In response to yesterday's post, about the reported corruption of Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, an Indian-American reader offers this observation:

Since I’m originally from India, I can tell you that finding politicians in South Asia who are not corrupt is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Just about every one of the leaders touted as being great or visionary has some dirty laundry. The difference is usually in the degree of corruption. I think it is only fair that news coverage include all aspects of Benazir Bhutto’s life. That said, I do know that there are people who feel that she would have been a much better influence on the evolution of Pakistani society than the alternative(s). There are moderate Pakistanis who feel that, regardless of her past history, today she would have been a force of moderation in Pakistan’s society and would have likely helped nudge the country away from the utterly ruinous and extremist path it has been on for decades – ever since the founding of Pakistan via its partition from India and the attendant dispute that arose over Kashmir.

One other thought. Bhutto and former Indian Prime Minister (PM) Rajiv Gandhi had developed a good rapport at one time – and her presence gave some Indians hope that there might be a way to resolve the Kashmir problem amicably. There are some strange parallels I should mention as well. Rajiv Gandhi became PM after his mother Indira Gandhi was assassinated in India by some of her own bodyguards (who happened to be some Sikhs who were angrywith her clampdown on Sikh extremists in one of the holiest Sikh shrines in India). Rajiv Gandhi was initially touted as ‘Mr. Clean’ and brought some positive changes, but his image soured after he was linked to some corruption scandals in his Government. He resigned when his party lost an election as a result and when he was campaigning during a following election, he was assassinated by a suicide bomber (a female terrorist associated with the LTTE terrorist group in Sri Lanka, a group that hated Rajiv Gandhi’s position on LTTE’s claim of independence from Sri Lanka).

More than one assassin. A shooter and an allegedly separate suicide bomber. NYT: "The new images of the men who appear to have been Ms. Bhutto’s assassins showed one dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and rimless sunglasses, and holding aloft what appeared to be a gun. He had a short haircut and wore the kind of attire reminiscent of plainclothes intelligence officials, though Al Qaeda and other militants have also been known to dress attackers in Western-style clothing in order to disguise them. That man is seen standing in front of another whose head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda has regrouped in the past year. He is described in the newspaper Dawn as the suicide bomber."

"Mr. Ten Percent". Here's the NY Times ten years ago, on January 8, 1998, on the extraordinary corruption of Benazir Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, named today as the caretaker head of the Pakistan People's Party until their 19 year old son can run the party.

A decade after she led this impoverished nation from military rule to democracy, Benazir Bhutto is at the heart of a widening corruption inquiry that Pakistani investigators say has traced more than $100 million to foreign bank accounts and properties controlled by Ms. Bhutto's family.

Starting from a cache of Bhutto family documents bought for $1 million from a shadowy intermediary, the investigators have detailed a pattern of secret payments by foreign companies that sought favors during Ms. Bhutto's two terms as Prime Minister.

The documents leave uncertain the degree of involvement by Ms. Bhutto, a Harvard graduate whose rise to power in 1988 made her the first woman to lead a Muslim country. But they trace the pervasive role of her husband, Asif Ali
Zardari, who turned his marriage to Ms. Bhutto into a source of virtually unchallengeable power.

In 1995, a leading French military contractor, Dassault Aviation, agreed to pay Mr. Zardari and a Pakistani partner $200 million for a $4 billion jet fighter deal that fell apart only when Ms. Bhutto's Government was dismissed. In another deal, a leading Swiss company hired to curb customs fraud in Pakistan paid millions of dollars between 1994 and 1996 to offshore companies controlled by Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto's widowed mother, Nusrat.

In the largest single payment investigators have discovered, a gold bullion dealer in the Middle East was shown to have deposited at least $10 million into an account controlled by Mr. Zardari after the Bhutto Government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained Pakistan's jewelry industry. The money was deposited into a Citibank account in the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, one of several Citibank accounts for companies owned by Mr. Zardari.
Together, the documents provided an extraordinarily detailed look at high-level corruption in Pakistan, a nation so poor that perhaps 70 percent of its 130 million people are illiterate, and millions have no proper shelter, no schools, no hospitals, not even safe drinking water. During Ms. Bhutto's five years in power, the economy became so enfeebled that she spent much of her time negotiating new foreign loans to stave off default on $62 billion in public debt.

A worldwide search for properties secretly bought by the Bhutto family is still in its early stages. But the inquiry has already found that Mr. Zardari went on a shopping spree in the mid-1990's, purchasing among other things a $4 million, 355-acre estate south of London. In 1994 and 1995, he used a Swiss bank account and an American Express card to buy jewelry worth $660,000 -- including $246,000 at Cartier Inc. and Bulgari Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., in barely a month.

In separate interviews in Karachi, Ms. Bhutto, 44, and Mr. Zardari, 42, declined to address specific questions about the Pakistani inquiry, which they dismissed as a political vendetta by Ms. Bhutto's successor as Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. In Karachi Central Prison, where he has been held for 14 months on charges of murdering Ms. Bhutto's brother, Mr. Zardari described the corruption allegations as part of a "meaningless game." But he offered no challenge to the
authenticity of the documents tracing some of his most lucrative deals. [...]

The Pakistani officials say their key break came last summer, when an informer offered to sell documents thatappeared to have been taken from the Geneva office of Jens Schlegelmilch, whom Ms. Bhutto described as the family's attorney in Europe for more than 20 years, and as a close personal friend. ...

Mr. Schlegelmilch, 55, developed his relationship with the Bhutto family through links between his Iranian-born wife and Ms. Bhutto's mother, who was also born in Iran. In a series of telephone interviews, he declined to say anything about Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto, other than that he had not sold the documents. [...]

The documents [obtained by the NYT] included: statements for several accounts in Switzerland, including the Citibank accounts in Dubai and Geneva; letters from executives promising payoffs, with details of the percentage payments to be made; memorandums detailing meetings at which these "commissions" and "remunerations" were agreed on, and certificates incorporating the offshore companies used as fronts in the deals, many registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The documents also revealed the crucial role played by Western institutions. Apart from the companies that made payoffs, and the network of banks that handled the money -- which included Barclay's Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland as well as Citibank -- the arrangements made by the Bhutto family for their wealth relied on Western property companies, Western lawyers and a network of Western friends.....

Notes a former US official who served in Pakistan, "Mr. 10% running it until the boy king comes of age. So much for democracy."

(Incidentally, the Swiss company referenced above is Cotecna - the same one that apparently put Kofi Annan's son on the payroll and got a lot of attention during the oil for food investigation.)

There it was, forehead smacking obvious, seeing Huckabee's astonishing comments Friday when asked about the Bhutto assassination. Huckabee is the spitting image of 24's ineffectual president Charles Logan.

24's President Logan:

Huckabee:

Bhutto's 19 year old son chosen to lead Pakistan People's Party. Husband to serve as co-chair.

Robert Dallek: "Ultimately Ms. Bumiller’s book will be seen not just as a discussion of Ms. Rice’s role in shaping one administration’s missteps in foreign affairs but also as a cautionary tale about the gap between ambitious presidential appointees and their unwillingness to speak truth to power."

NYT: Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo in exile in India. "For Mr. Jahanbegloo, more than 16 months after his release, the nightmares have begun to dissipate. 'Breathing the Indian air brings me health, at least mental health,' he said wryly. 'Sometimes I get really mad at the corruption, the Delhi traffic, how people drive, honking all the time. But the absence of nervousness and psychological violence gives you a peaceful life. In many other countries, like America and Iran, people are very nervous, psychologically very nervous.'”

David Ignatius recalls his college classmate Bhutto. Ahmed Rashid writes of Pakistan in shock. "The attack -- a gunman cut her down before a suicide-bomb explosion blew up her vehicle, early reports suggest -- bore the hallmarks of training by the al-Qaeda terrorists ensconced in northwest Pakistan." More personal recollections of a young Bhutto from a contributor at FDL.

