Best Wishes for a healthy, happy 2007.

LAT: US military deaths in Iraq reach 3,000.

Update: Worth reading, the letter of one who was killed to his baby son. More.

Ha'aretz:

In the wake of the execution of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh on Saturday expressed his concerns about Iraq's path in the post-Saddam era.

Sneh told Israel Radio that Israel was concerned about the strengthening of Iranian influence in the Shiite sections of southern Iraq and also in the central government. Iraq had also become a regional "power station" for terror that could spread chaos throughout the Middle East, he said.

"We have to be worried about what is going to happen now," he said.

More: Saddam's hanging spurs joy in Iran.

McClatchy's Hannah Allam:

The tiny, dusty shops of Kadhemiya are treasure chests filled with agate, turquoise, coral and amber. I used to spend hours in this colorful Baghdad market district, haggling over prices for semi-precious stones etched with prayers in Arabic calligraphy.

That was just before I left Iraq in 2005, when rings from Kadhemiya were simply sentimental reminders of a two-year assignment here. When I returned to Baghdad last month, however, I found a city so dramatically polarized that sectarian identity now extends to your fingers. Slipping on a turquoise ring is no longer an afterthought, but a carefully deliberated security precaution.

A certain color of stone worn a certain way is just one of the dozens of superficial clues - like dialect, style of beard, how you pin a veil - that indicate whether you're Sunni or Shiite. These little signs increasingly mean the difference between life and death at the terrifying illegal checkpoints that surround the districts of Baghdad. In a surprise reversal, Shiite militiamen have usurped Sunni insurgents as the most feared force on the streets.

When I was last here in 2005, it took guts and guards, but you could still travel to most anywhere in the capital. Now, there are few true neighborhoods left. They're mostly just cordoned-off enclaves in various stages of deadly sectarian cleansing. Moving trucks piled high with furniture weave through traffic, evidence of an unfolding humanitarian crisis involving hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Iraqis.

The Sunni-Shiite segregation is the starkest change of all, but nowadays it seems like everything in Baghdad hinges on separation. There's the Green Zone to guard the unpopular government from its suffering people, U.S. military bases where Iraqis aren't allowed to work, armored sedans to shield VIPs from the explosions that kill workaday civilians, different TV channels and newspapers for each political party, an unwritten citywide dress code to keep women from the eyes of men.

Attempts to bring people together have failed miserably. I attended a symposium called "How to Solve Iraq's Militia Problem," but the main militia representatives never showed up and those of us who did were stuck inside for hours while a robot disabled a car bomb in the parking lot. [...]

On one of my first days back, I took a little tour with my Iraqi colleagues to get reacquainted with the capital. We decided to stay on the eastern Shiite side of the Tigris River rather than play Russian roulette in the Sunni west.

Even on the relatively "safe" side of the river, a dizzying assortment of armed men roamed freely. In the space of an hour, we encountered the Badr Organization militia, the Mahdi Army militia, the Kurdish peshmerga militia, the Iraqi police, interior ministry commandos, the Iraqi military, American troops, the Oil Protection Force, the motorcade of a Communist Party official and Central Bank guards escorting an armored van.

We drove through one of my favorite districts in hopes of visiting shopkeepers I knew. But they had fled, leaving behind padlocked doors and faded signs for shops whose names now seem ironic rather than catchy: "Nuts," "Ghost Music," "Once Upon a Time."

I asked my colleagues to arrange meetings with old Iraqi sources - politicians, professors, activists and clerics - only to be told they'd been assassinated, abducted or exiled.

Even Mr. Milk is dead. The grocer we called by the name of his landmark shop in the upscale Mansour district was kidnapped and killed, along with his son, my colleagues said. The owner of a DVD shop where I once purchased a copy of "Napoleon Dynamite" also had been executed.

Read the rest. Via Juan.

Worth reading, Riverbend's end of year post:

...2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No- really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It's like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart- a chip here, a chunk there. ...

Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.

Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we.

So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.

Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so. ...

Also this account of Saddam's demise apparently at the hands of Moqtada al-Sadr loyalists, from the NYT:

The room was quiet as everyone began to pray, including Mr. Hussein. "Peace be upon Mohammed and his holy family."

Two guards added, "Supporting his son Moktada, Moktada, Moktada."

Mr. Hussein seemed a bit stunned, swinging his head in their direction.

They were talking about Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric whose militia is now committing some of the worst violence in the sectarian fighting; he is the son of a revered Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, whom many believe Mr. Hussein ordered murdered.

"Moktada?" he spat out, mixing sarcasm and disbelief.

More from the LAT.

The US Interior Department's Mineral Management Service under scrutiny for alleged kickbacks scheme:

The Justice Department is investigating whether the director of a multibillion-dollar oil-trading program at the Interior Department has been paid as a consultant for oil companies hoping for contracts.

The director of the program and three subordinates, all based in Denver, have been transferred to different jobs and have been ordered to cease all contacts with the oil industry until the investigation is completed some time next spring, according to officials involved.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation had not been announced publicly, said investigators were worried that senior government officials had been steering huge oil-trading contracts to favored companies.

Update: As I pointed out a year ago, the first federal contract that convicted Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Mitchell Wade received was through a special program at the Minerals Management Service, that became a kind of under the radar subcontracting unit for the Pentagon. Did the MMS and the Interior Department come under scrutiny as a result of the wider Cunningham or Abramoff investigations? You'll note the Defense and Interior departments are connected in this audit.

BBC: Saddam executed. NYT. Riverbend.

The BBC is reporting that "US forces in Iraq have released two Iranian diplomats detained in a raid in Baghdad last week. . . The diplomats were handed over to the Iranian embassy in the city on Friday, the IRNA agency said. ... US officials, who announced earlier this week they were holding the men, have made no comment on their release."

Update: From the Post:

Two senior Iranian operatives who were detained by U.S. forces in Iraq and were strongly suspected of planning attacks against American military forces and Iraqi targets were expelled to Iran on Friday, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The decision to free the men was made by the Iraqi government and has angered U.S. military officials who say the operatives were seeking to foment instability here.

"These are really serious people," said one U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They were the target of a very focused raid based on intelligence, and it would be hard for one to believe that their activities weren't endorsed by the Iranian government. It's a situation that is obviously troubling."

One of the commanders, identified by officials simply as Chizari, was the third-highest-ranking official of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' al-Quds Brigade, the unit most active in aiding, arming and training groups outside Iran, including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, U.S. officials said. The other commander was described as equally significant to Iran's support of foreign militaries but not as high-ranking.

And from the LAT: "When the two Iranians were taken into custody, they were at the office of Hadi Amiri, leader of the Badr Brigade Shiite militia, the Iraqi officials said. The office is in the compound of Abdelaziz Hakim, who leads the Badr-affiliated Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. In the raid, the military seized documents, maps, photographs and videos linking the two Iranians to illegal weapons shipments to armed groups in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said this week." More on the conflicting Iraqi versus American accounts from the NYT.

The Nixon Center's National Interest magazine interviews Iran's ambassador to the UN Javad Zarif on the recently passed UN sanctions.

The Australian: Spy hunt turns to mystery passenger:

DETECTIVES investigating the murder of Alexander Litvinenko are trying to trace a Russian businessman who flew to Britain at the time a consignment of deadly polonium-210 was allegedly smuggled into London.
The man was spotted on a flight from Hamburg sitting beside Dmitry Kovtun, another Russian whom German police are investigating for trafficking the radioactive material used to poison the former KGB spy.
Officers have studied CCTV footage from airports at Hamburg and London and believe the men were travelling together.

However, the mystery figure disappeared after leaving Heathrow with Mr Kovtun. The name he used on the flight and the passport presented to immigration officials does not show up on any hotel register in the capital. It is believed that he met up again with Mr Kovtun in London on November 1, the day Litvinenko fell ill.

Also on the wider Litvinenko case, don't miss Alexander Stille's account of the secret life of Mario Scaramella.

WP: US kills Sadr aide in Najaf -- a week after an elaborate hand off ceremony to Iraqi forces was held there. NYT: “'I have come to the conclusion that this is no longer America’s war in Iraq, but the Iraqi civil war where America is fighting,' Major Voorhies said."

Woodward:

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

NYT's Carlotta Gall attacked by Pakistani agents in Quetta Pakistan.

Former President Ford dies. His former chief of staff, of course, Dick Cheney.

NYT:

The American military is holding at least four Iranians in Iraq, including men the Bush administration called senior military officials, who were seized in a pair of raids late last week aimed at people suspected of conducting attacks on Iraqi security forces, according to senior Iraqi and American officials in Baghdad and Washington.

