In its war against Islamic terrorism, Russia's security services use torture to coerce fake confessions from detainees. Sound familiar?

My neighbor played ice hockey with Tony Rudy, who pled guilty today to fraud. The neighbor says that locker room talk often involved Rudy describing some new "piece" he'd acquired, (as in gun), etc. and that when they found out he worked at an international financial institution, Rudy turned to a third team mate and said, "Hey, John, didn't we get rid of that?" Funny guy.

How about it: Murray Waas v. Pat Roberts on the next Russert?

It's pretty clear that, as in the NIE on Iraq's capabilities itself, the endnotes and additional views will be more important in Phase II than the body of the report itself.

Kevin Drum has the story on people who truly deserved each other. The DeLay family, indeed. And don't miss the part about Scanlon's yoga instructor who Scanlon put in charge of his fake think tank. It seems that Mr. Scanlon's ex fiance -- later the Powell press aide who tried to get Powell to end his live interview with Tim Russert -- gave some useful information to Scanlon's ex wife that the latter shared with the Post that led to this whole thing unravelling. Jerry Springer on the Potomac. Update: Raw Story got much of this first. To be fair, National Journal's Peter Stone reported some of these allegations years before.

From tonight's Nelson Report:

... Republican friends say do not expect to see any major moves, including asking Treasury’s John Snow to retire, before Bolten is in place. But when that happens, it will shock few. The “Big One” is Rummy...has President Bush finally gotten to the point where he sees Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld as a liability, not an asset? You can see evidence for this, if you want.

Specifically, note who has been run out for TV recently defending and explaining Iraq...Bush, not Rumsfeld. The President has been forced to put himself irrevocably on the line, both in public, and with the press, because Rumsfeld has lost all credibility...that’s what our Republican friends say is the “inside word”.

Sources also confirm that the President has absorbed the fact that the professional military has completely given up on Rumsfeld...admittedly a process which began for some “uniforms” even before 9/11, but which has continued to affect...or infect...virtually the whole military establishment today. (Rumsfeld’s contemptuous treatment of the senior brass...including the Joint Chiefs...has become legend, if somewhat under-reported, since these folks are loyal to the institution, if not the man, despite the provocations.)

Some insiders had been hoping that Rumsfeld would take the opportunity of the third-anniversary of the war to step down. But he either didn’t hear the hints, or didn’t care. So it apparently will be up to Bolten to pull the plug, on the President’s behalf.

Won’t Vice President Cheney step in to save his ideological and political comrade? Sources don’t think the Veep is in any position to challenge the facts on the ground...he can see that Rumsfeld has lost the confidence of both the troops, and the media.

So the question may boil down to Bolten’s authority, and capacity. Observers say that the Bolten of today is just as smart as he ever was, with an additional layer of toughness. “Now he has learned that sometimes you must fire people, even your friends, if you want to succeed”.

So does he have the authority to fire Rumsfeld? Inside betting is “yes”...so stay tuned.

If Rummy goes, who’s next? Sources say don’t be surprised if Bush goes to Capitol Hill. Some Republicans think Senate Armed Services chair John Warner might look logical, given the confidence issues within both the military and the media. And come January next year, Warned is term-limited out as chairman, so will be “available”. But if Warner is deemed too old, some sources say don’t forget that former Senator and Indiana governor Dan Coats was on the short list back in 2000-2001 transition.

Hummm....we recall reporting at that time that Coats had DOD sewed up, pending his personal interview down at the ranch in Crawford, but that Coats’ performance was SO dismal the George Bush of that time...raw, inexperienced, and naïve on both defense and foreign policy...rejected Coats out of hand.

What about former Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage, we hear you ask? Certainly Armitage has been known to express serious interest...and perhaps even serious hopes he could be on the list....due to his strong personal relationship with Bush, despite his loyalty to Colin Powell.

There could hardly be a stronger choice to prove that Rumsfeld has been “fired” than Armitage, but you have to figure out how to parse Armitage’s recent interviews in Australia, for example, or with The Oriental Economist, in which he had some frank and not entirely comradely things to say about the current Bush team, Secretary Condi Rice included.

You have got to be kidding. Where do these hateful people come from? What planet are they from? (Via Atrios).

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) calls on President Bush to release the Hadley memo. "I am certain you would agree that, as we enter the fourth year of the invasion, it is important for the American people to understand exactly what set of circumstances led to your authorization of military action." See Murray Waas' latest for details.

Worth reading: Charlie Cook on some of the political complexities of public opinion about immigration.

State by state Survey USA poll, as of 3/15/2006. Bush's approval rating is below 40% in 23 states, below 30% in eight, and below 50% in 47 states of the Union. He is at or below 40% in fourteen states that went for him in 2004. He is at 41% in Texas, 40% in Indiana, 34% in Ohio, 37% in Florida, 39% in Virginia, 36% in Missouri, 36% in Colorado, 35% in Iowa, all states which went for him 2004.

Insulate the president, blame the CIA. Murray Waas' latest on White House anxiety over its exaggerated Iraq intelligence pronouncements:

[...] Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

As the 2004 election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The previously undisclosed review by Hadley was part of a damage-control effort launched after former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true. The CIA had sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate the purported procurement efforts by Iraq; he reported that they were most likely a hoax.

The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information might be untrue.

But Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons. [...]

(HT to Ezra).

The New Clientism. Former EU Mideast advisor Alistair Crooke and consultant Mark Perry on "How to lose the war on terror":

... We have reached a much more fundamental and alarming conclusion: Western governments are frighteningly out of touch with the principal political currents in the Middle East. The US and its allies overestimated Ayad Allawi's strength, were "stunned" by Hamas' win, and were surprised by the Aoun-Nasrallah agreement because they don't have a clue about what's really going on in the region.

But why?

With the exception of Israel (where a US and European appreciation ofrealities is critical to the formulation of policy), there are, inter alia, five political movements and governments in the Middle East of undeniable importance: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The governments of the West don't talk to any of them.

They do talk to the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf region; but the net result of most of these contacts is that Western governments are dependent for information about the region on a set of clients who, as often as not, are mere reflections of what Westerners want the Middle East to be, rather than what it actually is:

Ayad Allawi, who was wrong when he reassured US officials that Iraq's voters would reject sectarianism, Fatah, which was wrong when it told us that their acceptance of US funding for their campaign would enhance their legitimacy among Palestinian voters, and Lebanese leader Saad Hariri, who was wrong when he told the US government that its program for isolating Hezbollah would work.

This clientism is not new; rather, it is a continuation of the misreading that led US and British officials to believe their soldierswould ride to Baghdad along flower-paved highways.

Once again, we're being "Chalabied". [...]

Via Steve Aftergood, a study on the AQ Khan network (pdf) by Christopher Clary of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Reporter Jill Carroll freed in Iraq. The WP's Jackie Spinner saying Carroll was handed over to a Sunni political group early this morning before being delivered to the US embassy in Baghdad.

"I heart Gitmo" bumper stickers? There's an odd sort of justice that this Howard Kaloogian who ran Swift Boat Veterans for Truth-style campaigns has been outted as rather a pathetic liar. Justin Rood and Paul Kiel find that Kaloogian's organization launched an "I Love Gitmo" campaign, among other civic activities. Learning the past couple months a lot about Duke Cunningham -- who ran, it's worth remembering, in a 1990 primary against Bill Lowery as an anti-corruption candidate -- one wonders what is in the water in San Diego that it seems to elevate such charlatans and blowhards.

Civics 201: So who is the mysterious Senate Parliamentarian who determined that the Judiciary committee's Arlen Specter, and not the Intelligence committee's Pat Roberts, would oversee drafting legislation on NSA domestic spying? AP: "Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., expressed interest in handling legislation on the NSA effort. But the Senate Parliamentarian gave Specter jurisdiction over his bill and DeWine's." UPI: "In practice, the referral means that members and staff of the intelligence committee will have only a short time to work on whatever proposal emerges from Specter's panel -- 10 days, according to committee staff. And the intelligence committee's influence over the final shape of the bill the Senate will vote on may also be limited in other ways by the chamber's arcane parliamentary rules." And don't miss this either, "... Some on the intelligence committee -- though they would not speak for the record -- say important changes need to be made to the DeWine bill. Most controversially, they believe the bill should authorize the use of this new surveillance tool to protect the country against threats other than terrorism."

One has to think that being Moussaoui's defense lawyer would have to be among the most thankless jobs this side of Suez.

Hotline fronts its 3/23 poll on Bush's base with this summary: "This is Bush's base (approx. 45% of the entire GOP). According to the latest Diageo/Hotline poll, they're older (more than half are over 55 which translates into being "very likely" midterm voters), go to church weekly, and almost all of them are white. They oppose abortion rights, and, like VP Cheney himself, they listen to Rush and O'Reilly. And while DC is abuzz with talk that the faithful are weary and fractured, the poll shows they'll be a force at the ballot box. In '08, they're not looking for a renegade, but someone who more fits the Bush. They're not huge fans of McCain, who leads the list of GOPers they'd never support. Among Bush's base, McCain trails Giuliani in '08 matchups. Also, note how a plurality of all GOPers think Bush has been a worse president than Reagan. But among the most die-hard Bushies, most think he's been as good or better." Go read.

Hotline asks, more staff changes to come?

MORE TO COME? CNN also ran an interview Pres. Bush gave to CNN en Espanol's Juan Carlos Lopez. Most of the interview was about the upcoming summit in Cancun (no word if Bush will party at Senor Frogs with Lou Dobbs) but he was asked if there were more staff changes coming, Bush: "Josh has just begun to take a look at the White House structure. And I haven't had a chance to talk to him about the future yet. But right now I'm honoring and celebrating the service of Andy Card" ("Situation Room," 3/28).

NBC's Gregory: "The president has been very clear that Josh Bolten will have a free hand, meaning that other changes may come" ("Hardball," MSNBC, 3/28).

Weekly Standard's Kristol: "This is the first of a series of changes. And I think we could end up with a much more combative and aggressive administration than we've had in the last few months" ("Special Report," FNC, 3/28).

Pat Buchanan: "I have to think ... that it's probably the beginning of a lot of changes in the White House and maybe one or two in the cabinet. I think the president has clearly got the message" ("Situation," MSNBC, 3/28).

Likud trounced in Israeli polls, picks up just eleven Knesset seats. Ha'aretz reports that senior party leaders are calling for dumping Netanyahu. "The nation can't stand him." More results. Jo-Ann Mort take: "This election signaled a generational shift (finally) in Israeli politics; it also signaled a shift away from former generals toward politicians who rose through civilian ranks to lead. [...] The American darling Bibi Netanyahu is no more. [...] It wasn't simply Sharon's creation of Kadimah that did in the Likud. The narrative of the religious/right wing settlement policy is dead. It is finished--and the U.S. Administration and the supporters of the settlers need to understand that." The Corner: "Bye-bye, Bibi."

NYT's Eric Lichtblau: "Five former judges on the nation's most secretive court, including one who resigned in apparent protest over President Bush's domestic eavesdropping, urged Congress on Tuesday to give the court a formal role in overseeing the surveillance program. In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that grew out of the wiretaps. Judge Harold A. Baker, a sitting federal judge in Illinois who served on the intelligence court until last year, said the president was bound by the law 'like everyone else.' If a law like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is duly enacted by Congress and considered constitutional, Judge Baker said, 'the president ignores it at the president's peril.'"

The Supreme Court doesn't seem to be seeing things the administration's way either, in a case concerning whether the Bush administration is subject to judicial review in its treatment of Gitmo detainees. "At least five justices ... appeared ready to reject the administration's argument that the Detainee Treatment Act, passed and signed into law after the court accepted the case in November, had stripped the court of jurisdiction." More from Dahlia Lithwick.

Slate's Timothy Noah: Think Tanks for Sale (to Abramoff).

Liberia's Charles Taylor arrested. A friend knowledgeable about US policy to West Africa writes, "[Nigerian president] Obasanjo can’t afford to play any more games, and Taylor will be sent to the tribunal, it looks like via Liberia. Reuters reports that Obasanjo has ordered his immediate repatriation. (UNMIL has a chapter VII mandate to make the arrest and transfer, and nobody wants him in Liberia, so this will go very quickly once he’s there.) Obasanjo overplayed his hand, and got burned by the overwhelming response from Washington yesterday. Never have I seen a better example of the White House, State Department, House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, working together to send such a strong, clear signal. US leadership yesterday may have saved West Africa from years of additional mayhem and suffering." More on what Taylor's arrest could mean for the region here.

Refugee policy madness. International Refugee Committee president George Rupp: "U.S. policy toward authoritarian governments has been turned on its head: The victims of terrorism are being denied protection and sanctuary. [...] In Liberia, a female head of a household was referred to the U.S. resettlement program by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a person particularly vulnerable to attack. Rebels had come to her home, killed her father and beat and gang-raped her. The rebels held her hostage in her own home and forced her to wash their clothes. The woman escaped after several weeks and made her way to a refugee camp. The Department of Homeland Security has decided that because the rebels lived in her house and she washed their clothes, she had provided 'material support' to the rebels; the case has been placed on hold."

LAT: "New name in the 9/11 plot surfaces."

WSJ Washington Wire asks if Card is planning a run for governor of Massachusetts, his home state.

White House chief of staff Andrew Card resigns. OMB director Joshua Bolten to replace him.

From the NYT: "In addition, the senior intelligence official said, documents known to be forgeries are not posted. He said the database includes 'a fair amount of forgeries,' sold by Iraqi hustlers or concocted by Iraqis opposed to Mr. Hussein." Interesting.

Chris Suellentrop has a nice wrap up of some of the recent Fukuyama reviews. Here's one more.

Moussaoui shocker:

Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.

Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom as he disclosed details he had never revealed before. It was in stark contrast to Moussaoui's previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned on earlier terrorist convictions.

Moussaoui testified Monday he lied to investigators when arrested in August 2001 because he wanted to let the attacks of Sept. 11 go forward.

''Yes, you can say that,'' Moussaoui said when the prosecution asked if that was why he misled them. The statement was key to the government's case that the attacks might have been averted if Moussaoui had been more cooperative following his arrest.

He told the court he knew the attacks were coming some time after August 2001 and bought a radio so he could hear them unfold.