The WP: U.S. brokered Bhutto's return to Pakistan.

MJ: An interview with a former U.S. intelligence officer on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and what's next for Pakistan.

More reaction from former State Department intelligence official Wayne White at Harper's, and from former Bhutto advior Husain Haqqani.

Update: A summary of highlights from a press briefing today by former State Department South Asia expert Daniel Markey.

AP: Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto assassinated in suicide bomb attack at campaign rally in Rawalpindi. "A party security adviser said Bhutto was shot in the neck and chest as she got into her vehicle, then the gunman blew himself up."

NYT:

A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

Mr. Kean said the panel would provide the memorandum to the federal prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to determine whether the destruction of the tapes or withholding them from the courts and the commission was improper.

A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.

The review by Mr. Zelikow does not assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the C.I.A. that sought “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogations.

Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.

A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.

Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents. ...

This, also reported by NPR Friday, notable too: other tapes in the CIA's possession, but apparently made by the Jordanian intelligence service:

Government officials have said that the videos destroyed in 2005 were the only recordings of interrogations made by C.I.A. operatives, although in September government lawyers notified a federal judge in Virginia that the agency had recently found three audio and video recordings of detainees.

Intelligence officials have said that those tapes were not made by the C.I.A., but by foreign intelligence services.

AP: U.S. refugee official Ellen Sauerbray announces resignation.

Just Out: Operation Stop Talking: "John Kiriakou called it hypocritical for the White House and Congress to point fingers at the CIA for its harsh interrogation techniques. Now his former employer, with the help of the Justice Department, is trying to shut him up."

[...] It's quite likely that Kiriakou would have had more to say, in part as a result of where he served in the agency. Not only in Pakistan, but back at Langley, Kiriakou was in a position to know about important debates inside the CIA, regarding interrogation techniques and other high-level matters.

In the summer of 2002, after returning from a posting as the Counterterrorism Center chief in Pakistan, where he was involved in the questioning of Zubaida, Kiriakou served as the executive assistant to Robert Grenier, then the CIA's Iraq mission manager. Grenier, a former station chief in Pakistan and director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, later was called as a witness at the trial of the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby—and his testimony proved damaging to Libby's defense.

According to a declassified document filed with the court after the Libby trial and obtained by Mother Jones, Kiriakou authored a June 10, 2003 email sent to several CIA officials. The message apparently was written in response to intense efforts at that time by the vice president's office to learn how Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been selected to go on a CIA-sponsored fact-finding mission to Niger. The email makes clear that senior CIA officials, including Kiriakou's boss and the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, did not know who Valerie Wilson was at the time. [...]

In a brief interview, Grenier, now retired, said that it was his understanding that his former assistant may be writing a book. [...]

Go read.

Via Kevin Drum, fired US Attorney Bud Cummins argues why DOJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse should go because of his long public record of false statements. Reader DT writes, "Bud Cummins is very tactful. He mentions, under the head of 'Spinning the Post,' a March 2007 story that pleased the administration. He doesn't name the authors. The story dates to March 3, and the authors were: John Solomon and Dan Eggen. Solomon has done hard-hitting exposes of meaningless topics, like who John Edwards sold his house to..... But Cummins enumerates the errors [the piece] contains. ..." Kyle Sampson praised Roehrkasse for so effectively spinning the Post, Cummins notes: "Sampson (chief of staff to the attorney general) sent to Brian Roehrkasse at the time: 'Great work Brian. Kudos to you and the DAG [Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty].'" Would love to know what Roehrasse's career background is. His future career prospects we can figure out.

Update: A Washington attorney reader writes, "The article states Roehrkasse’s background: 'One player who remains is a DOJ Office of Public Affairs spokesperson named Brian Roehrkasse, a Bush campaign worker in 2000 who went on to be a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation and for the Department of Homeland Security before moving over to the DOJ in 2005.' I think the article’s points are well taken. But the real point, which I think Cummins is trying to make, is that PA weenies like Roehrkasse have a permanent campaign mentality that reflects a much broader problem than one dishonest spokesman. I heard Cummins speak this fall (at a symposium on politicization of the Justice Department) and posted the following":

The most interesting insights came from Cummins, who gave a candid and balanced assessment of the US attorney firings. Cummins said that he does not view the US attorney firings as part of some master plan to politicize the Justice Department (what he described as the “Karl Rove/Dr. Strangelove” theory). Instead, he believes that the plan was really motivated by the desire of mid-level DOJ officials (like Kyle Sampson) to open up some US Attorney slots that they or their friends could fill. He is mostly critical of senior DOJ officials for (a) failing to exercise “adult supervision” over their subordinates and (b) for falsely telling Congress that the terminations were based on performance.

NYT:

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. ...

The current and former officials also provided new details about the role played in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine branch, who ultimately ordered the destruction of the tapes.

The officials said that before he issued a secret cable directing that the tapes be destroyed, Mr. Rodriguez received legal guidance from two C.I.A. lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger. The officials said that those lawyers gave written guidance to Mr. Rodriguez that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws.

The agency did not make either Mr. Hermes or Mr. Eatinger available for comment.

Current and former officials said the two lawyers informed the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, about the legal advice they had provided. But officials said Mr. Rodriguez did not inform either Mr. Rizzo or Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, before he sent the cable to destroy the tapes. ...

Posted by Laura at 11:18 PM

Writing in the Guardian, Richard Byrne finds reason to be pessimistic about a Belgrade enlightenment on Kosovo.

Just Out: Iran NIE: Non-Nuclear Fallout:

The immediate conventional wisdom spurred by the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was that its conclusions were good news for those favoring a diplomatic track with Tehran—and a devastating rebuke to those who desire military action. Hawks predictably cried foul over the intelligence community's assessment that Tehran halted a secret nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 and is susceptible to international diplomatic pressure, and quickly sought to discredit the intelligence analysts who produced the 150-page document, only a short summary of which was unclassified and released (PDF). But as the dust settled, some foreign-policy wonks looking to put the brakes on the bomb-Iran crowd have become concerned about the NIE's possible consequences. They say that just because the regime stopped its weapons program doesn't mean the threat posed by a nuclear Iran should be underestimated. And they worry that the NIE may make it harder to rally international support to pressure Tehran, and, thereby, paradoxically, may make future military action more and not less likely.

"The more I digest everything…the more and more I begin to fear that the manner in which this NIE was written and released to the public is a disaster and a serious setback to an intelligent U.S. policy," says a Democratic Hill staffer who works on Iran proliferation. "Our best hope for derailing the Iranian nuclear program and stop[ping] short of military action was for a concerted international campaign of diplomatic and economic sanctions coordinated at the U.N. Security Council. With the release of this NIE, and the inevitable distortions and simplifications echoing in press coverage, a third [Security Council] resolution is dead." ...

Go read the whole thing.

Go read Marcy Wheeler on the latest Newsweek piece on the destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. She makes the case that Jose Rodriguez' lawyer Bob Bennett has made pretty clear he is going to advise his client to plead the fifth. And something in her analysis made me remember upon Goss's hasty resignation in May 2006, all the reports of tension between Goss and Negroponte and that Negroponte had long wanted him gone. Negroponte may not mind reminding DOJ and Senate investigators of his note to Goss advising against destroying the tapes.

