Run it by M?

From today's Times ...

In one of several cases in which an Iraqi prisoner died at Abu Ghraib in connection with interrogations, a hooded man identified only by his last name, Jamadi, slumped over dead on Nov. 20 as he was being questioned by a C.I.A. officer and translator, intelligence officials said. The incident is being investigated by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, and military officials have said that the man, whose body was later packed in ice and photographed at Abu Ghraib, had never been assigned a prisoner number, an indication that he had never been included on any official roster at the prison.

The memorandum criticizing the practice of keeping prisoners off the roster was signed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and a James Bond, who is identified as "SOS, Agent in Charge." Military and intelligence officials said that they did not know of a Mr. Bond who had been assigned to Abu Ghraib, and that it was possible that the name was an alias.

An intelligence official said Monday that he could not confirm the authenticity of the document, and that neither "SOS" or "Agent in Charge" was terminology that the C.I.A. or any other American intelligence agency would use. A military official said he believed that the document was authentic and was issued on or about Jan. 12, two days before abuses at Abu Ghraib involving military police were brought to the attention of Army investigators.

Isn't that Feith's nom de guerre when he's in the field? I need to make some calls on that.

I saw Sen. Mitch McConnell tonight marvelling that so much will be accomplished in "a thousand days" in Iraq. He went on to compare this with the twelve years it took the Americans to get their affairs in order after the American Revolution, noting

This is truly becoming almost a slur against our own history. After the conclusion of peace with the British there was almost a complete lack of political violence in the colonies. Disequilibrium, yes. A threat of rebellion in one state? Yes. But one that never really came off. Compared to what we are seeing today in Iraq, the creation of the federal constitution came about in a period of extreme quiescence.

No analogies are perfect, certainly. But if there is anything from the late eighteenth century comparable to the current situation in Iraq it is not the American Revolution but the French Revolution, with legitimacy and the sinews of society in a losing battle with a widening gyre of violence.

The 41% approval for President Bush in the CBS poll is pretty bad. But I hear the internals -- the details of the poll -- are even worse.

Down into Daddy territory. The president's approval rating is down to 41%, according to a just released CBS News poll.

WWLD: What would Lyndon do?

Lloyd Bentsen, bringing it all together with full Texasosity and history, could probably answer the above best.

Newsday, which continues to be one of the two best papers on the entire Iraq-intel story (along with related matters), has a new

But the big story is contained in this sentence: "An intelligence source confirmed to Newsday reports in Time and Newsweek that the FBI had launched an investigation into who in the administration had passed the classified material to his Iraqi National Congress."

Perhaps we'll find out that Chalabi got his classified info from some obscure analyst at DIA or a Colonel in the field. But both of those possibilities seem highly unlikely.

Chalabi's interlocutors in the US government were a fairly small and well-known group, stacked heavily toward the top of the totem pole and very much on the appointive, civilian side -- start with the acronyms OSD and OVP. For those who know the nature of the relationship it would, quite frankly, be hard to imagine that they weren't sharing highly sensitive information with him.

If one of those guys gets pegged for giving Chalabi info that later ended up in the hands of Iranian intelligence, everything up till now will seem like it was a breeze.

One of many noteworthy tidbits contained in Time's new piece on the fall of Chalabi ...

Aras Karim is the fugitive ex-intelligence chief for Ahmed Chalabi. He's the one accused of being an Iranian agent.

According to Time, he has now relocated to Tehran.

This article in the Times suggests that the uranium which Libya turned over to the US in January may have come from North Korea rather than Pakistan, an ominous development, if true.

Finally, finally, the president has decided to confront the root problem in our troubled occupation of Iraq: the spin deficit.

From Robin Wright's front page piece in tomorrow's Post ...

President Bush will launch an ambitious campaign tomorrow night to shift attention from recent setbacks that have eroded domestic and international support for U.S. policy in Iraq, particularly the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the escalating violence, and focus instead on the future of post-occupation Iraq.

The president will open a tightly orchestrated public relations effort in a speech at the Army War College outlining U.S. plans for the critical five weeks before the transfer of political power June 30.

Along related lines, I can't help but wonder whether the spill the president took from his bicycle today won't become iconic in the same way that the state dinner the first President Bush attended in Tokyo on January 8th 1992 in which he collapsed into the arms of, and then vomited on, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa became a symbol of his then-faltering presidency.

Drudge reported the following about John Kerry's alleged response ...

Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, 'Did the training wheels fall off?'... Reporters are debating whether to treat it is as on or off the record... Developing...