The Bush administration made no public announcement of the politically delicate seizure of the Iranians, though in response to specific questions the White House confirmed Sunday that the Iranians were in custody.

Gordon D. Johndroe, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said two Iranian diplomats were among those initially detained in the raids. The two had papers showing that they were accredited to work in Iraq, and he said they were turned over to the Iraqi authorities and released. He confirmed that a group of other Iranians, including the military officials, remained in custody while an investigation continued, and he said, “We continue to work with the government of Iraq on the status of the detainees.”

It was unclear what kind of evidence American officials possessed that the Iranians were planning attacks, and the officials would not identify those being held. One official said that “a lot of material” was seized in the raid, but would not say if it included arms or documents that pointed to planning for attacks. Much of the material was still being examined, the official said.

Nonetheless, the two raids, in central Baghdad, have deeply upset Iraqi government officials, who have been making strenuous efforts to engage Iran on matters of security. At least two of the Iranians were in this country on an invitation extended by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, during a visit to Tehran earlier this month. It was particularly awkward for the Iraqis that one of the raids took place in the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders, who traveled to Washington three weeks ago to meet President Bush. [...]

A senior Western official in Baghdad said the raids were conducted after American officials received information that the people detained had been involved in attacks on official security forces in Iraq. “We conduct operations against those who threaten Iraqi and coalition forces,” the official said. “This was based on information.”

US officials have recently indicated alleged intelligence that Iran is taking a more direct role in training those attacking coalition forces in Iraq.

LAT: Senate Intel committee finds Weldon Able Danger claims "baseless."

AP: "Two news organizations are asking a federal judge to unseal documents in the case of a CIA agent whose name was leaked, arguing that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never needed the testimony of reporters who were threatened with jail time because he knew the source of the leak all along. ... Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has acknowledged being Novak's source ... He also said he told Fitzgerald about the conversation as soon as the investigation began. Lawyers for the news organizations [the AP and Dow Jones] said the public has the right to know why Fitzgerald testified that he needed the testimony of reporters to continue the investigation. The only way to know that, the lawyers argued, is to unseal Fitzgerald's affidavits and the court's full legal opinion on the issue."

The LAT's Sonni Efron: Wolfowitz owes the country an explanation on Iraq:

... Some of the most fundamental misjudgments of Iraq appear to have been his as well. He testified to Congress, for instance, that U.S. troops were more likely to be treated as liberators than occupiers, and that Iraq's own wealth would likely suffice to pay for most of its reconstruction. He dismissed warnings that ethnic strife could erupt in a democratic or chaotic Iraq, saying that most of the violence in Iraq had always been by the Hussein regime against various ethnic groups. And his promotion of the now-discredited Ahmad Chalabi has never been explained.

In February 2003, on the eve of the invasion, before the House Budget Committee, he heaped scorn on "the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq," saying that the number was "wildly off the mark."

Of course, plenty of other smart people also got Iraq wrong, so why single out Wolfowitz? Because from Bush on down, the politicians are being held accountable. Iraq has destroyed the Bush legacy. Generals have seen their military wounded. The war has tarnished Colin Powell's once-shining reputation, destroyed Rumsfeld's and killed any shot Condoleezza Rice might have had at the White House. But Wolfowitz has failed up, into one of the world's most prestigious jobs. "I'll have a chance sometime to talk about Iraq," Wolfowitz said in his e-mail last week. "But it's a distraction and a harmful distraction from what I'm trying to accomplish for Africa and the developing world."

Still, as a man whose reputation for intellectual honesty helped land him the World Bank job, the cerebral Wolfowitz owes the American people not only an explanation but also his best forensic analysis of mistakes made and how not to repeat them. ...

If Wolfowitz still believes that the decision to go to war was correct and that more reconstruction money can still save Iraq, then this is a critical time to explain why. If he believes he erred, he should help us understand how it happened and why — and he should apologize, as a private citizen. A World Bank job — or any other important post — should not shield him from accountability.

Italian in Litvinenko case arrested. "Mario Scaramella was arrested in Naples after returning from London, the ANSA and Apcom agencies reported. Rome prosecutors have been investigating Scaramella for violating secrets and possible arms trafficking." BBC: "Scotland Yard said the arrest in Naples was not part of their investigation into Mr Litvinenko's death." More here.

AP: UN unanimously approves Iran sanctions. "The result of two months of negotiation, the resolution orders all countries to stop supplying Iran with materials and technology that could contribute to its nuclear and missile programs. It also would freeze Iranian assets of key companies and individuals related to those programs. ... The resolution authorizes action under Article 41 of Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. It allows the Security Council to impose nonmilitary sanctions such as severing diplomatic and economic relations, transportation and communications links." More here.

Update: Undersecretary of State Nick Burns: "We don't think this resolution is enough in itself ... We're certainly not going to put all of our eggs in a U.N. basket."

The WP on Bandar's back channel to Washington:

... But the woes within the royal family reflect a tug of war over how to handle foreign policy. Eighteen months ago, Prince Bandar bin Sultan ended a legendary 22-year career as the face of Saudi Arabia in the United States. Word at the time was that he was bored, preferring his palatial Aspen lodge to Washington. As it turns out, however, Bandar has secretly visited Washington almost monthly over the past year -- and is at least as pivotal today in influencing U.S. policy as he was in his years as ambassador.

Last week, his successor, Turki, abruptly resigned from the post -- partly, sources close to the royal family said, because of Bandar's back-channel trips to meet with top U.S. officials, including Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

Turki was kept so out of the loop that Bandar often did not inform him he was in town, much less what he was doing, the sources said. Twice, the Saudi Embassy was told by an outsider that Bandar had arrived -- and the embassy sent someone to the airport to look for his private plane to confirm it, according to the source who provided the tip. [...]

In his secret visits, Bandar increasingly pressed the Bush administration not to deal with Iran -- and, instead, to organize joint efforts to counter Iran's growing influence in the Middle East, such as in Lebanon, said sources close to the royal family. The new model would be based roughly on the kind of joint U.S.-Saudi cooperation that assisted anti-Soviet forces during Moscow's 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan, the sources said. [...]

The kingdom grew particularly alarmed as the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group began to leak out last month, with recommendations that the administration talk to both Iran and Syria, say U.S. officials and sources close to the royal family. Even before the report was released, Abdullah summoned Cheney to again warn about Iran and the regional implications of its growing influence -- and offer Saudi assistance and discuss joint U.S.-Saudi efforts. [...]

After a year of internal tensions and failure to pay bills, Turki was not invited to Riyadh for the Cheney visit, Saudi sources confirmed. And Bandar returned to Washington again right after the meeting to discuss the specifics of the joint efforts. Two weeks later, Turki quit.

Baghdad becomes a Shiite city:

Large portions of Baghdad have become Shiite in recent months, as militias press their fight against Sunni militants deeper into the heart of the capital, displacing thousands of Sunni residents. At least 10 neighborhoods that a year ago were mixed Sunni and Shiite are now almost entirely Shiite, according to residents, American and Iraqi military commanders and local officials. ...

Sunni political control in Baghdad is all but nonexistent: Of the 51 members of the Baghdad Provincial Council, which runs the city’s services, just one is Sunni.

In many ways, the changes are a natural development. Shiites, a majority of Iraq’s population, were locked out of the ruling elite under Saddam Hussein and now have power that matches their numbers.

The danger, voiced by Sunni Arabs, is that an emboldened militant fringe will conduct broader killings without being stopped by the government, or, some fear, with its help. That could, in turn, draw Sunni countries into the fight and lead to a protracted regional war, precisely the outcome that Americans most fear.

“They say they’re against this, but on the ground they do nothing.

Haditha: Four Marines charged with the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians last year, and significantly, four of their officers were charged too. NYT:

Four marines were charged yesterday with murder in the killings of two dozen Iraqi civilians, including at least 10 women and children, in the village of Haditha last year, military officials said at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Military prosecutors also charged four officers, including a lieutenant colonel in charge of the First Marine Regiment’s Third Battalion, with dereliction of duty and failure to ensure that accurate information about the killings was delivered up the Marine Corps’ chain of command. A military investigation has found evidence that Marine officers may have obscured certain facts in the case.

The Marines could punish other ranking officers administratively in weeks to come. But the criminal charges filed yesterday against Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, 42, and three other officers reflect an unusually aggressive judicial reaction by military prosecutors to a massacre that has damaged the military’s credibility with Iraqi officials and civilians, military justice experts said.

