Ha'aretz: IAF bombs Gaza mosque. "A senior Israeli military officer on Wednesday said jetfighters have carried out some 500 sorties against Hamas targets in Gaza. ... He said the targets included Hamas command posts, some 130 missile launch sites and anyone who could be carrying a weapon. Also hit was Hamas Islamic University, which he described as a weapons research facility. ...However, dozens of civilians have been killed in the offensive, along with some 200 Hamas policemen. ... A Palestinian medic was killed and two others wounded when an Israeli missile struck next to their ambulance during a clash east of Gaza City, Palestinians said. The IDF said it did not know of the incident. Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces has finished preparing for a ground operation in the Gaza Strip. However, it will not begin such an incursion until it receives the go-ahead from the government. On Tuesday, at least 30 Palestinians - including two sisters aged 5 and 12 - were killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza, and Palestinians fired more than 40 rockets on southern Israel by Tuesday evening. ... At least 390 Palestinians, including 36 children and nine women, have been killed by Israeli forces since Operation Cast Lead began on Saturday, according to Palestinian sources. According to Channel 2, 220 of those fatalities were members of Hamas."

"I Don't Recall." Suggested titles for Alberto Gonzales' new memoir?

NYT:

After four days of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, an outpouring of popular anger is putting pressure on American allies in the Arab world and appears to be worsening divisions in the region.

The sharpest rhetorical attacks have been aimed at Egypt, which is widely seen as having aided the Israeli campaign by closing its border with Gaza.

But as major street demonstrations continued Tuesday from North Africa to Yemen, some marchers and opinion-makers also lashed out at other moderate Arab governments for failing to take a stronger stand. Syria and Iran, meanwhile, have drawn praise for their militancy. [...]

To some extent, the outrage has forged a sense of trans-sectarian unity, allowing militant Shiite figures like Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, to extend his influence in the Sunni Arab world, as he did during the 2006 war. ...

More along these lines earlier here.

From one of the Obama news pool reports today:

President-elect Barack Obama deviated from his usual vacation workout routine today.

Rather than starting off the day with a workout at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, as he has every morning since he's been in Hawaii except Christmas Day, Obama instead traveled across the island to his alma mater to play basketball.

Obama's motorcade left his rented Kailua residence at 9:39 a.m. to begin the trip over the Pali Highway to Honolulu.

As his motorcade left the Kailua compound, a small throng of demonstrators had grown to about 10, waving signs that read, among other things: "No U.S. support for Israel," Free Palestine" and "Gazans need food, medicine, not war."

Obama was sitting in the rear on the passenger side of his black sport-utility vehicle, and was not visible to the protesters, who were on the left side of the vehicle as it exited. Obama was wearing a baseball cap (the insignia wasn't clear), sipped from a bottle of water and looked straight ahead as the vehicle passed the demonstrators. He did not acknowledge them.

On the opposite side of the street from the demonstrators were a handful of onlookers, with one group of four sporting Punahou attire and holding a sign reading: "We love you Obama Ohana." (Ohana is the Hawaiian word for family.)

The motorcade arrived at Punahou School at 10:19 a.m. The vehicles were met by a few hundred students, parents and administrators at the private school, which is on its winter break. ...

The Obama family is expected to move to Washington this weekend.

Obama is coming to Washington a couple of weeks early to accommodate his two young daughters, who are to start school at the private Sidwell Friends in Washington next week.

The 44th president likely will be staying in a Washington hotel at least until Jan. 15 , when he moves into Blair House, the official residence for visiting dignitaries located across the street from the White House.

Obama had wanted to move up his stay at Blair House, but was told by the Bush White House that pre-scheduled receptions prevented him from moving in early.

"Tells you what a tony place it is - you can't get in!'' said David Axelrod, the president-elect's chief strategist.

NYT: US pushing for Gaza ceasefire. Won't confirm backing 48 hour pause. "The United States is pressing Israel to call a cease-fire in its assault on Hamas militants in Gaza, officials said Tuesday, while enlisting Arab countries to press Hamas to do the same. The intensive diplomacy is being led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who made a flurry of phone calls over the last 24 hours to Israeli and Arab leaders. The goal, said a State Department spokesman, Gordon Duguid, is a 'reliable cease-fire, one that is durable and sustainable.' ... With diplomatic efforts still under way, the State Department did not confirm reports in Israel that Washington was seeking a 48-hour cease-fire that would allow relief supplies to be delivered to stricken areas in Gaza. The pause would also give Hamas a last chance to stop its attacks.”

Some analysis in the Israeli press is expressing more cautiousness and skepticism about the direction of the Gaza operation today. Essentially the gist seems to be that Israel has been using heavy air strikes to get a political goal - a ceasefire on its terms with a significant reduction in rocket attacks if not bringing them to zero (which IDF army chief of staff Gazi Ashkenazi thinks is unrealistic), in exchange for Gaza (still controlled by Hamas) possibly getting eventually less restrictive border crossings. Israeli press reports are suggesting that the air strikes are essentially running out of targets, that they are softening for possible ground incursion or that that could be a bluff if they can get the cease-fire they want in advance of that. If Israeli political and military leaders don't overreach and forget what their goal is, some journalists and commentators are today warning. See the Nahum Barnea and Ha'aretz analyses below. Barnea: " ... The problem is that politicians tend to forget who they're trying to trick, the enemy or their people. What begins as a deception ruse for the enemy ends with self-deception. ... With all the enthusiasm over the black smoke forming over Gaza, they tend to forget the operation's goal: Forcing Hamas to agree to a cease-fire on terms that Israel is willing to meet. That is the goal that Olmert, Livni and Barak and the overwhelming majority of Israelis agree on: Not occupation and not toppling. The moment that Hamas agrees to a cease-fire, the operation is supposed to end. This is also a lesson that should have been learned from the mistakes of 2006: In war, you have to know how to end on time."

A well known Arab American analyst in Washington who asked to speak on background offered this analysis on the regional and domestic politics of the Gaza conflict from an Arab perspective:

There are two domestic agendas here. The Israeli one is very familiar... But what people are not asking and is at least as important: what are the f**** rocket firers hoping to do? ... If you look at what people are saying, there is a disconnect between what Haniyah and people in Gaza are saying, and what Nasrallah and Meshal and regional actors say. ... The Hamas leadership in Gaza is saying, we want a ceasefire on our terms. What Nasrallah and Meshal and Iran are saying: Egyptians, rise up ... What’s missing in every analysis I see is that Egypt is the prize, the low hanging fruit ...

Sketch out the regional scenario: two unsympathetic forces hinged by Hamas. You have the Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Iraqi Islamist parties on the one hand, on one side of the hinge. ... And you’ve got the Muslim Brotherhood regional project for overthrowing [moderate Arab regime] governments on the other.

The hinge is Hamas. Because Hamas is a core member of Leninist-style collection of national Muslim Brotherhood parties. It is also the only Sunni member of the pro Iranian alliance because of the money it gets through Khaled Meshal. Hamas is a hinge, Syria is a hinge. You've got Meshal in Damascus who gets lots of money from Iran. Hamas is not neutral in the moderate Arab regimes vs. Iranian alliance rivalry.

Both stand to benefit here. One project advances [unrest] in Egypt to the benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood. And while that is not something to be overjoyed for for Nasrallah, it's very helpful if it advances the Islamist agenda to destabilize your enemies.

It's limited ultimately. It's very unlikely to result in direct destabilization of Egypt. But they shoot for it, and hope that it contributes to the discreditation of all the [moderate, pro American] Arab regimes [egypt, jordan, saudi arabia] and in that sense, shows that there is an authentic movement in the region that has two manifestations, the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are resistant to the regional order and the status quo. ...

What you end up with here are two groups of political actors with domestic and internal motivations that largely don’t have to do with Gaza. And they are using the lives of these people like casino chips...

Ha'aretz:

....Israel has thus far refused to officially discuss a cease-fire, but in practice it is conducting an indirect and hesitant dialogue with Hamas. As of yet, however, there is no official mediator.

Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based head of Hamas' political bureau, has been calling for a cease-fire for two days now. However, communications with the organization's leadership in Gaza are hampered because all its leaders have gone underground for fear of Israeli assassination attempts, while Israel's air strikes have disrupted the Strip's communications networks. Paradoxically, the same measures that have hampered Hamas' military response are also impeding efforts to end the fighting.

Israel will insist that any truce include a complete, long-term halt to the rocket fire from Gaza. In exchange, it will apparently agree to reopen the border crossings at some point, though no final decisions have been made. ...

The diplomatic clock is ticking relatively slowly because both Europe and the United States are all but closed for Christmas and New Year's Day. Meshal has been trying to get the Arab League and Senegal, which holds the rotating chairmanship of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to push for a cease-fire. So far, international criticism of Israel has been relatively muted despite the many Palestinian casualties. Even in the Arab world, not everyone is crying over Hamas' losses. ...

Nahum Barnea in Yediot Ahronoth, Remember 2006

... I would like to believe that Barak is talking about the fighting lasting a long time only in order to convince Hamas that Israel did not embark on this operation holding a stopwatch. The more Hamas is convinced that Israel has no time limitations, the quicker it will be to ask for a cease-fire. Declarations about the operation continuing are psychological warfare.

The problem is that politicians tend to forget who they’re trying to trick, the enemy or their people. What begins as a deception ruse for the enemy ends with self-deception. As the chairman of the Labor Party, the last thing that Barak wants are elections on their set date. ...When Menahem Begin ordered the Iraqi nuclear reactor bombed in 1981 what he wanted, firstly, was to destroy the nuclear threat against Israel. He also wanted to save himself in the elections. Two problems were solved with one military blow.

We cannot but help be suspicious. ... There does not appear to be any way to separate this operation from the elections. When the Knesset convened yesterday to discuss the operation, in the middle of the election recess, Ehud Olmert decided to boycott it: Olmert is not running for anything except for the mark he leaves behind when he goes. Netanyahu, Livni and Barak insisted on their right to speak. The Arab MKs insisted on their right to heckle, to be called to order and to be entitled to be kicked out of the hall. Each politician and his rights, each politician and his voters. Military operations were always part of the political game, but this time the politician’s breathing is particularly heavy.

With all the enthusiasm over the black smoke forming over Gaza, they tend to forget the operation’s goal: Forcing Hamas to agree to a cease-fire on terms that Israel is willing to meet. That is the goal that Olmert, Livni and Barak and the overwhelming majority of Israelis agree on: Not occupation and not toppling. The moment that Hamas agrees to a cease-fire, the operation is supposed to end. This is also a lesson that should have been learned from the mistakes of 2006: In war, you have to know how to end on time.

Rick Perlstein on Philip Agee.