"Who is This Punk?" When then Senate Intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts declared a witness's tesitmony to the committee secret to suppress him from testifying in public, Michigan city attorney Jim Marcinkowski contemplated what was happening to him -- and his country. Mother Jones has published an excerpt of my Afterword to Valerie Plame Wilson's Fair Game. Here's a snippet of that excerpt:

[Jim] Marcinkowski was an unlikely Bush White House antagonist. As the first chairman of the Michigan State University College Republicans, he had received an award from Jack Abramoff—the now-disgraced GOP lobbyist who was tight with the Bush White House—for heading the fastest-growing state College Republicans chapter in the country. He had helped run Reagan's 1980 campaign outreach to Michigan college students. Marcinkowski had been a CIA officer, an FBI clerk, a Navy enlistee, a public prosecutor, and by 2003, was deputy city attorney for Royal Oak, Michigan.5In 1992, he ran, unsuccessfully, as a Republican for a state office. Marcinkowski later donated to the Bush/Cheney campaign at a 1999 fund-raiser headlined by Laura Bush. ...

Nothing in his past experience as an FBI clerk, CIA officer, lawyer, and public prosecutor prepared Marcinkowski for what he faced when he went to testify before Pat Roberts's intelligence committee about the Plame leak. "We sent a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying we want to tell them something," Marcinkowski recounted. The letter was signed by a half-dozen former CIA officers, including three from Valerie's 1985 Career Trainee class. "They blew us off. After that, nothing happened until [then Senate minority leader] Tom Daschle contacted us and said, ‘I am going to have a Senate Democratic committee hearing,'" and asked if they would appear.

The Democratic Policy Committee hearing was supposed to take place on Friday, October 24, 2003. Shortly after it was scheduled, Marcinkowski recounts, "my boss here in Detroit got a fax from a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Basically it said in some snotty way, 'Somebody claims in your office to have information.' [The staffer] made it sound like, 'Who is this punk? If he wants to say anything, he can come in at 1pm on Thursday'"—the day before the policy committee hearing was scheduled, Marcinkowski recounts.

He provided the fax sent October 20, 2003 by then Republican chief of staff to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bill Duhnke—strangely, to Marcinkowski's boss. "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has received a fax from your office sent by James Marcinkowski," Duhnke, Roberts's staffer, wrote in his e-mail to Marcinkowski's boss. "Mr. Marcinkowski claims to have ‘important information' he wishes to share with the committee. . . . The letter states that '[t]ime is of the essence.' Therefore, I respectfully request that Mr. Marcinkowski contact me at his earliest convenience to discuss an appearance before the Committee." It seems obvious that, under the guise of a backhanded invitation to say something to the committee, Duhnke intended to try to get Marcinkowski in trouble with his boss. But it failed, Marcinkowski says, because his boss is an old friend with whom he had worked for years, who recognized the virtue in Marcinkowski's desire to seek justice for their former colleague Valerie. "Like I told you, it was my classmate they exposed," Marcinkowski says he told his boss. "He said, 'OK, great. Go beat the shit out of somebody.'"

"The next evening I was on the plane to D.C.," Marcinkowski continues. As it turned out, various other colleagues were out of town and Marcinkowski ended up facing twelve senators from the Senate Intelligence Committee for the closed briefing on Thursday, October 23, 2003, all by himself.

Marcinkowski told the senators that the exposure of Plame by her own government was "unprecedented. It was our classmate. We had kept a secret for eighteen years. And we were all betrayed by this White House." Marcinkowski had prepared a statement to deliver in open session before the Senate Democratic Policy committee the next day. "I also said she was covert, and I knew it. And they were taking it very seriously."

He took questions after his statement. One of the committee's more moderate Republicans, Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam vet from Nebraska, asked him, do you think this White House can investigate itself?

As Marcinkowski responded that if the attorney general was trying to intimidate federal judges, why would you think they would not be prepared to intimidate a special counsel, a ranking Republican close to the White House, Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri, walked in.

"He went off," Marcinkowski said. "'I am not going to sit here and listen to this guy attack my good friend, the attorney general Ashcroft, of this country.' "A total "food fight" ensued, Marcinkowski said, with committee member Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accusing Bond of trying to intimidate a witness.

After he finished with his testimony and the senators' questions, Marcinkowski went out the back door of the building and walked over to a little park between the Senate office building and Union Station. He sat down to think about what had just happened and his cell phone rang. It was Tom Daschle's staffer, who was setting up the hearing for the next day's Democratic Policy Committee meeting. "And she told me, ‘Jim, Pat Roberts just declared all your testimony to be secret. I don't know what you are planning on saying tomorrow, but he declared it secret.'"

Marcinkowski, the lawyer and deputy city attorney, was stunned. "I sat on the park bench, in a daze. I didn't know what the hell to do. Now it hits me, that is why the Senate Select Intelligence Committee had scheduled their testimony for the day before the Senate Democratic public hearing. Until that happened we didn't hear shit from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. They slapped the secrecy thing on it, that was their intention," to try to prevent Valerie's CIA colleagues from testifying publicly about what had happened to her, and why it was a betrayal of everyone in the CIA.

Marcinkowski called a close friend, an attorney in Detroit, to get legal advice on what he should do, since what he had told the Senate Intelligence Committee was exactly what he planned to tell the Senate Democratic Policy Committee the next day, and Roberts had appeared to try to suppress that testimony by, implausibly, declaring it classified. "'Jim, I tell you what,'" his friend told him. "'I already know what you're going to do. I am going to call all your friends and start collecting bond money right now,'" Marcinkowski recounts. "I told him, 'You think this is funny. I'm sitting here in a park, by my lonesome, and they're saying I'm violating all kinds of laws.' And he said, ‘Yep, and I know exactly what you are doing tomorrow morning.'"

Gathering courage, Marcinkowski called Daschle's staffer back. "You call Roberts' office and you tell him, I said that he can go straight to hell," Marcinkowski says he told her. ....

Read more.

Curveball author Bob Drogin answering questions over at FDL, hosted by Marcy Wheeler.

NYT: Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telcoms:

For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime. The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them. ...

The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues. [...]

Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”

Two other AT&T employees who worked on the proposal discounted his claims, saying in interviews that the project had simply sought to improve the N.S.A.’s internal communications systems and was never designed to allow the agency access to outside communications. Michael Coe, a company spokesman, said: “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security.”

But lawyers for the plaintiffs say that if the suit were allowed to proceed, internal AT&T documents would verify the engineer’s account.

“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”

The same lawsuit accuses Verizon of setting up a dedicated fiber optic line from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. In an interview, a former consultant who worked on internal security said he had tried numerous times to install safeguards on the line to prevent hacking on the system, as he was doing for other lines at the operations center, but his ideas were rejected by a senior security official. ...

Just Out: "After Fair Game: The Story Valerie Plame Couldn't Tell":

When former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson got the redacted manuscript of her draft memoir back from the CIA Publications Review Board (PRB) earlier this year, her book publisher realized it had a problem. "We were looking at a manuscript where 20 percent of the author's story was deemed classified by her former employer [even though] much of the information was probably in the public domain," explains an editor at the publishing house, Simon & Schuster. "So the challenge was, if Valerie can't tell her own story because she is bound by her agreement, then how is this story going to be told, inside her own book, given the confines presented by the Agency and her confidentiality agreement?"

The publisher's solution was to hire a reporter to write an 80-page "afterword" for the book (which was published in October under the title Fair Game: My Life As a Spy, My Betrayal By the White House), based on interviews and any information that could be found in the public domain. Which is how, in May, I ended up with a draft of Plame's memoir, with all of the CIA's blacked-out redactions, and about six weeks to learn as much as I could, write and deliver essentially a biography of the famous former spy.

There was just one person I could not contact for the project: Valerie Plame Wilson, who had signed an agreement with the CIA that she would submit to their censorship for the rest of her days. It was a firewall that everyone involved with the book project took extremely seriously—making for a somewhat paradoxical situation: publishers, editors and writers, plus armies of lawyers and a literary agent, all sweating to make sure they were abiding by the rules of government censorship. ...

Just Out: a sneak preview of a forthcoming print piece, "Hollywood and the CIA: the Spook Stays in the Picture; Charlie Wilson's War is only the latest in a string of movies brought to you by CIA insider Milt Bearden."