Let me translate this: Off the record John Kerry quipped "Did the training wheels fall off?" But the quote was so good that several reporters couldn't resist and passed it on to Drudge.

Bad politics? Maybe.

But I have to admit that it made me laugh and think of these two grafs from a post from Thursday afternoon ...

According to several participants, President Bush told Republicans that the Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming power.

That's a bit of a condescending thing to say about a country which encompasses what is generally considered to be the cradle of civilization. But the thought that an extra set of training wheels may now be available prompts the question of whether the Iraqis might be willing to hand their pair off to the White House.

On the other hand, giving it more thought, perhaps what he needs is not so much a pair of training wheels as a set of brakes ...

So how about the reader survey? We're still slicing and dicing the numbers in different ways. But I wanted to share some of the highlights.

We had a lot of respondents (20,708) and we left the survey open for twenty-four hours on a week day.

First, the number that, I have to confess, left me a touch chagrined: 81% of TPM readers are men.

(By the way, on all these numbers, I'm rounding to the closest whole number -- the exact figure was 80.82%).

Now, not only are you mainly male. But you're also, well ... pretty rich.

Here are the income figures ...

$200,000 or more = 7%
$150,000 to $199,999 = 7%
$100,000 to $149,999 = 20%
$75,000 to $99,999 = 18%
$50,000 to $74,999 = 19%
$25,000 to $49,999 = 16%
Under $25,000 = 7%
Rather not respond = 6%

Pretty well educated too. 85% of our readers have a college degree. And 46% have an advanced degree.

The age spread seemed pretty unsurprising to me ...

75 and older = 1%
65-74 = 4%
55-64 = 14%
45-54 = 25%
35-44 = 26%
25-34 = 24%
21-24 = 4%
18-21 = 1%
0-18 = 0.17%

Now, the one question that people wrote in and complained about was the one that asked people to characterize themselves politically. And the complaint in almost every case was that they weren't given enough flavors on the leftward side of the spectrum to choose a designation that fit them. The options were Liberal, Moderate, New Democrat, Independant, Libertarian, Conservative, and Neo-Conservative.

Lots of people wrote in saying they wanted to be able to choose "progressive", though in a sign of how complicated this political designation issue is, it was clear that some of those people meant 'progressive' as a designation to the left of 'liberal' and others meant it as a designation to the right of 'liberal'.

Others simply wanted to be able to call themselves Democrats or Republicans, rather than define themselves in terms of ideology. Not a few complained that the menu of options left no choice for those who defined themselves to the left of liberal. And at least one reader wrote in to tell me that since I clearly meant to demean those to the left of liberal he was removing TPM from his 'favorites' list. (Yeah, it's a tough business running a center-left website!)

In any case, there was no great thought, to be candid, that went into choosing these designations. And the point of the exercise was not reader self-expression. What we were trying to find out was the answer to a question people often ask about this and other related sites -- Is the audience just made up of people who, on balance, agree with my views or is it more diverse? Is it just preaching to the choir? We started with Liberal/Moderate/Conservative and then added from there in a pretty arbitrary fashion.

In any case, here were the answers, from the choices given above, 60% chose "Liberal" while another 35% chose "Moderate" (12%), "New Democrat" (12%) or "Independent" (11%).

Responses to the other choices were negligible: "Libertarian" 2%, "Conservative" 1%, "Neo-Conservative" .28%.

Remember, in all but the last instance I'm rounding off.

Those numbers basically make sense to me, since they range across the center-left spectrum. Cross-referencing these numbers with the income numbers, I guess we could say that TPM has a high percentages of readers who aren't "paying their fair share" and know it -- a little Clintonian humor there.

In any case, the responses confirmed to me that the site's readers are measurably, though not markedly, more to the left than I am.

I suspect that there was a sample bias on the rightward side of the spectrum since self-identified Conservatives probably have an antagonistic feeling towards the site. And thus, I think, they were probably less inclined to give us time to help the site by completing the survey. But that's just a surmise. You have the hard data in front of you and can make your own judgment.

92% of readers live in the United States. And of those, the responses were fairly evenly spread out over the country. I haven't looked too closely at these numbers yet -- and we did it by zip code so we'll eventually be able to look down very specifically into urban/suburban/rural divisions, etc. -- but a brief look shows some clear red state/blue state division, but not a stark one. So for instance, 17% of our American readers are from California, 10% from New York, 6% from Texas.

83% of our readers have "donated money to a political campaign, party committee or non-profit organization." 81% have bought a book online in the last six months; 70% have made travel arrangements online over that same time period, etc.

Finally, the five top professional categories were ...

