As we speculated here last week, J.D. Crouch it is, for deputy national security advisor. Here's Chris Nelson tonight:

Gossip...the new Deputy National Security Advisor was formally announced today...he’s Amb to Romania, and arms controller Jack Dyer Crouch the 2d, National Security Advisor Hadley’s principal deputy in Bush 1. Crouch will chair the Deputies’ meetings, while Elliot Abrams will be one of several lower ranking NSC deputies to be named this week...

Update: Dave Meyer has more. Al Kamen has more on possible successors to Douglas Feith.

Via Tapped, must-read Robert Wright piece:

Mr. Bush has too little hope, and too little faith. He underestimates the impetus behind freedom and so doesn't see how powerfully it imparts a "visible direction" to history. This lack of faith helps explain some of his biggest foreign policy failures and suggests that there are more to come...

This link between economic and political liberty has been extolled by conservative thinkers for centuries, but the microelectronic age has strengthened it...China is increasingly porous to news and ideas, and its high-tech political ferment goes beyond online debates. Last year a government official treated a blue-collar worker high-handedly in a sidewalk encounter and set off a riot - after news of the incident spread by cell phones and text messaging.

You won't hear much about such progress from neoconservatives, who prefer to stress how desperately the global fight for freedom needs American power behind it (and who last week raved about an inaugural speech that vowed to furnish this power). And, to be sure, neoconservatives can rightly point to lots of oppression and brutality in China and elsewhere - as can liberal human-rights activists. But anyone who talks as if Chinese freedom hasn't grown since China went capitalist is evincing a hazy historical memory and, however obliquely, is abetting war. Right-wing hawks thrive on depicting tyranny as a force of nature, when in fact nature is working toward its demise.

Read the whole piece.

Letters to the LAT re: Boot and Hersh.

In case you hadn't heard, these freedom spreaders loathe the press and would like to line their litter boxes with concepts like freedom of the press and the first amendment. Someone get the minders/escorts/press-babysitters a blog.

Slate's Fred Kaplan on the Iraqi elections:

... And yet, is it too romantic to see signs of real hope in today's election? One thing is clear: The day marked a terrible defeat for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had declared democracy to be an "infidel" belief. He and his goons passed out leaflets threatening to kill anyone and everyone who dared to vote; they dramatized their threat by killing dozens of police and poll workers in the days leading up to the election. And yet millions of Iraqis—including a fairly large number of Sunnis who live in Shiite areas—defied their fears and voted. Whatever mayhem they inflict in the coming days, it will be hard for anyone to interpret their actions as reflecting the beliefs of "the street."

In the week before the election, several Sunni leaders said they want to participate in the constitutional process in any case. Do these leaders now regret their calls for a boycott of the election? Seeing how badly Zarqawi failed in his effort to halt or disrupt the election, will they now work more vigilantly to pursue their cause peacefully and to separate their nationalist followers from the foreign terrorists in their midst?

Finally, imagine a Syrian watching Al-Arabiya, seeing Iraqi-born Syrians going to special polling places to elect Iraqi leaders, observing that no Syrians of any sort have the right to elect the leaders of Syria—and perhaps asking himself, "Why?" It is not inconceivable that this flicker of democratic practice in Iraq could ignite a flame of some sort across the Middle East. To what end, and for ultimate good or ill, who knows. But something happened in Iraq today, something not only dramatic and stirring but perhaps also very big.

Preparing for the worst and being pleasantly surprised is a good idea, one that one wishes the Pentagon's Iraq post-war planners had been willing to imagine two years ago.

A cry against US use of religious torture by columnists conservative and liberal.

Iraqi elections -- check out the first person account by the Boston Globe's Anne Barnard. Here's MSNBC on the vote so far. Update: Nice coverage of voting day from the BBC here and here.

Hear, hear. The Nation's and LA Weekly's Marc Cooper calls on the newspaper establishment to shake up the normal formulaic way of reporting news:

Wouldn't it be nice, then, if The Times completely unleashed these fine reporters and allowed them to tell us — during the crucial period ahead — exactly what they are and are not seeing? And even more important, what they're thinking? All of it written in the first person from ground level?

That's not to impugn what has been reported to date. But that reporting, like nearly all reporting in The Times, has been run through the usual sort of editorial food processor that guarantees the prevailing standard of "fair, balanced, objective stories." You know the routine: he said/she said; yes/but; the so-called blazing straddle of "objectivity."

As thorough as The Times' reporting has been, it often reads as if written by acrobats in pain — skilled professionals twisting themselves and their copy into knots as they strain to "balance" what they are actually seeing with the sometimes fantasy-based spin of both Iraqi and U.S. officialdom.

We need go no further than an otherwise compelling Times report out of Baghdad a few weeks ago. It began with the assertion that although the election process was, indeed, going ahead, its "planners" still faced what were called "the nuts and bolts of holding a credible vote." Insurgents gunning down election workers and candidates, the latter campaigning only clandestinely, the polling stations still a secret, car bombs killing dozens a week — these are mere nuts and bolts? Maybe to the U.S. Embassy — but for the rest of us? Puh-leeze.

It would be more fun to read.

Tom Friedman on the US, Europe and Iran:

The carrot the Iranians want for abandoning their nuclear program is not just unfettered trade with the West, but some kind of assurances that if they give up their nuclear research programs, the U.S. will agree to some kind of nonaggression accord. The Bush team has been reluctant to do this, because it wants regime change in Iran. (This is a mistake; we need to concentrate for now on changing the behavior of the Iranian regime and strengthening the reformers, and letting them handle the regime change.)

And this:

Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neocons, and it is the "geo-greens." I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.

By refusing to rein in U.S. energy consumption, the Bush team is not only depriving itself of the most effective lever for promoting internally driven reform in the Middle East, it is also depriving itself of any military option. As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, points out, given today's tight oil market and current U.S. consumption patterns, any kind of U.S. strike on Iran, one of the world's major oil producers, would send the price of oil through the roof, causing real problems for our economy. "Our own energy policy has tied our hands," Mr. Haass said.

New PNAC letter. Meantime, David Brooks declares springtime for soft power.

Medium lobster sayeth:

There's been some noise about the Pentagon's use of covert ops teams of late - specifically, of the Defense Department's decision to place these covert teams under its own authority rather than the CIA's in order to skirt Congressional oversight. The Medium Lobster doesn't see what's so outrageous about this. This is merely a natural extension of America's foreign policy: the United States will defend itself and the principles of Freedom no matter how many allies and branches of government get in its way.

More on those encumbering alliances between multiple branches of the US government.

As we've all heard, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services have paid certain columnists to praise Bush administration programs. Are political operatives in other boutique media being used to plant other narratives? Check this out.

Update on Payola:

[Education Secretary] Ms. Spellings also released a list of contracts the department had with outside public relations firms and media outlets, including Hager Sharp, a public affairs firm, ABC Radio Networks, Bauhaus Media Group, Radio One Inc. and the Corporate Sports Marketing Group. One firm, North American Precis, was given a "contract to develop short syndicated newspaper articles for national distribution informing the public about the National Center for Education Statistics Web site." The list did not show amounts paid.

The contract list showed two separate agreements with Ketchum Inc., which had arranged the contract with Mr. Williams. Although Department of Education officials said they had suspended Ketchum's work on the more than $1 million contract that included hiring Mr. Williams, they said they had not fired the public relations firm altogether, but were instead reviewing all existing agreements.

And on non-payola here.

Monday Update: More on Payola recipient Maggie Gallagher here.

Not convinced Alberto Gonzales is the wrong man to lead the Justice Department? Check out this video from Human Rights First. More on the advice given to the CIA on torture laws by Bush's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security:

One technique that C.I.A. officers could use under certain circumstances without fear of prosecution was waterboarding, in which a subject is strapped down and made to experience a feeling of drowning. Other practices that would not present any legal problems were those that did not involve the infliction of any pain, like tricking a subject into believing he was being interrogated by a member of a security service from another country.

But in other instances Mr. Chertoff opposed some aggressive procedures outright, the officials said. At one point, they said, Mr. Chertoff raised serious objections to other interrogation methods that he concluded would clearly violate the torture law. While the details remain classified, one method that he opposed appeared to violate a ban in the torture law against using a "threat of imminent death."

Mr. Chertoff and other senior officials at the Justice Department also disapproved of practices that seemed to be clearly prohibited, like death threats against family members, administration of mind-altering drugs or psychological procedures designed to profoundly disrupt a detainee's personality. It is not clear whether the C.I.A. or any other agency proposed these techniques.

Rumor has it that J.D. Crouch is set to become deputy national security advisor, working under Stephen Hadley. Told that Crouch is an "uber hawk," etc., and he's recently been teaching at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield Missouri. Here's more from a DoD press release announcing his return to academia in 2003. Update: Crouch currently serves as US ambassador to Romania.

