War and Piece

William Safire is, true to form, out of control. He tries to portray the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda did not indeed engage in meaningful cooperation as the marginalized opinion of the commission's [Republican] staff director, Philip Zelikow, and says the commission's co-chairmen have walked back from that conclusion.

The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow. After Vice President Dick Cheney's outraged objection, the staff's sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton.

"Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?" Kean asked himself. "Yes . . . no question." Hamilton joined in: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections . . . we don't disagree with that" — just "no credible evidence" of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attack.

The Zelikow report was seized upon by John Kerry because it fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks (which, as Hamilton said yesterday, modifying his earlier "no credible evidence" judgment, was "not proven one way or the other.")

Excuse me. Safire is here saying not only that there is evidence of meaningful cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and not only that the 9/11 commissioners buy into that conclusion [contrary to everything they have been reported to have said on the matter, with the exception of commissioner John Lehman, whose brother Chris worked in the Office of Special Plans]. Safire is out there with the Laurie Mylroie die-hards saying that there is evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks. What's more, he's saying the 9/11 commissioners haven't ruled that out.

That more than contradicts what the commissioners themselves are reported saying, to say the least. From the Times Monday:

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, reiterated Sunday that the inquiry turned up no evidence that Iraq or its former leader, Saddam Hussein, had taken part "in any way in attacks on the United States."

But Mr. Kean said that conclusion, made public last week, did not put the commission at odds with the Bush administration's contention that links existed between the terrorist group Al Qaeda and Iraq.

In an interview on the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Kean said, "All of us understand that when you begin to use words like `relationship' and `ties' and `connections' and `contacts,' everybody has a little different definition with regard to those statements."

Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview on Friday that "the evidence is overwhelming" of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Asked if he had information that the commission did not have, he replied, "Probably."

Mr. Kean said Sunday that if such information exists, "we need it — and we need it pretty fast."

Any normal person who would read this would conclude, the 9/11 commission's chairman Thomas Kean is challenging Cheney and the Bush White House to hand over any 'evidence' they continue to cite that would support such out-there conclusions. That Kean does it in the diplomatic language that would allow the administration to save face while doing so is true to form. Kean has consistently, even while protesting the Bush White House's stonewalling of the commission, always been strategically polite in his public statements about the administration. What he could have said is "Cough it up, or shut up."

But Safire does something else insidious here, which is to portray the commission's conclusion to date as being the opinion of one person, the staff director, who Safire implies must be working for Bush 43's political opponents. What is Safire talking about? If Zelikow is not getting attacked by the left for his having served with Condoleezza Rice in the first Bush administration's National Security Council, he is getting attacked by the wing-nuts on the right like Safire for not endorsing their most conspiracy-minded fantasies. Safire the wordsmith needs to reacquaint himself with one word missing from his endless propagandizing on behalf of the Mylroie-conspiracy crowd, a five letter word beginning with "t."

Post Script: Another take on 'Cheney vs. the NYT.'

Israel and the Kurds. Seymour Hersh reports this week on Israel's development of a "Plan B" after concluding that the US had lost the post-war in Iraq: building up a covert alliance with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and with Kurdish groups in Iran and Syria as well. For what strategic purpose? To counter the strength of Iraq's Shiite majority and a potentially nuclear armed Iran in the near future.

Hersh reports:

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan...

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war.

The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do—penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey.”

The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way—as balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration.”

Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes.

For what it's worth, I too have heard reports from former American diplomats consulting in northern Iraq that Israel is behind the creation of a Kurdish central bank in Kurdish northern Iraq, of mysterious Israeli American advisors to Iraqi Kurdish leaders, of Israelis buying property located around southeastern Turkey's GAP dam, and other developments that would seem to give credence to this report.

But one contrary thought: it is quite clear that a significant part of the pro-Israel professional lobbying community in Washington is among Turkey's greatest supporters in Washington. Is this covert Sharon policy of backing the Kurds even to the point of separatism that is clearly so alienating to Turkey dividing those who count themselves among Israel's greatest supporters?