Computer / IT = 16%
Education (includes students) = 15%
Other = 11%
Lawyer = 8%
Media / Publishing / Entertainment = 7%

2.5%, 509 respondents, classified themselves as "journalists".

We'll eventually put all this together in a more systematic fashion. But, as I said, those are some of the highlights.

An important new development.

According to an article in the New York Post, of all places, the Bush administration's dramatic turn against Ahmed Chalabi and the INC was precipitated

The dossier, writes Niles Lathem, included details of INC "Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran."

This provides a key piece of background information on the reports from last night that the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that Chalabi's INC 'intelligence operation' was in fact a front for Iranian intelligence, filtering the US WMD disinformation prior to the war and sending highly classified American military intelligence to the Iranians since the beginning of the occupation. The charges center on Aras Karim, Chalabi's intelligence chief.

As we noted last night, the CIA has apparently believed Aras Karim was an Iranian agent since the middle 1990s. It was, says the Post, this Jordanian dossier which confirmed already existing suspicions of Chalabi in the US intelligence community and led to the termination of his monthly American subsidy of $340,000 use to spy on us, it would seem, for the Iranians.

The enmity between the Jordanians and Chalabi is both primal and mortal. And as I've told you a few times recently, late last year, Abdullah brought the US reputedly incontravertible proof that Chalabi had had advance warning about the bombing of Jordan's embassy in Baghdad at the end of last year.

(The Chalabis are an old family; the Hashemites, much, much older.)

Also, see this post from last night for an important note of caution about all this new stuff we're hearing.

On the new charges that Ahmed Chalabi's 'intelligence chief' Aras Karim is in fact an Iranian spy, Knut Royce's piece in Newsday

The Post meanwhile has a lengthier, though less clear-cut account, which includes important new details and an interview with Chalabi's long-time Washington handler Francis Brooke.

(ed. note: Most of the articles discussing this issue refer to the man in question as Aras Karim Habib, though he is sometimes referred to as Aras Habib, Aras Karim, or Aras Habib Karim.)

Now, you probably remember all that has been said about the $340,000 a month stipend that the US was paying until just a few days ago for Chalabi's 'Information Collection Program' (ICP), basically the INC's intelligence operation, which was until recently supposed to become the nucleus of the new Iraqi intelligence service.

(According to a June 2001 letter which the INC sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the information collected was sent directly to the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President.)

Now, who was in charge of the ICP?

Right, Aras Karim.

A few more details.

We've been discussing for some time that Chalabi's connections to the Iranians and his flow of money from the Iranians has been known about among Chalabi's Washington supporters for years. But suspicions that Aras Karim was an Iranian agent are not new either.

Take this October 13th, 1998 New York Times article, which says that "An F.B.I. report said Mr. Karim's cousin Aras Habib Muhamad Al-Ufayli, who had been the intelligence chief for the Iraqi National Congress, had a 'well-documented connection to Iranian intelligence.'"

That article in the Times was about the on-going INS detention of a group of Iraqis who had worked with the INC in northern Iraq and were later held in detention by the INS because of alleged national security concerns. They were represented by former CIA Director James Woolsey, who was also a lobbyist for the INC.

(At the time, the case garnered a great deal of attention, and for good reason, because of the use of so-called 'secret evidence' in the detentions.)

Two years later, Dr. Ali Yasin Mohammed Karim, of the six original detainees, was finally released from INS custody. And the following passage appeared in an August 19th, 2000 article in the LA Times (emphasis added)...

Attorneys for the INS have contended that there is a reasonable belief Karim is a danger to national security. They have argued that one of the doctor's cousins is a suspected Iranian intelligence agent, the doctor's travel patterns were suspicious, and he might have misled federal agents about how his brother Mohammed made it into the United States.

Defense lawyers say the declassified material amounted to little more than rumor.

They said the espionage allegations were largely based on uncorroborated reports culled by FBI agents from Iraqi refugees, who were interviewed in Guam by the FBI after being evacuated from Iraq.

That information shows, for example, that one FBI agent thought Karim might be a spy for Iran, while another agent thought he was a mole for Iraq; the two countries are enemies.

In addition, the summary states that Karim's cousin, Aras, is suspected of being an Iranian intelligence agent, but it offers no specifics.

I suspect we'll be hearing more specifics.

The Ryan campaign, it seems, has decided to cut its losses.

As we reported early Friday, Jason Miller, campaign manager for Illinois Republican senate candidate Jack Ryan, defended the actions of the videographer/stalker his campaign sicced on opponent Barack Obama in quotes given to the Chicago Sun-Times.

