Daniel Levy and Trita Parsi weigh into day two of a lively "Iran panic" discussion at MoJo.

Bloomberg: "Crude oil was little changed, after rising to a record above $143 a barrel on concern Israel may attack Iran over its nuclear program and disrupt supply from OPEC's second-largest producer. Pressure on Iran to end uranium enrichment and the falling value of the U.S. dollar may drive prices to $170 a barrel, OPEC President Chakib Khelil said June 28. Kuwait, the fourth-largest OPEC producer, is taking precautionary steps to export oil if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, Kuwait News Agency reported."

Ha'aretz: Iran issues death sentence for alleged Israeli spy. More.

Spencer Ackerman: A security contractor's intelligence briefing for its clients about the conditions in Baghdad differs from administration picture.

Haaretz: "On Sunday, the [Israeli] cabinet overwhelmingly voted in favor of a prisoner exchange with the Lebanon-based guerilla group Hezbollah in which two kidnapped Israel Defense Forces reservists presumed dead, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, would be returned in exchange for five Lebanese fighters including notorious terrorist Samir Kuntar. Olmert said Monday that he believed there was a possibility that the government's move to begin the process of declaring the abducted soldiers dead, spurred Hezbollah to consummate the deal more quickly."

NYT: "A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say. The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism. In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said." Optics of this -- not so good.

George Packer: Obama's Iraq problem.

Seymour Hersh: Preparing the Battlefield:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

A friend comments:

The Seymour Hersh article is actually really interesting, good, and not overblown - as long as you read out anything coming from Gardiner.

There is much in it, but this is sure to provoke a big blowup:

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, "We'll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America." Gates's comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates's answer, the senator told me, was "Let's just say that I'm here speaking for myself." (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator's characterization.)

This bit strikes me as among the most important issues raised by the Hersh piece:

There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.

I am also pretty skeptical about the CIA-supporting-PJAK/Baluch to destabilize the Iranian regime stuff that Gardiner, discredited former ABC news consultant and phony Obama interviewer Alexis Debat, and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been saying. Skeptical in large part because people out front saying it like Debat have shown an inclination to make things up, while well meaning and sincere people like Gardiner saying it don't offer much in the way of evidence beyond their own conviction and some charts tracking the hawks' rhetoric that make the conspiracy theorists go nuts but don't in the end really show very much but that there's a propaganda effort, which was already reported a year ago. Another of that allegation's sources cited in the piece, who I do respect, seems sometimes inclined to crowd please and sex things up for his audience on occasion, in an almost he can't help himself or unwitting way perhaps because he feels that's what his audience wants. But mostly I'm skeptical because of the fact that former US intelligence sources I consider highly credible tell me the CIA is not working with the Baluch/Rigi, certainly not to destabilize the Iranian regime, and those like British reporter James Brandon who have been up in the Qandil mountains with the PKK/PJAK say the groups have no good weapons, are extremely modestly supplied, and no sign of serious US or western support to be found. They expressed that they would welcome western support when he was up there over a year ago, but he saw no sign and they said they hadn't gotten any. And indeed far more recently the PJAK has threatened to attack US forces because of US support to Turkey in its attacks against the PKK. As well as because of the fact I talk to several Iranian diaspora oppositionists and hawks some of whom would love the US to support these groups and act more aggressively to destabilize the Iranian regime, who are pretty unhappy with the Bush administration for not doing very much on this issue.

In the end, I just don't think the Bush administration is trying to seriously destabilize the Iranian regime or change it, while no doubt it would be thrilled if the Iranian Thomas Jefferson suddenly came to power or Ahmadinejad stepped on a poison viper. I think the thrust of the policy is overwhelmingly geared towards the fairly unsexy effort to cobble and keep together however imperfectly an international coalition to try to pressure and isolate this Iranian regime diplomatically, economically, etc. while preparing to turn over that multilateral diplomatic framework to its successor. Of course, in the meantime, it's trying to gather intelligence and get leverage - and not appear as a Gulliver hamstrung by Iraq, or a paper tiger, before Iran, as much as it can. And important too, it doesn't want Iran to miscalculate out of overconfidence either, and think the US indeed has no leverage. So a lot of projecting power, rhetoric about keeping military option on the table, etc. and of course, contingency planning in case something drastic changes (and leaving room, as Hersh illustrates, for accidents and incidents to exploit by those seeking to gin up confrontation, although they've failed repeatedly til now which is evidence as well of the thrust and direction of the policy and the people driving it). Was with someone last night working the issue pretty close to ground zero so to speak. The policy and expectation are basically to tread water on Iraq for the next six months, barring a major change. And treading water requires a degree of projecting power so that such a major change or provocation from Iran is, at least most in the administration hope (OVP excepting perhaps), averted.

The group I assembled at an online "Iran panic" forum offer considerable more insights on this, and you can join in.

Update: US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker to Candy Crowley on CNN Late Edition: "I can tell you flatly that US forces are not crossing the border into Iran. ... US forces are not operating across the Iran-Iraq border." (Does it depend how you define "US forces?" )

I do think Hersh makes an important larger case that administration and CIA are increasingly going to the defense appropriations subcommittee for authorization for covert budget items .... rather than to Congressional intellience oversight committees, which haven't passed an intelligence authorization bill for a few years; and that the administration, by defining something as military force protection and preparing the battlefield and running it out of the Pentagon rather than the CIA, is legally excusing itself from reporting covert actions to the intelligence oversight committees. I don't see them slipping in a war with Iran that way on the way out the door. He makes the point that it is more than a hypothetical possibility. But there are larger signs and far more that point to the policy continuing to be nudged along in a different direction.

"Iran Panic." How likely is a scenario in which the US or Israel strikes Iran before Bush leaves office? (Or is the left falling for propaganda?) I asked former Mid-East peace negotiator Daniel Levy, Iranian American pro-engagement activist Trita Parsi, Israeli national security correspondent Yossi Melman, former State Department counterproliferation expert Jacqueline Shire, and anti-war writer Danny Postel. Check out their responses, and join the conversation at MoJo all week, where they'll be weighing in.

I hear long-time jailed Iranian student dissident Ahmed Batebi, who appeared on the Economist cover on the Iranian student demonstrations in 1999, arrived in D.C. last Tuesday night.....

NYT: Obama to the Middle East, Europe in July.

Bloomberg: "Senator Chuck Hagel declined to endorse his party's likely presidential nominee, John McCain, and said he would consider serving as secretary of defense in a Barack Obama administration."

WP: "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents helped investigate the kidnapping last week of a Mexican citizen who is related to the chairman of the powerful House intelligence committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), officials confirmed yesterday."

The Post traces the roots of an email/Internet smear campaign against Obama, finding anonymous Freepsters in Boston and Washington State, an ex political opponent in Illinois, and others.

NYT: Bush rebuffs Cheney on North Korea:

Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been taking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution. Finally, he spoke:

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” the other participants recalled Mr. Cheney saying, pointing at himself. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.” He then declared that he was done taking questions, and left the room.

In the internal Bush administration war between the State Department and Mr. Cheney’s office over North Korea, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top North Korea envoy, Christopher R. Hill, won a major battle against the Cheney camp when President Bush announced Thursday that he was taking the country he once described as part of the “axis of evil” off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Dead ender?

National Journal's Bara Vaida and Jennifer Skalka with their cover story: With Clinton's loss, can Emily's List gets its mojo back?

... Although EMILY's List is not to blame for Clinton's narrow loss to Barack Obama, the group had a lot riding on her candidacy--politically and psychologically. Her defeat calls into question the very core of EMILY's List's strategy--that women will back female candidates in the interest of equality, and that gender and identity politics can trump issues, message, and personality. Clinton's failure, in many ways, is also a reflection of the divide between Baby Boomer women (the foundation of EMILY's List) and their daughters, who, according to exit poll data, came out in force in the primaries for Obama. Among women age 29 and younger, Obama routinely defeated Clinton in key primary states, even in contests that Clinton won, while Clinton overwhelmingly beat Obama among women age 45 and older. (See chart, pp. 22-23.)

Clinton's fall from front-runner to runner-up capped a challenging few years for EMILY's List, which pioneered the use of direct mail and donor bundling to raise early money for Democratic women candidates. In the 2006 election, Democrats triumphed mightily, yet EMILY's List faltered, as 74 percent of the challengers it backed lost their general election contests.

In the current campaign cycle, meanwhile, the group has drawn fire from other Democrats for employing divisive tactics--from pitting abortion-rights Democratic women against Democratic congressmen who also favor abortion rights, to feuding publicly with another high-profile abortion-rights group about its decision to endorse Obama.

EMILY's List has won wide praise over the years for leveraging the power of women at the polls and building an unprecedented network of progressive female donors. But now some political observers say that the group's influence may be waning. ...

As the November election looms large, EMILY's List has to demonstrate that its message and approach are still valid--even as the political world morphs to accommodate the Facebook generation--and in essence prove that it can still win. ...

PRI's Marketplace: Worst June for Dow since .... 1930. ?

Via Steve Aftergood, new CRS report on Iran's economy (pdf).

USA Today:

Even after leaving office, former Republican Senate leaders Rick Santorum and Bill Frist continue to raise and spend big money, but little of it has gone to GOP candidates, campaign finance records show.

Although Frist retired and Santorum lost re-election in 2006, both have political action committees, known as leadership PACs, that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars this campaign cycle.

Santorum's committee, America's Foundation, brought in nearly $800,000 from January 2007 to March 31, campaign finance reports show. The committee donated $19,500, or 2.4%, to candidates. ...

What's Santorum doing with the other $780,500?

The PAC's second largest expense — $150,218 — was for management fees, many of that paid to former campaign staffers. Of that, $113,320 went to Capitol Resource Group, which is headed by Rob Bickhart, who is also executive director of America's Foundation and once served as Santorum's fundraising chairman during his re-election campaign. An additional $20,000 went to Mark Rodgers, who was Santorum's chief of staff. The PAC's staff, Davis said, had many responsibilities, including managing Santorum's media requests, developing and maintaining a website, and overseeing fundraising. Davis, a former Santorum Senate staffer, has been paid $20,217 through March 31. [...]

Paul Chang, 60, wasn't happy with the small percentage of PAC donations to candidates. Chang, a retiree from Woodruff, S.C., said he wished he had known before he made $250 in donations....

NYT: "North Korea’s declaration of its nuclear activities is a triumph of the sort of diplomacy — complicated, plodding, often frustrating — that President Bush and his aides once eschewed as American weakness."

Oil up to $140/barrel, Dow plunges.

Former Justice Department official Marty Lederman writes on John Yoo testimony today at House Judiciary committee. Marcy Wheeler is covering the hearing.

More from the Post:

As the hearing was winding down, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) asked Addington whether he would bear any responsibility "if the CIA program is found to be unlawful."

Addington responded: "Is that a moral question? A legal question?" Another debate ensued. "No, I wouldn't be responsible is the answer to your question," he concluded.

"Legal or moral," he added after Nadler had moved on.

Time will tell.

Steve Clemons: "Chris Hill beats John Bolton: Bush Declares New Track for US-North Korea Relations."

AP:

The Bush administration is considering opening a diplomatic outpost in Iran in what would be a dramatic official U.S. return to the country nearly 30 years after the American Embassy was overrun and the two nations severed relations.

Even as it threatens Iran with sanctions and possible military action over its nuclear program, the administration is weighing opening a U.S. interests section in Tehran similar to one in Havana, officials said Monday.

This would give the U.S. a presence on the ground without endorsing the government, one official said.

The U.S. now relies on the Swiss Embassy in Tehran to communicate with the Iranian foreign ministry.

Also on Monday, European Union nations approved new sanctions against Iran, imposing additional financial and travel restrictions on a number of Iranian companies and experts—including the country's largest bank.

An Iranian American contact comments "This AP story is true. The US already opened its office two months ago in Hast-gerde Karaj... "

MJ: Federal investigations of Pentagon intrigues: don't forget the Chalabi leak investigation.

Newsweek: Turning U.S. spy satellites on America

SCOTUS overturns DC handgun ban.

Apparently they declared that the trigger lock requirement is unconstitutional. AP: "The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted."

More from Stephanie Mencimer: "... On a practical level, the decision simply means that for the first time in 30 years, D.C. residents will be able to get a license to keep handguns at home. Since it’s clear that huge numbers of city residents are already keeping guns at home illegally, it’s hard to see how this is going to have much of an impact on things one way or another, though perhaps the rats should start to worry."

BBC take will be worth listening to. They always do these straight faced American school massacre stories in a way that makes their American cousins seem positively uncivilized.

Coming down the pike: Big Sy Hersh piece out Sunday, about aggressive covert-operations targeting Iran. Perhaps this is what this secret briefing I mention below scheduled for Friday is meant to anticipate - but probably not the right agency.

Via Nazionale 260. Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro emails an update on the Abu Omar rendition trial. Among recent evidence presented at the trial, this:

A senior police officer described the search (on 5 july 2006) on the Italian secret service (SISMI) apartment in Rome, via Nazionale 260, where we found other evidences. So he spoke on the documents seized from this SISMI site in Rome:

• The investigations revealed the existence of an office (an apartment in Rome city centre) with links to SISMI, used for 'secret operations'. The manager of this secret centre, Pio POMPA, was a close associate of [former Sismi director Nicolo] Pollari. In this apartment, following a search ordered by an official mandate, the Police seized many reports on Italian and foreign judges and prosecutors, on Italian important politicians, on journalists etc. and other papers (The Rome Prosecution Office is leading an investigation into this illegal filing process);

• In the same apartment the Police seized a SISMI document dated on 01.07.2005. Annexes 9 and 10 of said document reveal that the CIA had informed SISMI as early as 15 May 2003 that Abu Omar was being interrogated by Egyptian security services in Cairo. But the Sismi Director said, on 2006 before the special commission of the European Parliament, that the Sismi didn't know anything on Abu Omar and his kidnapping.

In the apartment kept by Pollari's public relations aide Pio Pompa, files on journalists writing on Sismi's involvement with the Niger forgeries as well.

Update: More on the trial from the Post.

WP: McCain campaign manager Rick Davis pulled in $2.2 million in consulting/lobby profits through McCain relationship.

Friday 1130am: Secret level briefing for Senate Foreign Relations committee staff by State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs on State Department's democracy promotion activities in Iran.

New Spencer Ackerman blog link.

Lawyer for Chinese Uyghur ordered released from Gitmo by Supreme Court on CBC tonight: his client doesn't know about the ruling. Is sitting in solitary confinement. For the sixth year. Lawyer not not allowed by the U.S. government to tell him about the ruling. Lawyer: We've got a man in solitary confinement who they've got no authority to hold at all. ... Update: ThinkProgress has got the transcript.

US News: Seizing laptops and cameras without cause. Senate Judiciary Constitution subcommittee hearing on the matter led by Sen. Russell Feingold today.

Pro Publica: Journalists, think tankers, former government hands paid for Al Hurra appearances. Update: more thoughts on the station from Marc Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed's David Glenn: Scholars mourn a colleague who lost his life in Afghanistan.

Roll Call: Former Bush Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge busted by the Justice Department for failing to register for two years for lobbying for Albania, at $40k a month:

For almost two years former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge failed to register a nearly half-million-dollar lobbying contract that he had with the government of Albania.

Ridge filed a registration statement on behalf of the country earlier this month after being contacted by the Department of Justice.

"It was brought to my attention after the contract expired and my lawyer said under the circumstances I probably should have filed," said Ridge, who is a national co-chairman of Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign and has been mentioned as a potential vice presidential running mate. "I didn't think it was [necessary] to register."

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires agents to register with the DOJ within 10 days of signing a contract with a foreign government and before performing any duties for the client.

Additionally, "foreign agents" must file biannual reports detailing any agreements, income received and expenditures on behalf of foreign countries or corporations owned by countries.

Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor, represented Albania from October 2006 through the end of August 2007 on issues ranging from homeland security to NATO membership.

On May 7, 2007, Ridge and Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha met with Sens. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) to discuss "various reforms undertaken by the government of Albania to comply with NATO and EU requirements," according to the FARA supplemental statement. Ridge and Berisha met with Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.) to discuss the same issues on May 8.

The time stamp on Ridge's registration statement with the Justice Department is dated June 12, 2008. ...

Ridge's registration was spurred by a DOJ inquiry after press accounts surfaced noting Ridge's connection to the country. ...

After a meeting with Justice and his counsel at Blank Rome, Ridge decided to file his FARA registration.

"Once we were made aware of certain contacts by Gov. Ridge, we advised him to register, which he did," said Topper Ray, a spokesman for Blank Rome. ...

Ridge is in good company. One becomes aware of a lot of unregistered foreign lobbying in Washington, although not always as blatantly in violation as this. .... So, curious if Ridge knows something about the strange DOD-US embassy-Albanian government-AEY-mothballed $300 million Chinese ammo weapons deal, now under investigation by the Feds and Congress?

WP's Hiatt: "Senior officials at the State Department and beyond are mulling a proposal to open an interest section in Tehran, similar to the one the United States has operated in Havana since 1977. This would fall short of full diplomatic recognition, but it would open a channel to the Iranian people and, maybe, eventually, to the regime as well. The idea has been under discussion for close to two years and could be adopted within weeks -- though officials continue to worry about how to package such a proposal without having it appear, one said, 'as a sign of weakness.' They worry about the effect of such a signal on Iran, on U.S. negotiating partners in Europe and on domestic politics, given the clash between Barack Obama and John McCain about the wisdom of negotiating with Iranian leaders."

NYT: US embassy, ambassador to Albania implicated in DoD contracting scandal?

U.S. Institute of Peace's Mona Yacoubian: Dealing with Damascus.

Kevin Drum makes a good point. Perhaps in some Strangelovian way, the right and left are both coming to learn to love in some way fearmongering over bombing Iran. Everyone's pretty much already convinced of what they already believe, reporting be damned.

Update: And while you're at Kevin's site, check out the map that shows he and I are something of neighbors apparently in the political blog universe, pretty close to the center. Check out the same team's map of the Iranian blogosphere here too.

Connie Bruck on Sheldon Adelson.

Pro Publica's Dafna Linzer profiles the $500 million US taxpayer funded Al Hurra network. It's not pretty.

From the Archives: a re-read of former CIA director George Tenet's memoir offers his account of a 2002 CIA threat to the White House to file a crimes report with the Justice Department about the Pentagon Ghorbanifar meetings.

Ha'aretz: ImageSat CEO received millions for unnecessary deal.

Shimon Eckhaus, CEO of the satellite imaging company ImageSat International (ISI), became several million shekels richer last week. Eckhaus, who has held the job for about three years, sued the company ... claiming that he is entitled to a bonus of millions of dollars. According to Eckhaus, the bonus is a binding part of his employment contract and resulted from a deal the company struck in Angola some seven years ago. [...]

The generous payment to Eckhaus opens a window onto the secret world of the Israeli defense industry's operations in Third World countries. ...

At the start of the decade, the Angolan government signed a $150 million deal for the purchase of satellite photos from ImageSat, in order to improve its intelligence capabilities in the civil war against the forces of Jonas Savimbi. As part of the deal, ImageSat was to have set up a ground station in Angola to receive the photos, at a cost of some $20 million. The rest of the money was intended to pay for the imagery services over the course of a decade.

Arcadi Gaydamak's business partner in Angola, Pierre Falcone, was the mediator in the deal. Unlike Gaydamak, Falcone appeared for questioning in France and even spent some time in jail. While in jail, Falcone remained involved in mediating the ImageSat deal. A short time later, Patrick Rosenbaum, ImageSat's deputy CEO for marketing who was a key figure in promoting the deal, began working for one of Falcone's companies.

After the Angolan army was dissatisfied with the quality of the service it received, and upon the war's end after Savimbi was killed in 2002, Angola asked to terminate or change the contract. ImageSat, then under the management of Menashe Broder, refused and forced Angola to pay the full sums specified in the contract, even though the ground station was never built. ...

Morris Talansky, the American financier whose envelopes of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash to Israeli prime minister Olmert imperil Olmert's political future, is one of the founding shareholders in ImageSat.

The NYT mag profiles the brilliant "Mad Men," inexplicably passed over by HBO.

Wired's Sharon Weinberger: Pentagon black budget at all time high. " ... The updated report does not speculate on what specific programs are being funded--though past reports have noted that classified space programs account for a good portion of the total. Longtime aerospace reporter Bill Sweetman has speculated that some chunk of this large amount of change is going toward a classified bomber prototype. ...

Ha'aretz's Yossi Melman: Israel is a long way from attacking Iran. "... One cannot conclude, as many have following a report in The New York Times, that an Israeli attack is certainly around the corner. Not only has such a decision not been made in any relevant forum in Israel - the question has not even been discussed. The decision to attack Iran to foil its nuclear program is from Israel's point of view a last resort, and the chances of it happening depend on many variables, which are unfolding over various time frames -- some overlapping, others running in parallel. The most important variable is Israel's coordination with the United States. ... Another variable is international sanctions on Iran. .... Another significant factor is the domestic situation in Iran. ..." More here.

Over at Balkinization, former assistant deputy attorney general for national security affairs David Kris provides a guide to the new FISA bill: "....Fundamentally, this is what I think is at stake in the debate about FISA modernization: whether and to what extent the government will be subject to FISA’s individualized warrant requirement, rather than a vacuum-cleaner regime, for its foreign intelligence surveillance. The debate concerns not only the substantive standards for surveillance, but also the question of who applies those standards, in what manner, at what time, and subject to what minimization requirements. ..."

Update: Kris' part II here.

The NYT's Scott Shane: KSM waterboarded multiple times over two week period. I guess that's what's at variance with what is suggested by the "3-minute" account, which former Justice Department official Dan Levin sharply asserted was inaccurate. Times confirms Poland was one of the "black sites" -- what US officials described as "the 51st state."

LAT's Borzou Daragahi: Iran is offered conditional nuclear talks: "A European proposal to ease the West's nuclear standoff with Iran includes an offer for talks with the Iranians as long as they do not expand their current ability to enrich uranium, Western diplomats say." (Thx to LZ).

WP: "The United States in recent weeks has obtained new intelligence -- fresh traces of highly enriched uranium discovered among 18,000 pages of North Korean documents -- that are raising new questions about whether Pyongyang pursued an alternative route to producing a nuclear weapon, according to sources familiar with the intelligence findings."

AP: Hagel says he'd consider VP offer from Obama. Meantime, NY mayor Bloomberg's got Obama's back in Florida.

Just Out: Does investigation of the Pentagon's channel to an Iran Contra arms dealer continue?

When Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence presented the final installments of the committee’s long-awaited pre-war intelligence investigations to the press earlier this month in the Senate gallery, they demurred when reporters asked them if they intended to pursue possible charges against Bush administration officials whom the senators said had exaggerated the case for war based on the intelligence available to them. ...

But there are signs that further federal investigation of at least one aspect of the committee’s inquiry may continue.

... Mother Jones has learned that one subject of one of the recent Senate Intelligence committee reports has told associates that he has hired a defense attorney in connection to a federal investigation. [...]

One clue as to the origin of a possible federal investigation pursuing the US officials’ channel to Ghorbanifar is contained in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report (.PDF) on the Rome meetings. The report refers to a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation of the same matter (that report remains classified), as well as to a Defense Department Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) investigation of the Pentagon officials’ meetings with Ghorbanifar.

The CIFA investigation was halted only a month after it began by then Defense Department intelligence czar Stephen Cambone, the Senate report found. The CIFA report raised the possibility that “Ghorbanifar or his associates are being used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to leverage his continuing contact with Michael Ledeen and others to reach into and influence the highest levels of the US government.”

The Senate Intelligence committee report concluded that the decision to end the counterintelligence investigation of the Ghorbanifar channel was “premature,” and criticized the Pentagon for not pursuing CIFA’s recommendations. Among the counterintelligence office's recommendations, that a comprehensive “analysis be conducted of the counterintelligence implications related to the ability of Mr. Ghorbanifar or his associates to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials.”

The Justice Department would not comment on whether it is pursuing a counterintelligence investigation related to the case. ...

Update: Very interesting timeline from Marcy Wheeler.

MJ interview: What to make of a recent Israeli military exercise.

... Melman: The Israeli Air Force and all the other agencies are preparing tentative contingency plans. This has been going on for many many months. Israel's air space is limited, so you need to fly over the sea, but to practice you also need land. To do it over Turkey will not be sufficient ... and politically sensitive. So there is an Israeli Greek security agreement [for this purpose] and that's what they are doing.

Now does it mean an imminent attack? Far from that. I don't see at the moment an Israeli cabinet which has the nerve to take such a decision. ....

MJ: What is Israel's thinking on timing?

Melman: Of course they will wait. Israel will never do it before having some sort of understanding (tacit or not) with the U.S. administration. If they decide to do it, it will not be before spring - mid 2009 most probably, end of 2009, unless they realize something dramatic is boiling up in Iran. ....

Miami Herald: Feds arrest DoD munitions contractor Efraim Diveroli.

McClatchy:

The Taliban tortured Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al Ginco. They thought he was a U.S. spy. Then, U.S. soldiers called the Syrian native an enemy and shipped him to Guantanamo.

Now, Ginco will be turning a spotlight back on the Bush administration itself. Newly empowered by the Supreme Court, Ginco has become the first Guantanamo detainee to demand in a U.S. federal court that the military show the hard evidence that justifies his detention. Scores of others are expected to do likewise, attorneys predict.

The war on terror may never be the same.

On June 12, the court rewrote the rules for the Guantanamo detainees in the landmark case known as Boumediene v. Bush. The 5-4 majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded that the foreigners held at the U.S. Navy's Guantanamo Bay facility were protected by the U.S. Constitution's habeas corpus protections.

The ruling empowers the detainees to obtain what Kennedy termed a "prompt" hearing into the evidence used to justify their incarceration.

Some detainees will almost certainly be released. Others will reveal evidence of mistreatment. The Bush administration will have to defend its practices in open court. The military will have to adjust its treatment of prisoners and figure out the future of Guantanamo Bay. ...

Via Kevin Drum.

Gershom Gorenberg in The American Prospect: A new legal challenge to Israeli settlements. More here.

McClatchy's Warren Strobel: General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes:

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.

ABC: "Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, now under investigation for allegedly politicizing the Justice Department, ousted a top lawyer for failing to adopt the administration's position on torture and then promised him a position as a U.S. attorney to placate him, highly placed sources tell ABC News."

NYT:

Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The exercise also included Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900 miles, which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.

Israeli officials declined to discuss the details of the exercise. A spokesman for the Israeli military would say only that the country’s air force “regularly trains for various missions in order to confront and meet the challenges posed by the threats facing Israel.”

But the scope of the Israeli exercise virtually guaranteed that it would be noticed by American and other foreign intelligence agencies. A senior Pentagon official who has been briefed on the exercise, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter, said the exercise appeared to serve multiple purposes.

WP: Abramoff used White House to oust government foe.

Tomorrow's NYT: White House, GOP, telcos gloat over FISA deal.

... With some AT&T and other telecommunications companies now facing some 40 lawsuits over their reported participation in the wiretapping program, Republican leaders described this narrow court review on the immunity question as a mere “formality.”

“The lawsuits will be dismissed,” Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 2 Republican in the House, predicted with confidence.

The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute. "I think the White House got a better deal than they even they had hoped to get," said Senator Christopher Bond, the Missouri Republican who led the negotiations.

The White House immediately endorsed the proposal, which is likely to be voted on in the House on Friday and in the Senate next week. ...

Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who pushed unsuccessfully for more civil liberties safeguards in the plan, called the deal “a capitulation” by his fellow Democrats. ....

The NYT's Eric Lichtblau: "The bill could be brought to a vote on the House floor as soon as Friday, but it may face opposition from two quarters: conservatives who believe it does not give the National Security Agency enough freedom of action, and liberals who charge that it retroactively sanctions illegal conduct by the president."

Meantime, what does the public really know about the program at this point? As the Federation of American Scientists' Steve Aftergood recently told me: "How broad was the surveillance? What number of U.S. persons were swept up in it? What has been done with the information gathered? ... Many of the most basic questions about the program have gone unanswered."

Surveillance State. Congressional Quarterly's Tim Starks:

A final deal has been reached on a rewrite of electronic surveillance rules and will be announced Thursday, two congressional aides said.

The aides said the House is likely to take up the legislation Friday.

The bill would rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, PL 95-511).

On Wednesday, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D‑Md., had said negotiators were working on a bill that would be “significantly better” than a White House-backed, Senate-passed bill (HR 3773) that has support from some House Democrats.

As of Wednesday, sources said the new bill would allow a federal district court to decide whether to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies being sued for their role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

Under the prospective deal, the secret court created by the original law would get to review, in advance, the process by which the administration chooses foreign surveillance targets who may be communicating with people in the United States.

One source said the federal district court deciding on retroactive immunity would review whether there was “substantial evidence” the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report on an earlier version of the legislation detailed how the companies had received such assurances from the Justice Department and the White House.

A knowledgeable friend comments, "It's worse than Nixon because it extends [the argument that if the president says it's legal, it's legal] to cover non-government, private actors. Nixon limited himself to government actors."

More from the WSJ's Siobhan Gorman and Sarah Lueck. "After more than a year of partisan acrimony over government surveillance powers, Democratic and Republican leaders have agreed to a bipartisan deal that would be the most sweeping rewrite of spy powers in three decades." The House is set to vote on it Friday.

Update: Here's the bill (.pdf).

Senate Intel committee chairman office sends a fact sheet, among the key points:

Prospective Immunity. The Act ensures that the cooperation shall be in accordance with law, by providing an opportunity for the companies to challenge in court the lawfulness of directives to them and for the Government to compel compliance through judicial proceedings. Companies that act in accordance with directives provided under the law shall be protected against future liability.

Retroactive Immunity. The Act provides standards and procedures for liability protection for electronic communication service providers who assisted the Government between September 11, 2001 and January 17, 2007, when the surveillance program was brought under the FISA Court.

A district court hearing a case against a provider will decide whether the Attorney General’s certification attesting that the liability protection standard has been met and is supported by substantial evidence. In making that determination, the court will have the opportunity to examine the highly classified letters to the providers that indicated the President had authorized the activity and that it had been determined to be lawful. The plaintiffs and defendants will have the opportunity to file public briefs on legal issues and the court should include in any public order a description of the legal standards that govern the order.

The immunity provision of the Act does not apply to any actions against the Government for any alleged injuries caused by government officials. Nor does the immunity provision involve any statement by the Congress, pro or con, on the legality of the President’s program.

Inspector General Review. The Act directs the Inspectors General of the Department of Justice, the Office of the DNI, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense to complete a comprehensive review, within the oversight authority of each IG, of the President’s Surveillance Program. In no later than a year, the Inspectors General shall submit a report to Congress; the report shall be unclassified but may include a classified annex. In light of the dismissals of cases that may result from implementation of the immunity title, the IG review will be an especially important vehicle for reporting to Congress on the facts of the President’s program, as well as to the public, to the extent classification permits.

Multiple Levels of Oversight. The Act provides for multiple levels of oversight both within the Executive Branch, including by Department of Justice and Intelligence Community Inspectors General, and in regular reporting to both the Congress and the FISA Court.

Sunset. The Act will sunset at the end of 2012 ensuring that the next Administration, together with the Congress, will address whether the Act should be made permanent or modified based on experience.

More from Steve Benen, and the Post.