This leads to another observation which is probably obvious to those who cover Israel in more depth. The alienation of Israel's national security establishment from the Sharon government and Likud foreign policy, very similar to the alienation of the US national security establishment (CIA, State Department, elements of the uniformed military) from neocon policies and Bush foreign policy.

More on this all soon.

[Ed. note: this post has been revised.]

Zakaria, Anonymous, and the war on terror. Fareed Zakaria takes readers on a grim tour of Saudi Arabia on the brink, and asks if the country is doomed by the extremism its own political leaders have long cultivated.

The depth of this created culture of extremism is most evident regarding tolerance for non-Muslims...Even last week, as the regime was issuing fatwas against the killing of Paul Johnson, one could see forces that fueled his execution. A prominent cleric, Sheik Saleh bin Abdullah al-Humaid, explained that "killing a soul without justification is one of the gravest sins under Islam; it is as bad as polytheism." So polytheism is akin to murder? Is it any wonder that the leader of the recent terrorism in Khobar explained his killing of Westerners and Indians thusly: "We purged Muhammad's land of many Christians and polytheists"?

Why doesn't the regime take on the religious establishment more frontally? There is little danger that it would lose. Between state and mosque, there is really no contest. Every imam in the country is on the government's payroll...And yet the regime is extremely cautious about clipping the wings of these bureaucrats.

The key to the kingdom is not religion but politics. To understand why, you only have to drive through Riyadh, large parts of which are decaying, and then around the perimeter of the royal court. Rising on one side is an extension of the king's palace, a fantastical set of buildings, with a vast domed Renaissance extravaganza. When I commented on it, a government official nervously said to me, "Well, the French have Versailles." (I couldn't help but note, "Yes, and then they had a revolution.") Actually, Versailles doesn't capture it. Only Las Vegas compares...

But the reason corruption is so debilitating for Saudi Arabia today is this: the only way to effectively take on religious extremism—whether by terrorists or government clerics—is for the government to have its own source of credibility..."The fear is that if they take on the religious folk, the imams will stop preaching about infidels and start talking about decadence," said a journalist who asked not to be named.

That's from Part II of the Zakaria piece.

Meanwhile, over at Talking Points Memo, Imperial Hubris author Anonymous tells Spencer Ackerman something unexpected about why he thinks we're losing the war on terror, given his critique of the US's war in Iraq. We can't defeat Islamist extremist terrorists by engaging in a war of ideas, or by pushing for democratic reform in the Islamic world, Anonymous argues. We have to take them on with war, and with war with no political goal of democratization on the other side. Ackerman writes:

But Anonymous doesn't really consider it possible for the U.S. to answer bin Laden in a battle of ideas throughout the Islamic world: U.S. support for what many Muslims may see as unjust policies has drained us of our credibility, he argues. He combines that critique with a rejection of anything resembling democracy promotion...Insisting on democratic reform in the Muslim world then becomes naïve futility...

Without the option to work for reform, a large portion of what Anonymous advocates is essentially a policy of brutal and unforgiving war.

[From Imperial Hubris:]

To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing …

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. … [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

[Ackerman continues]: While military force will surely be necessary in the war on terrorism, a scorched-earth policy of warfare, especially in the age of Al Jazeera, seems tailored to play into Bin Laden’s arguments about U.S. desires to destroy Islam, to say nothing of transforming the U.S.'s war on terror into something resembling Russia's dirty war in Chechnya...I asked him about this.

ANONYMOUS: The war we need to conduct is simply to protect America. It's to stop the enemy, to have him cease and desist from attacking us. It is not--I hope it's not--to make them democratic, or to make them become libertarians or whatever...

Go read the interview. But I have to say, Anonymous' scorched earth, nihilist "final solution" to the crisis posed to western civilization by al Qaeda considerably weakens his other arguments in my eyes. That kind of uber-realism seems as morally bankrupt and of a type that generated some of the very Cold War policies that led to al Qaeda's emergence in the first place. I don't think this spook has the answers.

Iran has seized three British navy vessels and arrested eight British sailors, the BBC reports. A British Ministry of Defense spokesman says the British navy was "assisting the Iraqi water police in the area." So, is this some post IAEA meeting hard-ball?