Jack Abramoff's money-laundering cut outs. Can't keep track of which vehicles Abramoff used to launder the Marianas sweatshop money, vs. that of the Russian energy firm, and the tribal cash? Paul Kiel has a handy reference guide. Still curious about the Caucasus foundation, the Hong Kong outfit, and how Abramoff became a lobbyist for a brief while for the Pakistani military.

Atrios is right. West Wing got him totally wrong last night.

WP: focus on earmarks.

Kafka in the Bush administration. The NY Sun: "The Bush administration is asking the Supreme Court to refuse to hear an unusual petition brought by two Muslims from China who are being held at Guantanamo Bay despite the American military's determination that the pair pose no threat to America. [...] A year ago, a military tribunal formally determined that Messrs. Qassim and Al-Hakim were no longer enemy combatants. Lawyers for the men contend the military made that determination in 2003. However, the pair has remained at Guantanamo, because they object to being returned to China, and American authorities will not admit them to this country." So they're being held at Gitmo for years even though nobody thinks they are a threat. How long can you deprive a person of liberty that you know to be innocent?

Rice on CNN Late Edition: US ambassador to Afghanistan has met with Iranian ambassador to Afghanistan, and I believe she implied that Zalmay Khalilzad, when he was US ambassador to Afghanistan, also met with the Iranian ambassador.

Listening to C-Span discussion of the WaPo/Jeff Smith article on Ed Buckham/Abramoff et al (noted below). So Ed Buckham and his wife Wendy made payments of over $3000 a month to DeLay's wife Christine, for three years. From the Post: "During this latter period, Buckham and his wife, Wendy, acting through their consulting firm, made monthly payments averaging $3,200-$3,400 apiece to DeLay's wife, Christine, for three of the years in which he collected money from the USFN and some other clients." That approximately $125,000 in payments to Christine from the Buckham-controlled consulting firm answers the question of what the DeLays might have personally financially gotten out of the arrangement.

Meantime, this deep in the piece is also notably outrageous: "The following year [in 1999], the National Republican Congressional Committee gave the [US Family Network] a $500,000 check to finance additional radio ads in the districts of vulnerable Democrats. Buckham told the FEC he solicited the check, and others told FEC investigators it was paid over the objections of the NRCC's director and chief counsel. Of the $500,000, USFN gave just $300,000 to another nonprofit group for the ads. In his deposition, Buckham explained that he retained a portion of the Republican Party's check as a commission. 'If I raise money, I get a portion,' Buckham said. 'It is in my contract.'"

Buckham personally took a $200,000 "commission" from the NRCC?? Is there another word for that?

Update: This accompanying WP graphic, "Where the money went" is helpful.

From August until October 2004, Georgia Kontogiannis, the wife of alleged Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Thomas Kontogiannis, gave $18,000 to eighteen vulnerable Republican US House candidates, $1,000 each to: Thelma Drake, running from Virginia's second Congressional district, Jeffrey Lane Fortenberry, running from Nebraska, John Swallow, a Republican House candidate from Utah, Dave Reichert, (R-Washington state), Charles W. Dent (R-PA), Geoff Davis (R-Ken), Charles Boustany (R-Louisiana), Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Penn), Jim Gerlach (R-Penn), and a few others. Georgia Kontogiannis is described as a retired homemaker. These are not her local candidates, or broad nationally known candidates. Who was directing these payments to these obscure, vulnerable national Republican candidates? Who gave the Kontogiannis the Republican House play map? These payments suggest a degree of connection to someone far more central to the GOP House machine than even Cunningham.

How is the Lincoln Group spinning the US authorizing torture? As Bush's poll numbers since November indicate, it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the administration's efforts to attempt to covertly buy good press in Iraq through such an outfit as Lincoln. After all, so much for the spin machine employed by this administration at home or abroad when the single most used word American citizens tell pollsters they associate with the president is "incompetent" -- (closely followed by "idiot" and "liar," according to Pew). In some ways, perhaps the best Lincoln's funders could hope for is that its influence campaign convinces Iraqis that the US's foibles in Iraq are the result of incompetence rather than some malign intent. The White House's position on torture would seem however to erode the "bad apples" defense the Bush White House characteristically employs when acts of gross abuse by US personnel are uncovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, and eat away at the US's image in the world, far more than any Pentagon-funded Lincoln Group influence campaign could ever manage to counteract. Why not reevaluate the policies that erode US soft power rather than throw a few hundred million dollars at it through the likes of Lincoln? As Bush's own tanking credibility among the US populace indicates, spin -- covert and overt -- can only take you so far.

WP on the cut-outs Abramoff used to bribe DeLay's staffers Ed Buckham, Tony Rudy and their wives, to entice DeLay to vote to benefit Abramoff's clients, Russian energy concerns and Indian tribes. DeLay's staffers' outfits, Alexander Strategy Group and the US Family Network were literally conceived of by Abramoff as vehicles to launder money from Abramoff's clients to buy DeLay's votes (presumably, if DeLay was willing to vote in ways that would have benefitted Abramoff's clients for free, they could have saved their cash). The Post piece by Jeff Smith shows Buckham and his wife Wendy personally raked in over a million dollars from one such cut out, the pro-family values 'non-profit,' the US Family Network. And the piece further details what the National Journal's Peter Stone reported last week: that Buckham started to collect from Abramoff's clients via the US Family Network in late 1997 while he was still chief of staff to DeLay -- a post he seemed to continue to de facto serve even when Abramoff sent him off to K Street to launder the money from his clients. Given the evidence that Buckham and Delay and Abramoff were engaged in the crimes associated with the mob -- conspiracy to commit bribery, money laundering, fraud -- it's hard to fathom that Buckham is a minister, described as DeLay's spiritual advisor who prayed with him daily. What were they praying for?

The piece demonstrates a breathtaking degree of complicity on Buckham's part to participate in a bribery and money laundering scheme engineered by Abramoff. As a friend commented to me, a good money laundering scheme would involve several layers of cut outs or front companies -- from three to twelve. These guys apparently stuck to the lower number -- a think tank here, a family values charity there, Chelsea bank accounts in the Cayman islands, a law firm in London funneling money from the Russians -- because they were too arrogant to think that anybody would look too hard.

More than 500,000 demonstrate against anti-immigrant law in Los Angeles:

(Credit: Bob Chamberln/LAT)

AP: DOJ -- NSA can monitor doctors', lawyers' calls, introduce intercepted communications in court, even if classified. But it can't tell Congress answers to some of their questions. Why? It's classified.

Knight-Ridder's Warren Strobel introduces us to Mitchell Wade's Iranian partner, Behrooz Behbudi, an Australian-educated, pro-Shah, convert to Catholicism:

Behbudi said he and Wade had a deal to try to get a contract to rebuild the gutted Central Bank of Iraq headquarters building in downtown Baghdad.

Behbudi said he traveled twice to Baghdad soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime and "came up with the most beautiful building" design for the new headquarters.

"Mitch was supposed to come up with the contracts and secure the funds. I was supposed to do the work," Behbudi said. But, he said, Wade never paid him for the design work.

Behbudi's account couldn't be independently confirmed. He said he had a signed contract with Wade, but had to check with his business partners before making it public.

Available contracting records show MZM got one contract for Iraq reconstruction, a $5 million award in March 2003 to provide linguists and interpreters for the Pentagon.

Knight-Ridder reports Behbudi also gives generously to Republican causes, including $17,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2003. A third Wade/Behbudi foundation partner, real estate developer Sonny Lee, gave $41,250 to the National Republican Senatorial committee and was awarded numerous medals from Congressional Republican organizations. As far as I can tell, Behbudi never donated to any US politician before 2003.

I know of a dozen groups that have registered as some version of Iranian democratization or freedom or liberation etc. the past couple years in an effort to position themselves for anticipated Congressional funding, of varying degrees of seriousness, connectedness, and sophistication. Altogether this Wade-Behbudi outfit and effort was on the low range of all of that. Wade might have been in position to get Pentagon contracts, but Behbudi is no Chalabi. He seems to have been out to make a buck with his new pal Wade until the checks bounced.

Bill Arkin thinks he's identified who's doing the Pentagon's domestic spying:

Current and former members of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, come forth.

I believe your unit is spying on anti-war, anti-military and environmental organizations under the guise of "force protection."

Ever since Pentagon domestic spying was revealed by yours truly in December, the Defense Department has aggressively tried to assure Congress and the American public that it is not another agency breaking the law. [...]

902nd warriors: I know you are out there on the front lines, collecting and analyzing dots to find a terrorist enemy. It is activity that on the one hand is less intrusive and politically motivated than anything in the past. Yet, at the same time, it is more diabolical because of its very pervasiveness and promiscuity.

The Pentagon "suspicious activity" database I revealed in December contained entries of anti-war and anti-military demonstrations, certainly suggesting that the military was conducting surveillance.

To understand what kind of surveillance though, one has to abandon the Nixonian model of surveillance for the purpose of harassing government opponents or selecting individuals to spy on because of their political affiliations. [...]

But in this world of Pentagon "force protection," CIFA and 902nd analysts (and their contractor proxies) are mostly engaged in culling through intelligence and law enforcement reports and databases looking for "dots". As part of this work, they surf the web looking for upcoming protests, they follow threads of conversations on newsgroups, join listservs to receive announcements, even join organizations under false pretenses to attend meetings and receive materials.

The objective is to look for patterns or tip-offs that might be the next big one. And if not the next big one, maybe just an anti-war protest at the gate of the local National Guard armory.

The Pentagon's own force protection documents associated with the suspicious activity database reveal that CIFA and 902nd MI Group analysts are looking at whether the same license plates show up at different protests or meetings or whether the same individuals appear at different venues.

This clearly means that their work is not just passive. In the modern era, CIFA and 902nd analysts can just plug the license plate number into the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) to get biographic information. Digital photographs taken at protests can be matched with driver's licenses and the military's new Automated Biometric Identification System (IBIS). Okay, maybe the technologies aren’t yet "24" capable nor that seamless and quick, but we are getting there. Or so the dotists think, which is what drives the promiscuous collection of information with the hope of making the magical connection.

There are also old-fashioned "human intelligence" collection methods being used. In a March 8 letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (pdf), the Defense Department says that information about "domestic anti-military protests or demonstrations" was provided by "concerned citizens, DOD personnel, or law enforcement organizations."

Concerned citizens? My guess is that 902nd MI Group "special agents" and other military gumshoes are not just waiting for the hotline to ring. They are also out their acting as case officers "running" individuals to infiltrate organizations and report back. ...

AP: "The Russian government provided Saddam Hussein with intelligence on U.S. military movements and plans during the opening days of the war in 2003, according to a Pentagon report released today. The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing an Iraqi document that says the battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad. [...] Based on a captured Iraqi document - a memo to Saddam from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dated April 2 - Russian intelligence reported through its ambassador that the American forces were moving to cut off Baghdad from the south, east and north, with the heaviest concentration of troops in the Karbala area. It said the Americans had 12,000 troops in the area, along with 1,000 vehicles." But the information was wrong.

Justin Rood digs up some more MZM contracts the Pentagon might want to investigate. It makes sense that, as the Post reports today, undersecretary of defense for intelligence Steve Cambone is particularly interested in how MZM got contracts with the Counter Intelligence Field Activity, and seemed to have such an intertwined relationship with CIFA generally, because CIFA ultimately reports to him. (Chain of command: Cambone to Acting Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Counterintelligence Roger W. Rogalski to CIFA Director David A. Burtt II). Do the Defense homeland security contracts Justin found report ultimately to Cambone as well?

There are other military-intel related contracts MZM received that should fall in Cambone's purview. For instance, what's this $380,194 contract that MZM received from the Army INSCOM at Ft. Belvoir on October 17, 2003? Home of the Able Danger/Stratus Ivy datamining projects that also reportedly hired contractors and subcontractors to purchase information on US mosques from allegedly controvesial sources? A lot of the contractors in CIFA overlap with those involved in Stratus Ivy. And remember that MZM's contract with CIFA included providing "data acquisition and storage support."

Or this $1,213,632.00 contract from the Department of the Army (funding office name "CCE"), awarded to MZM November 17, 2003, work to be performed in Washington, D.C., location "50000"? [Hey, for those who know, what is location "50000"]? One of $5,090,406.00 worth of contracts MZM received as part of this funding action just between October 2003 and October 2004? It turns out the "CCE" above is the "Contracting Center of Excellence." The CCE "intends to issue a solicitation for the Command and Control Research Program on the behalf of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration)," John G. Grimes, ASD (NII)/DoD CIO. Another vehicle for the federal government to award private contracts and Wade was so there!

Or, as far as appearances of conflict of interest concerns go, what about this $222,368.00 contract MZM received February 2, 2004 from the National GeoSpatial-Intelligence Agency, the renamed National Imagery and Mapping Agency, that was formerly headed by James King, both an advisor to CIFA director David Burtt, a top executive at MZM, and now CEO of MZM's successor, Athena Innovative Solutions?

And what's this $1,381,250.10 contract to MZM via the Government Services Agency (GSA)/Federal Technology Service (FTS) Technical Services Division, from the Department of the Navy, funded by DFAS Indianapolis, awarded on November 13, 2003, to be performed in Arlington?

Indeed, MZM got some 120 public federal contracts just from 2002 until October 2004, and presumably even more valuable contracts for FY 2005 until the scandal broke. MZM went from 70 people to 400 people in recent years, 80% of them with national security clearance.

Remember Abramoff's friend, David Safavian, the former chief of staff at the General Services Administration, later the top White House federal procurement official, who went with Abramoff on a golfing trip abroad when Abramoff had business before his department, who is now slated to go on trial? It seems like Wade had a few well placed friends like Safavian in positions to be helpful not just in Congress, but also in key contracting offices in the administration and in the Defense Department. Who were they? And how different are the favors that MZM got from inside from those that more established Beltway Bandits get all the time?

Long term US bases in Iraq? Congress getting curious what it's paying for.

WP: "Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone has ordered an internal study of how funding earmarked in a bill by then-Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham (R-Calif.) led to contracts for MZM Inc. to do work for the Pentagon's newest intelligence agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, a Defense Department spokesman said. [...] In documents filed in Cunningham's case, prosecutors said that in fiscal 2003 legislation, the congressman, who was a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, set aside, or earmarked, $6.3 million for work to be done 'to benefit' the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created in 2002. Federal prosecutors have been looking into whether Pentagon personnel committed crimes in awarding CIFA contracts to MZM."