“This is very aggressive charging — wow,” said Gary Solis, who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University Law Center and at West Point. [...] “I definitely think the Marine Corps is sending a message to commanders, to those in authority of combat troops, that they better pay close attention to the activities of their subordinates to ensure that there was no wrongdoing.”

A comprehensive account of the Haditha case here:

... In the current conflict in Iraq, the massacre in Haditha stands out as the most serious case of misconduct allegedly committed by U.S. forces. ...

But the events at Haditha may have marked a turning point. The U.S. military initiated a criminal investigation into the alleged massacre in March 2006, and Pentagon officials familiar with the case have told the media that the marines involved will probably stand trial for murder and dereliction of duty. After the initial probe into the deaths was deemed to be highly suspect, moreover, the battalion and company commanders responsible for supervising the incriminated unit were relieved of duty, and additional disciplinary action against officers within the chain of command is possible. ...

Significantly, however, these measures were initiated only after Time informed the U.S. military of the result of its own investigation into the Haditha deaths in February 2006 -- almost three months after the incident. The system worked reasonably well, in other words, but only once someone outside the U.S. military had pulled the alarm -- a sign that disclosure of potential violations may be hindered by camaraderie among troops.

Here's the Time report on the November 2005 incident which prompted the investigation.

Just Out: Gunboat Diplomacy.

Leverett and Mann: What we wanted to tell you about Iran (minus redactions).

Reuel Marc Gerecht: one war at a time.

This new Berger stuff is pretty unbelievable. What was he thinking?

Update: These further details are even more perplexing. "On a subsequent visit, on Oct. 2, Berger was surprised to see other copies of the document in the files he was given, and he slid each one under his briefcase to hide them." He later destroyed three of the four copies he had taken.

Worth reading: Mark Danner, "Iraq, the War of the Imagination."

Worth reading: Jay Rosen. "Whereas if [journalists] tried to narrate the expansion of executive power (led by the vice president) through a revolt against empiricism (led by the chief executive) their story would be more accurate (to what happened) but less credible to more people. Because it sounds so extreme. This is in fact a way to discredit the press that the press has not fully appreciated. Take extreme action and a press that mistrusts 'the extremes' will mistrust initial reports of that action— like Suskind’s. This gives you time to re-make the scene and overawe people. There are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative that has been built up by beat reporters and career pundits. When the press can hang on to an old and proven one it will. The Bush people understood that. They knew they could change the game on the press because the press finds it hard to act in reply. Therefore it tends to behave. ... When I read 'Without a Doubt' I felt an immediate kinship with Suskind. Because I could see what he was trying to do: warn us about something that sounded crazy but was all too real. I could see he was going to fail in that, and I sensed that he knew it too. That’s what made it so sad to read. ... "

WP: Bush to expand size of military.

The AP reports that detained American contractor and FBI informant sues Rumsfeld:

A former private security employee in Iraq says he was imprisoned by U.S. forces in a Baghdad military camp, held for three months without charges and denied access to an attorney, despite being an American citizen.

Navy veteran Donald Vance, 29, filed a federal lawsuit Monday against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for his role in overseeing the military prison system in Iraq.

In the lawsuit, Vance alleges that Rumsfeld's "policies and directives are completely inconsistent with fundamental constitutional and human rights."

Vance alleges he was held in "physically and mentally coercive conditions which are supposedly reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants." Those conditions included being subjected to artificial light 24 hours a day, long periods of solitary confinement, threats of excessive force, being forced to wear blindfolds and hoods, and occasional deprivation of food and water.

The NYT wrote about Vance's case yesterday.

For the history books: "[NSC spokesman Gordon] Johndroe and CIA spokesman Mike Mansfield said that, in a lapse, the CIA did not circulate [Flynt Leverett's previously CIA-approved] Century Foundation paper to the White House. Johndroe said sections of that paper probably would have been deemed classified. 'It was an oversight,' Mansfield said. 'It should have been shared with them.'" Will the report be retroactively deemed "probably" classified, due to the bureaucratic knots the CIA and White House have tied themselves in over this episode of alleged censorship? Background here and here.

NYT: "A Justice Department team responsible for investigating accusations that civilian government employees had abused detainees has decided against prosecution in most of the nearly 20 cases referred in the last two years by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, said lawyers who have been officially briefed on the effort. The prosecution team, which was established in June 2004 at the United States attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., has not brought a single indictment and has been plagued by problems."

NYT:

Federal prosecutors in New York yesterday withdrew a subpoena to the American Civil Liberties Union that had sought to retrieve all copies of a classified document.

In an opaque and defensive four-page letter to the judge in the case, the prosecutors said they were acting “in light of changed circumstances” and their determination that “the grand jury can obtain the evidence necessary to its investigation from other sources.”

Another factor may have played a role. A transcript of a closed hearing in the case that was unsealed yesterday suggested the government was going to lose.

And this: "In yesterday’s letter, [assistant US attorney] Ms. Rodgers suggested that the A.C.L.U. had set up the government, creating a fight that could have been resolved informally. [...] Judge Rakoff, too, in last week’s argument, appeared unconvinced by the government’s contention that it thought the matter could have been resolved short of litigation."

Also, White House denies that it tried to suppress publication of sections of a NYT oped by former NSC official Flynt Leverett. At an event at the New America Foundation today, Leverett said the he was warned he would be prosecuted if he published the oped, although it was just a shorter version of a published paper the CIA pre-publication review board had already approved. Among those Leverett contends played censor, three officials from the NSC. More from the Post.

NYT, Violence in Iraq reaches a new high. "There were an average of 959 insurgent and sectarian attacks against American and Iraqi targets every week in Iraq over the last three months, the highest level ever recorded, according to a Pentagon report on security trends in Iraq issued today. Overall, the report, which covers the period from early August to early November, described a worsening security environment in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. The rise in attacks was a jump of nearly 160 a week compared to the weekly average in the previous three months. Civilian casualties reached an all-time high of more than 90 a day, the report said. While the majority of attacks were directed at American forces, most of the casualties were suffered by the Iraqi military and civilians." More from Justin Rood who noted the Congressionally-mandated report's delay. It is dated November 30, but wasn't released until today.

WP:

We wish we could be as enthusiastic about Ms. Pelosi's choice to head the intelligence committee. In an interview with Congressional Quarterly's http://CQ.com, the incoming chairman, Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), exhibited a troubling lack of familiarity with basic knowledge that ought to be expected of someone in that important position. Asked whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite, Mr. Reyes replied, "Al-Qaeda, they have both . . . Predominantly -- probably Shiite." In fact, al-Qaeda's members are adherents of the Sunni branch of Islam and their viciousness toward Shiites is a key fact of recent Iraqi history. Mr. Reyes also flubbed a question about Hezbollah.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Reyes said he had misunderstood some of the questions but added, "My position is I screwed it up and will admit it and move on from there." As to doubts about his capabilities, he said, "It's my expectation that people, once they get an opportunity to see my work, won't have that doubt."

We hope he's right. In our interview, Mr. Reyes said he was not enthusiastic about some of the recommendations by the Iraq Study Group but couldn't name them. "I can't speak to the specifics, some I was not enthused about in there," he said. "Let me defer until I get my book. I know I tabbed and highlighted it." Mr. Reyes has a steep learning curve ahead.

Wash Times reports on an alleged Saudi report on Iran's 'state within a state' in Iraq. Of alleged particular concern to the Saudis, SCIRI and the Badr Brigades, whose leader just visited the White House.

De-debaathification of Iraq's army attempted.

More from Iraq in the Post: "'It's become so bad that a woman who drives a car will be slaughtered, and a woman who doesn't put a scarf on her hair will be slaughtered,' she said. When classes ended in July, Shimirya and her husband, an engineer, sold their cars, locked up their large, modern-style house and headed to Dubai."

US-based Litvinenko associate Yuri Shvets talks to the BBC, says Litvinenko shared with him and Lugovoy a dossier he compiled on Putin figures for a potential British investor that nixed the deal, and that Lugovoy was still working covertly for the FSB and probably betrayed Litvinenko:

Murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was killed because of an eight-page dossier he had compiled on a powerful Russian figure for a British company, a business associate told the BBC on Saturday. [...]

Ex-spy Yuri Shvets, who is based in the United States, said Litvinenko had been employed by Western companies to provide information on potential Russian clients before they committed to investment deals in the former Soviet Union.

He said Litvinenko was asked by a British company to write reports on five Russians and asked Shvets for help. The British company was not named. Shvets said he had passed Litvinenko the information for the dossier on one individual in September.

