David Sanger:

... Three officials who were involved in the most recent iteration of that debate said Mr. Cheney and others stepped aside — perhaps because they read Mr. Bush's body language, or perhaps because they believed Iran would scuttle the effort by insisting that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the right to develop nuclear fuel. The United States insists that Iran gave up that right by deceiving inspectors for 18 years.

In the end, said one former official who has kept close tabs on the debate, "it came down to convincing Cheney and others that if we are going to confront Iran, we first have to check off the box" of trying talks. [...]

Yet skepticism abounds. "It's true that the conditions are significantly different than they were four or five years ago, but candidly they are not as favorable now for the United States," said Richard Haass, who as the head of the State Department's policy planning operation during Mr. Bush's first term was a major advocate of engagement with Iran. [...]

But the internal debates in the White House included vigorous discussion of the risks associated with any effort to negotiate with foes suspected of seeking nuclear weapons. And in this, Mr. Bush already has bitter experience.

In its dealings with North Korea, which Mr. Bush branded a member of the "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq, the administration also decided a few years ago to try limited engagement, locked arm-in-arm with neighboring nations.

But North Korea has kept making weapons fuel, and the allies have not stayed united: China and South Korea continue to aid the North. The Iranians have doubtless noticed.

The question now is whether there is any middle ground between Mr. Bush's demand that Iran give up everything, and Iran's insistence that it will give up nothing. Without breaking that logjam, the American-Iranian dialogue may never begin.

This Landay/Strobel piece on possible Iran talks has lots interesting, including this:

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, shortly before Rice spoke to tell him about her announcement. Bolton's spokesman, Richard Grenell, said the two men had never talked before.

This too:

In Congress, lawmakers generally supported the administration's decision.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said he cautiously endorsed the new discussion. "All options must be on the table if they fail to respond to the administration's overture," he said.

Chris Nelson's evening report on the state of play with US-Iran talks:

Step back a few feet and you can see that the US is now directly engaged with Iran...in negotiating about negotiations. Not a bad first step, and a critical one...certainly a more positive situation than that existing even a week ago.

OK, parse the press conference language of Secretary of State Rice, (noted in detail below) and you will have trouble pinning down anything beyond the basic US position that it’s all up to Iran to agree to the US precondition that it suspend reprocessing and enrichment activities, and get verified as such by the IAEA.

Is the US tacitly recognizing the Iranian regime? Does the US have a deal yet...or one in the works...with Russia and China which would allow sanctions IF the Iranians won’t meet the US conditions? Is the US prepared to talk about Iran’s security concerns? You won’t find clear answers from Rice...which is clearly just what she intended.

But she did make herself clear when she wanted to: “...let’s remember what is not happening here. This is not a bilateral negotiation between the United States and Iran on the whole host of issues that would lead to broader relations between Iran and the United States. This is an effort to reinforce diplomatic negotiations that we believe should succeed and have a chance to seed with the strongest possible way.”

Also, she minced no words on Iran as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism...and you have to think that on both points, she was talking mainly to US hardliners who still don’t like any part of this Euro-led business of talking to evil.

So where are we? Our expert observers are sticking with the prediction noted in our Bulletin just before noon...don’t expect Iran to accept the US conditions as laid down by Rice today, but don’t be dismayed. Rice’s decision to join the EU-3 now opens the door to real negotiations. The ball is now in Teheran’s court. It will soon be back in Washington’s. That’s how it works.

International sources directly involved in the nuclear talks say to expect Iranian officials to be pleased with the basic US decision to engage, but displeased at the often harsh rhetoric used today by Rice. They also expect that IF a deal is to be had, the US is going to have to accept continued Iranian R&D; on enrichment, at some level, under IAEA safeguards. But that’s down the road...

More analysis from Reuters' Carol Giacomo and Sue Pleming.

AP/CNN: "Rice: U.S. ready to talk with Iran on nuclear issue."

The United States is prepared to join other nations in holding direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program if Iran first agrees to stop disputed nuclear activities that the West fears could lead to a bomb, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday.

"To underscore our commitment to a diplomatic solution and to enhance prospects for success, as soon as Iran fully and verifiably suspends its enrichment and reprocessing activities, the United States will come to the table," Rice said in remarks prepared for delivery at the State Department.