Update: The ACLU declares the "Hoyer/Bush bill" unconstitutional. The group's Caroline Frederickson:

... "This bill allows for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans’ communications. The court review is mere window-dressing – all the court would look at is the procedures for the year-long dragnet and not at the who, what and why of the spying. Even this superficial court review has a gaping loophole – ‘exigent’ circumstances can short cut even this perfunctory oversight since any delay in the onset of spying meets the test and by definition going to the court would cause at least a minimal pause. Worse yet, if the court denies an order for any reason, the government is allowed to continue surveillance throughout the appeals process, thereby rendering the role of the judiciary meaningless. In the end, there is no one to answer to; a court review without power is no court review at all.

"The Hoyer/Bush surveillance deal was clearly written with the telephone companies and internet providers at the table and for their benefit. They wanted immunity, and this bill gives it to them.

"The telecom companies simply have to produce a piece of paper we already know exists, resulting in immediate dismissal. That’s not accountability. Loopholes and judicial theater don’t do our Fourth Amendment rights justice. In the end, this is politics. This bill does nothing to keep Americans safe and is a constitutional farce.

"The process by which this deal has come about has been as secretive as the warrantless wiretapping program it is seeking to legitimize."

It's hard to understand how David Broder could be under the delusion Lugar would have a cabinet position in a McCain presidency. That is about as unlikely as Rice being McCain's running mate. No chance. What's Lugar been about for the past umpteen years? Calling for engagement with Iran. What's McCain's chief foreign policy plank at this point? Being a tough guy on Iran. No chance. Nil. This is so self evident, hard to understand if Broder is channeling wishful thinking, or what.

Scott Horton in the New Republic: "Travel Advisory. The U.S. isn't likely to try Bush administration officials for war crimes -- but it's likely that a European country will."

Vali Nasr: Iran stumbles in Iraq:

... Washington needs to see this as an opportunity not just for Iraq but for U.S. relations with Iran. The U.S. and Iraqi governments should build on recent gains. Stepped-up action against Mahdi Army cells and disrupting the flow of money and weapons are important, but so is quickly improving the economic lot of the poor of Basra, Sadr City and other Mahdi Army strongholds. In the long run, only good government will change the calculus in Iraq.

It is a frequent refrain in Washington that the United States needs leverage before it can talk to Iran. In Iraq, Washington is getting leverage. America has the advantage while Iran is on its heels. Engaging Iran now could even influence who wins the Iraq debate in Tehran.

"Overt De-Escalation, Covert Disruption": Ignatius channels David Kilcullen's thinking on future US Iraq force.

Here's a question for Pelosi at her press conference today:

Reports of the newest FISA compromise indicate that, on telecom immunity, a federal court would be compelled to grant the telecoms immunity if there was substantial evidence that the Bush administration assured them that the warrantless surveillance program was legal. Doesn't that actually endorse and extend to private actors the Nixonian view that if the president says it's legal, it's legal, regardless of what the law says and the Constitution says? Wouldn't that set an awful precedent that an administration could get private actors to do whatever they wanted including breaking the law?

NYT:

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

Ha'aretz: Israel-Hamas truce takes hold in Gaza strip.

Worth rereading a post from a few weeks back, tracing the roots of an Iran oil blockade meme.

Update: An Iranian American contact writes, "Just fyi – Israelis connected to the intelligence services told me that their objective was a naval blockade already 1.5 years ago…" He adds, "They spoke with great confidence, as if they had planned to have the sanctions fail to create greater appetite for the blockade. I thought they were smoking something…"

Then again, 1.5 years ago was before the three sets of UN Security Council sanctions went through.

Presumably should they prove inadequate the option for an oil blockade plan B is what House Resolution 362 and its Senate counterpart are designed to help lay the groundwork for...

NBC Aram Roston investigation on a Jordan fuel deal sparks Congressional probe.

Daniel Levin, you'll remember, is the former acting assistant attorney general who submitted himself to waterboarding because he was so troubled about the question of whether it constituted torture (the White House insisted it does not). The White House later blocked his appointment. A friend watching Levin's testimony now to the House Judicary Committee hearing notes: "Levin just said, in essence, that anyone who thinks waterboarding was used only for a total of three minutes on detainees should go back and learn more. i.e. that is inaccurate and wrong, though he couldn't say very much more."

Update: In a further observation on today's House Judiciary Committee hearing, this friend notes:

Stunning. Levin's explanation of the infamous Footnote 8 from his December 2004 opinion repudiated the notion that his own opinion results in support for all the interrogation techniques that had been in use. That is a famous celebratory point from conservatives, even including really thoughtful folks like Jack Goldsmith. But now Levin is saying that's not what he intended. Instead, his point was that substituting his arguments for the previous arguments that had been used would not have resulted in different conclusions by the authors of those previous arguments. That is, those arguments would have concluded the same. But Levin repudiated the notion that his own opinion supported all the existing interrogation techniques at the time. That is truly stunning.

And in fact, it undercuts, to some extent, one of the central contentions of Goldsmith's excellent book, which was that [John] Yoo's executive overreach was utterly unnecessary. In a sense that remains the case, but only if one continued to buy into other problematic aspects of Yoo's views, which Levin evidently repudiates. In other words, Levin's new opinion did cause alterations in the actual specific techniques that could be used in interrogation. And in fact I believe Levin suggested as much in his opening statement as well.

More below the fold:

Here's the first passage [of Levin's testimony] alluding to footnote 8, though it's not explicit, that comes later in the transcript: [Rep. Jerrold] NADLER: OK.

Now, John Yoo has written that the December 2004 replacement opinion you drafted was done "for appearance sake," in quotes, and that, quote, "No policies or interrogation techniques changed as a result of the withdrawal of the torture memo," close quote.

Mr. Yoo has also said that, quote, "The OLC's reversal was pure politics," unquote.

NADLER: Now, do you agree that nothing changed as a result of your 2004 memo?

(CROSSTALK)

NADLER: Do you agree that the 2004 memo you authored was pure politics?

LEVIN: I certainly don't agree it was pure politics. And I don't think it's accurate that nothing changed as a result of the change in legal analysis.

NADLER: What do you think was the change?

LEVIN: I'm sorry?

NADLER: How would you characterize the change?

LEVIN: Well, unfortunately, I'm not authorized to discuss certain matters. But I believe it is the case that there were certain changes in practices as a result of the change in legal analysis.

NADLER: So as a result of the change in your memo, you think there were changes in practices. That means required changes in interrogation policies?

LEVIN: I believe that's the case, sir. Yes, sir.

Here's Daniel Levin's opening statement (as printed here and with some extra comments as delivered below):

LEVIN: Thank you for inviting me to testify today. As you can tell, since leaving government in 2005, I've avoided making any public statements on these matters. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I'd rather be keeping that record intact.

But I do believe that a public discussion and debate of the legal issues involved and of the process by which legal opinions were issued and relied upon is important. [...]

It's also important, frankly, to be precise about what you mean by torture. There's a definition under U.S. law where Congress has defined the term, although using words that I believe are very hard to apply.

There's a different definition, or, more accurately, definitions under international law, the Convention Against Torture being perhaps the most prominent.

The definition under U.S. law and under the convention differ in significant respects, in particular when it comes to the nonphysical forms of torture.

LEVIN: There's also the colloquial use of the term, which I believe differs from all these definitions.

And let me apologize for any disruption my daughter causes.

(LAUGHTER)

She's -- but I wanted to bring along her along.

And there are the Geneva Conventions, which use different terms, in addition to torture, but which certainly prohibit torture and much more.

This emphasis on precision and the terms used and the questions asked may sound overly lawyerly. And I suppose, in some sense, it is. But we are talking, here, about legal questions that are being analyzed by lawyers giving legal advice.

And I think that raises one of the most important issues in this area. I think it's critical to remember that the legal analysis should begin and not end the discussion of whether to do something.

If something is illegal, then obviously it's not an option. You simply can't do it. But if it's legal, then it's only that, an option. And there should be a powerful discussion about whether it's a good idea.

And Philip Zelikow gave an interesting talk about this, and I agree with him that, in this area in particular, too often the legal analysis replaced the policy analysis. And the question tended to become, simply, is it legal, and, if so, we'll do it.

I think that may have been understandable in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but as time went on, it became increasingly clear that many of the steps we were taking, even if legal, had significant costs, and costs which might well outweigh any benefits we were receiving.

LEVIN: And this is just my personal view, but I think that we in the government were sometimes too slow to recognize some of those costs and adjust our policies accordingly. [...]

I'd like to make two final points.

First, there's been reporting about certain steps I may have taken in working on opinions in this area, and some people have said some very flattering things. Some have said some not so flattering things as well.

I'm not authorized to discuss that matter, but I can say that while it's always nice to have nice things said about you, they're completely undeserved.

And I don't say that out of any false sense of modesty. The simple fact is I did nothing that thousands and thousands of members of our military have not done during training. I simply took the steps that I felt I needed to take in order to do the work I was privileged to be assigned, and I deserve no particular credit for that. [...]

I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you would have, but if I could just add one point. As a witness sitting here in a hearing, I feel like I have some obligation to say something about this. And I'm very limited, I think, in what I can say.

But if the subcommittee has been informed that there was a total of three minutes of waterboarding, I would suggest the subcommittee should go back and get that clarified, because that I don't believe is an accurate statement.

Postscript: I think it's striking that Levin brought his child to watch his testimony, which he seemed to be under some constraints about providing. Unlike John Yoo, former top Pentagon lawyer William Haynes, Alberto Gonzales and so many others, history is likely to treat Levin as honorable, and this will mark one of the events that can explain why he did what he did, even at the cost of his job in the Bush administration's Justice Department. As Philippe Sands and others suggest, in the years to come, even when we're not expecting it, who knows if there will be war crimes charges brought against some of the officials who seemed so willing to do what it took to advance their careers just a few years back.

And what is Levin suggesting about the "three-minute" simulated drowning being inaccurate? Is he suggesting other administration officials perjured themselves? Or that the procedure itself is administered differently? Jonah Goldberg thinks he has the answer - it was five minutes, according to Goldberg. (Unlike Levin, presumably Goldberg not willing to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak?) And is that right? And where did "three minutes" come from anyhow? From former CIA official John Kiriakou?

More from former Justice Department Office of Legal Council official Marty Lederman: "In previous posts on this blog, I have been both highly complementary of much of Dan Levin's work at OLC (see here and here), and, as to one specific aspect of Levin's analysis, sharply critical. Whatever our substantive differences might be, however (and I imagine there are many), it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dan Levin was an OLC attorney of great integrity, honesty, and rigor -- that he took his public service extremely seriously. Which is why he was fired. ..."

Today, Levin explained that the footnote did not mean what we have all understood it to mean -- namely, that Levin was signing off on the legality of all previously approved CIA techniques. Instead, he merely intended to convey that the persons who wrote those previous memos would not have altered their own bottom lines, even if they had used Levin's version of statutory analysis: If one replaced the statutory analysis in the previous OLC opinions regarding specific techniques with Levin’s statutory analysis, he explained, the attorneys writing those previous opinions would not have come to a different conclusion; but footnote 8 "did not mean, as some have interpreted -– and . . . this is my fault, no doubt, in drafting -- that we had concluded that we would have reached the same conclusions as those earlier opinions did. We were in fact analyzing that at the time and we never completed that analysis."

Why wasn't the new analysis of the legality of the CIA techniques completed? Because the Administration replaced Dan Levin with the (apparently much more compliant) Stephen Bradbury.

By contrast to Levin, see this WP profile on former Pentagon lawyer William Haynes, apparently at a lawyer's direction experiencing profound memory loss in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services committee Tuesday. Post: "It was the most public case of memory loss since Alberto Gonzales, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, forgot everything he ever knew about anything. And, like Gonzales, Haynes (who, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate, left the Pentagon in February for a job with Chevron) had good reason to plead temporary senility. [...] In two hours of testimony, Haynes managed to get off no fewer than 23 don't recalls, 22 don't remembers, 16 don't knows, and various other protestations of memory loss. It was an impressive performance, to be sure. But let's see him try to do that with a hood over his head, standing on a crate with wires attached to his arms."

Daniel Levy: Ten comments on the Gaza ceasefire and what's next.

CQ:

The Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to consider legislation Wednesday to impose additional sanctions on Iran, but the effort appears snarled by language in the bill that would block a proposed nuclear deal with Russia.

Supporters of the new Iran sanctions want to attach the bill, now in unnumbered draft form, to the Senate’s fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill, one of a few pieces of legislation with a good chance of enactment this year.

To make the sanctions more palatable to some lawmakers, they have weakened the bill, but the Russia language remains a sticking point.

“It’s just very much in our national interest to try to work with the Russians in dealing with nuclear materials and proliferation issues, and this would get in the way of that,” said Democrat Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.

Among those who have weighed in with their concerns are Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman, Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., and its ranking Republican, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, all of whom have written to the Finance Committee’s chairman, Max Baucus, DMont., and ranking Republican, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

Biden and Lugar wrote that the language “would likely make it impossible to obtain Russian agreement on further measures and would thus preclude the possibility of broad cooperation on additional U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.”

Opponents of the nuclear deal criticize Russia for providing nuclear fuel and conventional weapons to Tehran.

But supporters of the deal say the United States needs Moscow’s help in further isolating the regime, which they accuse of developing nuclear weapons. Russia is “a country that we have to have working with us if we’re going to be effective in diverting Iran from developing nuclear weapons,” Bingaman said.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential pro-Israel lobby, weighed in Tuesday, sending a letter to Finance Committee members in support of the bill. ...

Update: Worth rereading this post of mine from a few weeks back: tracing the roots of an Iranian oil blockade meme.

LAT: Curveball speaks.

Politico: Former White House aide David Safavian wins new trial. In appeal, two of the five counts he was convicted on were thrown out. He's getting a new trial on the remaining three counts.

As previously reported by Ha'aretz, the LA Times reports that Sheldon Adelson's ties to Tom DeLay said to have eased his Macao casino bid. In return for China giving Adelson the Macao casino license, Adelson allegedly helped Beijing by getting DeLay to kill a Lantos-backed House resolution which would have called for Beijing not to get the Olympics games, on human rights grounds. According to a recent George Will column, Adelson is now the single largest foreign investor in China. Hawks who cite China threat still lining up to tap Adelson ATM.

NYT: New progressive book club.

NYT's James Risen: "The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops. The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations. Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. ... But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block."

ISIS: Latest diplomatic offer to Iran (.pdf)

NBC's Aram Roston: "Today, long-time international arms dealer Monzer al Kassar will appear before federal judge Jed Rakoff in a hearing in Manhattan. Al Kassar already was arraigned on Friday, shortly after his extradition to the U.S., and he pleaded not guilty to charges of selling millions of dollars worth of machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and surface to air missiles to the FARC, the Colombian rebel group designated as a terrorist organization. Al Kassar's current accommodations, the federal correctional system, are a far cry from what he was used to when NBC News producer Aram Roston met him in 2006, in a palace in the south of Spain. ..."

Update: More context from the Sydney Morning Herald drawn from interview with another arms dealer pursued by DEA for his weapons sales to the FARC, Viktor Bout:

... Bout is not the only alleged global arms dealer to be targeted by the US. On June 7 last year the Syrian millionaire and alleged arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar was arrested in Spain in a similar sting operation organised by US authorities. He had also been indicted on charges of seeking to sell weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, to FARC.

In September 2006 the Indonesian arms dealer Hadja Subandi and a group of Sri Lankan Tamil and Singaporean associates were arrested in a sting in Guam. They are accused of trying to sell $US900,000 worth of surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weaponry to the Sri Lankan separatist rebels the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

It has been clear since the early years of the decade that Western security services have been concerned over the proliferation of man-portable air defence systems, such as the shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles Bout was allegedly trying to sell to FARC. The US has been more active than any other country in trying to secure stocks of these missiles, persuading governments to destroy obsolescent stocks while cracking down on arms merchants dealing in them.