Israeli writer and peace activist David Grossman, whose son was killed in the 2006 Lebanon conflict: "Hold your fire. Try for once to act against the usual response, in contrast to the lethal logic of belligerence. There will always be a chance to start firing again. War, as Barak said about two weeks ago, will not run away. International support for Israel will not be damaged, and will even grow, if we show calculated restraint and invite the international and Arab community to intervene and mediate."

Ha'aretz's Barak Ravid: Israeli Foreign Ministry prepares "diplomatic exit plan" from Gaza

The Foreign Ministry on Sunday released preliminary options for a "diplomatic exit strategy" from the operation in the Gaza Strip. Political sources in Jerusalem say the options are not similar to those available during the Second Lebanon War, which ended with a UN Security Council resolution and the deployment of peacekeepers.

On Saturday evening Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered work to begin on a policy for ending the Gaza operation. The foreign ministry's ideas were discussed at a meeting headed by Olmert political adviser Shalom Turgeman and including representatives of the Foreign Ministry, National Security Council, Defense Ministry, Military Intelligence, Shin Bet security service and Mossad. ...

These models focused on political gains the operation could achieve; the ministry, for example, hopes to increase pressure on Hamas and isolate it politically.

The sources in Jerusalem said the current operation will end differently than the Lebanon war, in which a political solution came in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and the deployment of international peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. "It seems that this time we won't move toward a Security Council resolution," said one source. "Moreover, the option of an international force does not apply."

The source added that the options presented thus far are only at a preliminary stage, and the operation has yet to take a definite course. "There are still actions they want to take in Gaza, only after which will we know which political solution will apply," he said. "Hamas' responses and its own activities in the coming days will have a significant influence on this."

Richard Byrne reviews an exhibit on Renaissance Journalism at the Folger Shakespeare library.

Ha'aretz's Zvi Barel: "Essentially, Israel is telling Hamas it is willing to recognize its control of Gaza on the condition that it assumes responsibility for the security of the territory, like Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon. It is likely that this will be the outcome of a wide-scale operation in the Gaza Strip if Israel decides it does not want to rule Gaza directly. Why, then, not forgo the war and agree to these conditions now?"

AP:

A Swiss man suspected of involvement in the world's biggest nuclear smuggling ring has been released from prison after more than four years of investigative detention, his family said Sunday.

Urs Tinner, 43, was freed several days ago, his mother, Hedwig Tinner, said by telephone from eastern Switzerland. His brother Marco Tinner, 40, remains in detention while prosecutors appeal his release to the federal criminal court in Bellinzona, she said, declining to comment further. ...The brothers, along with their father, Friedrich, are suspected of supplying the clandestine network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, creator of Pakistan's atomic bomb, with technical know-how and equipment that was used to make gas centrifuges. Khan sold the centrifuges to countries with secret nuclear weapons programs, including Libya and Iran, before his operation was disrupted in 2003.

Meir Javedanfar reports on Turkish media reports that an Iranian military official has defected to Turkey.

David Ignatius in Beirut: "What's interesting about this yuletide calm is that the United States had almost nothing to do with it. Indeed, Lebanon seems to have entered its own version of the post-American era. And, frankly, many people seem content with this state of nonalignment."

Gaza Day 2. Former Israeli intelligence chief Efraim Halevy, who has advocated for Israeli engagement with Hamas, writes me that, "Hamas will have to come to terms with the preponderance of Israel's force that will preclude it from dictating the 'rules of the game' in any future cease fire, if any future cease fire ever emerges from the ashes. We shall see how this unfolds."

An international journalist colleague reporting *from Israel on Gaza writes, "It is pretty desperate -- but definitely planned; briefing that the attack wouldn't take place until after the security cabinet meeting today and then doing it on Shabbat. A lot of Hamas policemen -- including the police chief -- were in their bases, completely unsuspecting."

Noting leftwing Meretz party's call for military action in Gaza, Israeli American analyst Haggai Elitzur writes that the strikes have pretty widespread support across the Israeli political spectrum. "Military planners want to hit as hard as they can while they have the chance, and the political leadership seems to agree. I'm not so sure it's all about electioneering, either."

AP: "Crowds of thousands swept into the streets of cities around the Middle East on Sunday to denounce Israel's air assault on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. From Lebanon to Iran, Israel's adversaries used the weekend assault to marshal crowds into the streets for noisy demonstrations. And among regional allies there was also discontent: The prime minister of Turkey, one of the few Muslim countries to have relations with Israel, called the air assault a 'crime against humanity.' ... 'We have entered a new spiral of despair,' French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told the Journal du Dimanche in an interview published Sunday. 'The truce must be restored.' ... In Amman, Jordan, about 5,000 lawyers marched toward parliament to demand the Israeli ambassador's expulsion and the closure of the embassy. 'No for peace, yes to the rifle,' they chanted. ... And in the normally politically placid streets of glitzy Dubai, hundreds of demonstrators -- some draped in Palestinian flags -- gathered at the Palestinian consulate.''

Marc Lynch: "Keep an eye on Cairo. Egypt has been at the heart of the Arab anger over the evolving crisis. It's been the one enforcing the blockade, ignoring a rising chorus of public criticism at home and in the wider Arab world. Egyptian and Arab media and political forces have been lacerating the Mubarak regime for months over its enforcement of the blockade of Gaza. Today, the Muslim Brotherhood upped the ante by calling for a highly unusual public protest today to be led by Supreme Guide Mohammed Mehdi Akef -- announced in a blaring red banner atop its official website. Most likely, this will just be another symbolic protest, but it contributes to a crisis atmosphere and there's no telling how the various forces will react." Steve Clemons: Hijacking Obama's Mideast strategy. eRiposte on strategy.

University of Maryland Mideast studies professor and analyst Paul Scham tells me: Israeli Defense Minister General Ehud Barak "is staking out a position between two key dates: January 20 (Obama's inauguration) and February 10 (Israeli elections). Metaphorically, they want to capture as much territory as they can before the UN steps in and says hold it. They assume whatever Obama does will be more dovish than the current administration."

"This is part of Israel responding to two things: especially to Lebanon two and a half years ago, where Israel was humiliated," Scham said. "But also the perception that Hamas outmaneuvered [them] into a ceasefire [last June]," by a steady stream of rocket attacks into Sderot.

"I think Hamas miscalculated. It thought the situation now was like when they got the ceasefire in June," Scham continued. "But at this point, Israel was prepared for a fight, and violence [recent Hamas rocket attacks into southern Israel] was more more likely to be counterproductive. In June, it helped [Hamas] get to a ceasefire."

Daniel Levy: What next?

Leading Israeli commentator Nahum Barnea in Yedioth Ahronoth:

... I don’t know where this operation is headed, nor am I sure that its captains know either. This isn’t a sophisticated, strategic game of chess being played here; it’s more like backgammon: You throw the dice and go wherever they lead you to. If Hamas succeeds in firing between 200 and 300 Kassam rockets every day over the course of weeks, as the most pessimistic scenario predicts, there won’t be any choice but to enter Gaza with massive numbers of ground forces and to evacuate tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes, if not more, and to bring them to central Israel. But there are other scenarios as well.

The goal that was set by the government this time is limited. It isn’t “to cause Hamas’s collapse,” as Tzippi Livni demanded not long ago but, rather, as one of the fathers of the operation said last night, “to deal Hamas a hard blow that will allow for quiet under conditions that are acceptable to Israel.” Olmert, who by nature aspired to achieve a more meaningful goal, ultimately supported lowering expectations. That is the lesson he learned from the errors he made at the beginning of the Second Lebanon War.

In practice, the goal of the operation is to force Hamas into accepting a new temporary cease-fire, whose rules are little more stable and more amenable to Israel. This is the very same mode of cautious thinking that engendered the limited IDF operations in Lebanon up until the fiasco of 2006. Not more than that and not less. Peace isn’t not going to reign now for 40 years. Israel doesn’t have a horoscope the ensures it 40 years of quiet. ...

Yedioth: View from Gaza, from resident Sami Abid: "...People in Gaza are not angry with Hamas. On the contrary: The anger is directed toward Israel. We live in fear, hunger and poverty. And on top of that, you are bombing us. Our lives are ones of distress and hunger, and in addition to that, death by bombardment awaits us. The time has come to find the third way in which we will be able to live better. After the bombardment, Hamas needs to decide where it is headed: toward a tahdia or toward continued war with Israel. One thing is clear: Hamas will not agree to a tahdia without the opening of the crossing points. Not only will Hamas refuse such a cease-fire, but so will all the organizations and all the residents. Nobody in Gaza will agree to a cease-fire without the opening of the crossing points."

A former senior US intelligence official who has served in the region says, "You cannot hold the people of Gaza responsible for the fact that there are terrorists in their midst. They are captive. ... The tragedy of this is that ... Israel is [not] taking steps...that would build community relations, and remove fear of one another."

*Monday Update: International journalists are blocked from entering Gaza, and this correspondent is not currently reporting from inside Gaza, as I originally understood. "Erez crossing closed since it started and even the approach roads are now declared a closed military zone as the ground forces build up."

WP: "Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Strip Imperil Obama's Peace Chances. Likely Escalation Complicates Already-Delicate Diplomacy."

"By now Israel should have realized that [this kind of attack] rarely has any decisive effect," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "At best you get another faltering cease-fire, and then the whole thing begins again. Both sides have been escalating to nowhere." ...

"Now I think what the Obama administration faces is at least two years or more before they can really think of having any serious movement" on the peace process, Cordesman said. "Every time this kind of violence breaks out, it becomes harder to move forward. It just creates more of a climate of hostility and anger."

BBC in Gaza. "Doctors say the operating rooms are full and the morgues are full and they have no place to put the dead bodies. They are asking for every doctor who is not working today to come and help."

Ron Rosenbaum on Bernard Madoff, gangsters, and the cult of respectability: "Take Meyer Lansky, or rather 'Hyman Roth,' Lee Strasberg's version of Lansky in The Godfather 2. What is it we like about him? The TV dinner tray! He runs the world's underground financial system, an illicit stock exchange and banking system combined, but what he likes most is the simple life at home in front of the tube with his wife. Sure, he'll enjoy an evening from time to time at one of his luxe Cuban casinos, but country clubs? Please. You knew Meyer Lansky wouldn't care whether he got into this or that Palm Beach Country Club, wouldn't care about hobnobbing with the respectable—i.e., Wall Street-approved—gangsters."

A few days back, the WSJ profiled Russia's wealthiest oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, hitting hard times:

No oligarchs have revealed their finances publicly, but Russian and Western bankers say Mr. Deripaska is one of the most exposed, with billions of dollars in borrowed money against assets valued at more than $20 billion at their peak. Last month, Rusal took the single largest loan in Moscow's bailout program -- $4.5 billion -- to avoid losing a stake in a big local nickel producer to Western creditors.