The NY Sun reports that Ayad al-Allawi's election list is full of Baathists. Of course, the person making the claim is from the Dawa party that, as I understand, is heavily backed by Iran. But really this is all about Ahmad Chalabi:

Ministers close to Mr. Allawi have been accused in recent weeks of covering up their Baathist ties. For example, the commission has looked at the case of Adnan al-Jenabi, a minister without portfolio in the interim government who is the fifth name on Mr. Allawi's list and manager of the slate's political campaign. According to officials familiar with the investigation, Mr. al-Jenabi was chairman of the oil and energy committee of Saddam's Parliament in the late 1990s, the height of the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.

The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, has accused Iraq's defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, of being a Baathist agent as recently as 2003. For publicizing these charges, Mr. Shaalan threatened to arrest Mr. Chalabi and send him to Jordan to face charges leveled by a military court for his role in the collapse of the Petra Bank. Mr. Chalabi is the nominal head of the Debaathification Commission.

NPR Baghdad correspondent Emily Harris' emailed chat about covering Iraq is worth reading. So too Jonathan Kaplan's piece on the US Army of nationbuilders. And more on the upcoming Iraqi elections from Carl Conetta.

And do check out Legal Affairs' debate about US attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzalez, featuring John Hutson and Heather Mac Donald.

Afghanistan's last Jewish person.

A bleak account of the realities of the American project in Iraq, by someone who strongly advocated it. Meantime, a former Pentagon Iraq hand says Bush's second term foreign policy is set to look a lot like that of his first term.

Of Feith's departure and potential successor, Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report writes: "Whether this opens the way for the highly respected Richard Lawless now bears watching, if not also prayer." Lawless, a former CIA operations officer, currently serves as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs. He is also supposedly a close Armitage chum. And has long business ties to Jeb Bush.

Does it not seem a bit unusual that the Defense Department issued a full fledged press release announcing Feith's plans to step down, a full six months or so before he intends to leave?

At a breakfast meeting with reporters Wednesday, Mr. Feith gave no hint of his resignation. Nor, however, was he asked.

I thought Washington officials usually deny their departures up until pretty close before they plan to go, as it naturally makes one a lame duck. Here's more:

The announcement of Feith's resignation is sure to spark speculation among many of Washington's chattering class that his departure signals the greater fall of neoconservatives within the administration. Not only is Mr. Feith leaving, but a prominent State Department hawk, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, has so far not been offered a job.

The vice president of foreign and defense policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, said this is the wrong analysis. "People get confused," she said. "Personnel come and personnel go, and what many refuse to recognize is that the president's views are not shaped by his staff. The staff's views are shaped by the president."

Thursday night update: Apparently Feith genuinely is leaving for personal and family reasons.

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith to leave the Pentagon by next summer. Here's the Defense Department's press release:

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith announced today that he would leave his position this summer. As he has informed Secretary Rumsfeld, Mr. Feith made his decision for personal and family reasons.

Managing an organization of approximately 1,500 persons, Mr. Feith also represents the Department in interagency policy making on national security affairs.

Under Mr. Feith's leadership, the Defense Department's policy organization has developed a number of key initiatives relative to the Department's future...

Commenting on Mr. Feith’s planned departure, Secretary Rumsfeld said, “Doug Feith has contributed to the security of the country. He is creative, well organized, and energetic, and he has earned the respect of civilian and military leaders across the government. Regretfully, he has decided to depart, and he will be missed.”

Here's the AP's Robert Burns:

... In the AP interview, Feith said he was not sure what he will do after leaving the Pentagon. He said he intends to remain in Washington, where he has lived since the 1970s. He said he was especially proud of his contributions to improving the relationship between the Pentagon's civilian policy-makers, the combat commanders and the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Many people have said it is now better than it has ever been," Feith said.

Cheney advisor Scooter Libby to succeed Feith? That's the idle speculation we've heard. It's a post that requires confirmation.

[Thanks to readers J and D.]

Is it really possible that Iraqi authorities recently captured Zarqawi only to let him go seven hours later?

While he was awaiting his mission, he says, he was told that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of a terrorist network responsible for numerous bombings and beheadings, had been captured by Iraqi police only to be let go after seven hours because they didn't recognize him. Iraqi officials have declined to comment on previous reports that Zarqawi had been captured and let go.

Rummy not welcome in Germany? Kevin Drum asks. Well, not quite. But he's sufficiently irritated by the war crimes suit filed against him there, as we mentioned here last month, to skip a conference in Munich.

Update: A reader in Europe writes:

German media say Rummy is simply pissed off by the charge filed against him. Even if the court accepts the charge, which is not clear at the moment, Rumsfeld would be protected by his immunity. However, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung says that the U.S. embassy has told the government that if there are the slighest hints for a possible investigation into the charges against Rumsfeld, he will cancel the trip. So now the Munich conference will be attended by Douglas Feith.

The organizer of the Konferenz, Horst Teltschik told Der Spiegel that the charge was not the reason for the Rumsfeld to cancel the trip, "but it wasn't helpful either." Teltschik also said the European will be disappointed that Rumsfeld will not come since there is a considerable necessity for talks in connection with the Iran crisis.

One is confident that Feith can hold his own on the issue of the Pentagon's Iran plans.

Update II: Another reader J writes:

The conference in Munich, known as the "Wehrkunde", is not just another conference. Always held in February, it is a who's who for the transatlantic community. The Secretary of Defense, regardless of the Administration, almost always attends, as do other senior U.S. government officials and Members of Congress. The Wehrkunde, in many ways, helps set the agenda for transatlantic security issues for the coming year and allows key U.S. and European policy makers to interact with one another in an intimate, off-the-record setting very different from the usual ministerial sessions.

That Rummy can't go, whatever his reasons, is a big deal.

How can that be? How can this?

Another case involved a 73-year-old Iraqi woman who was captured by members of the Delta Force special unit and alleged that she was robbed of money and jewels before being confined for days without food or water -- all in an effort to force her to disclose the location of her husband and son. Delta Force's Task Force 20 was assigned to capture senior Iraqi officials.

She said she was also stripped and humiliated by a man who "straddled her . . . and attempted to ride her like a horse" before hitting her with a stick and placing it in her anus. The case, which attracted the attention of senior Iraqi officials and led to an inquiry by an unnamed member of the White House staff, was closed without a conclusion.

The military eventually released her and reimbursed her "for all property and damage" after her complaints, the report said; details of the Delta Force investigation remain classified.

24 and the Heritage Foundation. So, after Jack rescued the Defense secretary and his daughter just before their live-broadcast execution by Middle Eastern terrorists, the Defense secretary's daughter recognizes one of the (non Middle Eastern) associates of their kidnappers. Later, she tells Jack, she remembers where she saw him before. At an event at the Heritage Foundation! OK, is Spencer consulting on the script these days or what? More.

The New York Post is going after former Republican VP candidate Jack Kemp, asking whether he got roped into lobbying for Saddam Hussein:

A blistering letter written by former vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp to congressional leaders, criticizing the 1998 U.S. bombing of Iraq, has raised new questions about whether he was promoting a secret agenda on behalf of Saddam Hussein's oil spy in the United States, The Post has learned.

Kemp's Dec. 18, 1998, letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), which called for congressional hearings into the Clinton administration's decision to bomb Iraq, has left investigators wondering whether he was pushing "talking points" drawn up by Virginia oil trader Samir Vincent, who pleaded guilty last week to charges that he received payments from Iraq to weaken U.N sanctions.

In the letter, Kemp — who has been questioned by the FBI about his contacts with Vincent — blasted U.S. policy and raised numerous Iraqi propaganda points.

It is hard to reconcile Kemp's views on Iraq with those of the company he keeps.

Congress making noises about demanding further briefings on this Pentagon secret intelligence gathering unit. And they did so well on getting to the bottom of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo abuse as well! As Seymour Hersh said on NPR's Diane Rehme show today, this is the most derelict Congress he has witnessed in decades.

Halliburton's Iran contracts follow up: "It is astonishing. The federal government is pushing European companies to divest in Iran, meanwhile an American-based company is acquiring new and additional contracts," New York City comptroller William Thompson tells the NY Sun. Update: Iran's imprisoned bloggers, from the LA Times.

Eli Lake has some follow up reporting on the strange case of the $300 million in cash the Iraqi defense ministry channeled through a mysterious Lebanese middleman to purchase weapons. As the LA Times' investigative team reported over the weekend, the American contractor whose company was awarded the weapons deal was gunned down last month in Baghdad, along with his deputy, after he allegedly reported concerns about kickbacks from the deal going to the Iraqi purchasers. The Iraqi interim defense minister Hazem Shaalan had been cited this past weekend as threatening to have Ahmad Chalabi arrested and turned over to Interpol for, among other things, alleging to have documents that defame him. But yesterday, Iraqi interim president Ghazi al-Yawir, and a fellow party candidate of the Iraqi defense minister, told a Lebanese satellite station that there would be no arrest.