Cool holiday gifts/non gifts ideas, here and here.

Dow Jones:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that debate on the legislation underpinning the government's warrantless wiretapping program will begin Monday.

Speaking in the Senate, Reid said he would bring forward a version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, that had been approved by the Intelligence Committee.

Crucially, this bill includes immunity for phone companies that are alleged to have participated in the wiretapping program.

Reid said a version of the FISA bill from the Judiciary Committee would be introduced as a standing amendment, which would mean that it would replace the other version if approved by senators.

The Judiciary bill doesn't include immunity for the phone companies.

Will the Senate soon have buyers' remorse about Mukasey? The WP reports that he's just rejected a Specter/Leahy request for help investigating the destroyed CIA interrogation tapes matter.

Chris Cillizza: Clinton and Obama tied for first.

Via Spencer, former CIA deputy director of operations Jose Rodriguez lawyers up, the NYT's Scott Shane reports:

Mr. Rodriguez has hired Robert S. Bennett, a well-known Washington lawyer, to represent him in Congressional and Justice Department inquiries into his handling of the tapes.

Mr. Bennett has represented a number of high-profile clients — among them former President Bill Clinton, Caspar W. Weinberger, the former defense secretary, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and World Bank president.

“Mr. Rodriguez has been a loyal public servant for 31 years and has always acted in the best interest of the country,” Mr. Bennett said. “He’s done nothing wrong.”

As is evident from his client list, which also includes former Times journalist Judith Miller, Bennet is -- as another attorney who has tussled with him puts it -- "basically a politically connected DC lawyer."

It's unlikely any malpractice insurance will begin to cover the legal fees. A former Rodriguez colleague says he has not heard of any legal defense fund being set up for Rodriguez. Update: Liability insurance senior officers required to get covers approximately $1.5 million, am told.

AP's Pam Hess: House votes to ban waterboarding, mock executions.

Kissinger on the Iran NIE.

David Ignatius: Intelligence oversight in freefall.

New AG Michael Mukasey argues for administration desired positions in SSCI FISA fix bill, including retroactive telco immunity, over draft bills that emerged from House, and Senate Judiciary committee.

Tom Friedman reports on the view of the Iran NIE from Bahrain and the small Gulf states.

"Paper Trail." Newsweek's Mark Hosenball and Mike Isikoff report on who authorized the CIA to destroy torture tapes.

Designated CIA surrogate? So Mr. Kiriakou would seem.

Update: To elaborate, I suspect but don't know that if a recent former CIA op as he was appears on network TV news in a concerted fashion -- ABC, NBC, also Post, etc. -- with a message that a) he didn't torture b) good we're having this discussion c) it worked this one time d) we shouldn't do it anymore but was effective at time and stopped a gazillion attacks e) it was all authorized up and down the line, including by high U.S. officials (how would he know that?) then it would seem to me highly plausible his media appearances are not only tolerated by CIA HQ but he's some sort of surrogate being put forward to some degree with an approved message. And I believe he represents Hayden. No coincidence he appeared the night before and day Hayden goes to testify at SSCI and tomorrow before HPSCI. (Such an impression has been influenced by the correspondent cited here.)

Update 2: Apparently not! People at Agency upset about him going on TV, a source says. "No way" that he's any sort of approved surrogate. Most controversial at the Agency are Kiriakou's statements about waterboarding. ' ... The American public has already decided they call this torture. Doesn't matter how many times you say it doesn't have any lasting effects, it just scares people.' Agency apparently very angry about Kiriakou's appearances on TV and threatening to trace him down. Isn't there anyone politically sophisticated enough at the top layers of the Agency to get that this guy's message may be ultimately useful to Hayden, I asked? There are, this source says, but they don't ever touch the parts of the process that work to counter the type of comments Kiriakou making. "He seems like a decent kid," he says. But he worries he's "going to get burned." More from Marty Lederman.

More from ABC: "The former CIA intelligence official who went public on ABC News about the agency's use of waterboarding in interrogations, John Kiriakou, apparently will not be the subject of a Justice Department investigation, even though some CIA officials believe he revealed classified information about the use of waterboarding. ... Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, did sent out a classified memo this morning warning all employees 'of the importance of protecting classified information,' a CIA spokesperson told ABCNews.com." That memo was, apparently, classified. And DOJ decided that quickly, it would seem?

The WP's Tom Ricks on Doug Feith at AEI.

When academia met the military. Incredible story by the Chronicle of Higher Education's David Glenn on how an up and coming religious studies PhD training to help the military in Iraq found herself blacklisted for a joking comment made over a late night beer. Wired's Noah Shachtman broke the story.

The AP's Pam Hess:

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden faces two days of testimony behind closed doors at the Senate and House intelligence committees to answer questions about his agency's destruction of videotaped interrogations of terrorist suspects.

Hayden will answer questions Tuesday from the Senate panel and Wednesday from its House counterpart. Both are closed sessions.

Hayden told CIA employees last week that the CIA taped the interrogations of two alleged terrorists in 2002. He said Congress was notified in 2003 both of the tapes' existence and the agency's intent to destroy them.

The CIA destroyed the tapes in November of 2005. Exactly when Congress was notified and in what detail is in dispute.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the CIA claims it told the committee of the tapes' destruction at a hearing in November 2006. Rockefeller said, however, that the hearing transcript found no mention of that subject.

The House committee first learned the tapes had been destroyed in March 2007, according to Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas.

In last week's message, Hayden told CIA employees that "the leaders of our oversight committees in Congress were informed of the videos years ago and of the Agency's intention to dispose of the material. Our oversight committees also have been told that the videos were, in fact, destroyed."

But Reyes said Monday that Hayden's claim that Congress was properly notified "does not appear to be true."

Reyes and ranking Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan have launched a committee investigation into the decision to destroy the videotapes and whether Congress was apprised. It will also scrutinize the techniques used during the interrogations.

Besides Hayden, the House panel is considering a list of other possible witnesses for future hearings that could include former CIA directors Porter Goss and George Tenet, said a committee aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision has not yet been made.

Would seem the overseers should want Jose Rodriguez to testify, but no mention of that.

NYT: DO lawyers cleared destroying the tapes?

As for guidance from the then CIA general counsel, top management and the White House during two years of discussions on the matter, no apparent firm written order was made to preserve the tapes, while no one wanted their fingerprints on the decision to destroy them. As a friend says, "We advise against it, but we sure wouldn't mind if those tapes disappeared. But we advise against it, like we said."

ABC News:

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

"The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline." [...]

Now retired, Kiriakou, who declined to use the enhanced interrogation techniques, says he has come to believe that water boarding is torture but that perhaps the circumstances warranted it. ...

More from the Post. "In an interview, Kiriakou said he did not witness Abu Zubaida's waterboarding but was part of the interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan for weeks after his capture in that country in the spring of 2002." Observes a correspondent: "That is an extremely clever-sounding interview ... first, he's got the necessity defense down; second, he's got the finger-point, it-was-authorized defense down ( i.e. everything was cleared ...), PLUS he's a perfect spokesperson, because he declined to use the enhanced techniques himself. [...] This entire thing seems to be EXTREMELY carefully and thoughtfully choreographed. I'm sure they've had this plan in mind for years when the time came." Kiriakou, a former counter terrorism officer and interrogator in Pakistan, was a consultant to the film, the Kite Runner. More from Kevin Drum, who recalls Ron Suskind's very different account of Zubaydah's interrogation.

Posted by Laura at 08:41 PM

Worth re-reading Sick's analysis here, from a few days before the NIE, remarking the signs US Iran relations were already improving, especially on the Iran in Iraq front. Also note this, from a few weeks before the release of the NIE key judgments. Things were already moving in the direction of ratcheting down talk of conflict.

Go read Ken Silverstein on the mounting evidence that the investigation of Weldon has to do with ties to organized crime, in Russia.