(For the details of what was involved, see this earlier post.)

But the campaign has now decided to apologize, according to this late report, and call off the dogs, or rather the dog.

"I have no reason to doubt [Obama's] word and I offer an apology on behalf of the campaign," said Communications Director Bill Pascoe, according to late reports.

I've asked you, the TPM readership, for many things -- to give contributions, to take surveys, and certainly other things I can't remember. But this is the greatest request. Someone ... someone out there, I have to imagine, and probably it will

At an earlier point, we might have imagined it would be Wagnerian. But I'm thinking more Verdi or actually Mozart, some sort of Opera Buffa, though perhaps the better question is whether Paul Sorvino is cast as Ahmed Chalabi or Richard Perle.

Who could miss the duet between Chalabi and Ali Khamenei in which the dark secret is revealed or Richard Perle's haunting, despairing aria at the beginning of the final act, in which this hawk of hawks, friend of Israel, swordsman against terror, and deacon in the high church of moral clarity confronts the shattering truth that he's played the cat's paw for what the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to this just-released article from Newsday, has determined was (horribile dictu!) actually a front for Iranian intelligence.

(Yes, the DIA, says Newsday, has concluded that the INC's 'Information Collection Program' was an Iranian front.)

Even now, I can almost feel myself raising a tissue to my eye for his moment of bleak sorrow. La Donna e Mobile, indeed!

From a trickle to a torrent ...

On Friday, Stahl reported that senior intelligence officials stress the information Ahmad Chalibi is alleged to have passed on to Iran is of such a seriously sensitive nature, the result of full disclosure could be highly damaging to U.S. security. The information involves secrets that were held by only a handful of very senior U.S. officials, says Stahl.

Meanwhile, Stahl reports that "grave concerns" about the true nature of Chalabi's relationship with Iran started after the U.S. obtained "undeniable intelligence" that Chalabi met with a senior Iranian intelligence, a "nefarious figure from the dark side of the regime - an individual with a direct hand in covert operations directed against the United States."

Chalabi never reported this meeting to his friends and sponsors in the U.S. government, says Stahl.

In truth, and not to defend Chalabi, but I think we need to wait and watch these reports closely. Much

It's not that the claims are false. In fact, I quite suspect the opposite. But what we're seeing here is less the result of new revelations than the outward signs of deep tectonic shifts within the US government -- the discrediting of some factions and agencies, the attempts of others to reposition themselves in a moment of acute crisis and get ahead of the storm, and the freeing up of others to assert themselves for the first time in years.

It's probably too dramatic to compare this to the bubbles, choppy water and occasional scraps churned up by a Piranha feeding. But the struggles that are giving rise to all these leaks and tergiversations of the state are the real story -- one that it is difficult to see directly, but possible to glimpse in what we can infer from its effects and repercussions.

From regime change to seat change.

Here's a clip from the Washington Post's Inside the Loop column from January 23rd, providing some backdrop to that Chalabi at the State of the Union picture ...

Meanwhile, the buzz is that enemies of Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's favorite, appeared to have misplaced his seating reservations. Council chief (they rotate) Adnan Pachachi was set to be on Laura Bush's left and the council's rep here, Rend Rahim Francke, given a seat on her right.

Chalabi and his folks are said to have mounted a fierce campaign to correct this obvious oversight. The effort rivaled in intensity one undertaken at the end of the Iraq invasion which, as reported in The Washington Post, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and several hundred heavily armed men into Baghdad. Vice President Cheney approved that move, which some people thought might have been an effort to have Chalabi take over and avoid all this messy transition business.

And so it goes ...

Pelosi, Shlemosi ... On the incompetence beat before incompetence was cool!

"Confidence Men: Why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary" September, 2002, The Washington Monthly.

For the Cheney-specific incompetence case, see "Vice Grip" from Jan/Feb 2003.

What? I've gotta plug my own stuff sometimes, right?

Another article to read: the San Francisco Chronicle's Robert Collier on the Chalabi, the dense web of power he's put together by installing (with our backing) relatives and cronies at the key government ministries in Baghdad, and how much mischief there still is for him to make.

Some thoughts to consider on the Israeli-Palestinian death-embrace in Gaza, from the Israel Policy Forum ("A Way Out?").

A note from a reader who is a former US government official ...

OK, the press has now understood that Chalabi was providing US intelligence to the Iranian intelligence service. That's a start.

Here are some questions you might want to ask.