The BBC said it had obtained extracts of the dossier, which British detectives also have, from an unnamed source. The BBC said the report contained damaging personal details about a “very highly placed member of Putin’s administration”.

“Litvinenko obtained the report on Sept. 20,” Shvets told the BBC. “Within the next two weeks he gave the report to Andrei Lugovoy. I believe that triggered the entire assassination.”

Lugovoy is a former Russian spy who told Reuters on Thursday he had known Litvinenko casually for nearly a decade and had worked closely with him during 2005, meeting him about 10 times.

Shvets said Litvinenko had given the dossier to Lugovoy to show him how reports on Russian companies and individuals should be presented to Western clients.

However, Shvets said he believed Lugovoy was still employed by the Russian secret service the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and had leaked Litvinenko’s dossier to the Russian figure.

Shvets said the report had led to the British company pulling out of a deal, losing the Russian figure potential earnings of “dozens of millions of dollars”.

This interesting too:

Lugovoy told Reuters in an interview that he met Litvinenko in October and November but he has repeatedly denied having anything to do with his death.

Litvinenko never blamed Lugovoy publicly for his murder before dying in the London hospital. However, Shvets said he had come around to that possibility.

“I asked Litvenenko who did you think did it?” Shvets told the BBC. “He immediately said Scaramella. For three days he stubbornly reiterated it was Scaramella and only on the fourth day did he admit he met Lugovoy and other Russians.

“I stopped communicating with Litvinenko when it was diagnosed he had been poisoned. But I spoke to his wife and she told me Litvinenko shared my opinion,” Shvets told the BBC.

More here. "Mr Litvinenko was convinced that he was poisoned when he met three Russians at the Millennium Hotel in London. Mr Shvets said: 'He drank a tea which was not made in front of him. He was agonised by the understanding that as a professional he failed.'"

Nice McClatchy summary of the emerging administration Option 1 for Iraq. "...A revised Iraq political strategy aimed at forging a 'moderate center' of Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim Arab and Kurdish politicians that would bolster embattled Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. The goal would be to marginalize radical Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents." Military analyst Andrew Bacevich described the approach to me a couple weeks ago as the "try harder; yes, it hasn't worked for three years, but try harder" plan.

The Guardian: "A major criminal investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems and its executives was stopped in its tracks yesterday when the prime minister claimed it would endanger Britain's security if the inquiry was allowed to continue. The remarkable intervention was announced by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who took the decision to end the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged bribes paid by the company to Saudi officials, after consulting cabinet colleagues. In recent weeks, BAE and the Saudi embassy had frantically lobbied the government for the long-running investigation to be discontinued, with the company insisting it was poised to lose another lucrative Saudi contract if it was allowed to go on. This came at a time when the SFO appeared to have made a significant breakthrough, with investigators on the brink of accessing key Swiss bank accounts. However, Lord Goldsmith consulted the prime minister, the defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the intelligence services, and they decided that 'the wider public interest' 'outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law'. [...] Shares had begun to rise in BAE and major suppliers such as Rolls-Royce in the last two days, as rumours reached the City that a deal had been done to appease the Saudis." More here, "UK wooed Saudi politicians." "...The deal was immediately controversial and perpetually shrouded in secrecy. It was paid for by the delivery of up 600,000 barrels oil a day, with the money going into a dedicated MoD account. But given the Saudi royal family's propensity for extravagance and corruption, the allegations of kickbacks soon surfaced and have never gone away. It was not only princes and their officials who were said to have benefited but also, allegedly, Mrs Thatcher's son, Mark, through his friendship with one of the intermediaries, the Syrian/Saudi billionaire Wafic Said."

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl) meets with Syria's Assad. Reid has recently appointed Nelson to be the newest member of the Senate Intel committee. Chalabi in Damascus too.

Re: Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD)'s reported stroke. Ezra reports that heavens forbid should Johnson not return, South Dakota's governor can temporarily appoint a substitute, then the "Governor has to call an election within 10 days of a vacancy, to be held no more than 90 days later." From a commentor at the Carpetbagger, "12-11-4. Temporary appointment by Governor to fill vacancy in United States Senate. Pursuant to the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, the Governor may fill by temporary appointment, until a special election is held pursuant to this chapter, vacancies in the office of senator in the Senate of the United States."

Update: A reader writes, "It's pretty clear the Governor gets to fill the vacancy with an appointment and then there has to be a special election held for Senate during the next regular election - i.e., I think, 2008." A commentor to Ezra writes, "The no more than 90 days provision looks to be for representatives, not Senators. Senate special elections would be held at the same time as the next general election (I don't know if this would be 2007 or 2008)."

Cordesman: a war we still can win (Afghanistan).

NYT:

Saudi Arabia has told the Bush administration that it might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, according to American and Arab diplomats.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia conveyed that message to Vice President Dick Cheney two weeks ago during Mr. Cheney’s whirlwind visit to Riyadh, the officials said. During the visit, King Abdullah also expressed strong opposition to diplomatic talks between the United States and Iran, and pushed for Washington to encourage the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, senior Bush administration officials said.

The Saudi warning reflects fears among America’s Sunni Arab allies about Iran’s rising influence in Iraq, coupled with Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. King Abdullah II of Jordan has also expressed concern about rising Shiite influence, and about the prospect that the Shiite-dominated government would use Iraqi troops against the Sunni population.

NYT: "A truck loaded with bags of wheat drove up to a crowd of poor Shiites early Tuesday, lured them close with a promise of work and exploded as they gathered around. Seventy were killed and 236 were wounded, officials said. The attack, in a square in central Baghdad, together with corpses found by Iraqi authorities, pushed the day’s death toll across Iraq to at least 131, the highest total since a bombing killed more than 200 here last month. [...] The wounded were taken to Kindi Hospital, which has one of Baghdad’s primary emergency rooms, but which declined badly in recent months, said the director, Flayeh Hassan. The hospital has lost large numbers of its doctors and nurses, as many middle-class Iraqis have fled the country. There is not enough money to buy basic supplies, he said."

WP: Saudi ambassador abruptly resigns, leaves DC.

Update: This from Chris Nelson on Amb. Turki's sudden departure:

Our sources on Saudi affairs say the sudden recall of Amb. Prince Turki al-Faisal is not part of the succession struggle, per se. They say the long Washington Post article to that effect, this morning, is wrong.

And, our sources say, it would be incorrect to “read” into the situation a power struggle or big internal debate due to recent Saudi statements on Iraq, and fears of a regional power-drive by Iran, but, they concede, “Prince Bandar’s hand is clear.”

So this is entirely personal, and not policy-related? “I do not see a direct link between the recall, and anything regional, including the US relationship,” a source warns. The dramatic resignation and return to Riyadh is “purely internal relationship politics, all inside the tent stuff”.

Specifically, we are told that Bandar, now the King’s national security advisor, seems to have become jealous of Amb. Turki’s increasingly rave reviews from Washington players who appreciated his frank talk and no-nonsense demeanor.

“Without question, he was the most candid, most valued Saudi official in DC ever, he won constant praise for always telling the truth,” this source continues. “Bandar spent 22 years hear and the contrast was obvious.”

In retrospect, a sign of possible trouble for Turki was missed at the time...he did not accompany Vice President Cheney on the recent emergency summit, two weeks ago, it is now being noted.

On Saudi policy, an observer reminds us that a couple of weeks ago, a Saudi operative raised the possibility of cutting the price of oil as a way to counter Iran’s increasing belligerency. This expert today notes, “this is really the only card the two of us [the US and Saudi Arabia] have to play against Iran.”

“But just imagine”, this expert continues, “if they did this for a concerted period of time, and the world price got back down to say $60/bbl, Amadinejad would be toast, and Putin would be a hell of a lot less cocky!”

McClatchy is publishing daily round ups of violence in Iraq. Here's the one for December 10.

Attempting to Sideline Sadr. NYT: "Following discussions with the Bush administration, several of Iraq’s major political parties are in talks to form a coalition whose aim is to break the powerful influence of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr within the government, senior Iraqi officials say. The talks are taking place among the two main Kurdish groups, the most influential Sunni Arab party and an Iranian-backed Shiite party that has long sought to lead the government. They have invited Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to join them. But Mr. Maliki, a conservative Shiite who has close ties to Mr. Sadr, has held back for fear that the parties might be seeking to oust him, a Shiite legislator close to Mr. Maliki said. ... The Americans, who are frustrated with Mr. Maliki’s political dependence on Mr. Sadr, appear to be working hard to help build the coalition. President Bush met last week in the White House with the leader of the Iranian-backed Shiite party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and is to meet this week with the head of the Sunni Arab party, Tariq al-Hashemi. ... The visits of Mr. Hakim and Mr. Hashemi to the White House are directly related to their bid to form a new alliance, a senior Iraqi official said."