Just out, at long last, my piece on why the Democrats are hesitant to embrace the issue of UN reform. It is subscription only, but here's the top.

The woman who knew too much....

What went wrong. An overall devastating Iraq report card on the eve of the handover by the Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran. But I found these observations among the most interesting:

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who want to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

...Over the course of the occupation, the relationship between the CPA and the military has become increasingly bitter. Soldiers have blamed civilians for not performing enough reconstruction to pacify the country, while civilians have blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding...

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

The piece goes on to offer reflections from Paul Bremer and other CPA officials on what went wrong.

Don't miss Spencer Ackerman's interview at Talking Points Memo with the anonymous US intelligence official who next month will release his second book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. [The book is also discussed here by Kevin Drum.] Ackerman interviewed Anonymous, a veteran intelligence official who's tracked radical Islamism going back to the 1980s, on the subject of the brutal killing of Paul Johnson by Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia yesterday, and what that event says about the US's war on terror. Don't miss it.

Laurie Mylroie, phone home.

The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.

"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said that, in particular, they wanted any information available to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either...

"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about."

Good to see the commission calling Cheney's bluff. Maybe they can duke it out on Meet the Press this Sunday.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a very interesting post on (what else?) Chalabi and the allegations of espionage for Iran....Here's the source she cites, Bruce Schneier at Cryptogram. They also both point to an earlier instance when the US had apparently broken Iran's communications codes. More on this later.

I've taken an interest in this company, Peninsula Investment Company SA. And in the fate of its former adminstrator, Tariq (or "Tarik") Mohsen and his wife Patricia Mohsen, who are Swiss nationals. Here's an interesting story about the Swiss subsidiary of a Saudi oil company, Delta Services SA, that they were involved in, that was outted recently as allegedly profitting from Saddam's oil for food program. But these folks are also very connected to people, I am told, who would be uncomfortable being revealed as benefitting from Saddam Hussein's regime.

From Friday's New York Times:

For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration's response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.

Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.

Intelligence failure. Lying defectors, defectors to the UK never interviewed by the CIA, mis-read satellite intelligence, the failure of allied intelligence services. Not a single high level intelligence source in Saddam's inner circle. Do we have reason to believe we're doing any better in Iran or North Korea? No. [Via Kevin Drum.]

Just had the second surreal meeting of the past eight days. This one involved drinking beer in the afternoon at Kramerbooks with the Iraqi National Congress's Washington advisor Francis Brooke, his wife Sharon, and my colleague Spencer Ackerman, of the New Republic. [Ackerman is guest blogging at Talking Points Memo this week while its boss slacks off on a tropical paradise somewhere.]

What was surreal about it? Well, Francis Brooke is an unusually open, pleasant and forthcoming person for someone whose long time political partner Ahmad Chalabi is facing US allegations of spying for Iran, and who himself is facing an Iraqi arrest warrant for allegedly obstructing the US-Iraqi raid on Dr. Chalabi's compound last month. Brooke says the charges are ridiculous, and he intends to return to Baghdad next week, surrounded by as many members of the US press corps and TV cameras as he can round up to accompany him. As Spencer points out, Brooke says his preferred route may have him flying to Tehran [to whom his boss Dr. Chalabi and his business partner, INC intelligence chief Aras Habib Kareem are accused of passing US intelligence] and then convoying into Baghdad. A provocation not lost on Brooke.

Brooke was telling me in some detail about the corporation he, Kareem, and US accountant Margaret Bartel, set up as a vehicle to receive first State Department and later Pentagon money to operate the Information Collection Program. [A "gentleman's agreement" between the Pentagon and them prevented them from previously discussing it much earlier - but Brooke promises much transparency about such mechanisms in the coming days. After all, their Pentagon funding runs out at the end of the month.] Brooke detailed for me the organization chart of the ICP, its funding mechanisms, number of agents and activities. He insists that the ICP's director Aras Habib Kareem, who has been reported to have fled to Tehran, is in fact in Iraq, although "he travels", and that Brooke has spoken by phone with Kareem more than once since the charges were brought against him. That Kareem has gone into hiding to evade an arrest warrant Brooke does not deny.