The Swiss ambassador to the United States was called to the State Department earlier Wednesday to receive a copy of Rice's remarks for transmission to Iran, U.S. officials said. The United States has had no diplomatic ties with Iran and few contacts at all with its government since Islamic radicals took over the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and held diplomats there for more than a year.

Background here and here. I guess Hagel's office was mistaken about the press release. More from Reuters, and the Post. Transcript of Rice's remarks.

Update: From Chris Nelson:

Expect an announcement soon that the President has authorized Secretary of State Condi Rice to join directly in the EU-3 talks with Iran...under the condition that Iran agree to a verifiable halt to its uranium reprocessing activities.

Experts say not to expect Iran to immediately respond in the positive...in fact, it will likely be a strong negative. But they also predict that a counter-offer will come within days...basically throwing a “temporary suspension pending developments” offer onto the table.

The US moves and anticipated Iranian counter-moves come in the context of progress at the UN Security Council on a resolution with Chinese and Russian support which seems headed in the general direction desired by the US, but with the critical compromise that NO possible use of force would be authorized in the event of failure.

Still being negotiated, sources say, is whether the latest resolution would contain language also banning economic sanctions, as has been demanded by both Moscow and Beijing.

In any event, the US decision is seen as throwing the ball back into Iran’s court, after weeks of the US being seen as the stumbling block through its refusal to agree to direct talks.

Rice and other officials started calling key Capitol Hill and other players in Washington last night, and through the morning. Initial response is favorable, to quote one, “this will bring us into line with the EU-3 and put the onus on Iran to respond.”

That last clause is key. That Iran and not the US be seen as the stumbling block.

FT: Bush meets Tuesday with Iranian columnist who propagated since discredited story about Iranian Jews having to wear identifying clothing.

AP's George Jahn, reporting from Vienna, US ready to join Iran talks:

The United States is ready to sit at the same table with Iran and other nations for talks on Tehran's nuclear ambitions if the Islamic republic gives up uranium enrichment, diplomats said Wednesday.

The diplomats, who demanded anonymity in exchange for divulging confidential information, said Washington's condition for joining such negotiations was agreement by Russia and China to support United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran if it remains defiant on the enrichment issue.

One of the diplomats told The Associated Press that the Bush administration was planning to make an official announcement later in the day on Washington's conditional readiness to join in such talks.

Some background to that eventuality here. More here.

This much noted CNN reporter's account of the same Marine unit showing a lot of restraint under constant insurgent attack in the Euphrates River valley a month before the alleged Haditha massacre is -- tragic:

I know the Marines that were operating in western al Anbar, from Husayba all the way to Haditha. I went on countless operations in 2005 up and down the Euphrates River Valley. I was pinned on rooftops with them in Ubeydi for hours taking incoming fire, and I've seen them not fire a shot back because they did not have positive identification on a target.

I saw their horror when they thought that they finally had identified their target, fired a tank round that went through a wall and into a house filled with civilians. They then rushed to help the wounded -- remarkably no one was killed. [...]

And I was with them in Haditha, a month before the alleged killings last November of some 24 Iraqi civilians.

I'm told that investigators now strongly suspect a rampage by a small number of Marines who snapped after one of their own was killed by a roadside bomb. [...]

We missed the beginning of the operation, and ended up entering Haditha that evening. The city was empty of insurgents, or they had gone into hiding as they so often do, blending with the civilian population, waiting for U.S. and Iraqi forces to sweep through and then popping up again.

But this time, after this operation, the Marines and the Iraqi Army were not going to pull out, they were going to set up fixed bases.

And what does it mean for the "clear and hold" strategy that has become much the rage?

Kos highlights this report on Kansas, where several Republican politicians are apparently switching parties and registering as Democrats in order to run against Republican Christian conservatives who have gotten ahold of a number of state seats, the Kansas Education board and the state AG's office, dropped requirements for the teaching of evolution, etc. Fascinating.

Worth reading: Chris Nolan. More here.

Incredible profile of Oriana Fallaci by the New Yorker's Margaret Talbot.

A long weekend with no FBI raids on Congress, no plea deals, nothing. Muckraker has your fix.

A really disturbing story about what seems a very dirty terrorism prosecution in Lodi California.