Where did he get the intelligence to leak? Who gave Chalabi the leaked classified information?
Was it lawful to provide Chalabi with classified USG military information that included such things as where our troops were and what they were doing?
Who is under investigation as a result of the intercepts of the Iranians discussing the intelligence provided by Chalabi? Who are the investigators? Has this been referred to the Department of Justice?
Did his provision of that information to Iran result in the death of US soldiers in Shi'ia areas?
Are the intel leaks the reason for the raids of Chalabi's home?
Are the intel leaks the reason they cut off his income?
Why did the USG say that Chalabi was not a "target" of the raids on his home? (It's possible other members of his family are the ones who are being used directly to provide the intel to Iran.)

Hmmmm. Who were Chalabi's US government interlocutors? What a mystery ...

Politics is certainly a rough business. And it's common, and understandable, that candidates will often send staffers to videotape or record their opponents' speeches.

But we seem to have an embarrassing new low in the Illinois senate race --

Barack Obama is the Democratic candidate for the open seat and his opponent is Republican Jack Ryan. For the last ten days, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Ryan has had a campaign staffer, Justin Warfel, follow Obama with a video camera all day.

And I mean, all day.

Not only does he record Obama's public appearances, he tails Obama in his car; he follows him into restrooms; he stays a couple feet behind him when he's walking in public; he waits outside his office and pesters his secretary. And he heckles Obama at public appearances.

The Chicago Sun-Times asked Ryan's campaign manager if this was appropriate ...

But Jason Miller, Ryan's campaign manager, insisted Obama's public movements are fair game and the point is to make sure Obama doesn't contradict himself with his public statements.

"If he's having a phone conversation, then Justin is not trying to tap into the conversation or record what he is saying or something like that," Miller said. "He's monitoring because you never know when ... a reporter comes up and starts asking questions."

The State's Republican Senate Minority Leader disagreed. "I don't care if you're in public life or who you are," Frank Watson (R-Greenville) told the Sun-Times. "You deserve your space, your privacy. I don't think it's appropriate."

If you'd like to register your opinion here's Obama's website and here's Ryan's.

Next up Gen. Zinni.

This from a CBS press release about Zinni's appearance this Sunday night on 60 Minutes ...

Accusing top Pentagon officials of "dereliction of duty," retired Marine General Anthony Zinni says staying the course in Iraq isn't a reasonable option. "The course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course," he tells Steve Kroft in an interview to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, May 23 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

The current situation in Iraq was destined to happen, says Zinni, because planning for the war and its aftermath has been flawed all along. "There has been poor strategic thinking in this...poor operational planning and execution on the ground," says Zinni, who served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000.

He blames the poor planning on the civilian policymakers in the administration known as neoconservatives who saw the invasion as a way to stabilize the region and support Israel. He believes these people, who include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, have hijacked U.S. foreign policy. "They promoted it and pushed [the war]...even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs. Then they should bear the responsibility," Zinni tells Kroft.

In his upcoming book, Battle Ready, written with Tom Clancy, Zinni writes of the poor planning in harsh terms. "In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility; at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption," he writes. Zinni explains to Kroft, "I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and [in not] fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan."

He still believes the situation is salvageable if the U.S. can communicate more effectively with the Iraqi people and demonstrate a better image to them. The enlistment of the U.N. and other countries to participate in the mission is also crucial, he says. Without these things, says Zinni, "We are going to be looking for quick exits. I don't believe we're there now, and I wouldn't want to see us fail here," he tells Kroft. Also central to success in Iraq is more troops, from the U.S. and especially other countries, to control violence and patrol borders, he says.

Zinni feels that undertaking the war with the minimum of troops paved the way for the security problems the U.S. faces there now - the violence Rumsfeld recently admitted he hadn't anticipated. "He should not have been surprised," says Zinni. "There were a number of people who before we even engaged in this conflict that felt strongly that we underestimated...the scope of the problems we would have in [Iraq]," he tells Kroft.

The fact that no one in the administration has paid for the blunder irks Zinni. "But regardless of whose responsibility...it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up, and whose heads are rolling on this?"

Incompetence + No Accountability = Bad Show for Nation. I was never good at math; but I think I've got this formula right.

And what will they say about Zinni? Another disgruntled showboater like Clarke and Wilson?

Department of unintended Chalabi ironies. From President Bush's commencement speech at LSU: "On the job, and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you. And that can be a good thing or a bad thing."

Ahmed who? From Robin Wright's piece in Friday's Post ...

"The vast majority of reports of his proximity to and influence on administration policy have been greatly exaggerated," said a senior administration official involved in Iraq policy who knows Chalabi. "The reality is that he was among a wide variety of Iraqi figures who made the case to an array of American officials over a period of time for the liberation of the Iraqi people."