Walter Pincus moves forward the story NBC broke about Saddam's foreign minister being an intelligence recruit of the French, and in touch indirectly with the Americans, in an interesting way. It was not the CIA, Pincus reports, but the White House, which became obsessed with trying to get Naji Sabri to defect (something he was never apparently prepared to do). "The White House was far more interested in trying to get Sabri to defect than in the information he was providing on Iraq's weapons programs, in part because the intelligence community did not trust him, another former intelligence official said."

More on that Interior Department, Minerals Management Service contract that MZM received in 2002 that I wrote about yesterday. MZM is the defense and intelligence contracting firm headed by confessed Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Mitchell Wade. The October 15 2002 contract I found yesterday appears to be the first of some more than $100 million in federal contracts Wade's MZM subsequently received from the federal government. A few people who know something about this world have written to explain what might be going on here. They suggest it may have little to do with the Interior Department, but disguise a contract for another agency.

One reader writes, "...MMS began operating a 'franchise fund' in the late '90s as a means of raising extra revenue that it could keep. The concept is classic good government - an agency with a particular area of administrative expertise and competence provides the expert service to other agencies in need of it with a small fee tacked on for its services. So basically MMS became kind of a freelance acquisition service - just tell us what you want and we will efficiently make sure you get it, no questions asked, for a small fee. Lots of agencies have taken advantage of this service, which is generally regarded as very effective and efficient, and good value for the money. One can see why, aside from all the usual good government reasons, there could (theoretically) be reasons why some agency might not want to award a contract directly and have them in its records. It might be useful to have it awarded by MMS, or some similar middleman service, so that it was not so transparent."

A second reader "When I worked [in a federal government agency during the Clinton administration], I learned from a contractor about an entrepreneurial chap in Interior who had made it very easy to contract work out without the usual complex procurement steps. This is the office that was used by The White House to get money to MZM. The strategy was to use the office to make a small contract, then use that contract as a justification for a sole-source contract through one's own agency. (It is not at all uncommon for agencies to pass money through one another...) You might also be surprised at how hard it is (or was) for the WH to contract directly. The usual means is to try to find a cabinet agency with a contract that is open enough in scope that it can fund whatever the WH wants, then to borrow the contractor's services or use the contractor to pass money through to someone else. If there is a way, you need to follow the money back from Interior. Was it originally Interior money or was it passed through from a WH fund or perhaps Defense? [...] It would be the rare contractor, however, who would not have learned about the Interior pipeline."

So who arranged for MZM to get that first $25,000 contract via the Interior Department's innovative franchise outfit, that opened the door to the hundred million dollars in the other contracts? One hint. The next contract MZM received was just three days later from the Defense Department's own IT contracting unit, DITCO, and while it was for only roughly half a million dollars, it was swiftly followed by two contracts for several million dollars. I believe those came from the Army National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose director's son was hired by MZM, one of many NGIC officials and relatives hired by the company.

What I thought would most likely be a goofy lawsuit against Brent Wilkes by one of ADCS's competitors actually turns out to be kind of revealing. So Wade learned his tricks of the trade from Wilkes, and Wilkes learned some of his tricks, the suit alleges, from Steve Caira, the owner of a San Diego-based document conversion company called TomaHawk II. [Tomahawk II is the supposedly Native American-owned spin-off of a document conversion firm Wilkes consulted for in the 1990s called Audre Recognition Systems -- before Wilkes ripped off the idea and started ADCS that directly competed with it]. And while Cunnigham was first Wilkes' and then Wade's benefactor, according to this lawsuit, Caira's benefactor was Rep. Duncan Hunter. What's also incredible if true is the lawsuit's allegation that Caira gave 15,000 stock shares in his company to the DoD official who awarded Caira's company, TomaHawk II, a Pentagon contract (facilitated by Hunter on the Appropriations committee).

And who lobbied for TomaHawk II? In one of those scenarios familiar from Wilkes' Group W Advisors' situation, TomaHawk II is both a registered lobbyist and a lobbying client of itself, and a client of another lobbying firm (The P.A.C.E. Companies, now Pace-Capstone), back in 1998. Get your head around that. [Pace-Capstone is interesting. Looking at the bios of its lobbyists, it seems to specialize in representing two familiar groups: Native American tribes and businesses, and the Mariana Islands, among others.]

This site has more on TomaHawk. It suggests that one of the founders of TomaHawk II, Dennis D. Di Ricco, resigned from the New York Bar association in 1989, and later "testified he helped launder hundreds of thousands of dollars and supplied large quantites of cash for use as payola, in the largest record industry payola case in U.S. history, that of Robert Isgro, a record promoter indicted after he was seen meeting with members of the Gambino Mafia family in New York in 1986." The Gambinos. Money laundering. Hmm. Is there anything to this hint that some in Wilkes' larger business circle had links to the mob? Was Kontogiannis one of his tie-ins to that milieu?

Update: How TomaHawk II and Audre Recognition Systems, for which Wilkes served as a consultant in the 1990s before starting ADCS, are related is both comical and a bit hard to understand. This 1993 press release says TomaHawk, which is supposedly owned by Native Americans, signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Audre. "The agreement will make TomaHawk the exclusive Minority Business Enterprise authorized to use Audre Recognition Systems advanced automatic conversion image- scanning system as a service bureau. A certain number of Federal contracts have a minority set-aside of up to 5 percent where Minority Business Enterprises have the privilege of non-competitive bids." As far as I can tell, Audre seemed to create a minority owned subsidiary, TomaHawk II, to get federal contracts.

Update II: More on Mr. Di Ricco's role in the massive 1980s record payola case. From the end of an August 1990 NYT Larry Rohter piece:

... Judge Ideman's announcement came immediately after testimony by David Michael Smith, [record producer] Mr. Isgro's former bodyguard and a chief prosecution witness, describing a money- laundering scheme in which Mr. Smith said he had acted as a courier between Mr. Isgro and Mr. Di Ricco. Beginning late in 1984, Mr. Smith said, he made ''about a dozen trips'' from Los Angeles to San Francisco, each time to pick up a briefcase containing between $60,000 and $100,000 in cash.

Mr. Smith said that after he and Mr. Isgro had counted the money, large sums were stuffed into record jackets and mailed to several radio stations. ''On a couple of occasions,'' he said, he also saw Mr. Isgro deliver amounts of cash as large as $30,000 to Fred Di Sipio, an independent record promoter from Cherry Hill, N.J.

Mr. Smith said he and Mr. Isgro had also made ''about a half-dozen trips'' to New York, where on ''about three occasions'' he had seen Mr. Isgro deliver large amounts of cash to Joseph Armone, a convicted heroin dealer who Federal investigators say is a member of the Gambino crime family. Government prosecutors have charged in earlier court documents that Mr. Isgro gave the money to Mr. Armone for loan-sharking activities. There are no charges against Mr. Armone.

Further research suggests that sort of New Jersey rough bunch is something Kontogiannis had a little bit of exposure to. From a 1992 Newsday story:

'I WANT THE PROBLEM ELIMINATED," Gregory Montagnino told a hit man when they met at the Vince Lombardi service stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in March, 1991.

The "problem" that Montagnino, a financial wheeler-dealer out on bail from auto loan fraud charges, said he would pay $ 5,000 to eliminate was Bergen County assistant prosecutor Robert Wilson. Wilson had been aggressively pursuing Montagnino on charges that he had fraudulently obtained $ 80,000 in auto loans by using false identities.

But the hit man turned out to be an undercover investigator, and Montagnino was later tried and convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced last month to 20 years in jail and is now in custody waiting to be assigned a prison.

The attempted murder shocked even jaded investigators, who said that it is unusual for anyone to target a prosecutor, and even more unusual for someone accused of white collar crimes to go to such lengths to avoid prosecution.

The New Jersey attorney general's office is investigating Montagnino for more than auto loan frauds. It has spent more than a year looking into bank and real estate fraud charges. [...]

Thomas Theodore Kontogiannis, president of Olympic, said his company did not sue Montagnino because Olympic found he had defaulted on loans from other lenders and believed it would be unlikely to recover anything.

Montagnino had apparently thought out every angle of that deal. The mortgage checks were made out to the co-op association. Kontogiannis claims that prior to the closing, Montagnino had opened a bank account in the name of the association, with himself as its president, and cashed the checks in that account.

Some might fault them for giving John Yoo a law degree in the first place. But Yale Law School has invited Yoo and other legal-policy practitioners back for a symposium next week, on executive power. Details here.

Great Chris Lehmann profile of Russ Feingold.

Pay-Offs. Looks like Wendy Buckham, the wife of former DeLay chief of staff-turned-lobbyist Ed Buckham, was getting her cut of donations going to a DeLay-linked "charity" too. From the National Journal's Peter Stone, March 11, 2006:

Federal prosecutors in the Jack Abramoff lobbying probe have obtained records from a conservative advocacy group with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, that provide new details about the group's heavy reliance on Abramoff clients for its funding and show that the group paid consulting fees to the wife of DeLay's then-chief of staff.

Edwin Buckham, Abramoff's friend and political ally, formed the U.S. Family Network in 1996 while he was working as DeLay's chief of staff. His wife, Wendy Buckham, was the group's bookkeeper and a member of its board.

In 1997, the network paid Wendy Buckham $30,000 in consulting fees -- in three separate payments of $10,000 apiece, each time on the same day or just days after the network received a large contribution from an Abramoff client or a law firm apparently linked to one of his clients, according to documents and to sources with knowledge of the federal investigation.

The network, which is now defunct, reportedly raised a total of $2.5 million during the five years it operated; almost all of the money apparently came from three of Abramoff's biggest clients. The group's financial records and other papers were subpoenaed in February and have recently been turned over
to federal prosecutors. [...]

According to the financial records, the network received almost $475,000 in donations in 1997, including two payments totaling $299,975 from an entity identified in the records as James & Sarch, a London law firm that is also defunct.

In 1998, the same firm sent a $1 million donation to the network. [...] Pastor Chris Geeslin, who was a president of the network, has said that Ed Buckham told him that two Russian energy executives were the source of the $1 million contribution. Geeslin later learned that the executives were Alexander Koulakovsky and Marina Nevskaya of the oil and gas firm Naftasib. The Russian executives were working with Abramoff in 1997. [...]

The other two major contributions to the U.S. Family Network in 1997, according to records, came from big Abramoff clients: $75,000 from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and $100,000 from Tan Holdings, the largest garment-makers in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands [...]

On February 28, 1997, according to the financial records, Wendy Buckham received her second $10,000 payment from the network -- with a notation in the ledger reading "Tan." That same day, Tan Holdings contributed $50,000 to the group. According to a source familiar with the network's records, Buckham received the third $10,000 payment later in the year, soon after the network received a large contribution from the Choctaws.

The federal investigation is looking at whether Abramoff directed payments to the wives of some members and Hill staffers who later became lobbyists. Abramoff's January plea bargain refers to $50,000 in payments from two Abramoff clients in 2000 that were funneled through another conservative nonprofit to Lisa Rudy, the wife of DeLay's then-Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Rudy, reportedly in exchange for his help on legislation.

According to a document obtained by National Journal, the [U.S. Family] network signed a "Letter of Engagement" with Ed Buckham on October 28, 1997, stating that it would pay the Alexander Strategy Group a monthly fee of $12,000 beginning on November 1 to perform a variety of services, including raising money, writing a business plan and promotional materials, and keeping the group's books. The Alexander Strategy Group was to receive "a percentage of high-dollar fundraising not to exceed 15 percent."

In 1998, a large part of the firm's revenues appears to have come from the network, which raised a total of $1.8 million. Based on the agreement, that would have generated as much as $420,000 in income for the lobbying shop. The firm's only lobbying client in 1998 was the Hebrew Vocational Institute, which paid Alexander Strategy less than $10,000 every six months, according to lobbying registrations. [...] Last month, the U.S. Family Network's former counsel, Tom Smith, was served a federal subpoena requiring him to produce a variety of records and documents, including any dealing with Koulakovsky, Nevskaya, and Naftasib. The subpoena also requested documents relating to Ed Buckham and Wendy Buckham.

One very weird MZM contract. The first contract I can find that Cunningham co-conspirator Mitchell Wade's MZM Inc. received from the federal government is from a federal agency I had never heard of. The Minerals Management Service, Interior Franchise Fund, funded by the Executive Office of the President, awarded MZM a $25,000 contract on 10/15/2002 to provide it custom computer programming services.

Naturally, the question is, what's the Mineral Management Agency and who did Wade butter up to get this? The MMS is part of the Department of the Interior. According to the Library of Congress's Thomas:

The Minerals Management Service is responsible for collecting, distributing, accounting and auditing revenues from mineral leases on Federal and Indian lands. In fiscal year 2005, MMS expects to collect and distribute about $9.5 billion from active Federal and Indian leases. [...] To date, the OCS program has been focused primarily on oil and gas leasing. [...] The MMS also operates the Interior Franchise Fund: the entrepreneurial GovWorks enterprise provides important procurement services to a variety of governmental agencies.

Waiting for critical mass in Minsk.

YLH on the newest WaPo blogger:

Here's an interesting tidbit about Ben Domenech. Turns out Ben isn't the only Bush appointee in the family. His dad, Doug Domenech, former Loudon County Republican Committee Chairman, was appointed in January, 2002, as the White House Liaison for the Department of the Interior.

How do I know this? Ben Domenech said so.

Jim Miklaszewski: Pentagon contingency planning for Iraq civil war.

Look at these rugs. Maybe the Iranian Democratization Foundation was a front for Wade and Cunningham to go into the Persian carpet biz?

