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Former Justice Department official Marty Lederman: Is there any way to fix legislative oversight of intelligence operations?
Note Lederman's critique here as well of oversight committee members' complicity in allowing themselves to become so hamstrung and captured in this predicament on FISA as well as CIA interrogation techniques:... As I've previously written, the pattern is by now very familiar. Whenever the Administration begins to do something of dubious legality, it:
1. sends to Congress messengers who the Intel committees trust -- solemn, serious, professionals, often uniformed military officers
2. to inform a very select, small number of legislators of the conduct -- legislators who have developed close and trusted relationships with the intel officials briefing them and who are, quite understandably, loathe to undermine such relationships, which do, after all, facilitate trust, access, and oversight itself
3. and to provide such briefings after the conduct has commenced
4. in a highly classified setting
5. putting the conduct in its best possible light -- in particular, making sure to insist that it has prevented terrorist attacks
6. while assuring the legislators that it has been vetted by the lawyers and is legal
7. without showing the legislators the legal analysis supporting the conduct
8. without disclosing the legal arguments that cut the other way
9. without informing the legislators of any policy-based or legal dissent within the executive branch
10. while warning the legislators that they may not legally breathe a word of it to anyone -- certainly not to staff, or their fellow legislators, nor to experts outside Congress who might be able to better assess the legality and efficacy of the conduct
11. and while insisting that the legislators cannot second-guess the need for classification and secrecy, even in cases -- such as with respect to OLC opinions concerning what techniques are lawful and which are not, and with respect to conduct that has been revealed to the enemy already -- where there is no legitimate justification for the classification.
The reaction from the Intel Committees is, alas, predictable: Muted, furtive and internal (i.e., entirely ineffective) protest, at best. More often than not, acquiescence and encouragement. ...
7. The members of the Committees must be willing to use the leverage they have to obtain information that the executive branch refuses to share. In recent days, Senator Rockefeller, for instance, has been heard complaining that he has repeatedly asked the Administration for memos, documentation, etc., regarding the CIA interrogation program, only to be rebuffed at every turn. The committees are still seeking authorization to make public the OLC memos on interrogation and surveillance -- but no such permission is forthcoming. But yet Rockefeller, et al., then go ahead and push through the Military Commissions Act; they work to grant telecom immunity; they cooperate with the Administration on FISA "reform"; etc. At every turn, that is, they cooperate to give the Administration most of what it wants in terms of legislative amendments. They should, instead, insist that they will not even consider such proposals unless and until the Administration comes clean with all of the information and documentation that the Committee has been requesting for several years.
Berlusconi, Again. Brookings: "After just two years, Italy is having another general election on April 13-14. Despite an electoral law intended to encourage coalition building before the election, Italian voters will have to choose from among 30 different parties, not to mention separate parties being presented to Italian nationals living abroad. Opinion polls predict that Silvio Berlusconi will become Prime Minister for a third time. The Italian electoral system, however, is extremely complex and various technicalities may create some surprises, especially in the upper Chamber (the Senate), presenting a serious risk that any new government will once again be very weak. ..."
National Journal's Charlie Cook on NPR's Diane Rehm show today: 50/50 chance McCain will be president, 99% chance Democratic Congress.
NYT's Eric Lichtblau: concerns about the potential illegality of the NSA warrantless domestic spying program up and down, going almost to the very top:
In one previously undisclosed episode, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson refused to sign off on any of the secret wiretapping requests that grew out of the program because of the secrecy and legal uncertainties surrounding it, the officials said. With the veil of secrecy around the program, Mr. Thompson was not given access to details of the N.S.A. operation, and he was so uncomfortable with the idea of approving this new breed of wiretap applications that he had a top adviser write a memorandum assessing the legal ramifications. The adviser warned him not to sign the warrant applications because it was unclear where the wiretaps were coming from.
Inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, technicians stumbled onto the N.S.A.’s program accidentally within 12 hours of its inception, setting off what officials described as a brief firestorm of anxiety among senior officials. Some who had not been told about the program were concerned that the agency was violating laws that required a court order for the singling out of Americans in wiretaps, and they immediately alerted higher-ups to what they had discovered. “What’s going on here? Is this legal?” one F.B.I. official asked after learning of the N.S.A. operation on American soil.
Carnegie Endowment's Karim Sadjadpour (.pdf): "Reading Khameni: The World View of Iran's Most Powerful Leader."
CNN: Arms dealer's dad wanted 'nice' doctor son. But grandpa Angelo Diveroli apparently sees things differently. "His grandfather told WPLG that [Efraim] Diveroli is now in Turkey or Albania doing his 'patriotic' duty. 'He's all over the world getting what the military needs,' Angelo Diveroli says." (How many days 'til this becomes the basis of a Law & Order episode?)
NYT: "Killing Fields" photographer Dith Pran dies of pancreatic cancer, at 65.
The Bush administration is undertaking a major do-over of the controversial Cuba democracy grants, restricting the funds available for anti-Castro groups in Miami and sending more resources to non-U.S. international advocacy organizations, officials and others familiar with the programs say.
The new orientation, which has sent tremors of uncertainty among many grant recipients in South Florida, comes as the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development prepare to award a record $45.7 million in Cuba democracy grants this year -- more than triple the 2007 levels.
The money aims to bring about a transition to democracy in Cuba, but the programs have long faced allegations they favor more Cuban Americans in Miami than people on the island. On Friday, a White House aide resigned amid allegations of misusing program money when he worked for one of the Cuban-American groups.
The funds are to be awarded via competitive bids and officials are urging Eastern European and Latin American groups to apply. The administration is especially eager for proposals that would provide communications technologies to activists in Cuba. Officials say Internet access, YouTube videos and cellphone text messages propelled movements to challenge governments in places like Tibet and Burma.
An aide to President Bush has resigned in the midst of an investigation by the Justice Department over allegations he misused U.S. grant money intended to promote democracy in Cuba, the White House said Friday.
Felipe Sixto, a Cuban American from Miami, was the special assistant to the president on inter-governmental affairs, dealing with Cuba and other issues.
Sixto was until last summer the chief of staff of Frank Calzón, the head of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba. Sixto did not respond to e-mails and calls to his home Friday.
Calzón said he welcomed the investigation by the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had provided the grants.
Neither Calzón nor the White House revealed how much money was misused but people familiar with the investigation say several hundreds of thousands of dollars could be involved -- an embarassing development coming just weeks ahead of the Bush administration's roll-out of its 2008 Cuba grant program. White House spokesman Blair Jones said the White House learned of the allegations from Sixto himself as he resigned from his post on March 20.
In 2006, the Government Accountability Office reported that most bids for Cuba grants were awarded without competitive bids and found some abuse.
San Diego Union Tribune blog: Wilkes set free while pursuing appeal. More. A former Congressional lawyer/reader notes this from the coverage: "Moreover, the judges said his appeal raised a 'substantial question' of law or fact, that 'is likely to result in reversal, an order for a new trial, or a sentence that does not include a term of imprisonment.'" His question: "I wonder what the substantial question is."
AP:
(Thx to DI).An aide to President Bush has resigned because of his alleged misuse of grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development when he worked for a Cuban democracy organization.
Felipe Sixto was promoted on March 1 as a special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and stepped forward on March 20 to reveal his alleged wrongdoing and to resign, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Friday. He said Sixto took that step after learning that his former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba, was prepared to bring legal action against him.
Stanzel said the alleged wrongdoing involved the misuse of money when Sixto was an official at the center.
The matter has been turned over to the Justice Department for investigation, Stanzel said. He said Bush was briefed on the case and felt that the appropriate action was being taken.
The Center for a Free Cuba describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan institution dedicated to promoting human rights and a transition to democracy and the rule of law in Cuba. ...
Update: A reader who prefers to go without attribution notes:
Indeed. I have been to 911 Duke Street to interview one of the then-INC accountants, Margaret Bartel. Specialists in these groups being administered US government funds. The INC and free Cuba folks certainly. But the Iran Policy Committee is an avowedly pro-MEK group. (And the MEK and several affiliates are designated by the State Department as a terrorist group). Is the Iran Policy Committee also getting US government funds?... My quick education on the issue has told me that the "Center For A Free Cuba" is a little more than a policy advocacy organization.
Anyway, I was looking at the Center's accountant address (where the books are) - 911 Duke Street in Alexandria.
http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/522/522060954/522060954_200412_990.pdfIt says the books are in care of IDS at 911 Duke, which I'd assume is the "Institute For Democratic Strategies" something run by R Bruce McColm.
That address stood out in my mind, because I was reading some of your old posts about Boxwood, the pass thru for the INC:
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000793.htmlAnd 911 Duke is their address too.
911 Duke also comes up as home to "International Decision Strategies, Inc" http://www.ids-us.com/ which is McColm's profitmaking "consulting" business.
911 Duke also brings up hits for the Iran Policy Committee, which I think is McColm affiliated.
Anyway, just some stuff I found interesting.
AP: Israel says it's talking to Syria. " ... On Wednesday, Olmert told foreign journalists that Israel favors face-to-face talks with Syria that could result in a peace treaty, adding: 'That doesn't mean that when we sit together you have to see us,' he said, an apparent reference to the possibility of secret contacts." Presumably Washington's veto has been withdrawn.
NYT: David Marash, American anchor, quits Al Jazeera, citing anti-American tone:
David Marash, the most prominent American anchor on Al Jazeera English, has quit the 24-hour international news channel, citing an increased level of editorial control exercised by the channel’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
“To put it bluntly, the channel that’s on now — while excellent, and I plan to be a lifetime viewer — is not the channel that I signed up to do,” Mr. Marash, formerly a correspondent for ABC’s “Nightline,” said in an interview.
Not that most Americans would notice: although Al Jazeera English, a 16-month-old companion to the Arabic-language Al Jazeera, reaches 100 million households around the world, it has so far been unable to secure widespread cable distribution in the United States. ...
Mr. Marash called his time at Al Jazeera English “very, very satisfying” and praised the channel’s coverage of Latin America, Africa and other regions, but said that the editorial direction had shifted during his time there.
When it started in November 2006, Al Jazeera English promoted an international point of view that set it apart from other television news outlets. As the channel matured, Mr. Marash said, the headquarters in Doha provided more and more direction about the assignment of stories, which meant that the other three regional news bureaus — in Washington, London and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — saw their autonomy shrink. [...]
He said he also sensed an anti-American sensibility creeping into the coverage. Will Stebbins, the channel’s Washington bureau chief, told The Associated Press Thursday that it seeks to evaluate United States policy rigorously but “give everyone a fair shout.” ...
The NYT's Eric Lichtblau in Slate:
Must read.For 13 long months, we'd held off on publicizing one of the Bush administration's biggest secrets. Finally, one afternoon in December 2005, as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House, we were again about to let President Bush's top aides plead their case: why our newspaper shouldn't let the public know that the president had authorized the National Security Agency, in apparent contravention of federal wiretapping law, to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants. As New York Times Editor Bill Keller, Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman, and I awaited our meeting, we still weren't sure who would make the pitch for the president. Dick Cheney had thought about coming to the meeting but figured his own tense relations with the newspaper might actually hinder the White House's efforts to stop publication. (He was probably right.) As the door to the conference room opened, however, a slew of other White House VIPs strolled out to greet us, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice near the head of the receiving line and White House Counsel Harriet Miers at the back. [...]
On that December afternoon in the White House, the gathered officials attacked on several fronts. There was never any serious legal debate within the administration about the legality of the program, Bush's advisers insisted. The Justice Department had always signed off on its legality, as required by the president. The few lawmakers who were briefed on the program never voiced any concerns. From the beginning, there were tight controls in place to guard against abuse. The program would be rendered so ineffective if disclosed that it would have to be shut down immediately.
All these assertions, as my partner Jim Risen and I would learn in our reporting, turned out to be largely untrue. [...]
We went back to old sources and tried new ones. Our reporting brought into sharper focus what had already started to become clear a year earlier: The concerns about the program—in both its legal underpinnings and its operations—reached the highest levels of the Bush administration. There were deep concerns within the administration that the president had authorized what amounted to an illegal usurpation of power. ...
An Iranian contact sends this. Please note that I have not confirmed the details, see the editor's note below:
WHO: AMIR FARSHAD EBRAHIMI, GERMAN-BASED JOURNALIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST
WHEN: TODAY
WHERE: ISTANBUL AIRPORT
WHAT: ARREST OF GERMAN-BASED IRANIAN JOURNALIST BY TURKISH AUTHORITIES ON CHARGES THAT HE HAS COLLABORATED WITH THE FBI IN THE FLIGHT OF ALIREZA ASHGARI FROM IRAN
DEAR ALL,
TURKISH AUTHORITIES HAVE ARRESTED AMIR-FARSHAD EBRAHIMI, A PROMINENT GERMAN-BASED IRANIAN JOURNALIST ON CHARGES THAT HE COLLABORATED WITH THE FBI IN THE FLIGHT OF A PROMINENT IRANIAN OFFICIAL LAST YEAR.
TURKISH AUTHORITIES HAVE ADVISED MR. EBRAHIMI THAT IN ORDER TO AVOID ANOTHER SIMILAR INCIDENT THEY ARE DEPORTING HIM IN THE NEXT FEW HOUS BACK TO IRAN WHERE HE WILL SURELY BE TORTURED AND EXECUTED.
IT IS IMPERATIVE FOR ALL GERMAN, EU, EC , US OFFICIALS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION TO IMMEDIATELY CONTACT TURKISH EMBASSIES. CONSULATES AND THE TURKISH INTERIOR AND INTELLIGENCE SERVICE TO STOP TURKEY (WHICH WANTS TO BE A PART OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD) FROM DEPORTING A GERMAN-RESIDENT BACK TO IRAN.
MR. EBRAHIMI IS GERMAN RESIDENT. HIS GERMAN PASSPORT NUMBER IS: N0014860.
TURKEY MUST DEPORT HIM TO GERMANY AND NOT IRAN! ...CONTACTS:
AMIR-FARSHAD EBRAHIMI: 0049-172-1560702 (THS PHONE WILL SOON BE TAKEN AWAY)
FRED SABERI: 0046-736-421240
Editor's note: I should note that I *have not confirmed the details* in the above, but decided, because the sender, a frequent contact on Iranian issues, strongly believed this person's life was in imminent danger, and that there was a short window for information and attention to possibly lead to diplomatic intervention which could save a person's life, to post it and forward it on to contacts 'as is' for the moment and deal with it as a news issue later. I made a judgment that that was the ethical thing to do.
Friday Update: The Iranian contact says, "There appears to be good news on this front thanks to the immediate response, interest and intervention of various parties." He'll try to confirm shortly.
A reader in Germany, MoonofA, notes German passport numbers have nine digits. [It's the number of his German refugee document, I'm told.] Also noted, the apparent allegation that Ebrahimi was involved in the defection of Ashgari from Iran to the West. I have never understood the story of that alleged defection, it's quite a rabbit hole; but have never before heard that the FBI was involved, and have reason to think that is not the case.
Later Friday Update: Am told that US officials and other NGOs and individuals on the scene in Turkey got involved, and that the VOA, in an interview with his Germany-based wife, is reporting that Ebrahimi has been put on a plane back to Germany from Turkey. Contact waiting to verify whether that is the case.
