Alright, I promise not to do too much of this. But here are some portions of comments from Jim Wilkinson, an NSC spokesman, on Paula Zahn Monday night (itals added)...

First, knock Clarke for pursuing the well-known fool's errand of hitting the terrorists overseas before they can hit us here ...

This is a president who had Condoleezza Rice and others ask for a strategy. Dick Clarke, when he first came and briefed, presented several ideas, all of which frankly were overseas. He had the idea to increase help for Uzbekistan, which we did. He had the idea to help increase the counterterrorism budget, which we did. These were all ideas, but they were over there.

Next, the 'strategy' strategy ...

I want to make a very point here, that all of his ideas he presented were not a strategy. This is a president who wanted a comprehensive strategy to go after al Qaeda where it lives, where it hides, where it plots, where it raises money. All the ideas that -- except for one -- that Dick Clarke submitted, this administration did. This is the president who expedited the arming of the Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle, so that we could go after these terrorists like we've done in other places.

This 'strategy' mumbojumbo has definite echoes of Nigel Tufnel: No, no, no, this one goes to eleven ...

On a more substantive note compare Wilkinson's description of Clarke's pitiful proposal to this one from an August 4th, 2002 article in Time. Note particularly the comment from the "senior Bush administration official" at the end ...

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

Next from Wilkinson, misstate Clarke's statements and then accuse him of Iraq double-talk by again mischaracterizing another statement ...

Well, I think your viewers tonight would be a little alarmed if the president didn't ask about Iraq. This is a nation that was shooting at our pilots, shooting at our pilots hundreds of times a day in the southern no-fly zone, a nation that had used WMD against its neighbors. And I think your viewers tonight would be a little alarmed if the president didn't ask about any connection from anybody on any part of the globe, frankly.

The president wanted to know who did it and who was responsible. Dick Clarke, on another interview he gave to PBS "Frontline," said that, right after 9/11, all his options were open. He wasn't sure who did it. So, again, we see Mr. Clarke on three sides of a two-sided issue. What the American people need to know is that their government is working diligently to go after al Qaeda where it lives, where it plots, where it raises money, and where it does threats or tries to do us harm here.

Here's the Frontline passage Wilkinson is referring to ...

Question: Because one of the things that surprises a lot of the public, I think, is that immediately after Sept. 11, the administration knew exactly who had done it. Was that why?

Clarke: No. On the day of Sept. 11, then the day or two following, we had a very open mind. CIA and FBI were asked, "See if it's Hezbollah. See if it's Hamas. Don't assume it's Al Qaeda. Don't just assume it's Al Qaeda." Frankly, there was absolutely not a shred of evidence that it was anybody else. The evidence that it was Al Qaeda began just to be massive within days after the attack.

Question: Somebody's quoted as saying that they walked into your office and almost immediately afterwards, the first words out of your mouth was "Al Qaeda."

Clarke: Well, I assumed it was Al Qaeda. No one else had the intention of doing that. No one else that I knew of had the capability of doing that. So yes, as soon as it happened, I assumed it was Al Qaeda.

Returning to the Wilkinson tirade already in progress, now blame all previous terrorism attacks on Clarke's being a doofus while also managing to step on Cheney's story line by insisting that Clarke was running the show right before 9/11 ...

I would say that, since this president's been here, two-thirds of al Qaeda have been captured or killed. I would say, I would remind you that Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy when the African embassies were bombed. Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy when the USS Cole was bombed. Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy in the time preceding 9/11 when the threat was growing.

Finally, make a nonsensical comparison between Clarke's blowing 9/11 and the president's wiping out all the bad guys afterwards ...

And in June of 2001, when the FBI said 16 of the 19 hijackers were already in the United States, Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism. I think you contrast that directly with this president's record of freezing millions of dollars in terrorist assets, rounding up more than two-thirds of the members of al Qaeda. It's a clear distinction.

Most of these aren't even distortions. They're silly little gotchas, many of which don't even make any sense.

This is the best they can do.

A Request ... I'm working on a couple different non-TPM projects at the moment. So I want to enlist your assistance.

Administration appointees and spokespeople are hitting the airwaves today like a motley medieval army -- little clear organization or discipline, just everyone running on to the field at once and hacking away as best they can.

(Along the lines of little discipline, note the contradictory nature of the attacks. In some, we did everything Clarke wanted; in others, he was out of the loop. Hard to figure both are true. It's scattershot because they're desparate and don't have the facts on their side.)

Many of these folks are saying things that are either demonstrably false or highly debatable. We noted one example in the former category from Vice President Cheney's appearance earlier today on Rush Limbaugh. (You can measure the Veep's confidence in his ability to face any amount of serious questioning by the fact that he decided to go on air with Limbaugh on this.)

In the latter category is this response of Paul Wolfowitz to Clarke's charges. The clip is from Newsweek ...

In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Clarke says he tried to refute Wolfowitz. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," Clarke recalls saying. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam." A spokesman for Wolfowitz describes Clarke's account as a "fabrication." Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as "a major threat," says this official.

So Wolfowitz says this account is a 'fabrication'.

Then the spokesperson says Wolfowitz always regarded al Qaida as a "major threat." Is that true? He certainly didn't have that reputation. He was seen as an Iraq hawk and advocate of various other generally hawkish positions. But not someone heavily invested in the al Qaida issue. Indeed, Clarke's description of his relative lack of interest in al Qaida seems very plausible.

To test my hypothesis I went to the Nexis database and tried this search: "wolfowitz w/100 bin laden". That is, all instances where Wolfowitz's name comes up within one hundred words of 'bin laden'. I set the date range between January 1st, 1980 and September 10th, 2001.

I got 14 hits. By way of contrast, when I plugged in Richard Clarke's name I got 48, with Sandy Berger, 502.

Of those fourteen, five were actually misdated articles from after 9/11. Others were just cases where his name came up in proximity to bin Laden's but in which there was no connection.

There seemed to be only two instances where his name actually came up in relation to bin Laden's. One was an article in which Richard Holbrooke was questioning the Bush administration's and Wolfowitz's zeal for national missile defense.

Holbrooke questioned that threat to Washington, charging that the plan is ''almost a religious matter'' for the Bush administration.

''We have to ask ourselves, in what way are we really threatened?'' he said. ''It's people like (Saudi militant) Osama bin Laden who are dangerous, and they have no long-range missiles.''

The other is a case in which Wolfowitz was being interviewed about missile defense ...

JACO: Dr. Wolfowitz, who is missile defense aimed to protect against? Is it the Chinese? Is it the so-called rogue states like Iraq, Iran, North Korea? Is it a freelance terrorist like Osama bin Laden who might have an ICBM? Who is this particularly a defense against?

WOLFOWITZ: Well, we're talking about defenses against missiles of a variety of ranges and I'll give you a real example that's out of history, in fact I think you were in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm yourself and you saw what even those limited Iraqi Scud missiles were able to do. They almost succeeded in dragging Israel into the war actively, which would have changed the whole character of the war. The single worst hit we took during the war was when a single Scud missile hit a barracks in Dhahran.

That's a real-world threat from 10 years ago that today is much worse in the Korean Peninsula than anything we encountered in the Gulf. Hopefully we have Saddam Hussein lower down now, but it's a threat we could face in the future in the Gulf either from Iraq or Iran.

Then there's a, sort of, intermediate-range threat which begins to target the capitals of our key allies and some of our bases in places like Japan or Turkey or Europe.

Finally, there's the longer-range threat which could attack the United States.

