a Lebanese war flaring up again by controlling the Shi'ite Hizbullah, and allowing UN backed troops into the South of Lebanon, as agreed by the UN at the end of the six week Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the Summer."

NYT: White House sees signs of plot in Lebanon.

In interviews in recent days, senior American officials have alluded less directly to concerns about Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon's affairs. They have suggested that the concerns are one reason that the United States could not engage in negotiations with Syria or Iran, as several leading Republicans, including former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have urged.

From the Post: "White House and State Department spokesmen declined to characterize the evidence used to support the claim, implying that it was based on classified information. And some U.S. intelligence officials and U.N. diplomats said privately that there was no sign that an armed overthrow of the government is in the works."

SF Chronicle: Bechtel pulling out of Iraq, after 52 worker deaths. Via Petrelis.