"When you have al-Kassar last year and Viktor Bout this year caught in strikingly similar sting operations, a pattern clearly emerges," says Anthony Davis, a security analyst with Jane's Information Group. That pattern is precisely why the US is on a collision course with Russia, where many surface-to-air missiles are manufactured and later somehow find their way onto black markets. (China is another, even more important, source of surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weaponry that is bought and sold on underground international markets.)

David Albright's report (.pdf): Swiss smugglers had advanced nuclear weapons design.

... Soon after learning of the weapon designs, a senior IAEA official told Pakistani government officials about the designs found in Switzerland. The Pakistanis were upset, since they realized that the designs had to be from their nuclear weapons arsenal. They were genuinely shocked; Khan may have transferred his own country's most secret and dangerous information to foreign smugglers so that they could sell it for a profit. And these advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of most treacherous regimes in the world.

The CIA pressured the Tinner family into working for them, most likely in 2003. They are believed to have provided information on the Khan network and turned over centrifuge components that they had not yet sent to Libya. However, the Tinners apparently did not tell the CIA about these nuclear weapon designs.

For what has to be viewed at best as partial cooperation, the Tinners appear to have received a large sum of money and a CIA commitment to help keep them out of jail. The CIA was unable to keep its promise on jail time. ...

The Bush Administration often says that the Khan network was wrapped up. However, four years after the arrest of Khan and several of his associates, important questions about their activities remain outstanding. Gaining their cooperation has been difficult; prosecuting Khan's associates has been especially difficult.

ACW's James Acton comments: "... However, most importantly, I want to question how much difference this actually makes at a practical level. ... Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to underplay the seriousness of Khan selling weapon designs. But, from a proliferators perspective, mounting a warhead on a missile is surely only a modest strategic advantage compared to obtaining the Bomb in the first place."

AP: UK raises terror threat to highest levels for citizens in the UAE

The British government has raised its terror warning to the highest level for its citizens living in the United Arab Emirates, an embassy spokesman said Monday.

A statement posted on the Web site of the British Embassy in Abu Dhabi said the country has "a high threat of terrorism."

"We believe terrorists may be planning to carry out attacks in the UAE. Attacks could be indiscriminate and could happen at any time," it said.

Simon Goldsmith, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Dubai, confirmed the heightened alert and said the terror threat level for Britons in the UAE was at the highest level used by the British government.

The embassy, however, "is not advising British nationals to change their travel plans," Goldsmith told The Associated Press by telephone from Dubai.

The threat level was changed on Saturday, he added.

Goldsmith would not comment on what triggered the heightened alert, but said the threat level was under constant review.

Possible targets include spots popular with expatriates and foreign travelers such as residential compounds, as well as "military, oil, transport and aviation interests," according to the warning posted on the British Embassy's Web site.

McClatchy: "An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad." More in its series here.

WP: New British, EU sanctions on Iran. British prime minister Gordon "Brown, appearing with Bush at a 10 Downing Street news conference, said Britain and the European Union would act later Monday to freeze the assets of Iran's largest bank, Bank Melli, in response to Tehran's refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program. [...] European action against Bank Melli comes on top of restrictions imposed in October 2007 when the U.S. Treasury Department froze bank assets and halted transactions as part of a broader package of sanctions against state-owned Iranian financial institutions. Bank Melli allegedly sent $100 million to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups from 2002 to 2006, according to Treasury officials. Treasury has also cut off another major Iranian bank, Bank Saderat, from the U.S. financial system."

The Baltimore Sun's Paul West: McCain cheapened his own brand. "He embraced President Bush and attempted to become, like Bush, the choice of the Republican establishment. In the process, he helped obliterate recollections of his first run for president, when he became the first Republican in a long time with strong crossover appeal to independents and Democrats. Losing his reputation for independence could prove particularly costly this year. [...] For many voters, his image today is as an outspoken defender of an unpopular war in Iraq and a supporter of Bush's economic policies, including the tax cuts that McCain voted against in the Senate but now promotes as a presidential candidate. Interviews this spring with swing voters in primary states underscored the depth of McCain's challenge. Even some of those who dislike Obama said they would not vote for McCain because it would be like giving Bush a third term."

NYT's Ethan Bronner: Hamas deepens control in Gaza. "One year ago, gunmen from Hamas, an Islamist anti-Israel group, took over Gaza, shooting some of their more secular Fatah rivals in the knees and tossing one off a building. Israel and the West imposed a blockade, hoping to squeeze the new rulers from power. Yet today Hamas has spread its authority across all aspects of life, including the judiciary. It is fully in charge. Gazans have not, as Israel and the United States hoped, risen up against it. ... The notion of Gaza as an enduringly separate entity is solidifying, making it less likely that Palestinians might agree even among themselves on peace with Israel. ... Even more politically complicated is the question of how the closure has affected Hamas’s authority and popularity. Many in the West and Israel would very much like to believe Hamas is in trouble. And it is easy to find people here who hate the government and its black-clad police, even among some who voted for Hamas in the January 2006 elections that gave it a majority in the Palestinian legislature and led to 18 months of tense power sharing before the takeover. But those in Israel who watch most closely — Arabic speaking security officials — say that while the closure is pressing Hamas, it is not jeopardizing it." Related from Ha'aretz: Israel agrees in principle to cease-fire proposal with Hamas.

Politico:

One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any.

Historians belonging to both parties offered a litany of historical comparisons that give little hope to the Republican. Several saw Barack Obama’s prospects as the most promising for a Democrat since Roosevelt trounced Hoover in 1932.

“This should be an overwhelming Democratic victory,” said Allan Lichtman, an American University presidential historian who ran in a Maryland Democratic senatorial primary in 2006. Lichtman, whose forecasting model has correctly predicted the last six presidential popular vote winners, predicts that this year, “Republicans face what have always been insurmountable historical odds.” His system gives McCain a score on par with Jimmy Carter’s in 1980.

“McCain shouldn’t win it,” said presidential historian Joan Hoff, a professor at Montana State University and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. She compared McCain’s prospects to those of Hubert Humphrey, whose 1968 loss to Richard Nixon resulted in large part from the unpopularity of sitting Democratic president Lyndon Johnson.

“It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II,” added Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University. His forecasting model — which factors in gross domestic product, whether a party has completed two terms in the White House and net presidential approval rating — gives McCain about the same odds as Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and Carter in 1980 — both of whom were handily defeated in elections that returned the presidency to the previously out-of-power party. “It would be a pretty stunning upset if McCain won,” Abramowitz said.

What’s more, Republicans have held the presidency for all but 12 years since the South became solidly Republican in the realignment of 1968 — which is among the longest runs with one party dominating in American history. “These things go in cycles,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “The public gets tired of one approach to politics. There is always a measure of optimism in this country, so they turn to the other party.”

That desire for change also tends to manifest itself at the end of a president’s second term. Only twice in the 20th century has a party won a third consecutive term in the White House, most recently in 1988, when George H.W. Bush replaced the term-limited Ronald Reagan, who was about twice as popular in the last year of his presidency as President George W. Bush is now.

But the biggest obstacle in McCain’s path may be running in the same party as the most unpopular president America has had since at least the advent of modern polling. Only Harry Truman and Nixon — both of whom were dogged by unpopular wars abroad and political scandals at home — have been nearly as unpopular in their last year in office, and both men’s parties lost the presidency in the following election. ...

Dr. iRack critiques hawks' failure to grasp why Iraqi leaders aren't signing on to US SOFA demands. " ... The truth of the matter is that it is difficult to see a way forward in current negotiations if one starts from the premise that the entire goal of the talks is to allow the United States the maximum amount of "freedom of action" in Iraq and the largest possible troop presence for as long as we want. As Dr. iRack wrote yesterday, even the Maliki government--which probably, deep down, wants a long-term bilateral security relationship--is uncomfortable with this position, because it is a blow to Iraqi sovereignty--creating, at the very least, a political "marketing" problem in the face of rising national sentiment and impending provincial elections. [...] Moreover, because Maliki et al. are increasingly overconfident that they can police Iraq all by themselves, and the Bush administration has done a great job of convincing the Iraqi government that we need them more than they need us (because our support to Maliki, at the strategic level, is effectively unconditional), the current Iraqi ruling coalition believes they have all the leverage. This shouldn't be the case. ...."

Former IAEA inspector David Albright: Pakistan nuclear 'hero' AQ Khan peddled Pakistan's own nuclear design. NYT: Khan nuclear smuggling ring had advanced design-- Pakistan's:

It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little.”

Tinners may have given information to the CIA, the NYT reports. More from the Post:

An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states. [...]

The computers that contained the drawings were owned by three members of the Tinner family -- brothers Marco and Urs and their father, Friedrich -- all Swiss businessmen who have been identified by U.S. and IAEA officials as key participants in Khan's nuclear black market. The smuggling ring operated from the mid-1980s until 2003, when it was exposed after a years-long probe by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies. [...]

Albright, citing information provided by IAEA investigators, said the designs were similar to that of a nuclear device built by Pakistan. He contends in the report that IAEA officials confronted Pakistan's government shortly after the discovery, adding that the private reaction of government officials was astonishment. The Pakistanis "were genuinely shocked; Khan may have transferred his own country's most secret and dangerous information to foreign smugglers so that they could sell it for a profit," Albright said, relating a description of the encounter given to him by IAEA officials.

US/IAEA pushback on Pakistan/Khan -- and Khan's image in Pakistan as nuclear hero, as AQ Khan makes campaign to be released from house arrest by new Pakistani leadership? Contact says timing of these stories may have had more to do with a bunch of Tinner stories in the works.

More from the AP: "The [senior IAEA] diplomat [in Vienna] referred a reporter to a transcript of a panel discussion on Nov. 7, 2005, where ElBaradei spoke of at least one weapons design being copied by the Khan network onto a CD-ROM 'that went somewhere that we haven't seen' and added, 'That gives you an indication of ... how much the technology had (been) disseminated.'"

CQ: Surveillance deal reached in principle: "...Sources said the major change is that a federal district court, not the secret FISA court itself, would make an assessment about whether to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies being sued for their alleged role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. It was not immediately clear, however, what standard the court would use to determine whether retroactive legal immunity was justified. If that standard is too low, civil liberties advocates maintain, the law will have been written so that companies are almost assured of being granted immunity, and any claim of court scrutiny is a mirage. One source said the court would review whether there was “substantial evidence” that the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal."

Weldon told Wired's Sharon Weinberger about his meeting with the former KGB head of Russian arms export control agency and their idea for an American front company for Russian weapons sales to the Mideast. Weldon:

Chemezov offers—it’s an amazing offer with Putin’s support... there are countries in the Middle East that are approaching Russia to buy replacement weapons and spare parts. Chemezov is here to say, "We want to work with America to either establish either a joint company, or even an American company that would act as a front for weapons these nations want to buy. So American would not think we’re going behind their back." What an unbelievable offer. Chemezov is here, with Putin’s knowledge, to try to set that up with us. Our National Security Advisor doesn’t even attend the meetings.

One suspects that Hadley and others may have already been advised of the FBI/DOJ task force investigating Weldon et co by this point (2006). Would not be surprised if MO was to stand back and see what he does. We know there were wiretaps on Weldon going back about this far.

Via MJ, new National Journal Peter Stone piece on brother Karl reveals that Rove making six figures from Freedom's Watch/Sheldon Adelson. "Two GOP strategists said they have heard that Rove has worked out a private consulting deal with Adelson; this arrangement, one strategist reported, pays Rove in the mid-six figures for giving speeches and providing assistance to Freedom’s Watch on labor union issues, a top priority of the group."

Site went down for a while yesterday. Now it seems to be working with Internet Explorer, but it doesn't seem visible in Mozilla. Basically, if someone blows a switch in India, it's kaput. (OK, some readers can see it in Mozilla, others including this one can't. Not sure what's up). Update: OK, seems to work everywhere, thanks to PK who advised cleaning out the Firefox cache.

Thomas Edsall: "Two other top Clinton advisers, former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and former national security adviser Samuel R. 'Sandy' Berger, face more difficulty in gaining entry to the Obama camp, according to sources. Holbrooke, who is known to have sharp elbows, reportedly does not get on well with two of Obama's key advisers, Anthony Lake, national security adviser in Bill Clinton's first term, and former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice. While Berger has many supporters, he also damaged his reputation by pleading guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified terrorism documents from the National Archives in 2003. He was fined $50,000, lost his security clearance for three years, and was placed on probation for two years. The likelihood that neither Holbrooke nor Berger will be absorbed into the Obama foreign policy staff or the advisory structure at a high level actually works to lessen the probability of divisive Democratic conflict on this front."

Paul Kiel at Pro Publica: 21 members of 109th Congress investigated by the FBI. "Below is a rundown of all 21 lawmakers, current and former. Ten of them are no longer in office. Investigations of seven are part of the Abramoff investigation. Seventeen are Republicans, four are Democrats. This total, based on prosecutorial filings and unambiguous news reports, does not include at least three reported federal investigations of lawmakers for matters other than corruption, including Ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL). All the lawmakers, with the exception of those who have pleaded guilty, deny wrongdoing."

Via Emptywheel, the AP's Matt Apuzzo challenges the Justice Department demand that a press conference call on the Supreme Court Gitmo decision yesterday be off the record:

That’s because Associated Press reporter Matt Apuzzo quickly objected, saying the off-the-record rule "does nothing to help anybody understand anything."

When he said he would consider the discussion on the record, he was told he should get off the call. Apuzzo refused, saying "there’s just no reason for this to be an off-the-record call." A conference call mute button prevented 40 other reporters from chiming in.

But Justice Department officials wouldn’t budge and the call was cut short. A follow-up call was hastily rescheduled with a warning: "If you are not able to accept the off-the-record ground rules, please do not join the call."

Contemptable? Pathetic? Foolish? Third worldy? What's the word to capture DOJ behavior and cowardice here?

Phil Carter: Army publishes anti Obama blog post in its daily news summary.

GOP shuts down Philipe Sands testimony on torture to Senate Judiciary committee. Senators Feinstein and Whitehouse shellshocked.

Dr. iRack on the US arming the sons of Sadr. "So, here we go again. We are purchasing short-term stability and gambling that we can organize and control the forces of disorder."

Daily Mail: The wife John McCain left behind after she was disfigured in a car wreck:

... Carol remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicise her support for the man who abandoned her.

Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband. ‘He’s a good guy,’ she assured us. ‘We are still good friends. He is the best man for president.’

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

WP:"A mid-level government official supportive of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's political faction was arrested Wednesday for making public accusations of corruption against several top clerics, the Iranian Fars News Agency reported."

AP: High Court sides with Guantanamo detainees again.

A Washington lawyer comments, "Having now read the entire 134 page decision, I'm afraid it may not go as far as I originally thought. The same rationale could apply to foreign nationals held at other U.S. military bases abroad, depending on the agreement between the U.S. and the foreign country in which it is based, but it would not apply to less formal U.S. outposts abroad, i.e., CIA safe houses."

Balkinization's Marty Lederman early reaction: " ... At first glance, it would appear that although the decision is momentous, there are other important things that it does not do: It does not speak to whether GTMO should be closed (although it basically undermines the Administration's principal reason for using GTMO in the first place, which was to keep the courts from reviewing the legality of the Executive's conduct). Nor does it affect, in any dramatic sense, possible military commission trials -- with the important exception that it invites the defendants in those trials to raise constitutional defenses, such as under the Ex Post Facto Clause. ..."

Andrew Exum in Democracy: "Thousands of foreign fighters are streaming back from Iraq to places as far-flung as London and Lebanon. What happens when the jihadis come marching home?"

Wired's Sharon Weinberger: "Pentagon Inked $97 Mil Deal with Kremlin-Tied Outfit; Promised 'Access' to 'Putin's Inner Cricle.'"