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I've recently written about the White House trying to engineer an internal tilt inside the Shia coalition away from Sadr to Hakim:

... The ['status quo plus'] plan would be to try to forge a new and more effective Iraqi government coalition that would include the Sunnis, Kurds, and the Shias, while engineering a tilt within Maliki's Shia coalition away from Sadr and toward fellow Shiite leader Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its attendant Badr Brigade militia. (Hakim is scheduled to arrive in Washington next week on an official visit.)...

The "unleash the Shia" option would have the United States back a Shiite coalition that would include SCIRI leader Hakim and his Badr Brigades as the core of an Iraqi Army under the direct control of Prime Minister Maliki. Even as the United States sided with the Shia, Hadley's memo makes clear that the United States would at the same time press Maliki to distance himself from Sadr and his Mahdi army. Note in particular the Hadley memo's language concerning the importance of rapidly expanding the size of, and Maliki's control over, the Iraqi Army: "Seek ways to strengthen Maliki immediately by giving him additional control over Iraqi forces, although we must recognize that in the immediate time frame, we would likely be able to give him more authority over existing forces, not more forces." Further down, Hadley adds, "Ask Casey to develop a plan to empower Maliki, including … more forces under Maliki's command and control." Military sources say the key to this control is the Badr Brigades.

Link.

AP: Talks underway to replace Iraqi Prime Minister:

Major partners in Iraq's governing coalition are in behind-the-scenes talks to oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki amid discontent over his failure to quell raging violence, according to lawmakers involved.

The talks are aimed at forming a new parliamentary bloc that would seek to replace the current government and that would likely exclude supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a vehement opponent of the U.S. military presence.

The new alliance would be led by senior Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, who met with President Bush last week. Al-Hakim, however, was not expected to be the next prime minister because he prefers the role of powerbroker, staying above the grinding day-to-day running of the country.

A key figure in the proposed alliance, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, left for Washington on Sunday for a meeting with Bush at least three weeks ahead of schedule.

"The failure of the government has forced us into this in the hope that it can provide a solution," said Omar Abdul-Sattar, a lawmaker from al-Hashemi's Iraqi Islamic Party. "The new alliance will form the new government."

The groups engaged in talks have yet to agree on a leader, said lawmaker Hameed Maalah, a senior official of al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI. [...]

It was not immediately clear how much progress had been made in the effort to cobble together a new parliamentary alliance. But lawmakers loyal to al-Sadr who support al-Maliki were almost certainly not going to be a part of it. They had no word on al-Maliki's Dawa party.

They said al-Maliki was livid at the attempt to unseat him.

SCIRI leader Hakim's discussions with the White House last week seemed to boost his confidence and political ambition. Note also the proposed Sunni member of the proposed SCIRI led alliance is arriving in Washington now. One possibility: the threat to replace Maliki could be a manufactured pretext to force him to rearrange his bloc to cut out Sadr -- or else.

I've recently written about the White House trying to engineer an internal tilt inside the Shia coalition away from Sadr to Hakim. One component of the plan, alluded to in the Hadley memo: bringing Hakim's Badr Corps under the control of the Iraqi prime minister:

The "unleash the Shia" option would have the United States back a Shiite coalition that would include SCIRI leader Hakim and his Badr Brigades as the core of an Iraqi Army under the direct control of Prime Minister Maliki. Even as the United States sided with the Shia, Hadley's memo makes clear that the United States would at the same time press Maliki to distance himself from Sadr and his Mahdi army. Note in particular the Hadley memo's language concerning the importance of rapidly expanding the size of, and Maliki's control over, the Iraqi Army: "Seek ways to strengthen Maliki immediately by giving him additional control over Iraqi forces, although we must recognize that in the immediate time frame, we would likely be able to give him more authority over existing forces, not more forces." Further down, Hadley adds, "Ask Casey to develop a plan to empower Maliki, including … more forces under Maliki's command and control." Military sources say the key to this control is the Badr Brigades.

Link.

Update: AP, White House denies move to oust Maliki. What's clear is that Maliki would seem to be under pressure from this White House to reorient his political bloc from Sadr to Hakim. More here.

WP: Iraq's Sunnis flee from attacks:

Farouk, a Sunni Muslim, fears his home might be targeted next. In the past two months, Shiite militiamen have tightened their grip on his central Baghdad neighborhood of Tobji, purging dozens of Sunni families, by fear and by threats. His world has become even more precarious since a barrage of car bombs, mortar shells and missiles killed more than 200 on Nov. 23 in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum that is home to many of Sadr's loyalists.

So Farouk began preparing to do what neither his father nor his grandfather could have imagined in their Iraq: flee Tobji, an enclave where Shiites and Sunnis have coexisted for more than half a century. Farouk plans to join the more than 400,000 Iraqis who have fled their homes, an exodus that is reshaping the face of Baghdad into neighborhoods polarized along sectarian lines.

On Saturday, Farouk's mission grew more urgent. In the latest spasm of revenge attacks, gangs of Shiite gunmen stormed Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood adjacent to Tobji, torching houses, killing at least two Sunni Arabs and driving out dozens of Sunni families. On Sunday, in interviews across Tobji, Sunni Arabs worried that their fate could soon mirror their brethren's.

"It is coming like a wave," said Khudir Mahmoud, 32, after his midday prayers.

Sectarian cleansing, very familiar from the ex Yugoslavia conflicts, ramps up in earnest. Update: Spencer is right. This is how genocide begins.

A potential suspect in the Litvinenko case. But who would have put Dmitri Kovtun up to it?

ABC:

The recommendations are not complete yet, but sources familiar with the reviews conducted by Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace and National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, tell ABC News that military leaders will advise the president that he change the primary mission from fighting insurgents to training and supporting Iraqi troops.

The plan for U.S. forces seems to mirror the one suggested by the Iraq Study Group. But there's one big difference.

Under the Iraq Study Group plan, released earlier this week, combat troops -- about half of all the forces in Iraq -- would return home by the first quarter of 2008.

But under the Pentagon's plan, those combat troops would remain in Iraq -- with a new mission. Entire companies of U.S. combat forces (units of about 150 troops) could be embedded in Iraqi army and police battalions.

Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the top operational commander in Iraq told Pentagon reporters this morning, "We believe now that what we need to do is to embed those trainers, to make that organic, as part of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police."

Other aspects of the plan under consideration include:

Supplying more equipment to Iraqi forces.

Taking steps to curb Iranian interference in Iraq.

Using U.S. special operations troops to target the leaders in Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army. That's a controversial and dangerous proposition that would be done only if the Iraqi government agrees to it. (*)

Absent from the plan: Any timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces in the short term.

Via Michael Stickings.

(*) See this.

Who are these new Iraqi special forces units whose origins no one seems to know, and whose existence some deny? With a chain of command that seems to be outside of ordinary ones?

Little is known publicly about Iraqi special forces units, a relatively new force that has participated in operations against suspected Shiite death squad members and high-level Iraqi insurgents.

Iraqi Defense Ministry officials have given conflicting information about the force. Some say that it is not answerable to the Iraqi army command and is attached to Iraq's intelligence service. Others deny its existence.

The earliest known raid by the force occurred in March, when its members attacked a Shiite mosque that was allegedly being used to hide kidnapping victims. Iraqi special forces soldiers killed 16 Shiite gunmen, detained 17 others and recovered an Iraqi hostage, U.S. and Iraqi military officials said.

The U.S. military announced Thursday that Iraqi special forces soldiers captured six suspected insurgents in a raid this week in Yousifiya, a town south of Baghdad.

Is this a unit created by US special forces? Part of this arrangement? In any case, multiple signs it is targeting in a very directed way key figures in Sadr's Mahdi army and the Sunni insurgency.

More whiffs of the Salvadorization of Iraq:

There are far more Americans in Iraq today — some 140,000 troops in all — than there were in El Salvador, but U.S. soldiers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role. In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main adviser; having been a central participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces. He is not the only American in Iraq with such experience: the senior U.S. adviser in the Ministry of Interior, which has operational control over the commandos, is Steve Casteel, a former top official in the Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. Casteel worked alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellín cocaine cartel.

Steele and Casteel were adamant in discussions with me that they oppose human rights abuses. They stressed that torture and death-squad activity are counterproductive. Yet excesses of that sort were endemic in Latin America and in virtually every modern counterinsurgency. American abuses at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan show that first-world armies are not immune to the seductions of torture.