Before that deal, Mr. Deripaska lost two other foreign holdings to lenders. He is in talks to sell control of his bank, as well as other assets. He says he hopes to have new investors in practically all his companies, including Rusal, by the end of March.

Mr. Deripaska wouldn't comment further on the Rusal talks, which still are preliminary and might not result in a deal. "He's talking to everyone he can," says a person close to the company. Failure could force Rusal to go directly to the Kremlin for more financing, people close to Rusal say.

As oligarchs' empires wobble, decisions about who gets to keep control of which company, and on what terms, are increasingly made by the Kremlin. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is chairman of the state bank that has become the lender of last resort for the debt-laden tycoons, offering billions in bailouts but demanding the tycoons put up their assets as collateral. Many business leaders suspect the deals are really stealthy takeover bids. [...]

In addition, persistent questions about just how he came to control such rich assets left some major investors and Western banks reluctant to deal with him. He emerged in the late 1990s as a major player in the lucrative aluminum business, which had been violent and heavily criminalized for much of that decade, according to Russian officials.

Mr. Deripaska has said he paid hundreds of millions of dollars around 2001 to end relations with former business associates he said forced him to pay for protection in the 1990s. One of those former associates is now suing Mr. Deripaska in the U.K., alleging he was cheated out of a stake in what later became Rusal. Mr. Deripaska denies that.

Suspected ties to organized crime -- which Mr. Deripaska denies -- led U.S. officials to revoke Mr. Deripaska's entry visa in 2006. Mr. Putin and other top Russian officials have repeatedly raised the issue on his behalf with their U.S. counterparts, so far to no avail, according to people familiar with the situation.

NYT: Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order," dies at 81.

Gaza. NYT: 140 killed in Israeli attack on Hamas security posts in Gaza. "Most were members of the security forces of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza, but a few civilians were also among the dead, including children. Scores more Palestinians were wounded. The air attack came after days of warnings by Israeli officials that Israel would retaliate for intense rocket and mortar fire against Israeli towns and villages by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. ... Though Israel had been threatening to end its policy of restraint that saw only limited strikes against rocket launchers and squads in recent days, the timing of the raid came as a surprise to Gazans. It came in mid-morning, when official buildings and security compounds were filled with personnel and children were at school, and not, as many had anticipated, at night."

Update: Israel Gaza strike kills more than 200.

I asked former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, currently in Israel, why, while recognizing the pressure on the Israeli government to do something about the rockets from Gaza hitting southern Israel the past weeks, did Israeli officials choose to strike Hamas security facilities at midday when they were full of people, with high loss of life and almost certain dramatic escalation of the conflict? "I do not fully understand why they went for such a disproportionate escalation," Levy writes. "My guess: a combination of electioneering and misplaced wishful thinking that this will push the Arabs/world to intervene and downsize Hamas on terms favorable to Israel ....[This] won't happen - certainly not in a sustainable way. By the way, Hamas probably thinks this will cause intervention on terms favorable to themselves - also misguided (though less so; long term, this helps Hamas is my guess)."

Update II: Haaretz: After IAF strike kills 225 in Gaza, Hamas chief vows third Intifada has come. "Prior to the operation, Israel sought to catch Hamas off guard by luring it into a false sense of security through certain measures, including the opening of Gaza border crossings on Friday." But Egypt seemed to have some warning: "On Friday, Egyptian officials said that Egypt had begun boosting the security along its border with Gaza, in anticipation of the imminent IDF operation within the territory, fearing an Israeli incursion would result in a breach of the border. ... Egyptian officials told Israel Radio, however, that Egypt is pressing on with efforts to prevent the escalation of violence in the region. The officials said that representatives on behalf of Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman have approached senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar in the Gaza Strip and presented him with Egypt's concerns." More. NYT: The highest one day death toll in the Israeli Palestinian conflict in decades. "A military operation had been forecast and demanded by Israeli officials for weeks ... Still, there was a shocking quality to Saturday’s attacks, which began in broad daylight as police cadets were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market, and children were emerging from school. ... Israeli officials said that anyone linked to the Hamas security structure or government was fair game because Hamas was a terrorist group that sought Israel’s destruction. But with work here increasingly scarce because of an international embargo on Hamas, young men are tempted by the steady work of the police force without necessarily fully accepting the Hamas ideology. One of the biggest tolls on Saturday was at a police cadet graduation ceremony in which 15 people were killed."

More: Critics of strikes protest in Tel Aviv.

Tom Friedman:

... Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity?...

Murray Waas: "Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light. Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer."

Farnaz Fassihi: Oil plunge heightens tensions in Iran. "The economy is becoming a sore point for the populist Mr. Ahmadinejad, who came to power promising to bring the country's oil money to the people, and faces new elections in June. 'What has the government done with $200 billion in oil revenues?' was the headline on one daily newspaper in Iran this week."

WSJ: SEC launches broad probe of Madoff fund. "A longtime Madoff employee, Frank DiPascali, has been questioned and was described by investigators as having been 'evasive' in his answers. Mr. DiPascali's lawyer has declined to comment on Mr. DiPascali's role at the firm."

AP:

Pakistan began moving thousands of troops to the Indian border Friday, intelligence officials said, sharply raising tensions triggered by the Mumbai terror attacks.

India has blamed Pakistani-based militants for last month's siege on its financial capital, which killed 164 people and has provoked an increasingly bitter war of words between nuclear-armed neighbors that have fought three wars in 60 years.

The troops headed to the Indian border were being diverted away from tribal areas near Afghanistan, officials said, and the move was expected to frustrate the U.S., which has been pushing Pakistan to step up its fight against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants near the Afghan border.

Two intelligence officials said the army's 14th Division was being redeployed to the towns of Kasur and Sialkot, close to the Indian border. They said some 20,000 troops were on the move. Earlier Friday, a security official said all troop leave had been canceled.

Happy Boxing Day, getting caught up after holiday travel, back online soon. Hope you had a nice holiday.

NYT: Clinton moves to bolster role of State Department, with bigger budget for diplomatic corps, team of special envoys. "The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private, said Mrs. Clinton was being supported in her push for more resources by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Obama’s incoming national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones Jr. For years, some Pentagon officials have complained that jobs like the economic reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq have been added to the military’s burden when they could have been handled by a robust Foreign Service."

WP: "The wide-ranging public corruption probe that led to the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich got its first big break when a grandmother of six walked into a breakfast meeting with shakedown artists wearing an FBI wire. Pamela Meyer Davis had been trying to win approval from a state health planning board for an expansion of Edward Hospital, the facility she runs in a Chicago suburb, but she realized that the only way to prevail was to retain a politically connected construction company and a specific investment house. Instead of succumbing to those demands, she went to the FBI and U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald in late 2003 and agreed to secretly record conversations about the project."

WP: Iraq government threatens to expel MEK.

David Ignatius:

As Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's leading foreign policy strategist, explains the series of political choices that are ahead in the Middle East next year, he might be describing a row of dominoes. If they fall in the right direction, good things could happen. But if they start toppling the wrong way, watch out.

Davutoglu's domino theory deserves careful attention from Barack Obama's team as it thinks about Middle East strategy. The Turkish official knows his stuff. As the top adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he has managed Turkey's successful mediation between Syria and Israel as well as other delicate diplomacy in this messy part of the world. ...

What's intriguing about Davutoglu's analysis is that it involves a series of elections. That's good news for a region that has had too little democracy. The bad news is that voters may make choices that confound U.S. policy -- and that make peace in the region more difficult.

NYT: White House philosophy stoked mortgage bonfire.

Adieu, Gaydamak, as the controversial alleged Angolagate arms dealer, oligarch, fugitive and recent failed Jerusalem mayoral candidate flees Israel for Russia, in advance of anticipated indictment. More. He makes an appearance in this recent piece.

Interesting NYT/Ethan Bronner profile of former Israeli politician and writer Avraham Burg:

But four years ago Mr. Burg not only walked away from politics, but also basically walked away from Zionism. In a book that came out last year and has just been translated and released in the United States, he said that Israel should not be a Jewish state, that its law of return granting citizenship to any Jew should be radically altered, that Israeli Arabs were like German Jews during the Second Reich and that the entire society felt eerily like Germany just before the rise of Hitler.

In other words, rather than reconciling the country’s complex tensions, Mr. Burg ended up imploding from them.

“I realized something about myself and Israel that frightened me,” he said recently, looking back over the past few years. “I realized that Israel had become an efficient kingdom with no prophecy. Where was it going? What is a Jewish democratic state? What does it mean that Jews define themselves by genetics 60 years after genetics were used against them?”

Journalist Gershom Gorenberg recently interviewed Burg on Bloggingheads. Burg makes an appearance here too.

The WP's Dana Priest: DNI pick Adm. Dennis Blair steeped in the ways of Washington. WSJ's Siobhan Gorman: "Mr. Obama is still weighing options for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mr. Blair is expected to advise in that selection, further cementing the intelligence director's role as the chief of all 16 intelligence agencies. Choosing Mr. Blair may reignite long-simmering tensions between military and civilian intelligence officials." NYT: "Obama aides said the official announcement of Mr. Blair’s selection as intelligence director, a post created in 2005 as part of intelligence reforms in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was not expected until next month, after the president-elect returns from a vacation in Hawaii. They said that Mr. Obama would most likely reveal his C.I.A. choice at the same time."

The FT asks, where is Madoff's $50 billion loss? "Less than three fifths of the claimed $50bn figure has been accounted for." Big NYT "Who is Bernie Madoff" piece worth reading too, which says he basically helped invent electronic stock trading.

Worth reading from the Forward: "We arrived, two scribes-for-hire, at the Madoff residence on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 'Queens High Baroque,' we said sotto voce in unison as we stepped off the elevator and into the vestibule of the Madoffs’ apartment. It was a wet day, and we quietly removed our galoshes. We had been summoned by the lady of the house, Ruth Madoff, director of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and wife of the company’s owner, to help with a special project. We took no notes that day, about five years ago, but the scenes and quotes that follow have come to mind in recent days, and are told here as faithfully as memory allows...."

NYT: W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat and then FBI associate director, dies.

Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair as the top U.S. intelligence official and could make an announcement as early as Friday, a source familiar with the nomination said on Thursday.

"We expect the announcement tomorrow," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Blair would oversee the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus and be responsible for delivering Obama's daily intelligence briefing.

Blair, former top U.S. military commander in the Pacific region, has for some time been considered the most-likely choice as Obama's director of national intelligence.

