Anwar al Awlaki, the radical cleric contacted by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, gave an interview to a "terrorism expert" who spoke on behalf of the Washington Post. (See the story for WaPo disclaimers/cautions.) Awlaki , who issued a statement praising Hasan for his killing spree, says he neither directed nor pressured Hasan to kill US Army soldiers.

But according to the Post:

On Dec. 23, 2008, days after he said Hasan first e-mailed him, Aulaqi also posted online words encouraging attacks on U.S. soldiers, writing: "The bullets of the fighters of Afghanistan and Iraq are a reflection of the feelings of the Muslims towards America," according to the NEFA Foundation, a private South Carolina group that monitors extremist Web sites.

The FBI and others familiar with Hasan's emails to Awlaki have described them as "benign" and consistent with his research. It's always good to be skeptical of self-serving accounts from al Qaeda clerics, but Awlaki has a different view. Again, according to the WaPo:

Aulaqi described Hasan as a man who took his Muslim faith seriously, and who was eager to understand how to interpret Islamic sharia law. In the e-mails, Hasan appeared to question U.S. involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and often used "evidence from sharia that what America was doing should be confronted," the cleric told Shaea.

Who is telling the truth? We should see the emails.

Pete Hoekstra, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, released a statement this morning calling for the heads of all relevant US intelligence agencies to preserve all intelligence related to the case of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. Hoekstra made the request after talking to intelligence community leaders over the weekend.

President Obama said people should not jump to conclusions about what happened at Fort Hood, but the administration is in possession of critical information related to the attack that they are refusing to release to Congress or the American people. I intend to push for intense review of this and other issues related to the performance of the intelligence community and whether or not information necessary for military, state and local officials to provide for the security of the post was provided to them.

I have requested this information be preserved because I believe members of the full committee on a bipartisan basis will want to scrutinize the intelligence relevant to this attack, what the agencies in possession of that intelligence did with it, who was and wasn’t informed and why, and what steps America’s intelligence agencies are taking in light of what they know. At some point, it becomes necessary for us as a nation to address the uncomfortable threat of homegrown terrorism and radicalism, and Congress has an obligation to review how federal agencies are handling and disseminating information related to the threat.

The horrific shootings at Fort Hood are a tragic reminder of the potential deadly consequences of the threat posed by homegrown jihadism and the failure of the government to adequately respond to it.

What is the "critical information" that the Obama administration has? And why hasn't it been briefed to Congress? Perhaps the administration can't make this information public quite yet because of the ongoing investigation. But given the persistent claims that the Obama administration would be the most transparent administration in history, that information should be released quickly.

Is the mainstream media coming around?

The Washington Post has an important front-page story this morning, with matter-of-fact reporting on the importance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad as an intelligence source and the enhanced interrogation techniques that made him talk. The piece is headlined: "How a Detainee Became an Asset: September 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding."

One key source is former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, who acknowledged that two of the CIA’s “most powerful” enhanced interrogation techniques “elicited a lot of information."

"Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information," he said in an interview with the Post.

Helgerson authored the 2004 IG report that the Department of Justice released on Monday. The evidence presented in the IG report made clear that EITs had been effective, but Helgerson, well-known inside the CIA as an opponent of the program, stopped short of making that claim in a declarative fashion.

In his interview with the Post there seems to be a subtle shift in his argument. In the IG report Helgerson had written that “measuring the overall effectiveness of EITs” is challenging and a “subjective process.”

In his interview with the Post, Helgerson narrowed the reasons he gave for his reluctance to draw conclusions. Count the qualifiers. Helgerson said he was not in "a position to reach definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods" and that “we didn't have the time or resources to do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out."

But that kind of analysis misses the point. The fact Helgerson didn’t perform such a study hardly prevents us from concluding that EITs were effective. It is not the effectiveness of “particular interrogation methods” that matters. It’s whether the EITs were effective used together, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes sequentially. And they were.

“The huge reason the program was successful was because the detainees did not know what to expect,” says one intelligence official with detailed knowledge of the program. “Sleep deprivation, forced nudity, dietary manipulation, the waterboard – all of these together created a feeling of utter helplessness and cluelessness.”

Helgerson says something else important. He acknowledges that EITs, particularly sleep deprivation and waterboarding, “elicited a lot of information” but he laments his inability to assess the quality of that intelligence. And the quality does matter. If EITs simply elicited lots of bad information nobody would consider them effective. They didn’t.

He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

The Post article describes “the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.”

In a must-read in the new issue of TWS, Tom Joscelyn offers more details about KSM and his interrogation:

On March 1, 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the principal planner of the September 11 attacks, was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. U.S. interrogators quickly went about the business of getting him to talk, and for good reasons. KSM's operatives were already here, inside America, planning attacks.

Shortly after KSM was detained, an Ohio-based truck driver named Iyman Faris was arrested by the FBI. Faris had reportedly been under suspicion beforehand, but U.S. authorities suddenly determined that they had to arrest him. It turned out that Faris, an al Qaeda-trained sleeper agent, had been dispatched to the United States by KSM to plot attacks on landmarks in the New York area, including the Brooklyn Bridge.

Then, in late March, a young Pakistani man named Uzair Paracha was arrested. He had been working out of an office in Manhattan's Garment District for a company owned by his father, Saifullah Paracha. KSM wanted Uzair to facilitate the entry of al Qaeda operatives and use the Parachas' import-export business to smuggle explosives into the United States.

Until this past week, it was not clear how U.S. authorities pieced together the details of this plotting so soon after KSM was captured. But the inspector general's report on the CIA's detainee interrogation program and two other CIA analytical papers--all three of which were released on August 24--fill in the blanks. It is clear now, if it wasn't before, that the CIA's questioning of KSM saved numerous lives, both here and abroad.

So will the United States again be able to elicit this kind of information from detainees? Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in the Wall Street Journal, thinks it unlikely.

The appointment of a prosecutor guarantees that unless the United States is again devastated by a terrorist attack—on a scale greater than 9/11—CIA operatives will certainly decline any future order by a Republican president to interrogate roughly a jihadist. Langley's junior officers may still receive survival and escape training, which is the baptismal font for the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques. But members of al Qaeda will not similarly get to enjoy the experience.

Constrained by new rules and hostile lawyers, can the CIA in the future successfully interrogate uncooperative jihadists, like self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who remained as close-mouthed as a clam when questioned without physical coercion? The Obama White House has been enamored of the possibilities of soft power; jihadists, too, are now supposed to yield to the psychological prowess of interrogators who play by the rules of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Will Langley be able to develop and retain interrogators culturally and linguistically qualified under the administration's new plans, which will have the White House and the FBI overseeing all counterterrorist interrogations? Such outside control is, among other things, meant to ensure that the CIA, which originally generated the idea of enhanced interrogation, will never again be a font of such unpleasant creativity.

Regardless of whether one believes CIA-inflicted waterboarding, sleep deprivation or severe psychological coercion (suggesting that harm could come to a family member of a taciturn al Qaeda detainee) constitute torture, such actions may have produced an intelligence bonanza and saved thousands of lives.

There may soon be more information made public that will demonstrate the effectiveness of EITs. Current and former CIA officials supportive of the program are pushing to have other reports declassified -– including a “rebuttal” document to the IG report written by senior officials in the directorate of operations; two internal CIA reviews of the program; and, perhaps most important, the interrogation logs written by interrogators to share the information they elicited with other interrogators and others at the CIA.

Greg Sargent once again reacts to my critique of his argument without responding to its substance. And, after some throatclearing, accuses me of cherrypicking.

Sargent claims that I cherrypicked the IG report "in a comically dishonest way." His evidence? I quoted part of the IG report on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, but, according to him, didn't include this sentence: "Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information."

Sargent calls this a "pretty clever omission." It was not omitted.

Apparently Sargent did not read my posts or the IG report very carefully. In my original post about his work I not only quoted the passage he accuses me of omitting, I quoted it twice. After quoting it the first time, I wrote:

Let's examine those last two sentences again. "Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information." The context makes the meaning clear: We cannot specify which EIT made al Nashiri more willing to provide more information. And in case there were any doubt, the final sentence is categorical. "Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs."

I'll let his correction be the last word.

Here is Greg Sargent pretending to respond to my post from Tuesday. It’s five paragraphs with almost zero substance. And that turns out to be an improvement on his previous commentary about the CIA and interrogations.

But we’re left without answers to basic questions. What about Sargent’s central claim, that the EITs did not work? How does he explain this finding about Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the mastermind of the USS Cole attack: “Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.” Or the fact that KSM “provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard,” – reports that were largely “outdated, inaccurate or incomplete” – but later became “the most prolific” and “preeminent” source of intelligence on al Qaeda, revealing names and locations of al Qaeda leaders and details of coming plots?

Sargent has argued that these techniques, specifically designed to elicit information from uncooperative detainees, did not work. Does he believe that KSM, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and a man who dedicated his life to killing Americans, simply had a change of heart? If not, then what, exactly, transformed KSM from “an accomplished resister” to the “preeminent” source of information on al Qaeda? Sargent does not tell us. It’s a revealing omission.

In another post, Sargent had scolded Cheney for coming up with policies that put CIA interrogators in legal jeopardy. Sargent calls them “Bush/Cheney torture policies.” So I pointed out that the CIA Inspector General’s report make clear that senior CIA officials, not Dick Cheney, conceived and executed the controversial interrogation techniques. I quoted directly from the IG report. “The Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks. Senior Agency officials believe Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly from other senior al Qaeda high value detainees.”

It’s a simple question: Why call the EITs “Bush/Cheney torture policies” when they were conceived and executed by senior CIA officals? Did Sargent fail to read the report or simply choose to ignore its findings?

Sargent later criticizes Cheney for defending the interrogators and suggests (without evidence) that he is doing so for political reasons. Here Sargent is just plain incoherent, arguing at one point that no one but TWS and Dick Cheney support EITs and elsewhere that Cheney’s defense of the interrogators will be politically advantageous.

Where Sargent isn’t confused, he’s dishonest. In one post, he leads his readers to believe that the interrogators would not welcome Cheney’s backing and did not support the policies. In Sargent’s view, they were victims who saw the use of EITs as he does. But this is a hard case to make for anyone who has read the report. At several different points in the report, the IG makes clear that senior Agency officials were enthusiastic about the program.

What’s more, they worried that they would be targeted by human rights groups – that is, people who make the kinds of arguments about EITs that Sargent does.

So how did Sargent deal with these basic facts? He chose not to report them. Here is his version:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…

And here is the actual text:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program. A number of officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities [redacted]. Additionally, they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them if this occurred.

One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes. Another said, "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this...[but] it has to be done."

So why leave out the fact that Agency officials were concerned about being targeted by human rights groups and why elide the views of the officer who said, without qualification, “it has to be done?”

Sargent doesn’t try to answer any of these substantive questions.

For months before the IG report was released on Monday the left touted it as the instrument that would finally shed light on the horrific and ineffective CIA interrogation program -- Sargent took to calling it the "holy grail" per Dem staffers who assured him it would "detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works." Instead, it did the opposite. Despite the fact that IG John Helgerson was known inside the CIA as a critic of the program, his report makes clear that abuses were rare and that the enhanced interrogation techniques were effective.

It's no wonder the left is compelled to distort its contents.

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent is worked up about the fact that "big news orgs" have not declared Dick Cheney a liar for claiming that EITs were effective. (For the record, many people still consider the Washington Post a big news org.) Sargent argues that "the docs themselves don't actually prove Cheney's claims" that the EITs were effective, he suggests that those who believe otherwise don't live in "the real world," and he calls the coverage "embarrassing."

So why the reluctance? Maybe it's because of the mainstream media's well-known pro-Cheney bias. We all remember the endless stream of flattering pieces about Cheney's ability to keep secrets, his willingness to listen quietly in meetings, and his eagerness to sacrifice his own personal popularity to defend unpopular policies that he believed kept the nation safe.

Or maybe it's because the documents -- including the much-ballyhooed Inspector General report -- actually do demonstrate that EITs were effective. Consider the IG report's section on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri.

With respect to al Nashiri [redacted] reported two waterboard sessions in November 2002, after which the psychologist/interrogations determined that al Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved [redacted] al Nashiri was thought to be withholding information. Al Nashiri subsequently received additional EITs, [redacted] but not the waterboard. The Agency then determined al Nashiri to be “compliant.” Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.

Let's examine those last two sentences again. "Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information." The context makes the meaning clear: We cannot specify which EIT made al Nashiri more willing to provide more information. And in case there were any doubt, the final sentence is categorical. "Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs."

Similarly, on page 91, the IG report notes that Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, "an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete." But four pages earlier, we learn from the IG about the valuable information that KSM did give up. KSM

provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

So, we know that before KSM was waterboarded, he gave up virtually nothing and what little intelligence he did provide was mostly "outdated, inaccurate or incomplete." And we also know that some of KSM's interrogations provided detailed, valuable information that led to the detention of sleeper agents in the United States plotting attacks. Despite this, Sargent wants to believe -- and wants big news orgs to report -- that this second batch of intelligence reports from KSM -- the highly-valuable ones -- came from the pre-waterboarding interrogations.

In another post, Sargent chastises Cheney for defending the interrogators and "claiming to speak for them and positioning himself as their brave and lonely defender." Sargent notes that some interrogators were worried that their participation in the program put them in legal jeopardy and cites a passage on page 94 of the IG report. Here is how Sargent reported it:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…

He concludes: "That Cheney is now claiming to speak for, and defend, the same class of officers who worried his policies were putting them at risk is only the latest sign of how absurd Cheney’s stance has been throughout."

Why the ellipses? What did Sargent cut out? Here is the passage in full:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program. A number of officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities [redacted]. Additionally, they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them if this occured.

One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes. Another said, "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this...[but] it has to be done."

So Sargent cut out two important passages to make his point. The first had to do with concerns among interrogators that they would not be supported if they were later targeted for their work -- exactly the kind of support Sargent scolds Cheney for providing. And second, in his effort to portray CIA officers as victims, Sargent deliberately omits the view of the Agency officer who told the IG, "it has to be done."

And whose policies were these? Sargent calls them the "Bush/Cheney torture policies." Did he read the IG report? The EITs were conceived and developed by senior intelligence officers who wanted to find additional ways to extract information from terrorists. From page 3: "The Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks. Senior Agency officials believe Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly from other senior al Qaeda high value detainees." [Emphasis added]

So set aside the so-called Cheney memos. Any honest analysis of the IG report alone shows that these three high-value detainees were largely uncooperative before the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques and produced critical information after the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques.

Late yesterday afternoon, the CIA public affairs office sent reporters an email with two documents attached. CIA spokesman George Little wrote: "For your information, the attached files are part of today’s document release on the CIA interrogation program. Former Vice President Cheney asked that these documents be released earlier this year.”

Those documents offer detailed evidence of the effectiveness of detainee interrogation, including the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. So most news accounts have concluded that these are, in fact, the so-called Cheney documents. But that's only half right.

One document, entitled "Khalid Shaykh Muhammad: Preeminent Source on al Qaida," is the precise document Cheney requested. The other, entitled, "Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against al Qaeda," is not. The document declassified and released by the CIA is dated June 3, 2003. The version of the document requested by Cheney was dated June 1, 2003.

Are there substantive differences, too? One intelligence source with knowledge of the memos says that the second report, the June 3 document releasing by the CIA, does not include the same level of detail as the June 1 document, the one requested by Cheney. So what aren't we seeing? It's hard to say. The explanation could be simple and innocent. Perhaps someone just conveyed the wrong request and the differences between the two versions of the "pivotal" report are not significant. But given that the purpose of the document is to describe the effectiveness of the interrogations, it's also possible that information supporting Cheney's position -- and contradicting that of the Obama administration -- was not released to the public.

So will the most transparent administration in history release the June 1 version that Cheney requested?

Adding to the intrigue is the timing of the release. On May 7, the CIA's Delores Nelson wrote to Cheney to deny his initial request to have the two documents declassified. Cheney appealed on June 8. On July 30, the CIA once again denied Cheney's request for declassification. The letter, also from Delores Nelson, reads, in relevant part:

"The Agency Release Panel (ARP) considered your appeals and determined that the material denied in its entirety must continue to be protected from release on the basis of section 3.5A3 of the order as the information information remains the subject of pending litigation. Therefore, in accordance with Agency regulations, the ARP denied your appeals in full."

Cheney received the CIA's denial letter from his Washington office yesterday -- the same day the so-called Cheney memos were released.

So in the period of three weeks, the CIA denied Cheney's request for declassification of the material and the Obama administration, with the approval of the CIA, declassified one of the Cheney memos and a less-detailed version of the other.

What's the deal? I have contacted George Little at the CIA for a comment, but have not yet received a response. TWS also contacted Susan Cooper, director of public affairs at the National Archives, the institution that conveyed Cheney's declassification request to the CIA. Cooper has not yet responded either. We will post responses when we get them.

The irony, of course, is that while the Cheney documents demonstrate the effectiveness of EITs, they were not necessary to make that point. The CIA's IG report, written by John Helgerson, who was plainly opposed to the use of EITs and considered them "torture," made that case, too.

That question has been among the most hotly disputed issues at the center of the continuing controversy over the CIA’s interrogation of suspected terrorists. The report released Monday from the former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson should end the debate.

Throughout his report, Helgerson goes out of his way to avoid expressing an opinion about the effectiveness of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs). On page 85, for instance, he writes generally about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program:

The detention of terrorists has prevented them from engaging in further terrorist activity, and their interrogation has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists, warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world, and supported articles frequently used in the finished intelligence publications for senior policymakers and war fighters. In this regard, there is no doubt that the Program has been effective.

Then he adds this caveat about EITs:

Measuring the effectiveness of EITs, however, is a more subjective process and not without some concern.

On page 89 he writes:

Inasmuch as EITs have been used only since August 2002, and they have not all been used with every high value detainee, there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness.

And later, on the same page, he argues:

Measuring the overall effectiveness of EITs is challenging for a number of reasons including: (1) the Agency cannot determine with any certainty the totality of the intelligence the detainee actually possesses; (2) each detainee has different fears of and tolerance for EITs; (3) the application of the same EITs by different interrogators may have produced different results.

I’m not sure what he means that such judgments are “not without some concern.” But is it really the case that it is difficult to judge the effectiveness of EITs because of different fear thresholds among the detainees and differences in the application of the techniques by interrogators? And does it really matter, in judging whether the techniques were effective, if the CIA doesn’t know exactly how much information each detainee possesses?

A hypothetical. One detainee, we’ll call him Detainee #1, has a low tolerance for EITs. So his interrogator, we’ll call him Interrogator #1, uses four of the ten approved EIT techniques and does not use the waterboard. Still, Detainee #1 shares 70 percent of the totality of the intelligence he possesses, including information that leads to the detention of other high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists. Detainee #2 has a higher fear threshold. So Interrogator #2 uses all of the approved EITs, including the waterboard, and manages to extract, say, 80 of the totality of the intelligence the detainee possesses, including details about organizational structure and specific information about al Qaeda operatives planning attacks in the United States.

So we have 1) the inability of interrogators to extract 100 percent of the information held by the detainees; 2) different fear thresholds among detainees; and, 3) different application of EITs by interrogators.

Would anyone suggest that the use of EITs in these cases was not effective?

Consider the details in the IG report. On page 90, we learn about EITs and Abu Zubaydah. Although the report redacts the specific number of intelligence reports generated before the use of EITs and after they were employed, we do know that his cooperation increased.

It is not possible to say definitively that the waterboard is the reason for Abu Zubaydah’s increased production, or if another factor, such as the length of detention, was the catalyst. Since the use of the waterboard, however, Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative.

If it was a mere coincidence, the same thing happened after EITs were used on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the al Qaeda operative behind the attack on the USS Cole.

With respect to al Nashiri [redacted] reported two waterboard sessions in November 2002, after which the psychologist/interrogations determined that al Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved [redacted] al Nashiri was thought to be withholding information. Al Nashiri subsequently received additional EITs, [redacted] but not the waterboard. The Agency then determined al Nashiri to be “compliant.” Because of the litany of technique used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.

And what about 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad? More coincidence? From page 91:

On the other hand, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete. As a means of less active resistance, at the beginning of their interrogation, detainees routinely provide information that they know is already known. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad received 183 applications of the waterboard in March 2003.

The section immediately following this overview of KSM’s pre-waterboard disclosures is redacted. But flip back a few pages in the IG report, to page 87, and we learn the details of KSM’s post-waterboard intelligence. KSM provided so many leads to other terrorists and plots that the IG described him as “the most prolific” source of information among the detainees. So, what did he tell us?

He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

Let’s review. Abu Zubaydah gave up some information before the use of EITs. But “since the use of the waterboard…Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative,” and gave up even more intelligence. Al Nashiri provided mostly historical information in the short time before EITs were employed. “However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning…” And “accomplished resistor” Khalid Shaykh Muhammad provided mostly useless information before the application of EITs. Afterwards, he “provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists” – so much information, in fact, that he was regarded as the “most prolific” intelligence source.

Reasonable people can – and do – disagree about the morality of using EITs. But only the most accomplished resister could continue to claim that they were not effective.

Dick Cheney released a statement responded to CIA Director Leon Panetta's suggestion that the former vice president's criticism of Obama administration policies means Cheney is wishing for another attack.

"I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted. The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years."

Panetta was quoted in a lengthy profile by Jane Mayer in this week's New Yorker.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

While that quote has understandably received lots of attention, there is another passage that deserves scrutiny.

Mayer reports that Panetta once supported a so-called "truth commission" and she examines his motivation. She writes:

It turns out, however, that Panetta initially supported the creation of a truth commission. “I’m not big on commissions,” Panetta told me. “On the other hand, I could see that it might make some sense, frankly, to appoint a high-level commission, with somebody like Sandra Day O’Connor, Lee Hamilton—people like that.” The appeal was that Obama could delegate to others the legal problems stemming from Bush Administration actions, allowing him to focus on his ambitious political agenda. “In the discussion phase”—early in the spring, before Obama decided the issue—“I was for it,” Panetta said. “Because every time a question came up, you could basically say, ‘The commission, hopefully, is looking at this.’ ” But by late April Obama had vetoed the idea, fearing that it would look vindictive and, possibly, inflame his predecessor. “It was the President who basically said, ‘If I do this, it will look like I’m trying to go after Cheney and Bush,’ ” Panetta said. “He just didn’t think it made sense. And then everybody kind of backed away from it.”

So, Panetta was for a truth commission so Obama's "ambitious political agenda" would not be derailed? Imagine the reaction if say, Porter Goss had said something like that.

I expect that we'll hear more about Panetta in the coming weeks. I've heard from two plugged-in intelligence sources that the rift between Panetta and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has escalated into a serious feud. Blair is seeking to expand the role of his directorate and Panetta, reflecting the concern of some at Langley that Obama is seeking to marginalize the Agency, is defending his turf.

One source said that he expects the tensions to "boil over" in the next week or two.

Update: At his press gaggle, Robert Gibbs was asked: "Does the President agree with Director Panetta's assessment that Vice President -- former Vice President Cheney almost wants another attack to happen?"

Gibbs replied: "Well, look, I'm not going to get into motivations. That's not what our business is. The President's concern is keeping the American people safe. We've had policy disagreements, but I think what is true for anybody is doing what's -- doing what we need to to keep the American people safe and secure. That's what the President is working on every day."

A Justice Department spokesman told the Weekly Standard Thursday that the department will not be answering any questions about the number of high-level detainees who have been Mirandized since Barack Obama took office five months ago.

“I can't comment on how many people have been Mirandized in recent months or years, as that information might relate to ongoing investigations and prosecutions, but there has been no policy change -- the FBI Mirandizes suspects overseas to preserve the quality of evidence and does so on a case-by-case basis, depending on the circumstances,” said Matthew Miller, Director of the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department released a statement Wednesday in response to a TWS article reporting that the U.S. government has been reading Miranda rights to some high-level detainees.

The statement:

There has been no policy change and nor blanket instruction issued for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas. While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas, at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees.

The statement, which confirms that the US government is, in fact, reading Miranda rights to some detainees, is otherwise highly misleading. The Justice Department claims that there has been "no policy change" with respect to reading Miranda rights to detainees. In background conversations with reporters, Obama administration officials are explaining that they can make this claim -- no change in policy -- because the practice of Mirandizing detainees started under the Bush administration.

And technically, they are correct.

There is at least one instance in which we know that a high-level detainee was Mirandized during the Bush administration. It concerns the case of Aafia Siddiqui. Siddiqui, a female, is married to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's nephew. While waiting to be interrogated by FBI officials in Afghanistan, she grabbed the rifle of a US Army warrant officer and attempted to shoot and kill her captors. It was after this crime that she was read her Miranda rights. The Bush Justice Department fact sheet on Siddiqui and her case is here. So she was not read her rights after her initial detention, but only after she committed a subsequent crime (attempted murder) at the US detention facility.

FBI agents and other law enforcement and intelligence officers on the ground in Afghanistan told Mike Rogers, a former FBI special agent and US Army officer who currently sits on the House Intelligence Committee, that they have been told to Mirandize some high-value detainees. These officials also told Rogers that the International Red Cross has been advising detainees to take advantage of their new Miranda rights by getting a lawyer. And in at least one instance, a high-level detainee has taken that advice and requested a lawyer.