A savvy reader pointed out something interesting deep down in the Washington Post story on the series of blasts across Iraq today that took the lives of among others members of the CBS crew:

The bloodiest attack was the bombing of a bus near Khalis, a predominantly Shiite town about 40 miles north of Baghdad in Diyala province. Fifteen people died, according to police and hospital officials. The passengers worked for the People's Mujaheddin Organization of Iran, a group opposed to the Shiite government of Iraq's eastern neighbor.

The story goes on to cite a bus passenger who survived the blast who theorized the bus was targeted by Shiites who hate the MEK. But it doesn't sound like the MEK is confined to Camp Ashraf anymore, does it?

Worth reading, Intel-Dump's Phil Carter on Memorial Day.

LAT's Rone Tempest: "Bloody Scenes Haunt a Marine."

Horrible horrible news to read my incredibly brave and talented friend Kimberly Dozier has been critically injured in Iraq and two of her crew killed. I am really wishing her to pull through. What is there to say about the two of her crew killed, I am terribly terribly sorry. Kimberly comes from a military family, she speaks fluent Arabic and Hebrew, she has lived for years in the Middle East and she lives to tell this story. For all her singlemindedness, she has always been an incredibly sweet and generous and utterly unpretentious person, never spoiled by all the nonsense that goes on in TV news. I don't think anything could have stopped her from going to Iraq and being there to tell this story, her whole personal history and education and career prepared her for being uniquely well placed to do just that. My deepest best wishes for her full recovery, and to her family in Baltimore on what has got to be an anxious Memorial Day, my thoughts are with you.

Firedoglake book club today on Glenn Greenwald's How Would a Patriot Act?

Senate Armed Services committee to probe alleged Haditha massacre:

... Congressional, military and Pentagon officials briefed on the incident — including Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a vocal critic of the war — now say that the killings were unprovoked, that only one of the dead was armed, and that the victims included children, including girls aged 1 to 14.

"One woman, as I understand it in talking to the officials in the Marine Corps, was bending over her child, pleading for mercy, and they shot her in cold blood," Mr. Murtha said. "That's the thing that's so disturbing."

Asked on the ABC News program "This Week" whether the marines involved might simply have believed that insurgents were firing on them from nearby houses, Mr. Murtha replied: "The reports that I have from the highest level, no firing at all. No interaction."

"It was an explosive device which killed a marine. From then on, it was purely shooting people inside the houses and in a taxi."

WP:

Prime Minister Tony Blair caved in to White House pressure by sharpening language on Iran and softening it on global warming in a speech he delivered Friday at Georgetown University, according to a British press report Sunday that Blair's office immediately denied.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, Blair made "significant" last-minute changes to his major foreign policy address and that "objections by President George W. Bush's inner circle played a key role in the alterations." An official at Blair's 10 Downing Street office, speaking on the condition of anonymity as is standard practice here, said it was "categorically untrue that any White House objective played any part" in the speech. [...]

The newspaper, citing anonymous British sources, said Blair aides told journalists three hours before the speech that Blair intended to say that "change should not be imposed" on Iran in the current dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The newspaper said that line reflected "the British view that bombing or invading Iran is not a realistic option."

Blair eventually used the more subtle phrasing, "I emphasize I am not saying we should impose change," which the newspaper said was altered to reflect a White House desire to keep the military option "on the table" to exert maximum negotiating pressure on Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejad.

Update: Not sure the same speechwriters got to Joschka Fischer's oped before it went to the Post.

Walter Pincus notes some overlooked details in the 2007 intelligence authorization bill, which passed the Senate Intel committee last week:

Many of the more controversial amendments, including one by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to make the intelligence budget public, were approved over the objection of the Republican committee majority when GOP Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) voted with Democrats.

In a 9 to 6 vote, the committee approved an amendment by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) requiring Negroponte to submit a classified report on each clandestine prison or detention facility the U.S. government has operated at home or abroad that held detainees labeled as terrorists.

The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage:

The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials.

The officials said Cheney's legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington , is the Bush administration's leading architect of the "signing statements" the president has appended to more than 750 laws. The statements assert the president's right to ignore the laws because they conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

The Bush-Cheney administration has used such statements to claim for itself the option of bypassing a ban on torture, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and numerous requirements that they provide certain information to Congress, among other laws.