The current director, Michael McConnell, has indicated he would be willing to stay on. But influential Democrats, including Sen. Diane Feinstein, incoming head of the Senate intelligence committee and a California Democrat, have called for new leadership at the post and the CIA.

NYT: "The governments of Saudi Arabia and Norway, the Dubai Foundation and the business moguls Bill Gates, Stephen Bing, Haim Saban and Robert L. Johnson are among the biggest financial backers of former President Bill Clinton’s foundation over the last decade, according to a complete donor list published for the first time Thursday morning."

From the office of the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee Henry Waxman: "New evidence obtained by the Oversight Committee indicates that the CIA rejected White House efforts to insert the claim that Iraq sought uranium from Africa into two speeches by President Bush prior to the 2003 State of the Union address, contradicting assertions made to Congress by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales on behalf of then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice." More here (.pdf) and here. Some prescient background to the findings here.

Interesting. 40% of the NY Fifth Avenue building is owned by an Iranian Bank Melli front company, the US government says. The rest? "The building was constructed in 1979 by the Pahlavi Foundation, a nonprofit group set up by the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, said Dassin, the prosecutor. Pahlavi was overthrown as that country’s leader in 1979. The Pahlavi Foundation, later renamed the Alavi Foundation, owns 60 percent of the 650 Fifth Avenue Co., which owns the building, Dassin said. ASSA owns the remaining 40 percent, the prosecutor said." More: "In 1989, the foundation, which had renamed itself Alavi, formed the 650 Fifth Avenue Company in partnership with Bank Melli, but disguised the bank’s role by transferring its partial stake to the Assa shell company, federal authorities said. From then on, they said, the shell company sent its proceeds from the building’s rental income to Bank Melli, in violation of federal laws that forbid the exportation of goods and services to Iran without a license from the treasury." An arrangement in which the Pahlavi-linked Alavi foundation was complicit? Update: No, I am told that is not the case, that the Pahlavis have no control over the Alavi foundation. An Iranian American activist writes that the "Pahlavis don't own it-----not even 1%. Pahlavi Foundation became Bonyad-e-Mostazafan after the revolution which in turn became Alavi Foundation. Alavi is also [controlled by] the Islamic Regime." Another writes, "It was called Pahlavi Foundation before the revolution. The whole building belonged to it. They were to give scholorship from its proceeds to Iranian students studying in the United States. After the revolution the Tehran regime changed the name to Alavi Foundation. From what appears now, they had placed 60% of the ownership of the building to the Alavi Foundation and the rest, 40% of the ownership to a shell company, a branch of the Iran's National Bank (Bank Meli), which is owned by the Iranian Government. Again from what it appears now, contrary to the US Iran sanctions law, Iran has been secretly collecting the proceeds of 40% of the rent clandestinely, in Europe or...., for thirty years."

More from AP: "U.S. Authorities charged the president of an Iranian foundation Friday with obstructing justice in an investigation of a bank accused of helping fund Iran's nuclear program. Jahedi Farshid, 54, the president of the Alavi Foundation, is accused of trying to throw away documents cited in a subpoena issued Wednesday, federal prosecutors said. An FBI complaint against Farshid said he was warned not to destroy documents requested by a grand jury. It said he disobeyed the order when he went home to Ardsley, New York, where he dumped papers in a public trash can on Thursday."

NYT:

Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to senior security officials in Baghdad.

The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals, one of whom, Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, is the ministry’s director of internal affairs. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The involvement of the counterterrorism unit speaks to the seriousness of the accusations, and several officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security said that some of those arrested were in the early stages of planning a coup.

AP: Dennis Blair falling out of favor for DNI?

WSJ: Chrysler to close all manufacturing plants for a month.

Barbara Slavin at the UN:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday briefed a half-dozen key Arab states on U.S.-led efforts to stem Iran's nuclear program but achieved no new consensus on how to prevent Iran from developing the technology for a nuclear weapon. ...

Miss Rice said there was no discussion of new sanctions against Iran, which has defied several U.N. resolutions demanding that it curb its nuclear program....

Divisions among Iran's Arab neighbors across the Persian Gulf have made it more difficult to contain Iran. For example, Qatar and Oman, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, declined a U.S. invitation to attend Tuesday's meeting, Arab sources here said.

At a regional security conference in Bahrain over the weekend, Omani Foreign Minister Yousuf Bin Alawi told The Washington Times that the incoming Obama administration should focus on talks with Iran. "I think both sides have been wrangling for a long time," he said. "The time has come to put everything in a correct attitude." He added that he would do his best to facilitate negotiations, as he tried to do under the Clinton administration.

Iran's Arab neighbors are understandably nervous about the prospect of a nuclear Iran but oppose military action and have been reluctant to implement tough economic sanctions. ...

Gary Sick, an Iran and Gulf specialist at Columbia University, said the Gulf Arab "strategy is two-fold."

"On the one hand, they are trying to develop reliable relations with Iran to preclude the sense that they are obvious enemies. At the same time, they are encouraging the United States to take a tough line."

Without naming Iran, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Bahrain meeting Sunday that Gulf Arab states should upgrade their air defenses and improve information sharing and intelligence cooperation. ...

More from Emile Hokayem.

San Diego Reader:

The sentencing of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who loomed large in the bribery scandal that brought down GOP congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, has been delayed until January 29 of next year while Foggo’s lawyers fight to keep the government from releasing secret grand jury testimony detailing his crimes. Foggo, who served as executive director, or third-ranking official, of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2004 to 2006, pleaded guilty on September 29 to a count of wire fraud and admitted he’d steered CIA contracts to Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes and a front company, Archer Logistics. Wilkes was convicted last year of bribing Cunningham. In his plea agreement, Foggo admitted that Wilkes, a longtime friend, showered him with lavish gifts, meals, and trips.

But when the government asked the court to unseal grand jury testimony containing secret evidence used in the case, Foggo’s lawyers objected. “The government can cite no case in which the public’s ‘right to know’ entitled the prosecution to disclose hand-picked portions of grand jury transcripts, much less classified ones,” they argued in a motion filed December 2. ...

More on the Foggo plea agreement here and here.

Mueller. From new David Rose piece in Vanity Fair:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls "enhanced techniques"?

"I'm really reluctant to answer that," Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: "I don't believe that has been the case."

There's an interesting piece to be done on Mueller as one of the few if not the only top US security official to have not only survived the past eight years while staying in the job, but protected his organization after 9/11 after pretty startling failures, and come out with his reputation intact. Lawyer, cop, politician, priest. He was witness if not at the center of all the most contentious issues of the conduct on the war on terror. But look how he fared compared to say Tenet, or Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Comey, Fran Townsend, or Cheney. Rice and Hadley served inside the past eight years, but their reputations are not as intact. Interesting, how Mueller did it. He seems to have some ability to keep quiet, convey some degree of deference to authority to his bosses while avoiding as much complicity in the administration's most controversial behavior, and projecting sincere regret and reform-mindedness before Congress or the 9/11 commission when the FBI gets caught in some failure or, for instance, abusing nat'l security letters, all the while signalling to the internal conscientious objectors such as Comey he supports their moral cause. Or maybe his organization has so much dirt on everybody nobody dares cross him. And he's appointed to a ten year term.

NYT: AG Mukasey recuses himself from Madoff investigation, because son representing alleged Madoff co-conspirator: "Meanwhile, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said in a statement that he had recused himself from the case because his son Marc Mukasey, a lawyer with Bracewell and & Giuliani in New York, is representing Frank DiPascali, who is suspected to have aided Mr. Madoff in his $50 billion fraud."

More from Bloomberg on Madoff, DiPascali, and the mysterious investment advisory activities taking place at the firm on the 17th floor:

Federal investigators working through the weekend to unravel Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme found evidence he ran an unregistered money-management business alongside his firm’s brokerage and investment-advisory subsidiaries, two people with knowledge of the inquiry said. ...

The SEC’s complaint said he conducted “certain investment advisory business” on a separate floor and that he was “cryptic” about those activities when talking with other employees. In registration documents, the company said its advisory unit served between 11 and 25 clients, yet many times that number of people, firms and funds have said they entrusted their savings to Madoff.

His advisory activities were a mystery to most people at the company, said two employees who declined to be identified, citing concern that they might be drawn into the probe. The firm on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan occupied several floors, with market-making and proprietary trading units on the 19th floor, and back-office functions on the 18th, the employees said. The advisory operations were on the 17th floor.

While traffic flowed between the 18th and 19th floors, the 17th floor wasn’t linked to the others and there was virtually no interaction between the groups, according to the employees. ...

The only person the employee recalled seeing Madoff consult with on the 17th floor was an executive known by his first name, Frank.

Reached by phone at home, Madoff official Frank DiPascali referred calls to his lawyer, Marc Mukasey, a former federal prosecutor now at Bracewell & Giuliani in New York, who declined to comment. His father is U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a former New York federal judge.

No one answered the door today at DiPascali’s home in Bridgewater, New Jersey, which tax records show was assessed at $1.38 million this year. A black Mercedes sat on the circular driveway in the almost seven-acre parcel, which includes a pond. A project to replace siding on the house is in progress and a construction permit in DiPascali’s name hung in a front window.

In court documents, U.S. criminal prosecutors and the SEC said Madoff confessed that his advisory business, which catered to rich people and institutional investors as well as hedge funds, was “all just one big lie.” The business had been insolvent for years, according to the SEC’s account of his statement. In a Ponzi scheme early investors are paid with money raised from subsequent victims.

Madoff made the admissions to his sons, Mark and Andrew, who turned him in to U.S. authorities, according to Martin Flumenbaum, a lawyer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in New York who represents the brothers. ...

Re: Madoff et al, what to make of the stunning emperor has no clothes quality of it all? And what does it say about us? This sort of existential confidence game couldn't be wholly perpetrated without us, to some degree, buying into the legitimacy of these empires with all the right establishment credentials and discreet social connections that turned out to be built on quicksand?

A colleague writes, "In principle I don't think there's much difference between Madoff and a common embezzler except that people are always looking for genius financial entrepreneurs to push their money on. The whole system, particularly the tax code, is built to worship the sacred personality of the entrepreneur. It would be surprising if some of them were not exposed as frauds. Even Zuckerman, as smart a guy as I've ever seen interviewed on financial matters, got taken by Madoff! If we undrstood how that happened, we'd understand a lot. Maybe these guy are only exposed in a crisis.