And hostile countries like North Korea are working at all ranges. The North Koreans have already deployed a lot of missiles of the short-range, Scud type, and a pretty large number we think of the intermediate range. And we think they're working, and within five to 10 years will have a capability to target the United States.

We're trying to get our ability to defend against those threats out in front of the threats, and we aren't yet there. We're still just a year away from deploying an answer to that Scud missile that we dealt with 10 years ago.

But with this acceleration of the program that President Bush has directed, I think we can catch up.

Nothin' about OBL from Wolfowitz.

These are the only two cases where Wolfowitz's name comes up in relation to bin Laden. And I think it's fair to say that both show a lack of interest in this threat rather than the presence of it.

In other words, my quick-and-dirty search didn't generate one case where Wolfowitz discussed bin Laden as a threat at all -- though I'm sure he must have mentioned him at some point.

You might say that the comparisons with Clarke and Berger are unfair since they were in government and Wolfowitz wasn't. But when I swapped bin Laden's name for 'Saddam' in my search, I got 546 hits, and well over 400 of them were from after he left government in 1993.

Now, I grant that this is a pretty crude way to measure how Wolfowitz judged the al Qaida threat prior to 9/11. But I think it's pretty suggestive too. And it does match up with what I think can only be called the consensus opinion about what Wolfowitz focused on.

Now, back to my request.

Since Nexis searching is a crude measure, I'd like to know if any readers can point me to pre-9/11, published references to Wolfowitz stating his belief that al Qaida was a "major threat." Doesn't have to be that phrase of course. Just any reference that would back up the present claim.

More generally, and this is the real request, there are a lot of White House appointees and surrogates hitting the airwaves bashing Clarke, many of which are making willfully deceptive claims or simply lying.

Sixty or seventy thousand people come to this site every week day. That should be more than enough eyes to monitor all the relevant chat shows. If you find instances where you think someone is pulling a Cheney and especially if you can point me to a transcript or an online replay, I'd be greatly obliged if you can send it my way.

Before this morning, the following occurred to

Vice President Cheney has been out of sight for a long time. But of late he's been out a lot, doing media interviews, giving campaign speeches and so forth.

Isn't it time someone asked him about the fact that senior members of his staff are at the center of a criminal investigation into the intentional leak of the identity of a clandestine operative at the CIA?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

Now to the point at hand.

Cheney was on Rush Limbaugh today fighting back against Richard Clarke.

Now, I don't expect Limbaugh to ask the question above. But look what Cheney said about Clarke.

RUSH: All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?

CHENEY: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame.

Cheney frequently gets a pass for what his aides later portray as unintentional misstatements of fact. But there are two or three levels of dishonesty involved in this response. The key one is timing. It's convenient that Cheney doesn't "recall the exact time frame" since the time frame puts the lie to his entire point.

Clarke was put in charge of cyberterrorism (a pet interest of his); but that was after 9/11.

He's saying that Clarke wasn't really so central to the terrorism big picture prior to 9/11 because he was tasked with dealing with cyberterrorism (which Cheney describes as something like a glorified version of Norton AntiVirus). But, as noted, this happened after 9/11. That's after the period in which Clarke claims the White House wasn't paying attention to the terrorism issue.

If there's any question that's the period Cheney is talking about it becomes more clear as the conversation continues ...

RUSH: Cybersecurity? Meaning Internet security?

CHENEY: Yeah, worried about attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology systems we have these days and that an adversary would use or try --

RUSH: Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there.

CHENEY: Well, he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff, and I saw part of his interview last night, and --

RUSH: He was demoted.

CHENEY: It was still -- he clearly missed a lot of what was going on. For example, just three weeks after the -- after we got here, there was communication, for example with the president of Pakistan laying out our concerns about Afghanistan and al-Qaeda and the importance of the -- going after the Taliban and getting them to end their support for the al-Qaeda. This is say within three weeks of our arrival here. So the only thing I can say about Dick Clarke is he was here throughout those eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa, in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit, and the question that out to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when they -- when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?

So Cheney's claim is that Clarke "wasn't in the loop ... on a lot of this stuff."

Consider what that means.

Clarke, as we've said, was the counter-terrorism coordinator at NSC. That means he ran the inter-agency process on terrorism issues. Cheney says Clarke wasn't in the loop; but that means that he actually ran the loop.

If he was out of the loop on the central points of what the White House was doing on terrorism that means there was a complete breakdown of the interagency process.

Saying Clarke was out of the loop is less a defense of the administration than an indictment of it.

We'll be saying more on this. But I think we can already see from this and other defenses coming from administration officials that the White House's line on this is filled with clear distortions and misstatements of fact -- most of which are easily identifiable by people who have even a rough understanding of the timing and issues involved.

If they're resorting to blatant distortions and untruths this quickly they must not have a good defense.

Paging Dr. Okrent, paging Dr. Okrent ...

We noted last night the odd and (I think now) clearly regrettable decision to have Judith Miller write the Times piece on Richard Clarke. (For general background on her inappropriateness to report

The first point to notice is that in an article purportedly about Clarke's accusations, she provides one sentence describing his claims, with no direct quotes, before moving onto two paragraphs with direct quotes from White House Communications Director attacking Clarke.

Also note that she describes Clarke's claims thusly, that he "asserts that while neither president did enough to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has undermined American national security by using the 9/11 attacks for political advantage and ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq."

With all respect, that's simply not what he says. He does criticize Clinton and Bush. But his statements last night did not come close to putting the two presidents on a par when it came to the lead-up to 9/11.

Maybe he's wrong. Maybe he's giving Clinton a free-ride. But Miller shouldn't change what he said.

Another point.

In the version of Miller's article that ran last night there was this passage ...

Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first domestic security adviser and head of the Department of Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own department on the grounds -- accurate ones in Clarke's view -- that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with other agencies. Clarke said Ridge had to clear major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff.

In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, denied that Ridge was against the creation of the department and said the department did not have to go through any more clearance with the White House than other Cabinet departments.

Miller hasn't been publishing as much of late. And someone needs to clue her into the revised rules. It's been at least a few months since reporters have willingly published demonstrably false statements from administration officials and spokespersons.

As we noted early this month Ridge went on record in May 2002 saying he was recommending that the president veto legislation that would have created his department.

(As we later learned, behind the scenes the White House was already planning to introduce the same legislation themselves. But this opposition had been the White House's public position for months, and one Ridge publicly supported.)

Apparently, the Times already realized it had a problem because the passage has now been revised to ...

Mr. Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first domestic security adviser and head of the Department of Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own department on grounds, accurate ones in Mr. Clarke's view, that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with other agencies. Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Ridge had to clear major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff.

In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, denied that.

So now Roehrkasse's denial stands but it's no longer clear what he's denying. You might say Miller has given him deniability about his denial.

The Times current article is here; but you can see the earlier version, preserved in amber shall we say, over here at the website of the Indianapolis Star.

We seem to have a bit of a contradiction, don't we?

Richard Clarke rolled out his book this evening on 60 Minutes, arguing, in brief, that the Bush administration

Meanwhile, on the Washington Post op-ed page, Condi Rice has a lengthy column presenting what can only be called a very, very different picture.

The new administration heeded the warnings of the outgoing Clinton administration and not only focused closely on al Qaida and the rise in chatter in the summer of 2001 but was actually preparing a much more aggressive approach than anything that had been considered previously. What's more, the president himself sensed that not enough was being done and called for further scrutiny into the possibility of a domestic attack and a more aggressive plan to "eliminate" al Qaida.