More hints that the mysterious "intelligence services" contracted by the Executive Office of the President to MZM in 2004-2005 may be connected to the Silberman-Robb commission? All three contracts, as well as other similar contracts I found for Booz-Allen Hamilton ($400,626.00 on 09/30/004) and SAIC ($686,878.00 on 09/10/2004), say the principal place of perfomance for the contract will be in Arlington, Virginia, zipcode 22202-3903. (Whereas a great many of EOPOA contracts for things like software services and news services indicate that the principal place of performance for the contract will be, naturally enough, in Washington, D.C.). And various Silberman-Robb commission press releases, as well as this interview with Charles Robb indicate the Commission was working out of offices in Arlington, VA. The three MZM "intelligence services" contracts also describe the "description of requirement" as "purchase of technical advisory services." Two of those indicate that the "type of contract" was for "labor services." Does that kind of sound like buying the time/expert consulting services of MZM executives?

BAH's contract [$400,626.00, effective 09/30/2004 to be completed by 02/28/2005], and to be performed in Arlington, indicates it's for the "purchase of advisory and assistance services," while SAIC's [$686,878.00, effective 09/10/2004 to be completed 04/12/2005], and also to be performed in Arlington, is for "technical advisory services." I am fairly convinced that all three companies BAH, SAIC, and MZM were all hired for the Robb-Silberman commission in some capacity.

Update: Reader PC pointed out that in December he wrote me noting that three Robb-Silberman professional staff members work for MZM, and two for SAIC. "On a hunch I checked out some of the other RS commissioners. It seems that Gordon Oehler and Samuel Visner both work for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)." Oehler, who was director of the CIA's Non-Proliferation Center until 1997, joined SAIC in 1998 as senior corporate vice president. Samuel Visner is a senior Vice President at SAIC. From 2001-2003, he was the chief of the signals intelligence programs at the National Security Agency.

Khamenei says yes to talks. Bush says yes to talks. Honestly, if you had asked me two months ago what one outcome was least likely, it would be the US and Iran openly declaring their willingness to talk to each other directly, about Iraq only of course.

It's too bad the Silberman-Robb commission literature fails to note three of its professional staff members' employment by MZM, Inc. (and a bit strange to neglect that part of their recent biographies). But Kenneth Geide's employment history is especially interesting given what we've learned about how the Pentagon Counter Intelligence Field Activity was conceived of by officials who first awarded CIFA contracts to MZM, and then went to work for MZM. From the Silberman-Robb commission professional staff list:

Kenneth Geide

Intelligence Professional. Currently a Special Advisor to the Director, DoD Counterintelligence Field Activity. Retired as a FBI Senior Executive after 30 years of service. Served as Agent in investigative, analytical and supervisory positions in the field and at headquarters. Chief of the Economic Counterintelligence Program, Deputy Director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center.

The Post's Walter Pincus recently reported that James King, another professional staff member of the Silberman-Robb commission, the number two at MZM and now the chief executive officer of MZM's successor Athena Innovative Solutions, was also a special advisor to the director of the DOD Counter Intelligence Field Activity, David A. Burtt II -- before King went to work for MZM:

CIFA has had a connection to MZM dating to its formation, said congressional and administration sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. Burtt, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for counterintelligence at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, developed the concept for CIFA.

A consultant to Burtt on the CIFA project was retired Lt. Gen. James C. King, who joined MZM after retiring in late 2001 as director of the Pentagon-based National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In August 2005, investment firm Veritas Capital bought MZM and changed its name to Athena Innovative Solutions Inc. King, who replaced Wade as president of MZM in June 2005, has remained president of Athena. A spokesman for Athena said yesterday that neither King nor the company would comment on MZM or matters under investigation.

Update: Which "federal investigators" precisely are investigating the MZM contracts with CIFA? In an earlier Post piece, Pincus reported, "The MZM investigation is being carried out by the FBI, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. attorney's offices in the District of Columbia and San Diego, according to one law enforcement official."

Update II: This April 2004 conference agenda describes Kenneth Geide as a Vice President of MZM.

Update III: Fellow blogger eRiposte of the Left Coaster points out that he noted to me many months ago that one of his readers, PC, noticed the MZM/Silberman-Robb Commission connection back in December. "Incidentally, John Quattrocki, one of MZM's senior execs, was on the National Security Council from 2002-2004. He also helped write the Robb-Silberman Commission report.”

WH Intel Contracts Mystery Solved? I think Justin Rood offers a Eureka moment with his observation that the White House issued Mitchell Wade's MZM Inc. three contracts for "intelligence services" in 2004, at the same time that the White House-authorized Silberman-Robb commission on WMD employed three MZM executives as expert staff.

The puzzle for me about the White House contracts to Wade/MZM for intelligence services has always been two-fold: first, what intelligence services did the White House need to contract out to a private firm, that it couldn't get from the vast $40 billion intelligence apparatus it already runs? and secondly, what could MZM have done for a measly $300k? (From my own reporting, I am convinced that the Iranian Democratization Foundation has nothing to do with the White House contracts. You are certainly not going to buy yourself Iran Contra for $300k. Ghorbanifar is demanding, for instance, $20 million. Other such US-funded programs I've heard about cost $200k a month, and are contracted out by the year at a minimum. Chalabi's Iraq intel outfit also cost about $300k a month, and again, was funded by State and then DIA for years. Wade was not known for underpricing his services). What you could get for $200k - $300k, I began thinking, was a couple of fancy, high priced consulting studies.

Examining the Executive Order that created the Silberman-Robb commission in the appendix to their report, the dates of the commission's authorization (February 2004) and dissolution (summer of 2005) coincide closely with the time period in which MZM received three White House contracts for intelligence services. The Executive Order (13328) even specifies who pays for the commission's research and work:

(e) The Director of the Office of Administration shall provide or arrange for the provision of administrative support and, with the assistance of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, ensure funding for the Commission consistent with applicable law. The Director of the Office of Administration shall ensure that such support and funding meets the Commission's reasonable needs and that the manner of provision of support and funding is consistent with the authority of the Commission within the executive branch in the performance of its functions.

(f) Members of the Commission shall serve without compensation for their work on the Commission. Members who are not officers or employees in the executive branch, while engaged in the work of the Commission, may be allowed travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, as authorized by law for persons serving intermittently in Government service (5 U.S.C. 5701 through 5707), consistent with the availability of funds.

(g) The Commission shall have a staff headed by an Executive Director. The Co-Chairs shall hire and employ, or obtain by assignment or detail from departments and agencies, the staff of the Commission, including the Executive Director. ...

A potential conflict of interest would be any MZM role in the commission's findings on the analysis performed by the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) in Charlottesville, Virginia (think, aluminum tubes). As Walter Pincus' reporting reveals, MZM systematically bought off key officials of the NGIC, hiring first their relatives and then hiring the key officials themselves. Another conflict of interest: recommendations on Pentagon domestic counterintelligence work such as the kind of collection and databasing of mapping data on mosques and churches MZM was up to with CIFA.

Unlike say the 9/11 commission, the Silberman-Robb commission operated with almost no transparency -- zero public hearings, almost no public outreach, except for a few public appearances after their report was released. It doesn't build much good will or confidence in their findings when allegations like this arise.

Update: I do remember noting that Charles Robb was one of the few Democrats who received a lot of money from Wilkes/Wade but couldn't remember which. It turns out Robb got $19,000 from Wilkes and Wilkes'-PAC. In fact as it turns out, Robb got more money than any other Democrat from Wilkes or Wade. Hmm.

The WP's Dan Eggen, "A Possible Clue on NSA Spying."

More whacks for the Pentagon leadership and their civilian advisors from the NY Times' right-leaning columnist John Tierney:

... A similar plan was proposed in a prewar briefing at the Pentagon by Robert Perito, a veteran of peacekeeping operations in other countries. He told the Defense Policy Board, the advisory group led by Richard Perle, that neither Iraqi authorities nor American soldiers could be counted on to maintain order, and that the U.S. should send in a constabulary force as soon as it occupied Iraq.

"The group at the Pentagon liked the concept and said it was a worthwhile thing to do," Perito told me. "But as one member put it, 'Not this war.' Their feeling was that the conflict in Iraq would be over so soon and things would be back to normal so quickly that it wasn't worth the effort."

The Tampa Tribune has gotten ahold of Florida state records concerning Mitchell Wade/MZM's negotiations for a $400k tax break from the state:

Wade's interest in Tampa came within months of the Harris contribution. He personally purchased a four-story office building in downtown Tampa two months later for $1.08 million and applied for the tax rebate program. [...]

There's no indication Harris intervened to help MZM with the Florida tax break. Records from Gov. Jeb Bush's office and documents supporting the tax rebate from Hillsborough County and Tampa make no mention of endorsements from third parties. Standard application forms don't request such endorsements.

The governor's office initially refused to release its files on MZM, citing a state law allowing companies to request confidentiality about business plans and other proprietary information. The documents released Wednesday include correspondence this month seeking a waiver of the confidentiality request from MZM's successor company, Athena Innovative Solutions Inc. [...]

Harris did try to help MZM in other ways. Her request for a $10 million federal appropriation for a Navy project in Sarasota failed. She has refused to release documents related to that request.

It followed a 2005 dinner meeting with Wade in which they discussed the possibility of Wade organizing a fundraiser for Harris, records show. She recently said she donated to charity a total of $50,000 in MZM-related contributions.

Could the prosecution's Moussaoui case get worse?

The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui weeks before Sept. 11 told a federal jury Monday that his own superiors were guilty of "criminal negligence and obstruction" for blocking his attempts to learn whether the terrorist was part of a larger cell about to hijack planes in the United States.

During intense cross-examination, Special Agent Harry Samit — a witness for the prosecution — accused his bosses of acting only to protect their positions within the FBI.

His testimony appeared to undermine the prosecution's case for the death penalty. Prosecutors argue that had Moussaoui cooperated by identifying some of the 19 hijackers, the FBI could have alerted airport security and kept them off the planes. [...]

Samit wanted to seek a criminal search warrant, and later one from a special intelligence court. But officials at the FBI headquarters refused to let him, because they did not believe he had enough evidence to prove Moussaoui was anything but a wealthy man who had come to this country to follow his dream of becoming a pilot.

He said that as Washington kept telling him there was "no urgency and no threat," his FBI superiors sent him on "wild goose chases."

For a while, Samit said, they did not even believe Moussaoui was the same person whom French intelligence sources had identified as a Muslim extremist. Samit said that FBI headquarters wanted him and his fellow agents to spend days poring through Paris phone books to make sure they had the right Moussaoui.

Samit said that when he asked permission to place an Arabic-speaking federal officer as a plant inside Moussaoui's cell to find out what Moussaoui was up to, Washington said no.

And he said that when he prepared a lengthy memo about Moussaoui for Federal Aviation Administration officials, Washington deleted key sections, including a part connecting Moussaoui with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. [...]

Samit said his immediate boss in Minneapolis, FBI Special Agent Greg Jones, did urge Washington to be more receptive.

Samit said he once overheard Jones on the phone with headquarters, telling FBI superiors that Minneapolis was trying to keep Zacarias Moussaoui "from flying an airplane into the World Trade Center."

WP: "Rosy Outlook on War Saps Public Trust in Bush." Clip:

Pollsters and some congressional Republicans said the administration's sunny-side-up appraisals, instead of lifting the public mood, may now complicate the task of sustaining support for a long-term military commitment in Iraq. The loss of trust, they said, is affecting Bush's presidency more broadly, as polls show his public support at a nadir. [...]

Michael Dimock, associate director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said a recent survey by his group showed the public skeptical toward Bush, about both his administrative competency and his personal credibility. Only 40 percent of respondents said Bush was trustworthy, a 22-point drop from September of 2003, six months after the invasion of Iraq.

Dimock said the cumulative effect of the past three years has made Bush's public-relations challenge imposing, and perhaps impossible. "When you give a speech and try to persuade people that they are only hearing the bad and things are going better than the media is saying, if a majority of people say they do not find you trustworthy, it is hard to be persuasive," he said.

NBC Iraq intelligence scoop. Former Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri, acquainted with French intelligence, met with a cut out for the CIA in a New York hotel room in September 2002 and told him about Saddam's actual capabilities:

But on that very trip [to the UN], there was also a secret contact made. The contact was brokered by the French intelligence service, sources say. Intelligence sources say that in a New York hotel room, CIA officers met with an intermediary who represented Sabri. All discussions between Sabri and the CIA were conducted through a "cutout," or third party. Through the intermediary, intelligence sources say, the CIA paid Sabri more than $100,000 in what was, essentially, "good-faith money." And for his part, Sabri, again through the intermediary, relayed information about Saddam’s actual capabilities.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.

The sources say Sabri’s answers were much more accurate than his proclamations to the United Nations, where he demonized the U.S. and defended Saddam. At the same time, they also were closer to reality than the CIA's estimates, as spelled out in its October 2002 intelligence estimate.

Riverbend on three years:

... I’m sitting here trying to think what makes this year, 2006, so much worse than 2005 or 2004. It’s not the outward differences- things such as electricity, water, dilapidated buildings, broken streets and ugly concrete security walls. Those things are disturbing, but they are fixable. Iraqis have proved again and again that countries can be rebuilt. No- it’s not the obvious that fills us with foreboding.

The real fear is the mentality of so many people lately- the rift that seems to have worked it’s way through the very heart of the country, dividing people. It’s disheartening to talk to acquaintances- sophisticated, civilized people- and hear how Sunnis are like this, and Shia are like that… To watch people pick up their things to move to “Sunni neighborhoods” or “Shia neighborhoods”. How did this happen? [...]

Even the most cynical war critics couldn't imagine the country being this bad three years after the war... Allah yistur min il rab3a (God protect us from the fourth year).

Via Steve Clemons, the Pentagon is investigating a 2005 incident in which Marines reportedly killed 15 civilians in Haditha after their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb. "'We launched an investigation of our own with the help of a human rights group,' said Aparisim Ghosh, a writer for Time. 'We spoke to some eyewitnesses. And it turns out all the people killed were killed by the Marines in small arms fire and, in a few instances, by an explosive that was tossed into the home by the Marines themselves.' Senior Pentagon officials would not comment on the details of the case but said they take the allegations very seriously, which is why they've launched the criminal investigation." More from Knight-Ridder's Matthew Schofield.

Calling the chair of the Senate Intelligence committee Pat Roberts (R-KS) a "lap dog of the administration" is unfair, writes Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman. "Even lap dogs will bite if they're kicked often enough, which is more than you can say for Congressional Republicans."