Brooke told me he was aware as early as March about the possible espionage charges coming down the pike [he first heard whispers of it from other journalists well briefed by US intelligence sources, shortly after Chalabi made another public visit to Tehran where he was greeted by a color guard, met with Khatami, Khamenei, and others]. Brooke is the first to admit that Chalabi and he himself have met with the Iranian intelligence official in charge of operations inside Iraq, Suleimani, to whom Chalabi is alleged to have passed the information that the US had broken the Iranian intelligence's communications code. [Brooke denies Chalabi passed any such intelligence to the Iranians, or indeed, that Chalabi even had access to sensitive US intelligence.] That Chalabi and Kareem had such liaison relationships is no secret, Brooke says, and indeed, was ostensibly part of what they were paid by the US to do. [The INC had such liaison relationships with many countries, Brooke asserts, including Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey.]

Brooke himself says he has talked with US intelligence officials who have parroted back to him recordings of conversations of his the NSA had "ping'ed."

He adamantly denies that Chalabi or Kareem would have been spies for Iran, I should point out. He also says that the INC's intelligence was so good that they knew days before the raid on Chalabi's compound that it was coming, informed their DIA colleagues to relocate, and stored elsewhere much of the sensitive information they had collected.

Brooke's cell phone rang from Baghdad throughout the meeting. He says he talks to Dr. Chalabi every day, who is doing very well. [He also revealed that NSC Iraq envoy Bob Blackwill lives across the street from him in Georgetown, and that Brooke has been disappointed in his performance in Iraq, as well as with Blackwill's memo on sidelining Chalabi.]

Brooke tells me that he hopes to finish up his work in Iraq soon, and to work in the future in the US, with perhaps the US government as his client. What would he like to do? Perhaps show them how to set up more innovative intelligence operations in other places on the cheap, as he feels he and the INC have done in Iraq. [He mentioned India-Pakistan, or Korea, as being places where Washington is desperately in need of more such HUMINT. We laugh over Iran.] He points out that US intelligence for all its budgets and heft had almost no human intelligence coming from Iraq except that provided by the INC, and that what the ICP managed to do for $340,000 a month, including helping enable the capture of Uday Hussein [who went to college at Baghdad University with fugitive INC intel chief Aras Habib Kareem, 36, Brooke says] and half of the 55 people on the US's most wanted list, shows what can be done with such an operation. [As for the three Iraqi defectors the INC provided to US intelligence who allegedly had information on Iraq WMD, Brooke went into some detail about two of them, can't remember the third, and I will report it out in a forthcoming piece.]

More soon.

Which Iraqi exile leader boasted of a powerful network inside Iraq that could overthrow Hussein that never materialized, coached defectors who provided bogus intelligence to the CIA, and is accused of having anti-democratic tendencies? Ahmad Chalabi, you say? How about Iyad Allawi, reports the NY Sun's Eli Lake.

"Rumsfeld ordered prisoner held off the books: Iraqi terror suspect hidden from International Red Cross," NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held “off the books” — hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else — in possible violation of international law.

It’s the first direct link between Rumsfeld and questionable though not violent treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

The Iraqi prisoner was captured last July...Shortly after the suspect’s capture, the CIA flew him to an undisclosed location outside Iraq for interrogation. But four months later the Justice Department suggested that holding him outside Iraq might be illegal, and the prisoner was returned to Iraq at the end of October.

That’s when Rumsfeld passed the order on to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep the prisoner locked up, but off the books.

And then what happened? The military forgot about the guy and seemed to have lost track of him! This important Ansar al Islam terrorist who Rumsfeld ordered had to be held off the books, because he had such potentially important intelligence information!

Once the prisoner was returned to Iraq, the interrogations ceased because the prisoner was entirely lost in the system.

Honestly no one accused Slobodan Milosevic of being incompetent, just brutal. But Rumsfeld -- should he be fired for incompetence or tried for war crimes?

Spencer Ackerman has figured out the dark secret about the so-called "independent" 9/11 commission...