Ask not for whom the memory-hole sucks, Ahmed; it sucketh for you ...

For years the backdrop to the Chalabi question was his 1992 conviction in absentia on charges of embezzlement in Jordan. To his American critics this was the crux of who Chalabi was: a crook. To his American partisans it was a political conviction, a slur, a price Chalabi had paid for earlier opposition to Saddam. (The Jordanians had, so the story went, turned on Chalabi at Saddam's behest.)

Now read this: a few grafs at the end of Post's piece on the Chalabi raid ...

For several months, U.S. officials have been investigating people affiliated with the INC for possible ties to a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency that took place from Oct. 15 last year to Jan. 15, according to a U.S. occupation authority official familiar with the case. The official said the raids were partly related to that investigation.

At the center of the inquiry is Nouri, whom Chalabi picked as the top anti-corruption official in the new Iraqi Finance Ministry. Chalabi heads the Governing Council's finance committee, and has major influence in its staffing and operation.

When auditors early this year began counting the old Iraqi dinars brought in and the new Iraqi dinars given out in return, they discovered a shortfall of more than $22 million. Nouri, a German national, was arrested in April and faces 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority. He is being held in a maximum security facility, according to three sources close to the investigation.

Speaks for itself.

Ahhh nothing like money well spent ...

According to a new GAO report, from March 2000 to September 2003, the State Department doled out some $33 million to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.

You can see the highlights of the report here and the whole deal here.

Of course, by a rather more expansive, though not unjust, measure, we dropped around $300 billion on our association with the Chalabi crew.

In Slate this afternoon, Chris Suellentrop, has a short profile of Doug Feith, the man who put the FU in the FUBAR that is the American adventure in Iraq. The subheading of the piece pretty much says it all: "What has the Pentagon's third man done wrong? Everything."

Feith has become the living, breathing, employed example of the fact that epochal screw-ups are the best source of job security within the Bush administration.

If anything, I'd say Chris lets Feith off a bit easy on several counts. But then, consider the source (i.e., me).

In any case, take a look.

In the category of articles you should not miss: Take a look at Wes Clark's new piece in The Washington Monthly on democracy, the Middle East and the how the Bush administration failed to understand how either works.

A tad tentative?

On CNN's new Chalabi story, the caption under Chalabi's picture reads: "Ahmed Chalabi is thought to have been a source of intelligence about Iraq's alleged WMD."

Like alleged Ba'athist Saddam Hussein.

A follow-up on this morning's post: Juan Cole says Chalabi has been suspended from the IGC. Maybe now he'll head north and found the Salo Republic -- that's a little Italian history shout-out. Another thought: why doesn't someone ask the Jordanians about the telephone intercept they shared with the Americans last fall showing that Chalabi had foreknowledge of the bombing of their embassy in Baghdad on August 7th.

Of course, the heart is a fickle, fickle thing. Here's the pre-Sharia-Chalabi (in the back on the left in the picture) as the guest of the First Lady at the 2004 State of the Union, a mere four months ago.

Talk about a not-so-fun meeting.

President Bush was up on the Hill this morning meeting with Congressional Republicans to quell their growing anxiety that their job

The tenor of the event can probably be judged by the fact that the 'rallying cry' coming out of the meeting seems to have been that things are really bad and almost certain to get worse.

Rah! Rah!

According to several participants, President Bush told Republicans that the Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming power.

That's a bit of a condescending thing to say about a country which encompasses what is generally considered to be the cradle of civilization. But the thought that an extra set of training wheels may now be available prompts the question of whether the Iraqis might be willing to hand their pair off to the White House.

As it happens, I was up on the Hill myself this morning for an early meeting and managed to get caught in the security sweep that preceded the president's visit -- something complicated by the fact that I wasn't carrying a press credential on me.

After parting company with my host, I went to one exit and was told I couldn't leave that way. And then, amid a thickening crowd of capitol police and secret service, I went to another exit.

"Where are you trying to go?"

"I'm just trying to leave."

"Lemme see some ID?"

"Why are you here?"

Etc. etc. etc. ...

Eventually one of the security team said I had just been seen walking down the hall with a member of congress. That seemed to stand me in semi-good-stead. And after being escorted to the Senate side of the Capitol I was cut loose in true catch-n-release fashion, none the worse for wear.

I've had a slew of readers writing in and asking -- or insisting -- that the raid on the Baghdad home of Ahmed Chalabi and INC headquarters was, if not staged, then conducted with the intent of boosting Chalabi's popularity by appearing to

So could this be true?