Am told Ebrahimi is a former Lebanese Hezbollah, former IRGC, friend of Asghari, left Iran in 2003, became refugee in Germany, married to Iranian journalist resident in Germany. That Ashgari contacted Ebrahimi after he defected to ask him to tell his family that he was okay, and that Ebrahimi has written about the Ashgari case.
Later Update: An LA-based Iranian activist writes: "DEAR FRIENDS: I AM HAPPY TO REPORT THAT AMIR FARSHAD EBRAHIMI IS NOW SAFE AND BACK IN BERLIN THANKS TO THE EXCEPTIONAL SPEEDY ASSISTANCE OF STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS AND OTHER NGO'S WHICH BROUGHT THIS NIGHTMARE FOR MR. EBRAHIMI TO A QUICK END. A US DIPLOMAT ARRIVED AT THE AIRPORT AT 3:30 IN THE MORNING TO INTERVENE. AT NOON (TURKISH TIME) HE WAS PUT ON MINIBUS AND TAKEN TO A PLANE. AT 12:40 IN THE AFTERNOON HIS PLANE TOOK OFF AND HE ARRIVED SAFELY IN GERMANY AT 3:20 PM ... IF WE HAD NOT REACHED OUT TO ALL OF YOU AS QUICKLY AS WE DID , WE WOULD BE DISCUSSING A VERY DIFFERENT FATE FOR MR. EBRAHIMI...."
More from the LA Times' Borzou Daragahi:
A diplomatic standoff over the fate of an Iranian dissident temporarily detained this week at a Turkish airport has revealed new clues about the defection of a high-ranking Iranian military official in late 2006 and exposed lingering tensions between Ankara and Tehran over the incident.
The dissident, Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, was held for nearly 18 hours over Thursday and Friday in a cell inside Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport amid a tug-of-war over whether he would be sent back to Germany, where he lives, or deported to Iran, human rights activists and Western officials said. He was finally placed on an airplane to Berlin on Friday afternoon, his lawyer said.
In a series of phone calls from his cell, Ebrahimi said Iranian officials wanted him to answer for his role in the defection of Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, a former Iranian deputy defense minister and Revolutionary Guard commander who disappeared during a trip to Turkey.
Ebrahimi said Asgari now lives in the United States, where he is believed to have provided intelligence about Iran's military capabilities and operations. ...
Asgari is believed to be the highest-ranking Iranian official to defect to the West. Analysts say he served as an intelligence official in Lebanon during the 1990s and became deputy defense minister under then-President Mohammad Khatami.
After a business trip to Syria in 2006, Asgari left for Turkey, and then dropped out of sight. "Because of the intelligence he had he was very much in danger," Ebrahimi said. "He had very precious intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program."
Ebrahimi said he coordinated with international organizations and U.S. officials to help Asgari leave Turkey for the West in late 2006. The two met in Nicosia, Cyprus, immediately after Asgari left Turkey, he said. ...
Has anyone else noted the heartwarming, only-in-America aspect of this tired, old another-unworthy-contractor-getting-an-undeserved-$300-million Pentagon contract story: the moving, apparent bringing together of the Israeli and Albanian peoples? Efraim Diveroli? his uncle and fellow arms dealer, Bar-Kochba Botach?
Via Abu M, CNAS's Colin Kahl and Shawn Brimley argue the case for 'conditional engagement' in Iraq. "Because it is the only strategy that employs both carrots and sticks, conditional engagement offers the best means of fostering political compromise and achieving some semblance of lasting stability in Iraq."
Times: Basra pipeline bombed in midst of showdown with Shia militias.
this notable too: "In Baghdad, the Mahdi Army took over neighbourhood after neighbourhood, some amid heavy fighting, others without firing a shot. In New Baghdad, militiamen simply ordered the police to leave their checkpoints: the officers complied en masse and the guerrillas stepped out of the shadows to take over their checkpoints. In Jihad, a mixed Sunni and Shia area of west Baghdad that had been one of the worst battlefields of Iraq’s dirty sectarian war in 2006, Mahdi units moved in and residents started moving out to avoid the lethal crossfire that erupted. One witness saw Iraqi Shia policemen rip off their uniform shirts and run for shelter with local Sunni neighbourhood patrols, most of them made up of ex-insurgents wooed by the US military into fighting al-Qaeda."
HRW to Judiciary Committee: "The US Senate should reject Steven Bradbury’s nomination as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) because he authorized torture, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Policy Center said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee today."
Today's battle in Basra foretold in the Independent five days ago:
The final battle for Basra is near, says Iraqi general
By Kim Sengupta in Basra
Thursday, 20 March 2008General Mohan al-Furayji, the Iraqi commander in charge of security in the south of Iraq, has warned his troops they must prepare for the final battle to defeat the Shia militias terrorising Basra.
For the British force based at Basra airport, the general's strategy raises the spectre of a return to the city they left last September after a summer of incessant attacks by the gunmen.
General Mohan is determined that the armed Shia groups have to be defeated before the provincial elections in the autumn. Failure to do so, he maintains, will mean the gunmen will take over what is left of the degenerating political process, making it impossible to shift them in the near future. No date has been fixed for the drive against the militias in Basra, he said yesterday. But he also delivered an uncompromising warning to his troops: they must be ready for a decisive military push, and it will come soon.
Two militias, the Mehdi Army, led by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Brigade used to dominate Basra. There are now, however, more than a dozen groups seeking the rich pickings of the region. The Mehdi Army has split into factions, with one group rejecting the current ceasefire called by the cleric.
Daniel Levy in The American Prospect: The next president and the Middle East.
Alistair Crooke in the Guardian: Calls for the west to use force to restore its values in the face of radical Islam reveal a profound detachment from reality.
Am shocked and very sad to learn that a wonderful friend and source on all things Iran and Washington Don Weadon has died today, apparently after a series of strokes at 4am Easter morning. A more lovely guy one wouldn't meet. Don had served in Iran before and after the shah fell and as a lawyer in Reagan's Pentagon. He'd studied at Cornell, been an intelligence officer in the Navy, lived in France, Iran and traveled widely in Asia, and was an expert on trade and export control law. Kind, generous, and genuinely charming, Don was friends with everybody, he had a real gift for friendship. We sometimes would go out to lunch in Georgetown where he and his wife were completing a renovation of their brownstone, which was finally almost done, and he's introduced me to numerous other people who have become sources and some, friends. He and his wife Suzie were devastated to have had to put their beloved lab Sir Blackamoor to sleep last week. He wrote me at the time, "Just returned from Friendship Animal Hospital where we had to put down my bestest friend, Sir Blackamoor. He had been failing for several weeks, but things accelerated over the weekend. Suzie, as you can imagine, is crushed. If she could, she would have donated most or all her organs to keep the little soldier alive. He was really trying, but after discussing matters with the doctors, he had a mysterious infection which had spread to his brain and was doing a number on his vitals. As I was once told, when the time is at hand, you’ll know. I knew, but could not admit it. But after we spent some time discussing it amid tears and frustration, we both knew. The procedure was fast and painless, and we held him in our arms as he expired. Now to pick up the pieces. But I thought you should know. He was the best of the best, and everyone’s friend. I learned a lot from him." Much the same could be said of Don too. A few weeks earlier, when my own pet had died under similar circumstances, he wrote me a note with his sympathies, about how painful it was to watch his dog decline, and realize his own mortality too. Last week, I guess just a day before Sir Blackamoor died, he wrote the nicest note, totally typical of him, prompted by I think a posting on borscht and Spitzer as the subject of the great American novel, but perhaps too by a sense that he himself wouldn't be here long. "Thanks. Now I know why I turn to your blog every day and why I miss it while you are on travel. You seem to ferret out every important piece of reading which I have missed or should have seen, and present the heart of it for me to evaluate ... As far as I am concerned, you are performing a remarkable public service. ... Just thought I should let you know ... And I am eternally appreciative." I am shocked Don died so quickly after absorbing the loss of Blackamoor, I am so sorry he had such a wrenching last month, and my great sympathies to his wife, Suzanne Cameron, who's lost her two best friends in the space of a week, their family and his many many friends all around the world on the loss of this most generous spirited man.
Update: Another reader and correspondent writes, "I read about Don Weadon and realized that he and I were at Cornell at the same time. He, JP Maher (who disappeared on a plane flight over Nicaragua four years ago [.pdf, p. 14]) introduced us and we were all friends and though I had lost contact I remember him fondly. He was intelligent, curious and had a 'rolypoly' sense of humor as befitted his stature. He was surely too young to go and the sad news conjured up many memories of happy student days. Please pass on my condolences. --Sheldon Haseltine, Class of '71"
"Don, I now vividly recall, liked his wine!" Haseltine further writes. "I was at the Hotel School and was in Les Amis d'escoffier and he, Jimmy [Maher] and I would often make sure all was as it should be (unofficially of course)."
Maher, in turn, I'm informed by Haseltine (whose own father succeeded "an old friend" Allen Dulles as station chief in Bern and got out of the business before being sent to Vietnam), was in the "paper business ... albeit in strange places, Cali, Columbia; Barrios Guatemala, Panama. ... He was en route from Honduras to Costa Rica when his plane disappeared. Nothing was ever found. Coincidentally he shares the same name as Chavez denounced a couple of years ago as being head of the CIA unit dealing with Venezuela, Cuba and other Latin American bad boys!" Just the kind of circles about which Don knew something and to which I delighted in his introductions.
More affectionate remembrances of Don at the Export Law blog and in the comments.
Memorial service
Date: April 5, 2008
Time: 11AM
Location: St. John's Episcopal Church Georgetown Parrish.
3240 O St NW
Washington, DC 20007
Condolences can be sent
3338 N ST NW, Washington DC 20007,
or here.
"In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Chincoteague Volunteer
Fire Company, Inc** or the American Diabetes Association**."
FT: US designates Iran central Bank:
Big step, a correspondent notes.Washington has called on international financial institutions to steer clear of doing business with Iran’s central bank, in the US’s most wide-ranging attempt yet to isolate Tehran financially.
The Treasury department has issued a warning of the risks of doing business with 51 state-owned and seven privately held Iranian banks – in effect the whole of Iran’s banking sector. The list includes institutions specialising in export financing and foreign investment, as well as Iranian state-owned banks located as far away as Venezuela, Hong Kong and the UK.
The move is an attempt to raise pressure on Tehran through measures that fall short of formal sanctions but go further than the private warnings US officials have delivered to regulators and financiers in recent months.
While no doubt some are suspicious that he's there to sabotage it, I actually think what's interesting about Cheney's comments in Israel is how on the reservation they are. Administration heavyweight being sent to seemingly reinforce Annapolis is not just Rice's pet project. Heavyweight who also is most directly involved in asking Riyadh for help getting Opec to increase oil supplies and for cooperation on other matters, and presumbly Saudi/Arab buy in for that and more comes with requests of their own on the peace process. Cheney's statement today that realization on both sides need for painful concessions not surprising from American leader, indeed would be wholly ordinary coming from most, but interesting coming from Cheney. We do not know what he's saying privately. But going by his public statements, he's not off the reservation as much as one sometimes sees with Cheney.
On Easter, Pope baptizes Italy's Corriere della Sera Islamic affairs commentator Magdi Allam, who recently converted from Islam to Catholicism, the AP reports.
Der Spiegel: In interview, former Iraq weapons hunter David Kay trashes German intelligence BND over hyping Curveball's information:
Kay: The BND was convinced that his information was so valuable that they distributed over 100 reports on 'Curveball' to their allies. I stand by my criticism of the BND to this day: To not have checked up on the exile Iraqis in Germany who knew him, not to have made all the appropriate efforts to validate the source, is a level of irresponsibility that is awfully hard to imagine in a service like the BND. [...]
SPIEGEL: Are you saying that German intelligence knowingly deceived the United States about 'Curveball?' Within the BND, at least, it seems that many actually believed him.
Kay: It was mysterious to me. I’ve thought about it for a long time and I have an explanation. If there is an intelligence service which has had experience with defectors, then it is the BND. They had so many Soviet defectors. But exactly those people who specialize in defectors and how to deal with them -- the people from the clandestine or operative side -- had nothing to do with 'Curveball.' He was primarily run by people from the analytical and technology side of the BND who don’t know that the first thing you do when someone walks through the door is you find out who he is, who knows him, who his real name is and what his real story is. But also there was a desire to believe. Fabricators work best when there is a desire to believe.
SPIEGEL: When you were in Iraq, your team found out that 'Curveball’s' story had nothing to do with the truth. How did CIA leadership react to your findings?
Kay: With resistance and denial. It was an absolute refusal to face reality. I just kept on hearing, 'don’t stop now. Keep working. You must be wrong. You will find it. Keep looking.' [...]
SPIEGEL: But nothing was ever found…
Kay: No and my e-mails became less and less friendly. There was a war going on in Baghdad, the members of my team were risking their lives every day, and the Germans kept on refusing us access to the source. When we finally got permission, it was even worse.
SPIEGEL: How so?
Kay: I sent two of my best people over to Germany -- they were gone for a total of two weeks. But they were not allowed to interrogate him. They were allowed to provide some initial questions and then watch it all on video from another room. But they were not allowed to submit follow up questions that could be immediately asked, which is the very essence of an interrogation. They were mad and I was mad. Yet what they watched on video was enough to convince them that 'Curveball' was a fabricator. ...
AP: Government appeals sealed judge ruling concerning CIPA procedures in Aipac trial. Article says defendants' lawyers believe there are signs government no longer wants to try the case. Lead government prosecutor on case recently retired to private practice. JTA: Government classification experts to testify for the defense.
Miami Velvet. Miami Herald: Roger Stone tipped off the FBI about Spitzer. "Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer 'used the services of high-priced call girls' while in Florida. The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from 'a social contact in an adult-themed club.' It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn't taken off his calf-length black socks `during the sex act.'... Stone confirmed details of the letter, saying a high-end call girl at an adult-themed club called Miami Velvet told him she was disappointed to have missed a call to entertain Spitzer. She said her friend had taken the call, and she described the details about the socks, Stone said. He referred The Miami Herald to his lawyer for comments." Who provided the letter to the Herald? It would appear to be camp Stone. Via TPM.
Update: The wreckage left behind.
More from Marcy Wheeler: " ... Stone says he relayed the dirt on Spitzer to the Feds only four months ago; exactly how are we, the American public, supposed to reconcile that with the sworn statements and posturing of our Federal officers and DOJ/US Attorneys that are contained in the record to date that indicate the investigation is much older? If Stone was corroborating evidence for information already possessed by the Feds, why wouldn't they disclose it? Because, last I heard, said Federal authorities were still not supposed to lie, omit material facts, and otherwise disingenuously mislead the Court. There is no historical record of such perfidy with this Administration right?"
AP: Cheney in Riyadh:
Cheney and Abdullah held about 4-1/2 hours of private, one-to-one meetings on Friday at the king's farm on the outskirts of Riyadh, where the vice president also met the Saudi oil minister.
"There was I think a lot of commonality in their assessment about the structural problems confronted by the global energy market now and some discussion of probably the way forward, how we work together to try and stabilize the market," the U.S. official told reporters traveling with Cheney.
