War and Piece

Darfur, here, here, and here. Kristof is putting together suggestions for what one can do, in the meantime, he's pointing people here.

"EPA: Amount of toxins in air, water and land increased at record level in 2002," Knight-Ridder reports.

The amount of toxic pollutants in America's air, water and land jumped 5 percent in 2002 - the highest increase since the federal government started keeping track of toxins in 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

God, this is so depressing. We have got. to. get. rid. of. these. guys.

Juan Cole is brutal here on the issue of the two Shakirs.

There isn't actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Here's Hayes' take.

The WaPo's Glenn Kessler agreed to be questioned by the Plame special prosecutor on his two phone conversations witih I. Lewis Libby last July. Apparently, Lewis signed a waiver asking Kessler to testify because Libby says he did not mention Plame's name in the interviews. [Kessler's statement, via Romenesko].

Michael Ledeen writes, the Iranians want to defeat Bush.

So the Iranians seized some British "warships" yesterday, and arrested eight British naval officers...

Why?

...Because they were planning to attack (or have their surrogates attack) the oil terminals, silly. And why attack the oil terminals? Because they want to defeat President Bush in November, and they figure if they can get the price of oil up to around $60 a barrel, he'll lose to Kerry.

Frankly, it seems the Bush administration has given the mullahs a pretty good deal. Its chosen Iraqi pet Ahmad Chalabi was allegedly providing them sensitive US intelligence, the Americans removed their life-long enemy Saddam and have delivered them a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and the Bush administration has so overstretched the US military in Iraq that it hardly has the military resources, international (or domestic) credibility, or intellectual capacity to deal with Iran's or North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Why would they want to defeat him?

The Anaconda Strategy. David Ignatius has an inside source on how the administration's grand designs for Iraq devolved in the past few months into an effort to find a way to get out.

I'm told the NYT's Douglas Jehl is going to reveal the identity of Imperial Hubris author Anonymous in the coming days.

Update: Well, partially identify him, as "a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999."

Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda...

In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a "sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities." Another new book, "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike.

More: Reader JM writes, "If Steve Coll's 'Mike,', who headed the Bin Laden or 'Alec' Station from 1996-99 is, in fact, Anonymous, then this excerpt about him from James Bamford's just published "A Pretext For War" becomes interesting":

Increasingly under Mike ____, its CIA chief, Alec Station began taking on the feel of the king's executioner. After the decision against blowing up the Tarnak Farm and the hunting camp, Mike unleashed a blast of angry e-mails to an assortment of officials.

Some saw him as an unkempt, tactless, annoying manager who had little understanding of the international ramifications of some of his suggestions. Killing innocent women, children and members of the royal families in harebrained, and likely to fail, cruise missile assassinations was the best way to increase, not decrease, hatred and terrorism directed against the United States.

Complaints began coming in, even from the White House. Mike later acknowledged that many even within his own agancy believed he and his unit had gone off the deep end. "The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic" he said. In 1999, after three years as head of Alec Station, Mike transferred to another job at CIA headquarters.

-- from p.216, James Bamford A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, Doubleday, 2004.

Reader BH points out that Anonymous' "first book also says that Anonymous 'trained as a professional historian specializing in the diplomatic history of the British Empire.' (p. 277)."

I'm told he is one of the few high ranking CIA people to have served in both the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence.

Wolfowitz on Chalabi. Testifying at the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted Tuesday that the Ahmed Chalabi's organization provided information that helped U.S. forces in Iraq, but conceded that some of the Iraqi politician's recent behavior was ``puzzling.''

Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, denied that Chalabi was ever a favorite of the Pentagon, as he has been widely described...

``There's a mixed picture there,'' he said. ``We know from our commanders that some of the intelligence that his organization has provided us has saved American lives and enabled us to capture some key enemy targets.''

Responding to questions from Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee's top Democrat, Wolfowitz would only say that many Iraqi exiles opposed to Saddam Hussein had contacts with Iran, Iraq's enemy in the 1980s.

``Nothing in Iraq is black and white. I don't think I know of any figure we're dealing with who hasn't had in one way or another to compromise with the incredibly difficult circumstances of the last 35 years of that country's history,'' Wolfowitz said. ``It's not surprising that many of them - and Chalabi's not the only one - made contacts with countries like Iran or Syria or others.''