So despite claims from Justice officials in Washington that there has been "no change in policy," several of the individuals responsible for conducting interrogations of detainees believe that there has been.

As one way to gauge the extent of Mirandizing, TWS asked for a breakdown of how many detainees had been Mirandized during the Bush administration and how many have been Mirandized under President Obama. And at least for now, the Justice Department, the agency leading the Obama administration's efforts on transparency and open government, is refusing to provide them.

On April 16, Barack Obama released memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques employed by CIA officers. A former top CIA official told me that the move had "devastated morale" at the Agency. Then, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brazenly accused CIA officials of lying to her and misleading Congress, the Obama White House did nothing to defend the CIA against her evidence-free claims.

Yesterday, the AP's Pamela Hess reported that Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, who is close to Obama, is seeking to replace CIA station chiefs at US embassies abroad with his own personnel.

The nation's two intelligence chiefs are locked in a turf battle over overseas posts, forcing National Security Adviser James L. Jones to mediate, according to current and former government officials.

The jockeying between CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives at U.S. embassies instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs. Current and former U.S. officials described the dispute on the condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of intelligence issues.

Blair's office was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to better coordinate intelligence gathering and make sure critical information isn't overlooked. But former and current CIA officials warn that his plan could do just the opposite — creating competing chains of command inside U.S. embassies and potentially fouling up intelligence operations. They also worry it could complicate the delicate relationships between U.S. and foreign intelligence services, and leave ambassadors confused about where to turn for intelligence advice.

CIA station chiefs posted in American embassies have handled the national intelligence role abroad for the last four years, but Blair wants the option of designating other intelligence specialists for the job. That prompted strong objections from Panetta.

And this morning, the Los Angeles Times reports on the Obama administration's aggressive efforts to shift the U.S. counterterrorism operation from one focused on intelligence and the military to one in which law enforcement dominates.

The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the "global justice" initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.

Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week -- one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a "legitimate" setting.

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials.

All of which raises an interesting question: Was Leon Panetta hired primarily to oversee the dismantling of the CIA?

From page 242 of his book: "After we received written Department of Justice guidance on the interrogation issue, we briefed the chairman and ranking members of our oversight committees. While they were not asked to formally approve the program, as it was conducted under the president's unilateral authorities, I can recall no objections being raised."

Porter Goss, former CIA Director and past chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, blasted the Obama administration for releasing Justice Department memos on harsh interrogation techniques. “For the first time in my experience we’ve crossed the red line of properly protecting our national security in order to gain partisan political advantage,” Goss said in an interview.

Goss, a former CIA operative, has made few public comments since leaving his post as DCI in September 2006. In December 2007, he told a Washington Post reporter that members of Congress had been fully briefed on the CIA’s special interrogation program. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Goss told the Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

In a letter to his intelligence community colleagues last Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair described those briefings. “From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended, the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.”

That passage from Blair’s letter – along with another confirming that the interrogations produced “high-value information” that provided a “deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization attacking this country” – was dropped when language from the letter was released publicly. A spokesman for Blair attributed to the omission to normal editing procedures.

In an interview this morning, senior Bush administration official accused the DNI of “politicizing intelligence” by attempting to hide his judgment that the program had produced valuable results. This official also accused the Obama administration of double standards, citing its professed belief in transparency and its unwillingness – at least so far – to declassify memos that demonstrate the value of the interrogation techniques Obama has banned.

Other Republicans have pointed out that with the exception of Blair, the Obama administration has defended the policies using political figures – like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod – rather than top national security advisers.

“You can imagine what it would have looked like, if on a sensitive intelligence matter involving the CIA and this controversy, if we sent Karl Rove out to do this briefing. And that’s in effect what’s happened here,” says a high-ranking official from the Bush White House. “And I assume that’s because they saw it primarily as a political issue – because it’s being debated inside as a political issue –because it’s about appeasing the left, whose support they sought during the campaign. And Axelrod is more of an expert on that crowd that anybody else. It also says to me he was in all the meetings where they were debating this question – whether or not Obama had better go forward with some kind of investigation.”

The official was referring to an article by Politico’s Mike Allen, in which Axelrod characterized Obama’s move as “a weighty decision.” Axelrod added: “He thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely. … He’s been thinking about this for four weeks, really.”

Allen later reported that Axelrod made the comments during an interview he and others at Politico conducted for another article. Axelrod, Allen wrote, gave he and his colleagues a “preview of the decision on the memos.”

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes on Obama, the CIA and the memos in today's paper. His column will be the most important you read all day. Ignatius, who is extraordinarily well-sourced at the Agency, writes that the consequences of the release have been swift and damaging:

President Obama promised CIA officers that they won't be prosecuted for carrying out lawful orders, but the people on the firing line don't believe him. They think the memos have opened a new season of investigation and retribution.

The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk. Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.

Obama tried personally to reassure the CIA workforce during a visit to Langley on Monday. He said all the right things about the agency's clandestine role. But it had the look of a campaign event, with employees hooting and hollering and the president reading from his teleprompter with a backdrop of stars that commemorate the CIA's fallen warriors. By yesterday, Obama was deferring to the attorney general whether to prosecute "those who formulated those legal decisions," whatever that means.

More:

Obama seems to think he can have it both ways -- authorizing an unprecedented disclosure of CIA operational methods and at the same time galvanizing a clandestine service whose best days, he told them Monday, are "yet to come." Life doesn't work that way -- even for charismatic politicians. Disclosure of the torture memos may have been necessary, as part of an overdue campaign to change America's image in the world. But nobody should pretend that the disclosures weren't costly to CIA morale and effectiveness.

And then, more consequences:

One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called "risk of capture" interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and "pocket litter" were exploited quickly.

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I'm told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn't even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.

Agency officials also worry about the effect on foreign intelligence services that share secrets with the United States in a process politely known as "liaison." A former official who remains in close touch with key Arab allies such as Egypt and Jordan warns: "There is a growing concern that the risk is too high to do the things with America they've done in the past."

If Obama means what he says about protecting the CIA workforce and its operational edge, he must give up the idea that he can please everyone on this issue. He should recommend limits on any congressional inquiry and resist demands for a special prosecutor. Instead, he should push the White House's preferred alternative -- a commission that can review secret evidence behind closed doors, then report to the nation.

Ignatius seems to think that all of this damage is worth it. I think he's wrong. But his reporting on the consequences of the release is a valuable contribution to the debate.

Last night, several news outlets reported that Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair contradicted claims from the White House on enhanced interrogations. Blair, in a letter to his intelligence community colleagues last week, wrote: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country." When the DNI released parts of Blair's letter as his public statement on the subject, that sentence was cut.

So you have the Director of National Intelligence acknowledging that "high value information" came from the now-banned techniques, contra his boss, and then hiding that intelligence assessment from the public. This from the self-described most transparent administration in history.

Smells like a scandal, no? The DNI's office apparently thought so and put out a statement to clarify Blair's position -- explaining why the assessments were cut from the public statement and backpedaling from his claim that the techniques were so valuable. (The DNI's office claims assessment were cut for space -- an odd explanation since such statements are released on the internet or over email. And Blair now says that because we don't know if we could have gotten the information using other methods he favors ending the techniques.)

So how did the Washington Post report it? Under the headline "Intelligence Chief Says Methods Hurt U.S." The story, written by Joby Warrick with an assist from Karen DeYoung, glides past the controversy by the conflicting statements and relegates to a mere footnote the fact that the DNI cut the discordant assessments from its initial public statement.

The Obama administration's chief intelligence officer has told the White House that harsh interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda officials produced "valuable" information, but he added that it is impossible to tell whether the same intelligence leads might have been obtained using less controversial methods.

In any case, the damage to the country's image caused by the use of waterboarding and similar techniques exceeded any potential benefit, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said.

"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances," he said in a statement yesterday, "but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means."

It's not until the last paragraph of the story that readers learn that "the memo that circulated last week among Blair's staff included language that was not in a public statement released the same day, the Associated Press reported last night."

An Associated Press story opened this way: "The Obama administration's top intelligence official privately told employees last week that 'high value information' was obtained in interrogations that included harsh techniques approved by former President George W. Bush." After a brief chronology of the events of the past week, the story noted that continued: "In a public statement released the same day, Blair did not say that interrogations using the techniques had yielded useful information. As word of the private memo surfaced Tuesday night, a new statement was issued in his name that appeared to be more explicit in one regard and contained something of a hedge on another point."

The Post spent years writing about the supposed "politicization of intelligence" during the Bush years -- often despite the fact that bipartisan panels looking into the subject had gutted those claims. Those stories were, often as not, splashed across the top of the newspaper.

The Post reporters plainly read the AP's more straightforward reporting of the story, since their story referenced the AP piece. So why did they Post downplay Blair's assessment and shrug off the fact that he attempted to bury it? And why, too, didn't the Post press the DNI's office on its laughable explanation for the omissions or scrutinize the flawed reasoning behind Blair's repacking of his original claim?

It would be nice to know.

CNN's Ed Henry asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs about the claim that the Obama administration "selectively declassified" some of the Justice Department memos in order to avoid disclosing information demonstrating that the interrogations produced valuable intelligence. (See here for background.)

Good question.

Gibbs first responded: “I would suggest that you contact the CIA."

When reporters told Gibbs that this effectively means that the documents will remain under seal, he said:
"They’re not going to give them to you. They’re coincidentally not going to give them to me.”

Maybe not. But they'd give them to the president. And the president, of course, can declassify and release the entire memos if he chooses.

The most transparent White House in history is choosing to keep them hidden.

This is rather extraordinary.

The Obama administration -- the self-declared most transparent administration in history -- has released interrogation memos that included descriptions of the valuable intelligence obtained by using coercive techniques. But while Obama advisers thought it appropriate to share detailed descriptions of those techniques with the world -- and with the terrorists who might one day be subject to them -- these same advisers blocked the release of the information these interrogations provided. They weren't subtle. All of this information came in the same set of documents.

"But just as the memo begins to describe previously undisclosed details of what enhanced interrogations achieved, the page is almost entirely blacked out. The Obama administration released pages of unredacted classified information on the techniques used to question captured terrorist leaders but pulled out its black marker when it came to the details of what those interrogations achieved."

Barack Obama has made two mistakes: 1) such blatant politicizing of intelligence, and, 2) thinking he can get away with it.

This is Obama's arrogance at its worst. The president and his advisers seem to think that because the world loves him -- and because he remains popular here at home, too -- his decisions will escape serious scrutiny.

This should be the end of the Obama honeymoon. The country has debated the politicization of intelligence for the last seven years. In that time, we have probably never seen such a clear example of that phenomenon. And though most reporters would surely agree with Obama on enhanced interrogation, they cannot give him a pass on this. It should be a very, very uncomfortable day for Robert Gibbs today.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has formally requested that information from the interrogations be declassified. Early signs from the Obama administration indicate that they will be unlikely to do this. Why? That's unclear. But Obama officials don't think they have to worry. Why? Obama is really, really popular.

This comes from Mike Allen's must-read Playbook this morning:

Cheney made the request in late March, while researching his memoirs. The CIA has not yet replied, but that’s not surprising given the complexity of the request. In coming days, Cheney can be expected to argue that the Obama administration's publication of other files last week is a precedent for release of the memos he wants. Cheney contends that the information he seeks does not pose a threat to anyone, nor to intelligence sources and methods. Obama supporters say privately that Cheney would be better off lying low for awhile – that he’s not going to win a fight with one of the most popular people in the world.

What is the Obama administration's substantive response to Cheney's request?

The president might refer back to a memo he wrote on January 21, 2009, the day after he was sworn in. Obama pledged to run an open government, one that favors transparency as its guiding principle. He wrote that "executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."

After all: "The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears."

Good point.

Politico's Josh Gerstein looks at the Obama White House and transparency. He writes:

The Obama administration also seems to be in no hurry to release security-related records that might disrupt its own plans. One report on released Guantanamo detainees who allegedly returned to fight was expected to come out last month — but never surfaced, notes Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.

Publishing that report could complicate Obama’s attempt to close Guantanamo and farm out many of the detainees to other countries.

“It’s easy to release stuff that makes your predecessor look bad,” Isikoff said at the AU meeting. “The real test of openness of an administration is when you’re willing to release material that might not let you look good.”

Indeed. See here and here.

And Obama is thinking about releasing War-on-Terror documents that will make his predecessor look bad. Isikoff broke that story, too. He writes:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against "high value" Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said the memos were "ugly" and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a "truth commission" on torture.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise "sources and methods." According to the administration official, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden was "furious" about the prospect of disclosure and tried to intervene directly with Obama officials. But the White House has sided with Holder. Faced with a court deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit regarding the memos filed by the ACLU, Justice lawyers asked for a two-week extension "because the memoranda are being reviewed for possible release." (White House, Justice and CIA spokesmen all declined to comment.)

Got it? So, the Obama administration has buried a report on recidivist Guantanamo Bay detainees that would cause political problems but it is seeking to release "torture" memos that could prove politically beneficial. Those Bush-era memos, according to Newsweek, would be released "over objections from the U.S. intelligence community."

Surely we will read stories in the Washington Post and New York Times this week about the Obama administration "politicizing intelligence," no? Especially because Obama advisers have overruled "intelligence professionals" before, right?

As the old journalism axiom has it: Three is a trend.

It would be most interesting to see Obama explain the double-standard tonight.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer reports on Barack Obama's executive order on interrogations. She writes:

Across the Potomac River, at the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, however, there was considerably less jubilation. Top C.I.A. officials have argued for years that so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs. “They disagree in some respect,” Craig admitted. Among the hard questions that Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama “is somewhat sympathetic to the spies’ argument that their mission and circumstances are different.”

Despite such sentiments, Obama’s executive orders will undoubtedly rein in the C.I.A. Waterboarding, for instance, has gone the way of the rack, now that the C.I.A. is strictly bound by customary interpretations of the Geneva Conventions. This decision, too, was the result of intense deliberation. During the transition period, unknown to the public, Obama’s legal, intelligence, and national-security advisers visited Langley for two long sessions with current and former intelligence-community members. They debated whether a ban on brutal interrogation practices would hurt their ability to gather intelligence, and the advisers asked the intelligence veterans to prepare a cost-benefit analysis. The conclusions may surprise defenders of harsh interrogation tactics. “There was unanimity among Obama’s expert advisers,” Craig said, “that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence.”

So "top CIA officials" say that enhanced interrogation techniques "have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs," but "Obama's expert advisers," some of whom he met on the campaign trail, nonetheless concluded "that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence.”

In the Bush administration this might have been called politicizing intelligence.

(H/T Ben Smith.)

It looks like some British government officials can’t keep a secret, or at least can’t hold onto secret documents. An embarrassing new story has emerged out of the UK. A “senior intelligence official in the Cabinet office,” who has since been suspended, apparently left copies of top secret documents on a commuter train. Passengers found the documents and brought them to the BBC, which then reported the documents to authorities. The BBC decided not to air the full contents of the documents citing legal concerns. But even absent legal concerns, the BBC was right not to publish the contents. The documents reportedly contained important assessments and secret intelligence reporting.

Details are murky, but it appears that several pages were stamped “UK Top Secret” and contained a very recent assessment of al Qaeda’s strengths and weaknesses in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as an assessment of Iraq’s security forces. The papers were authored by the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee and the Ministry of Defense. In addition, CNN reports, “The al Qaeda report was commissioned by the Foreign and Home Offices.”

Most disturbingly, “The assessments often include intelligence material gathered from agents on the ground.” That is, sensitive intelligence gathered from spies in harm’s way was floating around the British public transit system. This does not exactly inspire confidence, but at least the BBC decided not to publish the contents on air. Had the contents aired there is no telling what the ramifications could have been--assuming the intelligence was as sensitive as some reports make it out to be.

I think all of our readers in the D.C. area should be on the look out for documents on their respective commuter trains home this evening. Something tells me I won’t find any on the NYC subway, however.

A fantastic New York Sun editorial, here.

Guess who said this?

"Our evidence suggests that Baghdad is strengthening a relationship with al-Qaeda that dates back to the mid-1990s, when senior Iraqi intelligence officers established contact with the network in several countries."

"We have some evidence that Iraqi Intelligence has been in contact with elements in the northeastern area. And the al-Qaeda operatives there are in regular contact with other operatives located in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has also received information from other sources alerting it to the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in Baghdad."

"We have hard evidence that al-Qaeda is operating in several locations in Iraq with the knowledge and acquiescence of Saddam's regime."

It's not -- as you might have imagined -- Dick Cheney or something published in The Weekly Standard. It was Carl Ford, from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. As the editorial notes, his agency "was singled out for praise after the war for its dissenting assessment of Iraq's nuclear program." (And, we would add, its general skepticism that Saddam Hussein's Iraq presented any kind of a threat to the United States.)

More from the editorial:

But on the question of meaningful links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, something the anti-war movement believes never existed, the evidence suggests a more nuanced picture than Mr. Rockefeller has portrayed. This is where Mr. Ford's January 31, 2003, memo comes into play.

Mr. Ford's memo came on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His words demolish a talking point for Democrats who still say Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq until the coalition of the willing invaded. Mr. Ford wrote that the former emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi "has had a good relationship with Iraqi intelligence officials." He added that intelligence on Qaeda "revealed the presence of safe house facilities in the city as well as the clear intent to remain in Baghdad. Also, foreign NGO workers outside of Iraq who are believed to provide support to al-Qaeda have also expressed their intent to set up shop in Baghdad."

We would not be surprised if some of the administration's critics were to say that Mr. Ford's memo is itself evidence of political pressure on career bureaucrats. But the Democrats have relied on Mr. Ford before, for his testimony against John Bolton. In any event, if the supposed political pressure was impossible to withstand, how to explain the fact that Mr. Ford and his shop dissented from the national intelligence estimate on Iraq's nuclear program, which played a much bigger role in the Bush administration's case for war?

Also the committee looked at only the finished intelligence products but not the daily spot analyses the intelligence community produces for senior administration officials. Mr. Rockefeller decided to exclude a handwritten note from the CIA's terrorism analyst of the Mr. Bush's 2002 speech in Cincinnati on the eve of the Congressional vote authorizing the war saying the paragraphs about Iraq and terrorism were "all-Okay." Wrote Senators Bond, Chambliss, Hatch, and Burr in an addendum to the report: "Apparently the majority did not think this was something the public needed to know since they denied our request to include it and did not allow a vote on the amendment offered to fix this shortcoming."

These are inconvenient facts for Democrats that decided some time in 2004 that they could wash their hands of the war for Iraq by claiming they were duped by the president and his conservative backers. It turns out that even their own investigation mocks their claim.

Two Republicans, Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel, voted for the partisan report.

Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released (yet another) report written by Democratic staffers claiming the Bush administration politicized intelligence. The "report" is a political document that is already accomplishing its goal: making headlines. I'll leave it to someone more industrious to correct the numerous errors in the report and in the news stories about it. (Maybe the White House? Nah.)

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even non-existent," Rockefeller said at a news conference. "As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."

Like when Jay Rockefeller called it an "imminent threat" on October 10, 2002? The Bush administration made the case that the Iraqi threat must be addressed before it was imminent. Rockefeller disagreed.

There has been some debate over how "imminent" a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated.

It's also worth pointing out that the Jay Rockefeller who today accuses the Bush administration of inventing the threat posed by Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration once saw "a substantial connection" between the two and warned about the consequences of leaving Iraq to pass its WMD to Osama bin Laden. On February 5, 2003, Rockefeller said: "The fact that Zarqawi certainly is related to the death of the U.S. aid officer and that he is very close to bin Laden puts at rest, in fairly dramatic terms, that there is at least a substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda."

And here's what he said one week earlier, in an interview with the Charleston Gazette: "If you go pre-emptive, do you cause Hussein to strike where he might not have? He is not a martyr, not a Wahabbi, not a Muslim radical. He does not seek martyrdom. But he is getting older," Rockefeller told the paper. "Maybe he is seeking a legacy by attacking Israel or using al-Qaeda cells around the world."

Rockefeller and his colleagues also accuse the Bush administration of exaggerating WMD claims. It's worth recalling that Rockefeller called Iraq an "imminent threat" in his floor speech supporting the resolution which would authorize the war.

And it's worth noting that he told his colleagues that "there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years." And: "Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now." And: "We cannot know for certain that Saddam will use the weapons of mass destruction he currently possesses, or that he will use them against us. But we do know Saddam has the capability."

Unmistakable evidence. Existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities. We do know Saddam has the capability.

What are the chances any of these claims from Rockefeller will make the news stories about his committee's new "report?"

The White House won't try to correct the reports, of course, even by pointing to documents from the Iraqi regime that show they actually undersold Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, including al Qaeda and like-minded jihadists. And so phony accusations that the Bush administration took the country to war on deliberate lies will gain even more credibility.

It's a mistake. Karl Rove, asked recently about what he did wrong when he was at the White House, pointed to the administration's failure to respond to such bogus accusations.

"One of our biggest mistakes was, the first time Harry Reid got up and said, 'You lied and you deliberately misled the country,' we should have gone back immediately and hit back hard, and we didn't. We let that story line develop. In reality, you go back and look at what Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore--I'd be happy to supply you the quotes--what they said about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction."

The White House might at least supply the quotes.

Earlier today Joscelyn noted the word games being played over Saddam's connection to terrorist groups, specifically Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which later merged with al Qaeda. In his latest book, Cheney, Steve Hayes recounted one such incidence:

In 2002, the vice president had been briefed on fresh intelligence that members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had made their way to Iraq and had begun setting up safe houses in Baghdad. Cheney found the report interesting, but odd. He had understood that Egyptian Islamic Jihad had merged with al Qaeda several years earlier. Ayman al Zawahiri, the group’s longtime leader, was now Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy. Cheney wanted to know why the report did not simply conclude that al Qaeda was setting up safe houses in Baghdad.

He returned the report to the CIA with a question: Would it be accurate to substitute “al Qaeda” for every mention of “Egyptian Islamic Jihad?” The answer did not come immediately, but when it did, the CIA finally acknowledged that members of al Qaeda were operating in Baghdad.

To Cheney, the episode was one example of many that demonstrated the unwillingness of some CIA analysts to take an objective look at Iraq and its support for radical Islamic terrorists, al Qaeda in particular. In this case, analysts were so determined to avoid reporting the presence of al Qaeda members in Iraq that they presented Cheney with a less-than-accurate description of the situation in Baghdad.

Who was that CIA agent playing word games with Cheney anyway?

In the middle of a long and fascinating piece on his regrets about the Iraq War, former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, now with the Atlantic Monthly, discusses the new Institute for Defense Analyses report on Iraq and Terrorism. Unlike, virtually every other reporter, he appears to have read it. "Before the war," he writes, "I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorist groups."

The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite an achievement of translation and analysis.

As he indicates, Goldberg is not new to the subject. (It's telling that those who have written about Saddam Hussein's support for jihadist terror are encouraging people to read the actual report for themselves.) Before the war, he wrote two articles about Iraq and terrorism and the IDA study confirms several elements of his reporting.

In the first, Goldberg wrote that he learned about one al Qaeda connection “"while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad.”"

His name was Qassem Hussein Mohammed. He told Goldberg “that his involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to protect Zawahiri, who stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted him to one of Saddam's palaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself.”

When Goldberg first reported this it drew skepticism from intelligence officials who had long believed that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would not work with Islamic radicals like Zawahiri, now Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy. We now know from a captured Iraqi regime document dated March 18, 1993, that Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad had been receiving support from Saddam for at least two years.

According to the study’s authors: “Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda -- such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri -- or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.”

Goldberg also reported extensively on the links between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda affiliates in Kurdistan.

John Hinderaker at Power Line writes, "…our principal news media outlets have fabricated an alternative reality around the Iraq war by simply misreporting the facts." That’s true, especially with regards to Saddam’s terror ties. And, as Power Line has noted on a number of occasions, the media has gotten a lot of help from partisan members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (both current and former).

Take, for example, this recent column by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek concerning the Iraqi Perspectives Project’s recently released study of Saddam’s intelligence files. You would never know from Isikoff’s piece that the report contains documents linking Saddam’s regime to six terrorist groups that are all part of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist empire, including two groups that form the core of al Qaeda. Nor, would you know that Saddam’s regime cooperated with these groups at various times. Instead, all you’ll find is spin.

The spin is provided by Paul Pillar, a former high-ranking analyst at the CIA who has made his anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war inclinations known. Pillar has spun tale after tale about Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. He is heavily invested in the notion that Saddam’s "secular" regime did not work with the Islamists of al Qaeda. Pillar is, quite clearly, a man with an agenda. Here are the most relevant lines from Isikoff’s piece:

The report did find plenty of evidence that Saddam's regime had close ties to other (mainly Palestinian) terror groups and had maintained contacts with some radical Islamic movements-including, according to one 1993 document, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney said the document showed there was a "link between Iraq and Al Qaeda." But Pillar notes the Egyptian group-headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri-didn't merge with Al Qaeda until years later. "This is the same kind of word game they played before the war," Pillar says.