The talks covered "what could be done shorter-term, but probably more about what's necessary to do over the medium to longer term," he said.
The official would not give details of the discussions between Cheney and the Saudi king, a U.S. ally and leader of the world's top oil exporter, calling them confidential and private conversations.
Cheney's trip follows a visit to Saudi Arabia by President George W. Bush, who in January called for OPEC to increase production, but the crude oil exporters' group decided to hold production steady.
WP's Colum Lynch:
In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.
The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, wrote Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month.
"In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished" for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein's government, Muñoz wrote.
But the tough talk dissipated as the war effort worsened and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Muñoz's account suggests the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.
Welcome to the Club. Can we borrow your judicial system for a sec? NYT:
Hmm. Basic question of victims' rights. So, presumably, all those tens of thousands of Americans who are suspected of nothing who have had their private communications details spied on by the government with no warrants, all of those thousands the FBI director Mueller has been hauled up to Capitol Hill to testify about the FBI mistakenly targeting with stray exigent letters and blanket requests to banks, telecom companies and libraries for their records, all of them, then, deserve to be immediately notified by the government that they were the victims of a breach - and if not, have a good case to sue, according to the attorney's case laid out above? Seriously, what am I missing? Isn't there some bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance going on in seeing the reactions to the two cases? How much more intrusive is it to have federal law enforcement and intelligence scouring ordinary people's phone records, emails, bank records than a State Department contractor sneak peaking into presidential candidates' passport files, with the sort of information available in any credit check, and which is prompting a rush of Congressional investigations? Why do ordinary people have no recourse, no remedy, no way to demand accountability for the violation of their privacy, no recourse even to demand that they be notified the government has surveilled their communications and bank records, when the presidential candidates, who have volunteered after all for an extraordinary degree of public scrutiny to become the leader of the free world, get recourse, apologies, Congressional investigations and law suits?The breaches are particularly mortifying for the State Department because officials there discovered them as far back as last summer, in the case of Mrs. Clinton, but did not inform any of the candidates until Thursday, after The Washington Times reported that Mr. Obama’s privacy had been violated.
State Department officials have blamed managers in the passport office, below the level of political appointees, who did not inform their superiors about the breaches. Privacy lawyers said Friday that the department risked being taken to court over the failure to inform the candidates.
“Immediately on finding out that there was a breach, the victim should have been notified,” said Steven M. Dettelbach, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler L.L.P. “It’s a basic question of victims’ rights. When a crime happens, the victim needs to know what happened.”
Fox: Prosecutors might seek new Foggo indictment. "During Friday's hearing, prosecutor Phillip Halpern said that if a new indictment is obtained, it will likely come in April. He said the new indictment would be 'essentially of the same nature,' though it may include new charges of conflict of interest and making false statements and 'the conspiracy might be a bit broader.'" More from NBC. Back in December 2005, I broke the name of the Wilkes front company that got a covert CIA contract thanks to Foggo.
Wired's Noah Shachtman interviews Slate columnist Fred Kaplan about his new book, "Daydream Believers."
NYT's Helene Cooper: "The State Department has fired two employees and reprimanded a third for improperly accessing electronic information from the passport file of Senator Barack Obama, State Department officials said tonight. On three separate occasions in January, February and March, three different employees looked through Mr. Obama’s file within the department’s consular affairs section, violating department’s privacy rules, according to the State Department spokesman, Sean D. McCormack." Bill Gertz, who broke the story, adds that the FBI is investigating the breach.
Friday Update: WP: All three candidates' records breached.
Stranger still: AP: "McCormack said the individual who accessed Obama's files also reviewed McCain's file earlier this year. This contract employee has been reprimanded, but not fired. The individual no longer has access to passport records, he said." Obama and Mccain's --- but not Clinton's.
"...Aside from the file, the information could allow critics to dig deeper into the candidates' private lives. While the file includes date and place of birth, address at time of application and the countries the person has traveled to, the most important detail would be their Social Security number, which can be used to pull credit reports and other personal information. "
NYT:
The Justice Department used some of its most intrusive tactics against Eliot Spitzer, examining his financial records, eavesdropping on his phone calls and tailing him during its criminal investigation of the Emperor’s Club prostitution ring.
The scale and intensity of the investigation of Mr. Spitzer, then the governor of New York, seemed on its face to be a departure for the Justice Department, which aggressively investigates allegations of wrongdoing by public officials, but almost never investigates people who pay prostitutes for sex.
A review of recent federal cases shows that federal prosecutors go sparingly after owners and operators of prostitution enterprises, and usually only when millions of dollars are involved or there are aggravating circumstances, like human trafficking or child exploitation.
The Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood:
"The study was first reported prior to release by Warren P. Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers," Aftergood notes. "The first of the five volumes was previously posted on the ABC News web site. The latter volumes include hundreds of pages of captured Iraqi documents, declassified and translated into English."A Defense Department-sponsored report that examined captured Iraqi documents for indications of links between Saddam Hussein and terrorist organizations is now available online.
The five-volume report affirmed that there was "no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda." But it also said there was "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism."
Although the report was publicly released on March 13, the Department of Defense declined to publish it online, offering instead to provide copies on disk. The full five-volume study has now been posted on the Federation of American Scientists web site.
See "Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," Institute for Defense Analyses, November 2007, redacted and released March 2008:
Paul Kiel: Key Dem urged NYT reporter against running warrantless wiretapping program story.
Me writing five years ago in The American Prospect: "Police states don't just fade away. Their remnants persist -- through deeply intertwined networks of secret police, paramilitary units and criminal groups that have enriched themselves while serving as pillars of support to tyrants. No one knew this more than Zoran Djindjic, the pro-reform Serbian prime minister who was assassinated on Wednesday. And no one appears to know this less than Bush administration officials who assume that sweeping tyranny from Iraq will be as simple as a few days of precision bombing. The Djindjic assassination suggests that cleaning up after despots -- such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein or Serbia's former dictator Slobodan Milosevic -- is never as easy as Bush would have Americans believe. As Serbs are learning, the process takes years. And even then, it is not guaranteed to work. [...] It should also make members of the Bush administration put their fingers to their heads and consider that the remnants of dictatorship do not disappear quietly -- or without an extended fight. " Link.
NYT's Ethan Bronner:
A new poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the attack this month on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that killed eight young men, most of them teenagers, an indication of the alarming level of Israeli-Palestinian tension in recent weeks.
The survey also shows unprecedented support for the shooting of rockets on Israeli towns from the Gaza Strip and for the end of the peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
The pollster, Khalil Shikaki, said he was shocked because the survey showed greater support for violence than any other he had conducted over the past 15 years in the Palestinian areas. Never before, he said, had a majority favored an end to negotiations or the shooting of rockets at Israel. [...]
Mr. Shikaki’s poll also showed that the militant Islamist group Hamas, which Israel and the United States have been trying to isolate, is gaining popularity in the West Bank while its American-backed rival, the more secular Fatah, is losing ground. Asked for whom they would vote for president, 46 percent chose Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, the current president, while 47 percent chose Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.
"A More Perfect Union." Charles Murray at the Corner: Uh, did you see the same speech that I saw?
I read the various posts here on "The Corner," mostly pretty ho-hum or critical about Obama's speech. Then I figured I'd better read the text (I tried to find a video of it, but couldn't). I've just finished. Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols.... But you know me. Starry-eyed Obama groupie.
More reaction from the Guardian's Michael Tomasky:
David Corn:... I have to assume that many white Americans have been attracted to him in no small part because he seemed to offer a narrative that wouldn't take us into these discomfiting, cobwebbed corners of the American psyche. He seemed, as someone's one-liner had it, "just the right amount of black"; like he probably belonged to a genteel inter-racial Episcopal church.
Well, tough - he didn't. And yesterday he basically told us why. He did so with about as much honesty as we have any right to expect from a person seeking the presidency. I'm sure it helps us, as a society, to hear it all put out there with intelligence and subtlety. I'm less sure about whether it will help him.
... Unlike the black leaders of recent years, Obama identified with both the winners and losers of America: 'I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.' He is E Pluribus Unum. [...]
Obama ended up at an obvious point: can't we all just get along and "do unto others as we would have them do unto us." But the path he took was not without some courage. He dared to explain—and somewhat justify—black anger that can lead to comments that upset whites, while calling for blacks to move past such anger. And he did not dump Wright. He also dared to understand white resentment, but he chided whites (without castigating them) for dismissing or ignoring black anger. Events beyond Obama's control pushed him to make this speech. And, no doubt, political foes and conservative antagonists will continue their crusade to tar Obama with Wright's words. But with this address, Obama presented a candid approach to race. Still, there's no telling if this will help him in his fierce battle with Hillary Clinton—let alone in a general election, should he secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
While discussing his years of worship at the Trinity Church, Obama noted that by attending services there and imagining "the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones," he came to realize that "our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black." With this speech—and throughout his campaign—as he merges his own story with the story of race in America, he is presenting himself also as "black and more than black." And that is a story with no ending yet.
Bruce Falconer: "Viktor Bout's Last Deal: How an elite DEA unit brought down the world's most notorious arms dealer."
Link.FOR VIKTOR BOUT, meeting clients in person—looking them in the eye, shaking their hands—was his preferred way of doing business, though it was not strictly necessary. As the fugitive leader of the world's largest and most lucrative illicit-arms-trafficking network, he had plenty of capable lieutenants to manage his affairs. But Bout, by all accounts, enjoyed his work and liked to be on location when deals were closed. So it was that on Thursday, March 6, he landed in Bangkok, Thailand, having flown all night from his home in Moscow. He had come to meet representatives of what he hoped would be his newest customer, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and to finalize an arrangement to deliver millions of dollars of military-grade weapons from Eastern European warehouses to the FARC's jungle outposts. [...]
THE CHAIN OF EVENTS that brought Viktor Bout to Bangkok that morning had played out like moves in a high-stakes poker game, albeit one rigged in favor of Bout's opponents. What follows is the story of how the "Merchant of Death," so named for his role in fueling Third World conflicts with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of weapons and ammunition, was brought down by a months-long international DEA sting operation. [...]
Journalist Barbara Slavin has posted her interview with Iran's recently departed nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, newly elected to parliament, at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Chicago Tribune: Saudi former BCCI director sues American author Rachel Ehrenfeld using British libel law for writing that he financed Osama bin Laden. Suit demands destruction of all unsold copies of her books. Book was not released in UK but a dozen readers there purchased it through the Internet. (Plaintiff KbM is rather notorious among investigative journalists for this sort of action, and he has all the money in the world to fund armies of lawyers to engage in this sort of "libel tourism" as Ehrenfeld calls it. Nevertheless, and seriously, it's hard to understand why if and until Britain changes its libel laws, publishers and their armies of lawyers don't protect themselves by indicating their products with any sort of by-UK-standards-judged 'libelous' information cannot be sold or shipped to or downloaded in the UK. If people in the U.K. don't want the information by serious authors about who is allegedly funding al Qaeda for instance, they can accept having laws which prevent them from seeing it. But why should the rest of us be the victims of that sort of de facto censorship due to another government?)
Agent of Influence? You can read my interview with Emmy award winning investigative journalist Aram Roston about his new biography of Ahmad Chalabi, here:
Go read the rest. It's actually quite interesting.I asked Roston about allegations that Chalabi had such a close relationship with elements of the Iranian security services, that the FBI reportedly investigated him for passing highly classified U.S. intelligence to Iranian intelligence.
Roston's conclusion: "In the end, I came away thinking that the key question, from a U.S. perspective, was not whether or not Chalabi was an Iranian agent, but whether he was more useful to Iran's intelligence services and government, or to America's intelligence services and government," Roston told me. "Here I think it was indisputable that he was far more useful to Iran."
Debate on U.S. press Iran coverage. My colleague Eric Umansky kindly responds to my critique of his Columbia Journalism Review cover story on American press coverage of the Iran nuclear issue in the last update here. " ... In short, what I tried to show is not that the press went along for any ride but rather that particularly before the NIE there were a series of more broadly held assumptions about Iran—again, and most importantly, that leaders definitely wanted nukes, and also about why it might want them—that often went unexplored. ..." His full response here.
PressThink's Jay Rosen: "Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality. The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well."
Update: Weldon Berger has posted a copy of Pincus' essay, with permission from the magazine, Frank: Academics for the Real World.
Portfolio's Scot Paltrow: Why is no one calling for an independent inquiry into what caused the mortgage-market collapse? And, more importantly, how to prevent a repeat?
New legal all-star blog at Slate-- Convictions -- edited by Phil Carter and whose contributors include Marty Lederman, Jack Balkin, Dahlia Lithwick, and other must-reads.
WP: Cheney in Iraq, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion. "Among the items on the agenda will be the long-term security relationship between the United States and Iraq after the U.N. mandate that currently governs the presence of outside forces expires at the end of the year. The Bush administration and Iraqi leaders are currently developing a security agreement that would govern that. 'We've got to be talking to each other about exactly what that relationship is going to look like,' the senior official aboard Cheney's plane said."
Dispatches from the war on the economy. Quite a night:
Bear Sterns -- fifth largest investment bank -- sold to JP Morgan for $2/share, less than one tenth of its Friday value. WSJ: "The deal values Bear Stearns at just $236 million, based on the number of Bear shares outstanding as of Feb. 16. At the end of Friday, Bear's stock-market value was about $3.54 billion."
NYT: "JPMorgan is buying Bear, which has 14,000 employees, for a third the price at which the smaller firm went public in 1985. Only a year ago, Bear’s shares sold for $170. The sale price includes Bear Stearns’s soaring Madison Avenue headquarters. The agreement ended a day in which bankers and policy makers were racing to complete the takeover agreement before financial markets in Asia opened on Monday, fearing that the financial panic could spread if the 85-year-old investment bank failed to find a buyer. As the trading day began in Tokyo, however, markets tumbled more than 4 percent. In the United States, investors faced another week of gut-wrenching volatility in American markets." [emphasis added].
WSJ: "Meanwhile, worries are deepening that other securities firms and commercial banks might be on shaky ground. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Richard Fuld, concerned about the markets and possible fallout from Bear Stearns's troubles, cut short a trip to India and returned home Sunday, ahead of schedule, according to people familiar with the matter. The decision came after a series of calls Saturday to both senior executives at the firm and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, these people say."
Reuters : 'The market is totally panicking,' said a trader at big Japanese bank. 'The fact that the Fed had to announce its emergency steps on Sunday night highlighted the seriousness of the situation.'"
More: Bear CEO playing cards while Rome burns (via Atrios).
Big bailout coming? You bet, says Paul Krugman:
... Nobody expects an investment bank to be a charitable institution, but Bear has a particularly nasty reputation. As Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times reminds us, Bear “has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach.”
Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation.
Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.
But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse.
As Bear goes, so will go the rest of the financial system. And if history is any guide, the coming taxpayer-financed bailout will end up costing a lot of money.
The U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s ended up costing taxpayers 3.2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of $450 billion today. Some estimates put the fiscal cost of Japan’s post-bubble cleanup at more than 20 percent of G.D.P. — the equivalent of $3 trillion for the United States.
If these numbers shock you, they should. But the big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed. ...