The president, in the telling of Rice and her deputy Steve Hadley, seems to have been more engaged, forward-thinking and insightful on this issue than literally any other major player on the administration's national security team.

Even with all the vastness of the federal bureaucracy and the possible uncertainties of interpretation, there's no question that one of these two people -- Rice or Clarke -- is misleading us.

Rice was (and is) the president's National Security Advisor. Clarke was in charge of counter-terrorism policy at the National Security Council. Nothing discussed by either on this issue should be a mystery to the other. It's possible that neither is lying in a narrow factual sense. But, at a minimum, one must be giving us a deeply partial and misleading account.

(Clarke is yet to get the 'treatment' from the press. So we'll see how his statements hold up. But on this issue -- what happened pre-9/11 -- and the related yellowcake matter, Rice has already developed a track record of inaccurate, misleading, contradictory and contradicted statements -- which we'll be reviewing in future posts.)

This is why we have a press whose job it is not simply to frame this as a potent he-said/she-said but to dig into the details and find out who isn't leveling with us.

One place to start might be this claim which Steve Hadley made on 60 Minutes (and which is also echoed in Rice's editorial) ...

Hadley staunchly defended the president to Stahl: "The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with ... George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'"

Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Mr. Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.

"All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.'

"And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations."

We've heard the swatting at flies line before. So presumably there must have been some such conversation. The White House has referenced it again and again. But what was the context? And what did it lead to? Documents must have been generated. Directives must have been written up and executed. What are the details?

Someone is not levelling with us. If the press is worth anything it should find out who, right?

Nota Bene: Monday's New York Times story on Richard Clarke's revelations is written by Judith Miller. Quite a choice -- and problematic for a number of reasons. See Jack Shafer's latest on this from just last month.

It's hard to say which of the Clarke revelations is most damaging. But there are many contenders. Here's another -- the video of which just aired a few minutes ago on 60 Minutes ...

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the President saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."

More soon.

Atrios quotes this passage from Richard Clarke's interview tonight on CBS at length. But it's worth excerpting again for reasons I note below ...

"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.

For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

This is the essence of the whole story. Everything.

As Talleyrand said of the restored

One chilling note in this passage is that Paul Wolfowitz, the prime architect and idea man of the second Iraq war, spent the early months of the Bush administration focused on "Iraqi terrorism against the United States", something that demonstrably did not even exist. A rather bad sign.

The bigger point, however, is this.

The first months of the Bush administration were based on a fundamental strategic miscalcuation about the source of the greatest threats to the United States. They were, as Clark suggests, stuck in a Cold War mindset, focused on Cold War problems, though the terms of debate were superficially reordered to make them appear to address a post-Cold War world.

That screw up is a reality -- their inability to come clean about it is, I suspect, is at the root of all the covering up and stonewalling of the 9/11 commission. And Democrats are both right and within their rights to call the White House on it. But screw-ups happen; mistakes happen. What is inexcusable is the inability, indeed the refusal, to learn from them.

Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 -- exploiting it, really -- to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything they'd been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves to do it.

As the international relations expert John Ikenberry noted aptly in a recent essay, the Bush hardliners "fancy themselves tough-minded thinkers. But they didn't have the courage of their convictions to level with the American people on what this geopolitical adventure in Iraq was really about and what it would cost."

To revert again to paraphrases of Talleyrandian wisdom, this was worse than a crime. It was a mistake -- though I suspect that when the full story is told, we'll see that it was both.

See Doonesbury today, Sunday 21st. Funny. "I was proud to have served in the Alabama Guard both days!"

A little of the old compare and contrast ...

As you know, our campaign has praised your military service to our nation. Our campaign does not condone any effort to impugn your patriotism. Your letter claims that supporters of our campaign questioned your service and patriotism. In fact, that simply wasn’t the case. Our campaign is not questioning your patriotism or military service, but your votes and statements on the issues now facing our country.

Open Letter to John Kerry
Marc Racicot
Bush-Cheney Campaign Chair
February 22nd, 2004

And now for "The Outrages of the Week." President Bush's reelection campaign is distributing a letter from retired Colonel William Campenni, who served with Mr. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. After defending Bush's service, Campenni argues that Bush did more to defend the U.S. than John Kerry did in Vietnam, earning three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star.

Mark Shields
Capital Gang
March 20th, 2004

While most of America was sleeping and Mr. Kerry was playing antiwar games with Hanoi Jane Fonda, we were answering 3 a.m. scrambles for who knows what inbound threat over the Canadian subarctic, the cold North Atlantic and the shark-filled Gulf of Mexico.

Col. William Campenni (retired)
U.S. Air Force/Air National Guard
Letter to the Editor
Washington Times
February 11, 2004

Back to the foreign policy article.

"Richard A. Clarke said in a television interview airing Sunday that Bush 'ignored terrorism for months' before the 2001 attacks, then looked to attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan, the nation harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda, which launched

That's from Bloomberg.

It is fair to say that anyone who has seriously reported on this issue, or has read a lot of the good reporting on it, already knows this: namely, that the incoming Bush administration downgraded the attention given to terrorism and al Qaida specifically in the last years of the Clinton administration, and this after being warned by out-going members of the Clinton team that combatting al Qaida should be at the top of their agenda.

In short, they pushed al Qaida and a lot of resources aimed at fighting al Qaida to the backburner until the whole thing blew up in their faces on 9/11.

Their focus, as we've noted before, was on the centrality of states rather than shadowy transnational terrorist groups -- thus their preoccuption with issues like national missile defense.

In any case, as I say, we've basically known this.

But it's another thing to have the person who was there at the center of the action as NSC counter-terrorism czar -- both under Clinton and Bush -- saying on camera that the president ignored terrorism and al Qaida right up until the day of the attacks. Clarke was there. In fact, to the extent that Bush and Rice and Cheney and the rest of the team were ignoring the issue, it would have been Clarke's urgent warnings they were ignoring -- since he was the head of counter-terrorism on the NSC staff.

White House Spokesman Sean McCormick told the New York Times: "The president and his team received briefings on the threat from al-Qaida prior to taking office, and fighting terrorism became a top priority when this administration came into office. We actively pursued the Clinton administration's policies on al-Qaida until we could get into place a more comprehensive policy."

But Clark says that's baloney. And he was the one who headed up Clinton's counter-terrorism policies and Bush's. So who are you going to believe?

Now do you understand why they're stonewalling the 9/11 commission?

And while we're discussing the commission, why do they even really need to stonewall it?

Consider this passage from a piece in today's Times ...

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.

At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed.

"It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president's cyberterrorism adviser.

Now we know about Rice and Hadley, her deputy. But how about Zelikow? He's a former NSC official from the first Bush administration and a close associate of Rice's. The two of them even wrote a book together.

He was in the key meetings where the warnings -- seemingly ignored -- about al Qaida came up. He seems like someone you'd want to talk to to find out what they were warned about and why they didn't take the warnings more seriously.

Well, you don't have to look far to find him. He runs the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow is the Executive Director of the Commission, which means he has operational control of the investigation under the overall management of the two co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.

Now, Zelikow is no hack. He's an accomplished Republican foreign policy hand. But Condi Rice and what happened in the hand-off between the administrations is central to the whole 9/11 investigation enterprise.

Does it make sense to have the guy who's running the investigation be one of her close professional colleagues?

The 9/11 families didn't think so either.

Listen carefully to these passages from a new column in Newsweek by Eleanor Clift ...