This book made for very amusing plane reading. And it has the most detailed description of training on the "Farm" that I have read. All in all, it is extraordinarily unflattering to the CIA. New case officer trainees go through impressive paramilitary training, but then are rewarded for the quantity of agents they manage to recruit, not the quality, even if they are totally useless. [And Moran details how useless were the agents she inherited in the Balkans.] Her superiors declined to have her pursue recruiting a potential agent with knowledge of Islamic extremists, according to Moran, because he might have ties to terrorists. And the countless measures she was taught to evade surveillance I am utterly convinced did nothing to disguise her affiliation from all who met her in Macedonia, including her elderly Macedonian nationalist neighbor, who poisoned her cat and its kittens to death.

Starting from scratch may not be a bad idea. But what Rumsfeld is trying to do is to make his own stealth boutique special operations intelligence unit without oversight and without the barest hint of public debate. According to Moran, it is not oversight that got in the way of the CIA, but its own Cold War fetishes and rituals.

A couple weeks ago I wrote, a propos of a Forward article on Sharon's Gaza pull out plan realigning Israeli politics, that the American right and in particular the neoconservatives were also divided over the unilateral withdrawal plan. Take note of James Wolcott's recent post on Bibi Netanyahu's reappearance in the US media this past Friday, on the heels of Bush's inauguration.

Passing through Paris this past week, it was striking that the covers of most ever major news magazine in France was dedicated to the 60th anniversary this week of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Le Nouvel Observateur's cover story: "Auschwitz: 60 ans apres la liberation des camps nazis. L'histoire vraie du crime absolu avec Simone Veil, Ian Kershaw, Annete Wieviora, Boris Cyrulnik." (Auschwitz: 60 years after the liberation of the Nazi camps. The true story of the absolute crime). Le Figaro magazine's cover read: "Simone Veil: 60 years after the Holocaust." Also of interest in the news there last week, the lefty daily Liberation devoted half a dozen pages to European immigration, and the idea being discussed that France and Brussels should consider adopting US-style immigration quotas per particular countries or categories. Also appearing as top TV news in France -- second only to Bush's inauguration -- much discussion of Seymour Hersh's Iran piece (complete with televised still photos of the actual physical New Yorker magazine article) and Britain's own "Abu Ghraib" scandal. And the second week without any news of Liberation war correspondent, Florence Aubenas, and her driver, missing in Iraq. [Thx to PR for the correction.]

Bob Novak asks, is Bush moving to the middle?

Concern [among conservatives] about Bush's second-term course is derived from signals, small and large, coming from the White House. None of them separately signifies a president abandoning the principles on which he was elected. But taken together, they generate doubt and more than a little unease on the right.

*In pre-inaugural comments, Bush sounded defeatist about prospects for
a constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage. After campaigning
on the issue last year, he appeared resigned to failure in the Senate
this year.

*The second-term nominations abound with officials who are comfortable
personally with Bush, but do not necessarily follow an ideological course. The first round of nominations contained names provoking outrage on the left: John Ashcroft, Ted Olson, Gale Norton, Linda Chavez (whose nomination was withdrawn) and John Bolton. The second round is less combative.

*The State Department appears likely to be dominated by careerists
under Condoleezza Rice more than under Colin Powell. There seems to be
no place for Bolton, the conservative bulwark at State as undersecretary for arms control since 2001.

*The new co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, Jo Ann Davidson, has been a member of the abortion-rights group Republicans for Choice since its founding. While handpicked at the White House for the party post, she has opposed Bush's position on abortion...

The new State Department team is more worrisome [to conservatives]. Nick Burns, a foreign service officer named to the department's third-ranking post as
undersecretary for political affairs, is close to the John Kerry foreign policy team and probably would have had the same position if Bush had lost. There is no Bolton-type conservative stalwart.

I think it's entirely possible that State will continue to be dominated by diplomatic professionals and the Bush administration will take us to war in Iran, and Iraq will continue to implode based on the reality-resistant theories of the Bush administration's firmly entrenched chief national security ideologues. See the Post's Barton Gellman story below and Hersh's New Yorker piece for more evidence of this. [Thanks to RZ.]

Housekeeping Notes: I got back to the snowy US last night, but my sub-par travel telecom situation has followed me home. I can now check blog email, but not send from it. I apologize for not responding to emails but thank everybody for the news links, etc. , and hope to get this problem resolved soon enough. Monday afternoon update: Everything's working again.

So much for those blanket Pentagon denials about Hersh's piece, huh? And now that the Pentagon admits that it has been running a new intelligence gathering and support unit since 2002, after all, what does it turn out are the credentials of the commander of the Strategic Support Branch? According to the Post, Col. George Waldroup, an Army reserve officer:

...spent most of his working life as a midlevel manager at the INS, where he became embroiled in accusations that he participated in deceiving a congressional delegation about staffing problems at Miami International Airport in June 1995. The Justice Department inspector general's office, which concluded its probe the following year, quoted in its report sworn statements from subordinates that Waldroup, then assistant district director for external affairs, helped orchestrate a temporary doubling of immigration screeners on the day of the visit, instructed subordinates not to discuss staff shortages and physically confronted a union leader to prevent him from reaching members of Congress. Waldroup told the investigators that he was following an order from a superior in Washington to withhold information.

During the investigation, according to the inspector general's final report, Waldroup refused to disclose the password to his e-mail files, refused to sign an affidavit summarizing his testimony and, in a subsequent interview, "stated that he would not answer any questions" because "he wished to protect himself from exposure to criminal sanctions." The authors of the Justice Department report found insufficient evidence to file charges but said they were troubled by "recurrent failures to provide documents."

Troubling indeed, although one might plausibly argue that a penchant for deceit and resisting investigation by inspector generals is an art that could come in handy in this administration. The timing of the unit's creation, as Project Icon in April 2002, is also interesting.

Update: Atrios parses Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita's tortured statement that Walford does not directly report to Rumsfeld. Modify your org charts accordingly. Kevin Drum gently suggests, letting the Pentagon create a covert intelligence operations unit is the kind of bureaucratic shift that might warrant public and Congressional debate.

HDS Greenway's "the White Room."

Juan Cole has a helpful analysis of the latest drama involving Ahmad Chalabi, this time in the form of an arrest threat from the Iraqi interim defense minister. Go see the update at this link as well.

A really interesting article from the Forward:

A handful of ultra-wealthy Jewish liberals are resolving to do battle with conservatives by providing a big infusion of cash to progressive think tanks and idea mills.

New York-based financier George Soros, Cleveland insurance king Peter Lewis and Oakland, Calif., banking magnates Herb and Marian Sandler made the pledge at a meeting in San Francisco last month.

The donors are remaining mum about the extent of their involvement and haven't specified any institution or individuals who are likely to benefit from their largesse. . .

A report in The Financial Times quoted an unnamed source with knowledge of the San Francisco meeting as saying that the wealthy donors would put more than $100 million over 15 years behind the effort to bolster and expand the network of liberal institutions.

During the 2004 election, Soros, Lewis and the Sandlers comprised three of the top four donors to so-called 527 committees, giving $23,450,000, $22,997,220 and $13,008,459, respectively, according to the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics. The funds were seen as playing a key role in minimizing the impact of the Bush campaign's large fund-raising advantage over the Kerry camp.

The new pledge to support liberal causes represents a potentially important infusion into the coffers of the Democratic policy establishment, which generally has failed to keep pace with the massive investments that Republicans have made during the past quarter-century into their intellectual infrastructure, including two influential Washington-based conservative think tanks: the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute.

Here's the whole piece.

Reuters from Dubai is reporting that the Iraqi defense minister is threatening to arrest Ahmad Chalabi and turn him over to Interpol:

Iraq's interim defense minister said on Friday the government would arrest Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi after the Eid al-Adha holiday for allegedly maligning the defense ministry.

"We will arrest him and hand him over to Interpol. We will arrest him based on facts that he wanted to malign the reputation of the defense ministry and defense minister," Hazim al-Shaalan told Al Jazeera television, adding the measures would start after the Muslim holiday which began on Jan. 20.

One wonders, what ever did happen with Chalabi's erstwhile INC intelligence chief, who reportedly fled to Teheran?

More on the arms deal gone bad that the Iraqi Defense Ministry was involved with from the LA Times' Ken Silverstein, T. Christian Miller and Patrick J. McDonnell:

An American contractor gunned down last month in Iraq had accused Iraqi Defense Ministry officials of corruption days before his death, according to documents and U.S. officials.