AP: More Americans see federal government as secretive:
Nearly nine in 10 Americans say it's important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government, but three out of four view the federal government as secretive, according to a survey released Sunday.
Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University conducted the survey in conjunction with Sunshine Week, a nationwide effort by media organizations to draw attention to the public's right to know.
The survey found a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who believe the federal government is very or somewhat secretive, from 62 percent of those surveyed in 2006 to 74 percent in 2008. That's a sobering jump, said David Westphal, Washington editor for McClatchy Newspapers and co-chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Freedom of Information Committee.
Writer Richard Russo has the great American novel take on the Spitzer story, and boy, does it lend itself to the genre:
Worth a read.... My fictional Eliot would be complex, would contain paradoxes. He would not be a hypocrite. My Eliot would believe with his whole heart in his crusades against the corrupt and the powerful and the privileged, even as he worked studiously to undermine his legacy. Fiction can accommodate such paradoxes, provided they're explained.
But I don't mean to jigger the facts; fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught. And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent. For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly. He will swerve at the last moment. The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him. [...]
There's also a story in which Eliot isn't even the main character. Because how believable is it, really, that they came across him by chance on that wiretap? His many enemies are justly famous as the dirtiest of tricksters. Maybe I should be writing a thriller, but I dislike and distrust plot-driven narrative and have grown fond of my own messed-up, untidy Eliot, so American in both his ambition and the disgrace that seems to flow from it so naturally. I might not know precisely why he's done what he's done, but he connects to my long-held conviction that people (in fiction, in life) aren't meant to be saints, or to be treated like saints. That's the hard lesson Hawthorne's Reverend Dimmesdale learned from the pulpit.For years now, my Eliot (himself no stranger to the pulpit) has been besieged in restaurants, on the street, everywhere, by people telling him to keep fighting the good fight because, Eliot, you're our best hope in a world that's as depraved as Huck Finn's. Even his prostitutes agree -- don't they?
I cannot speak for the real Eliot, but some part of my Eliot has known all along that he's no saint, that he's not anybody's best hope, not even his own. He knows this even as some other part of him believes what people are telling him because, of course, he wants to. This has been his true conflict all along, and finally, explosively, it has been resolved.
Andy Borowitz* reports at the Huffington Post on Obama's conversion to Judaism:
Buffeted by criticism of his controversial Christian pastor while continuing to quell rumors that he is a Muslim, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) took a bold step today to settle questions about his religious faith once and for all.
"I am converting to Judaism, effective immediately," Mr. Obama told reporters at a press conference in Scarsdale, New York, adding that he would change his middle name from "Hussein" to "Murray." ...
* (Humorist).
More: "For heaven's sake, don't do it," says Gershom Gorenberg, referring to his recent NYT mag piece, "How to Prove You're a Jew."
Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin writes on Spitzer and the national surveillance state:
...The Spitzer story shows both the promise and the threat of these developments. On the one hand, reporting financial transactions makes the job of law enforcement easier, and it uncovers crimes (and terrorist plots) that might never be discovered otherwise. Mandatory disclosure (or in this case, voluntary disclosure by banks) of private individual's financial transactions, and sharing of data between intelligence services, federal, state and local law enforcement helps the state identify patterns of criminal activity, prevent crimes before they occur, and punish them after the fact. These techniques and technologies allow governments to do the jobs entrusted to them more powerfully and more efficiently than ever before.
On the other hand, these developments carry all of the potential risks of a powerful National Surveillance State: Governments can make mistakes in assessing levels of criminality and dangerousness; and their data mining models may characterize innocent activity as suspicious. Without sufficient oversight and checking functions, government actors may misuse the additional knowledge they gain, for example, by instigating abusive prosecutions, or creating discriminatory systems for access to public and private services (like banks, airports, government entitlements and so on). And the more powerful government becomes in knowing what its citizens are doing, the easier it becomes for government to control people's behavior.
These issues arise in the case of money transactions for prostitution, but they could easily have arisen in a wide range of other circumstances. The practices of financial disclosure and the technologies of surveillance can be adapted to many different ends, some noble, others less so.
Whether you like or fear the National Surveillance state, it is not a utopia or dystopia of the future; it is already here. It is the way we will govern and be governed in the years ahead. Spitzer's crime is his own; the techniques of surveillance, collation and analysis that caught him are ours and they will be applied to all of us.
Ha'aretz: Report: Syria wants public peace talks with Israel. " ... However, 'knowledgeable' sources told Al-Akhbar that Damascus estimates that the United States isn't interested in Israel holding talks with Syria, and will act to prevent such talks from taking place. In contrast to the Syrian peace overtures, Israel has recently conveyed a stern message to Damascus, also via a third party, stating that it would hold Damascus accountable for any Hezbollah attacks, Israeli and European sources said on Friday. ..."
Aram Roston's excellent new Chalabi biography, The Man Who Pushed America to War, mentioned in this NBC Nightly News report on Chalabi's comeback last night.
And listen for Aram's interview with NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross scheduled to air Monday.
CQ's Jeff Stein: Celebrated History of the CIA Comes Under Belated Fire.
James Meek in the Guardian:
Link. (Thx to PW).On the afternoon of March 31 2000, Boris Pasternak, editor-in-chief of the Moscow publishing house Polifakt, drove to the suburb of Podolsk to look up one of his authors, the food writer and historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin. Pokhlebkin was late delivering the final manuscript of his new book, A Century Of Cooking, and had failed either to turn up for a scheduled meeting or to respond to telegrams. The writer had no phone. He had no fridge or TV, either, although he did have 50,000 books crammed into his apartment.
When Pokhlebkin failed to answer the door, Pasternak (grandson of the writer of Dr Zhivago) called the police, who broke in. They found the body of the 77-year-old writer on the floor, where it had evidently lain for several days. Pokhlebkin, a war veteran, had been stabbed to death with his own military dagger. Relatives said none of the valuable books or documents in the flat had been stolen. Eight years on, the murder remains unsolved.
Pokhlebkin is best known outside Russia for his history of vodka. It was his research, in 1977, that persuaded international arbitrators to strike down an attempt by Poland to claim exclusive ownership of the term "vodka" on the basis that Poles had invented it first. But in his homeland, Pokhlebkin's famous as the author of 21 books about food and drink - mainly about the cuisine of a country that now exists only in the memories of his readers.
By chance, Pokhlebkin was last seen alive on the day Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia. It was fitting. The cuisine Pokhlebkin wrote about with such elan was the cuisine of the Soviet Union, and if the Soviet Union itself shut down in 1991, Putin's election nine years later marked the end of the post-Soviet era. Since then, the borders between the former parts of the Union have hardened; Putin may talk nostalgically about the greatness of the USSR, but his practice towards the former fraternal republics - sometimes pragmatic, sometimes petty - has been relentlessly Russia-first.
What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch? ...
So why did Rice meet this week, asks a former US government official, with the former Lebanese militia leader Samir Geagea, recently released from prison for murdering Dany Chamoun and his family, and perpetrator of numerous other atrocities? This source, no shrinking violet, described Geagea as truly a war criminal. "This guy is a psychopath." How can you tell Hezbollah to disarm if you are working with this militia leader, he further asks. For the Bush administration, Geagea has one important credential, apparently: he's anti Syrian. "As they say, the enemy of my enemy gets my visa," Al Kamen writes. And a meeting with the White House's Stephen Hadley.
FLC has posted the invitation: "What next? Will Congress host ... Radovan Karadzic?" Apparently if certain quarters are working for his rehabilitation.
My friend Hussein Ibish was on the Colbert report last night, to report on whether Obama is a secret Muslim.
WP's Juliet Eilpern: Ozone rules weakened at Bush's last minute direct request.
Update: Journalist Mark Goldberg sends this from former EPA administrator Carol Browner posted at a site he's working on called On Day One.
Writing at Asia Times, Conflicts Forum co-director Mark Perry, a former Newsday journalist, says Thomas Barnett's Fox Fallon piece:
Did anyone else detect the hand of a glossy magazine editor in the Barnett piece trying to overamplify what the story was about? It seemed like a likely scenario to me when I saw the hyperventilating "this is the one man standing between war and peace" frame. Come on.has to rank as one of the most embarrassing portraits of an American officer in US military history. Both for Barnett, as well as for Fallon. And that's saying a lot. Written in pseudo Tombstone style - a kind of vague signaling that this is just-between-us tough guys talk - Barnett presents a military commander who is constantly on the go, trailing exhausted aides who never rest ...
It's boorish and, very often, it's just plain wrong. Thus, Barnett: "If, in the dying light of the [George W] Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon."
Well, actually, yes - and no. The decision to go to war will come down to one man, but his name won't be Fox Fallon, it will be George W Bush. ...
But this little exchange, between Barnett and Fallon in Cairo, is what put the admiral on the retirement list: "Fallon sidles up to me during a morning coffee break. 'I'm in hot water again,' he says." And Barnett asks him: "The White House?" And Fallon nods his head: "They say, why are you even meeting with [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak." And Fallon goes on: "Why? Because it's my job to deal with this region, and it's all anyone wants to talk about right now. People here hear what I'm saying and understand. I don't want to get them too spun up. Washington interprets this as all aimed at them. Instead, it's aimed at government and media in this region. I'm not talking about the White House ... This is my center of gravity. This is my job."
Not anymore.
To hear Barnett talk about it, Fallon is not only a "man of strategic brilliance", he once actually stood between us and the apocalypse ...
This CJR piece by my admired friend Eric Umansky seems to suffer a bit from the editorial equivalent of fighting the last war. I don't think it sufficiently captures the skepticism and somewhat constraining role the press has brought to bear on the administration at key points on its Iran narrative. One example: I would say that the press played a big role in pushing back with skepticism to the point of impasse on the administration's efforts to roll out a campaign a year ago that Iran was the main destabilizing force in Iraq. Press barely let the administration get its powerpoint presentation out - it was delayed at a couple points -- and was all over it with skepticism with the notable exception of the NYT's Michael Gordon, who eventually said he was getting his information from the military. Press has consistently relayed IAEA and intelligence community ambivalence and uncertainty on Iran's nuclear program and intentions going back long before the NIE (the AP's George Jahn at the IAEA in Vienna comes to mind). The WP's Dafna Linzer has been stand out in appropriately questioning and investigating US claims on the intelligence, including the nuclear laptop. Press has relayed skepticism on the theory Iran is ripe for regime change in heaps (LAT's Borzou Daragahi, USA Today's Barbara Slavin, the WP guy who was there), and conveyed ample skepticism too about the benefits for Iranian rights activists actually living in Iran of the administration's declared efforts to fund pro democracy efforts on Iran (Wright's coverage of Hala Esfandiari's ordeal, just one instance, Laura Secor in the New Yorker and New Republic). It's reported the narrative of a fight between factions within the administration in heaps (NYT's Helene Cooper, WP's Wright, me), and I would say hardly suppressed portrayal of administration moderates at the State Department as the perceived saner ones. Is there any major press outlet which didn't portray Fallon as something of a hero? If anything, the US press underreports the human rights situation in Iran.
I mean, what would the public have to conclude about Iran from reporting to date: That it's working on a nuclear program that Iran says is peaceful and lots of people outside are skeptical is peaceful, that there is lots of uncertainty about the intelligence, that Ahmadinejad is a dangerous guy who sponsors Holocaust denial conferences, that much of the US government and public don't want a war, we're kind of busy in Iraq, and there are lots of people who think we should try harder on the diplomatic front and who favor trying to talk with Iran. To be fair to Eric, it's probably true that the public is inclined to think that Iran's nuclear program is probably not ultimately for peaceful purposes, and perhaps the press is responsible for sharing and conveying that overall bias, although I do think there has been more skepticism on administration claims and more conveyance of the uncertainty of the intelligence. And I think the piece misses important contextual differences in the reporting. The press has been almost and perhaps at earlier points rightly paranoid that the administration is planning to strike and had a hard time trusting the voices inside the government that have for a while been saying no. (Witness this Post headline today). Hardly selling a war. On the contrary.
Update: The Onion is sympathetic to CJR's take: "U.S. Not Planning to Attack Iran, Says U.S. Iran War Czar."
Update II: Upon more thought, what I think CJR gets wrong here is a big thing, a central framing thing: the press has questioned the fundamental precepts of Washington Iran policy in a fairly aggressive way (see Michael Hirsh's stuff at Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius, Wright, Ricks, Cooper, Slavin), and in particular the hardliners' proposed solutions on an uncertain diagnosis -- regime change or military confrontation -- as unrealistic, premature and unnecessary at this point. All the reporters who have reported from there have questioned hard what Washington thinks it knows about Iran, and challenged many of the fictions and fantasies of a city that hasn't had an embassy in Iran for thirty years. Those are big things. And it has not ignored the ambiguities of the diagnosis. Press is not selling this war.
After he completes a move, Eric plans to respond to some of these points.
Monday March 17 2008 Update: Eric Umansky sends this in response:
This is Eric Umansky. I wrote a piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review critiquing coverage of the nuclear tensions with Iran. Laura thinks that my criticisms were, basically, from Mars. (As she concluded, my story was “the editorial equivalent of fighting the last war.”) Laura has kindly allowed me to offer some follow-up thoughts and respond to her post.
Let me start off by agreeing with Laura: There has been plenty of good, aggressive reporting about Iran. I cite some examples in my piece. The Los Angeles Times has also had some fabulous coverage. One of the most revealing stories I’ve read about Iran was by the LAT’s Borzou Daragahi and about just how fractured power is in Iran. Meanwhile, Dafna Linzer and her (now former) colleagues at the Post have, I think, excelled in covering the nuclear tensions with Iran. I highlighted a few of their pieces in my story, but they really do deserve more of a shout-out.
I also don’t think the press jumped on board any march to war. In fact, I don’t think there was ever much of a march to begin with. I’ve never thought the administration was likely to attack Iran. And there has certainly been plenty of coverage about the potential costs of any attack.
None of that was the focus of my piece. My jumping off point was last December’s National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran had stopped the weaponization-only part of its nuclear program. (As I noted in my story, Iran is still enriching uranium, which can be used for civilian programs but is also the biggest hurdle for nukes.) What I was looking at is whether the NIE’s conclusions should have been such a stunner.
Obviously, the NIE went against the administration’s portrayal, and that’s certainly worthy of headlines. But I think the NIE was also such a surprise because it went against deeper assumptions held by many in the U.S. (including myself). It wasn’t just administration boosters, for instance, who thought that Iran’s leaders were committed to eventually getting nukes.
What I pointed out was evidence that undercut some of those assumptions. For example—and what I spent much of my piece on—was the apparent peace feelers Iranian leaders made in 2002-2003 and culminating in a peace offer in which they (exactly who, in fairness, has always been a question) put nearly everything on the table, including Iran’s nuclear program. As I wrote, the Financial Times, Washington Post, and Newsday all did fine reporting on the so-called “grand bargain” offer. But as I also noted, the apparent peace feelers got little pick-up overall. Indeed, I don’t believe the New York Times ever devoted a news story to it.
In short, what I tried to show is not that the press went along for any ride but rather that particularly before the NIE there were a series of more broadly held assumptions about Iran—again, and most importantly, that leaders definitely wanted nukes, and also about why it might want them—that often went unexplored. Readers can judge for themselves whether the case I made was convincing.