WaPo: A partial glimpse of the rise and fall of Mitchell Wade. Update: Q &A; with article co-writer Charles Babcock interesting as well.

Chitra Ragavan: "Black-Bag Jobs?"

Which politician received the most (public) donations from alleged Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Brent Wilkes and associates? If you thought Duke Cunningham, the San Diego Union Tribune says, think again. It was John Doolittle (R-CA), who got $118,000 from Wilkes and associates. Doolittle's wife Julie started a fundraising firm in 2001 that got a 15% commission on the campaign donations she brought in. The SDUT calculates the Doolittles took home $14,000 from Wilkes et co.

Who were the clients of Julie Doolittle's fundraising firm, Sierra Dominion? Beyond her husband's campaign, it's a familiar list from recent corruption cases:

A search by The San Diego Union-Tribune yielded only three other clients of Julie Doolittle's firm:

One was Greenberg Traurig, the lobbying firm that employed Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud and tax-evasion charges. The second was Abramoff's Washington restaurant, Signatures. The third was the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, founded by Ed Buckham, one-time chief of staff for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. [...]

Prosecutors in the Abramoff investigation have subpoenaed Julie Doolittle for information regarding her work for Abramoff's firm, which included planning fundraising events for his charity, the Capital Athletics Foundation. Records released by the Senate show that Abramoff used the foundation – whose official purpose was to raise money for underprivileged children – to bankroll some of his lobbying efforts.

Julie Doolittle launched Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions in March 2001, two months after her husband was named to the Appropriations Committee. The business, which is based at the couple's home in Oakton, Va., has no phone listing or Web site. The firm has no known employees other than Julie Doolittle. The congressman's office would not specify what previous fundraising experience she had. [...] Federal and state campaign records show that Julie Doolittle has received nearly $180,000 in commissions from her husband's political fundraising since late 2001.

Update: This article also hints at an answer to something I've been wondering about. Why did Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican, enter praise of Wilkes' San Diego-based Tribute to Heroes Foundation into the Congressional Record on October 1, 2002?

The answer is Wilkes' idea for a company, Mail-Safe. SDUT:

...Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses. One was tied to the 2002 [sic] anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

He called his proposed solution MailSafe – similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time – and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site.

The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.

Serbia buries Milosevic. From the BBC, a photo of anti Milosevic demonstrators gathering in Belgrade to celebrate, if that's the word.

Karl Vick reports from Tehran on journalist Akbar Ganji's homecoming after six years in prison, and several other writers and reform advocates recently jailed for attending workshops sponsored by US organizations.

Worth reading: Alan Brinkley in the Sunday NYT book review on Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy.

Task Force 6-26's crimes. An elite counterterrorism unit tasked with finding Zarqawi seriously abused detainees and escaped accountability. And they didn't nab Zarqawi either, apparently. As Mark Danner writes, "It becomes impossible to weigh what the practice [torture] gains military in 'actionable intelligence' against what it loses politically, in an increasingly estranged population and outraged world. Then as now, this was a political judgment, not a military one; and those who made it helped lose the generals' war."

Zalmay Khalilzad: Back channel talks with Iran underway. Also, LAT: US, Iran disagree over goal of talks. Rice: "We'll see if and when those talks take place." AP: Dissident journalist Akbar Ganji released from prison.

Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay: Mitchell Wade's MZM assisted "the government in identifying and procuring data" on maps, as well as "airports, ports, dams, churches/mosques/synagogues, schools (and) power plants," according to the statement of work for the Pentagon's Counter Intelligence Field Activity, a Pentagon domestic intelligence program. "CIFA recently has come under fire following disclosures that it maintained information on individuals and groups involved in peaceful anti-war protests at defense facilities and recruiting offices. The information was stored in a database that was supposed to be reserved for reports related to potential foreign terrorist activity. In a March 8 letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a senior Pentagon official said that a review of the Cornerstone database had identified 186 'protest-related reports' containing the names of 43 people that were mistakenly retained in the database."

Bush advance team poses as Fox news journalists, Knight-Ridder's Karen Nelson reports. At least they didn't say they were from NPR.

ABC: US willing to talk with Iran about Iraq. "The White House statement came after Ali Larijani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator and secretary of the country's Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran was ready to open direct talks with the United States over Iraq, marking a major shift in Iranian foreign policy. [...] Larijani also said any talks between the U.S. and Iran would deal only with Iraqi issues. But it's the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that Iran had officially called for dialogue with the United States, which it has repeatedly condemned as 'the Great Satan.'"

Update: National security advisor Stephen Hadley reiterated at his talk at USIP today that the US is prepared to talk with the Iranians about Iraq (not going around the Iraqis' back, he emphasized). He also joked, the US and Iran have been talking all along. "The Iranians make statements. And we make statements. That's communication."

Update II: Chris Nelson's take:

After months of inflated US rhetoric on Iran which sounded a lot like the Iraq-war buildup, potentially the most important story in some time is confirmation by National Security Advisor Steve Hadley that US Amb to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has been authorized to talk directly with Iranian government officials, and Iranian officials say they are ready and willing. But...Hadley and White House spokespersons warn, the US will only discuss Iraq security issues, not the nuclear weapons argument/crisis boiling away at the United Nations Security Council.

What may not be generally known is that the Administration initiated this Iraq-talks idea...several months ago. What we saw today was Iran’s decision to accept. Whether that action signals Iran’s understanding that international concern on nukes is harmful, or whether Tehran has concluded that it might be able to seek some advantage in any sort of bilateral engagement with the US (or both)...remains to be seen.

Given that Iran is in a position to make the US military situation in Iraq even worse than it already is, analysts take heart that the Administration decision, some months ago, to seek Iran’s help, by definition must be called “realism”, however mad the overall situation, and its causes.

So taken as a whole, analysts see the Khalilzad talks as a potential opening for more broadly based realism which could help build mutual trust, perhaps leading to direct bilateral dealings on the full range of issues being confronted...or, more aptly, not confronted. As Hadley and other officials argue, “we talk to Iran all the time up at the UN” and in other venues, and there’s no question that Iran’s sophisticated diplomatic corps is no comparison to the reclusive, tightly controlled N. Koreans.

Still, analysts note the negative parallel to US-N. Korea nuclear talks: in Bush-Cheney World it’s OK to directly engage on counterfeiting/money laundering, but on the really important issue, N. Korean production of nuclear weapons material for the past several years, direct talks are verbotten...so the two protagonists meet only under the cover of the currently stalemated 6 Party negotiations in Beijing.

Bush may not be inclined to add any to his staff, but the "wise men" have been summoned by Congress to cobble a way forward on Iraq. James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Robert Gates, Vernon Jordan, William Perry, Charles Robb, Alan Simpson, Leon Panetta, Rudi Giuliani, and if I am counting correctly, one more GOP wise man to come.

Abramoff's latest email to his friends.

National security strategy day. I am hoping to see two national security advisors speak today, although they are speaking at about the same time a few blocks apart, so I may have to choose. Zbigniew Brzezinski at Center for American Progress, and Stephen Hadley at the US Institute of Peace. Here's the new 2006 national security strategy. Amazing how in part IV, "Work with Others to Defuse Regional Conflicts," the Bush administration has come to rhetorically adopt almost the exact same ideas as the Clinton administration adopted in its second term.

More from Ivo Daalder, "..Clinton redux?" and "the Bush revolution is over".

This NYT article on allegations that Milosevic did not get adequate medical care has some really strange information in it. Namely, what was the arrangement by which French military doctors posted to ex Yugoslavia during the Balkans wars were becoming so closely acquainted with Milosevic?

Dr. Patrick Barriot, another French doctor who frequently visited Mr. Milosevic, said he suffered symptoms of increasingly severe high blood pressure in the six months before his death, including headaches, visual changes and a constant thrumming noise in his ear. The pressure routinely read 180/110, he said, well above safe limits.

"Each time I saw him, he was clearly deteriorating, more and more tired," said Dr. Barriot, a former military doctor who came to know Mr. Milosevic when stationed in what was then Yugoslavia, who has testified as a defense witness.

Update: And it seems that "Dr." Barriot was having war time conversations with Ratko Mladic, perpetrator of the Srebrenica massacre as well. "In the course of Patrick Barriot’s testimony about what Ratko Mladic had told him about the events in Srebrenica, Presiding Judge Robinson reminded Milosevic that he had “every right to call General Mladic as a witness”, but the accused responded that he would not do that as he did not want to assist in his arrest."

Given Barriot's murky history, it hardly seems like the NYT or anybody else should be citing this guy as a "medical expert" when his expertise is in the mind of the Serbian war crimes suspects he has taken to defending. "French 'blue helmet', Patrick Barriot, actually became an 'ambassador' for [the] Republika Srpska in Paris, shortly before he was discharged from the army." Come on. That's pretty outrageous. [Barriot also claims that Mohammed Atta was operating in Bosnia...Sound familiar?]

Phase II update.

New Pew poll:

This is interesting: "Even among people who say that the war in Iraq was the right decision, support for the president has declined. Today, 30% of people who believe that the use of force in Iraq was the right decision disapprove of the president's overall job performance, up from just 14% in January 2005. Job approval among Iraq war supporters has fallen from 81% to 58% over this time span."

This too:

The public's personal impressions of Bush's trustworthiness, effectiveness and leadership have all declined sharply since last fall. In this regard, a significantly higher percentage of Americans believe that Bush is "out of touch" with what is going on with the government than said that about former President Reagan during his second term, in August 1987. [...]

President Bush's declining image also is reflected in the single-word descriptions people use to describe their impression of the president. Three years ago, positive one-word descriptions of Bush far outnumbered negative ones. Over the past two years, the positive-negative balance has been roughly equal. But the one-word characterizations have turned decidedly negative since last July.

Currently, 48% use a negative word to describe Bush compared with just 28% who use a positive term, and 10% who use neutral language. [...] The changing impressions of the president can best be viewed by tracking over time how often words come up in these top-of-the-mind associations. Until now, the most frequently offered word to describe the president was "honest," but this comes up far less often today than in the past. Other positive traits such as "integrity" are also cited less, and virtually no respondent used superlatives such as "excellent" or "great" ­ terms that came up fairly often in previous surveys.

The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is "incompetent,"and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: "idiot" and "liar." All three are mentioned far more often today than a year ago.

Writing in Mother Jones, the former Daily Telegraph Baghdad bureau chief presents another damning account of the depths of the INC's perfidy. It's a shame US taxpayer money funded these elaborate lies targeted against the American people and the American government.

Philadelphia Inquirer: "Weldon's 9/11 Tale Unravels, But Wait!" All that Able Danger stuff? Never mind. After the Congressional hearings and Pentagon investigations and trashing of the 9/11 commission, Weldon is no longer sure that there was a photo of Atta after all.

Ahmadinejad, too much for the clerics?

Dismal science, indeed: "The International Monetary Fund says a global bird flu pandemic is likely to hurt the world's economy significantly if it is severe." Well, that's true. That's because it would kill millions of people, which might be a greater concern.

Here's one TSA lawyer who is probably going to be looking for a new job pretty soon.

AP: New bipartisan panel to investigate Iraq war policy:

The study was requested by Congress and will be announced Wednesday on Capitol Hill by [James] Baker and Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and a former member of Congress from Indiana, as providing a fresh look at Iraq.

Congress is increasingly restive about the human and financial toll of the administration's policies in Iraq and an apparently open-ended administration commitment to keep U.S. troops there and help rebuild the country amid sectarian violence and attacks by insurgents.

Five Republicans and five Democrats, including Robert M. Gates, director of the CIA from 1991-93, will serve on the group. Former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., also will be a member.

The congressionally-financed United States Institute of Peace and three private think tanks are supporting the inquiry. Four working groups will be assigned to measure the strategic situation in Iraq, formation of a government in Baghdad, political development and the Iraqi economy.

Outside experts will be consulted and the working groups are planning to make several trips to Iraq.

Move over, John Murtha. WP: "Bush sets timeline for Iraq war."

Not for lack of good intentions, the US could get a lot of people killed in Iran. The Post reports:

Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don't need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents.

In a case that advocates fear is directly linked to Bush's announcement, the government has jailed two Iranians who traveled outside the country to attend what was billed as a series of workshops on human rights. Two others who attended were interrogated for three days.

The workshops, conducted by groups based in the United States, were held last April, but Iranian investigators did not summon the participants until last month, about the time the Bush administration announced plans to spend $85 million "to support the cause of freedom in Iran this year."

"We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush," human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. "When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we're in here suffering."

The fallout illustrates the steep challenge facing the Bush administration as it seeks to play a role in a country where American influence is called unwelcome even by many who share the goal of increasing democratic freedoms.

"Unfortunately I've got to say it has a negative effect, not a positive one," said Abdolfattah Soltani, a human rights lawyer recently released from seven months in prison. After writing in a newspaper that his clients were beaten while in jail, Soltani was charged with offenses that included spying for the United States. [...]

Activists here said the Bush initiative demonstrates the chasm that often separates those working inside Iran for greater freedoms -- carefully calibrating their actions to nudge incremental changes in a hostile system -- and the more strident approach of many Iranian exiles who often have the ear of Washington policymakers.

Eric Reeves, "Bad to Worse in Darfur."

NASA: Global climate change is real. There. They've said it.

Law & Order, Moussaoui version. One very angry judge may declare mistrial after prosecutors admit government attorneys discussed witness testimony. Recess for now. If mistrial is declared, the government is expected to appeal to the 4th Circuit in Richmond.

Man in the news. Sen. Russ Feingold has a diary up at Daily Kos, "Censuring the President."

Woodward's Plame source was Armitage, Ben Bradlee tells Vanity Fair (according to Drudge). (I thought so -- after thinking it was about three other people.)
More.

Cunningham's Iranians. A long-time lobbyist for ADCS, the defense contracting firm headed by alleged Congressman Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Brent Wilkes, is Richard Bliss. A Washington-based attorney, Bliss could be found in the news in the late 1990s for leading lobbying efforts to relax US trade sanctions against Iran. In particular, simultaneous to his lobbying for ADCS, Bliss has been a lobbyist for a company that in 1999 was lobbying the Clinton administration for permission to sell $500 million worth of grain to Iran.