I have no direct knowledge. I just got back from a few meetings. And I've had no time to make any calls yet. But I'm very skeptical of this interpretation.

I don't doubt that some of Chalabi's Washington supporters have encouraged him to take a more oppositional stand toward the occupation authorities to bolster his own popularity. But there are many US government players in Iraq right now. And many of them really are hostile to Chalabi.

Something quite that orchestrated would, I suspect, be far too difficult to pull-off. And are we dealing here with smooth operators? Answers itself, doesn't it?

One other point: You only have to look next door to see what happens to American puppets after they have their fallings-out with the Americans. Clue: They don't get embraced by the other side. In fact, that guy from nextdoor was lucky to get out of the country in one piece.

Another theory -- or at least a portion of one -- is contained in an article appearing this morning in Salon by Andrew Cockburn. The article points to US government suspicions that Chalabi may be plotting against the soon to be announced caretaker government, chosen by American officials and UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi.

Cockburn notes Chalabi's continued efforts to ally himself with Shia sectarian groups in Iraq, particularly the new umbrella group he's created, variously translated as the Shiite Political Council or the Supreme Shia Council (I'm assuming these titles I've seen referred to are in fact the same group).

Cockburn mentions that Chalabi's new Shia sectarian faction includes members of Iraqi Hezbollah. And though he doesn't mention him by name, I believe he is referring in particular to a man named Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi, a key member of Iraqi Hezbollah.

Chalabi's dwindling number of Washington supporters have awkwardly claimed that his efforts to ally himself with Shia Islamist groups in Iraq is an evidence of their man's 'pragmatism', recognizing the political realities of the country and adjusting accordingly. This is an echo of their pre-invasion efforts to explain the copious funding Chalabi received from the government of Iran, which, in case you hadn't noticed, is not supposed to be a great friend of ours.

If you're looking for any entertainment, any silver lining to this mess, watch the faces of the hardest core Chalabistas and watch the less and less subtle ripples of chagrin on their faces as their man more and more publicly shows how much he played them for fools.

Could this really be happening? US troops raid Chalabi's residence in Baghdad, seize documents? What will Harold say? Will Richard be next?

It's an obvious question really, but worth asking, worth considering: How long do we think the administration, the CPA, the UN and whoever else now has a finger in the pie will wait to announce what government, even what sort of government

What's the absolute latest you can imagine? A month? A week? Could it be like one of Bill Clinton's state of the union addresses where they're fiddling with the small print until a couple hours before showtime?

I'd be surprised if they came up with a plan by the end of this month and I cannot imagine they'd leave it until less than a week before June 30th.

But just step back and look at how crazy this is: we've run Iraq for more than a year, spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the whole effort, lost many of our own sons and daughters as well as many Iraqis. And here you have what is arguably the big issue: who you hand the place off to and how you hand it off to them. And it's left to the last minute, with the powers that be having to ditch almost everything that has come up until this point and start from scratch.

The market in examples for how badly the Bush team has bungled this situation is admittedly glutted. But even if they're now going for a dime a dozen this is really one to marvel at.

Now, another related point: the increasing velocity and ferocity of war-hawks trying to shift the blame for their own goofs by inventing a new stab-in-the-back theory (nicely patterned on the original one from Weimar Germany) to cushion their consciences from the brunt of recognizing the dire pass to which their own foolishness and reckless zeal have brought their country.

The chief example I've seen -- though there must be many others -- is John Podhoretz's column in The New York Post from last Friday, May 14th.

The column is a string of accusations. The first is against The New York Times for, according to Podhoretz, blaming the United States, rather than his murderers, for Nick Berg's death. "The Times," writes Podhoretz, in concluding this section of his piece, "is leading the mainstream media in turning the United States into the bad guys in Iraq."

Podhoretz's evidence is an article in the Times which reports the Berg family's claims that the Bush administration somehow bears some of the blame for their son's death.

Now, just as Berg's death shouldn't have been cynically exploited by Bush partisans, what his family says shouldn't be exploited in the other direction. But simply reporting what the family says in a news article hardly seems to merit anything Podhoretz says. What he wants is a black-out on anything the family says -- and that in the context of the saturation coverage of the murder itself -- because it is politically off-message.

Then there's the Time magazine cover with an Abu Ghraib image which reads "Iraq: How Did It Come to This?"

After blowing some smoke about the war's aim of "liberat[ing] 25 million people and rout[ing] Islamic extremists, terrorists and those who thirst for the mass murder of Americans" Podhoretz calls the Time cover "a vile and grotesque slander against every American in uniform in Iraq."