If I am reading this right, it's kind of tragically comic. As a way to cover its derriere for obtaining phone records, emails, etc. from telecom companies and banks, etc. using claimed energency circumstances that turned out not to exist, the FBI then went and issued retroactive "blanket" requests to those carriers to justify the past exigent national security letters, the Inspector General has found:
The only silver lining if there is one is that we can bet all those warrantless wiretaps and phone and bank records are detecting lots of interesting behavior of our elected officials who are perhaps not doing enough to protect the public from government trampling over civil liberties. They seem to be keeping the FBI's public corruption division busy anyhow.... By 2006, F.B.I. officials began learning that the bureau had issued thousands of “exigent” or emergency records demands to phone providers in situations where no life-threatening emergency existed, according to the account of Mr. Youssef, who worked with the phone companies in collecting records in terrorism investigations. In these situations, the F.B.I. had promised the private companies that the emergency records demands would be followed up with formal subpoenas or properly processed letters, but often, the follow-up material never came.
This created a backlog of records that the F.B.I. had obtained without going through proper procedures. In response, the letter said, the F.B.I. devised a plan: rather than issuing national security letters retroactively for each individual investigation, it would issue the blanket letters to cover all the records obtained from a particular phone company.
“When Mr. Youssef was first informed of this concept, he was very uncomfortable with it,” his lawyer, Mr. Kohn, said in his letter to Senator Grassley. But the plan was ultimately approved in 2006 by three senior officials at highest levels of the F.B.I., and in the process, Mr. Kohn maintains, the solution may have worsened the problem.
“They made a mistake in cleaning up a mistake,” Mr. Kohn said, “because they didn’t know the law.”
An F.B.I. official who asked for anonymity because the inspector general is still examining the blanket warrant issue said the practice was “an attempt to fix a problem.”
“This was ham-handed but pure of heart,” the official said. “This was nothing evil, but it was not the right way to do it.”
WP: Fallon resignation not seen as step toward attack on Iran. More from Fred Kaplan and David Ignatius, who makes clear the administration did not appreciate Fallon's spirit for open access and calling it like he saw it and on the record to him.
NYT:
The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.
The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.
The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.
The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.
The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been detained. ...
Client 6. Mainstream British news sites are scrubbing their sites of reports that the Duke of Westminster was another alleged client of Emperors Club VIP (reportedly client six), a reader informs me, and it appears to be true. Go to the links here first. Then here: Gone. Gone. Why? This one still works, but only the photo and caption mention the Duke. Fortunately there's still News of the World.
Update: The Yanks' NY Daily News will not be intimidated by whatever is spooking the British broadsheets:
The richest man in Great Britain was a customer of the same high-end prostitution service patronized by Gov. Spitzer.
The Duke of Westminster, listed as the world's 46th richest person by Forbes magazine, hired four hookers over a six-week stretch in late 2006 and early last year, the News of the World reported last year. ...
The British reports about Grosvenor said the duke's prostitutes were young enough to be his daughters. They also had an international flair: In addition to the pair from the former Soviet Union, Grosvenor entertained an Asian woman in knee-high boots and a Brazilian. ...
Like Spitzer, Grosvenor is married - and he has four children with wife Natalia. The duke had close ties to the royal family and is one of Prince Charles' best friends. Grosvenor also is Prince William's godfather. ...
ABC's Jonathan Karl:
Here's a summary of the report (.pdf) some apparently don't want you to see. More from McClatchy two days ago on the study.The Bush Administration apparently does not want a military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.
The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.
It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online.
Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."
Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive." ...
Greg Mitchell: The Iraq Follies: Eighteen things you've already forgotten about the Iraq war and the press.
Centcom Commander Adm. William "Fox" Fallon, disparaging of possible U.S. Iran military confrontation, resigns:
..."As I say, the notion that this decision portends anything in terms of change in Iran policy is, to quote myself, 'ridiculous,' " Gates said.
Nevertheless, it is quite a signal for the White House to send to aides and in particular to the military to keep their thoughts on policy to themselves -- a concern voiced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "I am concerned that the resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and a military leader with more than three decades of command experience, is yet another example that independence and the frank, open airing of experts’ views are not welcomed in this Administration," Reid said in a statement. ...
Update: A few former military officer types have written to say something to the effect of, "this is far from normal." Writes one former Air Force officer: "Having spent six years serving on the Joint Staff, I can only state the obvious -- this resignation is far from normal behavior by 4-stars. It is also long overdue and should have happened six years ago. If Gen Tommy Franks or another 4-star had resigned in 2002, the US would not be mired in a Middle East conflict today and Osama bin Laden might well be dead."
According to a friend, Fallon's deputy and acting Centcom commander successor, Ltn General Martin Dempsey, is a good guy: "In 2006-2007 he was the 3-star head of MNSTC-I, the U.S. command in charge of training Iraqi security forces. Good guy. He was the 2-star Division commander for the 1st Armored Division in the year after regime change and did an okay job. Don't know his positions on Iran. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually move Petraeus into CENTCOM, Chiarelli to MNF-I, and maybe move Mattis over to EUCOM (which has authority over NATO in Afghanistan). That would create the COIN dream team for the wars in Iraq and Afghanstan."
Update II: Fallon fired for insubordination, not Iran war risk, says Chris Nelson.
This from Tom Ricks interesting too:
Adm. William J. "Fox" Fallon became head of U.S. Central Command last March, putting him ostensibly in charge of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he clashed frequently with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, over strategy and troop levels, Pentagon officials said. Though technically Fallon's subordinate, Petraeus has more experience in Iraq and has forged a strong connection with President Bush....
A likely successor to Fallon is Petraeus, some defense experts said. The general could be promoted to the Centcom post and replaced in Baghdad by Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who until last month was Petraeus's deputy in Iraq. Odierno, who has been nominated to become Army vice chief of staff, developed a strong working relationship with Petraeus.
Another possible successor mentioned yesterday is Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the head of Special Operations in Iraq. McChrystal recently was nominated to be director of the staff of the Joint Chiefs, a key Pentagon position.
On Iraq, Fallon butted heads with Petraeus over the past year, arguing for a more rapid drawdown of U.S. troops and a swifter transition to Iraqi security forces. Fallon even carried out his own review of the conduct of the war -- a move that surprised many Pentagon officials, in part because Odierno and Petraeus had already revamped U.S. strategy in Iraq and, with Bush's approval, had implemented a buildup of about 30,000 additional troops, moving them off big bases and deploying them among the Iraqi population. [...]
The article was "definitely the straw that broke the camel's back," a retired general said, especially because of its "extraordinarily flip, damning and insulting" tone. He noted that since it appeared last week, it has been the talk of military circles, where it was expected that Fallon would be disciplined. ...
Peter D. Feaver, a former staff member of Bush's National Security Council, said that the public nature of Fallon's remarks made it necessary for the admiral to step down. "There is ample room for military leaders to debate administration policy behind closed doors," said Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University. "However, taking such arguments into the media would violate basic democratic norms of civil-military relations." ...
Max Boot: "What Fallon (and Barnett) don't seem to understand is that Fallon's very public assurances that America has no plans to use force against Iran embolden the mullahs to continue developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorist groups that are killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is highly improbable that, as the profile implies, the president had any secret plans to bomb Iran that Fallon put a stop to. But there is no doubt that the president wants to maintain pressure on Iran, and that's what Fallon has been undermining."
OMG.
The Corner: "The news just keeps breaking: Shepard Smith reports that Spitzer has been indicted by the southern district of New York." Fox apparently reporting that Spitzer will resign.
Update: NYT now reporting that he had been caught on a federal wiretap arranging for a prostitute at a Washington hotel last month. (Mayflower, Valentine's Day eve).
Indicted for stupidity?
Update II: Chris Cillizza: "Spitzer apologizes, does not resign."
Best headline?
More from Stephanie Mencimer.
Update III: This interesting too. About Emperors' Club VIP "CEO" Mark Brener. "... Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Stein said a search of Brener's apartment produced $600,000 in cash and an Israeli passport. He asked that Brener be held without bail. Brener's lawyer, Jennifer Brown, said her client was a U.S. citizen who had lived in the United States for 20 years. Nevertheless, the judge ordered him detained without bail." Is there an Israeli connection to this prostitution ring, as this AP story implies?
QAT Consulting -- one of the alleged front groups for the prostitution ring -- "provides wide array of business related services, including financial, legal, marketing, and design services," according to its website.
A reader at Harper's/Ken Silverstein's site asks, political leak?
Paul Kiel asks how the probe started. More from ABC: probe followed trail of suspicious money transfers.
The WSJ's Siobhan Gorman breaks an important domestic surveillance story:
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.
The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
[...]According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.
The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.
The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.
It isn't clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency's work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all. ...
And, surprise, surprise: "Cheney's office did not provide any details of what issues would be discussed during his trip or what dates he would stop in each country."Vice President Dick Cheney will visit the Middle East next week and meet with leaders of Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Palestinian West Bank and Turkey, his office said on Monday. ...
Cheney, whose trip will begin on Sunday, also will meet with Saudi King Abdullah at a time when oil prices are hitting record highs. When Bush visited Saudi Arabia in January he urged OPEC to increase production but the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided not to boost output. [...]
Hamas temporary cease-fire? The BBC reports that Israel:
Ha'aretz media reports are making this sound very very tentative, and that Israeli officials are insisting there is no agreement.ordered its military to reduce its operations in the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials say.
The order comes after a sharp drop in rocket fire from militants in the Palestinian territory.
The Israelis and Palestinian officials from the Hamas faction, which controls Gaza, said no formal ceasefire had been agreed but that talks were under way.
The lull follows a violent period in which at least 120 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military operations.
Four Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets or in combat operations.
Rocket fire into Israel from Gaza dropped from dozens every day a week ago to a few over the weekend.
Under US pressure, Egypt has stepped up efforts to mediate between the Israelis and Hamas. A senior Israeli defence ministry official returned on Sunday from talks in Cairo with Egyptian officials, a few days after a similar mission by Hamas officials ...
Some sort of indirect proximity talks between Israel and Hamas via Egypt, as advocated by Halevy and others, are obviously underway. But this seems to be at the gesture stage, a kind of tactical deescalation, and temporary.
David Ignatius: Annapolis' Fading Hope:
Since [November], that crucial ingredient -- American follow-through -- has been sadly lacking. As a result, the Annapolis process has languished to the point that over the past two weeks, some Israelis and Palestinians warned it was near collapse. Rice's critics have argued that this failure to follow up on big initiatives has been her biggest weakness in her years in Washington. She's running out of time to prove her critics wrong. ...
What's sad is that Rice knew precisely what was needed to make the process work. Annapolis called for a tripartite commission in which a U.S. representative would sit with both sides to monitor progress in improving security and living conditions. The Israelis even agreed that the U.S. representative should decide whether the road map conditions had been met. President Bush named Air Force Lt. Gen. William Fraser III to this mediating post in January. But so far, his commission hasn't had a single three-way meeting. The first one is scheduled for Thursday, but there's no plan to make a public report. ...
Lurking behind this stalemate is the sinister hand of Hamas. It was Rice who insisted that this militant Islamic group be allowed to participate in the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, over strong protests from both Israelis and moderate Palestinians. Rice argued that the Islamic militancy represented by Hamas had to be given a political voice. But when Hamas won and predictably continued to reject Israel's right to exist, the United States had no coherent follow-up strategy. A new article in Vanity Fair says that Washington secretly egged on the rival Fatah movement to stage a coup in Gaza, but Hamas moved first with a countercoup that expelled Fatah security forces. The Hamas militants kept firing their rockets, goading the Israelis toward the reinvasion of Gaza they launched Feb. 27 that nearly scuttled the post-Annapolis peace process.What's needed is some sort of cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. But Washington and Jerusalem stoutly insist that they will never negotiate with a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, they are quietly blessing an Egyptian effort to broker just such a cease-fire package. I'm sorry, but that is a lame strategy -- letting others do secretly what you refuse to do openly.
Rice keeps insisting that she is serious about achieving an Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough before President Bush leaves office. But progress requires disciplined follow-through. Without it, you can add Annapolis to the dustbin.
E.J. Dionne declares the culture wars and the era of the religious right over:
... This shift is already obvious from the results of the 2008 primaries. Focusing relentlessly on national security, Sen. John McCain has clinched the Republican nomination despite robust opposition from the party's cultural and religious conservatives.
On the Democratic side, cultural and religious questions have played almost no role in the battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. They have spoken instead about economics, health care and the war in Iraq. Strikingly, both have been intent on putting an end to religious divisions in the electorate and have sought to welcome the devout to the Democratic Party. ...
In their efforts to push cultural issues aside, Obama and Clinton resemble no one so much as Roosevelt. He knew that maintaining a Democratic majority required overcoming the cultural divisions of the 1920s. And just as large events -- the Depression, the threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- helped him in his effort, so will the large questions of economic dislocation, the aftermath of the Iraq war, the continuing struggle in Afghanistan and concerns about long-term U.S. global influence allow Democrats to transcend the cultural battles of the recent past.
It is a human habit to assume that whatever defined the era we have just lived through will necessarily define the next. ...
The era of the religious right is over. Even absent the rise of urgent new problems, Americans had already reached a point of exhaustion with a religious style of politics that was dogmatic, partisan and ideological. ...
New Middle East Blog. Writers Gershom Gorenberg ("The Accidental Empire," "End of Days," and a frequent contributor to The American Prospect, NY Times, etc.) and Haim Watzman ("Company C," "A Crack in the Earth") have launched a new blog: South Jerusalem. Gorenberg writes today on it on last week's attack on a Jerusalem yeshiva:
It's a site that will be of interest to many readers closely following Middle Eastern events. (Link fixed, apologies)..... The sound of the newspaper page as I turn it is a whisper: The season of killing has not ended. There was a lull, like a few sunny days in the midst of the winter rains in Jerusalem. We must think about whether the children should ride the bus, whether to set appointments in cafes. I went and had coffee this morning anyway on Emek Refaim. An act of sumud, sticking to the soil.
Of course there has not even been a lull in the killing in Gaza or in Sderot. The dead of one’s own city are more noticeable, and the dead of one’s own side: No Israeli paper prints a long line of pictures of those who died on a given day in Gaza. The one-sided mourning is inevitable, and is a dangerous illusion. The tragedies are indivisible. ...
The WP reports on Doug Feith's new memoir:
In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.
Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies.
Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."
Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains "grimly incomplete."
Editors, take note: his manuscript is 900 pages!
Go read Muckraked's review of Aram Roston's new Chalabi biography, The Man Who Pushed America to War:
Among the [book's] revelations:
- One of his key backers has been John McCain, who was one of the first patrons of Chalabi’s grand-sounding International Committee for a Free Iraq when it was founded in 1991. McCain was Chalabi’s favored candidate in the 2000 election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, but held up by the Clinton State Department.
- Chalabi’s family runs much of Iraq’s economy: his grandnephew Hussein al-Uzri heads up the Trade Bank of Iraq, through which all Iraqi government purchases are made. That’s despite the fact that his only banking experience was handling software for ATM machines.
The day after Chalabi was confirmed as deputy prime minister, the bank signed a agreement with the family company, Card Tech, to provide card processing services for a range of Visa cards. The company was eventually sold to American company Total System Services for $54 million in July 2006.