CIA Directorate of Operations division chief Jose Rodriguez made decision to destroy interrogation tapes without authorization from CIA general counsel or director Goss? So reports the NYT today:

White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said. ...

Top C.I.A. officials had decided in 2003 to preserve the tapes in response to warnings from White House lawyers and lawmakers that destroying the tapes would be unwise, in part because it could carry legal risks, the government officials said.

But the government officials said that Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, had reversed that decision in November 2005, at a time when Congress and the courts were inquiring deeply into the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program. Mr. Rodriguez could not be reached Friday for comment.

As the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida, was among Congressional leaders who warned the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes, the former intelligence officials said. Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004 and was serving in the post when the tapes were destroyed, but was not informed in advance about Mr. Rodriguez’s decision, the former officials said.

It was not until at least a year after the destruction of the tapes that any members of Congress were informed about the action, the officials said. On Friday, Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2006, said he had never been told that the tapes were destroyed. ...

The first notification to Congress by the C.I.A. about the videotapes was delivered to a small group of senior lawmakers in February 2003 by Scott W. Muller, then the agency’s general counsel. Government officials said that Mr. Muller had told the lawmakers that the C.I.A. intended to destroy the interrogation tapes, arguing that they were no longer of any intelligence value and that the interrogations they showed put agency operatives who appeared in the tapes at risk.

At the time of the briefing in February 2003, the lawmakers who advised Mr. Muller not to destroy the tapes included both Mr. Goss and Representative Jane Harman of California, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Ms. Harman described her role on Friday. Mr. Goss’s role was described by former intelligence officials.

According to two government officials, Mr. Muller then raised the idea of destroying the tapes during discussions in 2003 with Justice Department lawyers and with Harriet E. Miers, who was then a deputy White House chief of staff. Ms. Miers became White House counsel in early 2005.

The officials said that Ms. Miers and the Justice Department lawyers had advised against destroying the tapes, but that it was not clear what the basis for their advice had been.

A message left at Mr. Muller’s law office on Friday was not returned, and White House officials would not comment about Ms. Miers’s role.

It was also not clear when the White House or Justice Department were told that the tapes had been destroyed, or whether anyone at either place was notified in advance that Mr. Rodriguez had ordered that the step be taken. Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush had “no recollection” of being made aware of the tapes’ destruction before Thursday, when General Hayden briefed him on the matter.

In his message to C.I.A. employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that the leaders of the intelligence committee had been informed of the agency’s “intention to dispose of the material,” but he did not say when that notification took place.

Several former intelligence officials also said there was great concern that the tapes, which recorded hours of grueling interrogations, could have set off controversies about the legality of the interrogations and generate a backlash in the Middle East.

According to one former intelligence official, the C.I.A. then decided to keep the tapes at the C.I.A. stations in the countries where Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri were interrogated.

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan, and it has been reported that he was taken to Thailand for part of his interrogation. It is unclear where Mr. Nashiri was interrogated by C.I.A. operatives.

Mr. Nashiri, a Qaeda operations chief in the Arabian Peninsula until his capture in 2002, is thought to have planned the October 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen.

The current and former intelligence officials said that when Mr. Rodriguez ultimately decided in late 2005 to destroy the tapes, he did so without advising Mr. Rizzo, Mr. Muller’s successor as the agency’s top general counsel. Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Goss were among the C.I.A. officials who were angry when told that the tapes had been destroyed, the officials said.

Mr. Rodriguez retired from the agency this year.

The Senate Intelligence Committee announced Friday that it was starting an investigation into the destruction of the videotapes.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said, “Whatever the intent, we must get to the bottom of it.”

Yesterday, NYT reporter Tim Weiner observed in an interview with NPR's All Things Considered that the tapes were ordered destroyed a month after Dana Priest's first article exposing the black site prison system. More from her here.

SSCI Chairman Jay Rockefeller on chronology of CIA interrogation tapes and what he knew:

In the last 24 hours, we have taken a close look at any relevant correspondence related to the tapes. The news that the tapes were destroyed was extremely disturbing to me and the CIA’s description of notifying Congress is inconsistent with our records. As we learn more, it is only raising new questions and concerns.

I have been pushing for a full investigation of CIA detention and interrogation programs for years. Along with this ongoing oversight, the committee has now asked for a complete and accurate chronology of events related to the tapes, including how the tapes were used, when and why they were destroyed, who was notified of their destruction and when, and any communication about them that was provided to the courts and Congress.

We do not know if there was intent to obstruct justice, an attempt to prevent congressional scrutiny, or whether they were simply destroyed out of concern they could be leaked – whatever the intent, we must get to the bottom of it. This is a very serious matter with very serious consequences.

Based on a preliminary review, here’s what we know:

Last night, the CIA informed me that it believes that the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee was told of the decision to destroy the tapes in February 2003 but was not told of their actual destruction until a closed committee hearing held in November 2006.

The committee has located no record of either being informed of the 2003 CIA decision or being notified late last year of the tapes having being destroyed. A review of the November 2006 hearing transcript finds no mention of tapes being destroyed.

While the existence of the videotapes was known to me in 2003 in my capacity as then-Vice Chairman of the committee, I was not told of the CIA’s decision to destroy the tapes and I was not aware of their destruction until yesterday’s press reports.

In May 2005, I wrote the CIA Inspector General requesting over a hundred documents referenced in or pertaining to his May 2004 report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation activities. Included in my letter was a request for the CIA to provide to the Senate Intelligence Committee the CIA’s Office of General Counsel report on the examination of the videotapes and whether they were in compliance with the August 2002 Department of Justice legal opinion concerning interrogation. The CIA refused to provide this and the other detention and interrogation documents to the committee as requested, despite a second written request to CIA Director Goss in September 2005.

It was during this 2005 period that I proposed without success, both in committee and on the Senate floor, that the committee undertake an investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation activities. In fact, all members of the congressional intelligence committees were not fully briefed into the CIA interrogation program until the day the President publicly disclosed the program last September.

Since that time, the committee has held numerous hearings on the program and just this week acted to prohibit the CIA from using enhanced interrogation techniques and requiring them to adhere to the Army Field Manual.

On the road, off line for a few days.

Team B. WP: "Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources. The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans."

Congressional Quarterly's Tim Starks:

Democrats on Thursday touted a provision in the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization conference report that would bar spy agencies from using controversial interrogation techniques.

But Republicans protested Democrats' late addition of the provision in the bill and said its inclusion jeopardizes Congress' first chance in three years to pass an intelligence authorization measure because the White House has signaled a veto. The annual bill authorizes funding for the intelligence agencies and gives Congress a vehicle to establish policy for the intelligence community.

Democrats acquired the necessary signatures and filed the conference report Thursday.

Under the interrogation provision, all spy agencies -- not just Defense agencies -- would be required to comply with the rules for interrogation set forth in the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations. The amendment's sponsor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said it would ban eight specific techniques, including 'waterboarding,' or simulated drowning.

The CIA's "alternative interrogation techniques" are the primary target of the amendment, although it would apply to other agencies and government contractors as well.

"I strongly oppose the CIA's so-called "alternative interrogation techniques," which are contrary to our nation's principles, are highly questionable legally, and do not make our nation safer," said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., one of the amendment's sponsors with Feinstein, Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.

Hagel had voted against a similar amendment when the Senate Intelligence Committee considered that chamber's version of the intelligence authorization in May, and it was defeated by a 7-8 vote. A spokesman for Hagel did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday about why he changed his vote.

The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., said President Bush should veto the legislation.

"The inclusion of this provision would certainly encourage a veto," White House spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said Thursday. "The program is safe, legal and very effective and efforts to impede it are dangerous and misguided."

Feinstein's office distributed a May letter from the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, addressing troops and asserting that methods in the manual 'work effectively.'