The U.S. military's Missile Defense Agency signed a $97 million contract with a suspicious, Kremlin-connected non-profit, to help secure Russia's aid in anti-missile projects.

Pentagon higher-ups ultimately quashed the deal between the agency and International Exchange Group, or IEG, for "facilitating" Russian "cooperation" on target missiles and early warning radars. But the 2004 agreement shows the strength of the connections between the Defense Department, IEG, and former Congressman Curt Weldon, now under investigation by the FBI. Earlier this week, news emerged that the wife of one of Weldon's staffers was reportedly paid money by IEG for work never performed.

On the surface, the non-profit IEG was merely working to facilitate U.S.-Russian partnerships. But in a 2006 interview with Sharon, Weldon revealed that the organization did much, much more. With IEG, Weldon said, "you can get access to any [WMD] sites you want in Russia, you can get cooperation with any project in Russia. We'll give you access the inner circle of President Putin."

In a letter to IEG, Brigadier General Mark Shackelford, the then-deputy director of the Missile Defense Agency, said he wanted to "establish a relationship" with the non-profit for precisely that kind of access. ...

Traditionally, the Missile Defense Agency had never been enthusiastic about Russian cooperation; it killed the RAMOS (Russian AMerican Observation Satellite) project several years ago. So why did the Agency agree to take part in this dubious relationship? Well, for starters, Weldon was one of the seminal supporters of missile defense, helping the agency at its height secure over $10 billion a year in funding. But the entire structure of IEG was suspect, and smacked of conflict of interest: why should the U.S. government have to pay an
openly Kremlin-linked nonprofit in order to ensure government cooperation? ...

Feith's office killed the deal, questioning its legality.

AFP: Iran arrests Ahmadinejad ally who accused clerics of corruption.

Easy Marks. Must-read teaser piece from Wired's Sharon Weinberger and Nathan Hodge*: "Lawyers, Nukes and Money: The Strange Case of Weldon's Russia Plan," in which they reveal the path to Weldon by the Kremlin linked Petrosyan also led through the office of Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana), lately in the news in alleged connection to the services of the late DC Madam:

While there have been a number of articles and blogs written about the IEG-Weldon connection, one thing that's been missing is any information on how far Weldon and the group got with this scheme. Meaning, did anyone in government jump on board? The quick answer: Yes.

We discuss the details of this in our book ... And tomorrow we'll also post ... the actual signed contract, worth nearly $100 million, that IEG concluded with a government agency.

DTRA?

From my archives: "Here's a Defense Department, Defense Threat Reduction Agency bulletin (.pdf) from March 2005 saying that Weldon was seeking Defense Department/DTRA funding in the low millions for the International Exchange Group. More here." (The actual pdf link was missing at my site).

Note this bit about Weldon expecting to get DTRA money to his International Exchange Group approved through the office of Doug Feith

... Weldon, fluent in Russian and a long-time proponent of improving relations between the United States and Russia, co-chairs IEG's Joint Political Council with Alexander Kotenkov, plenipotentiary representative of the president at the Russian Federation.... The two men provide "guidance, consultation and strategic oversight" a company brochure said. ...

Money for the project, a figure in the low millions of dollars, Weldon said, likely would come from the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, with no further congressional approval required. ...

The proposal is being reviewed, Weldon said, by the office of Douglas Feith and an interagency panel, Weldon noted. Feith is the Defense Department's undersecretary of defense for policy.

Of course, what other Pentagon Bush appointee would Weldon turn to for approval of a freelance international nonproliferation scheme that ends up the subject of a federal probe and is revealed to be a potential counterintelligence problem? (I also remember Weldon claiming that he had gotten a hearing to present his AbleDanger datamining shpiel to now NSC advisor Steve Hadley, who was also persuaded to authorize the Rome meetings involving the Pentagon, Sismi, Ghorbanifar and Ghorbanifar's Washington pals.)

It's really not much of a coincidence that the Ghorbanifar channels and the suspicious Russia stuff Weldon brought in crosses through middle men like Weldon and Ledeen into the executive branch through figures like Feith and Hadley. Such middlemen and their go-to executive branch friends are easy marks. Targets of opportunity easily identified by counterintelligence threat types such as Petrosyan and Ghorbanifar. Why? Because people like Weldon, Ledeen, etc. and their social-political networks have demonstrated their inclination to shut out the professionals who know something about vetting walk ins and counterintelligence threats, and their willingness, eagerness even to break the rules because they think they know better and it suits their agenda and preconceived ideological worldview. And these pros of the type of Petrosyan and Ghorbanifar know just how to identify, target and cultivate such people, know what tales to spin to tell them what they already believe (mostly in their own heroic status), test out how far they'd be willing to go (feverish faxed memos and cocktail napkin regime change schemes, as the case may be; shady oil contracts and kickbacks; putting their wives or daughters or girlfriends on the payroll of a front company or lobbying deal, in the cases of Weldon and his former chief of staff Russ Caso; some as yet unrevealed form of payback perhaps in the case of Vitter). And they count on the rules being broken by these guys, their very predilection to bypass the professionals, easiest yet their corruptability as is fairly strongly suggested in the case of Weldon. They rely on it.

I know something about how Ghorbanifar first got to Weldon, through a winding path of cut outs. And I know that Ghorbanifar changed his message when Weldon emerged as his latest Washington interlocutor, from one about Tehran wanting to deal, to something more ideologicaly useful for the likes of Weldon. ... It's highly plausible that Ghorbanifar was playing Weldon and others on the Tehran regime's behalf.

Moving on, here's another figure who worked doing intelligence analysis for Weldon and Feith, F. Michael Maloof. I remember reading in Maloof's CV his listing Feith and Weldon among five references. (Maloof had to leave DoD after he got his security clearance yanked, you'll remember).

More on the peculiar Maloof and Weldon working relationship here. As I noted in October 2005:

Michael Maloof, one of the original two analysts hired by Doug Feith to find connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the progenitor to the infamous Office of Special Plans, has a frankly astonishing article in the Washington Times yesterday. Ostensibly a defense of Able Danger, in the oped Maloof says that before his work for Feith, he got hired by Weldon to datamine open source material to find Chinese tech proliferators on Weldon's behalf:

...Following the initial DoD turndown, Ellen Preisser and this writer then data-mined unclassified information to report to Mr. Weldon on possible Chinese front companies in the United States seeking technology for the People's Liberation Army.

It showed how Chinese front companies in the United States listed as U.S. corporations were acquiring U.S. weapons technology from U.S. defense contractors, and improving China's military capability. Such access to U.S. technology then would allow the Chinese over time to duplicate U.S. military systems down to the widget.

Indeed, a June 27, 2005 article in The Washington Times reported U.S. investigators were concerned with China and its middlemen increasingly and illegally obtaining "sensitive or classified U.S. weapons technology" from U.S. companies.

Reaction to the study on Chinese front companies in the United States from the Army and the General Counsel's office in the Office of the Defense Secretary was immediate. In November 1999, they ordered the study destroyed, but not before Mr. Weldon complained to then Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki.

Mr. Weldon also wrote a letter to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh requesting an espionage investigation. Mr. Freeh never responded to the Weldon request...

What Maloof doesn't say here but has been reported elsewhere is that his project got shut down by armed federal agents after it fingered now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Defense secretary Bill Perry among others as Chinese tech proliferators, because of their connections to Stanford. Check out this NY Post story:

...Cyber-sleuths working for a Pentagon intelligence unit that reportedly identified some of the 9/11 hijackers before the attack were fired by military officials, after they mistakenly pinpointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks, The Post has learned.

The private contractors working for the counter-terrorism unit Able Danger lost their jobs in May 2000. The firings following a series of analyses that Pentagon lawyers feared were dangerously close to violating laws banning the military from spying on Americans, sources said.

The Pentagon canceled its contract with the private firm shortly after the analysts — who were working on identifying al Qaeda operatives — produced a particularly controversial chart on proliferation of sensitive technology to China, the sources said...

It would be funny if this guy didn't have such huge sway on the Pentagon's deceptions and delusions going into Iraq.

And under what authority does a public official have to hire people like Maloof to conduct their own counterintelligence investigations? Who's paying for this stuff? Several people have told me Jim Woolsey sat in on their presentations to Weldon of their datamining projects, and that his role was described as being a consultant to Weldon. It's worth noting that Maloof was fired from the Pentagon after he lost his security clearance.

Seem to have been asking all the right questions. Maloof had been involved in setting up at their direction the hawks' very own alternative intelligence "bat cave," as I'm told he called it.

So how many people did Weldon have as advisors and consultants, and in what capacity? Who was paying for Weldon to have Maloof doing such datamining? Who was paying for Weldon's Iran book co-author Peter Vincent Pry to be on the payroll? Who approved Weldon getting Petrosyan House of Rep Weldon advisor business cards? Were Russian defense and energy interests behind some of this? Mogilevich? And is the DOJ/FBI international organized crime/counterintel task force investigating Weldon investigating the wider network that was so susceptable to the likes of Petrosyan and Ghorbanifar?

(Also don't forget Ken Alibekov, he of the inflated bio-threat fame. I saw Weldon and Alibek speak together at Heritage a few years ago, again, never a hyped threat that Weldon didn't want to play up and they seemed quite cozy; and Heritage gave Weldon numerous opportunities to present his shpiel du jour; he also presented his Able Danger stuff there. Alibek seems likely to have managed to get enriched by US government approprations influenced by someone of Weldon's inclinations.)

One other point: if someone is working covertly on behalf of Iranian interests and wants influence in or to disinform Washington, who is he going to cultivate? He is going to go to the biggest Washington gasbag on the Iran threat he can get to, and spin tales of the horrible mullahs and long years of working against them and his super inside information and his plan to overturn them. Especially if that person has influence with the current American administration and has street cred with the anti-Iran crowd. Same with Russia, same with China. Amazingly, people who worked on their behalf like Weldon and Ledeen never seem to question the loyalties of those like Petrosyan and Ghorbanifar who come to them with such fantastic schemes and dubious information.

Update: Here's Weinberger's follow up. In it she reveals a Defense Missile Agency inked $97 million deals with IEG. But that ultimately Feith's office killed it, questioning its legality.

Heard a teaser that Wired's Weinberger and Hodge will be on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross Thursday.

Philly Inquirer: "Under investigation by the Justice Department, former U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon has transferred all of his campaign money to a fund he established for his legal defense. ... In December, Weldon's former chief of staff pleaded guilty to failing to report $19,000 that was paid to his wife through another Russian company. The former staffer, Russell James Caso Jr., agreed to cooperate with federal investigators, and the Justice Department said it would not prosecute Caso's wife. The Russian company for which Caso's wife worked is the International Exchange Group, sources said yesterday. ... As a congressman, Weldon had sought a federal grant for the group, the Journal reported. During a 2004 congressional hearing, Weldon said that the International Exchange Group was organized by Russians who 'report directly to [former President Vladimir] Putin.'"

WELDON! WSJ:

A former congressional aide admitted in court proceedings that his wife received unreported payments from an arms-control group with ties to top security officials in the Russian government, according to several people involved in an inquiry of a former congressman.

The aide worked as chief of staff for former Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican. Rep. Weldon had sought a federal grant for the Russian organization, known as International Exchange Group, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Rep. Weldon's former aide, Russell Caso, pleaded guilty in December to failing to disclose payments made to his wife, but the origin of the funds wasn't identified.

Rep. Weldon is embroiled in a federal corruption probe that contributed to his loss in the 2006 election. The Weldon inquiry is significant in part because it is an element of a broader U.S. Justice Department probe into what officials suspect are efforts by Russian-backed firms to gain influence or gather information in Washington. Prosecutors also are looking into Mr. Weldon's involvement with a Russian-owned natural-gas company with alleged ties to organized crime.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey in April said the government has reconvened its long-dormant federal Organized Crime Council to combat what he called a new "hybrid criminal problem" involving alliances between foreign intelligence agencies and criminal groups. In a speech before the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on April 23, Mr. Mukasey said law-enforcement officials have "grave concern" about "so-called 'iron triangles' of corrupt business leaders, corrupt government officials and organized criminals."

Mr. Mukasey cited Russia and other Eurasian nations as places where "organized criminals control significant positions in the global energy and strategic-materials markets. They are expanding their holdings in those sectors, which corrupts the normal functioning of these markets and may have a destabilizing effect on U.S. geopolitical interests."

The rise of world commodity prices has magnified the Justice Department's concerns.

The criminal case against Mr. Caso grew out of the Weldon probe. Mr. Caso entered a guilty plea in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for failing to disclose payments to his wife from a Colorado firm with "a stated mission of helping American businesses operate in Russia," according to a statement filed with the court. Several people involved in the case said the company is International Exchange Group, which was incorporated in Colorado. The now-defunct nonprofit company is involved in promoting U.S.-Russia business exchange, including nonproliferation issues.

The firm paid Mr. Caso's wife $19,000 for editing work, much of which wasn't performed, Mr. Caso admitted in his court statement, and he failed to disclose the payments as required by law. Mr. Caso is cooperating with the investigation, court filings state. Attorneys for Mr. Caso and Mr. Weldon declined to comment on International Exchange.

International Exchange was founded by Vladimir Petrosyan, who claimed to have ties to the Kremlin, according to Louisiana lawyer Claude Kelly, who also was involved with the firm. Mr. Kelly said in an interview that Mr. Petrosyan introduced him to top Russian officials including Alexei Alexandrov, a member of the Russian Parliament. Mr. Petrosyan, who left the U.S. in 2006, couldn't be located for comment.

In his 20 years in Congress, Rep. Weldon, who speaks Russian and made many trips to Russia, often sought to strengthen relations between the U.S. and Eastern Bloc nations. One person who dealt with Mr. Petrosyan said he used a business card with the House of Representatives seal that identified him as an adviser to Mr. Weldon.

Mr. Weldon, who served on the Armed Services Committee, promoted International Exchange Group, describing it in a Sept. 22, 2004, House speech as "comprised of senior [Russian] military, intelligence and political officials." The group was "established by President Vladimir Putin's plenipotentiary representative to the Duma...[and] includes the key people who are personally friendly with Putin," including the deputy chief of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, Mr. Weldon told the House Committee on International Relations on March 9, 2005.

Mr. Petrosyan, who was the "general secretary" of the group, "met frequently and sought official action from" then-Rep. Weldon, the Caso plea statement alleges. Mr. Weldon directed Mr. Caso to seek U.S. government backing for projects involving biological and chemical weapons and he "made presentations to various executive branch agencies, including to high-level officials in the Departments of State and Energy and the National Security Council."

In addition to International Exchange Group, federal investigators are looking at Mr. Weldon's actions on behalf of a natural-gas company, Itera International Energy LLC, which has longstanding connections to alleged Russian organized-crime figures, according to U.S. law-enforcement officials.

Itera, which has offices in Jacksonville, Fla., has sought to cultivate relationships with others in Congress and official Washington. In 2002, Mr. Weldon sought to enlist former CIA Director James Woolsey to help burnish Itera's reputation, but Mr. Woolsey declined to join its board. ...

Priceless if Weldon gave the Kremlin (ahem) affiliated Petrosyan a staff affiliation at the House of Reprentatives. Weldon also had some unkosher other appointments up there on the Hill before the FBI started taking a closer look.

I've heard former US officials express concern about Weldon's behavior in Russia -- he was known to kick US embassy minders out of meetings with his Russian partners -- and actions he took which they thought made him vulnerable to recruitment, blackmail, corruption by Russian intel pros.

The Russians had Weldon's number. So did man of the hour Ghorbanifar.

Whatever the counterintelligence and international organized crime implications of the case turn out to be, the former congressman from Pennsylvania and his network do seem to be keeping the FBI and DOJ task force investigators busy.

More.

New Murray Waas ABC piece on Justice Department cronyism.