Kerry knew this was coming. “Bring it on,” he said so often it became his battle cry. Well, now they’ve brought it on, and what is Kerry doing? He’s going on vacation in Idaho, leaving behind the festering story of his unholy bond with foreign leaders. “Before long they’ll be calling him Jacques Kerry,” says a Republican strategist. “It’s only a matter of time.”

...

The harsh tone of the attacks this early in the campaign indicates that Bush is willing to drive up his own negatives in order to raise doubts about Kerry. The good news for Kerry is that he fights better when he’s behind, and the way things are going, he’ll soon be behind.

A thought: if your opponent has $100 million to portray you as an effete snob, don't go on vacation to a fancy ski resort in Idaho.

Now read this email from a couple days ago from a very astute Democratic party insider in Washington ...

First, the ballgame will be won or lost in second quarter and early in second quarter. Right now Bush money is gaining him yardage, depicting Kerry as flip-flopper and weak on defense. That's the plan. Simple. Effective. Steamrolling. Fools like Maureen Dowd today echo and enable it in mainstream media, just as she did in 2000. Second, Kerry loses if he can't raise money to buy time to fight back in April. All pundits who say money doesn't matter are wrong, and enable Bush more. Money talks and early money screams. Third, Kerry needs Clinton fundraising and Gore fundraising base badly. Will Clinton really help? Seen any sign of it? Seen him rap Bush lately? Seen Hillary?

This is all true, the Clift passages every bit as much as the email just noted. As the emailer notes, and as we'll return to, this is a very challenging situation. I'm going to note some of the Kerry campaign's mistakes below. But other Democrats need to get off the sidelines too. Now.

(Put Richard Holbrooke, not campaign flacks -- much as I love them -- on every show that will book him. He wants to be Secretary of State. Make him work for it.)

Kerry is now being hit by a barrage of attacks

As John Dean notes in his soon to be released book Worse than Watergate -- about which we'll be saying more soon -- even during the Watergate investigation assistant Watergate special prosecutor Richard Davis -- who was tasked with investigating various dirty tricks operations -- was investigating Rove, quizzing Nixon's staffers about Rove's role in various dirty tricks operations.

But you know what? That's life.

Don't complain; fight.

The press is too lazy and insensible to be a watchdog for this sort of business.

Everybody knew who Kerry is going up against. As Clift notes, this is what Kerry told them to bring on. And they're bringing it on. Democrats gave Kerry this chance to take on the president -- whose reelect number is hovering in the low to mid-forties -- because they believed he would fight and that he was electable.

Kerry is a fighter. I saw it first hand during his 1996 senate race against Bill Weld. But Kerry will never successfully parry these hits by getting tangled and stuck in the molasses of the president's lies and distortions. Getting sidetracked into a discussion of legislative maneuvering isn't the answer to the president's attacks; it's precisely what they're trying to elicit.

The answer is simply to say they're lies (while having surrogates and staffers explain why) and then to go on the attack.

For instance, the Kerry campaign should never have let Bush get the upper hand on the issue of combat pay, health care, and getting things like body-armor to front line troops. One need only be a casual reader of the military press to know that the president is extremely vulnerable on these issues.

The Bush campaign against Kerry is already crystal clear: Kerry has no center, no core. That makes him a waffler and weak -- too weak to defend the country in perilous times. That's the whole campaign, the whole message.

The winning campaign against the president is equally clear. He doesn't tell the truth. Almost nothing he has told the American people has turned out to be true (from budgets to jobs, from wmds to his personal past). In many cases, that's because he's lied to them. In others, it's because he's promised things he had no reason to believe were true. In some instances, he just failed to deliver.

As you'll note from the Clift column, Republicans themselves know this is his central vulnerability.

Just as the president only tauntingly alludes to the attacks being mounted by his campaign surrogates, Kerry can't go around calling the president a liar in so many words. But the president's credibility and his ability to deliver on his promises should be the centerpiece of his campaign.

Indeed, the president's loss of

We are accustomed to thinking about a president's and the country's 'credibility' abroad as a factor of his willingness to use force. Credibility is key because it is central to a president's ability to protect the country and advance its interests.

But what we are seeing right now is that the president has lost his credibility with the world. Whether foreign leaders want Bush to be reelected is, from a domestic political perspective, irrelevant. Indeed, it can easily backfire on a candidate who seeks to mobilize it against him.

The key is simply that the president has no credibility. He has lost the trust of the country's allies in part because he has repeatedly deceived them -- dealt with them falsely or simply lied to them. But to a critical degree neither do they fear him. This is what we're seeing as our few remaining allies in Iraq ramp back their deployments in the country (Spain, South Korea, possibly Poland) and abandon our foolishly shortsighted effort to advance our interests by dividing Europe.

Right-wingers in this country are casting this pattern as a cosmic moral drama of appeasement, with the faint of heart cowering before the grand struggle. In fact, the president is reduced to a mix of taunt and begging, pleading with other countries not to abandon him. What is a leader without followers? Not a leader.

The president's campaign ads have heavily pressed the point that when confronted with a threat, he takes action -- but with conspicuous inattention to what action he takes, or whether it makes any sense or diminishes the threat.

The message of these ads amounts to ...

Vote Bush: When Dangers Threaten, You Know He'll Go Berserk!

But again, the president has damaged the country's hard credibility by lying to our allies and isolating us from them. For half a century the United States has been the guardian of a prosperous and increasingly democratic world order. If our allies are really abandoning us and making 'separate peaces' with gangs of murderous religious fanatics what does that tell you about this president's leadership? His credibility abroad or even his ability to use hard power to advance the country's interests?

The president made the mess and he lacks the credibility, thus the strength, to clean it up.

Credibility is the thread that ties this whole election together.

Oops ... Compare these paragraphs from a late afternoon article in the Washington Post to the breathless and wildly over-the-top coverage yesterday on CNN (itals added)...

Several thousand Pakistani army troops have surrounded between 150 and 400 tribal fighters and foreign Islamic guerrillas, some of them associated with al Qaeda, as heavy fighting continued in a remote area near the border with Afghanistan, military officials said Friday.

The intensity of the resistance encountered in the rugged hills of South Waziristan has prompted speculation by some military commanders that the tribal fighters and their foreign allies may be protecting senior al Qaeda figures such as Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who is Osama bin Laden's top deputy.

...

Senior Pakistan officials said that the foreign fighters include Chechens, Uzbeks and some Arabs, but they said they had no specific evidence that either bin Laden or Zawahiri was in the area.

"Most recent intelligence inputs do not support the perception that either Osama or Ayman are holed up in that vicinity," said a senior military intelligence officer in Peshawar, the capital of the province in northwestern Pakistan that includes the semi-autonomous tribal area of South Waziristan.

"The idea is to send the strongest message yet to the al Qaeda supporters, but who knows? We may hit the jackpot in the process," the official added.

Who knows?

Anything could happen.

We don't know he's not there! We could hit the jackpot.

Are we in the Hindu Kush or Vegas?

Everybody ran with this story a bit yesterday. But CNN reeeeaaaaaaalllly ran with it, almost certainly because the 'scoop' (or, what shall we call it, maybe the null scoop?) came in an interview CNN's Aaron Brown did with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

(Here's a good story from the LA Times about how all the nets are hurriedly prepositioning their foreign correspondents in Pakistan because they want to be able to go 24/7 when OBL finally gets grabbed.)

This headline in today's Daily Times, a Pakistani paper, sort of sums it up: "CNN ends up with 'much egg on its face'".

(Allow me a moment here to thoroughly relish South Asian English ... Okay, I'm good.)