Senate Republicans in November filibustered a House war spending measure (HR 4156) that contained a provision requiring the CIA and other agencies to comply with strict rules against torture proscribed in the Army field manual. ...

NYT:

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes. [...]

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations. [...]

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.

“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.

Who was general counsel of CIA in 2005, John Rizzo? Other CIA officials who would conceivably be in the loop at the time beyond Goss and his general counsel on such a decision? (Late Update: WP reports that then DO chief Jose Rodriguez made the decision).

Update: "I want to say 'unbelievable' but I find that I just shake my head thinking 'why should I be surprised,'" emails attorney Mark Zaid, an attorney who frequently represents Agency employees. "This is yet another example of the arrogance that exists out there - ESPECIALLY WITH THE LAWYERS (several of whom would have been involved in this matter) - that the CIA is the king that can do no wrong. They believe they are above the law and will not stop acting that way until someone or something prevents them from doing so."

Marty Lederman annotates Hayden's letter to CIA employees, and expresses some exasperation with Jane Harman and Jay Rockefeller for sitting on the information for over a year apparently.

NYT's Sanger and Myers: U.S. Says Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004.

Ever since the major findings of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program were made public on Monday, the White House has refused to discuss details of what President Bush, in a news conference on Tuesday, termed a “great discovery” that led to the reversal.

Some of Mr. Bush’s critics have questioned why he did not adjust his rhetoric about Iran after the intelligence agencies began to question their earlier findings.

In a statement late Wednesday, the White House revised its account of what Mr. Bush was told in August and acknowledged that Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had informed him new information might show that “Iran does in fact have a covert weapons program, but it may be suspended.”

Cheney Interview. "Intriguing article on a [Politico] interview with Cheney, apparently a preview of a longer one tomorrow," my friend JL writes. "There is much to chew on here ... But my favorite line, in explaining the decision to declassify the Key Judgments of the NIE, Cheney alluded to it likely leaking anyway:

So you thought it might leak?

'Everything leaks,' he said with a chuckle."

The longer interview here.

JTA: "The lesson [Labor MK Ephraim] Sneh drew from the NIE is that Israel could no longer rely on the United States to lead the battle to force Iran to back down from enriching uranium. 'I for years have advocated that to forestall the threat of a nuclear Iran, Israel should enhance the development of its own indigenous capacities to develop the defense systems which protect the Israeli civilian population and to rely on ourselves,' Sneh said."

Kevin Drum provides a good intro to Murray Waas' latest piece, on Huckabee.

The Politics of Iran Intelligence. This National Journal piece of mine from last February stands up reasonably well to recent events. Below the jump.

The Politics of Iran Intelligence February 10, 2007

Amid the continued political fallout over the faulty intelligence case for going to war in Iraq, the Bush administration is newly cautious about the specific intelligence it plans to present to the public to back up its claims that Iran is fighting a kind of proxy war with the United States in Iraq.

At least twice in the past month, the White House has delayed a PowerPoint presentation initially prepared by the military to detail evidence of suspected Iranian materiel and financial support for militants in Iraq. The presentation was to have been made at a press conference in Baghdad in the first week of February. Officials have set no new date, but they say it could be any day.

Even as U.S. officials in Baghdad were ready to make the case, administration principals in Washington who were charged with vetting the PowerPoint dossier bowed to pressure from the intelligence community and ordered that it be scrubbed again. [...]

A White House official who declined to be named told National Journal that the presentation was sent "back into the interagency process ... with all the usual agencies involved, both in Washington and Baghdad." Asked if it was the intelligence community that was most cautious about how to interpret the facts in the Iran dossier, the White House official said only, "It's, frankly, their job to be sure of the facts and to make sure the information is accurate, and to give their best advice about how to interpret it."

The delay in the briefing demonstrates the crosscurrents running through the administration, the intelligence agencies, and Congress over Iran. The White House has clearly shifted to a more confrontational posture toward Tehran even as it insists it has no plans to attack Iraq's neighbor to the east. Yet Bush officials keep hinting that the U.S. has damning intelligence about Iran's alleged nefarious activities throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile, the intelligence community is quietly indicating that the case purporting to prove Iran's involvement in Iraq is murkier and less decisive than the thrust of recent administration statements suggests.

The delay in the briefing also speaks to a general wariness within the congressional Intelligence oversight committees, the intelligence community, and even some quarters of the administration that felt burned in the pitched battles that followed the Iraq invasion. The debate is still simmering over who was at fault in the prewar intelligence failures: the policy makers or the intelligence community.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, for example, is moving aggressively to vet the intelligence community's analytical products on Iran.

For much of the past year, committee sources say, the panel has been intently reviewing all intelligence involving Iran but has met resistance from the intelligence community in obtaining the underlying raw intelligence that informs analytical products such as National Intelligence Estimates. Among the products the committee is scrutinizing are a May 2005 NIE titled "Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program"; a second May 2005 report that takes a broad view of Iran and its internal and external relations; and a February 2005 report that focuses on Iran and terrorism.

A source in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has indicated that the intelligence community plans to give Congress two additional NIEs on Iran in the coming months. The first, which deals with Iran's nuclear program, is in the drafting phase and is expected to be delivered this spring. The second will offer comprehensive estimates on a full range of Iranian political, economic, and military issues; it will be finished later in the year.

Senate Intelligence Committee sources indicate that members are also demanding to see the intelligence that informs these NIEs on Iran, given the experience with the 2002 NIE that asserted Iraq had biological and chemical weapons. "It goes back to the debacle of October 2002," says one congressional source.

"Up to that point, we took the documents from the intelligence community at face value. Now they do not get the benefit of the doubt.... This committee is not walking into another debate without performing due diligence on these documents.

"There's no way to tell there's anything wrong with the October 2002 NIE until one reads the source documents," the congressional source continued. "The key part to understand I that there's not enough evidence to support key judgments they had in there. They had to be honest about the uncertainties behind the data."

The administration is well aware of the skepticism.

"Everyone understands that the background to this thing is Colin Powell's presentation" to the United Nations Security Council on Iraq weapons of mass destruction four years ago, one U.S. official says on condition of anonymity. "Everyone understands that we need to make this [presentation] right."

Administration sources say they have solid proof of Iranian involvement in Iraq. The official said that the PowerPoint presentation includes pictures of munitions found in Iraq that have serial numbers indicating they were made in Iran. The briefing also includes evidence, he said, that among the five Iranians detained by U.S. forces last month at an Iranian liaison office in Erbil, in northern Iraq, are members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds force.

"There are two issues to this: materiel – physical evidence -- and people," said the administration official. "Now, the physical evidence we have -- weapons, ammunition, explosives -- have packaging material. When you look at it, it will be obvious ... that the stuff came from Iran." But that evidence, the official conceded, doesn't tell exactly why it was sent, or who sent it. "To a certain extent, the question of who sent this over -- was this officially sent over? -- can only be implied by perhaps this kind of stuff having had a history elsewhere." The implication is that Iranian-sourced materiel found in Iraq has also been used by Iranian-supplied Hezbollah in Lebanon. He added, "Another thing that crosses the line between the two is the specific materiel we have found in the hands of the [Iranian] people we seized."

The official gave no further details other than to say, "I will let the presentation speak for itself. We're just going through another scrub of the slides. We will not hype this. We will lay it out there. We know what we're doing."

Some experts remain skeptical. "Regarding references to materiel based on the serial numbers that came out of Iran, that still leaves the issue to be further demonstrated as to what is the role of the Iranian regime," said Paul Pillar, a former top Middle East analyst at the National Intelligence Council who is now a professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

"Even if this PowerPoint presentation eventually gets made public ... what does this show us as to where Iran is really coming from?" Pillar asked. "What is the larger significance? Even if Iranian assistance to an Iraqi group is proven to everyone's satisfaction, the [administration's] policy never rested on that. The policy [is being driven by a] much larger sense of Iran as the prime bete noire in the region, and that is why the administration is trying to put together these coalitions with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the Sunni states, that we've been reading about. None of this hinges [on the Iran dossier]. We are not going to call this off if we can't prove that Iran is furnishing munitions to Iraqi groups. It is just one more thing -- along with the nuclear issue, which is really more legitimate in a basic kind of way -- [in the administration's case that] Iran is doing nasty things, therefore it's appropriate to beat the drum about Iran. That's what it's come down to."