This is nonsense. Pillar is pretending that because Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (the "EIJ") had not formally merged with bin Laden until 1998 or 2001 (depending on who you talk to) that a connection between Saddam and the EIJ doesn’t represent a link to al Qaeda. On the contrary, as I pointed out in a recent post over at Power Line, Zawahiri and the EIJ began to work closely with bin Laden in the mid-1980’s--long before their formal merger. Numerous sources, including Zawahiri’s lawyer in Egypt, Montasser al-Zayyat, have reported on the long-standing relationship. Lawrence Wright has also provided numerous details in his reporting for the New Yorker and in his book The Looming Tower.

A clear pattern emerges from the available evidence: Zawahiri and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad were major influences on Osama bin Laden early on, long before their formal merger. There were, of course, tactical differences from time to time, but this never stopped the two groups from working hand-in-glove. In fact, as Wright, al-Zayyat, and other sources have reported, it was Zawahiri and his EIJ lieutenants who steered bin Laden towards the absolute jihadist approach that defines al Qaeda. They were, in fact, always as much a part of al Qaeda as bin Laden himself. It is highly significant, therefore, that the IIS document Pillar and Isikoff refer to says that the IIS and the EIJ had an agreement in place to collude against Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. (Subsequent documents show that Saddam wanted the EIJ to focus on hunting Americans in Somalia. I’ll have more on this in the near future.)

The evidence is rather unambiguous in this regard. So, we are left with two options: (1) Pillar doesn’t know this, or (2) He is spinning this story to serve his own agenda. Either way, Isikoff’s blind reliance on Pillar to dismiss this important connection between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda does not inspire confidence. Of course, as Robert Novak has reported, Isikoff has relied heavily on Pillar in the past.

Michael Rubin has a good write-up at the Corner. I covered this yesterday here, but what I didn't know until reading Rubin:

To support dismissing President Bush’s stated concerns, they cite Joseph Cirincione. Fair enough, but wouldn't basic integrity mandate that they mention that Cirincione is not a disinterested analyst, but rather is advising Barack Obama?

That would seem like useful information for the Post to include. Instead, Cirincione is identified merely as an "expert on Iran and nuclear proliferation." His expert opinion: Bush's comments were "as uninformed as [Sen. John] McCain's statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda." That sounds objective...

Bush spoke directly to the Iranian people yesterday in an address broadcast over Radio Farda:

"[The Iranian government has] declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some in the Middle East. And that's unacceptable to the United States, and it's unacceptable to the world..."

For some reason the Washington Post's Robin Wright took exception to this statement:

But most striking was Bush's accusation that Iran has openly declared its nuclear weapons intentions, even though a National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003, a major reversal in the long-standing U.S. assessment.

Robin Wright seems to have taken a break from this story for the last few months, since anybody who's been following it knows that it's not the president who has recast the NIE, but the intelligence community. In an interview with WTOP on February 26 of this year, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained:

As you know, there’s been confusion about what Iranian intentions are with regard to nuclear weapons. You know from our National Intelligence Estimate we released, we highlighted the fact that a specific portion of the program had been cancelled, and that was the technical design of the warhead.

What I’d just highlight for you is there are three parts to a nuclear-weapons program. First, you have to have fissile material. Second, you have a nuclear-weapons warhead design; and third, a means of delivery of that warhead, given that you had such a warhead. And what we highlighted that was cancelled was the specifics on the warhead design. They are still pursuing fissile material – which that is the most difficult challenge in a nuclear program. And they’re still doing the ballistic missile design and testing, which is probably the second-most difficult part.

It is an open question as to whether Iran has since restarted work on the warhead design. Regardless, given their progress in producing the fissile material, Iran could produce a workable nuclear device in "6 months to 12 months," according to testimony by McConnell to the House Intelligence Committee on February 7.

Also, in order to contradict the president's statement, Wright quotes Joseph Cirincione, a highly partisan "expert." Cirincione says "Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It's just not true." So Wright's attack boils down to little more than the fact that the Iranians themselves haven't fessed up (despite talk of wiping Israel off the map and the "accidental" discovery of blueprints for a nuclear warhead during an IAEA inspection of an Iranian facility). Of course Cirincione takes a rather laissez faire view of proliferation. Last fall, when the Israelis took out what was widely reported to be a North Korean nuclear facility inside Syria, Cirincione told Foreign Policy magazine that "if North Korea gave them [the Syrians] anything short of nuclear weapons it is of little consequence." Perhaps he thinks that, likewise, until the Iranians actually assemble the device, it is of little consequence.

Other experts take a different view. One such is Gary Samore, a top arms control official in the Clinton administration and a director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, who told the Los Angeles Times in December that "The halting of the weaponization program in 2003 is less important from a proliferation standpoint than resumption of the enrichment program in 2006." You wouldn't know it from Wright's piece, but this view represents something of a consensus within the intel community as demonstrated by McConnell's statements over the past few months. Bush was simply stating the obvious, even if Robin Wright, Joseph Cirincione, and Mahmoud Ammadinejad don't agree with the assessment.

The Washington Post reports on the difficulties Western intelligence agencies face in infiltrating al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The piece notes that fresh recruits are often "highly disposable," employed mainly as suicide bombers and general cannon fodder, making it difficult for informants to penetrate the networks. It also notes that those informants who do work their way up risk being exposed by the civilian justice system:

In January, Spanish police arrested 14 men in Barcelona who they suspected were preparing to bomb subways in cities across Europe. Investigators disclosed in court documents that the arrests had been prompted by a Pakistani informant working for French intelligence.

The revelation infuriated French officials, who were forced to withdraw the informant -- a rare example of an agent who had successfully infiltrated training camps in Pakistan. Spanish authorities expressed regret but said they had no choice; after they failed to find bombs or much other evidence during the arrests, the case rested largely on the informant's word.

This is why terrorists can't necessarily be allowed to see all the evidence against them. But it is problematic. What if 14 foreign nationals were arrested on American soil under similar circumstances? Would the federal government jeopardize a highly placed informant inside al Qaeda--one who had demonstrated his worth by averting at least one attack--for the sake of meeting the same standards applied in prosecuting mobsters?

So Think Progress went batty when McCain, earlier this week, said that Iran was "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back." Today, they continue to pound away on this issue by quoting a statement made by Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno last summer:

We don’t see any evidence, significant evidence, that shows that [Iranian-controlled] groups that are funding and providing arms to Shi’a extremists are directly related to al Qaeda. Now, we all know that al Qaeda uses Iran and they do in some cases traffic some of their individuals through Iran to Iraq, but it’s a very small number of people and it’s mostly through the Kurdish regions up north, where you have the old Ansar al-Sunna connections. But beyond that, there is no specific connection between the Shi’a extremists — excuse me — the [Iranian] Quds Force operations and supporting the Shi’a extremists and that of al Qaeda, and supporting al Qaeda.

Am I missing something, or isn't that exactly what McCain said? And since no one is disputing that Iran has control over its borders, we are now talking about degrees of support, which is to say, Iran is supporting al Qaeda, we just don't know to what extent.

As Steve Hayes and I have previously discussed, the new IPP study documents the relationship between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad ("EIJ"). It is worth reproducing the language from the IPP study in this regard once again: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives."

Indeed, this is a very important fact. Zawahiri has worked closely with Osama bin Laden since the mid-1980’s, when both terror chieftains were organizing and directing recruits for the jihad in Afghanistan. Zawahiri and other Egyptian terrorists, in particular Sheikh Omar abd al-Rahman (aka the "Blind Sheikh"), played instrumental roles in al Qaeda’s evolution. Most likely, al Qaeda would not have become nearly as effective without them. Almost all of the key roles inside al Qaeda were filled by EIJ members early on, and the EIJ remains at the core of al Qaeda to this day. It is no exaggeration to say that Zawahiri is as much a part of al Qaeda as Osama bin Laden himself.

But there is more to the story of Saddam’s relationship with the EIJ. If you take a closer look at one of the documents the IPP study relies upon, you will find that Saddam agreed to work with not only Zawahiri’s EIJ, but also, more broadly, the so-called "Afghan Arabs"--the veterans of the Afghanistan jihad against the Soviets who made up almost the entire first generation of al Qaeda--in general. (Of course, the EIJ’s members were themselves "Arab Afghans.")

The key is the January 25, 1993 memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to Saddam that I discussed in my first post in this series. Recall that just one week earlier, on January 18, Saddam had ordered his minions to use terrorists to "hunt" the Americans throughout the Muslim world, and especially in Somalia. One of the groups the IIS identified as capable of fulfilling this mission was Zawahiri’s EIJ.

According to the January 25 memo, Iraqi Intelligence had recently met with a leading figure in Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front party, Sheikh Ali ‘Uthman Taha. It was Taha who negotiated a renewal of the relationship between Saddam’s Iraq, on the one hand, and Zawahiri and the Blind Sheikh’s sister organizations on the other. Sudan was then playing host to the Arab Afghans.

Eli Lake, whose been covering this issue for years, reports for the New York Sun:

Mr. McCain's national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, told The New York Sun, "There is ample documentation that Iran has provided many different forms of support to Sunni extremists, including Al Qaeda as well as Shi'ia extremists in Iraq. It would require a willing suspension of disbelief to deny Iran supports Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Responding to Mr. Scheunemann's remarks, a senior foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama, Susan Rice, yesterday told the Sun, "It's very bizarre." She noted that Mr. McCain had "made the same statement three times in as many days. Surely he must know, as Senator Lieberman reminded him, that Iran is not engaged with Al Qaeda in Iraq. I don't know if he is confused, or is he cynically trying to conflate Al Qaeda and Iran as Cheney and Bush did Al Qaeda and Iraq in 2002 and 2003?"

Ms. Rice stipulated in the interview that she was not saying Iran and Al Qaeda have never worked together, but that "there is no body of evidence to suggest Iran is aiding Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Rice echoes what Brian Katulis of the left-wing Center for American Progress said yesterday, calling the intelligence on this a "gray area." Likewise, Rice won't say that Iran and al Qaeda don't work together, so it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. And whatever relationship exists, Iran isn't going to advertise it. In this gray area, the Obama camp leans one way (assuming our enemies don't collaborate) and the McCain camp leans another (assuming they do). Fact of the matter is that what little evidence exists suggests they do work together--and of course when they don't work together there will be no evidence. If Obama makes it to the White House, he can raise the issue with Ahmadinejad during their summit at Camp David--I'm sure he'll get a straight answer (maybe there really is no al Qaeda, or homosexuality, in Iran).

With the ongoing imbroglio over Senator McCain’s comments linking Iran and al Qaeda, it is worth reviewing what Saddam’s own files have to say about Iran’s support for al Qaeda. Not only do Saddam’s Intelligence files confirm that his regime had a significant relationship with al Qaeda, but they also provide more evidence of Iran’s hand in al Qaeda’s terror. Some may say this is impossible: How could two states that hated each other as much as Saddam’s Iraq and the mullah’s Iran support the same terrorist group(s)? However, such thinking is very narrow-minded.

The IPP study proposes that we think of our terrorist enemies as cartels. In this sense, each of these parties competes in some important ways, but they are also capable of collaborating when it suits their interests. The IPP’s paradigm for understanding terrorism is very similar to the one Michael Ledeen proposed in his book, The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen has proposed that our terrorist enemies are best compared to rival mafia families, who can bitterly fight one another only to band together when facing a common foe, like law enforcement agencies. James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, has proposed a similar way of understanding modern Islamic terrorism as well. For Woolsey, terrorist organizations and their sponsors are capable of forming "joint ventures" to fulfill their common interests--e.g. attacking Americans.

Numerous examples of such collaboration can be found throughout the history of Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorism. For example, Yasser Arafat and his PLO allied with both Iraq and Iran at various points throughout Arafat’s terrorist career. Hamas, a terrorist group which is the ideological cousin of al Qaeda and likewise an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has drawn support from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and previously Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Today, the Sunni Hamas is strongly allied with Iran. And the man who served as Osama bin Laden’s protector and mentor from 1991 through mid-1996, Hassan al-Turabi, was quite open about his relationships with both Saddam Hussein (who he called a "close" ally) and the Iranian Mullahs. Turabi turned his Sudan into a melting pot of terrorism, bringing together disparate groups under a common anti-Western, anti-American banner. (See here and here for my two part series on Turabi.) This does not mean that Saddam’s Iraq and Iran necessarily had to cooperate with each other (although they did when it came to illicit deals under the oil-for-food program), just that each was capable of supporting terrorist groups that shared their immediate interests.

Accompanying the IPP report were four volumes of backup materials. In all, the five total volumes contain more than 2,000 pages of documents, translations and other related materials, which are collectively housed in the so-called Harmony Database. The database contains a massive warehouse of materials collected in post-Saddam Iraq. Many of the documents contained in the four backup volumes were not discussed in the first volume of the IPP report, which was the actual study produced by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

One of those documents is a provocative letter from the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Dated January 17, 2003, the letter is addressed to Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its subject is listed as "Al-Qa’eda Activities." Here is the relevant portion of the U.S. government’s translation of the document:

Attached is a report, furnished by source code number 6841, which includes the following:

1- Al-Qa’eda dispatched elements and personnel with fake passports to Arabic Countries under fictitious [sic] alias to target American interests in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

2- The Yemeni (Abu-Muhammad) was sent to Algeria carrying a passport with the name Saydi Ahmed Habiballah, to contact the Algerian "Salafist group for the calling of Jihad" and deliver money to them; however he was killed in an armed skirmish between Algerian security forces and the above-mentioned group. Algerian authorities were able to trace his real name and his families [sic] address in cooperation with the Yemeni embassy in Algeria. His real name is (‘Imad ‘Abdul-Wahid Rahman ‘Ulwan) from the "Ta’iz" village and he was a member of Al-Qa’eda.

A careful reading of the translated letter raises a number of questions and observations:

• What was contained in the "report, furnished by source code number 6841"? The volume of documents produced as part of the study does not contain a copy of the actual report, which was apparently included with the letter. Only a copy of the translated cover letter was included. Does the U.S. government have a copy of the actual report too? Or, is it missing? If the government does have a copy of the full report, what does it say?

• Why does source 6841 know so much about al Qaeda’s activities? It is possible that 6841 was an Iraqi spy tasked with monitoring al Qaeda on behalf of the Iraqi regime. But if that is the case, then Iraq had a particularly well-placed mole. Not only did he know that al Qaeda had sent terrorists to three different countries "to target American interests," but he also knew that one al Qaeda member had been sent to Algeria to "deliver money" to still other al Qaeda operatives. Al Qaeda is a highly compartmentalized organization, just as Saddam’s intelligence services were. Yet, source 6841 seems to know details that only someone with sufficiently senior access inside the al Qaeda organization could know.

When the 9-11 Commission’s final report was published in July 2004, some in the press were quick to trumpet one line in the report that appeared to dispense with the issue of Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda. The Commission reported on a number of contacts between the two sides, but ultimately concluded: "to date we have seen no evidence that these or earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship."

For many, that was the end of the story. But re-read the Commission’s report carefully (as some did at the time) and you realize it found a number of disturbing threads tying Saddam’s Iraq to al Qaeda. For example, the Commission reported that Ayman al Zawahiri set up at least one and maybe two meetings between al Qaeda and Saddam’s regime in 1998. The Commission explained that Zawahiri was in a position to act as a liaison since he had "ties of his own to the Iraqis." The Commission did not explain further.

But now, thanks to the release of a new study on Saddam’s ties to terrorism, we learn more about Zawahiri’s "ties" to Iraq. The Iraqi Perspectives Project report (which we’ve discussed here, here, and here) explains:

Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.

As Steve Hayes pointed out again this morning, the study cites an Iraqi Intelligence document dated March 18, 1993. The translation of the document provided in the study begins:

We list herein the organizations that our agency [IIS] cooperates with and have relations with various elements in many parts of the Arab world and who also have the expertise to carry out assignments indicated in the above directive [the cited directive has not been discovered yet].

Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad is one of the nine terrorist organizations then discussed in the extracts of the document cited:

Islamic Jihad Organization [Egyptian Islamic Jihad]

- In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt. Our information on the group is as follows:

- It was established in 1979.

- Its goal is to apply the Islamic shari' a law and establish Islamic rule.

- It is considered one of the most brutal Egyptian organizations. It carried out numerous successful operations, including the assassination of Sadat.

- We have previously met with the organization's representative and we agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime.

So we now know that Zawahiri’s "ties" to Iraq included an agreement to cooperate on "commando operations against the Egyptian regime." This would seem to be evidence of an "operational collaborative relationship." That Saddam’s regime was willing to sponsor the EIJ’s operations should be a major blow to those who would argue that Saddam and al Qaeda could never, ever cooperate. It sheds new light on the 9/11 Commission’s report, and raises a number of questions.

Yesterday, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell participated in a foreign affairs symposium at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. This interesting exchange occurred between McConnell and Hopkins political science professor Dr. Stephen David:

DR. DAVID: Let me talk about torture. Is waterboarding a form of torture? Is it an effective means of extracting information? If it is a form of torture or if it is not an effective means of extracting information, why will not the Intelligence Community, the CIA foreswear its use?

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Let’s take it from the beginning. Has waterboarding ever been used by a professional organization whose mission is to extract information? The answer is yes. You might ask what are the circumstances? Three times. Situations where there’s been interrogation over a period of time. It was unsuccessful. Water boarding was used and then information started to flow.

Just to put it in context, probably upwards of a quarter to a third of all the information generated in this period of time came from these three individuals. It’s saved lives.

I would be willing to say it’s saved lives for some of the people who know, of people who are known to people in this room. So you’ve got to ask yourself the question, is it worth it?

Now here’s the problem for America. We have a political system that will define the bounds. This community, will always operate inside those bounds. Now what the image, particularly across the country, the image is Abu Ghraib. It was an abhorrent situation where some youngsters got out of control and did some terrible things, made photographs, and they are suffering the penalty or the punishment for having done that. That’s what people think about when they say torture.

We went through a long debate about how to do this consistent with the Geneva Convention and so on. Laws were passed. And we agreed upon an Army Field Manual for how interrogations will be conducted by the U.S. military. That in fact is where we are.

Now think of the Army Field Manual is about like this. Think of the law is about like that. So the question is, if it’s legal within the law, do you want to keep those techniques available in a situation where it might save lives, particularly if it were weapons of mass destruction?

Now add one other thing. Those three interrogations with waterboarding were hardened criminals. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Go to the web site, look up KSM, read about him. It was his intent to repeat 9/11 many times over and he would not speak with us. Also in the timeframe, this happened in 2002, might have gone to 2003, I just don’t remember, but 2002 timeframe. We didn’t know much about al-Qaida. This was a period of time when we just did not have information, understanding and so on. Have we used it since that time? No. The President gave us a list of techniques. Is it in that list of techniques? No. If we needed to use it, what would happen? We would have to ask, first the Agency would have to ask me, I’d have to agree or disagree. Then it would have to go to the Attorney General. The Attorney General would have to make a ruling, legal or not. Then we’d have to go to the President and get permission. Once that happened, you have to go notify the Congress.

So the way I think about it is we will abide by the laws of the nation. The laws right now are this size. The Army Field Manual is this size. So do we want to take all those options away and move them down to something smaller? That’s a decision for the nation. If the nation does it, we will comply. If the nation leaves that larger body of techniques open, then we’ll use every technique available to us given it would prevent a horrendous attack on the United States.

DR. DAVID: Again, just to clarify, if you felt the situation warranted it, you would us waterboarding, and you do believe in certain situations it’s effective and the only way of extracting information.

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Were you listening?

DR. DAVID: Yeah, I listened to every word.

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Well, I said it’s not in our list of techniques. If we decided we needed it we would go through a procedure to get permission and we would go notify the Congress.

So if it’s not illegal and it would prevent an attack on a city that would save hundreds, thousands of lives, would we use it? I would certainly be persuaded in that direction, given that the Attorney General verified it’s a legal technique.

Does it work? Yes, it works.

I'm skeptical of the notion that the effectiveness of the nation's intelligence agencies will be helped by opening up their operations so that Americans feel better about them:

A top intelligence official says he wants to pull back the curtain of secrecy to let Americans see more clearly what it is intelligence agencies do, and how they do it.

"We've allowed our detractors to frame the national debate and cast us as the villains," said Donald Kerr, the No. 2 official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We in the intelligence community are not winning hearts and minds in the U.S. We're not even trying. That's what bothers me most."

It was a wistful call to restore public trust in a community tarnished by its own actions and by allegations of misdeeds that feed on secrecy...

Kerr said he was thankful there hasn't been a poll asking people about their feelings on the intelligence community. "The number might be depressingly low," he said. "It's because they don't understand what we do."

I would move in the opposite direction: rather than more openness, I'd like more secrecy--particularly given the fact that Langley seems to leak like a sieve. I'd rather not get an accounting of exactly how many suspects have been waterboarded. I'd rather not hear members of our intelligence community say things like "I consider myself a citizen of the world" (no cite; that's a personal experience).

And when someone asks an intelligence official whether the United States had the hand in the demise of some terror suspect, I'd rather the answer be a wry smile, along with a simple "you know I'd never disclose that -- even if we did." Wouldn't the intel "community" be more effective if it was a little less understood?

The government shows up at your office just days after the 9/11 attack and asks for your help in the war on terror. What are you going to do? According to Glenn Greenwald, you should call a lawyer (isn't that always what the lawyers say). But telecom executives did the only thing they could do--assist the government in whatever way possible. I doubt any of them even had a moment of doubt in complying with the government's request--worst case, the NSA captures a call from some innocent, naturalized American talking to his al Qaeda-affiliated cousin in Paktia, not exactly an ethical minefield.

But the industry now faces as much as $7.243 trillion in liability, as practically every telephone customer in North America is to be considered a victim of this dastardly operation. After months of demagoguing the issue, the Dems in Congress are finally going to cave and grant the firms immunity from lawsuits that are not only frivolous, but a threat to national security.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who's devoted the last three months of his life to this issue, is despondent:

There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don't actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don't actually care about any of it. That's all a given.

But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

And to think of all the other things Glenn Greenwald could have not achieved over the last few months were his energy and resources devoted to other hopeless crusades!

The House of Representatives is likely to vote next week on a FISA extension, but not the bipartisan bill which passed the Senate by a wide margin:

“We don’t have agreement but ... I am very hopeful that we will have legislation on the floor next week, “ House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md., said on the floor Thursday in a colloquy with Minority Whip Roy Blunt , R-Mo...

The Senate version, which the White House helped to draft, would grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have been sued for their alleged cooperation with the administration’s warrantless surveillance activities after Sept. 11, 2001. The House measure includes no such liability shield.

Liberals in the House are unwilling to extend liability protection to telecommunications companies that facilitated surveillance on suspected terrorists operating abroad. Quin Hillyer looks at the lawsuits that House Democrats are insisting go forward:

Moreover, the suit defines the class of aggrieved citizens as “all individuals” who were customers of the phone company “at any time after September 2001” that the program was in effect. In this one suit, that class is identified as consisting of 24.6 million people. How all 24.6 million Americans could possibly be harmed by this program aimed at suspected foreign terrorists is a question perhaps best answered in the Twilight Zone...

Do the math: The total potential payout by AT&T for the first two categories of alleged violations is $49.2 billion. Meanwhile, at $100 per day for each day of the four years at issue after 9/11, the total potential liability for each of the two latter counts is $3 trillion, 591 billion.

That number times 2, plus the $49.2 billion, comes out to a potential grand liability of $7.243 trillion. That is half of the entire national economy! And that’s even before “punitive damages” are taken into account.

Don't worry, though. Speaker Pelosi is 100 percent certain that there's no national security risk for allowing FISA to lapse, or leaving telecom companies on the hook for cooperating.

Feel better now?

Andy McCarthy has an outstanding deconstruction of the political grandstanding that resulted in this piece from top Democrats involved in intelligence and judiciary oversight. McCarthy points out that Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, not long ago had the opposite view of the one he put forward in today's Washington Post.

The op-ed marks a dramatic shift for Rockefeller. The West Virginia Democrat championed the Senate bill, which was voted out of his committee by a 13-2 landslide. As recently as February 14, he was quite candid in acknowledging that the consequence of allowing the Protect America Act (PAA) to lapse, as it did a little over a week ago when House Democrats refused to act, would be “degraded” intelligence-collection capacity.

Now, however, with his fellow Democrats getting hammered as unserious about protecting American lives, it’s evidently time to close ranks. Rockefeller has suddenly joined the “Everything Is Beautiful” chorus that claims the sun’s setting on the PAA is really no big deal since any security gaps can still be filled by FISA — the ill-conceived, obsolete Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

Rockefeller does this regularly. He did it on Iraq, and on surveillance. Yet he somehow manages to escape the kind of truth-squadding regularly visited on the Bush administration and others who hold more (consistently) hawkish views.

On surveillance, Rockefeller was one of a select group of congressional leaders notified about the National Security Agency's "Terrorist Surveillance Program," shortly after that program started. When the program was exposed in the New York Times back in December 2005, Rockefeller's office quickly released a handwritten letter he wrote to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003. Rockefeller introduced the letter by claiming he was writing to "reiterate" concerns he had about the program. But those familiar with the briefings on TSP say Rockefeller had never before expressed any reservations.

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert recalled one briefing in which then-NSA Director Michael Hayden described the program and spoke of its benefits. Haster said that Cheney spoke next. "I remember him specifically saying, 'OK, we need your understanding to go forward. Does anybody have any objection? Do we need to do anything legislatively? It was a question Cheney asked. And everybody agreed: No, we don't need to do this in legislation. We need to let our intelligence go forward and do what they're doing. So he laid it out very specifically to everybody. I remember everybody was present at the time."