Chalabi has blamed the CIA for his problems and denied wrongdoing. The CIA and Chalabi have been at odds for years.

``I am surprised that he seems to be the target, for many years, of particular animus from some parts of this government,'' Wolfowitz said. ``But on the other hand, there are aspects of his recent behavior that are puzzling to me.'' He did not elaborate on what those activities were.

Vast majority of Iraqis still alive, the Onion reports, via Eric Umansky.

Kim Sun II, who was killed today by his terrorist captors in Iraq, was, the Post reports:

an evangelical Christian who had majored in Arabic, English and theology with university scholarships. [Kim] was working as a translator for a private South Korean contractor providing clothes and food to the U.S. military in Iraq, hoping to save enough money to fulfill his dream of becoming a missionary, his family said. "How could it have come to this?" a distraught neighbor, in tears, shouted at reporters as she consoled Kim's parents. "How can we have faith in the world anymore?"

Seeing this news and the grim picture of his parents one feels the same. But it also makes one angry. Kim's terrorist captors are reportedly associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist the Bush administration failed to kill when it got the chance almost two years ago. Why has the Bush administration been so ineffective at targeting the real terrorists now flourishing in Iraq, since the war?

The facts speak for themselves. Iraq was not cooperating with al Qaeda or its offshoots like Zarqawi in a serious way before the war, certainly not to the degree that members of the Saudi and Pakistani security and intelligence services were. Zarqawi of course was mostly operating in northern Iraq, in terroritory under the control of the US no fly zone - a fact the Bush administration would like us not to remember. By any reading of the news, Iraq today must certainly rank the world HQ for Islamist radical terrorists, and is certainly one of the most insecure places in the world, a misery for its citizenry and foreign occupiers alike.

The State Department's radically revised numbers in its re-released Patterns of Global Terrorism report for the year 2003 make it impossible to show how much terrorism increased in Iraq itself in the year the US invaded and conducted a disatrous post-war turned-back-into-a-war. [And, ridiculously to my mind, the State Department keeps post-invasion Iraq in the list of "state sponsors of terrorism," even as Iraq by May 2003 was under US-led occupation and (incompetent, insecure) administration. Nevertheless, the graph here, of the Total International Attacks by Region, 1998-2003, shows the spike in the number of incidents of terrorism in the Middle East overall in the past five years. And do note that the State Department does not count attacks that wound and kill military personnel, including bombings of buildings and vehicles that kill US troops, for instance, reports of which we hear nearly daily from Iraq, as incidents of terror.

[Many thx to KD for explaining how to post graphics, and to DL for formatting suggestions.]

I think Daniel Pipes gets this wrong, but he's asking an interesting set of questions.

The Iranian government learned recently that American intelligence has deciphered its codes and can read its mail...Who is to blame for this development?...

[Perhaps] Chalabi did tell them that Washington had cracked the code. In which case:

· Perhaps he made this up and just happened to be right. (Plausible: Chalabi reportedly took steps in 1995 to trick the Iranians.)

· Or he thought he was providing disinformation but actually was telling the truth. (Unlikely: Too convoluted.)

· Or he knowingly divulged classified information. (Unlikely: Why should the Americans give Chalabi, a British subject known to be in close contact with the Iranian regime, a crown jewel of U.S. state secrets?)

Perhaps the question to ask is not, "Why should the Americans give Chalabi...a crown jewel of US state secrets?" as if it were a deliberate policy. But rather, how did one American without, presumably, authorized access, learn this information? Is what existed not a conspiracy, but more of an accident, born of a chaotic atmosphere that lacked the discipline of the home office? Of course, this theory would only explain how Chalabi allegedly might have learned the news, not why he allegedly passed it to the Iranians.

How right Matt Yglesias is, when he writes, regarding the al Qaeda-Iraq canard, that "Bush’s words may be semantically secure, but his intent has always been to mislead." Check it out.

Seems 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman may have his names mixed up. [Given that Lehman was apparently getting his information from allies of Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, what does this indicate about how scrupulous was the OSP's intelligence analysis? All those foreign names?]

This from the WaPo, via Atrios:

An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein's private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said yesterday.

Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda." Although he said the identity "still has to be confirmed," Lehman introduced the information on NBC's "Meet the Press" to counter a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."

Yesterday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar-sounding names.

One of them is Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, identified as an al Qaeda "fixer" in Malaysia. Officials say he served as an airport greeter for al Qaeda in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, at a gathering for members who were to be involved in the attacks on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Iraqi military documents, found last year, listed a similar name, Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, on a roster of Hussein's militia, Saddam's Fedayeen.

"By most reckoning that would be someone else" other than the airport greeter, said the administration official...He added that the identification issue is still being studied but "it doesn't look like a match to most analysts."

In an interview yesterday, Lehman said it is still possible the man in Kuala Lumpur was affiliated with Hussein, even if he isn't the man on the Fedayeen roster. "It's one more instance where this is an intriguing possibility that needs to be run to ground," Lehman said. "The most intriguing part of it is not whether or not he was in the Fedayeen, but whether or not the guy who attended Kuala Lumpur had any connections to Iraqi intelligence. . . . We don't know."

Still possible that Azzawi might, in the great scheme of probability in the universe, be affiliated with Iraqi intelligence? That would be the triumph of fantasy over probability. He might also be a billion other things. What does Lehman want Azzawi to be? Iraqi intelligence of course. Does that make it true? No.

Spencer Ackerman has more on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, [not to confuse matters, but that would seem to actually be the same identity as the Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col. described in the WaPo piece above, Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, who is not to be confused with Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, the al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia. For future reference, Ackerman refers to the Iraqi Fedayeen colonel in his post as "Shakir"].

But because he is working from the background on Shakir provided by the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, Spencer would seem to be repeating the mistake that Hayes and indeed Lehman made. Conflating the identity of Shakir the Iraqi, and Shakir Azzawi, the al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia.

Indeed, it is confusing. Good for Pincus for clearing it up.

Here's Newsday's Knut Royce's take:

The CIA concluded 'a long time ago' that an al-Qaida associate who met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia was not an officer in Saddam Hussein's army, as alleged Sunday by a Republican member of the 9/11 commission...

The claim that the Iraqi officer and al-Qaida figure are the same first appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial on May 27. A similar account was then published in the June 7 edition of the Weekly Standard, which reported that the link was discovered by an analyst working for a controversial Pentagon intelligence unit under Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

As correspondent R writes, "Did the OSP get *anything* right?"

Here's a handy guide:

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a.k.a. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad = Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col.

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi = al Qaeda greeter in Malaysia

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir does not = Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi

Update: Spencer Ackerman points to this report by Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay on the issue of Shakir's identity, and it offers new information I hadn't seen in the other pieces: Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, the al Qaeda "greeter" in Kuala Lumpur, was an Iraqi, who "was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer."

Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer as a "greeter" or "facilitator" for Arabic-speaking visitors at the airport at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In January 2000, he accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al-Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000.

There's no evidence that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir attended the meeting. Four days after it ended, he left Kuala Lumpur.

Several days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Qatar in possession of highly suspicious materials that appeared to link him with al-Qaida.

The Qataris inexplicably released him, and he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was arrested again. The Jordanians freed him under pressure from Iraq and Amnesty International, and he went to Baghdad.

That would seem to offer more credence to Lehman's suspicions. What's more, as Ackerman points out, twice, "This is something we probably can know. We have three individuals in custody who either were directly present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting or pulled its strings: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Kuala Lumpur attendees Khallad bin Attash and Yazid Sufaat."

If it's knowable, why don't we know it?

And finally, why in the world did Amesty International push for Ahmad Hikmat Shakir's release from Jordanian custody? After all, while people may be quibbling over whether he had any connection to the Iraqi security services, no one argues that he was not affiliated with al Qaeda.

Post Script: I think Ana Marie Cox gets this just about right.

More: Reader N writes Wednesday:

From what Amnesty said at the time, I don't think they 'pushed for his release' so much as asked the Jordanians for confirmation that he was being humanely treated and whether charges would be brought:

[See this Amnesty report.]

There's something a little bathetic about the final comments, given what we now appear to know, but in context it seems like form-letter stuff rather than, say, a protracted letter-writing campaign for a prisoner of conscience. So I think the K-R report, written well after the fact, overstates Amnesty's role here...

Thanks much for the letters.

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.