Dale Stoffel, 43, was shot to death Dec. 8 shortly after leaving an Iraqi military base north of Baghdad, an attack attributed at the time to Iraqi insurgents. Also killed was a business associate, Joseph Wemple, 49.

The killings came after Stoffel alerted senior U.S. officials in Washington that he believed Iraqi Defense Ministry officials were part of a kickback scheme involving a multimillion-dollar contract awarded to his company, Wye Oak Technology, to refurbish old Iraqi military equipment.

The FBI has launched an investigation into the killings and whether they might have been retaliation for Stoffel's whistle-blowing activities, according to people familiar with the inquiry. The FBI declined to comment.

Stoffel, of Monongahela, Pa., made his allegations in a Dec. 3 letter to a senior Pentagon official and in a meeting with aides to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). Soon after, Stoffel was summoned to the Taji military base in Iraq by coalition military officials to discuss his concerns about his contract. He complained about payment problems with a mysterious Lebanese businessman designated by the Iraqis as a middleman, sources said...

Stoffel's death has prompted new worries about the integrity of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, which has been plagued by accusations of
corruption and cronyism almost from the start.

One U.S. official said that corruption problems involving middlemen and
kickbacks were become increasingly widespread as the Iraqis began to
exercise more control over the contracting process.

Stoffel's killing drew scrutiny from investigators not only because of his
whistle-blowing activities but also because of his mysterious and controversial past. Stoffel worked on a top secret U.S. program in the 1990s to buy Russian, Chinese and other foreign-made weapons for testing by the U.S. military, according to documents and interviews.

Stoffel's Iraq deal was the first large-scale contract issued and funded directly by the Iraqi government for military purposes, and was crucial for training and equipping the Iraqi army, considered a key component of the U.S. strategy for exiting Iraq...

According to the letter, Stoffel's Pennsylvania-based firm was awarded a
contract last year by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense to help overhaul its
aging Soviet-era military equipment, mostly T-55 tanks and artillery. Wye
Oak Technology delivered some refurbished tanks in November to Iraq's 1st
Mechanized Brigade.

As part of the contract, senior Defense Ministry officials required Stoffel's payments to be processed through a Lebanese middleman appointed by
the ministry, according to the Dec. 3 letter.

By November, Stoffel was seeking a payment of $24.7 million, submitting
invoices directly to the Defense Ministry. The ministry, in turn, cut three
separate checks, sending each of them to the Lebanese businessman for
"processing," people familiar with the contract said.

The middleman's role was to act as a sort of escrow account for the financial transactions, reconciling invoices and dispensing the payments, sources said.

But after the businessman failed to send him the money, Stoffel complained
to U.S. officials in Washington that he suspected that the middleman's true
role was to route payments back to Iraqi officials in the form of kickbacks,
people familiar with the contract said.

He also told the Pentagon in his letter that the middleman was withholding
payments in an attempt to force him to use subcontractors linked to the
middleman and to Defense Ministry officials.

Eager to know the identity of the Lebanese middleman.

Former Republican VP Candidate Jack Kemp grilled by the FBI about his frequent contact with an Iraqi American oil trader who has recently been indicted for sanctions busting, Newsweek reports:

Kemp today confirmed that the FBI interviewed him last October about his contacts with Samir A. Vincent, a Northern Virginia oil trader who on Tuesday pled guilty to four criminal charges, including violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq and failing to register with the Justice Department as an agent of Saddam Hussein.

Specifically, the indictment states that Vincent illegally lobbied U.S. officials on behalf of the Iraqi government and received in exchange, along with unidentified co-conspirators, “millions of dollars in cash” as well as allocations for more than 9 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil under the Oil-for-Food program.

Sources familiar with the investigation say that Kemp, who was Bob Dole’s running mate in the 1996 presidential election, had a number of contacts with Vincent, which have been closely scrutinized by federal prosecutors. The contacts began in the late 1990s when Vincent—who Justice officials say was secretly acting as an Iraqi government agent—approached Kemp and offered to work with him on a plan that could have led to the easing of sanctions on Saddam’s regime.

Very interesting. Maybe after all this is cleared up, Kemp and Vincent can go into business with Sevan.

Writing in the Washington Times, Tony Blankley calls for Seymour Hersh to be charged with espionage for his New Yorker article you might have heard about. Why not just criminalize investigative journalism altogether? What we really need for the health of our democracy is more pro-administration propaganda. [Thanks to RZ for the heads up.] Update: Another colleague writes, "For what it's worth, I talked to Hersh for this piece and he told me he vetted it with people to see that he was not putting lives in danger."

Meantime, regarding the Abu Ghraib story Hersh broke earlier this year, Tara McKelvey tells the story of abuse of women prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- allegedly at the hands of employees of US defense contractors. As McKelvey explains here, seven of the former Iraqi women prisoners she interviewed are now part of a class action lawsuit filed against two of the contractors, Titan Corporation and CACI International.

More Housekeeping: We're still abroad on dial up so posting will remain light.

Interesting article from the Forward, on how Ariel Sharon is increasingly dependent on the support of the left, and increasingly under attack from his old base in the right and the settler movement:

Even if Ariel Sharon's new government doesn't last long, it already has made Israeli political history. In a bizarre turn of events, Sharon — for decades the most visible and most vilified symbol of the Israeli right — managed this week to survive as prime minister only because the left and several Arab nationalist lawmakers supported him in a Knesset vote of confidence, after the right abandoned him almost entirely.

The reason for the unlikely reversal is Sharon's plan to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank next summer. The plan, first aired a year ago, has thrown Israeli politics into chaos, splitting parties and shattering old alliances left and right. Sharon's longtime political base in the settler movement has virtually declared war on him, leaving him in control of a constantly shrinking coalition and frantically searching for new partners.

Will be interesting to see shake out who on the American right comes out to oppose Sharon's Gaza pull-out plan. Meantime, this Observer's review of a new book, Sharon and my Mother in Law: Ramallah Diaries, by architect Suad Amiry, is worth reading too. It's been published to acclaim in 11 languages, including Hebrew and English, but as yet not in Arabic, although its subject is Palestinian life under occupation. Sounds surprisingly optimistic:

Does Amiry believe there will be a lasting peace? Strangely, she does. She thinks people - on both sides - are tired of fighting, and that those involved are aware of the price that they pay in other aspects of their lives. 'I don't believe that you can be violent to people that you don't know and be nice to your family. It can't be done. No, if the solution is not yesterday, it will be today; if it is not today, it will have to be tomorrow. You do feel there will be a solution. It will have to come.'

Housekeeping note: I am traveling abroad this week (If the Inauguration festivities were taking place so close to your domicile, you might leave town too). I don't expect to be able to check blog email very frequently, so apologize in advance for not responding. Enjoy your week.

Perhaps former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds should be recruited as a consultant to 24:

Edmonds, who worked as a translator at the FBI's Washington field office before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, sued the FBI over her March 2002 firing and is appealing dismissal of her case. She was born in Iran, raised in Turkey, and speaks Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.

Edmonds has said the bureau retaliated against her after she alleged that a Turkish American co-worker had attempted to censor translations of wiretapped conversations, alerted some targets that they were under surveillance and attempted to recruit her into a group that was under investigation. Edmonds also accused the unit of shoddy translations and other shortcomings.

Another former CIA spy has written a book complaining about the agency's risk aversion and tendency to the bureaucratic. Honestly, the join-and-then-leave (and perhaps sue)-the CIA-to-become-published-national security expert career route seems to be more sure-fire than almost any other. More seriously, Mahle does make an important point, when she says the security fetish of the US intel agencies makes them turn away just exactly the type of candidates they really need to recruit: those who have extensive experience living in other countries, and immigrants.

Part of the trouble in the CIA's trenches, she argues, arises from the agency's hermetically sealed office culture, where secrecy and security can become excuses for avoiding risk.

She cites the agency's continuing struggles to recruit Arab Americans, Asian Americans and other second-generation immigrants with native speaking ability who might blend more successfully into Third World societies than someone who looks like her.

As a CIA recruiter, Mahle said she sent many well-qualified, diverse candidates on for security review, only to see large numbers wash out. While some were rejected for straightforward reasons, such as lying about past drug use, others were turned away because their "psychological profile" did not match the CIA's abstract ideal or because their family and social contacts overseas made their backgrounds hard to scrub.

"Security has no incentive to take risks," Mahle said.

The result "was best illustrated by a panoramic view of the swearing-in of the first class to enter on duty . . . after September 11; it was a sea of white faces."