Another participant in those meetings put it this way: "It was [the Democrats'] unanimous recommendation that we continue the program and that we not seek legislative authorization. Jay Rockefeller was sitting at the table."

Senator Pat Roberts, who was then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said when the program was exposed that Rockefeller's opposition to it was something quite new. "On many occasions, Senator Rockefeller express to the vice president his vocal support for the program; his most recent expression of support was only two weeks ago."

On Iraq, Rockefeller's screeching u-turn came in public. Before the war, he spoke of the "unmistakable evidence" that Saddam Hussein was "working aggressively" on nuclear weapons and described the grave threat posed by Iraq's "existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities." After the war, Rockefeller went after the Bush Administration as "fundamentally misleading" for saying the exact same things.

In fact, Rockefeller went further than the Bush administration, calling the threat from Iraq "imminent."

There has been some debate over how "imminent" a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons, and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, that documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get.

And though Rockefeller voted in favor of the war, he said later that he did so based on inadequate intelligence. But before the war, he said he had all of the information he needed:

To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot!

So Rockefeller's latest reversal is part of a long pattern. He supports aggressive national security measures until they are politically unpopular. And yet he has the audacity to claim, as he did once again in today's op-ed, that it is the White House and Republicans who are playing "political games?"

According to multiple sources, House Democrats have decided to discontinue the authority of the administration to tap the communications of foreign terrorists operating overseas. They've decided to block a bill with majority support, effectively shutting down much of our intelligence collection on two-thirds of all terrorist communications.

It's important to consider what that means. One way to do that is to look at the legislation the Democrats did endorse, and listen to Democrats describe why it's necessary. Last November 15, this is what Intelligence Committee Chairman Sil Reyes (D-TX) had to say about the Democrats' RESTORE Act:

...we also have the mandate to provide our intelligence professionals the legal authorities required to protect the country from our enemies.

The RESTORE Act... exempts truly foreign-to-foreign communications from any judicial review, even when the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is still actually located in the United States. Second, it authorizes the acquisition of foreign intelligence information for all matters of national defense, including information relating to terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and other threats to the national security of our country...

I urge my colleagues to reject partisan politics in favor of sound policy and support this critically important bill.

So according to the Democratic Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, it's 'critically important' to ensure that the intelligence community avoid the time-consuming process of obtaining individual warrants to conduct surveillance of people like Osama bin Laden. But now that's exactly what Democrats will require -- in defiance of the majority of the House and Senate.

More on this from Andrew McCarthy here.

As the Democratic presidential race careens towards what may be an ugly finish, liberals are increasingly outraged that superdelegates could frustrate the will of a majority of Democratic primary voters. To this I say: what's the big deal? Liberals in the House of Representatives are doing it right now.

Here's the FISA state of play: the Senate yesterday soundly rejected an amendment by Chris Dodd to deny telecom companies legal protections for their good-faith cooperation with terrorist surveillance. Dodd and other liberals apparently want future requests to the telecom companies to sound like this: "Hi, I'm with the CIA and we want you to listen in on Osama bin Laden's phone calls. It's an urgent matter of national security, and you better have plenty to spend on lawyers because you'll get sued out the wazoo."

The Senate rejected this approach 67-31, then passed the surveillance bill 68-29.

This should effectively end the debate over whether to extend protection to these companies. That's because 21 'Blue Dog' House Democrats have written to Speaker Pelosi and told her that they support the Senate bill, and want to see it brought to the House floor promptly for a vote:

The Rockefeller-Bond FISA legislation contains satisfactory language addressing all these issues, and we would fully support that measure should it reach the House floor without substantial change. We believe these components will ensure a strong national security apparatus that can thwart terrorism across the globe and save American lives here in our country.

Combined with the 198 Republicans who support this approach, there is a clear majority in favor of telecom immunity, and of the Senate bill more generally. For those committed to majority rule, there's no more need for discussion, right? The bill ought to come to the House floor, be approved, and sent to the president.

But that's not what House Democrats are doing. This afternoon they're muscling through a 21-day extension of FISA, which they hope will give them breathing room to twist arms. Then they might pass a bill that takes the teeth out of terrorist surveillance, and which the president would veto.

Why are Democrats throwing out the principle of majority rule just to wind up back where they started? Because that's what MoveOn.org and their liberal base demands -- regardless of how futile the effort is. And if you don't intend to make laws that reflect the will of the majority, why select a presidential nominee that way either?

Congressional Democrats are getting off easy. With attention focused on the presidential campaign, there's been little coverage of their handling of FISA, which has been characterized by short-term extensions to the bill and behind the scenes efforts to gut the program.

The central point of the debate in Congress is whether to provide retroactive immunity to telecom companies that cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies on surveillance. Carter Wood points to a good explanation from the Senate Intelligence Committee of why it decided to do so--the amendment passed by an overwhelming margin earlier today.

With the Senate now ready to pass a FISA reauthorization that lasts six years, and which is otherwise acceptable to the president, the next question is what the House of Representatives will do. Roll Call reports:

Because the immunity provision will likely remain intact, the House is expected to balk. The House measure does not provide immunity, and, in the eyes of the American Civil Liberties Union, provides better protections than the Senate for Americans who might get caught up in the wiretapping dragnet authorized by both the bills and the current law...

But without the Senate’s version of immunity, there are not likely 60 votes in the Senate needed to prevent a filibuster, Republicans said.

It's unclear exactly what happens next. House liberals are unwilling to accept the telecom immunity provision, so the debate is frozen. Never mind that the more than two-thirds of the Senate voted today to protect those companies that had relied on the assurances of the White House and Attorney General (Senator Obama voted against the amendment, while Hillary Clinton missed the vote).

It seems entirely possible that the Democratic leadership will now have to push for yet another 15-day extension of surveillance authority. How long can they kick the can down the road?

How livid? Well, mad enough to do something that I've never heard of the CIA doing before: publishing a book review on their government website. The offending title is Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, a Pulitzer Prize winning account of the 60+ year history of the Agency. From the Central Intelligence Agency website:

Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes is not the definitive history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that it purports to be. Nor is it the well researched work that many reviewers say it is. It is odd, in fact, that much of the hype surrounding the book concerns its alleged mastery of available sources.

Weiner and his favorable reviewers-most, like Weiner, journalists-have cited the plethora of his sources as if the fact of their variety and number by themselves make the narrative impervious to criticism.

But the thing about scholarship is that one must use sources honestly, and one doesn't get a pass on this even if he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. Starting with a title that is based on a gross distortion of events, the book is a 600-page op-ed piece masquerading as serious history; it is the advocacy of a particularly dark point of view under the guise of scholarship. Weiner has allowed his agenda to drive his research and writing, which is, of course, exactly backwards....

The irony is that a new history of CIA is needed to fill the gap left by the now dated works of John Ranelagh (The Agency, 1986) and Christopher Andrew (For the President's Eyes Only, 1995). Having read the book, I have to conclude that this is not it; anyone who wants a balanced perspective of CIA and its history should steer well clear of Legacy of Ashes.

Ouch. I've read the book myself and there's no denying that Weiner placed a heavy emphasis on the CIA's failures, although I suspect that--in his eagerness to defend the Agency--Nicholas Dujmovic (a CIA historian and career analyst) may have overstated his case a bit.

From my own readings, I found it intensely frustrating to have to fight through hundreds of pages of the CIA getting their butts kicked by the KGB and associated Warsaw Pact alphabet soup security agencies. Surely there were Agency successes beyond placing the Shah in power and rigging Central American elections?

Dujmovic’s critiques are far more specific than what was illustrated in the quote--read the whole thing.

Defenders of harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding have generally been nonplussed by the recent news that the CIA destroyed videotapes of several interrogations. For waterboarding's harsh critics however, the news has caused some heartburn. In particular, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle (and contributor to the site TruthDig.com) wants to know why Speaker Pelosi didn't speak up about what she knew:

Pelosi's press aide Brendan Daly told me that the Washington Post report on her CIA briefing was "overblown" because Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee thought the techniques described, which the CIA insists included waterboarding, were planned for the future and not yet in use. Pelosi claimed that "several months later" her successor as the ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of Los Angeles County, was advised the techniques "had in fact been employed" and wrote a classified letter to the CIA in protest, and Pelosi "concurred." Neither went public with her concerns...

Pelosi testified before the commission on May 22, 2003 but uttered not a word of caution about the methods used....

Hopefully I am missing something here, having admired Pelosi for decades, but if she and the others in the know have another version of these events, it's time to come clean.

Here's one possible explanation: Speaker Pelosi recognized the importance of getting information from captured enemies in the period after September 11, but changed her mind about it when she sensed political opportunity in criticizing the Bush administration. Based on the Washington Post's reporting of the briefing she received on harsh interrogation, it's even possible that she was among those who wondered whether the methods were tough enough:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

After all, an informed Congressional source tells the Post that Pelosi at least raised no objection to the technique when she learned about it:

Pelosi declined to comment directly on her reaction to the classified briefings. But a congressional source familiar with Pelosi's position on the matter said the California lawmaker did recall discussions about enhanced interrogation. The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage -- they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice -- and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time.

Reasonable people can and do disagree about whether waterboarding constitutes torture, but given that there's no evidence the technique was ever widely used, and that it's use has been discontinued, it's clear that Democrats are seizing on it for political benefit. Pelosi's sudden devotion to stopping waterboarding provides even greater evidence. One can only hope that the left continues to press the Speaker for an explanation of her conversion--it's clear that she long ago stopped listening to the rest of us.

HT: LGF

The statement from Fred Thompson:

"The accuracy of the latest NIE on Iran should be received with a good deal of skepticism. Our intelligence community has often underestimated the intentions of adversaries, including Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea. And are all of the CIA detractors now going to take intelligence pronouncements at face value? It's awfully convenient for a lot of people: the administration gets to say its policies worked; the Democrats get to claim we should have eased up on Iran a long time ago: and Russia and China can claim sanctions on Iran are not necessary. Who benefits from all this? Iran.

"And what if the NIE estimate is accurate? It's essentially an analysis of Iran's intentions at a point in time. Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium for allegedly peaceful purposes, but which would allow them to easily transition to a nuclear weapons program at any point in the future. Maybe even now--now that so many seem willing to forget Iran's past deceptions and ongoing intransigence. After all, a nuclear weapons program is simply an extension of the process by why uranium is enriched for civilian nuclear fuel. To this day Iran has yet to comply with international demands and its Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty requirements for open inspections and other safeguard measures.

"The bottom line is that the United States must continue to improve its human intelligence capabilities and intelligence analysis. We must hope for the best, but not let our guard down for a moment. If something appears to be too good to be true, it very well may be."

Thompson gets it just about right, I think. The big news is that Iran might have nuclear weapons in two years. Is that reassuring? I'm not sure I understand the coverage that's come out given this fact. Iran is basically getting together the sugar, the flour, the icing . . . it just hasn't baked the cake yet. One has to ask why a country with so much oil would even want nuclear energy?

Today's New York Times editorial, titled "Good and Bad News About Iran":

There is a lot of good news in the latest intelligence assessment about Iran. Tehran, we are now told, halted its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, which means that President Bush has absolutely no excuse for going to war against Iran.

Then the bad news:

First, the report says “with high confidence” that Iran did have a secret nuclear weapons program and that it stopped only after it got caught and was threatened with international punishment. Even now, Tehran’s scientists are working to master the skills to make nuclear fuel — the hardest part of building a weapon.

Anyone who wants to give the Iranians the full benefit of the doubt should read the last four years of reports from United Nations’ nuclear inspectors about Iran’s 18-year history of hiding and dissembling. Or last month’s report, which criticized Tehran for providing “diminishing” information and access to its current program. In one of those ironies that would be delicious if it didn’t involve nuclear weapons, an official close to the inspection agency told The Times yesterday that the new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.

James Taranto:

In other words, the bad news, per the Times, is that a lunatic theocracy may soon become a lunatic theocracy armed with nuclear weapons. The good news is that that there's nothing President Bush can do to stop it.

Israel enters the NIE fray:

Israeli officials, who've been warning that Iran would soon pose a nuclear threat to the world, reacted angrily Tuesday to a new U.S. intelligence finding that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons development program in 2003 and to date hasn't resumed trying to produce nuclear weapons.

So here we have two intelligence communities, Israel and the United States, with two completely different estimates. Israel doesn't enjoy the electronic collection capabilities that the United States does, but the Mossad is widely to believed to field one of the most effective HUMINT networks in the world.

So who to believe?

There's no shortage of intel wonks who believe that running agents--HUMINT--is more reliable than signature, imagery, and signals intelligence. That's Israel's specialty. Given the Mossad's past successes, and their obsession with Iran's atomic program, one would assume that Israel has penetrated the Iranian government with a certain level of effectiveness. At the very least, they're worth a listen.

Update: More from Max Boot at Contentions.

As many recognize, the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program directly contradicts what the U.S. Intelligence Community was saying just two years previously. And it appears that this about-face was very recent. How recent?

Consider that on July 11, 2007, roughly four or so months prior to the most recent NIE’s publication, Deputy Director of Analysis Thomas Fingar gave the following testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (emphasis added):

Iran and North Korea are the states of most concern to us. The United States’ concerns about Iran are shared by many nations, including many of Iran’s neighbors. Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons--despite its international obligations and international pressure. This is a grave concern to the other countries in the region whose security would be threatened should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.

This paragraph appeared under the subheading: "Iran Assessed As Determined to Develop Nuclear Weapons." And the entirety of Fingar’s 22-page testimony was labeled "Information as of July 11, 2007." No part of it is consistent with the latest NIE, in which our spooks tell us Iran suspended its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 "primarily in response to international pressure" and they "do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."

The inconsistencies are more troubling when we realize that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Fingar is one of the three officials who were responsible for crafting the latest NIE. The Journal cites "an intelligence source" as describing Fingar and his two colleagues as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials." (The New York Sun drew attention to one of Fingar’s colleagues yesterday.)

So, if it is true that Dr. Fingar played a leading role in crafting this latest NIE, then we are left with serious questions:

• Why did your opinion change so drastically in just four months time?

• Is the new intelligence or analysis really that good? Is it good enough to overturn your previous assessments? Or, has it never really been good enough to make a definitive assessment at all?

• Did your political or ideological leanings, or your policy preferences, or those of your colleagues, influence your opinion in any way?

Many in the mainstream press have been willing to cite this latest NIE unquestioningly. Perhaps they should start asking some pointed questions. (Don’t hold your breath.)

Just to add to Tom Joscelyn's excellent post on the National Intelligence Estimate, Cliff May offers this note from a former CIA insider:

[While this NIE] does confirm Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons in 2002 and 2003, its conclusions that as to why it may have stopped the program and why this halt may have continued are debatable [sic] and speculation. These KJs [Key Judgments] have too much political spin. This assessment was strongly influenced by two hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials who oversaw it, both former State officials who fought tooth and nail against Bush WMD policies, especially Iran.

I've heard similar rumblings from similar people, though less specific.

While I do agree that the NIE was somewhat less grounded than previous estimates, I don't agree with what is becoming a popular conservative talking point: Iran dropped their program in 2003 because OIF showed the world that America meant business. I think that it's far more likely that the Iranians--if they really did drop their program--had a North Korea (rather than Libya) style epiphany, realizing that the technological hurdle in constructing a bomb, shrinking it, and mating it to an effective delivery system was just too complicated of an endeavor. Had Iran truly been scared into submission by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I doubt we would have heard four years of blustering about "Iran's right to nuclear research and development" and boasting about "thousands of operational centrifuges."

But that doesn't mean that liberals are being any more rational. It's amusing to watch the transformation of the most ignorant left wing bloggers into defense experts every time an ideologically satisfying Pentagon/CIA press release appears, but any discussion about how the NIE is a blow to the Bush administration's plan to attack Iran is just silly. For one, the NIE's confirmation of Iran's nuclear intentions prior to 2003 completely justified the White House's relatively measured "all options are the table" rhetoric, and second, the White House has never deviated--nor threatened to deviate--from its commitment to a diplomatic resolution. And to clarify, no... acknowledging that military options exist is not a deviation from diplomacy. Executing a military option is a deviation from diplomacy.

In a NIE just two years ago, the U.S. Intelligence Community (“IC”) concluded: “[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.” However, the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear program says, “…we do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” This is just one of many differences between the 2005 estimate, which concluded that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and this latest estimate, which claims that the “military” nuclear weapons program was shut down sometime in 2003. (Keep in mind that the “civilian” program, which everyone concedes is still up and running, could quite easily be repurposed for military use. And the NIE is drawing a line between the two without explaining how it made that judgment. See Question #3 here.)

What changed?

Judging from press accounts, anonymous intelligence officials are offering a number of answers.
For example, McClatchy newspapers ran this description (emphasis added):

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said the judgment that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in mid-2003 emerged four to six months ago as a result of fresh intelligence, some of it from open sources and some from a "very rigorous scrub" of 20 years of information, some of which informed the 2005 NIE.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the analysts who drafted the report also had applied lessons learned from an erroneous 2002 NIE on Iraq.

Taken at face value, we have here a number of explanations. What is the “fresh intelligence” gathered by the IC? I am a strong advocate of open source analysis, but what “fresh intelligence” was gathered through open sources (e.g. press articles, television appearances, etc.)? Can you determine through open sources that Iran shut down its nuclear program in 2003? If so, how?

What did the “very rigorous scrub” of two decades of information entail? Keep in mind that the U.S. and the international community were in the dark for much of this period concerning Iran’s nuclear program. And why did this scrub produce different results now since it also “informed the 2005 NIE”? Is this a concession that the tradecraft used in the 2005 estimate was sloppy? Or, have the analysts let the current climate, with partisan debates over how to handle Iran dominating the headlines, dictate the way they viewed this intelligence?

This last question is particular apt, since the McClatchy account tells us that the “analysts who drafted the report also had applied lessons learned from an erroneous 2002 NIE on Iraq?” Did the lessons have to do with tradecraft? Or, do they mean they just wanted to make sure that the intelligence coming out of the IC was not used to justify any military action, as it did in the case of Iraq?

The Washington Post, based on anonymous sources, gives us a sense of what intelligence was used in the revised estimate (emphasis added):

Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004 and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.

In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

What drawings were obtained? Were there any intercepts that cut against the thesis that the program was shuttered in 2003? Were any of the “more than 1,000 pieces of information” cited in the report contradictory? If so, how were these contradictions explained away?

As the Post notes, senior administration officials expressed their skepticism concerning these intercepts, noting that it could be part of an elaborate deception campaign. The IC then did a review to determine if this was plausible and evidently concluded that the intercepts were valid. I have no reason to think their judgment is wrong, but then again, who knows?

Key questions regarding the intercepts: Are the conversations intercepted between parties that would know the full scope of the program? Are intercepts alone enough to validate the cessation of the “military” program in 2003, or is human intelligence also needed? Did any human intelligence go into this assessment? Are there any intercepts pertaining to the current state of the “military” nuclear program? Do any of the intercepts relate to the “civilian” nuclear program and its dual uses?

It will be interesting to follow the details of what made up this NIE in the press over the next few days.

Additional note: Over at NRO’s The Corner, Seth Leibsohn offers his own rundown of the different explanations for the flip-flop appearing in the press.

Senator Lieberman just put out the following statement in response to yesterday's release of the NIE:

“The National Intelligence Estimate reinforces the need for concern and caution, not complacency, on the part of the United States and the international community, about Iran’s illegal nuclear activities.

“On the one hand, today’s NIE suggests that economic and diplomatic pressure can work in persuading the Iranian regime to suspend at least some elements of its illegal nuclear activities—and that therefore we should continue to work with our allies to ratchet up the heat.

“At the same time, as the NIE makes clear, the Iranian regime has neither verifiably ended nor abandoned its secret nuclear weapons program—the existence of which Tehran continues to deny. Rather, the Iranian regime has at best made a tactical decision to halt certain elements of this program, in response to increased international pressure and scrutiny, and which it may restart at any time.

“As the NIE also makes clear, the Iranian regime continues to pursue its illegal uranium enrichment program, in violation of its international commitments and in flagrant disregard of the will of the international community.

“As the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency have long insisted, Iran’s illegal uranium enrichment program is totally unacceptable. That is because, if Iran is able to perfect the technological know-how to produce highly enriched uranium through this program, this technology is then equally transferrable to produce a nuclear weapon.

“It is very important for the American people to understand this point: even if Iran has suspended its direct drive for a nuclear weapon, its continued efforts to develop the technological know-how that would allow it, at short notice, to be able to assemble a nuclear weapon are just as threatening.

“That is why it is so important for the United States and our allies to continue to turn up the economic and diplomatic pressure against Iran, to convince its regime to negotiate an end to all of its illegal nuclear activities.”

That ought to drive folks on the left absolutely bonkers.

The story dominating the news cycle right now is the public release of "Key Judgments" from an NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. In particular, the first sentence of the NIE is drawing the press’s intention: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program…" But, as they say, the devil is in the details. Given the poor performance of the U.S. Intelligence Community ("IC") in drafting previous NIE’s, we should review the IC’s work with a skeptical eye--no matter what conclusions are drawn. Interestingly, the IC now concedes that it is certain Iran had a nuclear weapons program. But that isn't getting the headlines. And after having read the little that has been made public from this NIE, we are left with substantive questions.

First, what intelligence is this assessment based upon?

Any student, or even casual observer, of the U.S. intelligence community knows that it has done a remarkably poor job of recruiting spies inside unfriendly regimes. For example, we had no meaningful spies inside Saddam’s regime. That was at least part of the reason the U.S. intelligence community misjudged Saddam’s WMD programs so badly. (Whatever came of Saddam’s WMD, U.S. intelligence clearly did not know what was going on since the few sources it had were on the periphery of Saddam’s regime.)

Reading the latest NIE does not provide, of course, any clues as to how the IC came to these conclusions. If the IC does have good sources inside the Iranian regime and its putative nuclear program, then quite naturally it would want to protect them. And we wouldn’t expect to see any information about sources in a declassified "Key Judgments" such as this.

However, there are good reasons to suspect that the IC does not have good intelligence inside Iran. For example, both of the leading members (one Republican, one Democrat) of the House Intelligence Committee explained back in 2006 that we did not really know then what was going on inside Iran. And the Robb-Silberman Commission, which investigated what the IC knew about WMD programs around the world, found in 2005: "Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or ten years ago." Understandably, the Commission refrained from discussing the specifics of the intelligence community’s infiltration, or lack thereof, of both the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. But it is a safe bet that the statement cited above applied in both cases.

Thus, we should not be confident, at all, that the IC has the type of intelligence that would allow it to make a definitive assessment one way or another. This is true no matter what conclusions the IC publishes. Who or what are the sources cited by IC? How do we know they are telling the truth? If they are members of the Iranian regime, have their so-called bona fides been established? Are they in a position to know what they claim to know? Do they have any motives to lie, or distort the truth? We should be mindful of all of these questions and more.

Second, what has changed since 2005?

As this latest NIE notes, its conclusions are at odds with what the IC believed in 2005. The last page of the declassified Key Judgments notes significant differences between what the IC believed in 2005 and what it is saying now. In 2005, the IC noted: "[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable." Now the IC says, "…we do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." So, in 2005 the IC was sure that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon and now it is not sure at all. This is a profound change in opinion and, at a minimum, does not inspire confidence that the IC can get this story right. After all, if the IC’s judgments can change so drastically in two years time, why should we believe any of its pronouncements one way or the other?

What is the basis for this flip-flop? What has been learned in the meantime to warrant such an about-face?

Third, how did the IC draw its line between a "civilian" nuclear program and a military one?

In the very first footnote the authors of the NIE explain: "For the purposes of this Estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is out, but I'll leave the serious analysis to Thomas Joscelyn, who should have something up in this space shortly. Still I think it's worth pointing out how ridiculous some of the claims being made about the NIE process are, almost all of which tie back to Gareth Porter. We've documented some of Porter's BS stories here in the past, and the description of Porter's employer, IPS, is a dead give away that their work product isn't news, but activism--they describe themselves as "civil society's leading news agency, [...] an independent voice from the South and for development, delving into globalisation for the stories underneath.”

Still, this quote from a November 8 story by Porter has been linked by numerous bloggers, including Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly and Bradford Plumer at the New Republic. Here's the bit that seems to be of interest to the left:

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Again, Porter has no source with first-hand knowledge of any of this. He's playing a game of whisper down the lane, if he's to be believed at all, same as he did when he reported that Admiral Fallon had called General Petraeus "an ass-kissing little chicken-shit" based not on sources familiar with the meeting but "familiar with reports of the meeting.” And, of course, Porter's reporting totally missed the mark again this time. These weren't "dissenting judgments" at all, they were the reports "primary conclusions" as Drum notes, and the administration has released the estimate--contrary to Porter's earlier reporting. If Porter actually knows anyone familiar with the current NIE process, it doesn't show.

Glenn Greenwald has been waging his own little war against Time columnist Joe Klein for more than a week now owing to what Greenwald says was a "factually false" description of the FISA legislation in the House in Klein's latest piece.