At length, the column concludes with these four grafs ...

So let's be clear what's going on here. As we speak, 138,000 Americans are serving under dangerous conditions in Iraq. And our forces in Karbala are fighting against the goons and thugs of Muqtada al-Sadr with some success. They're risking their lives for freedom and honor and duty and love of country.

And conventional liberal opinion wants them to lose.

Conventional liberal opinion believes that the Abu Ghraib photos are the true meaning of the war, and that Nick Berg is just another victim of callous U.S. policy.

Conventional liberal opinion is actively seeking the humiliation and defeat of the United States in Iraq.

Let's be a little more clear about what's going on here. Having led the country perilously close to humiliation and defeat, the architects of the war want to shift the blame for what's happened to their opponents who either said the whole thing was a mistake in the first place or criticized the incompetence of its execution as it unfolded. They take the blame, the moral accountability, by 'wishing' for a bad result. That at least is Podhoretz's reasoning.

If ever there was an example of moral up-is-downism, this is it. And claiming that their political opponents -- liberal, in Podhoretz's usage here, is just a catch-all -- want defeat and humiliation for their country is certainly the most gutterish sort of slander there is.

There's something almost uncomfortable about watching the mix of desperation, panicked zeal and projection evidenced in Podhoretz's column. It's like the pornography of watching someone beg for his life or shift the blame onto someone else when they've been caught in the act -- with the added twist of spasms of aggression mixed in. But on a broader level, it's in character. Not for Podhoretz -- this isn't at all directed at him as a person -- but for the movement, the crew, he's part of and is trying to defend.

How'd we get into this? After 50 years of pretty consistently prudential foreign policy, managed mostly on a consensus of bipartisan agreement (yes, there are exceptions, but by and large, true), they decided to bet the national ranch on an idea. Actually it was a series of ideas, wrapped together in an odd tangle that could look like an odd jumble when viewed from outside. The key, however, was betting the national ranch on steep odds.

Only, they weren't confident the country would get behind such a riverboat gamble. So they lied about what they were doing. They didn't trust the people -- which might be an epitaph we should return to.

Now, what do we expect of people who make reckless gambles with other people's money? Of people who can't discipline themselves enough to distinguish between their hopes and reality? What do you expect of that ne'er-do-well relative who's always hitting you up for a loan because he's come up with a sure thing?

Do you expect those sorts of folks to take responsibility when things go bad? Or do you expect them to blame others?

Character, alas, really does count.

Frequently, when I read a column by Bill Safire, I have to think to myself: who was the editor on this piece? And what must he or she have thought when they were editing this stuff? Read the man's column

This piece is such a clotted mix of discredited ridiculousness, slurs, false claims of racism, disinformation and lies that it's hard to know where to start.

But allow me a few examples.

First, there's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Safire is still claiming that back before the invasion Zarqawi's group was working not just within Iraq's international borders but at the behest of Saddam Hussein. In other words, Safire is still relying on the say-so of the folks who peddled the most discredited of pre-war intel mumbojumbo. Apparently he hasn't gotten the word. The line is still open to Chalabi, who finally got cut off by the Pentagon this week and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, the guy who put the FU in FUBAR.

(Remember how Zarqawi was supposed to have had his leg amputated in Baghdad before the war? Notice how he now seems to have two legs?)

Then there's the about-to-be-found caches of biological weapons. For a few months after the war, Safire and similar folks claimed that we weren't finding the goods because scientists were still afraid Saddam might make a come back -- after all, he and other high-value targets were still on the loose. Never a very probable theory -- and one pretty well disproved by the deaths of Saddam's sons and Saddam's eventual capture.

Now Safire has a new theory. "In a sovereign and free Iraq, when germ-warfare scientists are fearful of being tried as prewar criminals, their impetus will be to sing — and point to caches of anthrax and other mass killers."

To use a much-overused line, you can't make this stuff up. It transcends self-parody.

Conservatives hunting for media-bias in the Times often pick on its more liberal columnists. In fact, if there's bias to be found, it's in Safire. Only lack of interest and respect for conservative opinion can fully explain Safire's continued presence on the page.

Thank you, thank you and ... well, thank you.

We posted our TPM reader survey overnight last night. And the response has been amazing. As of late this evening, we're just shy of 20,000 responses. To be specific, as of 11:30 PM here on the east coast, we're at 19,448.

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Here's one of the Democratic candidates that everyone is excited about. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the open Senate seat in Illinois. And now his campaign's got a blog.