"More generally, I think the question has to do with the financialization of capitalism itself. It used to be that industrial capital (i.e. the car makers) had pride of place and practically defined the 'real' economy. Finance capital, mostly the bond markets, were at most two or three times larger (although no one has ever establshed what a 'normal' ratio is) At the peak of the market last sprng, finance capital was ten times 'real' or industrial capital. So the financial markets were so large that they displaced the capital that does the actual work that produces real value (rathr than interest or fees). Before the crisis, the comparatively small stock market (small compared to bonds) contributed only one percent of its value to the pool of real capital, meaning was used to create things; the rest was and still is almost entirely speculation. ... What was globalized was actually nothing more than a series of speculative financial bubbles. They are finally being deflated. We're gradually returning to the bedrock of the 'real' economy, based on the manufacture and sale of things of actual value.

"So if Mr Madoff is in some sense a common embezzler, in another, higher sense, so was the entire US economy. Who's to say who's guiltier than anyone else in the financial class?"

(Update: More along these lines from Paul Krugman: "So, how different is what Wall Street in general did from the Madoff affair?")

Bloomberg compiles Madoff's investors here.

CJR discusses books, nominally geared to journalists.

In exit interview with ABC, Cheney offers some praise to Obama national security team, urges Obama to carefully consider retaining "tools that have been so essential [in] defending the nation for the last seven and a half years, or whether they give them up."

WP:

The Bush administration has decided to transfer three Algerian detainees to their adopted homeland of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a decision that partially complies with the order of a federal judge who said last month that five Algerians should be released "forthwith," rejecting government allegations that the men were dangerous enemy combatants.

But Lakhdar Boumediene, the Algerian whose name is associated with a landmark Supreme Court decision regarding the legal rights of those held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, remains in limbo despite the U.S. District Court ruling and the imminent release of his countrymen.

Administration officials and other sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said today that authorities at the base have begun to prepare for a transfer, a process that includes moving detainees to a pre-release facility at Guantanamo and their conducting exit interviews with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Three of the men have had exit interviews in recent days, sources said.

More from the NYT: "The case against the six men offered the latest example of the administration’s pattern of changing strategy in its legal defense of the detention camp. On the eve of the hearing before Judge Leon, the Justice Department said it was abandoning its claims about the embassy bombing plot. Instead, it claimed in court that the men had been planning to go to Afghanistan to fight Americans. The Justice Department has not said whether it plans to appeal Judge Leon’s ruling. The transfer, which was expected to be completed Monday night, was the first indication that the government had concluded it could no longer fight to keep the men detained."

NYT, in article on chairman of joint chiefs of staff Mike Mullen preparing to transition to new commander in chief, says Adm. Dennis Blair expected to be named Obama's Director of National Intelligence:

“He’s not a jumper or a screamer; he looks at things to make them better for the long term,” said Adm. Dennis C. Blair, a retired Pacific Fleet commander who is expected to be named by Mr. Obama as director of national intelligence. “He’s an incredible networker, too.” ...

Admiral Mullen, the son of a former Hollywood press agent whose clients included Anthony Quinn and Julie Andrews, has a world view that friends say is closer to that of Mr. Obama than to President Bush. ...

Admiral Mullen’s Hollywood past would not seem to suggest a future as the nation’s top military officer — his father was also the press agent to Ann-Margret, Peter Graves and Dyan Cannon — but in the interview he said that his family had taught him the importance of communications and the Fourth Estate, and that it was by and large a stable life of Catholic schools and relatively modest means. As the oldest of five children, Admiral Mullen needed a scholarship for college, and he got one when he was recruited to play basketball for the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

To the amazement of his family, he took to the life instantly. “I got there and met the best people I’ve ever been around in my life,” Admiral Mullen said. Among his acquaintances in the class of 1968 were Admiral Blair; Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia; and Oliver L. North, the Reagan-era official who secretly sold weapons to Iran to support the anti-Marxist rebels of Nicaragua.

These days Admiral Mullen gives regular dinners at his 19th-century home on a small naval compound near the State Department, where the walls are hung not with medals but with framed Playbills from nearly every Broadway show that he and his wife have attended. Recent guests have included Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush who enraged the second when he publicly warned against war with Iraq. Mr. Scowcroft is now advising Mr. Obama.

Admiral Mullen has also reached out in recent weeks to Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who is retired and was reviled by the Bush administration for saying publicly on the eve of the Iraq war that far more troops would be needed than had been committed by the Pentagon under Mr. Rumsfeld. General Shinseki has since been chosen by Mr. Obama to be secretary of veterans affairs.

Point 3 of Foreign Policy's "10 Worst Predictions of 2008" worth reading, re: Blair:

“[In] reality the risks to maritime flows of oil are far smaller than is commonly assumed. First, tankers are much less vulnerable than conventional wisdom holds. Second, limited regional conflicts would be unlikely to seriously upset traffic, and terrorist attacks against shipping would have even less of an economic effect. Third, only a naval power of the United States’ strength could seriously disrupt oil shipments.” —Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007

On Nov. 15, 2008 a group of Somali pirates in inflatable rafts hijacked a Saudi oil tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude in the Indian Ocean. The daring raid was part of a rash of attacks by Somali pirates, which have primarily occurred in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates operating in the waterway have hijacked more than 50 ships this year, up from only 13 in all of last year, according to the Piracy Reporting Center. The Gulf of Aden, where nearly 4 percent of the world’s oil demand passes every day, was not on the list of strategic “chokepoints” where oil shipments could potentially be disrupted that Blair and Lieberthal included in their essay, “Smooth Sailing: The World’s Shipping Lanes Are Safe.” Hopefully, Blair will show a bit more foresight if, as some expect, he is selected as Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence.

NYT: "An American security consultant who is an expert on kidnapping and has helped negotiate the release of scores of kidnap victims in Latin America over the years was himself kidnapped last week in northern Mexico after delivering a seminar there on how to avoid that fate, according to officials and published reports."

Outgoing Time mag DC bureau chief Jay Carney to be VP Biden's communications director.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid announces anticipated chairmanships of 111th Congress.

Justin Elliott looks at whether Secretary of State designate Hillary Clinton will follow through on her campaign pledge to ban 'private mercenaries.'

Iran hands Ray Takeyh and Suzanne Maloney have published a new paper, "A New US Policy to Iran."

NYT: Caroline Kennedy to seek Hillary Clinton's NY Senate seat.

Seth Hettena: Wade's sentence 30 months. "With time off for good behavior, Wade will serve about two years behind bars. ... Equally significant, Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered Wade to pay a $250,000 fine. That essentially allows Wade to keep much of the money he made bribing Cunningham." Prosecutors had asked for Wade, who had cooperated extensively with the invesigation against Cunningham and other co-conspirators, to receive a four year jail term and significant fine. Update: Worth reading MZM-insidery comment here.

Reuters analysis: Iraqi shoe-thrower captures Mideast rage at Bush:

Mohammed al-Masri, a researcher at Jordan University's Centre for Strategic Studies, saw the vignette as iconic.

"Arabs will always remember the shoes hurled at Bush as symbolising their deep frustration with his failed policies."

The insult to Bush also embarrassed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who was standing beside him at the time.

More reaction from the NYT. "In the holy Shiite city of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, demonstrators chanted: 'Bush, Bush, is a cow, your farewell was by a shoe.'"

Former INR hand Wayne White, USIP/State Department peace ops hand Daniel Serwer, and author Bing West blog on "the Obama withdrawal from Iraq: how fast?" at Nat'l Journal.

WSJ's Cam Simpson:

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the FBI to arrest Rod Blagojevich before sunrise Tuesday in order to stop a crime from being committed. That would have been the sale of the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

But the opposite is true: Members of Fitzgerald’s team are livid the scheme didn’t advance, at least for a little longer, according to some people close to Fitzgerald’s office. Why? Because had the plot unfolded, they might have had an opportunity most feds can only dream of: A chance to catch the sale of a Senate seat on tape, including the sellers and the buyers.

The precise timing of Tuesday’s dramatic, pre-dawn arrest was not dictated by Fitzgerald, nor was it dictated by the pace of Blagojevich’s alleged “crime spree.” It was dictated by the Chicago Tribune, according to people close to the investigation and a careful reading of the FBI’s affidavit in the case.

At Fitzgerald’s request, the paper had been holding back a story since October detailing how a confidante of Blagojevich was cooperating with his office.

Gerould Kern, the Tribune’s editor, said in a statement last week that these requests are granted in what he called isolated instances. “In each case, we strive to make the right decision as reporters and as citizens,” he said.

But editors decided to publish the story on Friday, Dec. 5, ending the Tribune’s own cooperation deal with the prosecutor. [...]

Had it not been for the Tribune’s Dec. 5 story, the meeting Blagojevich’s brother was arranging might have proceeded. Mr. Blagojevich is quoted as citing the story, in the affidavit, then calling off the meeting. At a minimum, the FBI’s recorders would have been rolling when he reported back. The feds also probably would have tried to bug the session live, or at least to tail the participants and secretly film or photograph them. That’s what feds do. Jurors love video.

(Reporter Simpson previously reported as Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Trib.)

Ranking House intelligence committee Republican Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) to announce he will retire after this term. "The Second District congressman’s contemplation of a run for governor is common knowledge among Michigan political watchers. ... Hoekstra will become the latest Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee to announce his departure from the lower chamber. The second-ranking Republican on the committee, Rep. Terry Everett (Ala.), is retiring this year, while Rep. Heather Wilson (N.M.) lost a bid for Senate in 2008. The retirement list could still grow. Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) is considering a bid for a Senate seat left open by the retirement of Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), the third-ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, had to be convinced to run for a twelfth term in 2008, leaving some to wonder whether he will run again in two years."

Hint that Obama is considering keeping Mike McConnell as Director of Nat'l Intelligence? From transition on Obama's schedule for tomorrow: "Tomorrow, President-elect Obama is holding a national security meeting in Chicago. Attendees will include: Vice President-elect Biden, Secretary of State designee Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Attorney General designee Eric Holder, Secretary of Homeland Security designee Janet Napolitano, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, Ambassador to the United Nations designee Susan Rice, National Security Advisor designee Jim Jones, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, White House Chief of Staff designee Rahm Emanuel, White House Counsel designee Greg Craig."

San Diego Union Trib's Greg Moran: Fate of Cunningham co-conspirator, defense contractor Mitchell Wade, who cooperated early in probe, to be determined Monday. Seth Hettena: Cooperation as breathtaking as his corruption. Marcus Stern: Key figure in Cunningham scandal points to other lawmakers—with little evidence.

Ha'aretz: Obama to base his Mideast policy on army of envoys.

Stuart Bowen's SIGIR report: Hard Lessons, the Iraq Reconstruction Experience.

AP: Bush makes farewell visit to Iraq.

Update: Bush ducks, misses shoes thrown by Iraqi journalist Muthathar Al Zaida calling him a dog during Baghdad news conference. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino apparently got a black eye from a microphone in the ensuing melee. Mark Silva: "Bush, uninjured, laughed off the incident: 'All I can report is it is a size 10.'''