Hearing a bit about the experience of a few friends with real expertise in particular foreign regions and the accompanying language skills, there really is a pattern of them being stalled at the tail end of the recruiting process for the reason that the US governments' security clearance dimwits felt it would be too hard to clear them because these candidates have had so much international experience and knew too many foreigners. In other words, they are more qualified and infinitely more useful to the US than the straight out of college and grad school mostly white Americans who never traveled much abroad that the CIA has seemingly been more comfortable recruiting. One friend was asked by the guy running her security clearance process, "What is Latvia?" in response to one of the countries she had reported visiting in the past seven years. It wasn't that he'd misheard. It was that he apparently did not know that Latvia was a place. Another acquaintance, fluent in a useful Asian language, after being recruited by one such agency, was ultimately told it would just be too hard to do a clearance for someone who had studied and worked in said country for a couple years.

Update: And so much for information sharing between the FBI and the CIA.

The UN is looking for a Washington lobbyist, the FT reports:

The move, revealed to the Financial Times on Thursday, is touted as part of a public information revolution within the UN, which began with the recent appointment of Mark Malloch Brown, a former strategic communications professional, as chief of staff to Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general. According to one UN insider, the idea is to appoint an influential advocate with Capitol Hill experience who “understands how Washington works, can make calls, and get those calls answered”.

It's a good idea, a reflection of Mark Malloch Brown's street smarts.

The National Intelligence Council has issued a report espousing what most observers of the news the past year and a half were aware of: "Iraq has replaced Afghanistan" as the primary breeding ground for terror. Not the fly paper, but the breeding ground. Congratulations, Dick Cheney. Here's Tim Russert's take on what the new NIC report means for Bush:

It realizes his every worst fear. Afghanistan had been the haven for al-Qaida, with the Taliban protecting them -– we had to go in there and take down the Taliban and try to root out al-Qaida.

If Iraq becomes the new haven, geographically, it is a disaster. It is so much closer to Israel and to other countries in the Middle East. It is not what George Bush wants to leave behind.

Update: Tim Dunlop and Jonathan Landay have more on the NIC's forecast for China and India to become major world powers by the year 2020:

The world of 2020 is likely to be one in which Asia is the main engine of the global economy, India and China are major powers and al-Qaida-inspired Islamist movements have spread to Muslim communities outside the Middle East, a new U.S. intelligence report said Thursday.

The United States will remain "the single most important country across all dimensions of power," but wield less authority than it does now because of the greater influence of India, China and possibly other nations such as Brazil and Indonesia...China and India are likely to be among the leading beneficiaries of globalization, in part because of their low-cost labor and high technology capabilities. Many of their people, however, will remain poor.

It's hard to believe that 2020 is only three US presidential elections away.

With much speculation about whether the US will start reducing its troop presence in Iraq after the elections later this month, the NY Sun is reporting that the US is building a permanent satellite-based military communications system in Iraq:

The new network, known as Central Iraq Microwave System, will eventually consist of up to 12 communications towers throughout Iraq and fiber-optic cables connecting Camp Victory, located outside of Baghdad, to other coalition bases in the country, according to three sources familiar with the project. The land-based system will replace the tactical communications network the Army and Marines have been using in Iraq. That network relied primarily on satellites and is much easier to dismantle. The contract for the new communications system covering central Iraq, won by Galaxy Scientific Corporation, is worth about $10 million.

But could this be for "permanent" US military bases, and not just for the occupation forces? Dewey Clarridge seems to be suggesting as much:

"I believe this terrestrial microwave system going in, whose final target is Afghanistan, together with such recent signals as a new military relationship between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates, are further indications of the long-term implementation of the Bush vision to bring democracy to the Middle East," a former CIA officer and founder of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Duane Clarridge, said in an interview.

Mr. Clarridge, who has spent four months in Iraq in the last year and is the former chief of Arab operations for the CIA's clandestine service, added, "People should get realistic and think in terms of our presence being in Iraq for a generation or until democratic stability in the region is reached."

Meantime, former Bush I Secretary of State James Baker is urging Bush to consider drawing down US forces in Iraq.

The FBI's extraordinary computer problems. "A new FBI computer program designed to help agents share information to ward off terrorist attacks may have to be scrapped, the agency has concluded, forcing a further delay in a four-year, half-billion-dollar overhaul of its antiquated computer system," the LA Times reports:

A prototype of the Virtual Case File was delivered to the FBI last month by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. But bureau officials consider it inadequate and already outdated, and are using it mainly on a trial basis to glean information from users that will be incorporated in a new design.

Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.

SAIC is not expected to get its contract renewed, come March.

Williamson to succeed Danforth, asks the JTA:

Richard Williamson is considered a top candidate to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, according to U.N. insiders. Williamson is a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva and was a deputy to the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte. The resignation of the current ambassador, John Danforth, takes effect Jan. 20, the date of President Bush's inauguration. Nicholas Burns, U.S. ambassador to NATO, also was considered a top candidate, but he now is being considered for another top appointment in the State Department.

Bad news from Iraq. Sistani's aide killed, along with his son and body guards, and a Turkish businessman kidnapped.

This is right up there with the Ku Klux Klan and the Protocols of the Elders of the Zion. Via Atrios.

Never mind:

Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.

I bet it will.

Vice President Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton has just won a $300 million contract in Iran:

A Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, confirmed to The New York Sun yesterday that the subsidiary, Halliburton Products & Services Ltd., won the contract first announced on Iranian TV to develop phases nine and 10 of the south Pars oil and gas field. The Halliburton unit, headquartered in Dubai, is reportedly the target of a grand jury investigation regarding possible violations of an executive order barring American companies from substantial investment in Iran’s energy sector...

Yesterday, the Agence France-Presse news agency...quoted an anonymous official... as saying the deal was worth $310 million...

According to an October 21, 2003, report from Halliburton to the managers of the pension funds for the New York City police and fire departments, the total earnings from Halliburton’s business in Iran represents 0.5% of the company’s total revenues. HPSL does between $30 million and $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran, the report said...

In the late 1990s,when Mr.Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he was one of the harshest critics of President Clinton’s unilateral sanctions against Iran. At this time, Halliburton became one of the founding members of an industry lobbying group, USA Engage, devoted to ending bilateral sanctions against rogue states. Upon assuming office, Mr. Cheney surprised many of his former colleagues when his task force on energy policy declined to recommend the lifting of the 1995 executive order that prohibited American businesses from investing in Iran’s oil and gas sector.

Can anyone say big fat hypocrite?

Matt and Kevin are complaining about the new season of 24. First off, credit where credit is due: thank heavens the show's creators have retired Kim -- Kim running from killers and kidnappers, and Kim as CTU agent became so tiresome. My smaller complaint? That this season's plot revolves around a Turkish terrorist group. Turks just don't seem like the most plausible candidate for this sort of plot against the US defense secretary. I am still trying to figure out something from the first season. Who really were Nina and the Kosovo Serb guy working for? What was the international conspiracy they were part of that linked up with the presidential candidate's American financial backers? Alas, Nina is dead (or so we think!) and I still don't know.

Cambone leaving? Meantime, USA Today's John Diamond is reporting that

The Pentagon is considering establishing a new four-star military command for intelligence, reflecting concern that the powerful civilian intelligence post created by Congress last year could weaken the Pentagon's grip on its vast intelligence assets...

The proposal continues a power struggle between the Pentagon and civilian branches of intelligence that almost thwarted passage of a post-9/11 intelligence-restructuring bill last month. The Pentagon and its supporters on Capitol Hill want to ensure that the 9/11 law doesn't divert spy satellites controlled by the military from missions in support of frontline troops.

Memo to Fox News from Wolcott.

Via Kevin Drum, the Washington Monthly offers some out-of-the-box '08 presidential candidates.

No Child Left Behind, the Mesopotamian version. For the right price, Spencer says he's willing to take a more sunny view of events in Iraq. (He's kidding). James Wolcott is holding fast. Jeffrey Dubner outlines efforts to identify other as-yet undeclared administration propagandists.

"The man who insisted that President Bush make the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa is poised to assume a top State Department job that would make him the lead US arms negotiator with Iran and North Korea, according to administration officials," the Boston Globe reports.

The defense attorney for Abu Ghraib ringleader Charles Graner is as deranged as his client if he believes his defense. This from Reuters' Adam Tanner, attending the trial at Fort Hood, Texas:

Graner's attorney said piling naked prisoners into pyramids and leading them by a leash were acceptable methods of prisoner control. He compared this to pyramids made by cheerleaders at sports events and parents putting tethers on toddlers.

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments to the 10-member U.S. military jury at the reservist's court-martial...

Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees. "You're keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections," he said. "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there."

That's the kind of judgment we have come to expect from Bush's pick for attorney general. But from a defense attorney?

More top tier personnel changes at State:

Meanwhile, at the State Department, deputy spokesman Ereli said some other senior officials also had submitted their resignations, including the department's No. 3 diplomat, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Marc Grossman, and Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Elizabeth Jones.