What made me suspicious about this from the start was the fact that the announcement came right on the day Powell showed up in Islamabad. Helluva coincidence. I'm sure there was a great desire on the part of the Pakistanis to show how thorough a job they are doing hunting al Qaida in the tribal areas. And perhaps this story just got a bit out of control. (What I heard from a very trusted and knowledgable source also led me to believe that CNN was getting way out ahead of the story.)

Maybe he's there. Maybe they'll find him tomorrow. Could be. But for the moment at least I have to agree that CNN does seem to have much egg on its face.

People have been discussing for weeks what would be contained in the soon-to-be-released book by former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke (who served under Clinton and Bush).

CBS is rolling the book on 60 Minutes this Sunday night. And here's the press release they just put out ...

Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Lesley Stahl that on September 11, 2001 and the day after - when it was clear Al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday March 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the 9/11 attacks],'" he tells Stahl.

Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the reason for the focus on Iraq. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between Iraq and Al Qaeda] but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.

Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current administration's reaction to terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies."

At least among people who've followed this story closely, these facts are broadly known, at least in their outlines. Of course, hearing the details from the guy in charge of counter-terrorism at NSC sort of bumps it up a notch. I'll be curious to hear from Clarke just how far along plans for a lunge against Iraq really got.

As I hope to discuss this weekend,

The piece is running today on ABC News and the premise is that Kerry said voting against the $87 billion Iraq supplemental would be "reckless" and "irresponsible" just a few weeks before doing just that.

As we've noted, there were two bills -- one which would fund the $87 billion by rescinding a portion of the president's tax cut, another which would fund it by going $87 billion in to debt. Kerry voted for the first, the latter passed.

The article focuses on an appearance Kerry made on Face The Nation a few weeks before the vote. Doyle McManus asked him whether if his bill failed he would then vote for the other bill. That's a good question. And here was Kerry's response.

I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to — to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible. What is responsible is for the administration to do this properly now.

Kerry just ducked the question. He didn't say he would vote for it or that voting against it was irresponsible or reckless. That itself might be something to knock him for.

But here's how ABC characterizes it.

In the interview, Kerry never clearly stated whether he would or would not vote for the $87 billion funding bill, a fact that may offer him some sort of exculpation. But one of the few press outlets to cover his remarks on the subject, the Washington Times, wrote the next day that "Mr. Kerry said he would still vote to authorize the $87 billion. Not doing so, he said, would be 'irresponsible.'"

This is great. Kerry didn't say he would vote for it or that voting against would be irresponsible. But the tendentious misconstrual offered by the right-wing Washington Times says he did. So let's go with that. And contradicting what the Times said constitutes a flip-flop. Pulling in the Times, along with the frequent uses of variants of verb 'seem' are, I think, a sign that it was clear to the author or the editor that they didn't quite have it.

Of the 'political observers' who allegedly validate the flipflop charge, the only one referenced happens to be the author's boss, ABC News political director Mark Halperin.

The Dems were clear at the time that they weren't going to let the $87 billion go unfunded. They were trying to force a change in how it was funded and force some assurances that the administration would cut loose some of its more hopeless policies -- both of which would be vastly better than what happened.

Some of these points are made clear in the piece. But the thrust of the piece points in quite the opposite direction.

I can understand the Republicans using the vote for all its worth. Kerry didn't want to vote for a bad bill. And that gave his opponents a wedge. Politics is politics, I guess. But I'd figure we could do better from the news coverage.

I'm working today on a magazine article about Democrats and foreign policy, and whether they have an effective vision and strategy for confronting the present challenges -- setting aside whatever one thinks of the policies embraced by the current administration. That's got a monopoly on my time today -- as it has for the last few weeks. So let me just put out a few thoughts on the aftermath of Madrid, which I hope to return to, and to dig into in more depth, later.

First, here are four columns on the topic which have appeared in the last several days. I don't agree entirely with any of them. But they each contain important food for thought. They're by Bob Kagan, Anne Applebaum, Jim Pinkerton and Timothy Garton Ash.

It probably won't surprise you to hear that I find the right-wing charges -- now omnipresent in this country -- about Spanish 'appeasement' to be crass, verging on disgusting, not to mention I think simply untrue.

However, I think Ash has a very good point when he writes the following ...

So far as the Spanish voters' intentions are concerned, the election result was not subjectively a victory for al-Qaida. But it is, as Marxists used to say, an objective victory for al-Qaida. The Madrid bombings look likely to do exactly what a message posted on a radical Islamist website months ago said they should do: exploit the election moment to knock Spain out of the "Crusader-Zionist" coalition in Iraq. Conclusion: terror works.

I don't see how you get around that. But I don't think the policy prescription following from that insight is clear. At a minimum

In the case of Spain, if the impression is that the Spanish have been run out of the country, that's a bad thing. This is especially so since our only real hope of success in the country is to dramatically broaden the military presence, to internationalize it, as the now overworked phrase has it, either through the UN or preferably through NATO -- in some version of the Balkan model.

It's worth noting that the new or incoming Spanish government is on record supporting the continued presence of its troops in the country if such an internationalization of the effort occurs.

(One heartening, encouraging sign in today's papers comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that "Germany -- which helped thwart Washington's pursuit of a United Nations Security Council endorsement for the invasion -- privately has asked Spain's likely new leadership to tone down its anti-U.S. rhetoric." This is precisely the sort of drawing back from the brink -- and distinguishing rather than conflating these different issues -- that we need right now on all sides.)

If there is anything good that can come out of this Spanish tragedy, and it certainly looks like close to wall to wall bad, it is that it may force us to shake the attitude of denial that we're in about the nature of our coalition. A couple of the columns above are right to talk about the increasing danger this all poses to the Atlantic alliance.

But the truth is that we've just been fooling ourselves with all this mumbojumbo about New Europe and whatever Spain had meant, up to this point, about Western unity. The idea that there was a hawkish, pro-American, anti-dirigiste New Europe that we were allying ourselves with against Old Europe (i.e., Germany and France) was never more than a fantasy or a farce.

There was some variation in attitudes toward our policies in Iraq across the continent -- most notably in Poland. And support was somewhat higher in some countries in the post-Communist east. But by and large popular opposition to our policies was close to overwhelming from one end of the continent to the other.

What we were doing was piggybacking on intra-European struggles over unity, fault lines between the bigger states at the center and the smaller, generally poorer ones, on the periphery. And on the topic of the war, we were relying on leaders who offered their support over the overwhelming opposition of their electorates.

In the short-term that kind of support can be key, especially in a military context. But when dealing with democratic allies, in the medium and long-term, it's a losing game. In this sense, I don't think what's happened in Spain has been a blow to Western unity so much as a wake-up call to an already-existing reality which we must face if we are to wage a real war against Islamist terror as opposed to a war of words over Iraq.

On this latter point I continue to believe what I wrote last August, that "generality, vagueness and abstraction is the problem. They are becoming the engines of policy incoherence and the cover for domestic bad-actors who want to get this country into fights few Americans signed up for."

Some of this chatter about the 'war on terrorism' and 'appeasement' and Iraq as a sign of this or that is just disinformation, abuse and lying. But our real situation is genuinely bedeviled and obscured by how deep we are in a thicket of abstraction. This is a struggle of ideas, big ideas. And it's correct to see it in such terms rather than simply as a matter of police work or military capacity. But it can also makes us stumble, make us stumble or fall prey to the trickery of bad actors.