Until last year, the United States military tried to defeat the insurgency on its own, with Iraqi forces playing only a token role. The effort did not succeed. ...

Last summer, with the security situation deteriorating, some Iraqi and American officials began to argue that the time had passed for a ‘‘clean hands’’ policy that rejected most of the experienced people who had fought for Saddam Hussein. The first official to take action was Falah al-Naqib, interior minister under the interim government of Ayad Allawi. In August, Naqib formed his own regiment, the Special Police Commandos, drawn from veterans of Hussein’s special forces and the Republican Guard. As its leader, he chose General Adnan, not only because Adnan had a useful collection of colleagues from Iraq’s military and security networks, but also because Adnan is Naqib’s uncle.

Naqib did not ask for permission or training or even equipment from the United States military; he formed and armed the commandos because the U.S. military would not. ‘‘One of the biggest mistakes made by the coalition forces is that they started from zero,’’ he told me in his office in the Green Zone in Baghdad. ‘‘Our army and police are 80 years old. They have lots of experience. They know more about the country and the people, and about the way the insurgents are fighting, than any foreign forces.’’

Initially, Petraeus wasn’t even told of the commandos; Iraqis and American civilians at the Ministry of Interior had lost faith in the U.S. training program. The American who was most involved in the commandos’ creation was Casteel, Naqib’s senior American adviser. Casteel, who previously worked for Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority, realized that the de-Baathification policy had to be altered and that Naqib was the person to do it. ‘‘He was not looking for top Baathists or people with blood on their hands,’’ Casteel said. ‘‘But a tremendous amount of people who worked in the government or army weren’t either of those. So why start from scratch when we can start in the middle? That’s where the commando idea was formed.’’

After the commandos set up their headquarters at a bombed-out army base at the edge of the Green Zone, Petraeus went for a visit. He was pleasantly surprised, he told me, to see a force that was relatively disciplined and well motivated. He knew the commandos were officers and soldiers who had served Saddam Hussein, he knew many of them were Sunni and he certainly knew they were not under American control. But he also sensed that they could fight ... The hard men of the past would help shape the country’s future.

Petraeus decided that the commandos would receive whatever arms, ammunition and supplies they required. He also assigned Steele to work with them. In addition to his experience in El Salvador, Steele had been in charge of retraining Panama’s security forces following the ousting of Gen. Manuel Noriega. When I asked him to describe Adnan’s leadership qualities, Steele drew on the vocabulary he learned in Latin America. Adnan, he said approvingly, was a caudillo — a military strongman.

More from Swopa on this point.

Update: See bullet point 3, above.

CQ's Jeff Stein reveals that incoming House Intel committee chairman Silvestre Reyes doesn't know that Al Qaeda is Sunni or that Hezbollah is Shiite.

Tilt to the Shiites, advocated by Cheney's office. Who reported that before? Oh yeah, me, back on November 16th, in the LAT:

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, according to my sources, 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. Among those attending were President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor Stephen Hadley, outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

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....

So what's the logic behind the idea of "unleashing the Shiites"? ...

Glad the Post is catching up. Their "80% option" piece also came out more than a couple weeks after my own, but their piece missed that the real locus of advocacy for the "unleash the Shiites" option was coming from Cheney's office. Notice how I also revealed for the first time in the piece above the existence of the Hadley strategy paper drawn from his recent trip to Baghdad that the NYT later unearthed. I elaborate on the various nuances of the "tilt" and other options under consideration by the administration in further detail here:

... Among the views advanced ... was one seemingly at odds with the gist of the Hadley memo: This option, described to me as a fallback position supported by Cheney's office and elements of the National Security Council, would have the U.S. abandon the immediate goal of national reconciliation and instead pick a side -- the Shia. The "unleash the Shia" option would have the United States back a Shiite coalition that would include SCIRI leader Hakim and his Badr Brigades as the core of an Iraqi Army under the direct control of Prime Minister Maliki. Even as the United States sided with the Shia, Hadley's memo makes clear that the United States would at the same time press Maliki to distance himself from Sadr and his Mahdi army. Note in particular the Hadley memo's language concerning the importance of rapidly expanding the size of, and Maliki's control over, the Iraqi Army: ..."Ask Casey to develop a plan to empower Maliki, including … more forces under Maliki's command and control." Military sources say the key to this control is the Badr Brigades.

It's important to realize they are not mutually exclusive options, the hunker down and tilt to the Shiites option is something of a fallback position if and sadly likely when the immediate goal of national reconciliation is no longer considered supportable, potentially only after a new surge of several thousand US troops to try to secure Baghdad. When US government officials suggest tilt is just another way of validating the results of democratically held Iraqi elections, reporters should think, we are being spun. Tilt is about the risk of condoning a level of violence thought to be required to get the Sunnis to recognize their reduced status in the new Iraq.

NYT: Rumsfeld bids farewell to the Pentagon:

Mr. Rumsfeld said he would miss his jousting with reporters. “I think I will,” he said. “The stakeouts, the briefings. I’m told it was something like 613 over six years, all across the globe. Now, you know, we’ve not always seen eye to eye, I haven’t, with the press, but I still hold out hope that over time, they’ll get it close to right.”

That line was one of several that drew laughter. But he closed on a serious note, offering his belief that the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan will, in time, be worth it, and that the United States is on the right side of history in both theaters.

“God bless you all,” he said, exiting to applause.

Why is Maliki weak? This observation by CSIS scholar Anthony Cordesman on the Iraq Study Group report and really the larger debate you hear in Washington the past few months about why Iraqis aren't taking enough responsibility is particularly compelling:

Simply calling for a weak and divided Iraqi government to act in the face of all of the forces tearing Iraq apart is almost feckless: It is a "triumph of hope over experience." Efforts to exhort Iraqis into reconciliation are scarcely new; this has been a core political effort of the Bush Administration since before the elections, and one dates back to at least the summer of 2005. The only new twist is to call for the US to use threats and disincentives to pressure the Iraqi government to act decisively. Saying that, the "United States must make it clear to the Iraqi government that the United states could carry out its plans, including planned redeployments, even if the Iraqi government did not implement their planned changes" borders on being irresponsible. It comes far too close to having the US threaten to take it ball and go home if the Iraqi children do not play the game our way..

Such a policy ignores that lack of a clear Sunni leader and power structure, the diverse ambitions of the Kurds, and above all the divisions among the Shi'ites. Maliki is not weak because he personally is weak, he is weak because he is a compromise leader with two powerful parties - Sadr and SCIRI - that are seeking Shi'ite power and pursuing their own ambitions.

More importantly, it ignores the fact that the Iraqi government is weak as much because of US action as Iraq's inherent problems. The US destroyed the secular core of the country by disbanding the Ba'ath. The US created a constitutional process long before Iraq was ready, and created an intensely divisive document with more than 50 key areas of "clarification" including federation, control of oil resources and money, control of security, the role of religion, the nature of the legal system, etc. The US created an electoral system that almost forced Iraqis to vote to be Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds and divided the nation on sectoral and ethnic lines. The US effectively sent a bull in to liberate a china shop, and the Study Group now called upon the US to threaten to remove the bull if the shop doesn't fix the china.

Cited with permission.

McClatchy: "The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee signaled this week that he'll join prominent Democrats in seeking to restore legal rights to hundreds of suspected terrorists confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere."

The Guardian:

The spiralling violence in Iraq has created what is becoming the biggest refugee crisis in the world, a humanitarian group said today.

A report (pdf) by Washington-based Refugees International said an influx of Iraqis threatened to overwhelm other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Syria, Jordon and Lebanon.

Last month, the UN estimated that 100,000 people were fleeing the country each month, with the number of Iraqis now living in other Arab countries standing at 1.8 million.

The horrific irony is that the potential humanitarian crisis anticipated at the time of the invasion was largely avoided -- only to have it spiral now into this. US-occupied Iraq has become the source of the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world.

Senate confirms Gates, 95 to 2. "Somewhat oddly, both negative votes today were cast by Republicans: Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who was defeated in his re-election bid."

1968. Beschloss. Ackerman.

ISG executive summary.

Update: Here's the link to the full report.

NYT: Italy seeks indictment of former intel chief, 25 CIA operatives in Abu Omar abduction. Here's some background on the case. From August 2005: "Heightened terrorism fears in Rome have pushed the Omar rendition case out of the Italian headlines for now, but it remains a sleeper issue for the upcoming elections. Did the Italian government tacitly cooperate with a U.S. policy that in effect condones torture? And depending on what the Italian electorate comes to believe, U.S. policy-makers may face their own dilemma: At what point do allies become more important than the intelligence information gleaned from the practice of extraordinary rendition?"