Other sources also named Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Alan Larson among those slated to quit the State Department.

Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns, who has served as Bush's special Middle East envoy and helped broker a deal with Libya to give up weapons of mass destruction, may either become U.S. ambassador to Moscow or replace Grossman as undersecretary of state for political affairs, sources said.

And a journo friend asks, "Is Wolfowitz going to the UN, as the Nelson Report speculated? Elliot Abrams to become Stephen Hadley’s deputy [at the NSC]? Bolton to take Libby’s place? Libby to take Wolfowitz's place? I love this stuff." We shan't know for sure until after the Iraqi elections.

The New York Sun publishes an only semi-backhanded defense of the UN by Michael Barone:

Nevertheless, there is a place for the U.N. in American foreign policy. Useful guidance to that place can come from history - specifically, from two of the founder spirits of the U.N., Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Franklin Roosevelt more than anyone else created the U.N., but he did not do so out of some naive belief in world government bringing universal peace. He spoke words of idealism but was also a cynical observer of the way the world works...

Roosevelt did not intend the U.N. to be an independent arbiter. He intended it to be an instrument of American power - "a permanent system of intervention that he intended to institute by international law," in de Gaulle's words...

But it will not do for an American president to say out loud that the U.N. is America's tool.

I mostly agree with this -- the US should support the UN not out of idealism and charity, but because the UN more often than not advances US foreign policy and national security interests. As simple as that.

Breaking news at the MSNBC news site: "CBS News ousts four for Bush National Guard story." Here's the AP:

CBS fired four employees, including three top news producers, following an independent investigation that said a "myopic zeal'' led to a "60 Minutes Wednesday'' story about President Bush's military service that relied on allegedly forged documents.

The network fired Mary Mapes, producer of the report; Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday" and his top deputy Mary Murphy; and senior vice president Betsy West.

Dan Rather, who narrated the report, announced in November that he was stepping down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," but insisted the timing had nothing to do with the investigation.

The independent investigators -- former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, retired president and chief executive of the Associated Press -- said they could find no evidence to conclude the report was fueled by a political agenda.

The network's drive to be the first to break a story about Mr. Bush's National Guard service was a key reason it produced a story that was neither fair nor accurate and did not meet CBS News' internal standards, the investigators said.

Update: As reader S. pointed out, would that the Pentagon and the Bush administration had the same levels of accountability vis a vis Iraq post-war planning, Abu Ghraib, etc. as CBS.

Running to an event on counterinsurgency this morning. In the meantime, check out Kevin Drum on the worsening situation in Iraq, and Matt Yglesias' snazzy new reality-based redesign. On Iran, a reader sends news that the shah's son Reza Pahlavi has come out in support of the call for a referendum on Iran's constitution; and another reader sends this Iran travel piece from the Guardian. Meantime, who knew the Jamestown Foundation was created to support defectors? And check out Al Kamen on John Cornyn's (R-Tx) new staffer. Also don't miss the NYT's How the US might disengage in Iraq.

Will some US military medical personnel face charges of war crimes?

Kerry in Syria:

After Kerry left the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, 13-year-old Mustafa al-Nabulsi approached him with a drawing of the senator as a soldier in his Vietnam days.

"You have made me much more important than I was, though. You made me a general," Kerry said.

"I wish you were the president," al-Nabulsi said.

"Thank you very much. So do I," Kerry said.

The WaPo's Al Kamen reports that Wolfowitz is leaving too:

There was buzz early in the week that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz had seen President Bush and informed him that Wolfowitz would be leaving and that Rummy wanted a big-time corporate type to be the new deputy.

We quickly rounded up the usual suspects to see if this was true, but they only said things like: "There may be something there," or, "You'll just have to be patient," or, when asked who might know, suggested we call Newt Gingrich.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita waxed thusly: "As far as I know, he has no plans to leave his job. But I also know that everybody -- the president, the vice president, Secretary Rumsfeld, a whole lot of other people in this administration -- think he's an enormous talent. So I wouldn't be surprised, particularly at this point in time where there's movement in the administration, if people are scratching their heads and thinking if there's someplace else his talents could be applied." (No, not poll watcher in downtown Fallujah. There is an opening at the United Nations, however.) If Wolfowitz were, in fact, leaving the Pentagon, we were advised that it probably would not be for a while.

Big time corporate type for the deputy secretary of defense, because that worked so well for the CEO President and the Secretary himself.

Has anyone checked to see if Cheney is still breathing?

[Thanks to E for the heads up.]

Saturday Update: Wolfowitz says he's staying. But the rumors that he's leaving persist. Reports Reuters' Carol Giacomo: "One official said the expectation is that Rumsfeld would remain in his job for another six to ten months to get past the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq that could have a major impact on the course of that conflict. Rumsfeld thinks it unwise that the defense secretary and the deputy leave simultaneously and so would like to bring in a new deputy before he departs, the official added."

Greg Djerejian is gloating over the Zoellick nomination and rumored Bolton departure. I'd rather Greg gloat all he wants the next four years, but I remain pessimistic. So do Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Richard Gere -- not famous in Palestine.

Matt Yglesias points to a disturbing note from the Institute of War and Peace Reporting about why they have been delayed putting out their Iraq news.

John Bolton to quit the Bush administration, ABC News reports. [Thanks to reader JH.]

It's almost official: Bush is to nominate US Trade Rep Robert Zoellick to be Deputy Secretary of State, Bush administration officials tell Reuters. The neoconservatives had placed great hope in having undersecretary of state for arms control John Bolton, a strident hawk, nominated for the job. A plugged-in reader, responding to gossip posted here yesterday about Zoellick's rumored candicacy for the job, writes almost all of the recent candidates discussed for the job were the un-Bolton:

...What is significant, though, is looking at the recent crop of names that have come up for the deputy slot over the last month: Arnie Kanter, Nick Burns, John Negroponte, Bob Kimmitt. All foreign policy professionals, moderate and realistic in their thinking.

In other words, they're all polar opposites of John Bolton. Reading the tea leaves, it's becoming clear that the hard right lobbying campaign on behalf of Mr. Bolton went nowhere. But watch for him possibly going over to the White House to become Hadley's deputy -- perhaps just as dangerous.

Stay tuned.

Update: Robin Wright offers some meat to this story; highlights include such details as that Zoellick was earlier in his career an advisor to Bush I's Secretary of State James Baker; and that also expected to get top jobs at State are Rice friends, US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns and Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian who recently served as executive director of the 9/11 commission.

[Meantime, like Bolton, James Wolcott is also nursing disappointment at getting passed over for the Big Job.]

Gonzales AG nomination hearing:

Asked about the torture scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, Gonzales said he was “sickened and outraged by those photos.” But he declined to give a legal opinion on the alleged abuses, suggesting he didn’t want to prejudice a possible criminal case if he becomes attorney general.

The Forward translates and publishes an interesting piece by Yediot Aharanot military correspondent Alex Fishman about the chilling of relations between the US and Israeli military leadership over Israel's recent sales of military equipment to China.

Sad news from South Africa, where Nelson Mandela has announced that his eldest son has died from AIDS.

This WaPo account of alleged torture of a suspect "rendered" by the US to Egypt is depressing on so many counts. The cynicism of the secret rendition policy, and also the knowledge that Egypt is one of the US-propped-up and funded countries that is considered a semi success. Some success:

The petition says [Habib] was taken to an airfield where, during a struggle, he was beaten by several people who spoke American-accented English. The men cut off his clothes, one placed a foot on his neck "and posed while another took pictures," the document says. If Egypt is a case study for US foreign policy in the Middle East, we're doomed.

He was then flown to Egypt, it alleges, and spent six months in custody in a barren, 6-foot-by-8-foot cell, where he slept on the concrete floor with one blanket. During interrogations, Habib was "sometimes suspended from hooks on the wall" and repeatedly kicked, punched, beaten with a stick, rammed with an electric cattle prod and doused with cold water when he fell asleep, the petition says.

He was suspended from hooks, with his is feet resting on the side of a large cylindrical drum attached to wires and a battery, the document says. "When Mr. Habib did not give the answers his interrogators wanted, they threw a switch and a jolt of electricity" went through the drum, it says. "The action of Mr. Habib 'dancing' on the drum forced it to rotate, and his feet constantly slipped, leaving him suspended by only the hooks on the wall . . . This ingenious cruelty lasted until Mr. Habib finally fainted."

At other times, the petition alleges, he was placed in ankle-deep water that his interrogators told him "was wired to an electric current, and that unless Mr. Habib confessed, they would throw the switch and electrocute him."

Habib says he gave false confessions to stop the abuse.

The State Department's annual human rights report has consistently criticized Egypt for practices that include torturing prisoners.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the US "has provided Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. All told, Egypt has received over $50 billion in US largesse since 1975." $50 billion is an awful lot of money to have paid to a government whose rampant torture, corruption and authoritarianism is contributing to the creation of a generation of Mohammed Attas.