Newsweek: The Fed who blew the whistle on warrantless domestic spying. Must-read.

Related:

Two knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that the clash erupted over a part of Bush's espionage program that had nothing to do with the wiretapping of individual suspects. Rather, Comey and others threatened to resign because of the vast and indiscriminate collection of communications data. These sources, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence matters, describe a system in which the National Security Agency, with cooperation from some of the country's largest telecommunications companies, was able to vacuum up the records of calls and e-mails of tens of millions of average Americans between September 2001 and March 2004. The program's classified code name was "Stellar Wind," though when officials needed to refer to it on the phone, they called it "SW." (The NSA says it has "no information or comment"; a Justice Department spokesman also declined to comment.)

The NSA's powerful computers became vast storehouses of "metadata." They collected the telephone numbers of callers and recipients in the United States, and the time and duration of the calls. They also collected and stored the subject lines of e-mails, the times they were sent, and the addresses of both senders and recipients. By one estimate, the amount of data the NSA could suck up in close to real time was equivalent to one quarter of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica per second. (The actual content of calls and e-mails was not being monitored as part of this aspect of the program, the sources say.) All this metadata was then sifted by the NSA, using complex algorithms to detect patterns and links that might indicate terrorist activity.

Back in December 2005, based on reading media reports, I wrote, "I think the theory discussed here may be partly correct. The means by which the administration got 'probable cause' to go to the FISA court for warrants on specific individuals or US phone numbers may have involved some sort of large scale data mining or link analysis involving capturing communications from Americans who had done nothing but call a certain country, in a way that the courts would likely determine 'unreasonable search and seizure.' From the mined data, they got a target list of US person numbers or individuals. What I presumed is that the administration never went to the FISA court at that point, but this FISA judge resignation story suggests perhaps they did, disguising the means by which they got 'probable cause' on some of those they were seeking warrants on."

Gates in Bahrain for IISS Persian Gulf regional security summit talks up continuity and vigilance, avoiding quagmire in Afghanistan. NYT:

Mr. Gates, who did not mention President Bush in his address, told the delegates at the conference that he was bringing from Mr. Obama “a message of continuity and commitment to our friends and partners in the region.” He also told them to put the heated rhetoric of the presidential campaign aside.

“Though the American political process is at times tumultuous, and our open and vigorous debates might seem to indicate deep divisions, I can assure you that a change in administration does not alter our fundamental interests, especially in the Middle East,” Mr. Gates said. “Throughout my career in government, which began over 42 years ago, the security of the Gulf has been a central concern of every administration for which I have worked.”

In response to questions from audience members after his formal remarks, Mr. Gates said that although the Pentagon would be sending thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan over the next months, he was ultimately worried about the size of the American footprint on Afghan soil. The United States plans to add some 20,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2009.

“I am more mindful than most that with 120,000 troops the Soviets still lost, because they never had the support of the Afghan people,” Mr. Gates said, adding that “I think that after we complete these troop increases that we’re talking about, we ought to think long and hard about how many more go in.”

NYT's Helene Cooper: "The White House has turned down a request from the family of President-elect Barack Obama to move into Blair House in early January so that his daughters can start school on January 5. The Obamas were told that Blair House, where incoming presidents usually stay in the five days before Inauguration Day, is booked in early January, a spokesperson to the Obama transition said. ...It remained unclear who on Bushes guest list outranked the incoming President."

Chicago Trib: Financial advisor to Tribune Co. chief Sam Zell interviewed by FBI as part of Blagojevich probe:

As Tribune Co. acknowledged Thursday that it received a federal subpoena as part of criminal charges against Gov. Rod Blagojevich, sources confirmed that a close associate of company chief executive and chairman Sam Zell has been interviewed by the FBI.

The Tribune also has learned that the associate, Nils Larsen, is the unidentified financial adviser who allegedly was asked to help get Chicago Tribune editorial writers fired.

Larsen, a Tribune Co. executive vice president, is a 38-year-old financial whiz who was instrumental in Zell's takeover of Tribune Co.

Neither Larsen nor Zell responded to requests for comment.

In their subpoena to the Tribune, federal authorities are seeking memos about potential staff cuts or changes to the Chicago Tribune editorial board, a source said.

WSJ:

The Bush administration plans to sign its first nuclear-cooperation agreement with a Middle Eastern nation within the next few weeks, according to a senior U.S. official, raising concerns among congressional critics who say the deal could fuel nuclear proliferation in the region.

The proposed deal with the United Arab Emirates has attracted attention because the U.A.E.'s largest trading partner is Iran. The U.A.E. has served in the past as a transshipment point for technology with military applications headed to Iran.

The move could place President-elect Barack Obama in a political tight spot with a Middle East ally by forcing him to decide whether to push Congress to ratify the agreement. He hasn't taken an official position on the deal. An Obama spokesman declined to comment. The Bush administration has championed the nuclear agreement with the U.A.E. as a model for promoting peaceful nuclear energy while guarding against weapons proliferation.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, ranking Republican in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation this week that would set conditions before Congress could approve the agreement. It would require that the next president certify the U.A.E. has taken extensive measures to cut off the flow of financing and sensitive technologies into Iran. ...

More on the Congressional resolution introduced to impose conditions on US-UAE nuclear agreement here.

This interesting too:

The UAE, like other Gulf countries, is trying to perform a high-wire balancing act when it comes to Iran. On the one hand, the Gulf countries don't like Iran, fear the prospect of it developing nuclear weapons and would prefer not to anger the US. On the other hand, they would like to avoid antagonising Tehran -- the emerging regional power -- and they enjoy the benefits of strong commercial ties to Iran. Qatar's ongoing discussions with Iran and Russia on establishing a gas cartel are indicative of the uphill struggle the US will face in persuading the Gulf countries to financially isolate Iran.

Unfortunately, prioritising the requests we make of our allies -- especially in the Gulf -- as they relate to the multiple national security priorities facing the nation today has not been a strong suit of the outgoing Bush administration. Consider, for example, that in the midst of efforts to strengthen economic sanctions on Iran, the state department recently shifted gears and suddenly pressed the UAE to officially recognise Kosovo as an independent state. The UAE did recognise Kosovo, a fact Emirati officials now note whenever asked about progress on more pressing issues like Iran.

Slobo and Blago. Heard a story yesterday about then Congressman Rod Blagojevich accompanying Rev. Jesse Jackson and other religious leaders to Belgrade in 1999 for a meeting with Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to try to gain the release of US soldiers captured by Serbian forces during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo. Jackson gave a long impassioned speech, and then turned to Blagojevich, introducing the then only Serbian-American member of Congress as his "homeboy." "What is 'homeboy?'" Milosevic asked. The speeches came to a halt. The translators were perplexed. They filed out of the ceremonial rooms to work on translating the unfamiliar word. After a while they returned and one said, "'Homeboy' is a person from your village or town." The negotiations went on (and the captured US soldiers were released).

This on Jackson-Blagojevich family and fundraiser ties interesting too.

David Ignatius suggests how Obama should fill intel spots.

WP:

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday.

Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator for eight years under President Bill Clinton, to fill a new White House post overseeing energy, environmental and climate policies, the sources said. Browner, a member of Obama's transition team, is a principal at the Albright Group.

Obama has also settled on Lisa P. Jackson, recently appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) and former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to head the EPA. Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, will chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Wired: "A growing chorus of intelligence officials in the U.S. and in south Asia have pinned the Mumbai attacks on the Kashmir-based militants Lashkar-e-Taiba. But there's been hardly any mention of the extremist group's deep ties to American-based jihadists."

Former intel analyst Gregory Treverton reports on post 9/11 intel reforms in the new issue of Democracy.

Broken Government: Investigative journo group the Center for Public Integrity assesses 128 executive branch failures of the past eight years. Among the examples the new report cites:

* a Food and Drug Administration unable to guarantee the safety of food or drugs
* a National Aeronautics and Space Administration inspector general who blocked multiple investigations
* a budget deficit that ballooned to $455 billion for fiscal year 2008, and could reach $1 trillion in fiscal year 2009
* an Environmental Protection Agency that ignored and underutilized its own office and task force on children’s health
* a Securities and Exchange Commission that sat largely on the sidelines, allowing little-understood new financial instruments to undermine the pillars of the economy
* a Federal Labor Relations Board with neither a general counsel nor the quorum needed to handle hundreds of complaints regarding unfair labor practices
* a terrorist detention system based at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, whose legality has repeatedly been challenged by the courts

Politico: Tom Donilon likely pick for deputy national security advisor.

St. Paul Pioneer Press: Norm Coleman donor under FBI investigation:

Federal investigators are looking into allegations that a longtime friend and benefactor tried to steer money to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, the Pioneer Press has learned.

Agents with the FBI have talked to or made efforts to talk to people in Texas familiar with the allegations, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Houston is where the first of two lawsuits was filed alleging Nasser Kazeminy, a Bloomington financier, tried to steer $100,000 to Coleman via his wife's Minneapolis employer. The second suit, filed in Delaware, alleges Kazeminy initially tried to get money directly to the senator.

Both Coleman and Kazeminy have denied any wrongdoing, and Coleman last month said he welcomes an investigation.

Neither Coleman nor his office has been contacted by the FBI, spokesman LeRoy Coleman said Tuesday morning.

"We have not been contacted by any law enforcement or investigative authority on this matter," he said.

On Tuesday evening, Coleman's campaign released the following statement: "We are not aware of any investigation that is under way, nor have we been contacted by any agency with respect to this matter. As we have said repeatedly, we welcome any investigation of these lawsuits by the appropriate authorities to get to the bottom of these baseless, sleazy and politically inspired allegations."

The campaign provided no evidence for the claim that the allegations are "politically inspired."

Kazeminy has declined repeated requests for interviews and has not commented since releasing a one-page statement Nov. 8 flatly denying "false and baseless claims." When asked Tuesday evening whether Kazeminy had been contacted by investigators, spokeswoman Amy Rotenberg said: "We have no information along those lines. What you're telling me is news to me."

The breadth of the FBI probe is unclear. Several individuals involved in the lawsuits and their attorneys either declined to comment or couldn't be reached for comment.

FBI Special Agent Shauna Dunlap, a spokeswoman with the agency's Houston office, said, "We do not confirm or deny the existence of any investigations." ...

CJR. New website and daily online columns (among them Charles Kaiser's media column previously of the late Radar) and features for premier journalism magazine, Columbia Journalism Review.

William Broad: hidden travels of the atomic bomb.