According to Greenwald, the error lies in Klein's claim that the bill "require[s] the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." Klein responded to Greenwald here, but apparently didn't go far enough to satisfy his critics, and it's been back and forth for a few days now. Klein allowed that he might have misinterpreted the Democratic position, and "If I did, a correction will appear in the print magazine next week. This only got him into more trouble with his friends on the left, ultimately leading to this gem from Klein:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right.

Klein, not content to stop digging after five updates (remind you of anyone?), would later add after that sentence, "(ADD: about this minor detail of a bill that will never find its way out of the Congress)."

Kos himself has since joined the pile on, here, and now Greenwald has kicked it up a notch, teaming up with the "tenacious" Jane Hamsher to go after Klein's editor.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous, but, like a battle between the Giants and Cowboys, it's fun to watch and root for injuries.

Osama bin Laden escorted by the Black Guard. Click image to view.

Since September 11, the whereabouts of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been fodder for the rumor mill. Bin Laden sightings pop up now and then, but the rumors have never been substantiated. Since bin Laden fled the fighting in Tora Bora in 2001, U.S. intelligence has had few leads to follow up on. But bin Laden is widely believed to be operating in Pakistan’s rugged tribal regions of the Northwest Frontier Province.

The latest rumor comes from Ahmad Farooq, a Pakistani Pashtun Taliban fighter, who claimed to have last seen bin Laden in the Chitral district of the Northwest Frontier Province in September of 2003. Farooq’s story cannot be substantiated, but he claimed bin Laden traveled with a small detachment of bodyguards and spent time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and China. Adnkronos International reports:

Ahmad Farooq, a Pakistani Pashtun has told the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, that bin Laden had been moving from village to village in the area from Chitral to the "corridor of Waqan", the mountainous Hindu Kush region of Pakistan bordering Tajikstan and China.

Farooq told the Italian daily's magazine, that bin Laden was surrounded by about 20 armed men and he moved whenever he felt particularly threatened. "There are always 20 armed men with him, free from satellite telephones so that they did not risk detection by the Americans," he told the newspaper. "Not far from him there are two other similar groups that move in parallel. Osama passes from one to the other often many times in a week. No-one knows which group he is with at any time."

Farooq said bin Laden had also managed to hide in the Pakistan-China border area of Karakorum, an uninhabited remote area, because it is guarded by Chinese troops.

"He lives like a monk," Farooq said. "His health is not good. He is 50 years old. But he looks much older. He relies continutally on medicine for his weak kidneys and has a breathing apparatus. He almost died a few years ago from bronchitis that developed into pneumonia."

Farooq gave many details about where bin Laden had been since September 11 2001 - hiding in the Afghan province of Khost until it became too dangerous for him. Then, he said, the al-Qaeda leader moved to the Chitral region, in northern Pakistan.

"I saw him for the last time on 17 September 2003 not far from Dir, my village, " he said. "His caravan was moving slowly. They told me he was not well. They didn't seem worried about being detected by the Americans.

"Instead, they were looking for medicines and a warm place for the night. In that area winter arrives early. With the first snow fall the passes are closed at more than 4,000 metres and you have to wait for spring. I think they only went to China in summer, when the paths are clear."

A senior official from NATO's security services told the Italian daily's magazine such an account of bin Laden's activities was "quite possible". He said "We believe he remained in the mountains in the zones of Chitral and Swat. The detail about China was however new."

Again, Farooq’s story cannot be substantiated, but it does track with a slew of rumors about bin Laden during the same time period. His health has been a constant issue of debate. At the time bin Laden was believed to have be ‘living in caves’ and on the run. Due to bin Laden’s failure to appear in video or audio propaganda during the time, some believed he was gravely ill or even dead.

An interesting part of Farooq’s story is the composition of bin Laden’s personal bodyguard. If Farooq’s story is true, at some point between September 2003 and March of 2005, bin Laden’s personal bodyguard, known as the Black Guard, changed its protection scheme. The Christian Science Monitor reported in March 2005 that bin Laden’s security detail provided a sophisticated level of protection.

Was it really less than a month ago that House leaders tried to pass a deeply flawed rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by running roughshod over the opposition? As we covered at the time, the House leadership version of FISA actually makes it harder to conduct surveillance of terrorists in a number of ways. For example, it requires a court order for surveillance any time a call might involve an American. Since we do not know who a terrorist may call in advance, it essentially requires a court order to target foreigners overseas.

It also subjects military intelligence to FISA--so our forces in Iraq, for example, would require a court order before being permitted to listen in on communications by suspected terrorists. It would also require intelligence agencies to compile a database of U.S. citizens potentially involved in targeted communications.

Observers of this debate will recall that when the Democrats tried to ram the bill through with no debate last month, they were stymied by a proposed 'motion to recommit' that would have said that nothing in the bill would prevent the United States 'from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization…from attacking the United States.' Democrats complained both that the bill already contained this protection, and that they had to vote against it--which would have effectively killed the bill.

What have the Democrats learned from this experience? Not much. They have again brought their flawed FISA bill to the floor. They have not amended the bill to correct the problems it creates for intelligence agencies and they have again moved to block all amendments. The sole move they have made to ensure that this debate goes better than the first is to press all Democrats to vote against the GOP motion--no matter what it says.

We'll find out tonight whether this works any better for them than it did the last time.

Max Boot has just published an interesting item at the Commentary blog highlighting a new paper by two of our favorite neocons, Reuel Gerecht and Gary Schmitt, titled "France: Europe's Counterterrorist Powerhouse." Schmitt and Gerecht write that "of the things the French do well--and perhaps the hardest thing for Americans to appreciate, let alone adopt--is granting highly intrusive powers to their internal security service." But the authors indicate that American reluctance to adopt such methods may be, at least in part, misguided, despite their own distaste for "some French counterterrorism practices--such as the government's ability to jail French citizens without sufficient grounds for actually taking them to court."

Schmitt and Gerecht conclude:

President Bush has used his power as commander in chief to its fullest. And while his political opponents and a few judges criticize the use of that power, for the most part, Americans have not reacted in a manner that suggests that they see a darkening, dangerous shadow over their personal liberties. Similarly, since 1986, when French domestic counterterrorism became much more intrusive--when Judge Bruguière's distinctly un-Anglo-Saxon mission began--France has not gone down the slippery slope into tyranny. France's society, its politics, and many of its laws have actually become much more liberal and open.

So, on the one hand, the French, for all their self-righteous talk about American human rights abuses in war on terror, seem to have have far less regard for the rights of their own citizens than does the Bush administration for its. And yet, at the same time, neither has France become a police state. Quite the opposite, it's laws have become "much more liberal and open." So if Schmitt and Gerecht advocate a more European--a more French--approach to counterterrorism, where does that leave the American left?

The Hill reports that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has announced that the House is not likely to vote on FISA 'anytime soon,' apparently waiting to see how the Senate handles the issue:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) has postponed a vote to amend the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for at least a week, and a Hoyer aide told The Hill there was no indication the bill would go back to the floor “anytime soon...”

Hoyer’s spokeswoman also denied that House Democratic leaders were waiting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will start its markup of the bill’s Senate version Wednesday.

The Senate Intelligence panel has passed a FISA rewrite that includes limited retroactive immunity for telecommunications firms that cooperated with the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. Many Democrats oppose that provision, which is not in the House bill, and some on the Senate Judiciary panel may try to change or strip that language...

“Nothing’s new. Democratic leadership is still in limbo,” said Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.). “The best thing to do is to have a solid bill, not the bill the Democrats cobbled together. That was a mess.”

When asked whether she had heard that Democratic leaders were having trouble with gathering the votes on the measure, especially from conservative freshmen and Blue Dog Democrats, Wilson said, “That would make sense.”

Wilson is quite right. Whether out of conviction or political survival instincts, the Blue Dogs have been reluctant to vote for the leadership bill, which would afford terrorists significantly more protections than they have under current law. The Democratic leadership seems frustrated that they cannot find a way to force them to support such a measure--for now, at least.

For an excellent assessment of just how irresponsible the Democratic leadership position is, check out this piece from Gary Schmitt in this week's issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD:

In a perfect (or just more reasonable) world, the House and Senate Intelligence committees would start over. Constantly trying to amend FISA presumes that FISA's underlying structure (with its secret court of review) and its standard for issuing warrants ("probable cause") are worth preserving. We might remember our own system of separation of powers while picking up a thing or two from our European allies. Searches, electronic or otherwise, should be "reasonably" connected to the government's legitimate function of protecting us from terrorist attacks...

Read the whole thing.

The last part of the piece from the Hill drips with irony, by the way. We covered here the problems that Democrats created for themselves when they shut Republicans out of the process completely. Not having learned from the experience, it seems Democrats may try it again:

Democrats were mum about which tactics they may use to curtail other possible motions by Republicans, who vehemently opposed the bill’s closed rule. But when asked whether the Rules Committee may tweak the rule to limit Republican input on the floor, panel member Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) smiled and said: “We are aware of the options.”

Rather than hinting at another attempt to ram this through with no amendments, Hastings may be referring to an another attempt on the part of House Democrats to change the rules of the House completely to deny minority rights.

Over at his new blog "connecting the dots," Gabriel Schoenfeld--who is always a "must read" when it comes to intelligence matters--is discussing Kenneth Timmerman’s new book, Shadow Warriors. I have not yet read Timmerman’s book, but Schoenfeld is discussing one of Timmerman’s claims that I have looked into--that is, I’ve tried to look into it as much as I can. According to Schoenfeld, Timmerman writes that "to this day, the CIA has no spies in Iran" and he attributes this claim to "numerous agency insiders and other sources."

Schoenfeld points out that if the CIA did have spies inside Iran, Langley would have an incentive to tell journalists like Timmerman that they didn’t. It is a fair point. The Agency certainly does have a strong incentive to protect its most important sources. Despite his "distrust" of Timmerman’s account, Schoenfeld says his "best guess, knowing a bit about CIA difficulties in recruiting human sources, is that his claim about the agency’s non-coverage of Iran is accurate."

I am also inclined to believe Timmerman is right. Here’s why.

In 2006, Chris Wallace of Fox News interviewed Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Hoekstra was asked what we know about Iran’s nuclear program:

WALLACE: Congressman, how close is Iran to actually developing a nuclear weapon, or don't we really know?

HOEKSTRA: I'd say we really don't know. We're getting lots of mixed messages. Obviously, we're getting lots of different messages from their leadership, the stuff that they are saying in public.

It all points out the fact we need to do much better in rebuilding our intelligence community, reshaping it, transforming it, making sure that we give public policy--that we give policymakers the information that they need so that we can make better decisions.

We've got a long way to go in rebuilding our intelligence community. We're focused on this in a bipartisan basis, and we're going to keep trying to build the intelligence community that we outlined in the reform bill that we passed a couple of years ago.

WALLACE: But, Chairman Hoekstra, I mean, almost everyone agrees this is the major foreign policy issue or challenge facing this country today, and you're saying we really don't know what's going on in Tehran?

HOEKSTRA: Hey, sometimes it's better to be honest and to say there's a whole lot we don't know about Iran that I wish we did know, and we as public policymakers need to know that as we're moving forward and as decisions are being made on Iran, we don't have all of the information that we would like to have.
And that's nothing more than being honest, being honest with the American people of saying in some of this stuff, we wish we had the information, but right now we don't.

During the same session, Wallace also interviewed Jane Harman, Hoekstra’s Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee. Harman concurred with Hoekstra: "We don't know. Our intelligence is thin. I don't think we have enough sources. I don't think our analysis is sharp enough."

Is it possible that the CIA hid its sources inside Iran from the senior ranking Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, so much so that they went on television warning that we didn’t have any real significant intel inside Iran? Maybe, but that certainly isn’t likely. You could argue that Hoekstra and Harman did not say that the CIA had no spies at all inside Iran, which is Timmerman’s claim. That’s true, but their statements leave us in the same place--the U.S. intelligence community is blind when it comes to Iran.

It's a good thing Congressional Democrats didn't wait until the last minute to begin figuring out how to revise and renew FISA. It's clear that it's a very divisive process for them.

Senator Kit Bond--the senior Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee--held a conference call yesterday with some bloggers interested in the FISA debate. Bond pointed out the recklessness and poor logic of the House's approach to FISA.

The bill that the House failed to vote on last week allows U.S. intelligence agencies only to listen in on calls that they know to be from one foreign terrorist to another foreign terrorist--a very small subset of all threatening communications. But because it's almost impossible to predict in advance who a target will call, most surveillance requires a warrant under the Democratic approach. As a result, the judges who grant FISA warrants face a huge backlog of applications and U.S. surveillance is forced to 'go dark.

When asked about Senator Dodd's promise to put a hold on the legislation, Bond noted that as of the time of the call, Dodd had not yet placed a hold. And he also commented that Dodd 'must be spending too much time on the campaign trail' and he 'doesn't know what he's talking about.' Bond had insight into how Democrats would tackle the issue.

Roll Call reports this morning that Congressional Democrats don't know what they'll do on FISA, either. The House is trying to figure out how to pass a bill without empowering the majority--who favor a strong FISA bill--to get their way:

Another option would restyle the GOP’s amendment as a stand-alone bill that would be moved to the House floor under suspension of the rules, limiting debate on the measure but requiring a two-thirds majority to pass. That plan would allow Members to effectively vote in support of the amendment before voting against it.

So Democrats may consider a procedure that allows the majority in favor of strong surveillance get a straight up-or-down vote, but then render that vote meaningless by requiring a supermajority to pass their bill. For a party that constantly claims to be in touch with the majority of Americans, this is high irony.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are similarly unsure about their plan:

Glenn Greenwald is up in arms (what else is new?) over the fact that the Senate has moved to protect telecom companies from lawsuits related to their cooperation with the federal government in domestic surveillance. The Washington Post reports on the measure:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources. . . .

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, noted conservative wingnut John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

Greenwald's gripe is that "the question of whether the telecoms acted in 'good faith' in allowing warrantless government spying on their customers is already pending before a court of law." As to why the Senate is acting to protect the companies, Greenwald says that what we're seeing is that "the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in Washington can literally buy their way out of lawbreaking."

Two points. First, Greenwald's attack rests on his predictable presumption that the president, the telecoms, and now the Senate, have all acted in bad faith. Without exception, everyone who doesn't agree with Greenwald necessarily acts in bad faith. Except this isn't a matter of law--as a standard of behavior, good faith is subjective. The Congress makes the laws, the courts interpret them. In this case, a Democratic Senate and a Republican president have agreed that these companies acted in good faith and should therefore be granted immunity. What the court's have ruled, or would rule, is irrelevant.

And second, if federal agents show up at a corporate headquarters for a major American company and urgently seek that company's officers for assistance in the war on terror, the companies damn well ought to give it as a matter of simple patriotism, whether the CIA wants a plane for some extraordinary rendition or help in tracking terrorists via email. The companies affected by the new draft Senate bill acted in the interests of their country when they decided to comply with the government's requests. If the requests were inappropriate, that's another matter, but to expect a company to resist a plea from the government for help in a time of war is ridiculous. To subject them to the whimsy of our judicial system would be outrageous.

As an act of "good faith," the government has no choice but to deny a bunch of litigious lefties the chance to sue over a decision that any reasonable American would have made.

Update: So Senator Dodd has placed a hold on the bill, and Glenn Greenwald is actually asking readers, in Update XXVI, to "reward his superb actions with a contribution here [link to Chris Dodd for President]." This is the first time I've ever gotten to the end of a Gleen Greenwald post, so for all I know soliciting political contributions is routine at Salon, but doesn't "good faith" journalism, at a bare minimum, require the pretense of objectivity?

So thanks to Eric Cantor's shrewd parliamentary maneuver, House Democrats have been forced to defer a vote on terrorist surveillance legislation. The debate is on over who was playing politics--but Democrats give the game away by admitting they may be forced to allow debate on amendments.

Look at how we arrived where we are today:

• The House voted on FISA a little over two months ago and passed a short-term extension by a bipartisan vote.

• Democrats insisted that the extension be short-term so that they would have the opportunity to come back and revise the law.

• When it came time to vote on a long-term extension, Congressional Democratic leaders shut Republicans out of the drafting process. Regarding the process, House Republicans had this to say:

  It does not reflect discussions between the majority and the minority, or discussions the Committee has had with the Administration. It is also important to note that the minority was not consulted on specific text before introduction of the bill, and did not receive the final text of H.R. 3773 until twenty-four hours before the markup. In the brief period we had to review the legislation before Committee consideration, we uncovered numerous, serious problems rendering this bill beyond repair.

• When the time came to vote on the bill--which rejected the policy established by a bipartisan majority a few months ago, and which excluded all Republican input--Democrats acted in almost unprecedented fashion to shut down all debate on the House floor and forbid national security advocates from influencing the debate.

Perhaps most amusing of all, when forced to explain why they blocked a floor debate, Democrats said it was important to move swiftly to reauthorize the law. Never mind that it was they who insisted the law expire quickly; if this was really their view then they would schedule a vote to extend the measure as is--since the votes were clearly there for such a measure.

Now, after this abuse of process and national security, what does the left say when Republicans use the one procedural opportunity afforded them to force Democrats to cast a difficult vote?

'They're not playing fair.'

Read the breathless explanations on the left--from DailyKos, ThinkProgress, TalkingPointsMemo. They all say the same thing: Cantor's motion-to-recommit was unfair because it called for a vote on something already in the bill, and some Democrats would have looked bad if they voted against it. It was 'trickery.' If that's the best argument they can come up with, Soros's money is being wasted.

Congressman Eric Cantor reports on his blog that House Democrats are stalling the FISA debate. According to Cantor, they don't know how to address the vote that House Republicans intend to force on whether or not intelligence agencies should be permitted to pursue Osama bin Laden and other terrorist organizations:

House Democrats are holding the FISA bill off the floor, scrambling to figure out how to respond. Why would they possibly want to avoid a vote that merely says we need to allow our intelligence agencies to keep America safe from terrorism?

Clearly the text of the Republican amendment--reproduced in this earlier post--should cause no concern. Presumably nothing in the Democratic legislation would bar U.S. intelligence agencies from 'conducting surveillance' needed to protect the U.S. from terrorist attack. Nevertheless, House Democratic leaders are currently trying to decide on the 'right' vote before coaching their members to cast it.

Not many people are familiar with the House Rules Committee, or why it has so much power to determine what legislation passes the House. Simply put, the Committee sets the terms for debate of all significant legislation--how long a bill is debated, who may offer amendments, what amendments may be offered, etc. Before a bill goes to the House floor, the Committee meets to review amendments, hear testimony from interested parties, and discuss how to structure the floor debate.

Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter did something unusual however, in the hearing on legislation to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--she announced at the start of the hearing that no amendments of any type would be allowed for debate. Committee Democrats followed Slaughter's lead and voted against amendments to: authorize surveillance of those engaged in the creation of Weapons of Mass Destruction; authorize surveillance of foreign terrorists outside the United States; extend liability protection to telecommunications companies that relied on government directives and shared information deemed necessary for protection from terrorist attack; and, allow a debate on the Bush administration's alternative.

This is a reckless way to handle national security. House Democrats have once again shut Republicans out of the debate completely (as they did just yesterday in debate on the Internet Tax Freedom Act). They've used their position of power to give terrorists working with WMD a 'grace period' while U.S. intelligence agencies go to court for permission to tap them. They've abused the process to preserve the fatal flaws in their own bill:

• The Democratic bill specifically requires a court order to monitor conversations between terrorists abroad and people in the United States. So if Osama bin Laden called an al Qaeda cell in the United States, the intelligence community could not listen to the communication without a court order.

• It imposes FISA requirements on the US military--creating a perverse situation where it's easier to kill a suspected terrorist than monitor his calls.

• It creates a database of U.S. citizens suspected to be terrorists--a database that must be shared across agencies and with (notoriously leaky) members of Congress and their staffs.

• In specifically denying protection to telecommunications companies, it exposes those companies to lawsuits and creates a strong incentive for them not to cooperate with future surveillance activities.

House Democrats are shutting down debate to ram through a bill that will ensure repeats of episodes like this one, where U.S. soldiers in Iraq had to wait for hours to search for a missing comrade, while lawyers in Washington prepared a legal brief:

In the early hours of May 12, seven U.S. soldiers--including Spc. Jimenez--were on lookout near a patrol base in the al Qaeda-controlled area of Iraq called the "Triangle of Death."

Sometime before dawn, heavily armed al Qaeda gunmen quietly cut through the tangles of concertina wire surrounding the outpost of two Humvees and made a massive and coordinated surprise attack.

Four of the soldiers were killed on the spot and three others were taken hostage.

A search to rescue the men was quickly launched. But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers - obeying strict U.S. laws about surveillance - cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.

Starting at 10 a.m. on May 15, according to a timeline provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence, lawyers for the National Security Agency met and determined that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.

For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the "probable cause" necessary for the attorney general to grant such "emergency" permission.

Finally, approval was granted and, at 7:38 that night, surveillance began.

And here's the $64,000 question: why are Democrats closing down all debate? Because they know a majority of the House is against the Democratic leadership on this and other security issues. When the House approved a temporary extension of FISA that was consistent with White House recommendations, 41 Democrats voted with nearly all House Republicans to pass a strong bipartisan bill. Democratic leaders couldn't allow that to happen again.

We can only hope that the Members of the Rules Committee who imposed this reckless plan to shield terrorists face stiff questions from their constituents. Those members are Jim McGovern (D-MA), Alcee Hastings (D-FL), Doris Matsui (D-CA), Dennis Cardoza (D-CA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Kathy Castor (D-FL), Michael Arcuri (D-NY), and Louise Slaughter (D-NY).

UPDATE: House rules preserve the right of the minority to offer one 'motion to recommit' the bill. When that vote comes up, Republicans will call for a vote on whether to amend the bill to include the following simple language:

Nothing in this Act [H.R. 3773] or the amendments made by this Act shall be construed to prohibit the intelligence community (as defined in section 3(4) of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 401a(4))) from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization designated under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189) from attacking the United States or any United States person.

Do Democrats really want to go on the record shielding terrorists? This vote will give them that chance.

The web is buzzing with news this morning that the latest video of Osama bin Laden was possibly leaked by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community to the media. That leak reportedly led al Qaeda to shut down a hole in its Internet infrastructure, called "Obelisk," thereby closing a fruitful window into the terror organization’s web activities. The New York Sun’s Eli Lake and the Washington Post are both reporting on this unfortunate development this morning.

Much of the attention thus far has focused on the damage done to our national security--and rightfully so. But there is potentially another twist to this. According to Lake’s account, the SITE Institute first provided the video and a transcript of it to the National Counterterrorism Center. Here is how Lake’s report explains it:

The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.

Ms. Katz yesterday said, "We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies."

This means that a small, private firm got its hands on the latest missive from Osama bin Laden before the federal government did. Think about that. The U.S. Government spends billions of dollars each year tracking the al Qaeda threat. And yet, a comparatively small, independent, and private firm got their hands bin Laden’s latest message first. What does that say about the need for reform with the U.S. intelligence community?

In the Washington Post’s account, intelligence officials recognized that this aspect of the story may make them look bad:

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

So, although he emphasized that the U.S. intelligence community is diligently doing the same type of work as SITE, the DNI’s spokesman did not refute that SITE had first brought this tape to their attention. And other anonymous spooks confirmed that SITE is "tremendously helpful" in exposing al Qaeda’s secrets. Therefore, it does appear that the tape was first uncovered by SITE. In Lake’s account, U.S. intelligence officials claim that no one in the intelligence community leaked the tape. So, thus far, the only material issue at dispute appears to be who leaked the tape and the SITE folks are convinced it was someone in the government.

The bottom line so far then is: SITE beat the federal government to the punch in uncovering this latest bin Laden tape and while SITE managed to protect the source of the tape, the intelligence community allegedly did not.

And as Rita Katz, SITE’s founder, told the Washington Post: "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless."

Over the weekend, David Ignatius wrote a love letter to the CIA praising the agency for its prescient analysis of the problems this country would face in Iraq. Ignatius writes:

The estimates were circulated in January 2003. You don't have to take my word or Pillar's for what they said: They are posted on the Web site of the Senate intelligence committee. They make haunting reading now, to put it mildly -- because nearly every setback we have seen in Iraq was forecast by Pillar and the analysts in their effort to break through the administration's happy talk.

The opening paragraph of the estimate on "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" made this stark prediction: "The building of an Iraqi democracy would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process, with potential for backsliding into Iraq's tradition of authoritarianism." The next paragraph warned more explicitly that "a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict."

The second estimate, on "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq," rightly warned that an invasion could spawn more Muslim terrorism, rather than less. Here's how Pillar and the analysts summarized the danger on the first page: "A U.S.-led war against and occupation of Iraq would boost political Islam and increase popular sympathy for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short term."

Gary Schmitt dissected these estimates in THE WEEKLY STANDARD this summer. How about that backsliding?

Certainly, it is true that establishing democracy in Iraq will take time. That said, it actually hasn't been the case that Iraqis have spurned democracy. Given how beaten down civil society and politics were by the Baathist regime, and how extreme the security problems facing Iraqis since Saddam's removal have been, the democratic process has been surprisingly resilient. There has been little or no "backsliding into Iraq's tradition of authoritarianism," as the NIC suggested might happen.

And Iraq's deeply divided society...