Rice and Brownback Updates:

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous writes, regarding yesterday's news about Brownback quitting the Senate Foreign Relations committee, that it's not really "news":

...This decision was announced in December when the Senate was last in session. Brownback was forced to give up his seat on Foreign Relations because he wanted to assume a seat on Judiciary (where he can help enforce the party line on abortion vis-a-vis Mr. Specter). Both the Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees are two of four so-called "A" Committees in the Senate, and no Republican Senator can serve on more than one at any given time.

That's useful to know. Meantime, this same reader writes:

Meanwhile, maybe you can publicize this outrage, from today's Washington Post:

Lugar Offers Rice a Head Start

Condoleezza Rice should expect few surprises when she faces the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jan. 18 and 19 for confirmation hearings on her nomination to be secretary of state. Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and other GOP members have agreed to submit in advance the questions they plan to ask her, a decision some Democrats find surprising.

Lugar will give Rice the questions he plans to ask orally because he feels she should be fully prepared to answer without delay, said Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher said. "This is not a pop quiz," he said.

No, Mr. Fisher, Senate confirmation hearings are "pop-quizes" to a certain extent. For those questions that do not require on-the-spot grilling, there is something called "Questions for the Record", which are formally submitted in writing to the nominee and prepared by the nominee's staff, e.g. the State Department. In fact, for the Rice confirmation, both Chairman Lugar and Ranking Member Biden graciously agreed to submit the QFRs in advance of the hearing (at the end of December, in fact), to allow for full responses before January 20th and help pave the way for a speedy confirmation on the 20th. (Normally, the Senate does not move on a confirmation until all QFRs are answered).

But submitting your oral questions in advance -- that's unprecedented. Wouldn't we all like to see how our future SecState is able to respond under pressure and to questions where she has not spent hours and hours in preparation for?

Indeed, we would. Why is Lugar extending Rice this courtesy?

After the carnage (at Langley). The WaPo's Walter Pincus has a nice status report of where things are at the CIA. He reports that after the departure of 20 senior CIA officials, there is "only one member of the leadership team put together" by Tenet remaining. In addition to personnel changes, Pincus reports that there are clues as to what policy changes Goss and his Hill aides may be preparing to implement:

But there may be clues in the work Goss and his aides did last summer on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee's report on the fiscal 2005 intelligence authorization bill included two particularly controversial recommendations for changing the way the CIA does business.

The first was to have analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence put less emphasis on writing short, often overnight, spot reports to the president and other policymakers on intelligence. Rather, the report said, analysts should focus on writing longer-range, broader strategic estimates.

As the report put it, "Instead of 'chasing CNN,' as the committee has observed in the past, the DI should be devoting much more of its resources to doing the kind of all-source, in-depth analysis that cannot, and is not, being done elsewhere in government or through media outlets."

A former senior intelligence official questioned that approach in an interview last week: "The president, who is CIA's primary customer, is more worried about 2005 than he is 2020." If analysts "don't get things like today's threat from terrorism nailed down in the near term," he added, "it won't matter how they look at matters in Russia or China that are five, 10 and 20 years off." ...

The second significant but difficult-to-enact change that the Goss team promoted on Capitol Hill was getting analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence much more involved in recruiting and directing agents as well as choosing targets for intelligence collection. Those decisions have traditionally been made by the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO), which conducts the agency's spying and collection efforts, and is separate from the DI, where information is analyzed.

But these changes could be put on hold, if Bush nominates Goss to become the new Director of National Intelligence.

Nibras Kazimi has a powerful tribute to his friend, Sheikh Haithem Nayif Ahmed Al-Ansari, assassinated in Baghdad last week, at the end of this piece on alleged Syrian support for terrorists in Iraq:

Evil men trampled on one of God's flowers that had been planted in His good earth. Sheikh Haithem Nayif Ahmed Al-Ansari, 33, was walking to Friday prayers from his Baghdad home on December 31, when a gray BMW slowed down and sprayed him with a machine gun. One of the assailants then disembarked and hunched over the writhing body while emptying the rest of the magazine into my friend's head.

Haithem was both kindred spirit and close friend to me. His political affiliations were contradictory, and many sides will claim him as one of their own. Good, many sides will be out to avenge him. The crime of his murder has many possible leads, and that is due to the list of enemies Haithem chose to keep: Baathists, Wahhabis, and assorted regional intelligence services. A lamb in demeanor and a lion at heart, his loss made Iraq less of a home for me to get back to. Tall, thin, his movie-star face was ignited by fiery green eyes and offset by the sweet melancholy smile of a mystic. Since we had met and began working together three years ago, our conversations invariably started with "Is it possible that you are still alive? God must have a sense of humor." Haithem was a hero, and it may still be early to recount publicly his victories against evil. He was a Shia mullah grappling with existential issues of personal faith in God, but he had no illusions about fighting evil in all its guises. What a horrible loss. Haithem, in your release from the hard circumstances of the battles you chose to fight, has your spirit made it to Paris? He had wanted to see Paris before he died.

The WaPo's Anne Applebaum asks, does the right remember Abu Ghraib? You wouldn't know it from their recent statements or lack of action:

By nominating Gonzales to his Cabinet, the president has demonstrated not only that he is undisturbed by these aberrations, but that he still doesn't understand the nature of the international conflict which he says he is fighting. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its fancy weapons systems but also to prove to the Islamic world that democratic values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The Cold War ended because Eastern Europeans were clamoring to join the West; the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us. They will not do so if our system promotes people who support legal arguments for human rights abuse.

The president's opponents -- Democrats, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- are lining up to oppose Gonzales. But there are Republicans who ought to understand the deeper issues at stake as well.

But you find hardly any Republican leadership following up to prevent such torture and abuse, Applebaum writes. Instead a total absence of leadership from the right on this issue. Kudos to Applebaum for asking, where have McCain, Hagel, Warner and everybody gone? Update: This NYT piece about further abuse at Guantanamo is a couple days old but worth reading (via James Wolcott). Rumsfeld should really watch Pinochet's house arrest in Chile quite closely. More: Abuse at Abu Ghraib went on for months after scandal, Vanity Fair reports. And Newsweek says the FBI's Mueller deceived Congress about the FBI's knowledge of the torture:

"The AC had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees," one F.B.I. agent reported from Guantánamo in August. "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

The US military's Southern Command is going to investigate (FBI) reports of torture at Guantanamo only now?? Update II: Shouldn't Rumsfeld face trial for this? The NYT reports that FBI missives report it was in fact Wolfowitz who signed off on some of the witnessed torture techniques:

"This technique and all of those used in the scenarios was approved by the dep sec def," or deputy secretary of defense, one agent wrote from Guantánamo in January 2004.

More from Mark Danner:

By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us. True, that miserable man who pulled out his hair as he lay on the floor at Guantánamo may eventually tell his interrogators what he knows, or what they want to hear. But for America, torture is self-defeating; for a strong country it is in the end a strategy of weakness. After Mr. Gonzales is confirmed, the road back - to justice, order and propriety - will be very long. Torture will belong to us all.

Thursday Update: An intelligence professional friend writes in response to this NYT piece, "Hardly war ciminal stuff, really ... this is just standard hostile interrogation techniques using psychological methods. I... am totally opposed to physical torture (and I felt that the Abu Ghraib mess should have resulted in far more judicial reaction than it did), but the below describes SOP against the hardest of the hard. If you're never interrogated anyone I don't think you can understand. We're at war.

Wondering if the interrogation techniques described in the FBI messages about the abuse witnessed in Guantanamo is perceived by other "professionals" as standard operating procedure.

Parchin to be opened to international nuclear inspectors. Update: Meantime, the NY Sun's Benny Avni reports that stories of a clandestine nuclear program in Egypt are part of an American led campaign to oust Egyptian national Mohamed ElBaradei as head of the IAEA.

Intriguing gossip from the Nelson Report: current US trade rep Robert Zoellick a strong candidate for Deputy Secretary of State and ... Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) has reportedly quit the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Very interesting.

Thanks to Greg Djerejian for pointing me to Praktike's excellent blog, here. I've enjoyed Praktike's comments around my site and others the past few months, and his own site is definitely worth visiting regularly.

What an idiot. So glad they caught this guy.

Who ever could have imagined that we would see such a headline in the US?

Gonzales promises to support non-torture policy

Dear lord.

Let the eagles soar. Talk about elevated terror alert (via Atrios).