So, for instance, we have a 'war on terror'. Then we insist that invading Iraq is part of the 'war on terror'. But most of our allies don't agree. And now we have one of our nominal allies in the Iraq war possibly pulling out. So we conclude they've bagged on the 'war on terror' when in fact they seem to have bagged on the Iraq war (through pressing our manichean view can become a self-fulfilling reality.) And now we're told that any rethinking of the Iraq war would be a defeat in the 'war on terror'.

The ins and outs of these arguments are complex, I grant that. Still, I think our preoccupation with abstractions -- itself partly a product of nostalgia -- gets us shadow-boxing with ourselves and our friends rather than fighting our enemies.

As Lincoln once said, and this applies across the ideological spectrum, "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

A short follow-up on the Pew poll of foreign attitudes about the United States. Several readers have written in to question my characterization that the poll "appears

In fact, they note, the poll actually shows a slackening of anti-American attitudes in the four Muslim countries surveyed.

As Pew phrases it in one of their summaries, "anger toward the United States remains pervasive [in the four Muslim states surveyed], although the level of hatred has eased somewhat and support for the war on terrorism has inched up."

Now, one issue here is who's an Arab and who's a Muslim. But the key is what Pew's comparison point is. And what they're comparing to in that passage principally is the sounding they did in May 2003 -- in other words, about a month after the war. And from a month after the war to now there has been a slackening, although a modest one in those four Muslim states.

There was a spike. And it's true that the numbers have come down a bit from that high. I should have made that more clear. But the valid point of comparison, to me at least, isn't from the point when there was still smoke in the air till now (tempers do cool of course), but rather going back to before the war happened at all and over the period of the build up to it.

For that you need to go back to the data contained in this Pew survey which was released in 2002 but has data from 1999/2000 as well. Looking across that time horizon, which seems to me to the best for judging the impact of recent events, the trend line is quite clear despite coming down a bit from the spike during the war.

My reference of course was to Arab states nominally allied to the United States and the current Pew survey includes hard data on two of these -- though Morocco is actually mixed language and ethnicity. According to Pew, the favorability rating of the US in Jordan in the summer of 2002 was 25%. Just after the war it was 1%. And it has bounced back, if one can say that without too much irony, to 5%.

(Unfortunately, while Pew has pre-war-on-terror numbers for Pakistan and Turkey, they don't seem to have them -- at least not that I can find -- for Jordan. If anybody can point me to such numbers I'd be most obliged if you can send a reference.)

Now to the other point I mentioned.

One of the things that struck me most about these new numbers -- and comparing them with the December 2002 numbers -- were the opinions about the acceptability of suicide bombings.

Now, there's a problem because the questions don't seem to have been posed in the just the same fashion. In the earlier survey (Dec. 2002) the question was whether suicide bombings are acceptable in 'defense of Islam.' In the more recent survey the question was asked with respect to such attacks in Israel/Palestine and then against Americans or Westerners in Iraq.

Again, slightly different questions. But one can still draw some conclusions from the results. And they're not good.

In the earlier survey (and the questions were only asked of Muslims), the only country where Muslims seemed clearly to support suicide bombings was Lebanon (73% support, 21% oppose).

A number of countries were surveyed and after Lebanon the numbers jumped down rapidly, with a bunch of countries between more or less evenly divided. Jordan, for instance, the numbers were 43% for, 48% against.

Now, again, in the current survey they didn't use the straight 'defense of Islam' phrasing. They asked if suicide bombings were okay in those two places. Jordanians now believe suicide bombings are justifiable by Palestinians against Israelis by a margin of 86% to 12%. Against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq they believe they are justified by a margin of 70% to 24%.

In any case, as with all polls, to a get a sense of what they say you really need to dig into the details and the various subsidiary questions that are asked. So here's the link to the new one, the one from May 2003 and the one I've been referencing from 2002.

Are we about to capture Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaida's #2?

Clearly, something is afoot. Reports from the fighting near the Pakistani border say there is heavy resistance

On the other hand, I don't think you can avoid noting that Secretary of State Colin Powell has been in the neighborhood, most recently in India. And today, the day we hear this announcement, happens to be the very day when Powell came calling in Islamabad with the news that we're designating Pakistan a major non-NATO US ally, which carries not only prestige but significantly facilitates the purchase of US arms.

One needn't assume that the Pakistanis aren't being honest with what they're saying. But I don't think you need to be too imaginative to believe that with Powell in town with a prize in hand there'd be a great desire to put the best face on what may be very ambiguous evidence.

What's more, experts on the running fights through the mountains of Afghanistan in recent years note that these fighters tend to put up fierce fights whether they're protecting a bigwig or not.

All of it adds up to my not really knowing what to make of it. I've talked to several al Qaida experts this afternoon and they don't really seem to know what to make of it either. The best description I could give is to say they each seem like they're in wait-and-see mode, as I guess we all should be.

We'll know soon enough.

Classic. The facts don't mesh with our theory, so let's get new facts.

Last night Richard Perle was on Chris Matthews Hardball show and Matthews pressed him on the results of the new Pew poll which appears to show a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Arab states that are at least nominally allied with the United States. Most daunting, the public in those states is apparently increasingly supportive of suicide bombings.

Here's the exchange ...

PERLE: It is appalling and it is very dangerous. It shows you what happens when you allow suicide bombing to go largely unresponded to for as long as we did.

We had a decade in which we were attacked again and again and we didn't respond. And, eventually, these thing become entrenched and even fashionable.

MATTHEWS: But you said last year, in 2001, right after 9/11, that if we go in, the idea that it is going to damage us in the Arab world is nonsense. You think that our going into Iraq has not stimulated a higher level of hostility to us that would support this kind of horrible attitude toward our deaths?

PERLE: Because the Arab world was on Saddam's side? What is the logic of that? That they object to the fact that we've liberated 25 million Iraqis?

In other words, the facts don't make sense to me so they're not facts.

If this were just spin to snow Matthews and other barkers it would be one thing. But it's the essence of how these folks think, how they deceive themselves when they're not busy deceiving others.

I touched on precisely this point in my column in The Hill on Wednesday but today in The American Prospect Ivo Daalder makes it more pointedly and concisely. And on top of that, he's Ivo Daalder and I'm not ...

This is the third election of a major ally in which the party running against George Bush won. Look at Germany in '02, South Korea in '03, and now Spain. The message is: If you want to get re-elected, don't go to Crawford. Bush is a political liability -- in Europe, in particular. His foreign policy has trampled on the European views and it's now resulting in the election of governments that do not support his approach.

Think about it. And if it doesn't click with you, pick up a copy of Sun Tzu and think about it again.

The Speaker? Or the Meeker?

Denny Hastert on how it felt getting bamboozled by the White House on the cost of the Medicare bill ...

“Yeah, [the higher cost estimate] was a surprise to us, and [I was] surprised it happened. When the administration comes out and says this is going to be more expensive…[it] makes it tougher on us, kind of sticks it to us.”

The quote is from a piece tomorrow in The Hill, which also notes just how many investigations have already been spawned by this bum's-rush-bill.

Just a thought.

One of the things we hear again and again from the administration is that Saddam Hussein still had both the intention and the capability

Isn't this a logical fallacy?

I mean, if you have the intention to build WMDs and the ability to build them, then you have WMDs. It's about as close to 2 + 2 = 4 as you get in human affairs.

Not that this is the biggest bit of ridiculousness coming out 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days. But it's worth noting.

We can infer from the fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction that he lacked either the intention or the ability to have them. Something is missing from the equation. Maybe he had the intention to build them later. Maybe he was working to get back the ability. But he really couldn't have had both.

It's just 'p's and 'q's.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other." George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, March 17th, 2003.