Previous vice presidents have had neither the authority nor the interest in reviewing legislation. But Cheney has used his power over the administration's legal team to promote an expansive theory of presidential authority. Using signing statements, the administration has challenged more laws than all previous administrations combined.

San Diego Union-Tribune's Dean Calbreath and Jerry Kammer: "Defense Contractor's House of Cards." Definitive coverage of the Brent Wilkes-sponsored Watergate poker parties, and multiple-sourced accounts of the CIA aviation contract Wilkes was in negotiations to receive that I've been reporting here (and which they were kind to cite). More from Newsweek.

WP: Battered Congress Syndrome. More from Janet Hook and Faye Fiore, "The dispute and Hastert's defiance were just the latest, and perhaps the most vivid, evidence of a far broader political problem for Bush: It has become increasingly difficult for the president to keep his party in line as his support among voters has plummeted. [...] But some [Republican lawmakers] worried that the constitutional victory for Hastert would be a public relations problem for the rest of them. They fear that the nuances of constitutional principle will mean little to voters who conclude that the GOP — which aims to be the 'law-and-order' party — is now on the wrong side of the law by challenging law enforcement officials pursuing a bribery investigation."

David Addington, champion of a limited executive?

Our new friends in Iraq endorse Iran's nuclear research.

LAT: "Probe finds Marines killed unarmed Iraqi civilians"

Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found.

Officials who have seen the findings of the investigations said the filing of criminal charges, including some murder counts, was expected, which would make the Nov. 19 incident the most serious case of alleged U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

An administrative inquiry overseen by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell found that several infantry Marines fatally shot as many as 24 Iraqis and that other Marines either failed to stop them or filed misleading or blatantly false reports.

The report concludes that a dozen Marines acted improperly after a roadside bomb explosion killed a fellow Marine, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. Looking for insurgents, the Marines entered several homes and began firing their weapons, according to the report.

Worth reading: National Review's Jonathan Adler.

The tenure of Porter Goss, who left the CIA today, has become a kind of Rorschach test of what everyone always believed to be the problem with the Agency. Ken Silverstein takes an insidery-informed stab at correcting some of the misperceptions.

The House intelligence committee hearing on leaks (.pdf) was apparently the site of some action today. But not the action everyone might have anticipated:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), conducting a House Intelligence Committee hearing, interrupted a witness to tell people in the room they should not leave and the doors were being closed.

"It's a little unsettling to get a Blackberry message put in front of you that says there's gunfire in the building," he said.

About 60 people, including Capitol Hill staffers, media representatives and about 10 members of Congress, remain in the hearing room, talking on cell phones, checking their Blackberries, reading newspapers and sharing one bathroom.

"I have no confirmation of gunfire. We have confirmation of a loud noise," Hoekstra told people inside the room.

Some thoughtful speculation by Justin Rood tying together a bunch of recent stories on domestic surveillance.

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball has more on the bad blood between departing CIA director Porter Goss and the proposed incoming deputy director of the CIA Steve Kappes, and it runs through Belgrade.

From a conservative correspondent, in Texas. "Things have been looking pretty bad for conservatives, party base in full revolt (as predicted by me), Rove trying to twist arms and being told to go take a flying leap by House conservatives and now Hastert trying to defend Congress against living under the same laws we do..." More from the NYT: "... Aides to Mr. Bush liken their strategy to that of arms negotiators during the cold war: by first bringing the two sides together on matters of agreement and then moving onto the issues that divide them. But as of now all indications are that once the negotiators move from the border security measures that both sides can support to guest worker and citizenship provisions that conservative House members oppose, they will hit a wall." And from Fred Barnes.

I wonder if this signal from the top will have a larger ripple effect at the DOJ/FBI?

President Bush orders sealed papers seized over the weekend from the Office of Rep. Jefferson. "Bush’s demand came hours after Hastert accused the Justice Department of trying to intimidate him in retaliation for criticizing the search of Jefferson’s office, escalating a searing battle between the executive and legislative branches of government."

Hill news for those who follow Senate Intel issues. Just heard and confirmed that Bill Duhnke, the majority staff director to the Senate Intel committee, is going to step down to become chief of staff to his old boss, Richard Shelby, of the Banking Committee. Jim Hensler, Duhnke's deputy, succeeds him as Intel committee majority staff director.