The neocons are still in the saddle, undersecretary of defense Doug Feith taunts in a recent interview with the LA Times' Jacob Heilbrunn:

No doubt neoconservatives have been put on the defensive in recent months. When I met Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy, for an interview at his home recently, he was eager to discuss the attacks on him and his neoconservative associates. Sitting in his library surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East, Feith stated that his critics "are being shabby with the facts, cherry-picking evidence — doing things they're accusing us of."

But Feith was adamant in saying that the neoconservatives had not been sidelined. They remain influential, he said, and will remain so as long as ideas remain important in the administration. "Bush is not some empty vessel that we're pouring this stuff into. He's [been] underestimated the way critics underestimated Reagan."

Heilbrunn cites other evidence of the neocons holding on: chiefly, that none of them has been thrown overboard yet.

The truth is that, currently, the neocons are the only ones with any ideas in the administration. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell bridles at any drafts from his speechwriters that he considers too theoretical. Feith, by contrast, filled his office with neocon intellectuals.

So far, no neoconservative has been thrown overboard. Despite charges that his homemade intelligence network at the Pentagon relied on bogus intelligence from Chalabi, Feith remains firmly in place at the Defense Department. David Wurmser, the architect of the pro-Chalabi strategy, is Cheney's Middle East advisor now. Mark Lagon, a neoconservative who worked for Jeane Kirkpatrick, has been promoted at the State Department. A host of younger neocons remains embedded in other agencies.

Embedded, huh? Talk about needing James Jesus Angleton to smoke 'em out.

I do think Heilbrunn makes a good point. While the neocons may not be the only ones with interesting foreign policy ideas, it's not like they are getting much competition from the leading Democrats. John Kerry could do a better job of articulating a broad foreign policy vision...

Heilbrunn predicts, if Bush loses, a blood bath within the right, with conservatives gaining prominence over the neocons. But if Bush wins? Syria and Iran are next, Heilbrunn predicts, and Lord help us, John "Cuba has a biological weapons program" Bolton may be the next head of the CIA.

Addendum: I am not sure I agree with Heilbrunn that the neocons are not in trouble within the administration. Richard Perle was thrown overboard, more or less, in February. It is highly unlikely Feith or Wolfowitz would be promoted in any Bush II administration, or even be retained. The ousting of Chalabi does seem to indicate a shifting of gravity within the administration, benefiting pragmatists at State and CIA over Chalabi's neocon supporters in the Pentagon, and the office of the Vice President. And while the neocons might have dreamed of pursuing wider regime change in Syria and Iran, where would the US troop strength come from? And is there any sense the US public or the Congress would be able to be brought along this time, with the amazing discontent with the administration's conduct of the Iraq post-war? And mistrust of the administration's credibility on intelligence issues? [I don't believe Tenet's resignation had much to do with l'affaire Chalabi, it's been coming down the pike for months.]

Post-Script: Don't miss the priceless description, above, of Feith in his library, "surrounded by stacks of Commentary magazines and books on the British empire and the Middle East." No doubt, most of them by Bernard Lewis.

I really like this blog, Belgravia Dispatch. Must be because of its author's many years in the former Yugoslavia.

No Prague Meeting. Here's one more neocon/Cheney canard the blessed independent 9/11 commission puts to rest: Mohammad Atta never met with any Iraqi agent in Prague. This from MSNBC:

Hijacker never met with Iraqi agent:

In a second report released Wednesday, the commission staff said that Mohamed Atta, the pilot of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center and leader of the 19 hijackers, never met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic. That purported meeting also has been cited as evidence of a possible al-Qaida connection to Iraq.

“We do not believe that such a meeting occurred,” the report said.

Matt Yglesias is right. Dick Gephardt is a terrible choice for Kerry's running mate. Now, a question: Matt has about three posts a day over at Tapped, several posts a day on his own site, and about two articles a week at the Prospect. So, when does Matt sleep? Are we sure there is only one of him?

Commissioner Tim Roemer just asked US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is testifying at the 9/11 commission, if he has anything to say about the Plame investigation. I'm listening on the radio so couldn't see Fitzgerald's reaction, but everybody laughed. Nice try, Tim!