Daniel Byman, director of Georgetown's security studies program, said the administration is facing not only a more assertive intelligence community but also a more skeptical public. The White House, he said, is "trying to draw support for more aggressive action in the region, when Americans are both skeptical of what the U.S. has done before with regard to Iraq and really leery of new and increased involvement."

Marc Perelman: From Sarajevo to Guantanamo: the Strange Case of the Algerian Six.

WP: A Surge in Spying, New Caution Aided New NIE:

... A pivotal moment occurred in early summer 2005, when President Bush discussed the new Iran NIE with advisers during a routine intelligence briefing. Why, he asked, was it so hard to get information about Iran's nuclear program?

The exchange, described by a senior U.S. official who witnessed it, helped instigate the intelligence community's most aggressive attempt to penetrate Iran's highly secretive nuclear program. Over the coming months, the CIA established a new Iran Operations Division that brought analysts and clandestine collectors together to search for hard evidence.

But there was no "eureka" moment, according to senior officials who helped supervise the collection efforts. The surge in intelligence-gathering helped convince analysts that Iran had made a "course correction" in 2003, halting the weapons work while proceeding with the civilian nuclear energy program.

The result, ironically, was a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that reached conclusions far different from what many intelligence officials expected. ...

Besides requiring greater transparency about the sources of intelligence, McConnell and his colleagues have compelled analysts working on major estimates to challenge existing assumptions when new information does not fit, according to former and current U.S. officials familiar with the policies.

The report also reflects what several officials described yesterday as a new willingness by the intelligence community to analyze intentions in addition to capabilities. While Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to make nuclear weapons, including knowledge of how to enrich uranium to a level usable in bombs, the new intelligence collected through intercepted communications raised doubts about Iran's intended use of the technology. ...

DNI officials also pressed for a broader array of intelligence sources, including news accounts and other "open sources" that traditionally had carried little weight inside intelligence agencies. In the case of Iran, critical information was gleaned from non-clandestine sources, such as news photographs taken in 2005 depicting the inner workings of one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants, an official said.

Those photos helped persuade analysts that the Natanz plant was suited to making low-enriched uranium for nuclear energy but not the highly enriched uranium needed for bombs. "You go to wherever you think the answer might be," the official said, "instead of waiting for it to trickle into your top-secret computer system." ...

More really fascinating on the Iran Operations Division, "Persia House," from David Ignatius:

... The secret intelligence that produced this reversal came from multiple channels -- human sources as well as intercepted communications -- that arrived in June and July. At that time, a quite different draft of the Iran NIE was nearly finished. But the "volume and character" of the new information was so striking, says a senior official, that "we decided we've got to go back." It was this combination of data from different sources that gave the analysts "high confidence" the covert weapons program had been stopped in 2003. This led them to reject an alternative scenario (one of six) pitched by a "red team" of counterintelligence specialists that the new information was a deliberate Iranian deception.

A senior official describes the summer's windfall as "a variety of reporting that unlocked stuff we had, which we didn't understand fully before." That earlier information included technical drawings from an Iranian laptop computer purloined in 2004 that showed Iranian scientists had been designing an efficient nuclear bomb that could be delivered by a missile. Though some U.S. analysts had doubted the validity of the laptop evidence, they now believe it was part of the covert "weaponization" program that was shelved in the fall of 2003.

The most important finding of the NIE isn't the details about the scope of nuclear research; there remains some disagreement about that. Rather, it's the insight into the greatest mystery of all about the Islamic republic, which is the degree of rationality and predictability of its decisions. ...

WP: Weldon's chief of staff pleads guilty.

Former congressman Curt Weldon's chief of staff has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy charges for allegedly helping a consulting firm championed by Weldon obtain federal funds and for concealing money the firm paid his wife, according to court papers filed yesterday.

Russell James Caso Jr. and a top official at the unnamed nonprofit consulting firm met repeatedly with Weldon to seek the Pennsylvania Republican's help in obtaining federal funds for the organization's defense projects, according to the court papers. ...

The documents say that Weldon, who is identified as "Representative A," directed Caso to take many of the steps he followed to help win federal funds for the unnamed consulting firm. Weldon served on the governing council of the nonprofit firm, whose stated mission was to help American companies operate in Russia, according to court papers.

Prosecutors charge that Caso "intentionally" concealed $19,000 in payments from the consulting firm to his wife by failing to report them in his 2005 congressional disclosure forms "even though he knew he was required to do so." They further allege that the payments and Caso's agreements with the consulting firm's "general secretary" constituted an illegal conspiracy that deprived the U.S. government of Caso's "honest services."

Caso's attorney Kelly B. Kramer declined to comment yesterday. Weldon's attorney William Winning also declined to comment on yesterday's development.

"I haven't read the information," Winning said. "I haven't spoken with my client."

The papers indicate that Weldon was a "strong supporter" of the consulting firm. He instructed Caso to organize and attend meetings with high-level officials in executive branch agencies where Weldon and Caso argued that the firm's proposals should receive federal funding.

One proposal was described as an effort to "facilitate cooperation with respect to joint missile defense activities." The other was to "reduce the risk of the proliferation of biological and chemical weapons from Russia to rogue nations." ...

One interesting thing to note from the last page of the plea agreement: among the federal law enforcement officers signing the plea, several from the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division.

Update: The AP reports:

In March, Avineon Inc., a technology company that has contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, announced that it appointed Caso to be a vice president of strategic development.

A voice message left Tuesday afternoon with Avineon was not immediately returned.

Caso _ who served in the Navy _ worked for Weldon for about three years, and was his chief of staff for at least two of the years, records show.

His wife earned the $19,000 during a four-month period between April and August 2005, the court documents show.

Also, note this:

In his annual financial disclosure report for 2005, Caso omitted any mention of his wife's earnings from Solutions North America. Prosecutors said Caso "intentionally failed to disclose that his wife received payments ... even though he knew that he was required to do so."

Caso is charged with conspiring to commit wire fraud. The court documents also mention an unnamed employee of Solutions North America, identified only as its general secretary, with whom Caso allegedly conspired. It was not immediately clear whether that person also would be charged.

Solutions North America, Inc. is the consulting firm belonging to Weldon's daughter Karen and Delaware County political godfather Charlie Sexton, as first reported by Ken Silverstein.

Update: An observer suggests that this outfit may be connected to Firm A; it's chaired by Weldon pal and fellow Russophile, attorney John Gallagher, whose Philadelphia law offices were raided at the same time as those of Solutions North America and Itera.

Israeli PM Olmert and defense minister Barak comment on the new US Iran NIE:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday that a new U.S. intelligence report finding that Tehran halted its development of a nuclear weapons demonstrates the need for tighter international sanctions in order to ensure the Islamic republic can never acquire nuclear weapons. 'We discussed this report with leaders of the [U.S.] administration,' Olmert told reporters. 'It is vital to pursue efforts to prevent Iran from developing a capability like this and we will continue doing so along with our friends the United States.' ...

Responding to the report, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Tuesday that Iran had probably restarted its nuclear weapons program. "It seems Iran in 2003 halted for a certain period of time its military nuclear program but as far as we know it has probably since revived it," Barak told Army Radio.

"We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American [intelligence] connection, and maybe that of others, was severed," he said.

Barak said such reports were "made in an environment of high uncertainty."