You don't get more trenchant than that.

Bob Novak has a column today noting how tragic it apparently is that Illinois is trending increasingly Democratic. So much so, he laments, that the Bush campaign has already essentially written the state off.

Then he writes ...

Illinois also appears to be getting eliminated from serious consideration in the battle between George W. Bush and John Kerry for the presidency because of a change in the way the state is perceived. No longer a classic swing state that could go either way and produce famous standoffs in 1960 and 1976, Illinois is now considered the most reliably Democratic state in the Midwest.

The 2000 election had a lot to do with that revised image. Al Gore won 55 percent of the vote to Bush's 43 percent, with a 570,000 vote margin. If Illinois were subtracted from the national totals, Bush actually enjoyed a popular vote plurality in the rest of the country.

Hard to quarrel with that

This vaguely reminds me of the line one often hears in TV commentary about Democrats and their 'dependence' on the African-American vote. It's only the African-American vote, the argument goes, that keeps the Democratic party from becoming a permanent minority party.

That's true of course. But what's the point exactly? Presumably if you scratch out all the votes of a major constituency of any political party that would put a bit of a dent in their electoral fortunes, right?

If you wanted to be a little nasty you might, with equal merit, note that the Republican party's goose would be cooked if we disenfranchised everyone who doesn't believe in evolution.

CNN's Bill Schneider gave an almost textbook version of this line a couple years ago on CNN ...

Judy, how dependent are Democrats on the African-American vote?

Without black voters, the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections would have been virtually tied, just like the 2000 election. Oh no, more Florida recounts!

What would have happened if no blacks had voted in 2000? Six states would have shifted from Al Gore to George W. Bush: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oregon. Bush would have won by 187 electoral votes, instead of five. A Florida recount? Not necessary.

Right now, there are 50 Democrats in the Senate. How many would be there without African-American voters? We checked the state exit polls for the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections. If no blacks had voted, many Southern Democrats would not have made it to the Senate. Both Max Cleland and Zell Miller needed black votes to win in Georgia. So did Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Bill Nelson in Florida, John Edwards in North Carolina, and Ernest Hollings in South Carolina.

Black votes were also crucial for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, and Jean Carnahan in Missouri. Washington state and Nevada don't have many black voters, but they were still crucial to the victories of Harry Reid in Nevada and Maria Cantwell in Washington.

Nebraska and Wisconsin don't have many black voters either, but Ben Nelson would have lost Nebraska without them and Russ Feingold would have lost Wisconsin, too, in both cases by less than half-a- percent. Bottom line? Without the African-American vote, the number of Democrats in the Senate would be reduced from 50 to 37.

A hopeless minority. And Jim Jeffords' defection from the GOP would not have meant a thing -- Judy.

I don't want to overstate the point. But nestled down deep in this argument is some sort of perhaps unconscious notion that the Dems are just hopelessly sucking wind among real voters and thus have to resort to padding their totals with blacks.

Again and again I read -- or hear directly from administration supporters -- this excuse that any questioning of the administration's record in foreign affairs, or Iraq, or even on other matters is just a deplorable focusing on the past, a distraction,

This is more than just simple buck-passing. It is a sort of through-the-looking-glass version of how problem-solving and accountability are supposed to work. It also has the perverse benefit of allowing the scope of the administration's failures to become reasons for not discussing those failures -- a sort of self-reinforcing anti-accountability causality loop, with all manner of moral hazards built in.

We've created such a mess that we don't have the time or the luxury to start second-guessing how badly we screwed things up!

I've always been strict about keeping four-letter words off this site. So I apologize for the graphic nature of this analogy. But this is like I come back to my office to find my new employee has taken a crap right on my desk.

Puzzledly and not happy, I say, "What, umm ... what happened here?"

To which he replies, "There you go again, always focusing on the past, how this or that could have been done differently, when what's really important is the future, how we deal with this and other challenges we're going to face."

To which I would reply, "No. The future is exactly what I'm thinking about. And that's why you're fired. Because in the future I can't afford to have anyone working here who craps on my desk, and then when I confront them about it all they can do is dodge responsibility with moronic excuses and try to put the blame on me for asking what the hell is going on."

These guys should be fired too.

And, no, I wouldn't advise the Kerry campaign to base a 30 second ad on this analogy.

This new moveon.org ad about Don Rumsfeld (and the larger issue of administration dishonesty) is very powerful -- in large measure because it's so understated. All it does it replay a brief portion of Rumsfeld's appearance on Face the Nation last Sunday. Give this one a look.

Let me follow up on last night's post on the surreal shamelessness of the president's new TV ad.

As we noted, the new ad uses a very strained argument to allege that

I mean, how do you top that?

One could speculate about some weird sort of projection. A more likely possibility is that they're accusing Kerry first of that which they were in fact first guilty as a way of innoculating themselves.

All intriguing theories. But I suspect the reality is more banal. They just don't care. It's a handy attack. They've got funds to run the ads. And they figure people's memories are short and the press is too lazy or stupid to call them on it.

Clearly, the Kerry campaign should highlight the inaccuracy of the charge. But I think they should be focusing their fire on the shamelessness, the disrespect for the intelligence of the public and the press.

They simply can't stop lying.

That point should be hit again and again and again. And not simply -- or even primarily -- on the narrow point of dishonesty but on the broader issue of disrespect for the people they're communicating with.

'Disrespect' doesn't quite convey the intended message. But it comes close. It may be closer to 'contempt' though I think the attitude is somehow breezier than that. They don't think any rules apply to them.

They want to say up is down. And they're sure they can get away with it because they think the people who are listening are either chumps or that their trust can be exploited endlessly.

We'll be saying more about this in the coming days, but for now just a heads-up.

For some time we've had problems with slow downloading of TPM and even sporadic outages.

(Someday I will share with you the story of screaming into my cell phone

In part, this is due to the fact that our soon-to-be-former hosting service just provides egregiously bad service and support. But the overriding issue is that we've simply outgrown the server set-up that had served our needs well enough for most of the three-plus years the site has been online.

To give you a sense of the growth, TPM's traffic is roughly 1000% higher than it was in late 2002 and roughly 300% what it was in late 2003.

In any case, it's taken us a while to get the logistics and financing worked out. But we're in the midst of moving the site over to a new home flowing not only with milk and honey but, more importantly, copious bandwidth and, I'm told, crackerjack support.

With any luck, you won't notice the switch-over other than perhaps seeing that the site appears more quickly.

We'll keep you posted.

More information on what turned the Spanish election. This passage comes from an interview on Monday night's Newshour ...

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Checa, what is your reading of what was the number one thing behind the outcome? In other words, was it Aznar's support for the war against Bush or those people, or was it this public perception that he was trying to withhold information about who was behind the bombing?

NICOLAS CHECA: Margaret, I really think what the key issue here is the handling or mishandling of public information in the 48 hours after the tragic events of last Thursday. I think it bears mentioning that the election was a statistical dead heat, according to public polls the morning of the tragedy on Thursday morning well within the margin of error, one or two points. And it was really not until Saturday evening, as Keith in your set-up shared with us, that the government decided to come forward with information as to the arrest of these five suspects linked to al-Qaida.

As an example, it took a personal call from Prime Minister Elect Zapatero to the interior minister, the Spanish homeland security secretary, informing him that the Socialist Party was aware of the arrest and that he was prepared to move forward with that information. It took that kind of information to get the current government to come forward and announce to the country at large that in fact it was not the ETA lead that would generate success down the road in the investigation, but rather the al-Qaida route.