Former NSC Iran hand Gary Sick contextualizes sweeping new corruption accusations in Iran being levelled by Ahmadinejad and allies:

As some of you know, I have been arguing for some time that Ahmadinejad is carrying out, at minimum, a direct challenge to Khamenei and the old guard leadership; or, at maximum, a slow motion coup in which he gradually accumulates more and more power to himself and to the presidency.

The firing of Larijani -- the personal representative of the Supreme Leader and Iran's lead negotiator on the nuclear file -- and his replacement by a crony of Ahmadinejad, was an extraordinary display of chutzpah and naked ambition. The fact that he got away with it essentially unscathed is even more astonishing.

Recently Ahmadinejad started talking loudly and openly of cronyism and nepotism and corruption -- his strongest arguments in the presidential election nearly four years ago. And now, when challenged to "put up or shut up," he sends out one of his own cronies to denounce virtually the entire ruling elite, notably including the clergy, seemingly unconcerned that the accusations lead back directly to Khamenei himself. (Of course, almost all Iranians believe these charges, whether they are true or not, and they put his opponents on the defense while he charges ahead.) [...]

Those who have written off Ahmadinejad in the coming election have a lot of explaining to do. He is a ferocious competitor, an edgy populist who wins the hearts of his (lumpenproletariat) countrymen even while he is demolishing the economy, and a supremely ambitious politician who is a threat to the entire post-revolutionary establishment -- even as it looks on in bewilderment and, may one say, impotence.

Excerpts quoted with permission. More from Marc Perelman.

SOFA. AP: "The Bush administration is conceding for the first time that the United States may not finish a complex security agreement with Iraq before President Bush leaves office." More from McClatchy: "Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed 'status of forces' agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely. ... Both Saghir and Adeeb said that the Iraqi government rejected the terms as unacceptable. They said the [Iraqi]government wants a U.S. presence and a U.S. security guarantee but also wants to control security within the country, stop indefinite detentions of Iraqis by U.S. forces and have a say in U.S. forces' conduct in Iraq. The 58 bases would represent an expansion of the U.S. presence here. Currently, the United States operates out of about 30 major bases, not including smaller facilities such as combat outposts, according to a U.S. military map."

AFP: Fatah and Hamas weigh reconciliation in Dakar.

A former senior US Air Force officer writes to offer his interpretation of Defense Secretary Gates' new Air Force appointments today. (As the Tribune reported, "Gates has recommended President Bush nominate the head of Pentagon's management office, Michael Donley, to replace Michael Wynne. He also recommended the president nominate Gen. Norman Schwartz to replace Gen. Michael Moseley as the Air Force Chief of Staff.") The FSUSAFO's bumper sticker interpretation: "USAF CoS: Fighter pilots 'out,' unconventional ops, team player 'in'":

The SAC bomber pilots ran the USAF from 1947-1989. The fighter pilots, mostly "F-15 mafia" (fighter vs. the attack air-to-ground guys like me), have run the USAF since 1989.

Gates appointment of Schwartz is significant for a number of reasons, and clearly points to issues of "roles and missions" and procurement strategy -- not just nuclear weapon assurance.

Expect more emphasis on:

-- team player leadership vs. fighter pilot mavericks who nod their heads at civilian Pentagon leadership then do whatever they please

-- mobility (tanker/transport) vs. combat forces (fighter/attack/bomber)

-- UAVs (unmanned "drones") procurement vs. fighters (especially F-22 - the USAF gold-plated fighter without an adversary)

-- USAF support for small-unit special ops vs. preparing for global war with one of the [B]RIC nations

-- (perhaps) less promotion based on secret hand-shake patronage

The fact that Gates is going the Langley AFB (USAF's fighter HQ) to lecture them on leadership is really striking. It is a direct slap at the entrenched USAF culture.

Last, I don't know if Gen. Schwartz is Jewish or not. Given his name, he may be. If he is, his appointment is also a strong message against the evangelical Christian cult that has overtaken the USAF since the end of the Cold War.

Someone, somewhere has got to be working on an article about how Gates has made so much a better Defense Secretary than he made a CIA director.

WP: "Deputy national security adviser James F. Jeffrey is getting his reward for long hours of service at the White House: President Bush nominated him last week to be U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Jeffrey has been the deputy chief of mission in Baghdad and the ambassador to Albania, among a long list of assignments. No word as to when he will be heading out, but Senate confirmation is not expected to be a problem since he is a career official."

Jeffrey previously served as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, where he held the State Department's non-nuclear Iran brief and co-chaired the now defunct Iran-Syria Policy and Operation Group. I interviewed him for a National Journal story last year before he moved to the NSC, but the piece is subscription only and not online.

Update: A Hill contact writes of the Jeffrey nomination for US ambassador to Turkey: "Not surprising. Prior to this Administration, he was viewed as a Turkey specialist. Served as DCM in Ankara in the late 1990s."

The WP's Walter Pincus reports on the White House Iraq Group, whose propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American public went unexamined by the Senate Intelligence committee. "McClellan wrote that WHIG was not used to 'deliberately mislead the public' but that the 'more fundamental problem was the way [Bush's] advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people.'"

Pincus concludes: "WHIG's records would shed much light on whether, as Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the intelligence panel, put it: 'In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.'" Hint, hint: Henry Waxman.

Update: A former US official who worked in the Middle East comments: "We will never see those records. Note there was not a single person in the group with any actual experience in intelligence, the Middle East, WMD, classical weapons, or indeed anything else. It is all about spin."

Stuart Rothenberg:

... There will be changes, but don't expect the 2008 presidential map to look wildly different from those of 2000 and 2004.

Barring a full-scale McCain meltdown or the public's wholesale rejection of the GOP (neither of which can be ruled out), only a handful of states are prime candidates to swing from their traditional partisan bent in recent presidential elections. [...]

A close electoral map invariably raises the specter of a possible split decision -- with one nominee winning the popular vote and the other winning an Electoral College majority. As in 2000, this seems like a serious possibility.

Obama is likely to "waste" votes in Illinois, New York and California (winning them with large majorities), and he may gain some ground in normally Republican states -- getting closer than most Democrats normally do, but not winning.

If this happens, and if Obama narrowly loses one or two larger, traditionally Democratic states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, we could see an updated version of 2000, with McCain winning the White House at the same time that Obama gets more than half a million more votes.

Seems highly plausible to me.

World Politics Review's Judah Grunstein launches a week long series on France's strategic posture review, the product of a month's worth of interviews he did with some of France's top foreign and defense policy figures.

MJ: The Fawlty Towers' Pipeline to the White House:

The AP reports on Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's meeting today with Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Who I believe Iran contra fabulist Manucher Ghorbanifar and Washington pals definitively declared dead over a year ago, based on Ghorbanifar's amazing insidery deep, high priced network of Iran intelligence sources. Eventually, they are bound to be right about that. In the meantime, these are the folks that former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and national security advisor Steve Hadley were turning to for Iran intelligence and operational advice? [...] Wouldn't a normal sane person even think twice about buying Mid East take out from people with such a track record?

Link.

CNN: Maliki in Iran: "Iraq will not be used to 'damage' Iran." Not perhaps the headline Washington was hoping for from Maliki's visit to Tehran.

At the NYT book review, Jeff Stein reviews Eric Lichtblau's Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice:

... Even readers who have followed the administration’s legalistic contortions over wiretapping and waterboarding since 9/11 may be unnerved by Lichtblau’s recounting of the human dramas behind the stories of laws broken and ignored. Some of his stories involve officials who stood up to the White House and its henchmen in the F.B.I. and the Justice Department at the cost of their jobs. Others are moving accounts of professionals who lost their integrity, or at least their dignity, by averting their eyes.

Then there are the victims of the administration’s frantic, post-9/11 bloodhounds, who rounded up hundreds of people and held them incommunicado, mostly without charges, and occasionally prosecuting them simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, had the wrong names and religions, were wrongly identified or were drawn into conspiracies wholly created by the F.B.I.

Not Afghans and Pakistanis, mind you, who were swept up on the battlefield or kidnapped off the streets and thrown into Guantánamo or secret jails, only to be quietly released years later without so much as a fare-thee-well. Too often it was the guy next door, people like Brandon Mayfield, who became part of the collateral damage of the “war on terror.” ...

This is Cujo, not homeland security. Mayfield was detained and, according to his lawyers, threatened with the death penalty. Only the Spaniards’ eventual arrest of the fingerprint’s real owner, an Algerian, saved him.

What if it hadn’t? ...

New CNAS Iraq Report: Shaping the Iraq Inheritance. "The report ... outlines a policy of conditional engagement—a strategy that initiates a phased, negotiated redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq while conditioning residual support to the Iraqi government on continued political progress—and argues that it offers the best chance of achieving sustainable stability in Iraq while balancing U.S. commitments worldwide." (large .pdf)

David Ignatius:

Let's try for a moment to put ourselves in the mind of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. For it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation's confrontation with the United States.

Soleimani represents the sharp point of the Iranian spear. He is responsible for Iran's covert activities in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other battlegrounds. He oversees the regime's relations with its militant proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. His elite, secretive wing of the Revolutionary Guard is identified as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration, but he is also Iran's leading strategist on foreign policy. He reports personally to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his budget (mostly in cash) comes directly from the supreme leader's office. [...]

After a particularly heavy day of shelling, Gen. David Petraeus sent Soleimani a message -- "Stop shooting at the Green Zone." The message was conveyed verbally by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The Quds Force commander didn't react immediately. But the heavy mortar fire on the Green Zone soon tapered off. Iran had flexed its muscles and demonstrated America's vulnerability, and then opted for a tactical retreat.

This ebb and flow of Iranian tactics was noted by Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. He told journalists Thursday that the Iranians have withdrawn Mahdi Army fighters from Basra and Sadr City, but it isn't clear yet whether they have decided that "the militia era is over" in Iraq or are just making a "tactical pause."

The question for Soleimani-watchers is how he will play his hand in the growing confrontation over Iran's nuclear program. The Bush administration seems to have decided on a course of escalating pressure against Tehran during its remaining months in office. The Iranians, while maintaining a tough line on the nuclear issue, as well as in Iraq and Lebanon, appear wary of an all-out confrontation.

So imagine that you are Qassem Soleimani, commander of a covert Iranian army deployed across the Middle East: You doubt the Bush administration would run the risk of a military strike against Iran, but you can't be sure. You think America can't afford to play chicken in an election year, but you can't be certain of that, either. You think Iran is on a roll, but you know how quickly that advantage can be squandered by unwise choices. You know that Arabs, even in Iraq, have become peeved at what they see as meddling and overreaching by Tehran.

So you watch and wait. You give ground where necessary, but you prepare to strike back, as devastatingly as possible -- and on your own terms, not those of your adversary.

C&L: Moyers asks Fox News producer about that $20/barrel oil Murdoch promised after the US invaded Iraq. "If you can't come on my show, send someone below you. Send Bill O'Reilly."

Reuters/Haaretz: Israel Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz comes under domestic criticism for "political" Iran comments:

There was agreement from Yedioth's economic analyst, Sever Plotzker, who suggested that Mofaz was, paradoxically, giving a back-end boost to Iran -- the world fourth-biggest oil producer:

"Blathering away about how 'we'll attack and destroy you' does not deter the decision-makers in Tehran, but it does drive the oil markets crazy ... And who profits from that? Tehran."

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball et al: Obama's Jewish Problem -- a Myth?

Human Rights Watch:

Iranian authorities should immediately grant three men detained on politically motivated charges access to proper medical care, Human Rights Watch said today. Cleric Ayatollah Kazemi Boroujerdi, journalist and activist Mohammad-Sadiq Kaboudvand, and prominent human rights defender Emad Baghi are in poor health and urgently require specialist medical attention.

The authorities are holding all three men in section 209 of Evin prison, a security unit where Human Rights Watch has previously documented abuses. Baghi had a heart attack on May 11 and Kaboudvand had a stroke on May 19, while Boroujerdi suffers from a range of ailments, including Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and heart disease.

"It's outrageous that these men's health is being comprised for no apparent reason," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "Iranian authorities have yet to produce evidence for why these men are in prison to begin with, and now they are refusing to provide them with adequate care." ...

On October 8, 2006, authorities arrested Boroujerdi at his house in Tehran and transferred him to Evin 209. In July 2007, the Special Court for the Clergy convicted him on unknown charges in a closed court. Boroujerdi espouses an interpretation of Islam that calls for the separation of religion and politics. It appears likely that the authorities have targeted him for his critical views about the current form of the Iranian government (http://hrw.org/reports/2008/iran0108/4.htm#_ftnref12). ...

Baghi, who had previously served a three-year sentence for his writings, has been in Evin Prison since October 2007. On October 14, Branch 1 of the Security Unit of the General and Revolutionary Public Prosecutor's Office charged him with "propaganda against the State" and "publishing secret government documents" in his capacity as president of the Society for the Defense of Prisoners' Rights, a nongovernmental organization that he founded in 2003 (http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/10/16/iran17105.htm).

While in solitary confinement in Evin 209, Baghi developed heart problems. In February 2008, authorities granted him a two-month release from prison on medical grounds, although they continued to summon and question him during this time. After the expiration of his release on April 15, authorities rearrested Baghi and returned him to prison.

On May 11, Baghi suffered a heart attack. Authorities transferred him to the prison's clinic but soon returned him to his cell.

Kaboudvand, a journalist and a founder of Human Rights Organization of Kurdistan, was arrested in 2007 on charges of "endangering national security" and "propaganda against the State."

On May 19, 2008, Kaboudvand suffered a heart attack in prison. According to public statements by his lawyer, Kaboudvand's numerous requests for medical care have gone unheeded.

Kaboudvand was also the owner, general manager, and editor of the Persian-language newspaper Payam-e Mardom, which the government suspended in 2005. In April 2006, the Public Prosecutor's Court in Sanandaj gave him a suspended sentence of one year in prison on charges of "creating splits among groups of people by raising tribal and racial issues." ...

Former Pentagon official Graham Allison: Sitting Down at the Nuclear Table with Iran

... In baseball, it's three strikes and you're out. After the undeniable failure of the third Security Council resolution imposing sanctions to slow Iran's nuclear program, Bush's Iran strategists should recognize that they have struck out. [...]

If Bush recognized the fact that his diplomatic squeeze has failed, and asked what he could do in his final eight months to advance US interests in relations with Iran, he would not have to look beyond his own Cabinet.

In a 2004 report titled "Iran: Now is the Time for a New Approach," Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged that "the United States deal with the current regime rather than wait for it to fall." When asked about this recommendation during recent testimony on the Hill, Gates noted that he had been "in a happier place" then.

But it is clear that Gates remains convinced that direct negotiations are imperative for solving the nuclear standoff. As he told the Academy of American Diplomacy last month, "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage . . . and then sit down and talk with them."

Negotiations are never certain to yield results. The alternative, a world of nuclear anarchy, is of great concern to both nations. Having seen the results of seven years of nonengagement, Bush could do his successor - whether Democrat or Republican - a great favor by proposing to negotiate with Iran now.

Just Out: "The Cocktail Napkin Plan for Regime Change in Iran"

Enlisting high-level contacts in the White House, Pentagon and Congress, Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen relentlessly pushed a freelance intelligence collection and Iran regime change plan on behalf of another veteran of the scandal, according to a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (PDF) released Thursday.

The proposed plan to change the Iran regime, which requested $5 million in initial "seed" money from the U.S. government, was outlined on a cocktail napkin by Iran contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar at a Rome bar during a three-day meeting in December 2001 that brought the Iran contra actors together with two officials from the Pentagon. The Pentagon officials’ attendance at the meeting was authorized by Stephen Hadley, now the top White House national security advisor, the report found. Revelations that Iran Contra figures Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved in a new channel to the Bush administration set off alarm bells throughout the US government, and prompted multiple inquiries into whether the channel amounted to an unauthorized covert action and a possible counterintelligence threat. The latter issue was never fully resolved, after a top Pentagon official shut down the counterintelligence inquiry only a month after it had begun.