Finally, the headline news from the report was the supposed prediction by the intelligence community that sectarian violence would erupt in the wake of a U.S. invasion, Shiites would engage in bloody reprisals against Sunnis, and the dead-enders from Saddam's regime would turn to guerrilla war. Yet, as the NIC analysis also notes, this "violent conflict" between Iraqi groups would occur "unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."

In short, the sectarian killings we have seen over the past year were not inevitable. To the contrary, until the al Qaeda attack on the Shia mosque in Samara in early 2006, it was quite striking how little Shias struck back at the Iraqi Sunni community. And contrary to the potential bloody "score-settling" predicted by the NIC in the wake of Saddam's fall, the Shia, under the leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, kept sectarian violence to a minimum.

There's a lot more in Schmitt's piece, but the bottom line is that the two NIEs that prompt Ignatius to gush about the CIA's foresight are, in fact, almost entirely worthless. On the upside, Ignatius's sources at the CIA must have been very pleased with his effort to rehabilitate the agency's reputation.

Last Thursday, Beijing announced the appointment of five new cabinet ministers. The personnel reshuffle came just ahead of the 17th party congress, scheduled to convene on October 15. The all-important gathering will set China’s policy agenda for the next five years.

One of the five appointments is the new minister of state security, Geng Huichang. Official Chinese media have provided scant information on Geng, other than that the 56-year-old native of Hebei province had served as a vice minister of state security before the promotion.

Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily, in a report titled "Under Geng Huichang, the Ministry of State Security Is to Strengthen Intelligence Work on the U.S. and Japan," describes Geng as "an expert on America and Japan" who once headed the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a think tank that falls under the jurisdiction of the eighth bureau of the Ministry of State Security. In the same article, Geng is characterized by his colleagues as an academic who is "discreet in conduct and prudent in speech."

In a 2003 op-ed published in the Tribune, former Indian prime minister I.K. Gujral recounted how during a 1993 visit to Beijing he learned that, under the leadership of Professor Geng Huichang, South Asia specialists at CICIR were devoting their energies to the study of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia--a full eight years before the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States.

Geng, co-author of an article titled "America’s New Right-Wing Movement," is also described by observers in Hong Kong as an expert on commercial intelligence who delivered a lecture this past February on ways to protect and obtain commercial secrets. His appointment as China’s intelligence chief is seen as a signal that Beijing is set to step up economic espionage activities in the United States.

Geng’s appointment came less than two months after a controversial FBI advertisement appeared in three Chinese-language newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area soliciting assistance in counter-intelligence from the Chinese American community. Mentioning the Chinese Ministry of State Security by name, the ad ran from July 2nd to July 8th:

The FBI has many responsibilities. One of these is to protect our domestic security and civil rights. Chinese living here have often helped the FBI prevent subversive elements from penetrating and harming our country. In order to protect our freedom and democracy, we continue to seek your assistance. We would like to speak with individuals who have information about any intelligence service whose intent is to harm the U.S. We especially welcome anyone who has information about the Chinese Ministry of State Security to contact our office…

Beijing expressed indignation over the ad's "cold war mentality."

Separately, some Chinese Americans in this country found the ad’s message troubling. In response to queries from the Chinese American community, the FBI issued a press release on July 9th stating that it "is not asking members of the Chinese community to spy on one another or to spy on the Chinese government."

Chinese media reported in detail on the content of the original ad and the subsequent clarification by the FBI, and there has been much heated discussion in Chinese cyberspace about the subject.

The FBI links Beijing to roughly one-third of all economic espionage cases in the U.S. and has more than doubled the number of agents assigned to counter Chinese spying activities since 2001. The appointment of Geng as China’s new intelligence chief may signal a need for even greater vigilance by the FBI.

One of the lessons of 9/11 is the danger of 'stovepiping' in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It's not enough for agencies to collect the data they need to piece together and disrupt a plot; the analysts who 'own' those critical nuggets must be able to find others with relevant information and piece it together. Recognizing this problem, the 9/11 commission recommended that new networks be created to facilitate the sharing of data across agencies.

The New York Times described the problem last year:

The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink — the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network — the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands — used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog — that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

The intelligence community now seems eager to catch-up to the private sector. It has created Intellipedia, blogs, and now a 'MySpace'-type system in order to boost the sharing of information:

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of “MySpace for analysts” – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community. He says the technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.

“Burying the same number of analysts in ever higher piles of hay would no more increase the number of needles,” says Mr Fingar...

A-Space will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user just like Amazon suggests books to its customers. The site will also allow users to create and modify documents, and determine user privileges, in a similar fashion to Google Documents.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra, Ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, spoke with me on a break from his annual August bike tour of his Congressional district (pictures from the 2006 tour are on Mr. Hoekstra's website here).

Hoekstra said that he's encouraged to see the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly experiment with new models for information sharing after showing little interest at the onset. He credits DCI McConnell for 'taking the ball and running with it,' when it comes to improving the ability of his team to share information. Hoekstra says that Admiral McConnell clearly means to do more than just "keep the seat warm" until the end of the Bush administration, but to "build an intelligence community to keep America safe."

Hoekstra didn't express an opinion as to whether one or more of these new applications would prove revolutionary, or even beneficial, in improving the security of America and American interests. But he expressed an eagerness to see how they turn out, and, given the community's past failures, we suspect there's nowhere to go but up.

One of the last things Congress did before adjourning for the August recess was to pass the Protect America Act, which clarifies the authority of the Executive Branch to intercept without a court order the communications of suspected terrorists who are foreign nationals, located abroad. It represents nothing more than the preservation of the original effect of FISA, updated to reflect changing technology. The legislation lasts just 6 months, which means Congress must quickly consider a longer extension.

As Rob Bluey has pointed out, the left is hard at work concocting a fiction about politicization of the issue. They ignore the fact that Democrats knew of the problem for months and chose not to act, they pulled the rug out from under Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell when he was slated to testify about it, and once again drafted a 'Democrats-only' solution with no Republican inputl--which ultimately forced them to pass a Republican alternative rather than a bipartisan response.

In the weeks since passage, the Democratic base has focused much of its anger on the Democrats who supported the measure. The Post's EJ Dionne talked about why the Democratic leadership caved. The Huffington Post asks whether we are a country 'that allows fear and vague threats to browbeat our leaders' into passing laws that 'violate our Constitution.' And Markos "Screw Them" Moulitsas called the Democrats who had voted for the measure "cowards."

Of the 41 House Democrats who voted for the FISA extension, 13 are so-called 'majority makers'--Democratic freshmen who flipped GOP seats to the Democratic column. At DailyKos, there's talk of lining up primary opponents for to challenge those Democrats who sit in safe seats. And Soren Dayton finds others on the left who want to go further. He says they're getting ready to eat their own by choosing to fight on an issue where Democrats are split and independents side with the president:

Seventy-nine percent (79%) of Republicans believe that allowing the government to intercept such calls makes the nation safer. Forty-eight percent (48%) of Democrats agree along with 53% of those not affiliated voters.

This looks like a no-win situation for Democrats, but the party's base is unwilling to accept a continuation of the status quo--which they believe puts too much power in the hands of an administration they do not trust. There's a great deal of pressure on Congressional Democrats to create a new requirement for court orders, which will significantly undermine the ability of our intelligence agencies to discover and prevent attacks planned against the U.S.. And because the 'fix' passed by Congress lasts just a few months, Democrats will be forced to take up the issue again in the heightened atmosphere of a presidential race.

In the latest edition of CQ Radio, Ed Morrissey hosts Representative Pete Hoekstra, the Ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and a strong proponent of updating FISA. The interview is extremely illuminating. Go have a listen.

Democrats in Congress reacted quickly to the request by the Bush administration for clarification of their authority to listen in on the communications of foreign terrorists located abroad, passing legislation to modernize FISA. President Bush has since signed the measure into law.

But while Democrats acted quickly to schedule this legislation for consideration in both the House and Senate, the party's base wasn't nearly so enthusiastic. A writer at the DailyKos, for example, seems pretty angry about the move--and not just at the 57 Democrats in the House and Senate who voted for the bill:

Unfortunately, you 57 are not the only Democrats at fault for enabling these unconstitutional abuses. Party leaders bear responsibility for not playing hardball. For not using every technique and every bit of clout at their command to at least attempt to block amendments like this atrocity from becoming law. You leaders don’t have to explain about the paper-thin majority. You don’t have point out that it’s important to choose your fights. Understood. But this isn’t about corn subsidies, or earmarks or resolutions establishing Soap Carvers of America Day. Constitutional protections are at stake. Most people won’t blame you for losing if you put up a good fight. But how can you expect to avoid blame when you don’t?

It's essential that the president have the requisite tools to conduct surveillance on terrorists plotting to harm Americans and American interests. It's therefore heartening to recognize that Congressional leaders again lacked the courage of their convictions in opposition to the program. That said, Speaker Pelosi will have to do better to try to convince her base that she's going to 'fix' the program whose passage she just expedited:

Barely an hour after the House voted, 227-183, to clear the legislation (S 1927) late Aug. 4, Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a letter calling on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees to “send to the House, as soon as possible after Congress reconvenes, legislation which responds comprehensively to the administration’s proposal while addressing the many deficiencies in S 1927.” The legislation expires in February.

The pandering here is plain. Congress is out of session until September, at which time debate will resume in earnest on Iraq and the appropriations bills that fund the government. By the time those fights are over, the Thanksgiving and Christmas recesses will arrive. The president will veto any changes, and House and Senate Republicans show little inclination to oppose him on this measure. A reasonable person would conclude that the Speaker's letter is for show, and will be forgotten relatively quickly.

Ed Morrissey analyzes the stance of the Congressional leadership pretty accurately.

We've written on the case of John Murtha's clandestine pork-barrel projects before. Now CNN is taking a closer look at the project in Murtha's district--the National Drug Intelligence Center--that was recently funded by the House Intelligence Committee in violation of House rules.

Lest there be any doubt about the value of the NDIC , CNN uncovered a GAO report from 1993 that found the Center's work was already being done by 19 other federal agencies. The report says that "law enforcement officials... have questioned the NDIC's management structure while some are unclear on its mission." OMB requested that the agency be shut down in 2005, but Murtha has kept the Center open through Congressional earmarks.

One would think that even though House Democrats have canceled the war on terror, the intelligence committee might still find better ways to spend our tax dollars.

My colleague Mike Goldfarb noted yesterday that House Democrats were preparing to pass an intelligence authorization bill that directs the CIA not to get bogged down on things like the war on terror, but instead to focus on global warming. It was only later that we--and opponents of pork-barrel spending in Congress--became aware that the legislation had also been loaded up with 26 earmarks with a total cost of $100 million.

It's troubling that some of the earmarks were included at the request of Republicans, but it's also worth noting that the only effort to strip them was mounted by Republican reformers. Those include Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who went to the committee offices days before the vote to examine the pork-barrel items, but was unable to get explanations. Some earmarks were not properly disclosed (due to a GPO printing error, according to committee Democrats) and others were not on the list of earmarks included in the report accompanying the bill. When Congressman Flake moved to begin a secret session to discuss the matter, the majority voted him down.

Attracting the most attention was an earmark proposed by Congressman Murtha--$23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center, conveniently located in his district. Murtha argued that this would only bring the authorization for the project in line with its previously-approved $39 million appropriation. But, of course, Murtha is one of the most powerful Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. The president's request for the center was $16 million--the amount required to shut it down.

A highlight of this kerfuffle was an attempt by Republicans to raise a point of order, since not all earmarks were listed as required (under the new House rules enacted by Democrats). In this dense exchange, Democrats explain that a committee report need only claim to list all earmarks--not actually list them--in order to satisfy House rules. The relevant portion of the debate is around the 4:20 mark:

Speaker Pelosi asserted yesterday in debate on Iraq that "benchmarks without consequences and enforcement are meaningless." You could say the same about House rules. Why claim to require that earmarks are disclosed if you have no interest in ensuring that the disclosure is accurate?

Oh--and in case you're wondering, Democrats voted 230-185 against stripping the provision on global warming. Remember that when they complain that U.S. intelligence agencies aren't properly addressing their core mission

The CIA has a lot on its plate these days, mainly a global war on terror...oops, I mean "ongoing military operations throughout the world." Besides detecting terror plots, the agency must also provide policy makers with accurate and timely information on threats to proliferation, i.e. Iran, North Korea, Russia, etc. Add to that the ever increasing threat from China, and now, courtesy of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the director of Central Intelligence is also required to:

(1) assess the political, social, agricultural, and economic risks during the 30-year period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act posed by global climate change for countries or regions that are-- (A) of strategic national security importance to the United States and at risk of significant impact due to global climate change; or (B) at significant risk of large-scale humanitarian suffering with cross-border implications as predicted on the basis of the assessments; (2) assess the capabilities of the countries or regions described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) to respond to adverse national security impacts caused by global climate change; (3) assess the strategic challenges and opportunities posed to the United States by the risks described in paragraph (1); and (4) assess the impact of global climate change on the activities of the United States intelligence community throughout the world. (c) Coordination- In preparing the national intelligence estimate under this section, the Director of National Intelligence shall consult with representatives of the scientific community, and, as appropriate, multilateral institutions and allies of the United States that have conducted significant research on global climate change.

This according to Ares blogger Catherine MacRae Hockmuth, who also includes this reaction from the committee's Republicans:

The task of the intelligence community is to steal foreign secrets. Global climate change simply does not require clandestinely acquired, classified information or analysis. The United States is spending more than $6.5 billion in FY07 on global climate change. Thousands of reports have been paid for on global climate change across the U.S. government. Hundreds of universities and private organizations have written many more reports on climate change. This is not the time to force our intelligence professionals to waste scarce intelligence resources on trendy topics such as global warming for the purposes of `political correctness'.

Byron York writes on this over at NRO today:

Hoekstra and other Republicans worry that Democrats want to return intelligence policy to a time in the 1990s when the Clinton administration established what was known as the DCI Environmental Center within the CIA. The Center used satellite spying resources to track environmental matters. “They took pictures of volcanoes and sea turtle nests and took air samples of air pollution, as opposed to checking for traces of biological or chemical weapons, and it was all done at the behest of Al Gore,” says one Republican knowledgeable about intelligence affairs.

Former CIA director George Tenet mentions Gore’s environmental emphasis in his new book, At the Center of the Storm. “True to his interests, [Gore] had a fascination for wonkish issues,” Tenet writes. “He asked lots of questions about the impact on national security of water shortages, disease and environmental concerns.” Tenet reveals that some inside the CIA derided Gore’s priorities as “bugs and bunnies.”

“We started allocating precious intelligence resources to environmental issues just as al Qaeda was on the upswing,” says Rep. Hoekstra. “We were becoming politically correct. My fear is that we’re going back to the same place.”

“We started allocating precious intelligence resources to environmental issues just as al Qaeda was on the upswing,” says Rep. Hoekstra. “We were becoming politically correct. My fear is that we’re going back to the same place.”

Surely the DCI can find better ways to spend his time than worrying about "bugs and bunnies."

This post was written by DJ Elliott and has been cross-posted at The Fourth Rail. DJ is a retired US Navy Intelligence Specialist with 22 years of service, the primary author of the Iraqi Security Forces Order of Battle and co-author of the the Baghdad Security Operation Order of Battle .)

Most people do not realize that Chris and I were bouncing Order of Battle [OOB] data between each other for a year before the OOBs were finally published. I started my collection of data as a hobby to see just what the real status of the Iraqi Security Forces was since the published press reports were far off base and contradictory in their own stories. My principle motivations for my involvement in publishing these OOBs are somewhat contradictory. First, I wanted to get the principle operational security [OPSEC] violators to tighten their OPSEC. Second, I want to further an understanding of the development of the Iraqi Security Forces and the Baghdad Security Plan. As a retired intelligence analyst, I could not believe that the Public Affairs Officers [PAOs] and Commanders were releasing this much operational data in a time of war.

Since we started to publish the Iraqi Security Forces OOB and the Baghdad OOB, Bill has received the occasional complaint about the reports being a violation of OPSEC. The complainers continually miss the point.

The Order of Battles we have published are not OPSEC violations, they are reports of OPSEC violations. All of the data contained within the OOBs is available with a simple word search on the Internet and any intelligence operation worthy of its name already has the data in far greater detail than what we publish in these OOBs. Most of the information used to compile the OOB comes from the PAOs and senior officer briefs. By far, these are the source of the greatest OPSEC violations in this war.

Also since we started publishing these OOBs, the reported unit IDs have dropped by more than half. Some of the previous OPSEC violators have either rethought what they were doing or been "counseled". Good. The harder it is for the OOB to be updated the better I feel.

The worst OPSEC violator in the senior staffs is the Pentagon. I get more advance notice from a Pentagon Press Brief of US movements from Kuwait into Iraq than I get from all other sources combined. The Pentagon acts as if it is not at war, and the leaks emanating from Arlington are enormous.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith had a review of George Tenet's just released At the Center of the Storm in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. The piece is now publicly available at Feith's personal website, dougfeith.com.

Feith says that "the problem with George Tenet is that he doesn't seem to care to get his facts straight. He is not meticulous. He is willing to make up stories that suit his purposes and to suppress information that does not." With regard to Tenet's invented account of running into Richard Perle at the White House on the morning of September 12, 2001--which was first reported at THE DAILY STANDARD--Feith says that "the date, the physical descriptions, the quotation marks are all, in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado," 'merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.'"

In addition to the inaccuracies of Tenet's account, Feith notes several omissions, the significance of which he explains thusly:

I stress these omissions because Mr. Tenet is doing in his book just what my office had criticized the CIA for doing in its prewar analysis: omitting information that contradicts preconceived arguments. It's a form of cherry-picking, a charge that Mr. Tenet throws at others on several occasions.

Eventually, in a have-it-both-ways concession, Mr. Tenet explains that there actually was a "solid basis" for "concern" about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda with respect to "safe haven, contacts and training." He winds up confirming the essence of what the CIA's critics had said -- that there was worrisome information about Iraq's ties to al Qaeda that deserved to be presented to policy makers. But he never admits that those critics were correct. He doesn't even acknowledge that they acted in good faith.

Ultimately Feith accuses Tenet of writing a self-serving account of the run up to the Iraq war, in which Tenet himself was a major player, and to which he apparently had few objections at the time:

Mr. Tenet's point here builds on the book's much-publicized statements that the author never heard the president and his national-security team debate "the imminence of the Iraqi threat," whether or not it was "wise to go to war" or when the war should start. He paints a distorted picture here.

But even if it were true that he never heard any such debate and was seriously dissatisfied with the dialogue in the White House Situation Room, he had hundreds of opportunities to improve the discussion by asking questions or making comments. I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn't he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?

One of Mr. Tenet's main arguments is that he was somehow disconnected from the decision to go to war. Under the circumstances, it seems odd that he would call his book "At the Center of the Storm." He should have called it "At the Periphery of the Storm" or maybe: "Was That a Storm That Just Went By?"

This last criticism--that Tenet didn't speak up when it might have mattered, and that doing so now seems disingenuous and self-serving--has been echoed by commentators across the political spectrum. It might seem odd that both Arianna Huffington and Doug Feith were attacking George Tenet this week for, in Huffington's words, "portraying himself as a poor, hapless victim," but no one seems to find Tenet's version of events very credible, except Tenet.

One of the more interesting parts of George Tenet’s new book is his discussion of al Qaeda’s attempts to acquire a nuclear weapon and other weapons of mass destruction. It has long been known that al Qaeda seeks the capability to inflict mass casualties with a WMD attack. But Tenet offers new details that are disconcerting, to say the least. For example, consider this passage:

From the end of 2002 to the spring of 2003, we received a stream of reliable reporting that the senior al-Qa'ida leadership in Saudi Arabia was negotiating for the purchase of three Russian nuclear devices. Saudi al-Qa'ida chief Abu Bakr related the offer directly to the al-Qa'ida leadership in Iran, where Sayf al-Adl and Abdel al-Aziz al-Masri (described as al-Qa'ida's 'nuclear chief' by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) were reportedly being held under a loose form of house arrest by the Iranian regime. The al-Qa'ida leadership had obviously learned much from their ventures into the nuclear market in the early 1990s. Sayf al-Adl told Abu Bakr that no price was too high to pay if they could get their hands on such weapons. However, he cautioned Abu Bakr that al-Qa'ida had been stung by scams in the past and that Pakistani specialists should be brought to Saudi Arabia to inspect the merchandise prior to purchase.

Tenet repeats a common explanation offered for al Qaeda’s presence in Iran: the terrorists are supposedly under a “loose form of house arrest.” But how meaningful is this “detention” if they are openly discussing the acquisition of nuclear weapons? Obviously, it is not very meaningful at all. This should raise a host of questions about the relationship between the Iranian regime and al Qaeda, but Tenet is uninterested.

Tenet does not mention that Sayf al-Adl--one of the terrorists pursuing a nuke while under “house arrest”--has been working with the Iranians and Hezbollah since the early 1990's. Al-Adl was even trained in a Hezbollah camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where, along with other al Qaeda terrorists, he was taught how to blow up big buildings like American embassies. Al-Adl and his comrades found a use for the skills Hezbollah gave them by blowing up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. Tenet also neglects to mention that al-Adl and his comrades have reportedly ordered attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and elsewhere from Iranian soil. There’s much more Tenet does not mention, including evidence that al Qaeda has been openly operating out of Tehran for years.

Shouldn't Tenet, the CIA, and the rest of us be a little more worried that al Qaeda's “nuclear chief” and al-Adl are freely working to acquire nuclear weapons from their safe haven in Iran?

From the ArmsControlWonk:

So, I am reading my copy of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm.

I turn to the account of the strike on Dora Farm first. Tenet offers the standard account—embellished by an odd new detail here, an occasional defense of his own role there—when Tenet says that “targets were being passed to B-2s …”

Wait a minute.

Then a couple of sentences later, “a number of bombs from the B-2s …”

The strike at Dora Farm--according to every other source including Plan of Attack, Cobra II, The Iraq War, and American Soldier--was conducted with F-117s.

Adam Hebert in Air Force Magazine profiled the strike and the pilots--Lt. Col. David F. Toomey III and Maj. Mark J. Hoehn--complete with pictures of the planes landing after the mission.

Did anyone fact-check this book?

This goes back a little ways.

You may recall that after the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives last fall, there was discussion over who would become chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Representative Jane Harman was in line for it, but she had quarreled with Speaker Pelosi and so was denied the position. By multiple reports, Speaker Pelosi was prepared to name Alcee Hastings as the new chair--even though he had been impeached and removed as a federal judge. Eventually--it was reported--she relented.

Now Congressman Hastings has done an interview with Congressional Quarterly in which he says that no, Speaker Pelosi was not going to deny him the chairmanship; he withdrew his own name. What led him to do such a thing? A chat with Bill Clinton:

By virtue of seniority, with Harman cast aside, Hastings was in line to take over the Intelligence panel.

It's entirely possible that Mr. Hastings' story is nothing more than sour grapes. Having been denied the chairmanship, he might have decided to make it look as if it was his choice. But then why invent the intercession of Bill Clinton?

If Hastings' tale is true, then we cannot credit Nancy Pelosi with having recognized that a Hastings chairmanship would have been at odds with the Democrats' ethics promises. Rather, it would mean that she just got lucky.

The boss just posted an interesting piece on THE DAILY STANDARD about George Tenet's soon-to-be-released At the Center of the Storm. It seems that Tenet has included some misleading statements in the book, as well at least one rather serious factual error. According to Kristol's reporting:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a . . . stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15. Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

Also, Kristol points to this questionable account Tenet gives of a 2002 meeting with Douglas Feith and his staff:

Scott Shane reported in Saturday's New York Times that former CIA chief George Tenet's dramatic description in his book, At the Center of the Storm, of an August 2002 presentation at the CIA by defense undersecretary Douglas Feith and his staff, is at the very least misleading. In order to suggest that Feith's staff was utterly out of its depth, Tenet characterized the main briefer, Tina Shelton, as a "naval reservist." In fact, she had been a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst for almost two decades. Tenet also claimed that Shelton said in her presentation of Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, "It is an open-and-shut case." Shelton and Feith both deny she said that. One person who served in government with Shelton told THE WEEKLY STANDARD today he finds it "inconceivable" that Shelton, an experienced analyst, would have made such an unequivocal assertion.

The bottom line: Kristol wonders "How many other facts has George Tenet invented?"

Update: In his interview with 60 Minutes tonight, Tenet repeated the story about running into Perle at the White House. Here's the transcript:

The truth of Iraq begins, according to Tenet, the day after the attack of Sept. 11, when he ran into Pentagon advisor Richard Perle at the White House.

"He said to me, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.' It’s September the 12th. I’ve got the manifest with me that tell me al Qaeda did this. Nothing in my head that says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way shape or form and I remember thinking to myself, as I'm about to go brief the president, 'What the hell is he talking about?'" Tenet remembers.

If the truth of Iraq according to George Tenet begins with a fictional conversation...maybe Tenet's truth isn't so reliable.

From the MEMRI Blog:

Ibrahim Karagul, a columnist with strong anti-U.S. views who writes for the Islamic Turkish daily Yeni Safak, which is the unofficial mouthpiece of Turkey's AKP government, has stated that since the disappearance of former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asghari, two more Iranian commanders have been "kidnapped." He added that the espionage games being played by the U.S. and Israel, with Istanbul as their playground, are making Turkey look suspicious.