Worth reading: the letters to the editor of the NYT concerning its article on Jose Padilla's treatment by the Bush administration. "We treat convicted serial killers better than this." "I am horrified." "Is this America?" "I am disgusted by the depth of depravity of the treatment of Jose Padilla by our government. This administration has turned our country into a Kafka novel. The cover-up of the government’s mistake in pressing its original charges is just as bad as the original charges. When will this insanity end?"

Over at the Plank, John Judis blogs on the 'wisdom of Robert Gates':

During his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing today, one of Defense Secretary nominee Robert Gates' most telling exchanges was with Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. In it, Gates came very close to endorsing the view of Iraq war critics that the Bush administration should have focused on Osama Bin Laden rather than Saddam Hussein. He also expressed extreme reluctance about going to war with Iran, or for that matter, Syria. Anyone hearing Gates would have to assume that he would not endorse a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, as some neoconservatives have urged:

SEN. ROBERT BYRD (D-WV): Do you support--now we hear all these rumors about the potential for an attack on Iran, due to its nuclear weapons program, or on Syria, due to its support of terrorism. Do you support an attack on Iran?

MR. GATES: Senator Byrd, I think that military action against Iran would be an absolute last resort; that any problems that we have with Iran, our first option should be diplomacy and working with our allies to try and deal with the problems that Iran is posing to us. I think that we have seen in Iraq that once war is unleashed, it becomes unpredictable. And I think that the consequences of a conflict--a military conflict with Iran could be quite dramatic. And therefore, I would counsel against military action, except as a last resort and if we felt that our vital interests were threatened.

SEN. BYRD: Do you support an attack on Syria?

MR. GATES: No, sir, I do not.

SEN. BYRD: Do you believe the president has the authority, under either the 9/11 war resolution or the Iraq war resolution, to attack Iran or to attack Syria?

MR. GATES: To the best of my knowledge of both of those authorizations, I don't believe so.

SEN. BYRD: Would you briefly describe your view of the likely consequences of a U.S. attack on Iran.

MR. GATES: It's always awkward to talk about hypotheticals in this case. But I think that while Iran cannot attack us directly militarily, I think that their capacity to potentially close off the Persian Gulf to all exports of oil, their potential to unleash a significant wave of terror both in the--well, in the Middle East and in Europe and even here in this country is very real. They are certainly not being helpful in Iraq and are doing us--I think doing damage to our interests there, but I think they could do a lot more to hurt our effort in Iraq.

I think that they could provide certain kinds of weapons of mass destruction, particularly chemical and biological weapons, to terrorist groups. Their ability to get Hezbollah to further destabilize Lebanon I think is very real. So I think that while their ability to retaliate against us in a conventional military way is quite limited, they have the capacity to do all of the things, and perhaps more, that I just described.

[...]

SEN. BYRD: With respect to Osama bin Laden, within eight months of taking Baghdad, our troops captured Saddam Hussein. However, five years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden is still on the loose. Who is responsible, Dr. Gates, in your judgment, for the 9/11 attacks; Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden?

MR. GATES: Osama bin Laden, Senator.

The Times of London: "Intelligence services in Britain are convinced that the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko was authorised by the Russian Federal Security Service. Security sources have told The Times that the FSB orchestrated a 'highly sophisticated plot” and was likely to have used some of its former agents to carry out the operation on the streets of London.'"

Kos: "If Obama runs, he wins."

Vanity Fair: "Neo Culpa: Please don't call them 'architects of the war.'"

NYT:

The Bush-Hakim visit is significant because Mr. Hakim is a fierce rival of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American Shiite cleric who has thrown his weight behind Mr. Maliki. The White House wants Mr. Maliki to lessen his dependence on Mr. Sadr; one way to advance that cause would be to bolster Mr. Hakim's ties with Mr. Maliki.

Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, outlined the strategy in a classified memo published by The New York Times last week. "Press Sunni and other Iraqi leaders (especially Hakim) to support Maliki," Mr. Hadley wrote, in a section outlining how the White House might drive a wedge between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Sadr.

By meeting with leaders other than Mr. Maliki, Mr. Bush runs the risk of undermining the Iraqi prime minister — whom he declared ''the right guy for Iraq" during their meeting in Amman — by seeming to hedge his bets with others who might claim power should the Maliki government fail.

Was at Hakim's USIP speech today (see here), although I spent most of it in the foyer overflow and only made it inside at the end. It didn't seem to matter much. Hakim read from a distributed speech at length in Arabic for minutes at a stretch - then the translator would read pretty much verbatim from the distributed speech. Hakim spoke and appeared in that soft spoken, Shiite clerical style that to my eyes looks kind of Persian -- golden brown robe, black turban, wire-rimmed glasses. Then he took questions (see his reply to Spencer). His denial and disregard for any abuses committed by his Badr organization, indeed his denial that the organization existed in a militant form at all since 2003, clarified things quite a bit. Washington and Hakim may find common interests for a time, but one could have few illusions about the element of past and future violence that runs through it.

Chris Nelson:

UN AMBASSADOR...the decision to let John Bolton’s UN Ambassadorship die with a whimper, not a bang, lends weight to rumor mill action favoring as his replacement the US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

If nothing else, that rumor has more credibility than the most mischievous, and therefore enjoyable gossip we heard last week...that an interim Ambassador would be appointed, Bolton would take a “sabbatical” until February, and then, after the new Congress convenes, be given another “recess appointment”.

Apparently the law only blocks him from consecutive appointments.

In the meantime...still no Deputy, recurring rumors that House Speaker Hastert will be sent to Tokyo, and word from friends of Asst. Sec. East Asia Chris Hill that if Secretary Rice does not name him as the Congressionally mandated special Korea policy review czar, he’s out of here.

More from Bloomberg.

The administration may be riven with infighting over who lost Iraq, but one clear winner in the Washington fracas of leaked memos and resigning bureaucrats is Congressionally-funded think tank USIP. Washington's newly courted Shiite golden boy Sciri leader Abdul Aziz Hakim speaks there today, and they roll out the Iraq Study Group recommendations Wednesday. Update: At a jampacked USIP event today, Hakim told reporter Spencer Ackerman that all of the allegations of human rights abuses allegedly committed by members of the (long defunct, Hakim said) Badr brigades were a complete fiction.

Via Atrios, Bolton resigns.

NYT: The Rumsfeld memo on options for Iraq war, leaning towards redeployment of US troops by July 2007 to five fortified bases and contain type model. Dated one day before the election. One interpretation: Hunker down and tilt, versus status quo plus.

It seems increasingly plausible it was someone from Rumsfeld's camp who leaked the original Hadley memo to the NYT to blow up the Amman meeting. Incredible. Maybe Rumsfeld doesn't appreciate being made the historical scapegoat for the recent direction of the war? And is pointing back to the White House as the deciders?

The Guardian: Iraq corruption 'the second insurgency,' costing $4 billion a year. "The Iraqi government is in danger of being brought down by the wholesale smuggling of the nation's oil and other forms of corruption... Stuart Bowen, who has been in charge of auditing Iraq's faltering reconstruction since 2004, said corruption had reached such levels that it threatened the survival of the state. A US government report has concluded that oil smuggling abetted by corrupt Iraqi officials is netting insurgents $100m a year, helping to make them financially self-sustaining." Blown up oil pipelines mean oil transported by trucks is sold on the black market.

Via Doug Farah, check out this LAT piece on an investigation of a small Pennsylvania hunting supply store, and its sales of telescopic rifle scopes, binoculars and optics to a Moscow firm, Tactica, Ltd., known to be connected to Russian intelligence, and apparently as well to arms dealer Viktor Bout. As Stephen Braun writes, "The wire transfers showing an alleged financial relationship between Bout's organization and Russian intelligence marks the first time that the U.S. has found contemporary evidence that the two entities work in concert. Western intelligence officials have long suspected that Bout's entry into the air transport business and contraband arms trade in the early 1990s was staked either by the KGB or GRU, Russia's military intelligence wing... "

Not a guy the US should be doing business with in Iraq, as it apparently has been. Led by? Oh yeah: "...Among the firms holding U.S. government contracts that officials said were using the [Bout] network's services [in Iraq]: FedEx and KBR. The latter, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the Houston conglomerate formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney and holder of a massive no-bid contract for reconstruction projects in Iraq." Braun: Bout's "planes had flown hundreds of clandestine flights into Iraq, ferrying weapons, supplies and personnel for the U.S. military and private American contractors."