Later operations would require as much as $25 million, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar advised US officials, but could be financed in part, they said, by a foreign government in exchange for commitments of future Iran oil contracts to the foreign government’s state energy company, believed to be Italy’s ENI. Italy’s military intelligence service Sismi facilitated Ledeen’s Rome meeting, which, highly unusually, was not cleared with the US embassy in Rome or the CIA, even though it involved interaction with a foreign intelligence service.

The new Senate Intelligence committee report presents more evidence that the U.S. government under the Bush administration has been uniquely vulnerable to the foreign policy freelancing and intelligence schemes of discredited individuals and deemed fabricators such as Manoucher Ghorbanifar, and potentially even counterintelligence threats of an Iranian or other nature. It details how top officials in the Bush administration endeavored to permit such an ill-advised channel, took affirmative measures to conceal it in order to bypass the professional intelligence service, and then took steps to protect their role in the matter by shutting down the counterintelligence investigation launched by the Pentagon and to stall the Senate probe. The report also documents that Ghorbanifar has been able to influence US policy and intelligence channels in particular through Ledeen's contacts within Cheney's office and the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz Pentagon.

"The questions is: is information from Ledeen and Ghorbanifar still going to the vice president's office, and is it affecting them?" a former senior CIA offiicial said. "It's a logical assumption. That is what is known in the intelligence business as circular reporting: the same information, coming through the same source, peddled through different channels, slightly altered to make it look like it's coming from multiple sources. And it's one of the biggest dangers in the intelligence business. That is what Iraq Niger was all about." [...]

Link.

Reuters: White House: US committed to solve Iran issue diplomatically

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Friday that the United States was committed to solving the Iranian nuclear threat through diplomatic multilateral means.

Perino was responding to comments made earlier Friday by Transportation Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, who said that an Israeli attack on Iran appeared "unavoidable" given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential.

"I understand that Israel is very concerned about their future and their safety when they have a neighbor in their region - Iran - that says they want to wipe them off the map," Perino told reporters. "We are trying to solve this diplomatically," she explained.

Asked whether the United States was keeping military options open as a last resort with Iran, she said U.S. President George W. Bush had always said he "would never take any options off the table" but that Washington was pursuing multilateral diplomacy. [...]

NYT: Oil prices skyrocket, taking biggest jump ever.

Oil prices had their biggest gains ever on Friday, jumping nearly $11 to a new record above $138 a barrel, after a senior Israeli politician raised the specter of an attack on Iran and the dollar fell sharply against the euro.

The unprecedented gains on Friday capped a second day of strong gains on energy markets, and fueled suspicions that commodities might be caught in a speculative bubble.

More.

Reuters: "A spate of chilling snooping scandals involving some of their country's biggest corporations has unsettled Germans who have not forgotten the dark days of the Cold War. Revelations by Deutsche Telekom, Europe's biggest telecommunications firm, that it illegally monitored phone records in 2005 have reawakened memories of communist East Germany's Stasi secret police and even Hitler's Gestapo. [...] The Telekom scandal, based on a report that the firm had spied on journalists and directors to find out who was leaking information to the press, is the dominant case but others have also made headlines. Discount retailer Lidl was investigated after accusations it was monitoring staff activity -- from toilet breaks to suspected love affairs. Rail operator Deutsche Bahn this week denied illegal snooping despite using the same firm as Telekom. These incidents may be seen as ordinary business practice in some countries. But not in Germany. ..."

Joe Conason: "The Clintons, along with many of the activists closest to them, are veterans of the civil rights struggle, notably Harold Ickes, the hard-bitten lawyer and advisor who was nearly beaten to death by a racist gang in Mississippi more than 40 years ago while trying to register black voters. What Obama represents is a future for which they fought valiantly before he was born. It is ironic, of course, that the price of that triumph has turned out to be so high for them personally."

McClatchy's John Walcott: Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

More on the Rome meeting here.

National Geographic's Hannah Bloch analyzes Hillary's accents. "But was Hillary purposely pandering? Or just engaging in normal human behavior?"

NYT: Advisor says McCain backs warrantless wiretaps. "Although a spokesman for Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, denied that the senator’s views on surveillance and executive power had shifted, legal specialists said the letter contrasted with statements Mr. McCain previously made about the limits of presidential power."

Sen. Joe Biden (D-De) comments: “Senator McCain has now not only joined the company of President Bush – but also President Nixon – in taking the position that as President he would consider himself above the law. In 1978, I helped draft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which made clear the exclusive legal steps the President must take in order to conduct national security surveillance. President Bush chose to ignore the law and now it seems Senator McCain will continue this policy. Once again – there is no daylight between President Bush and Sen. McCain."

Just Out at the Forward: "The Operator: The Double Life of a Military Strategist." A propos of the Senate Intelligence committee's Phase II report release today, a profile of a Washington military strategist with a double life. The Niger forgeries? Italian intelligence showed them to him before Dick Cheney heard about Iraq and yellowcake. (He refused to back channel them). Abu Omar rendition? He knew about it as it was going down in Italy. Back when Dick Cheney was House Intelligence committee minority leader, Cheney even told him what Iran Contra operation wasn't authorized and notified to Congress. And recently, the consulting services of the author of "coup d'etat: a practical handbook" have been in demand from groups seeking to overturn the Iran regime.

... Many of these past associations emerged in a recent episode revealed during my meeting with Luttwak: that he was shown the infamous Niger forgeries by a friend with the Italian intelligence agency Sismi, when he was working as a consultant to a Sismi contractor named Luciano Monti in the 2001-2002 time frame, but that he refused to back-channel them to the Bush administration. (He never agrees to back-channel intelligence, Luttwak said, and these looked like forgeries to him.) The allegations in the forgeries, of course, became one of the Bush White House’s most controversial casus belli for the Iraq war — and, after proven phony even on the eve of the invasion, among the most embarrassing and politically damaging for the president and vice president, who cited the bogus uranium allegations despite warnings from the CIA not to. [...]

But some 25 years later, covert Iran intrigues and operations were again on Luttwak’s mind when he spoke with me this year. Speaking at a panel held at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, in February, Luttwak hinted at post-Revolutionary travels in Iran. “I recommend that you take a trip to Iran,” Luttwak mischievously suggested to audience members. “Isfahan is beautiful, as is Tabriz in the north, where the people crave to be Turks,” he said, before describing being offered whiskey — the good stuff — by locals he met, a sign of their defiance to the mullahs.

Luttwak told me he had traveled to Turkey on a prospective assignment a couple years ago that involved advising Azeri Iranians how they might agitate for more independence from the Tehran regime. He walked away from the assignment, he described, when it became evident to him that the operation was not, as he had originally thought, authorized by the necessary governments.

But in April, Luttwak told me, he was off to Paris to meet with another Iranian group seeking his consulting services. “My client is an anti-Iran group,” Luttwak said. “They are serious enough to have come up with funds to hire consultants.” He wouldn’t reveal which group it was, except to say it was authorized to operate in France. ...

Iran is also central to Luttwak’s thinking about America’s own political landscape and the current presidential race. When we met in February, a day after Maryland’s Democratic primary, Luttwak said that he was supporting Hillary Clinton because he thought she would be most inclined to order air strikes on Iran. Contrary to conventional wisdom, as always, Luttwak said that direct conversations he had had with a certain leading Republican presidential candidate convinced him that this person, under the influence of war-weary Pentagon brass, would be disinclined to order such military action. As for his opinion about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, Luttwak took a preemptive swipe at the candidate’s elite American supporters who might be under the delusion, according to Luttwak, that Obama would improve America’s image in the world, arguing in a May 13 New York Times op-ed the exact opposite: that the Muslim world would see Obama as a heretic. The Times’s public editor devoted his entire June 1 column to debunking the allegations Luttwak cited in the piece and criticizing the Times’s editors’ decision to run it. ...

Go read the whole thing.

Regarding Sismi showing Luttwak the Niger forgeries: He was working at the time as a consultant to a Sismi contractor called APRI S.p.a. headed by Luciano Monti. "I was their consultant for methods,” Luttwak said, looking up the details in his income tax returns. (He mentions both Sismi director press aide Pio Pompa and former Sismi director Nicolo Pollari as contacts). He refused to back channel the documents to Washington, and would have nothing to do with them, and was later told they were determined to be forgeries, as he had thought. Perhaps others who got an early peak at them were not so scrupulous.

AP: Air Force military and civilian chiefs sacked.

Updated: Wired's Noah Shachtman has the backstory:

... Despite reports you may be reading elsewhere, this firing was not about nukes or missiles, well-placed sources say. "Far and away the biggest issue was the budget stuff, not the nuclear stuff. The UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] fight, the F-22 deal... Gates really didn't appreciate it," one of those sources tells Danger Room. Now, with the botched missile and nuke shipments, "the SecDef [Secretary of Defense] has good cover to do something that suits him bureaucratically."

"The problem seems to be a philosophical difference between Gates and the USAF [U.S. Air Force], not anything to do with nuclear weapons," another adds. And Moseley and Wynne may not be the last to go. Rumors are swirling of more top-level Air Force officers getting the axe. Stay tuned.

Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin said in a statement: “Secretary Gates’ focus on accountability is essential and had been absent from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for too long. The safety and security of America’s nuclear weapons must receive the highest priority, just as it must in other countries. The Secretary took appropriate action following the reports of the Defense Science Board, the Air Force’s own internal review, and now most recently, the report of Admiral Donald showing that the underlying security of our nuclear weapons has been degraded."

Update II: A former senior Air Force officer comments:

The firings of the senior USAF leadership are long overdue, and are the direct result of its senior leaders having betrayed the Core Values that they had hypocritically instituted and reinforced in the post-Cold War era.

Ironically, as the Air Force's operational capability has increased exponentially since 1991, the ethics of the USAF leadership have simultaneously 'gone down in flames.' The nuclear safeguard firings are just the latest in a series of USAF scandals that included the dismissal and demotion of the top Air Force JAG for serial adultery; the Boeing tanker lease scandal; officially sanctioned fundamentalist Christian zealotry at the Air Force Academy; and one of the top colonel JAGs in the Air Force having served for 20 years as a disbarred attorney.

Sadly, while the USAF's line airmen have delivered excellence, its senior leaders have repeatedly betrayed the institution and their subordinates. The now-fired General Moseley was made Chief of Staff only after having been protected from accountability for a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in which two USAF F-16s mistakenly bombed Canadian soldiers, largely due to command and control failure at Moseley's headquarters. Moseley threw a USAF colonel commander who tried to defend the pilots under the bus in order to save his own career.

The USAF leadership debacle is the end result of having shifted from "To Fly and to Fight" to Madison Avenue hype.

Phase II Out....

Report (.pdf)

For background on the Rome meeting, addressed in this report, see my piece, "Three Days in Rome."

Press release from Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman John Rockefeller below the fold:

The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, and a bipartisan majority of the Committee (10-5), today unveiled the final two sections of its Phase II report on prewar intelligence. The first report details Administration prewar statements that, on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq. The second report details inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities conducted by the DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department.

“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.

“These reports represent the final chapter in our oversight of prewar intelligence. They complete the story of mistakes and failures – both by the Intelligence Community and the Administration – in the lead up to the war. Fundamentally, these reports are about transparency and holding our government accountable, and making sure these mistakes never happen again,” Rockefeller added.

The Committee’s report cites several conclusions in which the Administration’s public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include:

Ø Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

Ø Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

Ø Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.

Ø Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

Ø The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.

Ø The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

Additionally, the Committee issued a report on the Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The report found that the clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranians in Rome and Paris were inappropriate and mishandled from beginning to end. Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz failed to keep the Intelligence Community and the State Department appropriately informed about the meetings. The involvement of Manucher Ghobanifer and Michael Ledeen in the meetings was inappropriate. Potentially important information collected during the meetings was withheld from intelligence agencies by Pentagon officials. Finally, senior Defense Department officials cut short internal investigations of the meetings and failed to implement the recommendations of their own counterintelligence experts.

Today’s reports are the culmination of efforts that began in March 2003, when, as Vice Chairman, Senator Rockefeller initially requested an investigation into the origin of the fraudulent Niger documents. In June 2003, he was joined by all Democrats on the Committee in pushing for a full investigation into prewar intelligence, which was eventually expanded by the Committee in February 2004 to include the five phase II tasks.

The Committee released its first report on July 9, 2004, which focused primarily on the Intelligence Community’s prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and links to terrorism. Those findings helped lay the foundation for some of the intelligence reforms enacted into law in late 2004.

In September 2006, the Committee completed and publicly released two sections of Phase II: The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress; and Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments.

In May 2007, the Committee released the third section of Phase II: Prewar Intelligence Assessments About Postwar Iraq.

Separately, in early 2007, the Pentagon Inspector General released its own report on the intelligence activities conducted by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and also concluded that those activities were inappropriate.

More here.

As I previously reported:

But it was one thing for Ghorbanifar to rekindle his rapport with Ledeen; it was another to get the Bush administration to start paying attention. That would require more strategizing—and as Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, noted in a 2004 letter to the Washington Monthly, the initiative did not come from the Pentagon. “DoD learned from the White House that there were some Iranians who had information about terrorist threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who wanted to defect,” Feith wrote. “It turned out that the Iranians did not want to defect, but they did want to share information directly with the U.S. Government. The Iranians did not, however, want to deal with the CIA.” It was classic Ghorbanifar-Ledeen fare—the hint to the White House, the handoff to the Pentagon, the quickly deflated promises, the end run around the CIA.

Not that the CIA had any desire to be involved. CIA headquarters “was extremely goosey about this,” a former senior agency official knowledgeable about the Rome meeting told me. “You don’t want to be sucked into Iran-Contra. Many of us were around when that happened, and went over a cliff with them. [Then-CIA Director George] Tenet was on the Senate intelligence committee staff when that happened. The answer from Langley was: We don’t want anything to do with this.” When the CIA learned that the Rome meeting was going ahead, its local station chief even fired off a memo to Langley reporting that an unauthorized covert action might be taking place—a memo that would eventually find its way into the files of Senate staffers investigating the matter. The State Department likewise complained to the White House, and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley reportedly promised that the channel would be shut down. (Hadley’s office has referred questions about the meeting to the Defense Department, where spokeswoman Lt. Colonel Tracy O’Grady Walsh first told me to email questions, then did not respond.)

Despite the complaints, it appears that the dalliance between U.S. government officials and Ghorbanifar continued beyond the Rome meeting. Rhode would travel to Paris in June 2003 to meet with Ghorbanifar again—a meeting the Pentagon later claimed was “unplanned.” Also in June 2003, three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a CIA case officer was sent to meet in Baghdad with a Ghorbanifar associate known to U.S. intelligence officials as a London-based fraudster. As Newsday’s Knut Royce—who first broke the story of the Rome meeting in 2003—discovered, Ghorbanifar and his associate claimed to have information about a secret cache of weapons-grade uranium in Iraq that Iranian intelligence had allegedly discovered and stolen part of.

Ha'aretz: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met Wednesday with President George W. Bush in Washington, with Iran at the center of the discussion. Following the meeting, the premier said Wednesday that there are fewer question marks between the two allies concerning the means, the time constraints, and the level of American determination in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. The two leaders met face to face for an hour in the Oval Office. ... 'I do not think it is appropriate for Iran to know what we are doing,' Olmert said, and described the cooperation with the United States on countering Iran's nuclear program."

A colleague writes, "It all reminds me of the moment toward the end of the Vietnam war, circa 1973, when Nixon was telling Kissinger to go to the negotations with the N. Vietnamese in Paris and say, 'You gotta cooperate. Nixon is crazy! He could do anything.' The vast irony was that it was true."

CongressDaily: Reyes open to GOP compromise on FISA.

HRC at Aipac: ... We need a Democrat in the White House. Not just Israel faces threats. America does too. Next president will inherit grave problems, difficult threats....Bush moved us in wrong direction. ... McCain will continue same failed policies in Iraq and the Middle East.