In his column, Karagul wrote that while the mystery of Asghari's disappearance is still unsolved, Iranian Col. Amir Muhammad Shirazi and Gen. Muhammad Sultani are missing.

He added that fingers in Iran are pointing at U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, and wrote, "It is said that five Iranians left Iran on Friday, March 16, and entered Turkey at midnight on March 17, and that they were handed over to CIA and Mossad agents on March 18. Whether Col. Shirazi and Gen. Sultani were among these five is not clear."

He warned, "If the U.S. keeps kidnapping Iranian officials, a big storm will erupt, because Iranian circles are warning that they have the capability and manpower to kidnap or strike at any U.S. or Israeli target, any time and anywhere in the world."

First Jane Harman feels the wrath of the new speaker and now Steny Hoyer. Pelosi is backing Jack Murtha for majority leader because of the boost he gave the Democratic faithful by calling for the rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq and his “strong voice for national security.” Murtha first called for the “immediate withdrawal” of U.S. troops last November. Pelosi endorsed the Murtha plan at the time, but Hoyer opposed it. “I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq,” Hoyer warned, “could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation's security and credibility.” Also in the fall of 2005, Hoyer joined a handful of other centrist Democrats to form a group to counter the party’s weak image on national security issues. One of the other prominent Democrats involved in the group: Jane Harman.

Over at TCS Daily, J. Peter Pham of James Madison University and George Mason's Michael I. Krauss weigh in on the pending Democratic control of the House Intelligence Committee.

For all her talk about changing the tone in Washington, Rep. Pelosi evidently wants to inject more partisanship into the House Intelligence Committee. Today’s New York Times reports that a Speaker Pelosi would not appoint Rep. Jane Harman to chair the committee. Why? It isn’t because Harmon isn’t qualified. She’s one of the most articulate and thoughtful Democrats on national security. No, Pelosi won’t appoint Harmon because she isn’t partisan enough.

Representative Jane Harman has gained national prominence as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, but even her supporters now concede that she is unlikely to become chairman if her party wins control of the House.

Standing in her way is another California lawmaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ speaker-in-waiting, who would have the power to pick the leader of each committee. The relationship between the two has soured in recent years over political rivalries and policy disputes, and Congressional officials on both sides of the divide say Ms. Pelosi would most likely look elsewhere to fill the Intelligence Committee’s top job….

“Ms. Harman, a moderate from Southern California, has been one of the party’s most outspoken voices on national security matters since the Sept. 11 attacks. But she has also drawn sharp criticism from more liberal Democrats, including Ms. Pelosi, who have privately said that she has not sufficiently used her position to attack the Bush administration for its prewar intelligence failures on Iraq and for its use of secret programs like the domestic eavesdropping carried out without warrants by the National Security Agency….

The anti-Harman campaign has gotten so nasty that someone leaked to Time magazine that Harman was the focus of an F.B.I. "inquiry."

Ms. Pelosi’s allies say that she is infuriated by the lobbying effort and that the outside pressure has made her even less likely to consider Ms. Harman.

Ms. Harman’s efforts to claim the post have even attracted the attention of investigators. Federal officials said Monday that she was the focus of a year-old F.B.I. inquiry related to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. The officials, confirming a Time magazine report, said the bureau had been looking into whether she had made improper promises to the group in exchange for its efforts to lobby Ms. Pelosi on her behalf.

But the officials also said that the accusations had not been proved and that although the inquiry remained open, it was no longer being actively pursued.

“Congresswoman Harman does not know what this is all about,” said her lawyer, Theodore B. Olson. “She has no information from the government that she is under an investigation of any sort, and the idea that she should be investigated for being a supporter of Aipac is frightening.”

In a Pelosi-run House, the White House would be wise to cultivate closer relations with moderate Democrats like Harman. The combination of a unified GOP and a core group of Democrats uneasy with its leadership could score the administration some surprising legislative victories.

Senator Clinton is a very shrewd politician. She's trying to pull off the nearly impossible: be tough on national security while not alienating too many Democratic primary voters. Her latest two-step is on the terror detainee bill. She opposed the bill and drew wild applause from the Left with this speech she delivered on the Senate floor:

The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty….

Once again, there are those who are willing to stay a course that is not working, giving the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people, including Americans, to be free of judicial oversight and accountability, to put our troops in greater danger.

Now, after the bill is off the front pages and the media focus back on Iraq, Clinton says that she’s ok with torture if there’s "an imminent threat to millions of Americans." She adds: "That very, very narrow exception within very, very limited circumstances is better than blasting a big hole in our entire law."

But why didn’t she offer such an amendment – one that gave “a blank check to torture” only under “ticking time bomb” scenarios -- when the bill was on the Senate floor and the Democratic grass roots fully engaged? I checked. She didn’t. In fact, had her argument won the day our interrogation program, which has yielded solid intelligence, would have been shut down. Senator Clinton is trying to have it both ways and, judging from the press coverage of her latest torture remarks, she’s succeeding.

Rather than engage in this nonsense, the RNC should take the advice of former Clintonite Dick Morris in today’s New York Post:

Here's one possible ad: We see and hear a wiretapped conversation, with a terrorist revealing his worst plans to his associate - and, inadvertently, to government eavesdroppers, too. Then, when he's about to spill the beans on when and where the next attack is going to come, the line should go dead, with a dial tone, with a machine voice saying "This wiretap terminated in the name of privacy rights by the Democratic U.S. Congress."

The announcer can then say, "If the Democrats win, the National Security Agency will never be able to listen in as the terrorists are plotting to attack us.

Connecticut’s Nancy Johnson has run a similar campaign ad. For more on the terrorist surveillance program, see Democratic Center, R.I.P.

(Will Sen. Clinton et al. file an amicus brief in this case? According to Reuters, "attorneys for 25 men being held in Afghanistan launched a pre-emptive strike Monday against President Bush's plan to prosecute and interrogate terror suspects. Court documents filed Monday demand that the men be released or charged and allowed to meet with attorneys. Such a filing, known as a habeas corpus petition, is prohibited under the legislation approved by Congress last week.")

Posted on September 28, 2006:

The Senate passed the terrorist detainee bill tonight, 65 to 34. The minority leader opposed final passage, as did all the prospective Democratic presidential candidates – Bayh, Biden, Kerry, Feingold, and Hillary Clinton. Here’s Sen. Clinton’s statement opposing the bill:

The Senate, under the authority of the Republican Majority and with the blessing and encouragement of the Bush-Cheney Administration, is doing a great disservice to our history, our principles, our citizens, and our soldiers. The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty….

Once again, there are those who are willing to stay a course that is not working, giving the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people, including Americans, to be free of judicial oversight and accountability, to put our troops in greater danger.

And here is McCain’s urging its passage:

This legislation will allow the CIA to continue interrogating prisoners within the boundaries established in the bill. Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act….

Finally, I would note that there has been opposition to this legislation from some quarters, including the New York Times editorial page. Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal here on the floor, I would simply say that I have been reading the Congressional Record trying to find the bill that page so vociferously denounced. The hyperbolic attack is aimed not at any bill this body is today debating, nor even at the Administration’s original position. I can only presume that some would prefer that Congress simply ignore the Hamdan decision, and pass no legislation at all. That, I suggest to my colleagues, would be a travesty.

I assume many modern-day Democrats would view FDR as an extra-constitutional tyrant running a “thinly veiled military dictatorship.” From today’s Washington Post:

The [terrorist detainee] bill contains some protections unavailable to the eight Nazi saboteurs who came ashore in the United States in 1942 and were captured two weeks later. Six were executed that year after a closed military trial on the fifth floor of Justice Department headquarters. That proceeding was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision it explained two months after the electrocutions.

Also, the Democratic Leadership Council’s Marshall Wittmann offers some tough words:

It is safe to say that America is providing non-state combatant detainees more rights and better treatment than any other nation would do under similar circumstances. These military tribunals compare favorably with any others in our own history from Washington to Lincoln to FDR. The hysteria about "tyranny" in America is truly inappropriate.

America accords extraordinary rights even to our enemies who would use all means necessary to kill us and our families. How many countries in the history of civilization would give these rights to killers who refuse to abide by the rules of war and who don't exactly adhere to international treaties? The congressional debate over the last few days was not over "torture" but rather setting reasonable procedures to interrogate and address the status of stateless terrorists and their enablers who refuse to abide by the rules of war.

It comes down to a clash of perspectives between those who view the fight against Jihadists as a criminal action against a gang versus those who view it as a war against a terrorist movement that rejects the normal rules of combat. If you believe the former, the detainees should have access to all of the protections and rights of the American legal system. If your perspective is that this is a war, then the normal protections that are championed by the ACLU for American citizens do not apply.

America remains the great hope of liberalism in a world threatened by reactionaries who seek to repeal civilization and return us to the seventh century. For the sake of the soul of progressivism, it is time for liberals to speak these truths.

Anti-Bush animus is leading lefties to lose perspective and adopt the old "Blame America First" mentality. The enemy is not us.

The Senate passed the terrorist detainee bill tonight, 65 to 34. The minority leader opposed final passage, as did all the prospective Democratic presidential candidates – Bayh, Biden, Kerry, Feingold, and Hillary Clinton. Here’s Sen. Clinton’s statement opposing the bill:

The Senate, under the authority of the Republican Majority and with the blessing and encouragement of the Bush-Cheney Administration, is doing a great disservice to our history, our principles, our citizens, and our soldiers. The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty….

Once again, there are those who are willing to stay a course that is not working, giving the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people, including Americans, to be free of judicial oversight and accountability, to put our troops in greater danger.

And here is McCain’s urging its passage:

This legislation will allow the CIA to continue interrogating prisoners within the boundaries established in the bill. Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act….

Finally, I would note that there has been opposition to this legislation from some quarters, including the New York Times editorial page. Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal here on the floor, I would simply say that I have been reading the Congressional Record trying to find the bill that page so vociferously denounced. The hyperbolic attack is aimed not at any bill this body is today debating, nor even at the Administration’s original position. I can only presume that some would prefer that Congress simply ignore the Hamdan decision, and pass no legislation at all. That, I suggest to my colleagues, would be a travesty.

(The House also passed legislation yesterday authorizing a robust terrorist wiretapping program. 177 Democrats voted against final passage, including Hoyer and Tauscher.)

To understand just how much the Democratic center has collapsed look no further than Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer. Last September, Roll Call reported that Hoyer had cobbled together a dozen or so of his colleagues "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense." Hoyer also said that Democrats had lost the “national election because of national security” and because of a “lack of confidence of the American public.” A few months later, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA), a member of Hoyer's group and also onetime vice chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, co-sponsored legislation with Rep. John Conyers (MI) calling for the termination of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program -- a program Gen. Hayden said "has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States." Tauscher dubbed the Bush administration's actions "despicable.”

Fast forward to yesterday’s House vote on the terrorist detainee legislation. Hoyer (along with Tauscher) was one of 160 Democrats who opposed the bill. Why? The bill "is really more about who we are as a people than it is about those who seek to harm us,” said Hoyer. “Defending America requires us to marshal the full range of our power: diplomatic and military, economic and moral. And when our moral standing is eroded, our international credibility is diminished as well." Actually, the bill, as Sen. McCain explained, keeps a critical wartime intelligence program going so we can disrupt al Qaeda operations to attack us.

Look, [the] ACLU and the New York Times don't like the agreement, but we think this will recognize, people will recognize that it defends both our values and our security. Some want the CIA not to be able to carry out this program. That was never our intent. And--but it was--it's very important that we have this tool to collect intelligence.

Democrats have now backed themselves into a corner with the ACLU and the New York Times. Republicans may want to note it.

Senator Clinton made the following statement on the NIE on September 25:

Its findings as described in the press are deeply distressing because they confirm what a lot of us feared that the policies pursued by this administration have not worked and therefore we are breeding terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies including innocent Iraqis who try to get up and go on with their lives. I have been a strong critic of the administration's policies from the very beginning - the way they have conducted themselves, the decisions they have made the strategic blunder after blunder that they are responsible for. I would hope that they would listen to other people and obviously they haven't been willing to do that which is why this election in November is so important.

Does the senator now believe that it was a “strategic blunder” to take Saddam out in March 2003?

Does she agree that Iraq was a “cause celebre” for al Qaeda prior to the invasion?

Does she believe it would be a “strategic blunder” for President Bush to follow the advice of the Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and the other Ned Lamont Democrats and withdraw from Iraq?

Would such a policy “breed” more “terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies including innocent Iraqis”?

Given Sen. Hillary Clinton's remark yesterday,

I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team,"

has the Richard Clarke-authored Millennium after-action report on the Clinton administration’s anti-terror efforts ever been made public? From the 9/11 report, Staff Statement Number 8:

In a January 2000 note to Berger, Clarke reported that the CSG drew two main conclusions from the Millennium crisis. First, it had concluded that U.S.-led disruption efforts “have not put too much of a dent” into Bin Ladin’s network abroad. Second, it feared that “sleeper cells” or other links to foreign terrorist groups had taken root in the United States. Berger then led a formal Millennium after-action review....

Here's the "Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States dated April 2006." Among other things, the NIE, which Democrats have embraced, indicates that a jihadist failure in Iraq would hurt their cause. It will be interesting to listen to Democrats explain how their troop withdrawal plans for Iraq would hasten that failure. As I noted earlier today, Democrats can’t even convince sympathetic generals to buy into what they’re selling on the cut-and-run front. Sen. McConnell has it right:

Whoever leaked this report forgot to mention a key finding of the intelligence community: If we defeat the terrorists in Iraq, there will be fewer terrorists inspired to carry on the fight. In other words, defeating terrorists in Iraq not only secures that new democracy, but prevents future attacks here at home. This is a dramatically different message than the selective leaks to the media.

It’s important to remember that terror attacks against the United States didn’t start the day our troops entered Baghdad, and they won’t end if we leave Iraq to the terrorists.

Also, Robert Kagan makes some excellent points on the NIE in today’s Washington Post.

Why? The ACLU and the editors at the New York Times don’t like the terrorist interrogation deal. The Times is urging Senate Democrats to filibuster the bill and the ACLU is calling it a “charade of a compromise.” It doesn’t get any better than that if you’re a Republican considering a run at the White House. Republicans can only hope that Senate liberals take the bait the New York Times has dangled in the front of them.

And while the ACLU is dismayed with the deal, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas offered his support on Fox News:

What the American people can be assured of is they're as aggressive as necessary, but short of the prohibitions against torture, cruel, and inhumane treatment.

The Arizona senator has come under an avalanche of criticism from conservatives (though Reagan Secretary of State George Schulz supports his position) for his opposition to making changes to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Agree or disagree with him, McCain makes his case in today’s Union Leader:

MY FRIEND Joe McQuaid has raised an important question. Can America prevail over a barbaric enemy who holds our values in contempt and uses them against us without compromising those values and altering long-standing treaty obligations that reflect them? I believe we can. He worries that we cannot.

On one point Joe and I are in complete agreement. Our war against Islamic terrorists is a new kind of war. Our enemies are stateless; they reside in many countries, even, we assume, within the borders of our own country. They kill combatants and non-combatants alike with savage cruelty and take a truly evil delight in crossing all civilized boundaries governing the conduct of war. All wars are a miserable business, and this one is particularly so. That is why I believe we must prosecute it as rapidly as we can and as violently as we must.

It often seems to me and many Americans that international public support for the United States is always strongest when we are the victims of terrorism and weakest when we forcefully defend ourselves from it. We must persevere confident in the necessity and justice of our cause even though we can expect that much of the world, even our allies, will often find fault with us as we seek to defeat the enemies who threaten us and them.

History will vindicate us, even though many of us will no longer be around to read it. And when history records our victory may it also celebrate the fact that we fought an enemy who believed our values made us weak and discovered in the end that our faithfulness to our values was as important to their defeat as was the strength and courage of our armed forces.

(I noted in an earlier post that I’d checked to see if any of the material below is discussed and evaluated in the latest Senate Intelligence Committee report. It isn’t. In fact, there’s not a single mention of either group in the report. )

Posted on September 14, 2006:

The BBC reports on Zawahiri's latest claim "that a radical Algerian Islamist group has joined al-Qaeda and is being urged to punish France.” In the video that aired on a website on September 11, Zawahiri stated: "Osama Bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC [the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat] has joined al-Qaeda." He called on the Algerian-based terror group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders.” The GSPC has since released a statement: “We pledge allegiance to Sheikh Osama Bin Laden... Our soldiers are at his call so that he may strike who and where he likes.”

How did the GSPC come about?

In 1997, a splinter group emerged from Algeria’s GIA (Armed Islamic Group) called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC. Stanley Bedlington, who worked counterterrorism for the CIA from 1986 to 1994, told USA Today in December 2001 that "we traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from Iraq." But how close a relationship the GSPC had with al Qaeda before this recent pledge has been difficult to nail down. Some say there wasn’t much of one; others believe the GSPC had close ties to bin Laden. A January 2004 analysis from the Center for Defense Information noted this on the relationship between the GSPC and bin Laden:

The Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) has emerged in recent years as a major source of recruiting and other support for al Qaeda operations in Europe. A splinter faction of the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the GSPC is engaged simultaneously in efforts to topple Algeria's secular government and to organize high-profile attacks against Western interests on the continent....

Yet more alarming to U.S. and European observers, by 2000, according to Italian investigators, the GSPC had taken over the GIA's external networks across Europe and North Africa and were moving to establish an 'Islamic International' under the aegis of Osama bin Laden. Haydar Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian known as "the Doctor," was instrumental in this reorganization. Abu Doha moved to the UK in 1999 after serving as a senior official in a Qaeda Afghan terrorist camp.

Doha was one of the first to encourage the GSPC to split from the GIA and he helped recruit new terrorists from the large base of disenfranchised Algerian youth in Europe's cities, especially in France. (Algerians to have been among the most numerous militants at al Qaeda's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before the war.) Many of these new adherents were involved in petty crimes such as car theft, credit-card fraud, and document forgery; and their earnings were now channeled to finance terrorist operations.

Another Algerian, Mohamed Bensakhria, who was based in Germany, and a Tunisian, Tarek Maaroufi, based in Italy, helped Doha establish and coordinate these cells across Europe. They expanded upon the Algerian base of recruits by incorporating radical militants who had left behind dormant conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Bensakhria and Maaroufi also created a vast support network that provided newcomers with false documents, lodgings, and incidental spending money.

In recent years, authorities have foiled an alarming number of terrorist plots across Europe and uncovered cells — many linked in one way or another to the GSPC — in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. Some of the high profile operations planned included a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Paris and Rome, and attacks on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France and the G-8 summit in Genoa.

Bensakhria was arrested in Spain in June 2002. Maaroufi is wanted in Italy but remains free because of his Belgian citizenship, which prevents his extradition to Italy. Meanwhile, Abu Doha has been connected to Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted for trying to attack Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium changeover, and is currently in British custody fighting extradition to the United States.

Although European and allied authorities have now begun to unearth the myriad connections between these groups and expose their plots, the struggle continues. Most recently French officials arrested four people, two Algerians and two Moroccans, on Dec. 16, 2002, in possession of chemicals and a military personal-protection suit. French authorities say they appear to have been planning a chemical attack. The four were later linked to the GSPC Frankfurt cell.

The group's possible contact with Saddam’s regime was touched on in the January 2006 Weekly Standard cover piece, "Saddam's Terror Training Camps." Regarding the training of Algerian terrorists, in particular, Stephen Hayes wrote:

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army.

I haven’t checked the recent Senate Intelligence report to see if any of the above is discussed and evaluated, but I will.

The BBC reports on Zawahiri's latest claim "that a radical Algerian Islamist group has joined al-Qaeda and is being urged to punish France.” In the video that aired on a website on September 11, Zawahiri stated: "Osama Bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC [the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat] has joined al-Qaeda." He called on the Algerian-based terror group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders.” The GSPC has since released a statement: “We pledge allegiance to Sheikh Osama Bin Laden... Our soldiers are at his call so that he may strike who and where he likes.”

How did the GSPC come about?

In 1997, a splinter group emerged from Algeria’s GIA (Armed Islamic Group) called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC. Stanley Bedlington, who worked counterterrorism for the CIA from 1986 to 1994, told USA Today in December 2001 that "we traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from Iraq." But how close a relationship the GSPC had with al Qaeda before this recent pledge has been difficult to nail down. Some say there wasn’t much of one; others believe the GSPC had close ties to bin Laden. A January 2004 analysis from the Center for Defense Information noted this on the relationship between the GSPC and bin Laden:

The Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) has emerged in recent years as a major source of recruiting and other support for al Qaeda operations in Europe. A splinter faction of the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the GSPC is engaged simultaneously in efforts to topple Algeria's secular government and to organize high-profile attacks against Western interests on the continent....

Yet more alarming to U.S. and European observers, by 2000, according to Italian investigators, the GSPC had taken over the GIA's external networks across Europe and North Africa and were moving to establish an 'Islamic International' under the aegis of Osama bin Laden. Haydar Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian known as "the Doctor," was instrumental in this reorganization. Abu Doha moved to the UK in 1999 after serving as a senior official in a Qaeda Afghan terrorist camp.

Doha was one of the first to encourage the GSPC to split from the GIA and he helped recruit new terrorists from the large base of disenfranchised Algerian youth in Europe's cities, especially in France. (Algerians to have been among the most numerous militants at al Qaeda's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before the war.) Many of these new adherents were involved in petty crimes such as car theft, credit-card fraud, and document forgery; and their earnings were now channeled to finance terrorist operations.

Another Algerian, Mohamed Bensakhria, who was based in Germany, and a Tunisian, Tarek Maaroufi, based in Italy, helped Doha establish and coordinate these cells across Europe. They expanded upon the Algerian base of recruits by incorporating radical militants who had left behind dormant conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Bensakhria and Maaroufi also created a vast support network that provided newcomers with false documents, lodgings, and incidental spending money.

In recent years, authorities have foiled an alarming number of terrorist plots across Europe and uncovered cells — many linked in one way or another to the GSPC — in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. Some of the high profile operations planned included a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Paris and Rome, and attacks on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France and the G-8 summit in Genoa.

Bensakhria was arrested in Spain in June 2002. Maaroufi is wanted in Italy but remains free because of his Belgian citizenship, which prevents his extradition to Italy. Meanwhile, Abu Doha has been connected to Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted for trying to attack Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium changeover, and is currently in British custody fighting extradition to the United States.

Although European and allied authorities have now begun to unearth the myriad connections between these groups and expose their plots, the struggle continues. Most recently French officials arrested four people, two Algerians and two Moroccans, on Dec. 16, 2002, in possession of chemicals and a military personal-protection suit. French authorities say they appear to have been planning a chemical attack. The four were later linked to the GSPC Frankfurt cell.

The group's possible contact with Saddam’s regime was touched on in the January 2006 Weekly Standard cover piece, "Saddam's Terror Training Camps." Regarding the training of Algerian terrorists, in particular, Stephen Hayes wrote:

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army.

I haven’t checked the recent Senate Intelligence report to see if any of the above is discussed and evaluated, but I will.

From today's Wall Street Journal editorial:

What would Jack Bauer do? If he worked at the CIA in real life today, the anti-terror hero of Fox's "24" would apparently be buying insurance in case the ACLU or John Kerry decided to sue or subpoena him for protecting America with too much vigor.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that more CIA counterterrorism officers are signing up for private insurance that would pay for civil judgments and legal costs if they are sued or charged with a crime. These are the agents who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and other jihadis, using what President Bush last week called methods that were legal but "tough." Those methods succeeded in breaking these men into divulging information that led to the arrest of other al Qaeda bigs, and to the foiling of plots that could have killed thousands.

"'There are a lot of people who think that subpoenas could be coming' from Congress after the November elections or from federal prosecutors if Democrats capture the White House in 2008," wrote the Post, quoting a retired intelligence officer close to the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which conducted the interrogations. This is not paranoia. We reported yesterday how Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, is blocking Bush nominees simply for having been mentioned in passing in emails about Guantanamo. Some of us also remember the infamous Frank Church hearings of the 1970s that pilloried the CIA and weakened it for decades.

Though the government pays the premiums for this kind of insurance, it is a sorry spectacle that these agents must now fear partisan retribution for having done precisely what the country asked them to do. The story is one more reason Congress should follow through on Mr. Bush's request to put its stamp of approval on such interrogations, including ex post facto immunity for these CIA officers.

Intelligence is the front line of this anti-jihadi conflict, and the danger from the current political second-guessing is that CIA officers will go back to the FBI's law enforcement mentality of reading terrorists their Miranda rights that failed the country leading up to 9/11. The country needs Jack Bauer insurance, too.

(KSL.com reports: "A controversy over words at BYU this morning. A professor is on paid leave for suggesting the government is responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The man on paid leave is Dr. Steven Jones. He's a physics professor involved in the so-called ‘9-11 Truth Movement.’” Last week, Reuters reported on another professor from the “9/11 Truth” group who teaches at the University of New Hampshire.)