Nephew Ali Allawi has an important role at the Trade Ministry and another nephew, Salem Chalabi, helped organize the prosecution of Saddam Hussein.- Before and after the invasion, Chalabi met with Gen. Ahmed Frouzanda, a top Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force general, who was wanted by U.S. military and counterterrorism officials who considered him a “murderer of Americans.” Around the time of their spring 2004 meeting, the NSC learned that Tehran had been warned its codes had been broken, a high-level breach of U.S. intelligence. When the FBI tried to set up an interview with Chalabi, it never happened.
- Chalabi helped arrange meetings with the Iraqi oil minister for American oilmen like Bush fundraiser Albert Huddleston. Chalabi “fawned over the Texan,” taking him out and presenting him with gifts like a lavish crystal sculpture of an Iraqi reed house which had to be shipped back to his home in Texas.
Update: Aram writes to add: "By the way, it was clear to you that the Iranian General I call Ahmad Frouzendah in the book is the same one that the Treasury Department designated as Ahmad Foruzandah in January, right? They designated him well after my book was already at the warehouse though."
The Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell weighs in on how the Post decided to run the Charlotte Allen piece -- the only Post official to do so on the paper's own pages to date:
An Outlook assigning editor, Zofia Smardz, who worked directly on the piece, tells Howell the piece was meant to be satire -- a point disputed by Allen in her chat. John Pomfret, the top editor at the Outlook section to sign off on the piece, said he thought that "it presented a different, albeit very non-PC take at a time when women and politics is a riveting topic in this country. I expected the piece to be controversial, but I did not expect the intensity of the reaction. It was a learning experience about the section, my job and our readership."Thousands of women -- including this one -- were offended by an Outlook opinion piece last Sunday by writer Charlotte Allen. Complaints flooded my in-box, letters to the editor, the comment board linked to the article on washingtonpost.com, and the blogs. Outlook editors thought the piece was humorous and knew it might be controversial, but they were stunned at the outpouring of outrage. ...
The only person to come out looking good is Post deputy editor Warren Bass, who "wrote a fairly blunt e-mail arguing that it wasn't up to snuff and that the paper shouldn't run a glib, essentialist screed that insulted an entire gender."
Right!
How did Smardz and Pomfret so misread what Allen herself indicated was not meant to be quite satire? And which their colleague Bass - and a gazillion readers across political lines -- recognized and responded to right away as "a glib, essentialist screed that insulted an entire gender"?
And when is the Post going to apologize, for the failure in judgment in running the piece, as Post editors immediately apologized when an online "On Faith" column by Gandhi's grandson they ran offended some Jewish groups a couple months ago? Howell:
... [Editors Jon] Meacham and [Sally] Quinn apologized on Jan. 18 and published a critical letter from Judea Pearl, father of the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Muslim extremists in Pakistan in 2002.
The apologies helped, but some readers wanted the article removed and Gandhi off the panel. Quinn and Meacham said Gandhi will stay on the panel. It is the policy of washingtonpost.com editors not to remove articles; they equate that with trying to change history.
In hindsight, everyone sees the error. Straus said the piece should not have been published. Waters said Gandhi should have been asked to rewrite it. Meacham said the article was "ill-conceived and sloppily written. I regret the whole thing. When I read it, I flinched. It should have come down." Meacham and Quinn also wished they had apologized earlier. The lessons learned, Meacham said, were: "Take it down. Always apologize when you're in the wrong and quickly."...
As Newsweek/Post editor Jon Meacham says: "Always apologize when you're in the wrong and quickly."
Hello, Post?
Is the reason there is no apology because the Post still doesn't think it was wrong to publish the Allen piece? Or more precisely, because it thinks it can get away with running a "glib, essentialist screed that insulted an entire gender" by saying its readers were just not sophisticated enough to get the joke, as Smardz implies? When by all accounts, including Allen's: Zofia Smardz and John Pomfret, the joke was on you.
Katha Pollitt: The question is not why Charlotte Allen wrote her silly piece-- it's why the Post published it:
Right on.... A far more important question is this: Why did The Post publish this nonsense? I can't imagine a great newspaper airing comparable trash talk about any other group. "Asians Really Do Just Copy." "No Wonder Africa's Such a Mess: It's Full of Black People!" Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation's clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media. I can just picture the edit meeting: This time, let's get a woman to say women are dumb and silly! If readers raise too big a ruckus, Outlook editor John Pomfret can say it was all "tongue in cheek." Women are dingbats! Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Here's a thought. Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post. We should be half the assigning editors, half the writers, and half the regular columnists too (current roster of op-ed columnists: 16 men, two women). We've got those superior verbal skills, remember? Drastically increasing the presence of women isn't a foolproof recipe for gender fairness -- Allen is far from alone in her dislike of her sex -- but I have to believe a gender-balanced paper would reflect a broader view of women than The Post does at present.
A male editor with a lot of women colleagues on his level might think twice before proposing a sweeping denunciation, humorous or not, of "women." Ideally he would have come to respect women as equals from working with them -- but if he were just afraid of being seen as a total caveman, that would be okay too. And maybe this kind of editor would have flagged as tired cliches references to Oprah and Celine Dion; would have looked up the studies Allen claims prove women have the I.Q. of a bowl of cereal and found they don't say anything like that; would have wondered if more women bake doggy treats than subscribe to Scientific American or run marathons, and how does the treat-baker come to stand for all women?
And then, after all this, and seeing that Allen's piece still didn't ring even vaguely-kinda-sorta true, our imaginary editor would have asked a question. "You know what I think of this article?" a good editor would have said. "I think it's really stupid."
WP: US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker to leave Baghdad in January:
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker plans to leave Baghdad as early as January, leaving the most critical U.S. diplomatic post not long after the top military commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is expected to rotate out of Iraq.
Crocker, 58, plans to retire from the foreign service. He has been telling colleagues that he wants to leave by mid-January, before a new administration comes in, after almost 22 months in Iraq.
"I am prepared to remain in Baghdad until early 2009, when I intend to retire," Crocker said in an e-mail to The Post. "That will make two years in Iraq and 37 years in the Foreign Service -- it's enough!"
But Iraq experts are concerned about the near-simultaneous departure of two men who have made the most progress during the checkered five-year U.S. presence in Iraq. "To have changes all occur at the same time is not healthy, especially when dealing with a place like Iraq," said Edward S. Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs under whom Crocker served.
"A lot of people would concur that it's the best team we've had there," said Daniel P. Serwer, a former diplomat who oversaw the Iraq Study Group project that recommended revisions in U.S. policy. "Why switch people out when you're having relative success? But then, there's not a good time."
Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung: "A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November."
How can a journalist quote someone in an off the record comment -- and then print that the person said it was off the record? Is this a British press thing?
Update: Journalist Jeet Heer says it may be.
More from Ian Williams and Jacob Heilbrunn.
Our beautiful Istanbul street cat Sophie, who adopted me when I was looking for an apartment in Turkey ten years ago this month, and who proceeded to surprise us when we got her back to the States when the vet declared her pregnant, who could fool anybody into thinking she was a Russian blue worthy of salmon and tuna, but with a strange penchant for olives (Mediterranean legacy), picked today to fail on me. I had finally turned off every distraction and was trying to finish (okay start) some writing project. Between the time I found her upstairs after I heard her moaning, and gone to the basement to find her pet case, she had crawled into a corner of my husband's study to die. I drove with her on my lap to the vet. He later called and said we probably would want to euthanize her tonight, and when we got there a couple hours later, breathing fast and her eyes not blinking, it was clear she was suffering. (Two months ago, she picked the day I was stepping on a plane to the Middle East to get suddenly sick). ... Six kittens born looking exactly like her are scattered in various homes in Martha's Vineyard. She had a nice, "bourgeois" life with us as my Turkish friend calls it, and gave me tremendous pleasure. It's hard to believe ten years have passed. And it's so strange coming home, and expecting to see her on the stairs or at the door, to remember she's not here. I'll miss her.
Former Treasury Department official Michael Jacobson writes on new financial warnings for Iran:
... Although no additional Iranian financial institutions were formally blacklisted, the UN and [Financial Action Task Force] FATF moves could nonetheless increase financial pressure on Tehran. Global financial institutions -- risk-averse by nature, particularly with regard to "reputational risk" -- are already leery about dealing with Iranian banks, and this new warning may reinforce their cautiousness.
In fact, according to U.S. Treasury undersecretary Stuart Levey, all of the global financial executives that departmental officials have met with over the past two years have either cut off or reduced their institutions' exposure to Iran. The number of foreign banks operating in Iran has sharply declined since 2006, dropping from forty-six to twenty. Surprisingly, even Chinese and United Arab Emirates banks seem to be exercising greater caution in their business dealings with Iran in recent months.
Reports that two British banks -- Lloyds TSB and Barclays -- are under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and the Manhattan district attorney for possible violations of the Iran sanctions regime should only heighten the financial sector's concern. Financial institutions are particularly eager to avoid being the "next ABN Amro" -- the Dutch bank fined $80 million by the United States in 2005 for having an inadequate program in place to ensure compliance with U.S. sanctions against Iran and Libya. The Financial Times noted that the fine sent "seismic waves through the international banking system," and that the "reverberations are still being felt today."
How the Europeans respond to the new resolution will be crucial. Following the two previous resolutions, the European Union went further than the UN required, freezing the assets of not only the designated fifty individuals and entities, but also twenty others. The EU has also enacted a more comprehensive arms embargo and travel ban against Iran and its officials than required by the UN.
Now that the UN has spoken, perhaps it will free the EU to act further. ...
Jerusalem Post: Terrorist attack on Jerusalem yeshiva:
Eight people were confirmed dead in a terror attack at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, near the entrance to Jerusalem on Thursday evening. The attack was reportedly perpetrated by a resident of Jabel Mukaber in east Jerusalem.
Magen David Adom have confirmed 10 wounded civilians, including three seriously. One terrorist was said to have been killed by a student.
Witnesses said that only one terrorist had entered the building and that he managed to fire 500-600 bullets over the course of 4-10 minutes before he was killed.
Although witnesses said only a single terrorist carried out the attack, police were searching the building for an additional terrorist, preventing the entrance of rescue workers. Later Police Chief David Cohen confirmed that there were no additional attackers.
The terrorist entered the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in the neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe carrying weapons. He was not wearing a suicide-bomb belt as earlier reported.
The gunman entered the library where about 80 people were gathered, witnesses said, and opened fire.
Yitzhak Dadon, a student, said he was armed with a rifle and waited on the roof of a nearby building. "He came out of the library spraying automatic fire ... the terrorist came to the entrance and I shot him twice in the head," he said.
Approximately 50 ambulances were sent to the scene and a 16-year-old boy in serious condition and suffering from chest wounds was seen being evacuated from the scene.
"It's very sad tonight in Jerusalem - many people were killed in the heart of Jerusalem," Mayor Uri Lupolianski told Channel 2,
"We bless the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last," Hamas said in a statement. ...
Go read my colleague Bruce Falconer's report on the Pentagon's plan to increase backing for Pakistan's Frontier Corps:
... But building the Frontier Corps into something more is precisely what the United States aims to do. "The basic assumption in terms of dealing with the militancy in the FATA is that the Pakistani army is too blunt an instrument and too much of an occupying force to be effective," says Daniel Markey, a former member of the State Department's policy-planning staff for South and Central Asia and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The hope is that the Frontier Corps will "offer a local face and a greater connection to the local population…winning hearts and minds and doing things that are more constabulary in nature than full-scale military operations."
The idea to beef up the Frontier Corps appears to have originated on the Pakistani side, said Markey, as a sort of desperate response to the failure of both diplomacy and military invasion to rid the tribal areas of Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens. "It was sort of the next thing on the list," he said. "First you try to get the tribes to work with you, cajoling them, paying them off. That doesn't work. Then you send in the troops and knock some heads, and that doesn't work. You pull out the troops and make another deal. That doesn't work. Then you say, 'What's wrong with the deal?' It needs an enforcement mechanism. It's better to have a local one than a foreign one, so maybe we'll try this!" [...]
The idea of arming local tribesmen to fight Al Qaeda has been used to great effect in Iraq, but whether the same approach will work in Pakistan is an open question. ...
CNN: Viktor Bout arrested in Thailand:
Seems like he was arrested on a U.S. warrant. Here's my interview with Doug Farah, who wrote the book on Bout. (Thanks to AY).For years, Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout has made millions of dollars allegedly delivering weapons and ammunition to warlords and militants. Officials believe many of his activities may be illegal, and on Thursday, Thai police announced his arrest.
Authorities say Viktor Bout, seen in this 2002 image, has sold arms to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
A formal announcement on his arrest is expected later in the day in New York.
He was picked up in Bangkok but neither police nor U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Cynthia Brown had details on his arrest.
"We can confirm he has been arrested in Bangkok, and we congratulate the Thai authorities on making this arrest," Brown said.
Intelligence agencies around the world have tracked Bout for years. While some of his work has been legitimate, most has not.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has a warrant for Bout's arrest, and the United States could request extradition, but the details are still being worked out, a U.S. government official told CNN....
Could this have anything to do with what Doug Farah told me last year, that Bout was thought to be supplying Hezbollah through Syria?
MJ: You mentioned that Bout was supplying Hezbollah, presumably with authorization from the Russian government. Do you believe this indicates a kind of proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Lebanon via Israel and Hezbollah, or that it is just a reflection of Russian defense manufacturers seeking a profit outlet for their supplies?
DF: I think it is both. Russia has long had an interest in Hezbollah and has given the group support, which it continues to do. It is clear from the large stockpiles of new armor-piercing Russian missiles that Hezbollah used last year. But such activities both project Russian power, at a time when the Putin government is desperate to project Russian power across the world, as well as provide outlets for the sale of Russian weapons.
Update: AP reports Bout was arrested on charges of arming Colombia's FARC:
More from the Yorkshire Ranter.One of the world's most notorious arms dealers was arrested Thursday in Bangkok on allegations that he supplied Colombian rebels with arms and explosives, Thai police said.
Russian Viktor Bout was arrested in his hotel room in the capital, Bangkok, on a warrant issued by a Thai court, said Police Lt. Gen. Pongpat Chayapan, head of the Crime Suppression Bureau. The warrant stemmed from an earlier one issued by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, he said.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman ''congratulated'' Thai police for the arrest but could not provide details about the role U.S. officials played in it.
Police Col. Petcharat Sengchai told reporters that Bout was wanted on charges of ''procuring weapons and explosives for Colombian rebels'' known as the Revolutionary Armed Forced of Colombia or FARC. The leftist FARC has been fighting Colombia's government for more than four decades, and funds itself largely through the cocaine trade and kidnaps for ransom and political ends.
Bout, a murky figure rarely seen in public, has also been accused of trafficking weapons to Central and West Africa since the early 1990s. United Nations reports say he set up a network of more than 50 aircraft around the world and trade experts have said the illicit diamond trade was likely one source of funds for his smuggled arms shipments.
Although Bout has been investigated by police in several countries, he has never been prosecuted for arms dealing. ...