MARGARET WARNER: So you're saying it more than just a public suspicion that they were withholding information, in fact the Zapatero campaign had to essentially pressure the government to release this information?

NICOLAS CHECA: Precisely. Yet there was a report earlier in the afternoon on Saturday coming out of Spanish intelligence agency saying that they were 99 percent confident that ETA was not responsible for the attacks and that all the avenues of the investigation pointed into al-Qaida.

In the early afternoon after the arrests had already been made, the director of the Spanish CIA denied those reports and it was after that that the campaign manager for the Zapatero campaign had to come forward and basically inform public opinion that there was information that was not being shared with the population.

Amazing.

As we noted a few days ago, the vagaries of public opinion are simply too great to accurately measure the response to such a traumatic event as the Madrid bombings over such a short period of time as three days.

But this article

(In practice, I suspect both melded together in the public mind.)

This story has been coming into focus slowly in the English-language press (though it was already roiling the Spanish press in the 24 hours just before the election). And the Post piece advances it substantially.

Aznar's government immediately blamed ETA for the bombings based on very little evidence and continued to insist on the ETA theory of the crime even as more and more evidence piled up pointing to an Islamist link.

Aznar himself personally and repeatedly called several major national dailies to press the point that ETA was responsible. As doubts were beginning to mount, Aznar twice called the editor of one Catalan daily El Periodico and "courteously cautioned [the editor] not to be mistaken. ETA was responsible."

Certainly, given Spain's history, a quick rush-to-judgment about ETA's culpability would neither be surprising nor evidence of bad faith. But the article makes a rather good case that there was a coordinated and cynical effort to misdirect public suspicion.

In other words, faced with a great national tragedy, the government tried to deceive the public in order to achieve a political end -- something that is paradoxically heartening since it suggests that, all the recent unpleasantness aside, we Americans and our European brethren seem to share quite a lot in common after all.

As you know, it's now been revealed that the White House threatened the top government Medicare actuary that he'd be fired if he revealed the

What struck me most about this story was how generally muted the reaction to it was.

I don't think this was because it wasn't reported widely or because people didn't take note. I think people just aren't that surprised that this administration would practice deceit in such a casual, even routine, manner.

It's just not surprising anymore. It's expected. (Pat Moynihan died too soon to see the most bracing example of defining -- governmental -- deviancy down.)

In any case, now we have another example from the latest Bush campaign ad.

This one uses last year's $87 billion Iraq supplemental, and the fact that Kerry voted against it, to accuse him of voting against each of the various line items for troop funding included in the bill.

Now, this is inherently misleading since I believe Kerry, like many other Dems, voted for an alternative bill which would have funded these needs by rescinding part of Bush tax cuts. So to say he voted against these particulars is really a distortion of the legislative process.

(Admittedly, it's not quite as bad as what they tried to pull last week, but still pretty bad. In that case, the President charged Kerry with a reckless plan to cut Intelligence spending in 1995, without mentioning that the agency targeted was was mismanaging the funds in question or, much more importantly, that the Congress, then under Republican control, voted a substantially larger cut than the one Kerry had proposed.)

What's more, the commercial highlights three budget items, each of which were ones the president opposed and had to be bullied into supporting -- by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

The text narration says: ""No body armor for troops in combat. No higher combat pay. No to better health care for reservists and their families. No -- wrong on defense."

What's most bracing about this narration is that this is actually a pretty factual statement if the target is the president, not Kerry.

Now, one claim really stands out here. The ad says Kerry voted no to "higher combat pay."

This is truly a milestone in the long bilious history of gall.

If you watched this debate at the time you'll remember that last summer the Bush administration went to great lengths to cut combat pay for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to save money for other priorities. They only relented when Democrats, Republicans and most of all military-oriented publications like Army Times expressed so much outrage that they had no choice but abandon the effort.

Here's a snippet from an article which appeared on August 15th, 2003 in the San Francisco Chronicle which gives a brief glimpse of their ignominious retreat ...

The White House quickly backpedaled Thursday on Pentagon plans to cut the combat pay of the 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan after disclosure of the idea quickly became a political embarrassment.

The Pentagon's support for the idea of rolling back "imminent danger pay" by $75 a month and "family separation allowances" for the American forces by $150 a month collapsed after a story in The Chronicle Thursday generated intense criticism from military families, veterans groups and Democratic candidates seeking to unseat President Bush in 2004.

And so the White House which was pushing to save money by reducing combat pay for troops currently serving in two combat zones is now challenging Kerry's national security bona-fides by alleging that he opposed increases in combat pay.

Sometimes you try to dress it up or package it in some artful way. But the truth is irreducibly blunt: lying and indifference to a factual record often no further away than the google web site is the hallmark of this administration.

Up is down.

Please! No more challenges!

As you know, a couple days ago, Colin Powell challenged John Kerry to come forward with the names of some of the foreign leaders who he says want President Bush turned out of office.

"If he feels it is that important an assertion to make, he ought to list some names. If he can't list names, then perhaps he should find something else to talk about."

After that he apparently upped the ante, denying Kerry's claims that he, Powell, had been undermined or sidelined in administration foreign policy debates.

"Name a specific issue," said Powell, "where it looks like I have been marginalized."

Sorta sad, isn't it?

A brief note on this brouhaha over whether some foreign leaders want president Bush turned out of office in November.

This is the topic of my column tomorrow in The Hill. So I just

Clearly, the president and his surrogates are hammering John Kerry now over this claim and even accusing him of making the whole thing up to hurt the president.

"Either [Kerry] is straightforward and states who they are," said Scott McClellan, "or the only conclusion one can draw is that he is making it up to attack the president."

Now, I don't think there's any question this was an unwise thing for Kerry to say, not least because it's opened him up to all these attacks which are awkward to answer.

But the idea that he's making this up is laughable. The question isn't whether or which foreign leaders don't want to see George W. Bush get another term. A better question is whether there are any outside of perhaps a half-dozen capitals around the world who do.

(Powell knows this perhaps better than anyone.)

The reason it's unwise to say this -- or at least say it so bluntly -- is precisely because it's so undoubtedly true. And the fact that it's true is a difficult matter politically for both candidates.

A new dispatch from the department of telling delays.

You'll remember that the initial excuse which the White House and congressional Republicans used to oppose the 9/11 commission's request to extend its mandate for two months was the claim that the information was just too damned important to let another two months go by before getting it into policymakers' hands.

Along those lines, see this quote from a new article in Time about the president's new commission on the Iraqi intelligence failure. "Five weeks after being appointed, the group has not met, and it is unclear when it will."

One of the keys for Democrats this election season will not only be getting a lot of small donations to Democratic candidates but getting those funds where they can do the most good, where extra money could make the difference in a close race.

Along those lines, the following passage caught my eye.

In the new edition of Charlie Cook's 'Off to the Races' column which is generally positive about the Dems' improving chances in the Senate, there's this passage ...

Republicans might actually get a bit of a break in Illinois. Jack Ryan, an attractive and wealthy former investment banker who was teaching in an inner-city school until recently, is expected to win the GOP primary. The likely Democratic nominee, state Sen. Barack Obama, is equally, if not more, impressive, yet does not have the personal fortune Ryan has. Blair Hull, the fabulously wealthy Democrat, was expected to win the nomination until revelations about his messy divorce and cocaine use in the 1980s doomed his chances. National Democrats had counted on this seat to be the best of all possible worlds, an easy pickup by a self-funding candidate. Now it is likely to be very close and will have to be funded through more traditional -- read difficult -- means.

Here's Obama's website.