This while simultaneously pulling in about $40k a year to lobby the Senate and House on behalf of ADCS. Bliss seems to only have been lobbying for about four firms in the period from 1998 until now, including ADCS and Niki, both with ties to San Diego.

In the bitterly divided US Iran policy community, this would seem to put Bliss pretty firmly in the "trade and engage" camp with Iran, although I'm told his position was not motivated by ideology but just business. That position appeared to have the ear at least for a time of some farm state lawmakers, like Nebraska's Chuck Hagel, Pat Roberts (R-KS), Larry Craig (R-ID), and Bob Kerrey (D-NE), as well as Bob Ney, who was apparently sympathetic to efforts to engage with Iran and feels connected to Iran for among other reasons, the fact that he taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Shiraz in the 1970s and speaks Farsi.

Is Wilkes connected to Bliss' Iran work? Not clear. The San Diego Union Tribune noted the two worked pretty closely in synch. Back in 1998, "as the Appropriations Committee earmarked the budget, Wilkes, his wife Regina, Wilkes' nephew and lobbyist Joel Combs, attorney Richard Bliss and Rollie Kimbrough, a Democrat who headed a Washington, D.C., company that partnered with ADCS on the project, contributed a total of $28,000 to the three Republican lawmakers" -- and got the contract to digitize US military documents in Panama.

Starting a couple years later, we know from Cunningham's plea agreement, we have Wilkes bribing Cunningham to the tune of over half a million dollars, and Cunningham aggressively intervening to help Wilkes's ADCS get defense contracts. All the while, Bliss was one of ADCS's lobbyists.

**

So it's interesting to note that there's a prominent Iranian American businessman involved in the network of players who arranged for Cunningham's two trips to Saudi Arabia in 2004. That Iranian-American businessman is close with Washington Iran hawks, is very heavily involved in Republican circles, and is now a leading advocate of getting the US to back efforts to promote the democratic overthrow of the Tehran regime. In the past couple years, his business has shifted from "the businss of business" to more of this Iran democracy work. Sources tell me he would like to become part of the administration in some capacity to advise on Iran policy. (I've interviewed this person. He acknowledges having met Cunningham once but not in Saudi Arabia, although he has worked there; which differs from another account I've heard).

Where am I going with this? Well, the obvious question is, what's the deal? Is Wilkes with Bliss' Iran trade crowd, and Wade with the free Iran crowd? Or are those labels themselves irrelevant, or diversion for something else going on?

The evidence speaks to something else. The available evidence suggests that Wilkes and Wade are extraordinary mercenary opportunists, and if Wade had to set up a non profit to be eligible for Brownback's proposed "free Iran" money [Brownback proposed $50 million be made available to liberate Iran in May 2003, only $3 million of which went through in 2005] that was a small formality. What's more, sources tell me Brownback was originally being urged to make his "free Iran" money doled out not through the State Department, but through a special [Congressionally-designated, I believe] committee. The reason? So the designated terrorist group the MEK could get in on the money as well, something not available to it through State because it's on the State Department's list of designated terrorist groups. [State will be in charge of the $85 million being proposed this year.] Why Wilkes worked with Bliss, as opposed to hundred other attorneys, isn't clear to me.

The part that most intrigues me is the Iranian American in the mix on the sidelines of Cunningham's Middle East adventures. Because separate from Cunningham, that person operates at a very interesting nexus of Republican party operatives, Iranian exile politics, and the big money people (abroad and at home). I'm also told another person who was invited to be on the second Saudi trip with Cunningham (and Cunningham's pal, co-conspirator #3 Thomas Kontogiannis), was Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House intelligence committee. Hoekstra ultimately decide to decline Cunningham's invitation for the Saudi trip. What's interesting about that is it suggests that whoever wanted Cunningham to come to Saudi Arabia may have had a reason for inviting members from the House Intelligence Committee in particular.

Update: Reader C notes, "Looking at Wilkes contributions I now see he enriched quite a few on the House Foreign Affairs Committee: Dan Burton, Dana Rohrbacher, Darrell Issa, and Katherine Harris. Did this committee ever do any favors for Wilkes?" Former long-time House International Relations committee chair Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) received $28,646 from Wilkes and the ADCS PAC as well. That committee is interesting, because it would be the one to lobby on such issues as permission for sale of sensitive items on State Department-managed export control lists (say, satellite systems) and those involving countries that are the subject of trade sanctions, say, in the Iran case, grain.

(Editor's Note: This post has been revised.)

The LAT's Tracy Wilkinson reports on the Jesus Christ of Italian politics.

In the immediate wake of media reports on allegations of Italian intelligence operatives involved in all sorts of partisan dirty tricks, Sismi director Nicolo Pollari offers his resignation. Berlusconi, alleged beneficiary of dirty tricks, declines to accept it.

Meantime, Berlusconi storms out of live TV interview, outraged by questions about his relationship with President Bush.

Dutch pathologists say Milosevic died of a heart attack. And Milosevic's wife Mirjana and son Marko, living in exile in Russia after fleeing corruption charges at home in Serbia, and daughter Marija, can't agree where Milosevic should be buried.

Atrios is right. This American Life features reporter Jack Hitt on Gitmo this week, and it's well worth listening to.

The WP, NYT, and LAT (two days ahead of the pack) are all over the exact same story: partisan tensions in the Senate Intel committee. Me thinks the public may have been better served by something other than a 'he said, he said' between Roberts and Rockefeller -- something that clouds the real issue: not partisan tensions per se, but performance failure. How the committee has passed on exercising oversight of some of the most pressing issues of our post 9/11 age. Including the administration's use of pre-Iraq war intelligence; the dramatically expanded operational intelligence role of the Pentagon; extraordinary renditions and credible allegations of state-sanctioned torture; and civil liberties concerns raised by growing Pentagon and NSA domestic surveillance. In short, where are the results? Where's the common historical document Americans can look to on how we got into the war and why it has gone so disastrously? Where is the evidence Americans can have confidence that any administration excesses in defining executive power and suspending laws in the war on terror are being checked by Congress? Where are the signs that people are being held accountable for acknowledged Pentagon abuses in domestic surveillance? And where should they go if the Intel committee won't deliver?

James Traub on crafting of Democratic strategy and message for 2006.

Clinton-era assistant secretary of defense for policy Graham Allison, perhaps the preeminent expert on the Cuban missile crisis (and my former professor), has a very smart article on underappreciated risks to US national security of Iran becoming a nuclear-armed state. Conclusion:

As Henry A. Kissinger has noted, a defining challenge for statesmen is to recognize ''a change in the international environment so likely to undermine national security that it must be resisted no matter what form the threat takes or how ostensibly legitimate it appears." Iran's emergence as a nuclear armed state would constitute just such a catastrophic transformation for the United States. But just as JFK refused to choose between accepting nuclear weapons in Cuba or attacking the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis, the challenge today is to find additional options, short of war, to stop Iran's acquisition of nuclear arms.

The Accidental ComIntern. DeWine proposed legislation gets the White House off the hook for warrantless domestic surveillance, but 'unintentionally' criminalizes reporting on illegal programs? Via Glenn Greenwald.

David Rothkopf argues that Cheney's dominance of Bush national security policy has waned - a lot - and with it, the whole center of gravity in foreign policy has shifted away from the White House, reversing a trend of the past 35 years. Who's succeeded him? Rice, aided by what Rothkopf portrays as one of the weakest national security advisors in decades.

So how well will this new, more harmonious dynamic serve U.S. foreign policy? [...] "I believe people will ultimately look at the foreign policy of this administration as having had four quarters, like a football game," one senior official at State told me. "The first was focused on 9/11 and the instant coalition that was offered to us by the world to support our efforts in responding to the terrorist threat. The second came as we made the decision to enter Iraq and did so in a way that undercut much of our international support. The third has been spent, during the past year, with Condi's leadership, rebuilding those international coalitions. But the fourth will be about Iran."

And as any football fan knows, the last quarter often counts the most. Iran "is the critical challenge we face," the State Department official added, "but I would have to say, that if I were a betting man, I would not give us very high odds of achieving our goal of keeping Iran from gaining nuclear weapons or emerging as an even more formidable threat to us in the Middle East."

Talk about politicization of intelligence. Check out the latest from Rome:

Berlusconi's campaign was hit by other turbulence Friday when Health Minister Francesco Storace resigned after police arrested 16 people alleged to have operated a spy ring targeting rivals of Storace during last year's elections for president of the Lazio region. Storace, the incumbent, was unseated in the vote. [...] Storace, the health minister, resigned after investigators contended that his campaign had hired private investigators to spy on Alessandra Mussolini, the wartime dictator's politician granddaughter, who broke with Storace's party and threatened to take votes from him, and on Piero Marrazzo, the opposition candidate who eventually won.

UN Tribunal confirms Slobodan Milosevic found dead in his prison cell. Update: Justice will remain elusive for his victims. Almost all of the Balkan war-time leaders are recently deceased -- Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, Bosnia's Alija Izetbegovic, Macedonia's Boris Trajkovski, Kosovo's Ibrahim Rugova, now Milosevic. (In an unrelated Sunday NYT book review, Michiko Kakutani notes writer Marilyn Johnson's observation that "people have been slipping out of this world in occupational clusters for years: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams famously died within hours of each other..."

NYT: With rebels like these, who needs loyalists?

AP:

The poll suggests that most Americans wonder whether Bush is up to the job. The survey, conducted Monday through Wednesday of 1,000 people, found that just 37 percent approve of his overall performance. That is the lowest of his presidency.

Bush's job approval among Republicans plummeted from 82 percent in February to 74 percent, a dangerous sign in a midterm election year when parties rely on enthusiasm from their most loyal voters. The biggest losses were among white males.

On issues, Bush's approval rating declined from 39 percent to 36 percent for his handling of domestic affairs and from 47 percent to 43 percent on foreign policy and terrorism. His approval ratings for dealing with the economy and Iraq held steady, but still hovered around 40 percent.

Personally, far fewer Americans consider Bush likable, honest, strong and dependable than they did just after his re-election campaign.

By comparison, Presidents Clinton and Reagan had public approval in the mid 60s at this stage of their second terms in office, while Eisenhower was close to 60 percent, according to Gallup polls. Nixon, who was increasingly tangled up in the Watergate scandal, was in the high 20s in early 1974.

The AP-Ipsos poll, which has a margin of error of 3 percentage points, gives Republicans reason to worry that they may inherit Bush's political woes. Two-thirds of the public disapproves of how the GOP-led Congress is handling its job and a surprising 53 percent of Republicans give Congress poor marks.

By a 47-36 margin, people favor Democrats over Republicans when they are asked who should control Congress.

Interesting. Italy's right-leaning daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, has apparently endorsed Berlusconi's center-left opponent, Romano Prodi. More here and here.

Via Atrios, why Bush's long time domestic policy advisor Claude Allen really resigned.

The Department of Defense admits in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy that it improperly retained the name of Quaker peace groups and other peaceful antiwar demonstrators, and says it will purge the name of 67 demonstrators from its domestic spying databases. Not to beat a dead horse, but it's important to remember who had a contract to do domestic spying for the Pentagon which apparently has run afoul of the law. Mitchell Wade's MZM.

And even though Wade has pleaded guilty to bribing former Congressman Duke Cunningham and is headed to jail, the potential threat to American civil liberties posed by the program may not be over. As Walter Pincus recently reported, MZM's successor continues to get millions of dollars in US government secret contracts to spy on Americans: "CIFA has had a connection to MZM dating to its formation, said congressional and administration sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. Burtt, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for counterintelligence at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, developed the concept for CIFA. A consultant to Burtt on the CIFA project was retired Lt. Gen. James C. King, who joined MZM after retiring in late 2001 as director of the Pentagon-based National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In August 2005, investment firm Veritas Capital bought MZM and changed its name to Athena Innovative Solutions Inc. King, who replaced Wade as president of MZM in June 2005, has remained president of Athena."

Whatever protections are supposed to be in place in the Intelligence and defense appropriations process to prevent corrupt lawmakers from endangering national security by recommending domestic counterintelligence contracts to those bribing them, those safeguards sure don't seem to have worked in the Cunningham case. Pincus:

In late 2002, Cunningham made the contract for Wade's company, MZM, one of "his top priorities" in the defense appropriations bill, according to the prosecutors' pre-sentencing filing. After Congress approved the money, Wade told unnamed Defense Department officials they had to "work something up" that would provide a "real benefit to CIFA," according to the prosecutors' documents.

The resultant program saw more than $6 million spent for a mass data storage system supposedly for CIFA that, according to the prosecutorial document, included almost $5.4 million in profit for MZM and a subcontractor. "Adding insult to injury," the prosecutors wrote, "the final system sold to the government was never installed (as it was incompatible with CIFA's network system) and remains in storage in Arlington, Va."

In January 2004, Cunningham sought about $16.15 million to be added to the defense authorization bill for a CIFA "collaboration center." A month later, Cunningham wrote Burtt his thank you note about the center, adding: "I wish to endorse and support MZM, Inc.'s work." He concluded, "As the Collaboration Center is completed, I hope to help you inaugurate the center as I did at the inception of CIFA." Defense spokesman Hicks said he was unaware of a CIFA collaboration center.

Gale Norton to resign. Abramoff deals came pretty close to her doorstep.

If ever one is discouraged by the American political scene, one can think about what is going on in Italy:

Prosecutors in Milan said Friday they have requested that Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi be indicted on corruption charges.

The premier is accused of ordering the payment in 1997 of at least $600,000 to British lawyer David Mills -- whose indictment also was being sought -- in exchange for his false testimony in two trials against Berlusconi. Both men deny the allegations.

A judge must now rule on the indictment requests. Prosecutors said there was no indication of when a decision on the indictments would come. Such decisions have been known to take weeks.

Prosecutors have said they had rushed to complete the investigation and to try to bring the case to trial after Parliament passed a reform, backed by Berlusconi's government, that reduced the statute of limitations on the charges.

Berlusconi's spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti said the prosecutors' move was timed to hurt the premier before April 9-10 national elections. [...]

In a separate development Friday, Health Minister Francesco Storace said he intends to resign following allegations of illicit wiretapping from an earlier local election.

Storace has been at the center of a political storm recently, accused of spying on his political opponents before a local election last spring. He lost the election.