America needs a new policy to make us stronger. We cannot stand strongly with Israel if we are not strong at home and not respected as leader of the world everywhere else.

America needs new beginning in foreign policy ...

We have rare moment of opportunity and we must seize this moment. Build world we want, rather than just defend from world we fear.

Obama at AIPAC:

I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel's security. That starts with ensuring Israel's qualitative military advantage. ...I will ensure Israel can defend itself from any threat, from Gaza to Tehran. ...

As president I will use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything.

That starts with aggressive, principled tough diplomacy with clear eyed understanding of our interests. We have no time to waste. ... We have tried limited, piecemeal talks, outsourced to other parties. It has not worked. It is time for the US to lead ....

I have no interest to sit down just for sake of talking. But as president I would be willing at time and place of my choosing, if and only if it advances the interests of the United States. It is time once again to make diplomacy succeed.

(Choice to Iran will be clear). If you abandon your nuclear program, your support for terrorism, and your threats to Israel, there will be economic incentives. If you refuse, we will ratchet up the pressure.

(And it will be clear to the world) that the Iran regime is the author of its own isolation, and that will strengthen our hand -- with allies, Russia, China ...

More here and full transcript (.pdf).

A contact who was in the room for both Obama talk today and Mccain speech Monday said, "Mccain got a better reception. Applause on Obama's Iran comments were very lackluster - and the cheers seemed to largely come from the student delegation there."

Rice on Iran at AIPAC: Excerpts from transcript (.pdf):

And when the President of Iran stated his desire to wipe Israel off the map, it was the United States that arranged a 10-year, $30 billion security package to help Israel defend its homeland against any threats. Now we hear Iran’s rulers say that they do not seek a nuclear weapon--only peaceful nuclear energy. Well then why have they rejected the past offers from the international community for incentives--even cooperation on light water reactors? Why has Iran rejected thus far Russia’s offers of uranium enrichment in Russia? Why as the IAEA’s most recent report shows is Iran continuing to enrich uranium in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions? Why as the IAEA also suggests are parts of Iran’s nuclear program under the control of the Iranian military? And why is Iran continuing to deny international experts full access to its nuclear facilities? Well ladies and gentlemen it’s just hard to imagine that there are innocent answers to these questions.

I know that there is a serious debate right now both in our country and in Israel about how to address the threat posed by the Iranian regime. This debate though should not be about whether we talk to Iran. That’s not the real issue. Diplomacy is not a synonym for talking; true diplomacy means structuring a set of incentives and disincentives to produce change in behavior. So let me tell you how I see our diplomacy; on the one hand we are showing the rulers of Iran that if they think the best way to advance their national interest is through lying and cheating and terror they will only deepen their isolation and the cost to their nation. The--the Iranian government is dangerous yet Iran has vulnerabilities. Its failing and inflationary economic policies, its discredited revolutionary ideology, the resentment that its violent behavior fosters among its neighbors and the deprivation of its people at home--we can and we must exploit these vulnerabilities. The world has passed three sets of sanctions against Iran in the Security Council. The United States has also taken additional steps of sanctioning Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Quds Force and three of its major banks were abusing the international financial system. We have sent carrier battle groups to the region to deter attacks against our allies and our interests and we will continue to improve the capabilities of our friends, including through missile defense cooperation with Israel.

In Iraq, we are confronting and wrapping up Iranian agents who are attacking our troops, destabilizing the country and killing innocent Iraqis. When Iranian-backed militias challenged Iraqi security forces in Basra they lost; and they are in retreat in Sauder City. Indeed by meddling so egregiously in Iraq’s internal affairs, Iran’s regime is increasingly on the wrong side of Iraqi nationalism and it is hard to overstate how important this could be as a check on the regional ambitions of this violent and extremist State. America will continue to rally the world to hold Iran accountable. But the world needs to rise to this challenge; our partners in Europe and beyond need to exploit Iran’s vulnerabilities more vigorously and impose greater costs on the regime--economically, financially, politically, and diplomatically.

A regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens, murders its neighbor’s citizens and seeks to destroy a member of the United Nations should not be allowed to cross the nuclear threshold. As President Bush told the Knesset, for the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

At the same time President Bush and I have been clear that a path is open for Iran to improve its relations with the international community and with the United States. Indeed I have said that if Iran suspends its enrichment and reprocessing activities I will join my UN Security Council colleagues; I’ll meet with my Iranian counterpart. I’ll do it any time, anywhere, on any issue. It’s harder to be much clearer than that. And we would welcome a change in Iran’s behavior because America doesn’t have permanent enemies. We would be willing to meet with them but now while they continue to inch closer to a nuclear weapon under the cover of talk.

So--so the real question is not why won't the Bush Administration talk to Tehran; the real question is why won't Tehran talk to us? This ladies and gentlemen is the real practice of diplomacy; it requires that we keep open a path for negotiation. But it also requires that we impose costs on the Iranian regime should they refuse to negotiate.

Olmert on Iran at AIPAC. Here are excerpts from the transcript of Israel prime minister Ehud Olmert's remarks on Iran at the AIPAC conference earlier tonight:

The most serious and imminent threat to global security and stability is undoubtedly Iran. Iran is the world's largest exporter of terrorism, a fundamentalist dictatorship, motivated by utter contempt for the values represented by the free world and an uninhibited ambition to achieve military superiority and regional hegemony. It openly calls for the elimination of Israel and actively seeks nuclear capabilities to enable it to translate its sinister plans into action. Iran's fingerprints are evident in almost every terrorist organization across the Middle East, from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip to Hizballah in Lebanon. Hizballah, Iran's major protégé, receives its directives, ammunition and finances directly from Tehran, with the help of Syria, and is actively engaged in torpedoing any chance of calm in Lebanon. Its long-standing record as a ruthless terrorist organization has earned Hizballah a place of honor on almost every list of global terrorist organizations. I urge you to work together with us to include Hizballah in the terrorist list of the European Union and encourage other countries to do the same.

The Iranian threat must be stopped by all possible means. International economic and political sanctions on Iran, as crucial as they may be, are only an initial step, and must be dramatically increased. Iran's defiance of international resolutions and its continued tactics of deception and denial leave no doubt as to the urgent need for more drastic and robust measures. The sanctions must be clearly defined and religiously enforced. Any willingness to overlook Iranian violations or justify Iran's questionable tactics will immediately be interpreted as a sign of weakness and will only encourage them to proceed with more vigor.

The international community has a duty and responsibility to clarify to Iran, through drastic measures, that the repercussions of their continued pursuit of nuclear weapons will be devastating. The sanctions initiated by the UN are of immense importance, as they represent a unified stand by a large number of nations, but sanctions should also be initiated by individual countries which have dealings with Iran. Each and every country must understand that the long-term cost of a nuclear Iran greatly outweighs the short-term benefits of doing business with Iran. While Iran may be a large oil exporter, it imports almost half of its refined oil products. Sanctions can be imposed on the export of gasoline to Iran and they can be imposed on countries which refine gasoline for Iran. Governments should announce that Iranian businessmen are no longer welcome in their countries, and that funds arriving from or channeled to Iran should not be transferred through their banks.

Israel and the United States have long understood the acute danger embodied in a nuclear Iran, and are working closely in a concerted, coordinated effort to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear. Israel will not tolerate the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and neither should any other country in the free world.

And in his conclusion, a few words referencing his own troubles as the target of a corruption probe:

Given the recent political developments in Israel, of which I am sure you are all aware, I hesitated as to whether it was the right time and the right thing to leave everything behind and meet with you today. I didn’t hesitate for too long. Your friendship to Israel, your dedication to consolidating the strategic bond between Israel and the United States and your steadfast commitment to Israel's security and welfare have all inspired me. Israeli politics is accustomed to all kinds of trials and tribulations, but your love and support for the State of Israel provides a powerful foundation, a solid rock on which we know we can always rely, in good times and in times of crisis. One of the most fundamental pillars of Israel's national security is its alliance with the United States, and you have dedicated your lives to ensuring that not only will this alliance never weaken or fail, but that it will grow stronger and deeper.

CJR: What happened with What Happened? McClellan publisher Peter Osnos fires back.

AP: Obama clinches Democratic nomination:

Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday, becoming the first black candidate to lead a major party into a campaign for the White House. Vanquished rival Hillary Rodham Clinton swiftly signaled an interest in joining the ticket as his running mate.

Obama arranged a victory celebration in St. Paul, Minn., at the site of this summer's Republican National Convention — an in-your-face gesture to Sen. John McCain, who will be his opponent in the race to become the nation's 44th president.

The 46-year-old Obama outlasted Clinton in a historic campaign that sparked record turnouts in primary after primary, yet exposed deep racial and gender divisions within the party.

In a campaign of surprises, Clinton's comments about joining the ticket rated high.

According to one participant in an afternoon conference call among Clinton and members of the New York congressional delegation, Rep. Lydia Velasquez said she believed the best way for Obama to win over Hispanics and members of other key voting blocs would be to take the former first lady as his running mate.

"I am open to it," Clinton replied, if it would help the party's prospects in November, said the participant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the call was a private matter.

Obama sealed his victory based on primary elections, state Democratic caucuses and delegates' public declarations as well as support from 22 delegates and "superdelegates" who privately confirmed their intentions to The Associated Press. It takes 2,118 delegates to clinch the nomination.

Clinton stood ready to concede that her rival had amassed the delegates needed to triumph, according to officials in her campaign. They stressed that the New York senator did not intend to suspend or end her candidacy in a speech Tuesday night in New York. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to divulge her plans. ...

Maybe this explains why the White House got so bent out of shape by that NBC/Richard Engel interview the other week. Clandestine blogger Muckraked reports that it wasn't Bush's first interview with Engel, and Engel has a book coming out now drawing on a previous interview in which the president made some candid statements he may not be eager to see debated right now. Among POTUS' statements last year, according to Muckraked's read of Engel's book: "We'll be in Iraq forty years."

And this: "The problem is Olmert. This is a man who came to power on a promise that he was going to unilaterally define a Palestinian state." (Welcome back to Washington, Ehud! ....)

And also, this: "We can have meetings. Talking is not the problem. We can talk to Iran."

Huff Post: Kristol at Aipac:

... But partisan concerns seemed to be seeping into several aspects of the pro-Israel group's conference -- so much so that a note of bipartisan calm chimed in from what some might consider an unlikely corner. In an afternoon breakout session featuring Weekly Standard editor (and New York Times op-ed page neocon) Bill Kristol, panelists were repeatedly asked to divine the candidates' views on the Middle East by looking at their respective advisers.

Both Kristol and his Democratic counterpart Ambassador Marc Greenberg were at pains to remind their audience that they weren't official representatives for the candidates. Kristol eventually even found himself in the position of defending Obama's national security bona fides relative to past Democratic candidates. Comparing the policy gulf that separates Obama and McCain to national security differences between the two major parties in past cycles, Kristol told the crowd:

"There are actually no disputes of that nature...with the exception of Iraq this time. Obama's not for cutting the defense budget; Obama's not for pulling troops back from our forward positions around the world, with the exception of Iraq. Obama and McCain don't actually differ, at least on paper, even on Iran, where they're arguing about whether they would talk to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad or not -- and I think that's an important dispute. Still, at the end of the day, Obama doesn't say he would rule out the use of force. McCain certainly is committed as he said this morning to trying to increase economic pressure on Iran, which Obama has also talked about."

Of course there have been differences between the two candidates. Kristol brushed aside perhaps the greatest one: whether or not lowering the bar for diplomatic engagement might prove a tactical benefit for U.S. foreign policy. But beyond that, Obama opposed the recent Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which would have designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. While Obama says he shares that opinion of the group with McCain and others, he instead prefers a less deliberately bellicose approach to international relations.

But given the fact that some Obama opponents seem to believe his views are frighteningly distant from the mainstream, it was interesting to hear someone of Kristol's stature on the right make the case that the Illinois Democrat's differences from McCain are ones of degree and not kind....

Ron Kampeas: Iran sanctions figure large in AIPAC lobbying:

... The Iran Counter Proliferation Act would expand existing sanctions by hitting companies and nations that deal with Iran's energy sector. It also would cut off Iran entirely from the U.S. finance system.

Bolstering that bill is a nonbinding resolution put forward last week by U.S. Reps. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.). The resolution urges President Bush to immediately impose some of the sanctions in the Counter Proliferation Act and adds the new proposal: cut off the export of refined petroleum to Iran.

"Despite sitting on some of the largest oil reserves in the world, Iran has been forced to import 40 percent of its refined petroleum -- gasoline and diesel -- because of a lack of investment in its oil refining infrastructure," states the memo prepared for AIPAC activists. "Limiting Iran’s ability to import gasoline will severely impact Iran’s economy and could lead to dramatically greater domestic pressure on the regime to change course."

The language of the congressional resolution is sensitive to the political realities of a presidential campaign that has made the possibility of war against Iran a partisan issue: It explicitly counts out military action -- a point hammered home in the AIPAC talking points.

"The resolution specifically states that nothing in the resolution shall be construed to be an authorization for military action," the sheet says. "In fact, the sanctions called for in H. Con. Res. 362 are the best way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability by avoiding military action."

Additionally, the action part of the resolution opens by declaring "that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means is vital to the national security interests of the United States and must be dealt with urgently."

Notably absent from AIPAC's talking points is any mention of military force -- a prospect that spooks Democrats and would discomfit an organization that prides itself on its bipartisanship. ...

More here.

Der Spiegel profiles "Mr. Hezbollah," the German intelligence official Gerhard C. who has been negotiating exchanges of prisoners and remains held by Israel and Hezbollah.

Bill Kristol: Weekly Standard's Goldfarb joins McCain campaign.

Miami Herald: Two Florida Republican Congressmen and brothers, Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, co-sponsored a bill shortly after accepting $10,000 in campaign contributions from a Maryland company pushing the bill.

WP:

Getting lost in the media furor over McClellan's memoir is the new autobiography of retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the onetime commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, who is scathing in his assessment that the Bush administration "led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions."

Among the anecdotes in "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" is an arresting portrait of Bush after four contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, triggering a fierce U.S. response that was reportedly egged on by the president.

During a videoconference with his national security team and generals, Sanchez writes, Bush launched into what he described as a "confused" pep talk:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal."

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

"A White House spokesman had no comment," the piece concludes.

NYT: State Department reinstates Gaza Fulbright grants.

WP: "Bhutto Dealt Nuclear Secrets to North Korea, Book Says"

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment -- a route to making a nuclear weapon -- to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang, according to a new book by a journalist who knew the slain politician well.

The assertion is based on conversations that the author, Shyam Bhatia, had with Bhutto in 2003, in which she said she would tell him a secret "so significant that I had to promise never to reveal it, at least not during her lifetime," Bhatia writes in "Goodbye, Shahzadi," which was published in India last month. [...]

In his book, Bhatia writes that Bhutto brought up the North Korea visit during a discussion in 2003 about her difficulties with Pakistan's military. "Let me tell you something," she declared, before telling Bhatia to turn off his tape recorder. "I have done more for my country than all the military chiefs of Pakistan combined."

At the time, Pakistan was in desperate need of new missile technology that would counter improvements in India's missiles. Bhutto said she was asked to carry "critical nuclear data" to hand over in Pyongyang as part of a barter deal.

"Before leaving Islamabad she shopped for an overcoat with the 'deepest possible pockets' into which she transferred CDs containing the scientific data about uranium enrichment that the North Koreans wanted," Bhatia writes. "She implied with a glint in her eye that she had acted as a two-way courier, bringing North Korea's missile information on CDs back with her on the return journey."

Bhatia said Bhutto did not tell him how many CDs she carried or who she gave them to in Pyongyang. His repeated efforts to persuade her to go on the record about the story were not successful.