Posted on June 21, 2006:

The U.S government murdered thousands of its own citizens on September 11, 2001. That theory has been circulating among an assortment of America haters, Jew haters, paranoids … and a few professors at U.S. universities. An upcoming cover story in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at a group called “Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors – more in the humanities than in the sciences – from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.” The co-chair of the group, Steven E. Jones, is from, of all places, Brigham Young University and has been roundly denounced by his colleagues at the Utah campus. Jones and the others believe preplanted explosives took down the World Trade Centers. Why? In order to “manipulate Americans” into supporting policies, as the conspiracy thinking goes, that seek world domination through the barrel of a gun and to fatten the profits of the oil companies and weapons manufactures. Another “scholar,” David Ray Griffin, wrote the book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, “exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11.” A blurb on the book’s jacket reads:

The most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush administration’s relationship to that historic and troubling event.

The blurb’s author isn’t some obscure academic. It’s Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, best-selling author and frequent speaker at American universities across the country. The good news is that unlike Zinn most other academics in the U.S. believe “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” are just a bunch of crackpots.

From the Senate minority leader:

I commend British authorities for defusing this terror plot and apprehending the suspects. Their actions protected the lives of innocent civilians, including many American citizens. Today’s events are an important reminder that we need to renew our focus on the war on terror and to continue to work with our allies to protect Americans from terrorism.

Terrorism remains the greatest threat to our security. As the five year anniversary of the September 11th attacks approaches, we should take this opportunity not just to remember, but to take stock of what progress has been made to protect Americans and what steps remain unfulfilled. As a result of mismanagement and the wrong funding priorities, we are not as safe as we should be and we still have not implemented the bipartisan 9-11 Commission’s recommendations to secure our ports, airports, and chemical plants. The Iraq war has diverted our focus and more than $300 billion in resources from the war on terrorism and has created a rallying cry for international terrorists. This latest plot demonstrates the need for the Bush administration and the Congress to change course in Iraq and ensure that we are taking all the steps necessary to protect Americans at home and across the world.

So Democrats like Harry Reid vote for the Iraq War resolution (which passed 77-23) and now want to cut and run, handing a victory to al Qaeda. Remember al-Zawahiri’s first priority in Iraq? It’s to “expel the Americans.” Bin Ladin used the American withdrawal from Somalia and other events to rally jihadists. America was “a weak horse,” he told his followers in the '90s. Al Qaeda, he said, was the "the strong horse. " It worked -- see here. Evidently, Reid’s unaware of all this. Are we supposed to believe that al Qaeda will react differently to the Lamont-Kerry-Pelosi-Murtha withdrawal plan? Joe Lieberman certainly doesn't believe so.

As to the lesson of the latest terror plot, Reid should listen to Sen. McConnell:

This is yet another reminder, if anyone needed one, that the war on terror is not over. And it is a reminder that our military, law enforcement and intelligence forces are working around the clock and around the world to prevent attacks here at home.

That's why we need more tools, not less, to fight terrorists. It is clear to anyone paying attention that our law enforcement and intelligence forces need every legal means at their disposal to be able connect the dots and prevent and disrupt al Qaeda’s attacks. Tools such as the terrorist surveillance program and others allow us to prevent the attacks before they happen, not just to respond when it’s too late. We must continue to arm our forces, so that they can disarm terrorists.

A short time ago, the British government released two reports -- here and here -- on the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London, which killed 52 and injured over 800. The reports suggest that more interrogations and more wiretaps may have thwarted the attack, as Gary Schmitt explained in the Weekly Standard:

If there is any smoking gun when it comes to the failure of British intelligence and the July 2005 bombings, it's the fact that there appears to have been knowledge of [subway bomber Mohammad Sidique] Khan's role as a possible al Qaeda fellow traveler among the post-9/11 detainees in both Pakistan and Guantanamo. What is known for sure is that Khan had traveled to Pakistan in 2003 and late 2004. And while he was only one of several hundred thousand U.K. residents who visited Pakistan for a month or longer in 2004, at least one detainee, and perhaps a second, subsequently recognized Khan and knew about his efforts to reach out to Muslim extremists while there.

In addition, the government's report takes note of the fact that in the run-up to the bombings themselves, the terrorists appeared to be in relatively constant phone contact with an individual or individuals in Pakistan. Although "it is not known who this was or the content of the contacts," according to the report, "the methods used, designed to make it difficult to identify the individual, make the contacts look suspicious."

Of course, it is impossible to know whether, if these "leads" had been followed up, the bombings would have been prevented. Nevertheless, the irony here is what would have been required to crack the case--information gained from detainee interrogations and from listening in on calls made to terrorist suspects abroad. Both are practices pushed by the Bush White House and roundly reviled by London's elite.

Based on the reports’ findings, it’s a good bet the British used more aggressive intelligence gathering techniques to help unravel the current bomb plot. And the British (and the U.S. for that matter) need all the help they can get if this report is accurate.

Securitywatchtower.com has a good roundup of news (with multiple links) on the terrorist bomb plot here (scroll up a bit). At the Counterterrorism blog, Evan Kohlman comments:

Though for some, news of a reported Al-Qaida plot to down multiple commercial airliners with liquid explosives may sound exotic and unusual, in fact, U.S. authorities have been aware of such a threat from Al-Qaida affiliates for over a decade.

In 1995, when U.S. and Philippine security services uncovered a plot by 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and his uncle 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to bomb over a dozen U.S. airliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean, they quickly moved in and arrested their co-conspirators. One of the detained men, trained commercial pilot Abdel Hakim Murad, described Ramzi Yousef's plans in detail -- including his intention to travel to "France, Egypt, and Algeria after the activities here in the Philippines. The purpose was to train those Muslim brothers thereat, on using a Casio watch as a timing device, chemical mixtures to compound bombs, and to share his expertise in eluding detection on an airport's x-ray machine, and eventually smuggling [onboard] this liquid chemical bombs. Furthermore, France has a lot of Algerians staying and that these Egyptians and Algerians ha[ve] no experience on making these bombs and [do] not know the basics of smuggling liquid bombs through the airport."

Eleven years later, we once again return to the same threat to commercial aviation posed by liquid explosives. Only now, it would appear that the fabrication of such high-tech terrorist weapons by Al-Qaida operatives inside Western Europe is no longer an insurmountable challenge.

Senate reaction to the plot:

BOWLING GREEN, KY— U.S. Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell made the following statement Thursday regarding the disruption of a major terrorist plot centered in the United Kingdom, and the need for continued anti-terror efforts in the United States:

“This is yet another reminder, if anyone needed one, that the war on terror is not over. And it is a reminder that our military, law enforcement and intelligence forces are working around the clock and around the world to prevent attacks here at home.

“That's why we need more tools, not less, to fight terrorists. It is clear to anyone paying attention that our law enforcement and intelligence forces need every legal means at their disposal to be able connect the dots and prevent and disrupt al Qaeda’s attacks. Tools such as the terrorist surveillance program and others allow us to prevent the attacks before they happen, not just to respond when it’s too late. We must continue to arm our forces, so that they can disarm terrorists.”

Here and here are two takes worth reading on the military difficulties facing Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has had six years to prepare for the Israelis, and thanks to its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, the group's weapons have turned out to be more advanced than Israeli and U.S. intelligence assessed prior to the anti-ship cruise missile attack on an Israeli naval vessel off Lebanon's coast and rockets landing in places like Tiberias. Last week, the New York Times ran a piece, "Arming of Hezbollah Reveals U.S. and Israeli Blind Spots." It noted:

The power and sophistication of the missile and rocket arsenal that Hezbollah has used in recent days has caught the United States and Israel off guard, and officials in both countries are just now learning the extent to which the militant group has succeeded in getting weapons from Iran and Syria.

While the Bush administration has stated that cracking down on weapons proliferation is one of its top priorities, the arming of Hezbollah shows the blind spots of American and other Western intelligence services in assessing the threat, officials from across those governments said….

The officials interviewed agreed to discuss classified intelligence assessments about Hezbollah’s capabilities only on condition of anonymity. …[O]fficials said the current conflict also indicated that some of the rockets in Hezbollah’s arsenal — including a 220-millimeter rocket used in a deadly attack on a railway site in Haifa on Sunday — were built in Syria.

“The Israelis did forensics, and found several were Syrian-made,” said David Schenker, who this spring became a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy after four years working on Middle East issues at the Pentagon. “Everybody recognizes that Syria has played an important role in facilitating transshipment — but not supplying their own missiles to Hezbollah.”

Officials have since confirmed that the warhead on the Syrian rocket was filled with ball bearings — a method of destruction used frequently in suicide bombings but not in warhead technology. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” said one Western intelligence official, speaking about the warhead.

But it was Friday’s successful launching of a C-802 cruise missile that most alarmed officials in Washington and Jerusalem. Iran began buying dozens of those sophisticated antiship missiles from the Chinese during the 1990’s, until the United States pressured Beijing to cease the sales.

Until Friday, however, Western intelligence services did not know that Iran had managed to ship C-802 missiles to Hezbollah….

Such intelligence “blind spots” aren’t especially good news in a post-9/11 world. Two terror-sponsoring states arm their client, which operates in a relatively small area, with advanced weaponry we know nothing about until it’s used. What else have we missed? Has North Korea proliferated more to Iran than we believe? How good is our grasp of the relationship between rogue regimes and terror groups? You get the point.

(With the ambassador back in the news, this is a good time to review some material that much of the media neglects to mention in its coverage of him.)

Posted on April 9, 2006:

You've got to hand it to Joe Wilson. He has certainly cashed in on his celebrity as he tours college campuses making ludicrous statements. Wilson is also someone who is curiously forgetful about facts that involve his behavior and those surrounding his trip to Niger.

''It seems to me that first and foremost, the White House needs to come clean on this matter,'' Wilson told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's ''This Week.'' ''My own view of this is that the White House owes the American people and particularly our service people who have been sent into war, an apology for having misrepresented the facts.''

In case you forgot, Joe Wilson once claimed a role in exposing the Iraq-Niger documents as forgeries. But that wasn't true, as the Senate's 2004 bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq pointed out:

Page 45

The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article…which said, "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'" Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.

And media reports to the contrary, Wilson did not "debunk" the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium. In fact, most intelligence analysts believed his trip "lent more credibility" to reports that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, and the CIA continued to approve the use of the Iraq-Niger-Uranium language "in Administration publications and speeches, including the State of the Union."
The same Senate report states:

Conclusion 13 (page 73)

The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be wiling or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

Conclusion 12 (page 72)

Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence.

Conclusion 19 (page 77)

Even after obtaining the forged documents and being alerted by a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analyst about problems with them, analysts at both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did not examine them carefully enough to see the obvious problems with the documents. Both agencies continued to publish assessments that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa. In addition, CIA continued to approve the use of similar language in Administration publications and speeches, including the State of the Union.

And, for the record, the British have stood firm in their intelligence on the matter. In fact, the July 2004 Butler report states that the president's uranium reference in his 2003 State of the Union address was "well-founded" and based on intelligence having nothing to do with the forged documents.

Here are the "relevant" bits, on pages 123 and 125:

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:

'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa'

was well-founded.

And,

From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.

d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.

I wonder why none of this makes it into Mr. Wilson's speeches.

John Kerry's running mate has never stopped running for president. He tried to get Kerry to fight on in Ohio even after it was clear there weren't enough uncounted ballots to put Kerry over the top. Kerry was smart enough to realize that delaying the inevitable may have excited the party's base but would have done terrible damage to a potential comeback in 2008. But Edwards' plea wasn't about getting Kerry into the Oval office; it was about Edwards pandering to the Left and his '08 ambitions. Since then, Edwards has jettisoned much of the Southern "centrism" that got him elected Senator from the state of North Carolina and on the 2004 ticket. On Iraq, he was a hawk. He voted for the war and made forceful speeches on why Saddam Hussein must go. Now, like Kerry, he has repudiated his old position and sounds more like Howard Dean, the man who sent the Democratic establishment into a panic pre-Iowa and New Hampshire. Yesterday, Edwards was in Iowa sounding very much like the Dean of 2004. According to the Des Moines Register,

Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards said Thursday, at the outset of an Iowa swing, that Democrats ought to express their outrage over the Bush administration's reported use of millions of telephone records to track terrorists, despite caution from others in his party on a similar issue.

The 2004 vice presidential nominee, considered a likely candidate for president in 2008, said the National Security Agency's use of telephone records to track suspected terrorists should be a political issue.

"Most Americans want us to monitor al-Qaida, but they hate the idea of the president not following the law," Edwards told the Register by phone.

Some Democrats eyeing the 2008 presidential nomination, including Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, have said party leaders should be wary about making a political issue out of a similar Bush policy. In December, it was reported that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails traveling to or from the United States.

Without evidence that the policy has wronged anyone specifically, Democrats could be falling into a Republican campaign trap, Vilsack has argued.

This month, reports were published that the NSA had collected domestic telephone records of millions of Americans, as part of its tracking of potential terrorist activity.

Edwards echoed Democrats who have called for congressional hearings on the record-keeping, which leaders in the Republican-controlled Congress have declined to convene.

"The reason it has political impact is because it goes to a lot of other things that show this president doesn't respect the law and the Constitution," Edwards said.

I can't help but think that Howard Dean must be amused by it all.

Signs of life are stirring in the White House. Here's what the vice president had to say in a speech yesterday at a Bilbray for Congress event in San Diego:

Issues of national security will clearly be at the top of the agenda in this election year. The President and I welcome the discussion, because every voter in America needs to know how the leaders of the Democratic Party view the war on terror. Their leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has boasted publicly of his efforts to kill the Patriot Act. Their nominee for President in the last election viewed terrorism mainly as a law enforcement issue, and recently said that American troops are "terrorizing" Iraqis. The Chairman of the Democratic Party is Howard Dean, who said the capture of Saddam Hussein didn't make America safer. And those prominent Democrats who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq are counseling the very kind of retreat that Osama bin Laden has been predicting and counting on. Yet these Democrats will not -- and cannot -- make the case that somehow surrender in Iraq would make our nation safer.

This is also the crowd that objects to the terrorist surveillance program -- even though that program has helped prevent attacks and has protected American lives. We've heard it said many times that our government failed to connect the dots before 9/11. We now know that some of the hijackers were in the United States, here in the San Diego area, and they placed telephone calls to al Qaeda operatives overseas before that attack. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late. To help prevent another such attack, and based on authority given him by the Constitution and by statute, the President authorized a surveillance program to intercept a certain category of terrorist-linked international communications. Let me emphasize that because on occasion you will hear the press or our opponents talk about domestic surveillance. This is not domestic surveillance. One end has to be outside the United States, and therefore international, one end has to be affiliated in some fashion with al Qaeda. It's hard to think of any category of information that could be more important to the safety of the United States. The program is a wartime measure, it's limited in scope to surveillance associated with terrorists, and it is conducted in a way that safeguards the civil liberties of the American people. Leaders of Congress have been briefed on this program more than a dozen times on the program. I have personally presided over most of those briefings. In addition, the entire program is reconsidered and reauthorized by the President every 45 days. He has reauthorized it more than 30 times since September 11th, because it has helped prevent attacks. It has protected American lives. And that program remains essential to the security of the United States. If there are individuals inside our country talking with al Qaeda, we want to know about it because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again. (Applause.)

This enemy is weakened and fractured, yet still lethal and still determined to kill Americans. We have a duty to act against them as swiftly and as effectively as we possibly can. Either we are serious about fighting this war or we are not. And with George W. Bush leading the nation, we are serious, and we will not let down our guard.

(Just a thought but Republicans may want to remind voters of British intelligence failures leading up to the July 7 bombings and note the return in force of the ACLU Democrats -- see here and here.)

Posted on May 22, 2006:

The British government has released two reports -- here and here -- on the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London, which killed 52 and injured over 800. In the current Weekly Standard, Gary Schmitt reviews what the British learned and notes the following:

If there is any smoking gun when it comes to the failure of British intelligence and the July 2005 bombings, it's the fact that there appears to have been knowledge of Khan's role as a possible al Qaeda fellow traveler among the post-9/11 detainees in both Pakistan and Guantanamo. What is known for sure is that Khan had traveled to Pakistan in 2003 and late 2004. And while he was only one of several hundred thousand U.K. residents who visited Pakistan for a month or longer in 2004, at least one detainee, and perhaps a second, subsequently recognized Khan and knew about his efforts to reach out to Muslim extremists while there.

In addition, the government's report takes note of the fact that in the run-up to the bombings themselves, the terrorists appeared to be in relatively constant phone contact with an individual or individuals in Pakistan. Although "it is not known who this was or the content of the contacts," according to the report, "the methods used, designed to make it difficult to identify the individual, make the contacts look suspicious."

Of course, it is impossible to know whether, if these "leads" had been followed up, the bombings would have been prevented. Nevertheless, the irony here is what would have been required to crack the case--information gained from detainee interrogations and from listening in on calls made to terrorist suspects abroad. Both are practices pushed by the Bush White House and roundly reviled by London's elite.

Those who support the NSA's al Qaeda spying program may want to cite the British experience in explaining the program to their constituents. Most in the media surely won't and I doubt Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi will either.

The British government has released two reports on the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London, which killed 52 and injured over 800. In the current Weekly Standard, Gary Schmitt reviews what the British learned and notes the following:

If there is any smoking gun when it comes to the failure of British intelligence and the July 2005 bombings, it's the fact that there appears to have been knowledge of Khan's role as a possible al Qaeda fellow traveler among the post-9/11 detainees in both Pakistan and Guantanamo. What is known for sure is that Khan had traveled to Pakistan in 2003 and late 2004. And while he was only one of several hundred thousand U.K. residents who visited Pakistan for a month or longer in 2004, at least one detainee, and perhaps a second, subsequently recognized Khan and knew about his efforts to reach out to Muslim extremists while there.

In addition, the government's report takes note of the fact that in the run-up to the bombings themselves, the terrorists appeared to be in relatively constant phone contact with an individual or individuals in Pakistan. Although "it is not known who this was or the content of the contacts," according to the report, "the methods used, designed to make it difficult to identify the individual, make the contacts look suspicious."

Of course, it is impossible to know whether, if these "leads" had been followed up, the bombings would have been prevented. Nevertheless, the irony here is what would have been required to crack the case--information gained from detainee interrogations and from listening in on calls made to terrorist suspects abroad. Both are practices pushed by the Bush White House and roundly reviled by London's elite.

Those who support the NSA's al Qaeda spying program may want to cite the British experience in explaining the program to their constituents. Most in the media surely won't and I doubt Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi will either.

Here's what Roll Call's Morton Kondracke had to say about Qwest's trumpeting that it refused to cooperate with the National Security Agency:

In the beginning, Qwest, this other company, to its discredit, said it was not cooperating with the NSA and specifically decided not to cooperate. Now if we are fighting a war on terrorism, you would think the telephone companies would want to cooperate and I would hope that they would be cooperating.

And for a company to opt out and say no, no, no we are to privacy minded for this is it is basically helping terrorists. I think Senator Roberts is absolutely right. What's going on now is shocking. People are treating the Constitution of the United States as a suicide pact. Here we have al- Qaeda, everybody has been watching "United 93," and everybody should watch "United 93," just to remind us of what we're dealing with.

They would slam a plane into the capitol, they would blow up an atomic bomb if they possibly could, and we are acting like people who are trying to protect us are criminals.

We haven't heard Porter Goss's side of the story but I'm sure we will. I doubt he and his staff are going to let all the stuff being dumped on them -- from Dana Priest in the Washington Post, an anonymous administration source, and the Democrats -- go unanswered. Of course, as this Washington Times editorial notes, "the real back story of the Goss ouster" is a separate issue from the "from debates over Gen. Hayden's merits." Today's Wall Street Journal editorial makes a similar point. And, after reading Reuel Marc Gerecht's WSJ piece, there's no doubt the general has his work cut out for him. Gerecht writes:

Another myth is on the verge of being born. To wit: Porter Goss, the conservative ideologue, greatly politicized the CIA, and encouraged or forced several critically important senior officers to leave the agency, thus dispiriting the entire organization.

Implicit in Ms. Harman's commentary -- made more explicit elsewhere by her, by other Democrats in Congress, and by sympathetic members of the press -- is the assumption that the Bush administration is waging a vendetta against Langley's upper echelons for their hostility to the administration and their embarrassing leaks to the press, especially before the 2004 elections. The current version of this theme, best articulated by Howard Dean of the Democratic National Committee, posits a completely apolitical, professional CIA -- correctly analyzing Iraq (weapons of mass destruction excepted, of course) -- being pounded by a partisan, bellicose, mendacious Republican administration, punishing those who speak truth to power.

One has the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Dean, like others in politics and the press, really has no idea at all what CIA case officers, working-level analysts and their few Iraqi reporting assets (overwhelmingly expatriate cliques of former Baathist Sunni military officers) were writing about Iraq from 2001 until the invasion. I'll take a bet that not a single analyst or Iraq task-force case officer foresaw, in a written report, the all-important role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the senior Shiite clergy; the power of the Salafi fundamentalist movement among the Sunnis; or the speed and nature of the Sunni insurgency before the insurgency actually developed.

But a remote understanding of the CIA has not prevented Mr. Dean, and others, from speaking with certainty about how astute Langley was in Iraq. Few seem to suggest that some in the senior management of the CIA might possibly want to rewrite history to make themselves look better, or that agency officers, like senior State Department officials, can occasionally misbehave and forget that they are apolitical executive-branch officers.

So what do we actually know about the state of the CIA -- especially the clandestine service, which has always defined the agency? And what can we say about Porter Goss's brief tenure?

The one thing we know for sure is that Mr. Goss certainly didn't degrade the capabilities of Langley, given how poor the espionage capacity already was. And the agency's covert-action (CA) capabilities -- against targets that really mattered (for example, Iran) -- were for most purposes nonexistent when Mr. Goss arrived and remain so today (the brain and muscle for these things take years to develop). A working-level CIA officer familiar with the operations directorate's Iran assets described Langley's CA abilities inside Iran from 2000 through 2004 as "unchanged: they're zero."

... Regrettably, reform at the CIA is now dead. The only real chance opened immediately after 9/11 and closed when President Bush decided to retain the services of George Tenet, who always remained close and sympathetic to the operations directorate. Ms. Harman, many other prominent Democrats, and the anti-Bush press have put another nail into the clandestine service's coffin by rallying around an organization that desperately needs to be radically deconstructed. However tepidly or lazily Mr. Goss approached his work, he and his abrasive minions ought to be complimented for at least firing somebody. Given the history of the CIA, this is not an insignificant achievement.

In the 1980s, it was the Republican Party which was hopelessly lost concerning the supposed value and achievements of the CIA. Today, it's the Democrats who've lost it. This is a pity. The first-rate young men and women at the CIA, who have been quitting Langley quietly in large numbers for decades, deserve better.

Valerie Plame Wilson, the NY Times reports, "is shopping a book proposal among a small group of publishers, according to two people familiar with the project." It will be interesting to read the book's acknowledgements.

Read the comments of New York Times editor Bill Keller here and then read the latest from Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times here (reg. req'd).

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial looks at the "unseemly symbiosis between elements of the press corps and a cabal of partisan bureaucrats at the CIA and elsewhere in the 'intelligence community' who have been trying to undermine the Bush Presidency." The editors also note that there were "many selective election-year leaks of prewar Iraq intelligence fed to the likes of the [New York] Times's James Risen, who also won a Pulitzer this year--for helping expose the National Security Agency's anti-al Qaeda surveillance program." But even the NSA disclosure may have been intended as a pre-election leak. The New York Times revealed the program in December but noted it had delayed the article's publication for a year. According to the December 16, 2005 Times piece,

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

So the original piece was set to run in December 2004. Assuming it took some time to put together, the original leak tipping off the Times may have occurred some time before the November election. The Times also noted,

Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

And what are the odds the leaker voted for Bush on November 2, 2004?

Well, they're looking for a new CEO. From TechWeb News:

Yoran, CIA's Venture Capital Chief, Resigns

The head of the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm, Amit Yoran, has resigned his position after less than four months in the position as chief executive of In-Q-Tel.

In a report in the Washington Post Monday, Yoran said he resigned for personal reasons that included a wish to spend more time with him family. "It's a very amicable parting" said Yoran. "I will say I'm sorry and disappointed as well."

With a budget of some $50 million annually, In-Q-Tel invests in emerging technologies that the CIA believes have future use.

In a statement Lee A. Ault, III, In-Q-Tel's trustees board chairman, said: "We look forward to continuing In-Q-Tel's unique and important mission of delivering important and cutting edge technologies to the CIA and the intelligence community." Yoran previously served as head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security.

Send in those resumes.

Mary O. McCarthy has reportedly been fingered for leaking the CIA's secret prisons operation to the Washington Post. She also apparently donated to the Kerry for President campaign and other Democrats as well, which, of course, she is free to do. Today's New York Times also reports that McCarthy returned to the Agency in 2004:

H. Andrew Schwartz, a spokesman for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Ms. McCarthy's relationship with the organization lasted from 2001 to 2003. Several associates of Ms. McCarthy say she returned to the C.I.A. in 2004, taking a job in the inspector general's office.

CIA Director Goss said the prison disclosure, which appeared in the Washington Post in November 2005, severely harmed US national security. Were there any other leaks in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election that caused similar damage to ongoing U.S. intelligence operations? Buried in another New York Times piece on McCarthy is this intriguing line:

Intelligence officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said that the dismissal resulted from ''a pattern of conduct'' and not from a single leak, but that the case involved in part information about secret C.I.A. detention centers that was given to The Washington Post.