Asked if the new U.S. assessment reduced chances that the U.S. will launch a military strike on Iran, Barak said that was possible. However, he said, "We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend."

Ha'aretz: Bush to make first trip to Israel as president, in January. Reassurance he has not abandoned them on Iran, as is being widely interpreted in pro-Israel circles? "With this visit, Bush hopes to demonstrate his commitment to the peace process relaunched in Annapolis. Bush is also expected to discuss with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the issue of Iran's nuclear program, and steps to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. ...
Officials at the Prime Minister's Office reported that Bush's visit has not yet been confirmed, but it will likely take place in January, and will likely include a tour of Gulf States as well."

Forbes offers an interesting business perspective on the latest NIE. "The latest National Intelligence Estimate offers a lifeline to companies caught in the crossfire as politicians call for harsher sanctions from the European Union, in conjunction with existing American legislation and United Nations sanctions. Energy companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Total have suffered from the politicization of their plans to develop Iran's natural gas fields, while Germany's Deutsche Bank ended its Iranian operations in July after increased regulatory pressures. ..."

Cliff May at The Corner: "Jonah, the purpose of this NIE is to prevent Bush from using military force during the remainder of his term to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program."

Commentary's Gabriel Schoenfeld: "Is the NIE part of a plot to undermine Bush?"

(Man, does the Commentary online site look nice).

Ledeen, via the NYT: "The Great Intelligence Scam."

Robert Kagan: Talk to Iran.

Norman Podhoretz, at Commentary's blog: Dark Suspicions about the NIE.

Just Out: Iran hawks down?

...Those advocating a tougher line towards Iran naturally had a different take: "I would say that the new NIE reflects very nicely the character of the U.S. intelligence community, which is very highly confident," Patrick Clawson, an Iran proliferation expert and deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Mother Jones with evident sarcasm. "You might think that an agency which is issuing a report which says its 2005 judgment was wrong would have a lot of caution about what it says it knows now.

"They were wrong about the nuclear programs of Iraq, Libya, South Africa and Pakistan," Clawson continued. "They were wrong about every nuclear program. And now they come along and say they were wrong about the Iranian nuclear program [in 2005] and now they are 'highly confident.' I would think they would rather be a little humble."

Paul Pillar disagrees. As the former top National Intelligence Council officer for the Middle East, he knows his way around the NIE process. "I think the thing reeks with humility," says Pillar, who is now with Georgetown University. He characterizes the new NIE's tone as full of qualifiers: '"We have low confidence on this, moderate conference on that…' If there is one upfront statement…"

The NIE released today had been held up for more than a year. At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats this summer, the CIA's top intel analyst indicated to Mother Jones during a break that the delay was due in part to new intelligence that the United States had obtained. [...]

The Washington Institute's Clawson said that the new NIE left out an important fact implied by its findings. It says nothing, he noted, about what effect the halt in Iran’s nuclear weapons program has on its ability to weaponize fissile material manufactured for its civilian program. "If the information they are providing here about Iran's production of highly enriched uranium is correct," he said, "the reported halt in the weapons program has no effect."

The NIE estimated that Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon by 2009 at the earliest, "but this is very unlikely," it stated. "We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame." In other words, the NIE seems to argue that the Bush administration can defer the decision about whether to act on Iran’s nuclear program to the next administration—if it chooses.

The Democratic Hill staffer who follows Iran policy closely offered a note of caution to anyone convinced the NIE would stymie the hardliners. It could also set back efforts to get a third round of economic sanctions through the UN Security Council, he warned, and thereby, weaken the effectiveness of those pushing for a non-military approach. "Failure of the sanction drive at the UN may give Cheney et al the opportunity to convince the president that the diplomatic route is now closed and the United States must move to more direct military pressure."

Go read the whole thing.

WP:

Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004 and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.

In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

Intelligence officers then spent months examining whether the new information was part of a well-orchestrated ruse. Their effort included "Red Team" exercises in which groups of intelligence officers tried to punch holes in the new evidence, substantially delaying publication of the NIE.

Q When was the Vice President briefed on this? You mentioned when the President was, what about the Vice President?

MR. HADLEY: He, of course, can answer that for himself. I will say that the week before the Tuesday/Wednesday, there was a meeting that was held with the principals -- including the Vice President, myself and others -- to get a preliminary look at this information, to get some sense of it, and to give us an opportunity to test it and ask questions about it, and probe it a little bit, as part -- and we thought, one, so we would understand it, and two, as part of the process for the intelligence community, you know, coming to its conclusion about what this all meant. And those were the conclusions that they reached on Tuesday, and which were briefed to the President on Wednesday of last week.

Flagged by a friend.

Ha'aretz: "Government sources in Jerusalem told Haaretz Monday night that the Bush administration appears to have lost its sense of urgency regarding Iran's nuclear program, making a military strike in 2008 increasingly unlikely. The change in policy comes on the heels of the release Monday of the National Intelligence Estimate in Washington. The report, which discounted the likelihood that Iran is on a path to develop nuclear weapons soon, did not catch the Israeli leadership by surprise. During their visit to Washington last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were briefed on the report." Presumably, around the time of the Annapolis talks, last Tuesday.

But then note this, from tomorrow's NYT:

One official pointed out that the chief American diplomat on the Iran question, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, had just met with counterparts from Europe, Russia and China, and had seemed to make some headway on winning support for a third round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. The official said Mr. Burns could not divulge the intelligence findings at that meeting on Friday because Congress had not been briefed.

A friend points out: So the information could be divulged last week to at least one nation, before Congress? Update: A Hill staffer writes in, " ... The irony is that a majority of the Congress would probably insist on Israel being briefed first."

Newsweek: Rice offers Wolfowitz a job.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.

Wolfowitz, now a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, will replace former senator Fred Thompson, who quit over the summer to run for president. Although officials declined to say how Rice came to choose him, Wolfowitz began his government career in the 1970s in the State Department as an arms-control expert; he forged a relationship with Rice during the 2000 presidential campaign, when they both served as top foreign-policy advisers to the then candidate Bush. But his selection has raised more than a few eyebrows within State because he'll be providing advice on some of the same issues that critics say the administration got spectacularly wrong when Wolfowitz was pushing the case for the Iraq War at the Pentagon. (One of the department sources called the appointment "amazing.") At least Wolfowitz, who did not return calls seeking comment, will have like-minded company: other panel members include Robert Joseph, the former National Security Council official in charge of Iraq WMD intelligence, and ex-CIA director James Woolsey, both strong allies during the Iraq debate.

The job doesn't require Senate confirmation.

WP's Thomas Ricks: U.S. wargames Pakistan.

NYT's Celia Dugger: Malawi ends famine, by ignoring the World Bank experts.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

The answer, adopted against the advice of the expat free marketeers? Fertilizer subsidies. Now, Malawi which hovered on the brink of famine, is feeding not only its own population, but that of its neighbors.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe. ...

Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production. The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”

Go read.

Marty Lederman: "Our Legacy (Jordan edition)."

Boston Globe's Charlie Savage:

President Bush this month issued his first signing statement since the Democratic takeover of Congress, reserving the right to bypass 11 provisions in a military appropriations bill under his executive powers. ...

Bush also challenged a new law that limits his ability to transfer funds lawmakers approved for one purpose to start a different program, as well as a law requiring him to keep in place an existing command structure for the Navy's Pacific fleet. ...

In a further sign that the White House adopted a muted tone, the new signing statement also said nothing about two higher-profile provisions in the bill that limit presidential power: One law prohibits the military from using foreign intelligence information that was collected illegally, and the other forbids expending funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq.

As lawmakers drafted the bill earlier this year, the White House warned Congress that the illegal intelligence and Iraq-base provisions "impermissibly" infringed "on the president's constitutional authority" over national security and foreign affairs.

But Congress kept the provisions in the final bill and Bush's statement did not mention them. ...