WP: "According to secretly recorded phone conversations, the Democratic governor had his deputies convey a threat that Blagojevich would block the Tribune's effort to sell the Chicago Cubs unless certain staffers were dismissed. An aide to the governor told him a Tribune financial adviser suggested that changes would be made at the editorial page. But the journalist targeted by Blagojevich, Deputy Editorial Page Editor John P. McCormick, was not fired. As media analysts question the continuing relevance of newspapers, prosecutors are charging Blagojevich in an extraordinary scheme to silence critics at the state's largest paper -- even as they were urging editors not to undermine the investigation with premature disclosures. A day after Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy, the charges raise new questions about the embattled tenure of Zell, the Chicago businessman who bought the media conglomerate last December."

WP: Brazen Words on Tape Left Agents 'Shocked'

Trade Law News on the 2008 Transparency International bribe payers index, released today.

Jeff Toobin:

... In a breathtaking seventy-six-page complaint filed this morning, the current Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, and his chief of staff are charged with engaging in a pattern of corruption that suggests that the culture of Illinois has only got worse in recent decades. David Mamet is a dewy-eyed idealist compared with the government lawyers and investigators who chronicled the cynicism and depravity of Blagojevich and his staff. (George Ryan, the governor who was elected before Blagojevich, is currently serving a prison sentence for his role in a more prosaic corruption scandal during his tenure. And Dan Walker, the governor from 1973 to 1977, waited until he left office to engage in the criminal conduct that led to his imprisonment.)

The case against the Governor comes in three parts, each more astonishing than the last. The first, the result of a long-running investigation in the state, charges a fairly routine pay-to-play operation. The Governor is said to have demanded campaign contributions in return for highway contracts and the like. (In a bravura touch, Blagojevich appears to have delayed an addition to a children’s hospital because the sponsors had not paid up.)

The surreal aspects of the case begin with the fallout from the bankruptcy of the Tribune company. The company, which owns the Chicago Cubs, was looking to raise money by selling the team’s home, Wrigley Field, and seeking the assistance of state government in the process. Blagojevich had a condition for giving the help: the newspaper had to fire a group of editorial writers and editors who had been critical of him. In these troubled times for newspapers, it’s cheering, in a way, that the Governor thought that a mere editorial page mattered so much, but his manner of showing his respect seems to owe too much to local custom.

Most attention, of course, will focus on the third aspect of Blagojevich’s scheme: his apparent effort to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat, which the Governor had the sole right to fill. It is Obama’s good fortune that the Governor seems to be pretty irritated with Obama’s lack of attention to Blagojevich’s needs. In a soon-to-be famous observation on the tapes, the Governor on Obama’s team: “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”

Freedom's Watch closing down at the end of the month.

Bonfire of the Vanities. A local golden boy who wins his bid for the White House, the hometown paper bought by a wheeler dealer tycoon whose media empire files for bankruptcy, a corrupt local governor arranging to sell the golden boy's open seat and do favors for the media owner in exchange for firing critical editors, a star, squeaky clean federal prosecutor who took down the aide to the most powerful vice president in US history, the governor scheming with a national union over a slot in exchange for a political fundraising mechanism, as workers take over a local factory. I mean, the screenplay writes itself!

Journopalooza. My friend Christina Davidson is organizing a battle of the journo bands, to benefit the Committee to Protect Journalists. Tickets for Journapalooza, to be held January 9 at 8pm at the Nat'l Press Club, went on sale today, details here.

The AP's Matt Lee reports:

The first sign of cracks in President-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy team of rivals emerged on Monday as his choices for secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations visited the State Department.

As Secretary of State-pick Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. envoy-choice Susan Rice separately visited the diplomatic agency's headquarters in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood, persons familiar with the transition said that Rice wants to install her own transition team inside the department.

Such a move by an incoming U.N. ambassador is rare, if not unprecedented, because the job is based at the United Nations in New York, where Rice already has a small transition staff, the sources familiar with the incoming administration.

The push by Rice, an early Obama supporter whose position the President-elect wants to elevate to a cabinet post, is also a signal that she intends to use her influence with the new president to play a more significant role than previous U.N. envoys, they said. The transition sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Officials with Clinton's transition team declined to comment on the matter, and aides to Rice could not immediately be reached. State Department officials declined to comment on issues related to the transition.

It was not clear if Clinton and Rice—who had strained relations during the Democratic primaries because of Rice's steadfast backing of Obama—saw each other at the State Department as Clinton left the building shortly after Rice arrived.

WP: "Five of the men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said Monday that they wanted to plead guilty to murder and war crimes but withdrew the offer when a military judge raised questions about whether it would prevent them from fulfilling their desire to receive the death penalty. 'Are you saying if we plead guilty we will not be able to be sentenced to death?' Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed operational mastermind of the attacks, asked at a pretrial hearing here."

Illinois "Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were arrested today by FBI agents on federal corruption charges. Blagojevich and Harris were accused of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that included Blagojevich conspiring to sell or trade the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for financial benefits for the governor and his wife. The governor was also accused of obtaining campaign contributions in exchange for other official actions. Blagojevich was taken into federal custody at his North Side home this morning. ... Blagojevich was taken into custody hours after the Tribune reported that the investigation into allegations of pay-to-play politics within his administration had been expanded to include his pending choice of a Senate replacement for Obama. The Democratic governor has said he expects to make a decision on the state's next senator in weeks. ... The Tribune previously disclosed that federal investigators had recordings of Blagojevich. Those recordings were aided by the cooperation of longtime Blagojevich confidant and former congressional chief of staff John Wyma." Isn't the US attorney there Patrick Fitzgerald?

Update: Complaint here (.pdf).

And the Trib bankruptcy/Blagojevich corruption story lines converge: "Beginning no later than November 2008 to the present ... defendants ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH and JOHN HARRIS, being agents of the State of Illinois...corruptly solicited and demanded a thing of value, namely, the firing of certain Chicago Tribune editorial members responsible for widely-circulated editorials critical of ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, intending to be influenced and rewarded in connection with business and transactions of the State of Illinois involving a thing of value of $5,000 or more, namely, the provision of millions of dollars in financial assistance by the State of Illinois, including through the Illinois Finance Authority, an agency of the State of Illinois, to the Tribune Company involving the Wrigley Field baseball stadium; in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 666(a)(1)(B) and 2." Who at the Tribune Co. did they solicit that editors-firing-for-baseball-stadium-financing plan from?

More on the investigation from the Chicago Tribune.

Mark Gimein in Slate:

More than 10 years ago, in my first job as a reporter, I was assigned to write an article about a Chicago financier named Sam Zell, who had just bought a chain of radio stations, for a magazine that covered the television industry. Zell at the time was already famous for scooping up the remnants of failing businesses, paring what was left of them to the core and squeezing a lot more water from stones than anyone thought possible.

I'd called and faxed Zell a half-dozen times, and, after what must have been the fourth call in one day, finally got a lecture from his secretary about how there was no way, no how Zell was ever going to talk to me. Just at that moment—he must have either been passing by or overhearing his secretary's exasperation from inside his office—Zell did exactly what he was never, ever going to do and picked up his line. The conversation took about 45 seconds. "You want to know what I'm going to do in radio?" Zell growled at me. "All you need to do is look at what I did with shipping containers."

The point was clear: Buy cheap, cut mercilessly, consolidate until you're the only game in town, and you can charge what you want. It worked for shipping; it would work for radio. Media: just another undervalued asset class. It all works the same way. Except, it doesn't, as Zell and the rest of us found out unequivocally Monday with the implosion of Sam Zell's latest media venture in the bankruptcy of the Tribune Co. publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. ...

The NYT's Eric Lichtblau and James Risen:

A Congressional oversight panel plans to ask the National Security Agency to start an investigation into new evidence that the agency illegally wiretapped a Muslim scholar in Northern Virginia and concealed the eavesdropping during a 2005 trial in which the scholar was convicted on terrorism charges.

Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, said in an interview that he planned to ask the inspector general of the N.S.A. to open what would be the first formal investigation by the agency into whether its eavesdropping program had improperly interfered with an American’s right to a fair trial.

Mr. Holt said he was responding to new evidence presented to him and other Congressional leaders by the Muslim scholar’s lawyer indicating that the Bush administration tried to hide the full extent of the government’s illegal spying in the criminal case.

If the N.S.A. inspector general begins an inquiry, analysts said, that could also signal a new willingness by the agency, under a new administration, to examine its own operations in the eavesdropping program.

President-elect Barack Obama was a critic of the Bush administration’s domestic spying program while he was in the Senate and on the campaign trail, and experts on intelligence matters are waiting to see whether he takes action early in his administration to rein in the program. ...

Shane Harris: "President Bush is helping clear the decks for President-elect Barack Obama by asking his political appointees to submit their resignations effective Inauguration Day, Jan. 20." Harris got the memo, here (.pdf).

MSNBC: Hillary Clinton-Condoleezza Rice dinner tonight. "State Department officials say the meeting at Rice's Watergate home will focus on policy issues, management of the State Department bureaucracy and the day-to-day life of the Secretary of State. Rice set the tone for tonight's dinner, the first face-to-face meeting since Clinton's nomination, yesterday on ABC News. 'I think she's going to be terrific,' Rice said. ... Today, in preparation for her session with Rice, Clinton has been spending the day receiving policy briefings at the State Department. The policy plate is full: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, North Korea and Middle East peace to name a few." No word on the menu, but Rice told ABC she makes good fried chicken.

Chris Cillizza: Out of a cabinet job, where do they land?

The clamor among Democratic office-holders to be a part of President-elect Barack Obama's Administration is so great that, inevitably, some get left behind.

What does the future hold for the elected officials who -- voluntarily or involuntarily -- don't make the cut for the Cabinet? Here's a look at the biggest names and what the future might hold for them.

Kathleen Sebelius: The governor of Kansas was an early endorser of Obama and was mentioned as a vice presidential pick. The assumption when Obama won was that she would end up in his Cabinet but her surprise decision over the weekend to remove herself from consideration for any opening means that her future is now less clear. Sebelius, a popular two term governor, will be heavily recruited by Democrats to run for the seat being vacated by Sen. Sam Brownback (R) in 2010. While she would clearly be the strongest potential candidate for Democrats, she faces some daunting history: no Democrat has been elected to the Senate from Kansas since 1932.

Tim Kaine: Throughout the veepstakes, Kaine allies insisted that while he would love to be vice president he was not looking for a way out of his current job as the governor of Virginia -- a gig, they argued, he loves. With Kaine seemingly set on serving out his term through 2009, he faces a number of electoral roadblocks. He is barred from seeking a second (consecutive) gubernatorial term (Virginia is the only state in the country with a one-term limit) and his path to the Senate is blocked by two Democrats -- Mark Warner and Jim Webb -- ensconced in those seats. Kaine could wait for an appointment in the second round of Obama Cabinet picks (maybe as the second attorney general although Gov. Janet Napolitano might have something to say about that) or hope that either Webb, up for reelection in 2012, or Warner, up in 2014, decide to step away from their seats. Still, that's a long time to wait.