Tom Ricks on Thomas Barnett/Adm. Fallon piece: "Fallon clearly cooperated with Barnett for the article, with the author accompanying the Centcom chief on trips to Egypt and Afghanistan over the past year. The article quotes Fallon as saying one day in Cairo that 'I'm in hot water again' with the White House, apparently for telling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that the United States would not attack Iran." Barnett webmaster Sean Meade* reacts. Barnett's Esquire profile. (Via ThinkProgress. *Thx to JJ for fix.)
More from James Joyner.
In all honesty, I'm torn. Partly I'm tired of this jihad, and was tired of it two days ago. Partly, I feel a smidgen of compassion for Pomfret not knowing what to do, who did express regrets if the piece offended (in an email), and for whom I never had anything but respect until I deduced he was responsible for the Allen piece Sunday. But mostly, I am still fuming that the Post as an institution is now hiding behind Charlotte Allen's knickers, and stubbornly continues to refuse to answer tremendous reader demand (more than a thousand comments, several hundred blog posts) for an explanation and an apology for running the piece. It's cowardly. It makes their and my profession look bad. It's unnecessary.
Instead, comically, truly, they're hauling out Charlotte Allen (who can be faulted for writing the tripe -- but not for publishing it!) to take the first bullets during a chat today which I honestly don't see why anyone should dignify, except possibly to interrogate her about how the interactions with the Post went down exactly as her essay thesis got clarified.
WP commenter "j in paris" gets the next word:
Well said.Is anybody awake in the Washington Post? Have Aliens stolen your brains? It was offensive enough to imagine you published this drivel. It was shocking to see Outlook Editor Pomfret pretend the article was in good fun. It has been lunatic to see the Post trivialize the thousand-plus letters that demanded accountability for this craven misogyny by inviting readers to vote on whether it should have been published. It was appalling to see the paper publish as the lead Letter to the Editor one that *agreed* with this tripe when so many hundreds (thousands) had appeared that disagreed. And now? ...They've invited this ... Charlotte Allen ... to answer questions about her views. What's next? David Duke getting invited to have a forum to discuss racism? Iranian President Amadinejad to debate the Holocaust? Fred Phelps to chitchat about why homophobia works for him? It's time--no two days ago it was already time--to put an end to this farce. Cancel this forum. Get the editor on here to account for the stupidity that led to this travesty. ...
The Post's efforts to pretend this whole affair just "made readers angry" and would warrant a nice, cathartic chat are pathetic. Accountability? There was no editorial agency here? While Allen is responsible for what she wrote, the real issue is the Post taking responsibility for publishing it. Something they have so far refused to do, or even explain.
(And man. Didn't there used to be something called media critics? Doesn't the Post have a few? This wouldn't be an issue of interest for them? We've got one pro...)
Update: A well placed, top tier, MSM journalist colleague writes:
Someone should demand of Downie an answer to the following question: Is he willing to issue a clear statement to the effect that it is not acceptable to publish opinion articles that demean women on his pages. And if he's not, how does he feel about articles that demean black, Jews, Catholics, etc. Are we back in the dark ages? This all makes me sick. As far as the public reading the Post Web site is concerned, there was apparently nothing troubling about Allen's piece as far as the Post's editors are concerned. They have not apologized or explained or anything -- on their own Web site. In fact, they've offered her a further soapbox to make offensive comments without any kind of official context or rebuttal. She may be laughing this off, but readers aren't. Not to mention that her denial that the piece was satirical makes Pomfret a liar. Thanks for letting me vent.
Thanks to the Poynter Institute's Jim Romenesko, Mediabistro's Patrick Gavin, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, my colleague and sometimes collaborator Jeet Heer, Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher, China Matters, Sadly, No, Echidne, DailyKos, Jessica Valenti, Atrios (who got 677 comments on it in two hours), the Prospect's Scott Lemieux, Slate, Crooks & Liars, Rick Perlstein, Bastard Logic, Supreme Irony, Jocie Fong, the Huffington Post, and many others who have written in for the links, letters and discussion. "Thanks," writes A.W. "I've been printing out your posts for my 92 year old mother. .... I just want you to know we've been enjoying talking about them."
And for the few friends and colleagues who have written to say, why not let an idiotic piece die a faster death, respectfully, you miss the point: it's not about the piece, it's about the Post, and the standards they hold and don't hold themselves to, about whether they can be made to hold themselves accountable, including to their readers, thousands of whom have written them to demand to understand why they ran such a piece and what their standards are for attacking which groups on their pages. As Jay Rosen wrote me, "The authority and credibility of the Post is an important thing, a national asset in a sense (this is my view, anyway) and should not be squandered this way. The Post may one day soon need to offend some of its loyal readers about something important. This isn't an act of truth-telling. It trivializes the courage that publishers sometimes need." In other words, if the utterly brilliant and not at all dim Dana Priest gets subpoenaed on black sites, don't you think Downie is going to want some of that authority and credibility he's squandering in his cowardly non reaction to his paper's as yet unexplained Charlotte "women are dumb" Allen Sunday section front page cover story, no matter how many feminist opeds Pomfret now tries desparately to publish to pretend he's initiated an important and provocative debate?
Any more Posties want to weigh in? I will honor any request for confidence.
Thursday Update: Am told "the issue" didn't really reach Downie's desk until yesterday. And that it was the Post website, not Pomfret, that was responsible for the series of offensive titles on the site for 24 hours.
Am also told the Post is worried about the exposure of Allen's deeply racially offensive writings on Hurricane Katrina, highlighted by Jessica Valenti. Allen: "I said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans because it finally opportunity to a huge number of New Orleans residents living in passive dependency on welfare to get out of New Orleans..."
Those aren't knickers I would want to hide behind.
WP: Clinton wins Ohio. " ... Obama began the day with a total of 1,386 pledged delegates and unpledged superdelegates, compared with Clinton's total of 1,276, according to an Associated Press tally. ..." Cleveland, expected to go for Obama, still not reporting. Texas still too close. NYT: McCain sweeps four states, Huckabee concedes, McCain Republican nominee. Update: Clinton wins Texas
Just Out: A short piece of mine, part of the Mother Jones March/April "Torture Hits Home" cover package, "Central Intelligence Anxiety: How the Bush Administration Left the Spooks to Twist in the Wind":
More at the link. Also go read Peter Bergen's piece on the Abu Omar rendition, "Exclusive: I Was Kidnapped By the CIA" and Eric Umansky's "Department of Pre-Crime."
This winter, as politicians fulminated over the destroyed tapes of the waterboarding of Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, a former CIA operative told me that after 9/11 he was approached to take part in a special counterterrorism group authorized to use "enhanced techniques." He had "a moral problem with it," he told a superior, but he wanted to go after the bad guys; what should he do? "These enhanced techniques may make us feel good now, but one of these days they will leak," the superior told him. "They will hit the press, and there will be congressional investigations. And God forbid someone will go overboard and kill someone." So, the former operative turned down the job, "thank God."
After that, a division emerged between what a former senior Agency official described to me as the "SS crowd" and the "Wehrmacht crowd," the "hard edged" and the "smarter and better informed." He said, "People managed not to take assignments. There were senior people who would not go to meetings if they thought that extraordinary rendition or enhanced interrogation techniques were going to be discussed."
Sure enough, when public opinion finally shifted, the administration left the spooks to twist in the wind. "The Bush administration ordered it and approved it and then never came to the Agency's defense when it hit the fan," the former operative said. "The hypocrisy is breathtaking." ...
PressThink's Jay Rosen:
... “To provoke, but not to offend.”
“Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image” was, I think, the variety of mischief afoot at the Outlook Section of Washington Post Sunday when it published We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?, a dubious essay by a dim woman about how dumb most women really are. This was a deeply foolish act of publishing. The editor responsible, John Pomfret, told Laura Rozen that he “ran Charlotte Allen’s piece to provoke, but not to offend.” But if that were the case, he would not have chosen as provocateur a political opponent of the people who needed to be poked.
Let’s provoke people by suggesting that women really are dumb is supposed to scan iconoclastic. I mean, what other logic could it have? If the Post is willing to smash idols like that—women’s equality—it must be a pretty broad-minded place, right? This is not only a crude and formulaic way of demonstrating independence of mind; it misreads the cultural politics of the thing.
Thus, Glenn Reynolds demurred, Ed Morrisey fled in disbelief, Jessica Valenti and Jezebel seethed on behalf of millions who might, Jay Newton-Small of Time found the editors judgment “unbelievable,” Jane Hamsher gave a shout out to Posties: “clue me in to what happened here,” and the Post ombudsman started scribbling notes with an angry look on her face. (Rachel Sklar has more.)
John Pomfret, you misread. But what did you misread? Good provocations do not begin with an intention to provoke, but with an author who has something real to say, and an editor willing to provoke in order to see that it gets said. ...
So the Post and Pomfret are going to use the exercise to run letters as if they had provoked a legitimate -- if touchy -- debate. And yet, when, as Jay Rosen notes, bloggers from right to left were horrified by the piece, and the Post got 600 1,000 comments on it, about 580 900 of which were asking the question "Why did the Post publish this?" -- the paper, in touch with the cultural zeitgeist as usual! -- starts with the one mildly positive one! Editorial discretion! Incredible, really, and so buried as to seem perhaps cowardly.
Where is the letter from the editor explaining what happened and why the paper chose to run the "light-hearted" but utterly unironic "women are stupid" piece and what he thinks in its aftermath? No doubt he's busy with the task force on why women don't read the paper and lots of other people don't read the paper and lots of advertisers are leaving the papers and which next hundred people are going to be asked to take buy-outs. Is there any moral voice over there who is going to speak up on this? No sign.
All the Post online features in the world don't disguise the fact that the Post elders are pulling up the moat drawbridge on this one, and retreating from tremendous reader demand for an explanation from them about their editorial decision to run a piece saying women are stupid. (Among the "evidence" of "female inferiority" the Post astonishingly gave Allen a platform to deploy in a Sunday section front page cover, pulling out the calibers to measure brain sizes.) And can we enjoy such attacks on the intellectual inferiority of Jews and blacks in the future deploying similar such "evidence" in the pages of the Post, if the editor says it's tongue in cheek? Or just women? What is the editorial standard? How did this go past them? People honestly want to know. It's not clear the editors of the Post think it was a mistake to publish the piece at all.
It's not hard to recover from a mistake -- "a deeply foolish act of publishing," as Rosen puts it. You just write, where people can see it, using the same platform where the mistake was made, preferably closer to when you realize it: "Many readers were offended by our Sunday Outlook cover story ... and for that, we apologize. ..." It takes just a small dose of humility and sense of accountability and frankly good business sense. You don't pretend that letters to the editor ( "Agree? Disagree?") are a sufficient response, and replace the crying need for a public and high profile apology and explanation. But so far, it seems they are hoping to leave it to running letters to the editor and the ombudsman to deal with: he says this, she says that -- where you can be assured the missing young mothers the Post is seeking to attract won't see it.
Update: Addie Stan has a piece at the Post in response.
But again, Pomfret and the Post are conning themselves if they think they offered a piece that provoked a debate about an issue. The only debate the Post provoked was about one thing: its judgment at publishing what everybody from the American Prospect's Stan to the National Review's Shiffren has said is a shockingly stupid and insulting piece. So the debate is about the Post's editorial decisionmaking. That's it.
John Pomfret writes me:
The expression of regret for offending readers is appreciated, although I still think the editorial judgment involved in running it at least in that form was seriously off, at so many levels. It's hard for me to see how any moderately sentient being would not have realized that running such a piece so prominently under a "women aren't very bright" headline would indeed do more than provoke, but offend. And as a colleague writes, "Where, exactly, was her analysis? And what was her analysis? 'She did it to make a point' but what exactly was the point? That women are stupid. That was the point." And it's one that I would think most people you or I would want to work with in the modern world would almost certainly recognize as deeply offensive, and not acceptable for a place like the Post to run.... I ran Charlotte Allen's piece to provoke, but not to offend. I thought the parallel she drew between fainting Obama followers and Beatlemania was an interesting frame with which to analyze the Obama phenomenon. She went further, of course, to draw broader conclusions about the state of her gender highlighting women's interest in Gray's Anatomy and Eat, Pray, Love. But my reading of it was more a tongue-in-cheek screed borne from exasperation with her sisters than a mysoginist rant from a self-hating woman. Yes, she engaged in massive hyperbole but she did it to try to make a point. That said the piece obviously offended you and others and I regret that. But it was an opinion piece and that is what they sometimes do. ...
He says the paper has asked for letters in response that will run in tomorrow's oped page and on Sunday.
Back to journalism.
Howell responds to a reader:
Maybe she could get Pomfret to take a lie detector test. The words coming out of his mouth defy belief. Again, not a trait usually prized by the journalism profession.1. I didn't like it. It was supposed to be "tongue in cheek," but I didn't get that at all.
2. No, women are no kind of dim.
3. I don't like it. I will write about it on Sunday. ...
Update: A MSM journalist colleague writes what occurred to me as well yesterday:
This is all so obvious. Any normal company recognizing they had offended their customers would have already taken such steps. That a media company in the very business of writing sentences was so slow on the uptake speaks volumes. And they had an outside paper float Pomfret's "it was failed satire" trial balloon to try it out. Give me a break. Is the Post tongue-tied? Having trouble loading the publishing software?And one other thing: There's a real-time way to determine the sincerity of their regret and disappointment. Once it became clear how offensively Allen's piece was "misinterpreted" there wasn't much the print paper could do -- but there was plenty that could have been done on the Web. A note could have been appended. And at the very least, the proud promo on the home page "Why Do Women Act So Dumb?" with that cheezy picture could either have been removed, or at least rewritten. Instead, it was there until noon -- and the story itself is still exactly as it was.
[The Post bosses] need to address this themselves, and now, on their own site, in real time. [...]
Not that I buy this "packaging" BS. They need to go on record saying not just "oh this was misinterpreted" but "we apologize and in no way condone the demeaning of women on our pages."...
More from FireDogLake, Rachel Sklar, Matt Yglesias, Jessica Valenti, Laura McGann, Steve Benen, Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, Atrios, Jane Hamsher, Ed Morrissey, Zuzu and here.
A friend points out that Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber predicted this sleight of hand yesterday: "Occupying a niche of this sort also gives you certain rhetorical advantages in generating controversy and responding to it. (See, a woman admits the truth! Or, how can I be anti-woman if I am one? And if you misjudge the reaction, you can claim the whole thing was a joke.)"
Update II: Another MSM former foreign correspondent colleague writes:
I think, too, that someone needs to get from Pomfret what the actual intent of the piece was: ok, he says tongue-in-cheek, but about what exactly? About women fainting for Obama? Can't be, not going on and on at such acreage. So what did he intend for Outlook to be saying on this subject of women and Obama, or the election, exactly? What was the point? Because this just was not very smart or informative or even very interesting. It was just offensive. (Much worse than "falling flat." ...
Pomfret: It was all tongue in cheek.
Uhuh, right.
His explanation is if possible even more insulting to readers' intelligence than his decision to run the original piece.
And frankly, it doesn't matter. The Post contributor who lost his job for offending Jewish groups with his Post piece didn't mean to offend Jewish groups, but he did and his editors apologized and took other steps to make amends.