''The mere suspicion that I may have orchestrated political maneuvering against my political opponents hurts me and outrages me,'' Storace said in a statement. [...]

Prosecutors have declined to release details, but according to news reports, Mills is accused of failing to mention a 1995 phone call with Berlusconi in which the two discussed alleged illicit payments from Berlusconi to former Socialist Premier Bettino Craxi.

Boston.

"He has no political capital." WP:

When President Bush and senior adviser Karl Rove mapped out plans for a political comeback in 2006, this was nowhere on the script. Suddenly, the collapse of a port-management deal neither even knew about a month ago has devastated the White House and raised questions about its ability to lead even fellow Republicans.

The bipartisan uprising in Congress in the face of a veto threat represented a singular defeat for Bush, who when it came to national security grew accustomed during his first five years in office to leading as he chose and having loyal lawmakers fall in line. Now, with his poll numbers in a political ditch, the port debacle has contributed to a perception of weakness that has liberated Republicans who once would never have dared cross Bush.

"He has no political capital," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. "Slowly but surely it's been unraveling. ...

Walter Pincus:

The new seven-senator intelligence subcommittee created to review the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program had its first White House briefing yesterday and is scheduled to visit the National Security Agency's headquarters Monday to gather additional information, according to congressional and administration officials.

Those who participated in the briefing, which lasted more than two hours, were close-mouthed about the details. [...]

The subcommittee visit to the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters will come a little more than a week after Rockefeller went there on his own to get answers to 450 questions he had sent earlier to the agency. Rockefeller is one of the few lawmakers who have been briefed on the NSA program over the past three years. The program has troubled the senator since his first briefing in 2003, when he sent a classified letter about his doubts to Vice President Cheney. [...]

Some questions that Rockefeller said he hopes the subcommittee will cover are "How many phone calls are listened to and e-mails read without court warrants; how many Americans are a party to these calls and e-mails; why this electronic surveillance without a warrant is necessary; and the extent to which eavesdropping being undertaken in the U.S. for the past 4 1/2 years has actually resulted in the arrest and prosecution of terrorists."

Dan Froomkin:

Hoagland quotes a "White House aide defending U.S. policies on Guantanamo Bay prisoners, secret renditions and warrantless eavesdropping."

This is what the aide has to say: "The powers of the presidency have been eroded and usurped to the breaking point. We are engaged in a new kind of war that cannot be fought by old methods. It can only be directed by a strong executive who alone is not subject to the conflicting pressures that legislators or judges face. The public understands and supports that unpleasant reality, whatever the media and intellectuals say."

Fascinating, huh?

New foreign affairs group blog Morningside Post from some folks at Columbia's SIPA.

Xeni Jardin in the NYT: Silicon Valley exporting censorship technology to Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Sudan, Oman, Tunisia. Main culprits: SmartFilter, Fortinet.

BREAKING NEWS: US military to close Abu Ghraib, transfer prisoners to other jails in Iraq, CNN confirms...

Reuters. ThinkProgress says Bush promised to do this two years ago.

(Thx to JH).

Via reader B, campaign finance lawyer to DeLay, Cunningham, Santorum suddenly quits. "This could be a very big deal. Barbara Bonfiglio was the treasurer and/or counsel for several dozen leadership PACs - including ARMPAC (DeLay), the American Prosperity PAC (Cunningham) and America's Foundation (Santorum). She knows where a lot of bodies are buried."

NYT:

The Republicans' idea of supervision involves saying the White House should get a warrant for spying whenever possible. Currently a warrant is needed, period. And that's the right law. The White House has not offered a scrap of evidence that it interferes with antiterrorist operations. Mr. Bush simply decided the law did not apply to him.

It was no surprise that Mr. Roberts led this retreat. He's been blocking an investigation into the domestic spying operation for weeks, just as he has been stonewalling a promised investigation into how the White House hyped the intelligence on Iraq.

...“Good morning, you've reached the office of Senator Pat Roberts.”

“Good morning, my name is Margot, known as Missy, and I’m calling from the Washington, DC offices of Wonkette. I hate to take up too much of your time, and I don’t know if Senator Roberts or any of his aides are currently on the phone, but could you be a dear and just conference me in on one of their calls so I can listen in?”

[a long period stunned silence]

“I’m sorry. You’re with who?”

“The Washington DC office of Wonkette.”

“And you’d like us to conference you in to one of our calls?”

“That’s right.”

“And could I ask why?”

“Why sure! I just want to, you know, listen in.”

“I’m sorry. We can’t do that.”

“Really? Gosh. I’m a little surprised, considering the Senator’s voting record!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, that’s okay. Thanks anyway!”

“Goodbye.”

Gee whiz! We were only trying to participate in all the great new laws!

More from ThinkProgress.

Walter Pincus:

The panel's vice chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), took a sharply different view of yesterday's outcome. "The committee is, to put it bluntly, basically under the control of the White House through its chairman," he told reporters.

Senate Intel committee votes behind closed doors not to investigate NSA warrantless domestic spying. Moving towards DeWine proposal to provide retroactive legal cover for the past four years of a program that the Congress doesn't fully understand. Reid: “It is no surprise that the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has once again caved to the wishes of the White House and refused even to open an investigation into President Bush’s domestic spying program. One is left to wonder what it would take to make this Congress stop rubberstamping the Bush Administration and actually do real oversight. We cannot effectively legislate on the NSA spying issue if we do not know the facts, and we will not know them if the Republican-controlled Intelligence Committee persists in refusing to do its job.” Roberts: "Today we reached an accommodation with the White House to expand the number of members involved in overseeing this important program to seven, just about half of the Committee. The Committee voted to create a seven member subcommittee to conduct enhanced oversight of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Including myself, there will be four Republicans on the Subcommittee. I have appointed the Members. They are: Senator Hatch, Senator DeWine, and Senator Bond." Accomodation indeed!

Update: Bill Arkin: "In my mind, this just draws the Congressional institution into the business of the Executive Branch in such a way that it loses all ability to oversee."

LAT: "The top U.S. envoy to Iraq said Monday that the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime had opened a 'Pandora's box' of volatile ethnic and sectarian tensions that could engulf the region in all-out war and disrupt the global economy if America were to extricate itself from the country too soon." Then go read this.

eRiposte at the Left Coaster presents a convincing case that SISMI fabricated the missing Niger yellowcake "accord" when it transmitted reports based on the yellowcake forgeries to the CIA. The accord itself was missing from the forgeries dossier that Italian middleman Rocco Martino tried to sell to an Italian reporter.

Knight-Ridder's James Kuhnhenn:

Republicans in Congress are trying to limit the scope of any investigation into how President Bush's secret domestic-surveillance program has operated. Some key lawmakers are also working to legalize such spying on U.S. citizens in the future, perhaps with some judicial restrictions.

The dual-track effort is designed to protect the Bush administration from an all-out congressional inquiry into the secret program, while rejecting Bush's argument that he already has full legal authority to order such surveillance.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a Democratic plan to conduct a broad investigation into the program. Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., is trying to win support for a more limited inquiry. Roberts refused to say Monday whether he had the votes to forestall the Democratic demand for an investigation. Democrats need only one Republican to side with them to order such a probe.

The Cunningham Case, the CIA and Off-the-Books Planes. As I have already reported, alleged Cunningham co-conspirator #1 Brent Wilkes already got a couple smallish CIA contracts ($5 million to $10 million/year deals each), through a company nominally owned by his nephew and former ADCS and Group W Advisors employee, Joel G. Combs, called Archer Logistics. As I reported in December, one contract dates to 2003 and was to supply water to CIA personnel in Iraq. But sources tell me far larger CIA contracts were in the pipeline, until Wilkes was revealed to be involved in the Cunningham corruption case. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source indicates. "There were several more opportunities on the board when the federal investigation came down on Wilkes. Opportunities worth much more than the $5M or $10 million/year deals Wilkes was used to. The FBI probably knows about these from the raids they conducted, but I wonder if they have shared that information with the CIA." The last point refers to the CIA Inspector General investigation of the CIA contracts Wilkes'-associated firms received, including, the probe will examine, any directed by Wilkes' best friend, Dusty Foggo, the executive director of the Agency.

And what were the forthcoming contracts for? According to a source, they were to create and run a secret plane network, for whatever needs the CIA has for secret fleets of planes. Presumably, that might include "extraordinary renditions," e.g. to fly terror suspects off the radar to locations for interrogation. "I Imagine that since their whole flying operation has been outed, it makes it tough to operate clandestine flights," the source explained. "I bet it would cost a bundle to set up a whole new operation that no one knew about ... How do they operate a secret fleet of aircraft now that everyone knows about the planes we have? If I were high up in the CIA, this would be a big priority for me, and I would need a solution outside the normal range of solutions." Enter trusted contractor Brent Wilkes and Archer Logistics, and perhaps a whole new front company to be invented for the purpose.

And who would Wilkes go to for help with such a venture? To a subcontractor? To some other sort of fixer adept at creating and registering front companies? At running below the radar operations that nevertheless require proper airplane registrations, etc. For the purposes of speculation, one might ponder, what kind of fixers might have been involved even in the discussions (since the contracts were still pending when the Cunningham case broke). Was alleged Cunningham co-conspirator #3 Thomas Theodore Kontogiannis involved? I don't know. But I wonder.

Here's a short list of companies controlled by Kontogiannis:

161 Hempstead Realty
Apple Homes Corp
Axxion Group LLC
Bayswater Ltd
Bravo
Brookville Plaza Management
Calvander
Coastal Capital Corp
Duocash PLC
Emerald Estates Ltd
Eurocon International LLC
First Equity Corporation
Genfinity Corp
Group Kappa
InterAmerican Mortgage Company
Kontogiannis Construction, Inc.
Kontogiannis Developers, Ltd
Moonlight Management
Olympicorp International
Olympic Corp
Olympic Equtiy Corp
Olympic Petroleum Industries, Inc
Onlinetelcard
PlayRadio
Rockaway Real Estate
SeaView Estates
Yonah Real Estate

As another source explained to me, Kontogiannis "has oodles of companies, and none of them appear to be in legitimate business, i.e. they operate legit only to cover for scams." He's one go-to guy for front companies. Whether he's done work as a fixer for US intelligence linked business is something one might ponder. He certainly seems to be protected.

Update: Readers have sent more Kontogiannis companies they have found:

Reader C says Coaster Capital Corp is now Clearlight Mortgage.

And JP says that "Kontogiannis has a construction company named Bond & Walsh located at 133 Brookville Blvd in Rosedale, Queens, NYC. One real estate site listed Jamaica rather than Rosedale as the town." More here.

24 sure has Dick Cheney's number. And is Vice President Hal Gardner really being played by the same actor who played the evil father on Twin Peaks? Update: It is indeed.

Via Atrios, "Peacemakers?" Orwell alert!

Recently have been re-reading the articles about Bob Ney (R-OH) being invited to London by lobbyists for a Cyprus-registered company, FN Aviation, later known as FAZ Aviation, that wanted a license to sell US plane parts to Iran. The lobbyists who arranged for Ney to go to London to discuss the proposal were Roy C. Coffee, a former aide and deputy campaign manager to one governor George W. Bush, and David diStefano, former chief of staff to Ney. Coffee and diStefano have recently been hired by Harriet Miers' old Dallas law firm, Locke Liddell & Sapp, which opened a lobbying outfit in DC last October. (Coffee's letter about how he found Ney and Nigel Winfield is quite interesting). But that's not what got my attention. It's the guy who owns FAZ Aviation, Fouad al Zayat, one of the top dozen high stakes gamblers in the world, along with Adnan Khashoggi of Iran Contra fame, etc. Al Zayat is Syrian born, resident of Cyprus, holds a Portuguese passport, and gambled in London's Ritz casino some 156 times between 1999 and 2001, losing nearly 10 million pounds. How did al Zayat make his fortune? You know, the usual. As the Sunday Times (UK) diplomatically put it when al Zayat's Rolls Royce and personal Boeing 727 were seized in 2002 after he bounced some 2 million pounds in checks at the Ritz casino, "Zayat built his fortune on a string of lucrative deals. Former business partners say he has acted as an intermediary in a series of contracts for the supply of defence-related equipment in Cyprus and the Middle East." For his part, Coffee says that Fouad Al Zayat was described to him by Winfield as the former Middle Eastern representative for Boeing for more than twenty years. If you Nexis al Zayat's companies, FN Aviation, later known as FAZ Aviation, you get a parent company, Samata Enterprises, with two parent companies, Lendinex Investments and Samaya Investments Ltd., both registered in Cyprus, Aqua Transit Ltd., previous name Aqua Gulf Transport....and others.

Lobbyist Roy Coffee insists the lobbying he did on behalf of FAZ Aviation was genuinely humanitarian in spirit. Their efforts were "to pursue a humanitarian exemption to the Iran-Syrian Sanctions Act for spare parts for civilian commercial aircraft. We were not attempting to make an end run around the sanctions act for military parts."

Coffee claims he had no idea that the FN/FAZ Aviation rep who hired him, Nigel Winfield, was a three time convicted felon who's been convicted of tax evasion and banned from race tracks across the East Coast for among other things alleged ties to the mob. He says he's not sure that would have stopped him from accepting the FN Aviation contract even if he had known because he so believed in the humanitarian mission FAZ was pursuing. All the paperwork was filed correctly, he insists, etc. etc.

Coffee doesn't address the strange fact that Ney beat 340 to 1 odds to win $34,000 while gambling with al Zayat at a London casino.

Coffee's piece is actually quite useful and interesting. It mentions a former fellow law student with Coffee, an Iranian American patent attorney now in Beverley Hills, that Coffee says he brought in to meet Ney and talk about opportunities for engagement with the Iranian people. Also this, "Through our contacts in the Administration, on the Hill and in the Diplomatic community, we were aware of behind the scenes meetings between officials of Iran and the US in the run up to and during the invasion of Afghanistan. Our understanding was the Iranians were being very helpful and there may be an opportunity for a breakthrough with the Bush Administration. However, in March the US invaded Iraq and the decision was made to shelve the plan until the war was over and conditions stabilized. By the summer of 2003, before we could revisit the issue, Foaud and Nigel broke their company up. It was during this time that we first learned of Nigel's criminal convictions for tax evasion in the mid 1980's." Hmmm. Why would what Coffee describes as a legitimate businessman (e.g. al Zayat, the alleged Boeing rep for the Mideast) be working with a convicted felon like Winfield? It's baffling. Also one notes again just the interesting fact that Ney lived in both Iran and Saudi Arabia, and while not serving on any of the foreign affairs committees, apparently was quite active on the sidelines on Iranian issues.