From the archives...this tidbit was interesting. From a 1997 New York Review of Books piece by Theodore Draper, asking "Is the CIA Necessary?":

A journalist who filed a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request with the Department of State in 1984 seeking information on oil production in Saudi Arabia during the 1970s finally received a reply in 1993-nine years later. That reply consisted of a one-page chart that the State Department had retrieved and referred to the originating agency, the Department of Energy. In 1989, the DoE sent it to the Central Intelligence Agency for further review. It was then returned by the CIA to the DoE in 1993, and finally sent to the journalist with half of its numbers deleted and a notation in the document that it had actually been declassified in 1992. After nearly a decade of waiting, the journalist had long since moved on to another story.

Steven Aftergood follows excessive government secrecy issues all the time here, but something about the above case of the CIA sitting on a FOIA request for four years, then redacting half the document that had since been declassified was rather striking. And that was back in Reagan and George H. W. Bush's time.

Incidentally, Draper concluded eight years ago that the US no longer needed a secret intelligence agency:

Apart from particular questions about the CIA, there is the problem of the place of a secret agency in a democracy. Secret agencies, especially those which can conceal their secrets more or less permanently, necessarily operate outside the democratic process. They are most difficult to control and even to scrutinize. They tempt presidents to use them to escape from ordinary political oversight. They offer a quick panacea instead of patient, long-term policies. Without a war, hot or cold, they can do more harm than good.

The time has come to ask whether the country still needs the CIA. It remains an expensive adjunct which has lost its way and shows little sign of finding one. Its past is littered with "unblemished triumphs" that are now recognized as having led to disasters. Its potential for misdeeds is frightening, but it has been so secretive that there has been no telling, until much too late, what it had been doing and why. Without a clear and extraordinary mission, such as contending with the Soviet enemy, the CIA is a relic that the country does not need.

Worth reading. Update: Eric Umansky has more on contemporary FOIA hell.

The Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, now a fellow at Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, has an interesting editorial on the crisis that dare-not-speak-its-name in the mainstream American press, between the Pentagon and the Israeli defense ministry over Israeli weapons sales to China. The gist of Glick's argument is two-fold -- first, that just because Israel is dependent on its alliance with the US, the US should not take Israel for granted, and secondly, that the crisis could be an opportunity for Washington and Tel Aviv to recognize that Israel and the US have separate security interests in the world. Worth reading.

Still feeling not altogether ready to relinquish your holiday vacation and face the ugly world of politics and the coming inauguration? Well - the Guardian's list of books to look out for in 2005 is a nice transition read then.

Backing Alberto Gonzales for attorney general is backing torture, writes Robert Scheer in the LA Times. A group of retired US military officers opposes Gonzales' nomination as well, the WaPo's Dan Eggen reports, citing "his role in shaping policies on torture." Is there bipartisan congressional support for torture? Scheer asks.

Former CIA station chief Haviland Smith, writing in the WaPo:

Given the way the Bush White House has handled intelligence during the past three years, it makes sense that it is angry at the clandestine service. The officers in that service are often required to give their opinions about policies in advance of their implementation. It is unlikely that any clandestine service officer, having spent a career in the Middle East, would see our current policy there as flawless. Thus many in the White House probably see the clandestine service as a nest of enemies. They might just want to consider an alternative possibility: that the service is made up of professionals who would like to save their country from the further embarrassment and potential difficulties of a truly flawed and dangerous Iraq policy...

Given his dogged adherence to the righteousness of that policy, it makes sense that the president would be angry with the clandestine service. It seems quite possible that the service is being punished for having been right... The agency's statutory responsibility is to speak the truth, whether the truth supports the president's plans or not. It would appear that this concept is not shared by this administration.

'Cutting off our nose to spite our face,' is how Smith sums up Porter Goss's White House ordered purge of the clandestine service underway.

Overshadowed by the debate over Iran, writes former Senate Foreign Relations Committee nonproliferation advisor Jofi Joseph, was the IAEA's recent decision not to refer South Korea's uranium enrichment experiment to the UN Security Council. That decision leaves the IAEA vulnerable to charges of political bias, Joseph argues.

Ali, one of the Iraqi Fadhils brothers who recently quit writing at Iraq the Model, has started his own blog, where he explains his decision. His two brothers, Omar and Mohammed, recently met with President Bush while on a tour of the States, a well publicized event which Ali believes may have endangered them, as he explains here.

Tim Dunlop recreates a sad and fascinating conversation he overheard while riding the train back from New York to Washington D.C. the other day, about the war in Iraq.

Meantime, on the subject of interesting international webblogs, my friend Uli Buechsenschuetz has started a new Europe-oriented blog from his base in Berlin.

This account of Richard Holbrooke's umpteenth effort to save the UN from the right wing in Washington and itself is at turns fascinating and comical, written as it is as a whodunnit. But one thought that occurs in reading is, it would not be a bad political move for Bush to cross party lines and nominate Holbrooke to be US ambassador to the UN.

You may have read that there is an effort by Iranian dissidents in and out of Iran to organize a referendum on Iran's constitution. Facing charges of trying to overthrow the government, one of the Iranian student organizers of this effort, Akbar Atri, has recently fled Iran. Here's an article based on an recent interview with him. As one of my readers, an Iranian American, closely following this referendum effort points out, Atri is quite critical of the monarchist-oriented Iranian exile broadcasters in Los Angeles, to which some American conservatives are trying to increase US funding:

The referendum would be on whether Islam should be the basis of Iranian law and politics, almost a mirror image of a 1980 referendum, which the Iranian regime to this day touts as proof the 1979 Islamic revolution had popular legitimacy...

In the interview, Mr. Atri said that he believes some mistakes have been made so far in the political strategy of the opposition, but he was confident the referendum would gain support from the people.

In particular, Mr. Atri singled out the Iranian-language satellite television and radio stations based in Los Angeles for not endorsing the call for a referendum. Several American legislators have pushed in recent years for government money to go to those stations. "Some people are upset because they are not the leader of the movement," he said, referring to monarchists and other exile oppositionists who have not yet signed the call for a referendum.

Atri also says he and his colleages are following events in Ukraine closely.

Update: Robert Dreyfuss reports that Ahmad Chalabi has recently returned from his "home away from home" in Iran and met there with Iranian presidential candidate Rafsanjani. "It’s not inconceivable that by the end of 2005 Chalabi and Rafsanjani could end up running the two neighboring countries."

Prof. Eric Gordy has some thoughts on Daniel Pipes' recent defense of the US's internment of Japanese Americans (including the late Rep. Matsui) in camps during World War II. I cannot believe that any decent person would want to be associated with this advocacy of racial hatred and specific punitive policies based on a person's race or religion, which so resembles the Nazis. Least of all the US Institute of Peace. Beyond the pale.

Writing in the Washington Post, Adnan Pachachi calls for a delay in the Iraqi elections. But it seems that the horrendous security situation he describes is not going to get better with more time, but is likely to only get worse if elections were postponed.

Reader F sends news about Nobel Peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi's attempted candidacy in the upcoming Iranian presidential elections:

According to Iran Daily...14 groups [including] the Council in Defense of Prisoners' Rights along with independent human rights advocates are to form a coalition to back Ebadi's candidacy. This is while, according to Iran's Guardian Council, the controversial term ' Rejal' explicitly mentioned in Iran's constitution ... refers to the masculinity of the candidates. Thus it is still unknown what strategies Ebadi's supporters are to take to overcome this obstacle.

Monday Update: The reader has now learned that Ebadi has decided not to run.

Talk about the Taliban -- via Atrios.

Jonathan Raban reviews a harvest of recent literature and documentaries on the war on terror in the New York Review of Books, worth reading:

The name al-Qaeda means something different practically every time it's used. Sometimes it's a synecdoche, intended to conjure shadowy legions of all the various militant Islamist groups around the globe, which is how Podhoretz generally refers to it. Sometimes it's held to be a transnational corporation, like Starbucks, with a spiderweb of sleeper-cell outlets spread worldwide, but controlled from a headquarters somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Sometimes it's described as a franchise outfit, like 7-Eleven, renting out its name to any small-time independent shopkeeper who's prepared to subscribe to the company program, and sometimes as a single store, or bank, owned and operated by Osama bin Laden.

This fogginess has been thickened by the political and journalistic habit of using speculative—often wildly speculative—conjunctions to connect particular people to the organization. Terrorist suspects, along with almost anyone temporarily detained under the provisions of the Patriot Act, are said to have alleged ties to, be associated with, or be linked to al-Qaeda. Although most of these associations have subsequently proved to be fictitious (as in the case of Brandon Mayfield, the unfortunate Portland, Oregon, lawyer who was arrested by the FBI for his supposed involvement in the Madrid train bombing), the impression is left that members of al-Qaeda are strewn as thickly over the ground, and in our very midst, as those of the AARP.

The Forward's Ori Nir has an interesting article suggesting that the FBI Aipac investigation may result in AIPAC being required to register as a foreign lobbying organization, and what that would mean for it.