Over at Slate, journalist Alan Berlow says White House counsel Alberto Gonzales has been torturing international law for a long time; first in Texas, where as legal advisor to then Gov. Bush, Gonzales created legal justifications for the state of Texas killing foreign nationals on death row.

Berlow writes:

Although the president said he's only approved actions consistent with U.S. and international law, that hasn't settled the matter because the main thrust of the memos crafted by Gonzales as well as Justice, Defense, and intelligence agency lawyers, seems to have been to come up with justifications for torture within the law...

The president also said he couldn't remember if he'd seen legal opinions written by Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers. But it may prove more difficult for him to deny having seen a January 2002 "Memorandum for the President" in which Gonzales argued that the Geneva Conventions were "obsolete" and that by disregarding them the administration would substantially reduce its vulnerability to "criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," which he noted could incur a death sentence.

Curiously, it was in his role as legal counsel to then-Gov. Bush that Gonzales penned yet another memo pertaining to international law, only in that case his advice was designed not to avoid death sentences, but rather to expedite them on Texas' heavily populated death row. On June 16, 1997, Gonzales first showcased his proclivity for torturing international law when he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that, "Since the State of Texas is not a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, we believe it is inappropriate to ask Texas to determine whether a breach … occurred in connection with the arrest and conviction" of a Mexican national. Or, put another way, he asserted that an international treaty just didn't apply to Texas.

Look where compassionate conservatism got us.

No link or meaningful cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda, the 9/11 commission reports. Someone tell Dick Cheney.

In fact, bin Laden explored using Saddam's Iraq for training camps, but Saddam "never responded."

This from the AP:

In a report released this morning and based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader's secular regime.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, the panel found, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

Here's the .pdf of the 9/11 commission staff report released today, "Overview of the Enemy." Here's the text version of the report.

Here's the "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," commission staff report No. 16, in .pdf format. Here's the text version, thanks to MSNBC. Very interesting. The commission got to question Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the plot mastermind, and review other US government agencies' interviews with him. Among other interesting facts uncovered, was that the 9/11 plan was originally to involve more pilots, more planes, and more targets:

As originally envisioned, the 9/11 plot involved even more extensive attacks than those carried out on September 11. KSM maintains that his initial proposal involved hijacking ten planes to attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States. He claims that, in addition to the targets actually hit on 9/11, these hijacked planes were to be crashed into CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State. The centerpiece of his original proposal was the tenth plane, which he would have piloted himself. Rather than crashing the plane into a target, he would have killed every adult male passenger, contacted the media from the air, and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport. He says he then would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers.

KSM concedes that this ambitious proposal initially received only a lukewarm response from the al Qaeda leadership in view of the proposal’s scale and complexity. When Bin Ladin finally approved the operation, he scrapped the idea of using one of the hijacked planes to make a public statement but provided KSM with four operatives, only two of whom ultimately would participate in the 9/11 attacks...

According to KSM, al Qaeda intended to use 25 or 26 hijackers for the 9/11 plot, as opposed to the 19 who actually participated. Even as late as the summer of 2001, KSM wanted to send as many operatives as possible to the United States in order to increase the chances for successful attacks, contemplating as many as seven or more hijackers per flight. We have identified at least nine candidate hijackers slated to be part of the 9/11 attacks at one time or another...

Also very interesting, and very tragic too, that the commission uncovered, is the fact that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, part of the "Hamburg Group," seemed to seriously consider dropping out of the plot, in large part because of his attachment to his Turkish girlfriend in Germany [Two others who KSM originally identified for the plots were prevented from participating by their families in Saudi Arabia, the commission found]. KSM was preparing to replace Jarrah with Zacarias Moussaoui, the commission believes, if need be. But ultimately, Jarrah decided, or was coerced, to proceed with the suicide attacks.

Wolfie's in Baghdad, correspondent J writes. Why don't they just keep him, he asks.

Interesting that Wolfowitz met today with, among those you would expect, Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah Hassan al-Nakib. That was the agency to which the eight DynCorp contractors who participated in the raid on Chalabi's home last month said they were assigned.

The coming reports. The CIA is trying to suppress publication of up to 40% of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war intelligence blunders, according to the NYT.