John Kerry: It's no secret that Kerry, the party's 2004 presidential nominee, would have liked to be secretary of State. With that post going to Hillary Rodham Clinton, however, it appears that Kerry will spend the rest of his political life in the Senate. Those familiar with his thinking insist Kerry is perfectly happy in the Senate particularly given that he will assume the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee at the start of the 111th Congress -- a lifelong dream. (Kerry famously testified before the committee in April 1971.)

Chuck Hagel: The outgoing Nebraska Republican senator was seen as a potential pick as secretary of Defense for Obama given his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq. That job no longer open, expect Hagel to remain in the mix on foreign policy issues -- particularly how to responsibly end the war -- and examine whether or not the Republican party might be ready for a candidate in 2012 who opposed the war in Iraq. Hagel has made no secret of his interest in running for national office and would only be 66 on election day 2012.

WP: "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed operational mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four co-defendants told a U.S. military court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Monday that they want to make a "confession" and enter guilty pleas to murder and war-crimes charges in the death-penalty case. The startling announcement came at the start of what was supposed to be a week of pre-trial hearings on various motions. It could create a major dilemma for the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has said he wants to close the Guantanamo detention facility and prosecute defendants such as Mohammed in federal courts."

Visiting a friend abroad last month, struck with jetlag, I pulled Hemingway's Fiesta, the Sun Also Rises from the book shelves, and half completed by the time I left and craving to get to back to it, some twenty years after I'd first read it, bought a copy at a book shop to finish on the plane back. What a mistake perhaps to have everyone read this in high school, and feel like they've already read it, when you can't begin to understand it until later. (Then again, when one thinks of how young are the soldiers going to war, perhaps not). As with so much that seems at first like a kind of thrilling romanticism from the modern period (DH Lawrence, Joyce), how it too is a kind of war novel, or post-war novel, about the breakdown in the order of things that occurred after the suffering of the first world war, and how it made going on in a certain way, the old way, impossible, but what will replace it hasn't yet fully emerged. What's most devastating about it is that it at first reads as a kind of novel about the pursuit of pleasure and authentic experience: beauty, Paris, love, the bullfights, fishing, wine, Spain -- a moveable feast. And what it's ultimately about of course is despair, a crushing, existential, perhaps inconsolable despair, masked in all these elegant scenes (San Sebastian, Paris, Pamplona), that consumes the reporter narrator, injured as a volunteer in the war, as well as the novel's beautiful, aristocratic heroine Brett Ashley, a bystander as a nurse whose boyfriend is killed in the war, her many post-war admirers as lost as she is amid the endless, elegant vacation. All of them succumbed to alcoholism as the addictive anesthetic for their unspoken predicament. But there are glimpses of the future too in the breakdown of the old social order--Brett's brief dalliance with a Jewish admirer, at first tolerated and ultimately openly despised by the others. Worth reading or re-reading if like me you haven't picked it up in a number of years.

Goskomnovosti. What else will be left? Time for an Obama New Deal/WPA plan for artists, writers, and hacks? Update: Tribune Co. files for Chapter 11.

Frank Rich on the proverbial best and brightest.

AP:

Military prosecutors have withdrawn a government witness in an upcoming Guantanamo war-crimes trial to conceal evidence of ''abuse and mistreatment'' of the defendant, his Pentagon-appointed lawyer alleged Sunday.

The witness, a U.S. agent whose identity is protected, was scheduled to testify that Canadian-born Omar Khadr -- charged with killing a U.S. soldier -- made a self-incriminating statement during a December 2004 interrogation, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who represents Khadr.

The defense says the statement was extracted by coercion, an example of the kinds of abuse Khadr has endured since he became a prisoner in 2002.

Military officials did not immediately respond to calls and e-mails for comment.

Prosecutors dropped the witness and the incriminating statement to block any discussion of abuse, the attorney said.

NYT:

More than 100 trucks loaded with supplies for American forces in Afghanistan were destroyed Sunday by militants in Peshawar, the city that serves as an important transit point for the Afghan war effort.

It was the third major attack by Taliban militants on NATO supplies in Pakistan in less than a month, and served to expose the vulnerability of the route from the port of Karachi through Peshawar and over the border into Afghanistan. The United States relies on the route for an overwhelming proportion of its supplies for the war in Afghanistan.

The damaged trucks were loaded with American war materiel, including Humvees, destined for the Afghan National Army, said Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for United States forces in Kabul.

The militants overwhelmed the rudimentary security system at two parking lots where the trucks were parked in the heart of Peshawar. They easily disarmed security guards at about 2:30 a.m., then threw grenades and fired rockets at the loaded trucks.

The New Yorker profiles Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein:

Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer’s goal seemed to be to establish a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still reeling from the “shock and awe” bombing. Then she noticed that soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to replace New Orleans’s disastrous public schools with charter schools. The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory—the shock (the bank failures and the market’s nosedive) had inspired the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook part. But the plan wasn’t working. Constituents wrote thousands of outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar, like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written at the end of the book: memory was shock’s antidote. (Another difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.)

“Americans remembered that they thought Rudy Giuliani was their daddy after September 11th, which was why they’re a little less inclined to say that Paulson and Goldman Sachs were going to take care of them this time,” Klein told the audience at the Bloor Cinema. “I think actually their biggest mistake with the bailout was how short it was. It’s just two pages and three paragraphs, and so the weirdest thing happened: people read it.” Everyone laughed. “It sounded like a coup.”

She went on, “It’s worth thinking about what the right has been doing for the past thirty-five years as a counter-revolution that has been waged against our victories.” The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R., she said, but we don’t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors’ furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.” Now, these market shocks are opportunities for the same reason that the crash was in the thirties, because we are seeing the failures of laissez-faire before our eyes. “It’s time to say, ‘Your model failed,’ ” she said. “This is a progressive moment: it’s ours to lose.”

Brookings' Iran expert Suzanne Maloney and CFR's Ray Takeyh propose a new diplomatic initiative to engage Iran (.pdf).

Bob Dreyfuss: "It was an extraordinary scene at the American Enterprise Institute on December 2, when John Bolton read 'em and wept. There is, he said, no way to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. His conclusion, stunning in its finality: 'We are going to have to deal with a nuclear Iran.' ...Bolton is folding his cards. 'Iran's going to get nuclear weapons,' said Bolton, to an audience at AEI that seemed shocked into silence. 'We have lost this race.' If you don't believe me, you can watch the video."

Kissinger weighs in on Obama appointments: "extraordinary team for national security policy. ... [It] encourages the hope that America is moving beyond its divisions to its opportunities."

NYT: Justices Take Case on President's Power to Detain Suspects.

Obama workout discipline not yet spreading to the press corps. The Christian Science Monitor's David Cook with this morning's pool report: "While Mr. Obama worked at maintaining his lithe look, your pear-shaped pooler spent quality time at a local coffee shop. After 70 minutes at the Regents Park gym, the president-elect’s motorcade left the complex at 8:56 a.m. At 9:00, the press van held at the entrance to the neighborhood while Mr. Obama and his Secret Service detail proceeded to his home. At 9:24 the Obama motorcade emerged from Greenwood Avenue, and sped its way along scenic Lake Shore Drive, Chicago Police sirens blaring occasionally. The motorcade pulled into the underground garage at the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago at approximately 9:35."

Mona Charen: Conservatives delight in Obama picks.

Shane Harris: "Former intelligence officials say left-leaning bloggers drove John Brennan out of contention for CIA director, and they question the message that may send to agency employees."

Jeff Stein: The FBI meets Hollywood.

David Isenberg's new book, Shadow Force, on private military contractors in Iraq, is now available from Praeger.

Gershom Gorenberg in Ha'aretz: Dayan as tragedy, Bibi as farce.

NYT: "A former Defense Department official said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies had determined that former officers from Pakistan’s Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped train the Mumbai attackers. But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that no specific links had been uncovered yet between the terrorists and the Pakistani government. His disclosure came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held meetings with Indian leaders in New Delhi and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad, in a two-pronged effort to pressure Pakistan to cooperate fully in the effort to track down those responsible for the bloody attacks in Mumbai last week."

Ben Adler: Are cows worse than cars?

NBC's Aram Roston: Reputed mobster: Supporter of Mumbai attacks?

So I get the Obama pool reports; the latest is typical: "President-elect Obama left his Hyde Park home at 7:30 a.m. under grey skies and arrived at the Regents Park Apartments for his morning workout at 7:35." Doesn't this guy ever skip a workout? I don't think even once since I've been receiving these things a few days after he won.

ANSA: CIA Abu Omar rendition trial on hold 'til March.

Joshua Kucera in The Atlantic on his encounters with a Russian spy and the FBI.

CQ on Congressional secrecy.

More related via FAS' Steve Aftergood: "Index on Censorship, the British magazine on freedom of expression, devotes its latest issue to secrecy, surveillance and executive authority in the United States at the end of the Bush Administration. It features articles by Jameel Jaffer, Geoffrey R. Stone, Eric Lichtblau, Patrick Radden Keefe, and myself, among others. Many of the articles can be viewed online."

WP: Holbrooke under consideration for south Asia envoy.

Anyone have a mini laptop/netbook they love? I need one for short travel, typing some interviews live, with basic word processing, email, Internet functionality, when lugging 15 pounds of my laptop and accoutrements, converters, etc. is too inconvenient. (Update: Thank you for all the great suggestions. I bought the Acer, will see how it does as a travel laptop.).

WP: Gates' top deputies may leave.

Seth Hettena: Mitch Wade's Congressional Fab Five.

WSJ: "Several officials close to the transition process said retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair was the front-runner to be the director of national intelligence, though they cautioned that the decision hadn't been finalized and probably wouldn't be announced Monday. The officials said that Mr. Obama was impressed by Adm. Blair's reputation as a strong manager. [...] Choosing Mr. Blair may reignite long-simmering tensions between military and civilian intelligence officials, who are wary of what they see as the creeping militarization of the nation's intelligence services. Several former intelligence officials wondered whether it was wise for an admiral to oversee an intelligence operation that is increasingly involved in domestic issues. Still, Mr. Blair is free of any association with two of the intelligence community's most controversial issues: the CIA's harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects and the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program."

Hill Gossip: Foreign Affairs. A staffer writes that Nancy Stetson, the former long time foreign policy staffer to John Kerry now at the Sheridan Group, is set to return to Kerry’s side as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as he prepares to assume the Chairmanship in the next Congress.

MJ: Picking up the pieces: A sober, war-time national security cabinet takes shape.