(*This post has been updated and revised).

Is this what the 9/11 Commission had in mind? Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, taking his daily massage, swim and cigar:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

Jeff Stein's larger point in this piece should not be missed. Negroponte has the free time because Rumsfeld and Cambone are the ones running intelligence policy, with scarce oversight from anybody, either the White House intel czar, or Congress:

The Director of National Intelligence was forced to concede that the U.S. intelligence activities Feinstein was asking him about had “not risen to the level of my office.” In any event, they came “under the direction of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence” — a pipsqueak, relatively speaking.

Negroponte said he “understood” that the Pentagon was doing an internal review of spying programs because of a congressional uproar.

“But will you get the results of that review?” Feinstein asked.

“Yes,” promised Negroponte, dismissed like a schoolboy, “I will get those results.”

Washington’s conventional wisdom these days is that [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] ODNI is a joke.

The main reason is that Negroponte’s group has little power over the Pentagon’s covert actions.

It’s not his fault. Congress set it up that way after Rumsfeld and company worked the rooms of the House and Senate office buildings.

(Via Paul Kiel.)

Elections do not a democracy make. Ezra Klein notes an interesting development: Natan Sharansky dissing the Bush administration's democratization approach to the Mideast and its focus on holding elections. Wonder if Sharansky's critique was timed to a certain big conference happening in DC these days. Update: Matt has more.

Good for Frank Wolf (R-VA), who shamed a former US diplomat turned lobbyist, Robert Cabelly, into giving up his $530,000 a year lobbying contract from the government of Sudan.

NYT: Kabuki Congress.

Some hardened fighters, and some chicken farmers with the wrong watch. One can understand why Rumsfeld and the Bush administration would be anxious to not have the information on the thinness of its evidence on some of the people held at Guantanamo come out. More from Eric Umansky.

An alleged bribe from Silvio Berlusconi to her spouse probably won't take down Britain's culture minister, though Tessa Jowell has now separated from her husband over revelations from the investigation. David Mills is alleged to have set up a host of off shore companies and tax shelters to help Berlusconi disguise his fortune, including one headed by a Berlusconi aide later convicted for colluding with the Mafia, sought to help procure airplane parts for Iran (sound familiar from the Bob Ney Scotland trip?), used his wife's cabinet position to seek business opportunities in Dubai, etc. More here, here and here. (Thx to RS).

WP: The Bush White House v. the public's right to know how incompetent they are. They can either do that or fight terrorism, and they've chosen to devote a significant amount of resources to fighting the public's right to know and keep their operations, some of them arguably illegal, in the dark. And it's not just liberals saying it. Check out Bruce Bartlett, who says Bush's political heredity is pure Nixon. Even Bill Kristol is complaining about this administration's lack of competence.

More on this from Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum.

Update: And via ReddHedd, David Gergen tells Howard Kurtz he is also reminded of Nixon:

This administration has engaged in secrecy at a level we have not seen in over 30 years. Unfortunately, I have to bring up the name of Richard Nixon, because we haven't seen it since the days of Nixon. And now what they're doing -- and they're using the war on terror to justify -- is they're starting to target journalists who try to pierce the veil of secrecy and find things and put them in the newspapers.

Now, in the past what the government has always done is go after the people who leak, the inside people. That's the way they try to stop leaks. This is the first administration that I can remember, including Nixon's, that said -- and Porter Goss said this to Congress -- that we need to think about a law that would put journalists who print national security things to...bring them up in front of grand juries and put them in jail if they don't -- in effect, if they don't reveal their sources.

The Bush administration continues to make fools of Congress, including Republican representative of New York, Peter King, who took the lead in opposing the Dubai port deal. As the NYT reports in Sunday's paper, King recently received notice that the Pentagon would no longer be able to provide his Congressional delegation air transport inside Iraq. "'It is very coincidental,' said Mr. King, who talked reluctantly when pressed about the canceled trip, which had first been unintentionally disclosed by another lawmaker. Mr. King said that he did not intend to make an issue out of it or allow it to affect his stance in the port dispute." The White House managed to scare Frist off his early opposition to the deal, and has brought him to heel.

Who's Afraid of the Senate Intelligence Committee? Senate majority leader Bill Frist threatens to restructure the Intelligence committee into an outright coverup committee. What's to explain the motivation for this (pdf) except a White House and its enablers that truly have reasons to be worried about a committee that would be exercising any pretense of intelligence oversight responsibilities?

Check out this astonishing paragraph from Frist's letter to Reid:

The inquiries currently underway, and the ones being proposed by the minority, would demand an overwhelming amount of staff time, attention and resources. Rather than conducting oversight of the intelligence community and its activities, or assessing current and future threats to the United States national security, the committee is focusing most of its activities on investigations that offer little (or no) value to the challenges our Nation faces now. [...]

I would propose that we meet with Senators Roberts and Rockefeller as soon as possible to discuss and rectify this matter. [...] If we are unable to reach agreement, I believe we must consider other options to improve the Committee's oversight capabilities, to include restructuring the Committee so that it is organized and operated like most Senate committees.

More from Atrios and ReddHedd.

Cunningham and the CIA. Something that I believe I was the first to report is now getting a lot of attention. The fact that alleged co-conspirator #1 in the Cunningham case, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, is best friends since junior high days with the #3 guy at the CIA, Dusty Foggo. Apparently, the CIA Inspector General is now investigating the matter, including whether there were any contracting improprieties resulting from the friendship. Here's where the IG can start. Check out whether the CIA gave any contracts to a company called Archer Logistics, which is nominally owned by Wilkes' nephew and former ADCS executive and Wilkes-owned Group W Advisors lobbyist, Joel G. Combs. (What's also notable, given the extent prosecutors have shown that Cunningham was able to bully and cajole officials in the Defense Department and Intelligence community to request contractual services from those who bribed Cunningham, is that the chair of the Appropriations committee, Jerry Lewis, has not seen fit to launch a formal investigation. Lewis may have his reasons for not wanting these matters to be investigated).

The larger point I raised in this piece should also not be missed: the security implications, and counterintelligence implications, raised by the Cunningham case:

... Viewed as a corruption case, the Cunningham matter has an arc that suggests the possibility of more high-profile indictments to come. But looked at from a counterintelligence angle, it is even more disturbing. The case is still more worrying if it is turned around, and focused not only on the congressman for sale, but on the defense contractors and foreign-linked financiers who cultivated Cunningham -- and potentially other lawmakers -- precisely because of their position on the Intelligence and Appropriations Committees.

Cunningham has admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes from two men who sought and received not only U.S. government contracts, but particular types of contracts. They were awarded defense and intelligence contracts, including counterintelligence and counterterrorism programs so sensitive their precise details are confined to those with security clearances. [...]

It is clear that companies belonging to Wilkes and Wade received a few hundred million dollars in sensitive defense and intelligence contracts. Who is investigating whether such companies should be performing such controversial tasks as conducting domestic surveillance on peace groups for the Defense Department? Who is investigating whether MZM and its successor Athena Innovative Solutions should be evaluating which foreign companies supply weapons to the Pentagon -- when MZM may have gotten the initial contract through dubious means? [...] In short, who is investigating the counterintelligence implications of this case to protect against potential breaches of U.S. national security?

Update: If this rumor is true, that Wilkes will testify about not just Cunningham, one can expect that he will have a lot to say, about Doolittle and Lewis in particular.

Re: Cunningham, I think lead prosecutor Jason Forge calls it right. "Frankly, today's sentence is sad, but well deserved."

Hamas victory forecast in State Department-sponsored pre-elections poll. As Jonathan Landay reports, the Secretary of State still claims to have been taken entirely by surprise by Palestinian elections outcome.

Writing in The Nation, Tim Shorrock reports on how telecom giants have been cooperating with NSA warrantless domestic surveillance programs.

Would be easier to get Hamas to recognize Israel than this. Here's Harry Reid, quixotic optimist:

“I agree with Senator Frist, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has been bogged down by partisanship. The only way we can restore this important committee’s non-partisan tradition is for Leader Frist and Chairman Roberts to stop bowing to the pressure of the Bush White House and permit the committee to do its job. When faced with strong evidence that the Bush Administration has misused intelligence, misuses that have made America less secure, time and again the Senate Intelligence Committee has ducked its responsibilities and refused to hold the Administration accountable. The recent record of the Republican-controlled committee is most notable for its abdication of authority and responsibility.

“The Intelligence Committee’s meeting on March 7th presents an important credibility test for Senator Frist and Senator Roberts. If both are serious about their desire to let this committee perform its duties, Chairman Roberts will keep his word and permit the committee to conduct a vote on Senator Rockefeller’s reasonable proposal to review the Administration’s controversial domestic spying program.”

Trained seals.

Credit where credit is due.

Former Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham to be sentenced today. "The staggering details of Cunningham's wrongdoing surpass anything in the history of Congress, Senate and House historians said."

More bad news for Bush, in a new poll from the LA Times/Bloomberg. This trend is also interesting:

And, in a trend that could affect turnout in the November midterm elections, Bush confronts what might be called an intensity gap: The percentage of Americans who said they strongly disapproved of his performance on a wide range of issues greatly exceeded the share who strongly approved. [...]

In the Times poll, majorities disapproved of Bush's performance in dealing with each of four issues measured: the economy, the federal budget deficit, Iraq and terrorism.

Amid searing sectarian violence in Iraq, 34% said they approved of Bush's handling of the conflict, down from 41% last month. The new results are by far the lowest ratings on the war recorded for Bush in a Times poll. [...]

Perhaps most strikingly, 44% said they approved of Bush's handling of terrorism, whereas 54% disapproved — the first time a majority has expressed a negative opinion of his handling of that issue in a Times survey.

The Corner really is worth a skim today.

Listening to Bruce Bartlett, author of Imposter: How George Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy tell it like it is on NPR's Diane Rehme is fascinating. The conservative think tank heads who threatened him (and ultimately fired him) for criticizing "our guy," etc. You can listen in here. More from Kevin Drum.

WP:

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison.

In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to challenge treatment that the detainee's lawyers described as "systematic torture."

Bruce Bartlett: Is Bush losing his base?

Murray Waas' latest on Iraq WMD intelligence the White House suppressed. Knight-Ridder reported earlier this week on other Iraq intelligence the White House suppressed.

In part as a result of the Cunningham bribery findings, federal investigators are scrutinizing some of the nearly $1 billion in contracts awarded by the Pentagon Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), Walter Pincus reports:

In pre-sentencing documents filed this week, prosecutors said that in fiscal 2003 legislation, Cunningham set aside, or earmarked, $6.3 million for work to be done "to benefit" CIFA shortly after the agency was created. The contract went to MZM Inc., a company run by Mitchell J. Wade, who recently pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Cunningham.

Also this week, prosecutors released a letter dated Feb. 24, 2004, from Cunningham to CIFA Director David A. Burtt II, in which the former member of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence thanked the CIFA staff for supporting another multimillion-dollar program that involved MZM. [...]

CIFA has had a connection to MZM dating to its formation, said congressional and administration sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. Burtt, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for counterintelligence at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, developed the concept for CIFA.

A consultant to Burtt on the CIFA project was retired Lt. Gen. James C. King, who joined MZM after retiring in late 2001 as director of the Pentagon-based National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In August 2005, investment firm Veritas Capital bought MZM and changed its name to Athena Innovative Solutions Inc. King, who replaced Wade as president of MZM in June 2005, has remained president of Athena. A spokesman for Athena said yesterday that neither King nor the company would comment on MZM or matters under investigation.

Regime Change: Tehran. Check out Think Progress, Ray Takeyh and Charles Kupchan, Ilan Berman, and the new Connie Bruck piece in the New Yorker. This too (pdf). More background here and here. Next up, Iranian exile groups battling each other for US government funds.

Wow. Condy Rice may be contemplating running for president after all.

Congressional oversight mulled.

Quite a corruption scandal roiling England, with an Italian twist. "[British cabinet secretary] Sir Gus [O'Donnell] has been investigating whether [British culture secretary] Ms Jowell should have declared an alleged £350,000 gift from [Italian prime minister] Mr Berlusconi. It is alleged the money was offered in return for [Jowell's husband] Mr Mills giving helpful testimony in an investigation into alleged corruption by Mr Berlusconi. Ms Jowell and her husband have categorically denied the money was from Mr Berlusconi, insisting that it came from one of Mr Mills' other clients." More background here. "According to the UK investigation, there is a letter from Mr Mills to his accountant in which he says the money came to him 'discreetly' from 'the B people'. In addition, it states that his court appearance 'kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble and that I told no lies but turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly.'"

AP:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

Not to be missed Al Kamen. Look who's headed to Italy:

Former Justice Department official John Yoo , author of the famous Torture Memo and proponent of a most interesting view of presidential power, appears to be taking some time off from his teaching duties at the University of California at Berkeley law school.

The Web site for the State Department-sponsored Fulbright educational exchange program says Yoo will be off next month for a semester teaching at the University of Trento in Italy. The Fulbright Web site indicates he'll be lecturing and researching on "Terrorism and the Law."

The Trento site, however, says he's lecturing on "globalization and constitutional law." Whatever he's teaching, he might want to watch where he travels.

For example, an aggressive Spanish prosecutor -- and officials in three other countries -- tried to have former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet , who was visiting England, extradited to Spain for human rights crimes Pinochet committed there.

The effort ultimately failed to send Pinochet to Spain, but he was held in England -- albeit in a very nice house -- for more than a year while the matter was sorted out. Whether human rights groups can make a plausible legal case against a lawyer who finds legal support for interrogation techniques that others call torture is a hotly debated matter.

But that would be small comfort to Yoo if he's languishing for months in a dark, windowless tapas bar in Barcelona. Might be best to stay in Berlusconi-land -- much nicer than Gitmo.

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Sarasota Herald-Tribune: "Aide to Katherine Harris went to work for Mitchell Wade's MZM."