The Salvador Option, revisited. A possible model for the "hunker down and tilt" hybrid option, a reader suggests: El Salvador. (See, for example, this).

In some corners of the USG, "the 'Salvador option' has been viewed as a great model -- big effect with only a few advisors. This is especially the case in the special ops community which has long argued that we should've gone this route a long time ago. It also plays well with those who argue that our big presence breeds dependence."

From Jonathan Tepperman's April 2005 Foreign Affairs article, "Salvadaor in Iraq":

....During El Salvador's bloody twelve-year civil war, which ended in 1992, the United States had used American trainers and vast amounts of cash to strengthen the Salvadoran military in its battle against leftist guerrillas. It had also allegedly supported the use of right-wing paramilitaries and death squads to liquidate the leaders of the rebellion. And it was this latter policy, the articles claimed, that was now being contemplated for Iraq: the creation of elite commando units, trained by American Special Operations Forces, and made up of Shia militiamen and Kurdish peshmerga, to hunt down leaders of the Sunni insurgency. When asked, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stopped short of categorically denying the Salvador option, but refused to comment further.

Although Rumsfeld isn't talking, others close to him have, and their comments suggest that the Salvador option may be on the table— an ominous sign for Iraq. In resurrecting El Salvador— one of the darkest episodes in recent U.S. history— as a model of a successful counterinsurgency, the Pentagon and hawks close to the administration have relied on faulty history and wishful thinking. Contrary to conservative conventional wisdom, U.S. policy in Central America during the '80s was seriously misguided, and— other than contributing to the death of tens of thousands of civilians— ultimately ineffectual. If applied in Iraq today, the results could be even worse.

Despite Rumsfeld's tepid denials, enthusiasm for using El Salvador as a precedent for Iraq runs deep in Republican foreign policy circles. Prominent hawks close to the administration have publicly touted the benefits of this approach. Max Boot, of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that U.S. policy in Central America was "tremendously successful" at putting down local insurgencies and that "everyone agrees" it is the model to follow. And Eliot Cohen, director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins— and whose last book was reported to be bedtime reading for President Bush— has said, "We did counterinsurgency very well in Salvador."

When Newsweek first reported this line of thinking, back in early 2005, obviously the death squads part of the thesis is what caught everybody's attention. (And thinking back, if I'm remembering correctly, that was still when the existence of Shiite death squads wasn't entirely established -- clearly, there's no doubt any longer). But given the current debate, we shouldn't overlook as well the 'few US advisors having large impact' part, and the current consensus gathering around the idea of ramping up the number of US advisors and trainers sent to Iraq as a possible direct US combat role decrease is contemplated.

Update: More on the counterinsurgency lessons of Salvador being contemplated for Iraq from a 2005 piece by Jason Vest.

Steve Aftergood: "Now that the 109th Congress is drawing to a close, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has belatedly issued a report summarizing its activities during the 108th Congress (2003-2004). See, if you care to, "Committee Activities," Senate Report 109-360, November 16." Chairman Roberts' legacy.

MSNBC/AP/Reuters: Italian character Mario Scaramella who met with Litvinenko at a London sushi bar the day he fell ill tests positive for polonium toxin. Prior to his lunch with Scaramella, Litvinenko met three Russian security consultants at a London hotel bar. One of those Russians he met with worked previously as a body guard for Russian reformer Yegor Gaidar, who has also fallen inexplicably ill on a trip to Ireland and is now recovering in a Moscow hospital. That Russian body guard Andrei Lugovoy says he appears to have been framed. His business partners, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, also came to London on separate flights to watch a Russian-UK soccer match. More here.

Just Out: a readers' guide to the Hadley memo:

... The memo reveals an administration desperately trying to brainstorm ways to prop up Maliki as head of a reconstituted unity government, but it also hints at another key aspect of recent internal White House deliberations about how to proceed in Iraq: that the Hadley recommendation is not the only option under active consideration by the administration. Indeed, if it becomes untenable to support a unity government -- as the memo's authors make clear they believe may happen – there are administration elements advocating a complete abandonment of unity in favor of the Iraqi Shia.

Over Veterans' Day weekend, the entire national security team met for a White House-ordered review of Iraq strategy, as first reported by the Washington Post's Robin Wright. According to my sources, the memo, which was dated November 8 (two days before Veterans' Day), was intended as a starting point for those discussions. While it does not reflect all the positions within the administration over how to proceed in Iraq, the Hadley memo offers clues to the wider debate. Herewith a readers' guide to the plans that are emerging as dominant:

Option 1: Status quo plus. This option, as outlined in the Hadley memo, would be a last-ditch effort to prop up a reconstituted Iraqi government of national reconciliation with 20,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad. "The immediate obvious task is securing Baghdad," says military analyst Tom Donnelly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It would be better to introduce more troops [to do so], but if you had to you could take them from [western Iraq's] Anbar [province]. … I think if we don't produce positive results in Baghdad in six months, the war is over."

The plan would be to try to forge a new and more effective Iraqi government coalition that would include the Sunnis, Kurds, and the Shias, while engineering a tilt within Maliki's Shia coalition away from Sadr and toward fellow Shiite leader Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its attendant Badr Brigade militia. (Hakim is scheduled to arrive in Washington next week on an official visit.) The Mahdi Army loyal to radical young Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr would continue to be the enemy. Washington would also engage Saudi Arabia and regional neighbors to encourage Sunni support for Maliki, and Syria and Iran would be pressured to limit their support for combatants.

"Does anyone think at this stage we have ability to build a political base among moderates?" asks Boston University-based military analyst Andrew Bacevich, reflecting on the memo. "We have been trying to do [much of what is in the Hadley memo] for the last three years. Along those lines, it seems to be a policy of 'come on, try harder. Yes, it hasn't worked for three years, but come on, try harder.'"

Option 2: Tilt to the Shias. Among the views advanced at the Veterans' Day weekend meeting was one seemingly at odds with the gist of the Hadley memo: This option, described to me as a fallback position supported by Cheney's office and elements of the National Security Council, would have the U.S. abandon the immediate goal of national reconciliation and instead pick a side -- the Shia. The "unleash the Shia" option would have the United States back a Shiite coalition that would include SCIRI leader Hakim and his Badr Brigades as the core of an Iraqi Army under the direct control of Prime Minister Maliki. Even as the United States sided with the Shia, Hadley's memo makes clear that the United States would at the same time press Maliki to distance himself from Sadr and his Mahdi army. Note in particular the Hadley memo's language concerning the importance of rapidly expanding the size of, and Maliki's control over, the Iraqi Army: "Seek ways to strengthen Maliki immediately by giving him additional control over Iraqi forces, although we must recognize that in the immediate time frame, we would likely be able to give him more authority over existing forces, not more forces." Further down, Hadley adds, "Ask Casey to develop a plan to empower Maliki, including … more forces under Maliki's command and control." Military sources say the key to this control is the Badr Brigades.

Increasingly, we're hearing talk of "picking a winner" or "backing the Shiites versus policing a civil war" from elements in the Pentagon and intelligence community. "The situation requires that the administration abandon its long-held goal of national reconciliation and instead 'pick a winner' in Iraq," the Post's Thomas Ricks and Robin Wright cited a U.S. intelligence official as saying Monday. "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." ...

More on the picking sides option here, here, and a prescient piece from Spencer last year.

Also note this point on the memo's provenance: "At this moment, it is not clear who leaked the Hadley memo and why. But one possibility is that it might have been a shot in a bureaucratic turf war aimed at making people talk about the futility of Option 1, national reconciliation, with the intention of accelerating Option 2 or 3. Even if that wasn't the intent of the leak, it may be the result..."

The Independent:

The State Department is considering disciplinary action against the analyst at its intelligence unit who delivered a scathing assessment of the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the US, describing it as "a sad business", and "totally one-sided, with no payback, no sense of reciprocity".

Kendall Myers, a veteran specialist on British and European affairs, has been summoned to explain his remarks by his superiors at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Tom Casey, the department's deputy spokesman, said yesterday. The remarks were "ill-informed, and I think, from our perspective, just plain wrong", said Mr Casey.

Mr Myers' comments - at an open discussion of British/US relations on Tuesday at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies - have caused much embarrassment in Washington.

However, Mr Myers contended that the war had left Britain in a diplomatic no-man's land, and "ruined" the reputation of the Prime Minister. "What I think and fear is that Britain will draw back from the US without moving closer to Europe. In that sense, London's bridge is falling down," he said.