The Central Intelligence Agency has ruled that large portions of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that is highly critical of the agency includes material too sensitive to be released to the public, Congressional and intelligence officials said Tuesday.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the material in a 400-page report was deleted by the C.I.A. in a version that was returned to the committee on Monday as approved for public release, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the 9/11 commission, which holds its last hearings today and tomorrow, featuring among others US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald who also happens to be heading the Valerie Plame investigation, has concluded the 9/11 hijackers were originally planning their attacks for May or June 2001. They were reportedly delayed because ringleader Mohammad Atta wasn't ready, the Post reports.

Bush and war crimes, by William Pfaff.

Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.

Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

...The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions ... were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed.

Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities.

High U.S. administration figures reportedly lingered - with delectation? - over what exactly was to be done to the unfortunate prisoners - for how long, in what position, with what pain inflicted...

And when all this began to come out, what did the administration have to say? The president said on May 24 that "a few American troops ... disregarded our values." Civilians in the Pentagon, speaking informally to the press, blamed the Abu Ghraib scandals on "a few hillbillies."

. . .This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil.

[Via Atrios.]

Meantime, WaPo editorial writer Anne Applebaum says political will is draining from the Hill to fully connect the dots linking the White House to the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and beyond.

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it...

They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it ... Unfortunately, Congress has no real motive to find the answer either. After a bit of obligatory spluttering, the House has gone silent... Meanwhile, Sen. John Warner's Armed Services Committee, conducting the only active investigation on Capitol Hill, is moving at a leisurely pace...

If the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all. Edmund Burke, a conservative philosopher, wrote, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

The Post house editorial also says torture was the policy of the Bush White House:

SLOWLY, AND IN spite of systematic stonewalling by the Bush administration, it is becoming clearer why a group of military guards at Abu Ghraib prison tortured Iraqis in the ways depicted in those infamous photographs. President Bush and his spokesmen shamefully cling to the myth that the guards were rogues acting on their own. Yet over the past month we have learned that much of what the guards did -- from threatening prisoners with dogs, to stripping them naked, to forcing them to wear women's underwear -- had been practiced at U.S. military prisons elsewhere in the world. Moreover, most of these techniques were sanctioned by senior U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Iraqi theater command under Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.

The Post calls on the Senate to pass an "amendment to the defense authorization bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), [that] would reaffirm the commitment of the United States not to engage in torture, and it would require the defense secretary to provide Congress with guidelines ensuring compliance with this standard."

At the very least. But what about trials of Bush and Rumsfeld on war crimes? How can this just remain a matter for editorial writers?

A couple days back, Salon ran a very interesting interview with intelligence historian and author, Thomas Powers. Powers is the author of the newly released Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Powers describes in the interview the Bush administration conducting a virtual coup against US government agencies, particularly the intelligence community, in its efforts to mobilize the US to invade Iraq.

Salon: It seems like there has almost never been direct acknowledgement by the White House of any policy problems.

Powers: Yes, but they've done something else which troubles me more than anything. They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.

President Bush used the intelligence system as a blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along -- the Congress was in an almost impossible position. When the president uses the maximum power of his own office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta listen to the guy. At least once.

Worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Powers' book is being released at the same time as James Bamford's A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, described below, which sounds to offer a very similar analysis.

Looks like John Ashcroft has at least one friend in his Paranoia tree house club.

Check out Bob Dreyfuss' "Investigation Summer" post today at TomPaine. Between the FBI Valerie Plame investigation, the forthcoming 9/11 commission report, the Senate Select Intelligence committee report on pre-war intelligence, the multiple counterintelligence investigations of who leaked US intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, and multiple panels investigating the Abu Ghraib abuse, it looks set to be a summer of non stop revelations of Bush administration scandal. As Bob Dreyfuss writes, "John Kerry, who specialized in investigations in the Senate . . .must be marveling at the irony: official investigators are going to help elect him this summer."

This is so unbelievably disturbing. I cannot believe this is my country. Via Salon. Between Ashcroft permitting torture and deporting British journalists, . . . he really should spend some time in a totalitarian prison. Will 60 Minutes please do a story on this?