If the piece Pomfret had the apparently deficient editorial skills to make satirical offended so many readers (and let's face it, Allen meant exactly what Pomfret understood her to mean), he and the paper still owe readers and frankly the paper's reporters an apology. They look bad too. And Pomfret looks particularly disingenuous. Which for a journalist is about the worst thing you can be judged to be.
Now we get to await the tsk tsking Deborah Howell piece.
Pomfret and the Post still owe readers an apology.
MJ: Gaza Strife Raises Urgency of Israeli Calls for Talks with Hamas: "After a weekend ground operation in Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip that left more than 100 people dead, many of them civilians, Israeli Defense Forces pulled out of Gaza Monday. The withdrawal could be a gesture to placate an important visitor: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to arrive in Israel Tuesday to try to advance stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and all out-warfare going on in the background to her peace mission would no doubt be an embarrassment to Washington. ... "
More at the link and from Ken Silverstein.
NYT:
More from the Boston Globe's James Carroll.In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.
Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.
What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:
¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.
¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.
¶ Waterboarding.
¶ Using military working dogs.
¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.
¶ Conducting mock executions.
¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care. ...
Dear Mr. Pomfret, Any interest in a short, humorous article about how Jews really do have a magical talent for making money? I believe there's some sociobiological research I could dig up to "support" this. [...] Since I am half-Jewish myself, there would be no question of anti-semitism. It would be like Charlotte Allen saying women are stupid. That piece was so funny! Although being a woman I'm not sure I understood it. Maybe you could explain it to me. Since you are a man, you probably understood it really well.
Hoping to hear from you soon,
Katha Pollitt
It's pitch the Outlook section day at the Wash Post! Atrios has some suggested topics they might be hot for. Which racial subset do you think is dumber (masquerading as a lively political debate): Hispanics who vote for Obama, Hispanics who vote for Clinton, or Hispanics who vote for McCain? The Post wants to hear from you! Which Jews are intellectually inferior: those who vote for Obama, those who vote for Hillary, or those who vote for McCain? You get the picture. Jews secretly love to be told they're dumb by other Jews, and courageous editors devilishly love to run such clever and funny -- if provocative -- pieces! All in good fun. A lively and deeply enriching and informative debate, no holds barred!
New Dynamics in Darfur Genocide. About this NYT story about a new wave of genocidal killing in Darfur, a U.S. official knowledgeable about the region tells me: "The actual story is both more heart-rending and more complex than the article explains," he writes. "The tragedy is that the area was totally quiet - only local police - before the rebels moved in in late December. Chad actually bombed Darfur for three days to help them take the area. The rebels are no heroes and abused the local people and then the Sudanese Government responded in February with a counter-offensive characterized by their usual callousness and brutality - the rebels fled - and the innocent civilian population paid the terrible price."
The UN Security Council is expected to approve a third round of international sanctions against Iran today. (AP). Here is a copy of the February 21 draft sanctions resolution I obtained. Big thing I was told is cargo inspections in which cargo going to Iran can be inspected for dual use goods, and further commands of "vigilance" to financial institutions to not deal with various Iranian institutions including those connected to Iran's nuclear program, and a command of vigilance to countries on not entering into new trade agreements with Iran:
8. Calls upon all States to exercise vigilance in entering into new commitments for public provided financial support for trade with Iran, including the granting of export credits, guarantees or insurance, to their nationals or entities involved in such trade, in order to avoid such financial support contributing to the proliferation sensitive nuclear activities, or to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, as referred to in resolution 1737 (2006);9. Calls upon all States to exercise vigilance over the activities of financial institutions in their territories with all banks domiciled in Iran, in particular with Bank Melli and Bank Saderat, and their branches and subsidiaries abroad, in order to avoid such activities contributing to the proliferation sensitive nuclear activities, or to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, as referred to in resolution 1737 (2006);
10. Calls upon all States, in accordance with their national legal authorities and legislation and consistent with international law, to inspect the cargoes to and from Iran, of aircraft and vessels, at their airports and seaports, owned or operated by Iran Air Cargo and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line, provided there are reasonable grounds to believe that the aircraft or vessel is transporting goods prohibited under this resolution or resolutions 1737 (2006) or resolution 1747 (2007);
11. Requires all States, in cases when inspection mentioned in the paragraph above is undertaken, to submit to the Security Council within five working days a written report on the inspection containing, in particular, explanation of the grounds for the inspection, as well as information on its time, place, circumstances, results and other relevant details;
Amos Harel: "The Israel Defense Forces pulled its ground troops out of the Gaza Strip early Monday, and Hamas seized the pullout to declare 'victory' in the intensive fighting that has killed more than 100 people in recent days. The pullback followed days of sequential fighting that drew an appeal from Washington to end violence and rescue peace talks with the Palestinians. The withdrawal came after the IDF senior command on Sunday recommended keeping up intensive military pressure on Hamas." Rice arrives in Israel tomorrow. And without an Egyptian-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire, which Israeli Labor Minister Ami Ayalon and others in the background are advocating, Israel is considering launching a much larger ground invasion into Gaza in the next few weeks.
Kevin Drum: " ... It's the Bush administration that wants [retroactive telco] immunity, and they want it because they're trying to keep the scope of their wiretapping programs secret":
Bingo."I think the administration would be very loath for folks to realize that ordinary people were being surveilled," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the lead lawsuit, against AT&T.;
....Peter Eliasberg, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney involved in cases against AT&T; and Verizon, said that if the cases proceed, the plaintiffs could submit an interrogatory to the carriers seeking answers to the questions: Did you turn over customer phone records en masse to the government? Did you receive a warrant or a subpoena?
Answers to those questions, he said, might reveal that "everybody in the country" has had their phone calls "combed through, and lots of people will be outraged."
Hilzoy speaks for me here: "Doesn't the Post have editors whose job is to prevent this sort of trainwreck?" The editor responsible for it has shown just remarkably poor editorial judgment. What in the world was the editor thinking? Does he need a roster of smart conservative women who have something to say about women and politics that doesn't denigrate the human race? More from Time, and Atrios, link.
Update: Here's how the Post dealt with another recent controversy, when an online contributor's essay offended some Jewish groups. The contributor lost his job at his home institute and the editors of the section apologized to readers, and then some. And that was apparently an online essay that had not even been edited by someone on the paper's payroll before it went up, as was this piece in the Post's Sunday print section front page. Can the Post Outlook editor promote the slurring of women (in the name of "voice") but not other groups as something that generates lots of discussion? Or can he commission articles to denigrate the intelligence of other racial groups as well in the same spirit of a lively and provocative debate? What's the Post standard on which groups can be legitimately denigrated on which page? Let's watch and find out. I bet the reaction will lean towards "tsk-tsk" in next week's ombudsman column and a hearty self congratulation from the Post to itself about generating such an important discussion about whether women are in fact dumb. At the very least, we can hope a few of the fine Post reporters who actually do journalism will professionally humiliate Outlook editor John Pomfret and whoever else in the chain of command is responsible for this piece internally at the Post in the way they deserve. That there is not already an apology on the Post site is pretty surprising.
They're only seeking a warrant to search Ricin guy's home -- now? Incredible. Whence this outpouring of civil liberties sensitivities suddenly coming from? If he'd been Muslim, and not a confused white Mormon anarchist wanna be, can you imagine they would have waited so long to get a warrant and search his home?
Amos Harel and Avi Issachoroff:
Noted, the major ground operation is still to come....On Friday one had the impression that Hamas was trying to end the current cycle of violence, and therefore fired considerably fewer Qassam rockets (nine compared with about 40 per day over the previous two days). But the decision in Israel was to continue the attacks, the intention being to prevent Hamas from dictating the pace of the confrontation, or its intensity.
After the operation in Jabalya and the high number of Palestinian deaths, it will take longer to achieve relative calm. But even if calm is restored, through Egyptian mediation, it is likely to be temporary. Israel is quickly approaching the point at which it will embark on a major ground operation, which may happen in a few weeks. Even before the operation begins, Israel may decide to assassinate Hamas political leaders.
The government has mostly bad options. Even a ground operation will not immediately contain the launching of Qassam rockets, and it is doubtful whether it will achieve a long-term solution. ...
Zvi Bar'el: Get ready for the third intifadah. " ...The moment that war begins in the Gaza Strip, it will not be a war against Hamas; it will be seen as a war against the most downtrodden and poor segment of the Palestinian people, against women and children, a war that cannot leave the West Bank indifferent. The opening of a second front, on the east, against Israel, should then come as no surprise."
WP's Glenn Kessler: In search for peace, a shrinking White House role:
More from the LAT's Richard Boudreaux:...As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads back to the Middle East this week, three months after Bush hosted a peace conference bringing together Israelis and Arabs in Annapolis, prospects for peace have shifted dramatically. There has been little clear movement in peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, while the Iranian-backed militant group Hamas has shown increasingly that it can set the region's agenda.
Hamas rockets have continued to rain down on Israeli towns, prompting deadly counterattacks by Israel amid increasing speculation that Israel will invade the narrow coastal strip housing 1.5 million Palestinians that it abandoned just two years ago.
Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said that key players in the region are moving beyond the Bush administration. "The feeling is that if you keep the flash points on a lower or somewhat higher flame, it will give you more cards when a new administration comes in," he said, speaking in a phone interview from Israel. "Everyone is sucking up to the Iranians," he added.
The signs of American irrelevance are apparent throughout the region. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, hailed as a potential peacemaker by the Bush administration, mused last week to the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustour that in the future it might be necessary to return to armed struggle against Israel. And Syria, which received an unexpected invitation to Annapolis, believes that the peace summit was "an exercise in public relations" and that Bush has no interest in peace, as Syria's ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha put it last week. [...]
Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Abbas and now advocacy director for the American Task Force on Palestine, faulted the Bush administration for not nurturing a process that it started. He noted that the administration has appointed three generals to assess various aspects of the issue, but that few people in the region understand their roles. Rice's two-day visit this week is her first substantive trip since the conference in November.
"There is no push from the Americans," he said. "We are still waiting to see what they will do. It is surprising how little has happened. If you guys are going to run out of steam, why create all these expectations?" ...
Rice is expected to arrive in Israel on Tuesday with an Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza, an Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange and a reopening of the Egypt-Gaza border under European Union monitoring. Israeli officials are skeptical of a cease-fire, which they fear would allow Hamas to continue stockpiling weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border.
Rice will have an additional challenge: rescuing the peace talks begun in December between Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. They are aimed at reaching agreement on the birth of an independent Palestinian state by the end of President Bush's term.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said it was perfectly consistent for Israel to "fight terror that hurts its people" while negotiating peace with moderate Palestinian leaders.
But Ahmed Korei, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Israel was committing a "massacre" in Gaza and making it impossible for Abbas to continue peace talks.
Zvi Bar'el: " ... This is a new situation in which the IDF operates in a wide scope, the television footage is extremely hard to watch, the number of dead Palestinians since Wednesday is close to 90 and the physical damage inflicted is enormous. All these factors make it easier for Hamas to swerve public opinion its way and direct it towards a large-scale operation in the West Bank that would run deeper than a quiet protest. Arab leaders could soon find the situation to be out of their control. The problem facing Israel at the moment is how to confine the incursion within the limits of Israel's struggle against Hamas and the rocket barrage, and not turn it into a war that seems to be directed against all Palestinians. The line between these two stages is tricky and dangerous. Therefore the Israeli government should not give up on trying to get Egypt and the rest of the Arab countries to initiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas."
On this last point, of a possible Egyptian-brokered Hamas-Israel ceasefire, former Israeli intelligence chief Efraim Halevy informs me that he is going to have a chance to advocate for such talks in an interview with Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera's English service, with 80 million viewers. You can see my interview on the topic here.
Book Recommendations: Two friends and colleagues have important new books out. I will write more about them both later, but in the meantime, if you are at your book store this weekend, I highly recommend checking these out:
NBC investigative journalist Aram Roston's brilliant reported book on Ahmad Chalabi, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.
And the new book by Slate national security writer Fred Kaplan, one of the best foreign policy observers around: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.
I went to see the Jordanian king and delegation speak at Princeton yesterday. Will write more about his visit at one of my mags after I get some things off my plate. But here's the question. What's the one thing King Abdullah is really asking President Bush when he meets with him Tuesday? What's the one thing he really needs? He needs the spreading turmoil in the neighborhood not to cause unrest inside Jordan. We're most likely not going to have a big war - with Iran - before Bush leaves office. But it seems we may be in for a bunch of small wars, or near wars, involving Lebanon, Hezbollah, Israel, Gaza, peripherally Syria and in the background Iran, upheaval deeply threatening to a country like Jordan whose internal stability is a balancing act.
(It's a theory I first saw here upon the assassination of Mugniyah and I think it is playing out.)
Was the assassination of Mugniyah the "Sarajevo" of the coming conflicts, as former CIA officer Robert Baer told me he's hearing from his friends in the region? Perhaps that's overblown but we'll see. It all does seem far more tumultuous than a hollowed out Annapolis process, lacking any political will or conviction, can right. And even more threatening, after more violence and bloodshed and stall, the undermining of confidence in a two state solution ever being realized.
Haaretz: "At least 32 Palestinians were killed, among them 10 civilians - including five children and three women - during an ongoing Israel Defense Forces ground incursion near the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabaliya which began before dawn Saturday. Five IDF soldiers were wounded during the fighting - three of them lightly and two others who suffered light to moderate injuries. The soldiers were evacuated to Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheba for treatment. Sources in Gaza report that IDF soldiers exchanged heavy gunfire with Palestinian gunmen on the eastern outskirts of Jabaliya, situated 2-3 kilometers from the fence which lies on the Israel-Gaza border. The ground forces, which included units from Givati Brigades, the Armored Corps, and the Engineering Corps, received air support from the Israel Air Force." More from the AP.
An American friend who travels on business to the region writes, "Saw your posts and thought I would pass along some info I just received from my contacts in the Golan- they are preparing for another extended war. Local officials are telling them to stock their bomb shelters with 3 weeks of supplies at a minimum. They believe Hezbollah will attack around March 22 as the 40 day mourning period is over for Mughniyeh. Conventional wisdom there is that no amount of US firepower in the Med is going to deter Nasrallah from seeking revenge. We also discussed the possibility of the IDF having to operate a two front battle plan with the continued unrest in the South. I was in Bahrain two weeks ago and met with some colleagues who were just in Beirut. They report the situation in Lebanon is worsening by the day."
AP: "Iranian officials touted their country's growing economic ties to Iraq, particularly $1 billion in loans set aside for infrastructure projects there, ahead of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's historic visit to the Arab country."
Robin Wright: "The United States and Saudi Arabia have launched a joint campaign to pressure Syria to end its political interference in Lebanon, including the U.S. deployment of the USS Cole and two other warships off the Lebanese coast, according to U.S. and Arab officials. The new military, economic and diplomatic steps include the toughest actions taken by the Bush administration against the regime of President Bashar Assad, such as a recent presidential executive order allowing sanctions against Syrian officials meddling in Lebanon and a member of Assad's family. Saudi Arabia is withdrawing its ambassador from Damascus and pressed for an Arab League meeting, to be held next week, to discuss the political vacuum in Lebanon brought on by its inability to elect a new president since November, U.S. officials said."