Walter Pincus zeroes in on the question of whether the Attorney General has hinted that his legal interpretation deems that more than just telecom transactional data may be considered not protected by the Fourth Amendment, if it's obtained by a device installed at the telecom company and not by tapping/invading the target's phone. At Hayden's nomination hearings last week, Sen. Feinstein asked a very pointed question about the pen register technology Pincus refers to, and Hayden declined to answer in open session.

Worth reading, David Ignatius on learning what State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research got right, and how they did it.

Lawmakers and Law Enforcement. I am still kind of amazed at this story. In a city that has become so hyper, Beria-like politicized, House GOP leaders have overwhelmingly sided with a House Democrat looking at face value pretty vulnerable to corruption charges in protesting the unprecedented FBI weekend raid on Rep. Jefferson's office as a sign of what lawmakers claim is executive overreach. But the strange thing is, lawmakers would ostensibly have total oversight responsibility for the FBI, through the power of the purse, the power of writing legislation, subpoena power, confirming nominees, etc. If they're concerned about alleged FBI overreach, they can haul in to testify not just FBI director Mueller, but his boss Alberto Gonzales. So what is really going on here? Perhaps a shot across the bow? Or is it panic?

Tom Donnelly offers an Iran reading list.

In closed door vote, Senate Intel committee votes 12 to 3 in favor of Hayden's nomination to become CIA director (CNN). Rockefeller says he voted for, Wyden and Feingold said they voted against.

NY Daily News: "Two top CIA officials will bolster prosecutors' charge that Vice President Cheney's chief aide lied to them, court papers show."

WP, via Romenesko, "VOA's Baghdad bureau has been closed for past six months." Howard Kurtz, "For a federally funded information service to pull out of Baghdad for such a prolonged period raises questions about the Bush administration's insistence that conditions there are gradually improving." Worth reading beyond the headline, the story of what drove VOA's reporter out is a series of attacks against those working with her by Shiite militias closely tied to the new Iraqi government.

POGO's taken a stab at doing a Venn diagram of sorts on the wider Duke Cunningham network. Perhaps not quite as elegant as the NYT one the other day, but all good Venn diagrams begin on a cocktail napkin.

Update: My friend Justin Rood writes, "Technically a venn diagram shows overlapping circles -- POGO's chart is really more of a flow chart or wiring diagram." I stand corrected.

Harper's: How an investigative journalist accidentally drove up share value in a corrupt oil company.

Worth reading, Michael Hirsh on "The Real Libya Model." This too.

Go read lawyer Henry Lanman in Slate on the new secrecy doctrine. I am not sure what you call the existential level of injustice presented by the fact that so many of the most controversial recent actions taken by the US government -- such as snatching the wrong guy for a few months of special treatment in Afghanistan -- are deemed beyond the bounds of justice itself because they were undertaken as secret state policies. Unaccountable? Unsustainable? Pragmatic? Dreadful? More from Kevin Drum.

Priceless exchange of emails between the legendary Pentagon reporter Joe Galloway, soon to retire from Knight Ridder, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita. Love this, from Galloway to Di Rita, after getting a complaint from Di Rita about one of his recent columns, "larry: i am delighted that folks over in OSD continue to read my columns with great attention. Who knows, it might make a difference one day...."

(via Atrios and the soon to be deployed to Iraq Larry Johnson).

Do you remember the whole dust up last year between the US and Israeli defense ministries/departments over Israeli weapons and technology sales to China, specifically concerning upgrades to the Israeli-made, Beijing-purchased Harpy drone? It got so bad that at one point the undersecretary of defense for policy was demanding the resignation of the director general of the Israeli defense ministry, and the Pentagon quietly suspended cooperation with the Israeli defense ministry on technology transfer issues. Well, here's the latest installment from Ha'aretz:

The police and the Defense Ministry are conducting an investigation into suspicions that an Israeli company sought to smuggle defense-related reconnaissance drones to China.

The company under investigation, Amit, manufactures Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) for reconnaissance purposes. [...]

The company and its owner are suspected of having transferred an RPV to a foreign nation, ostensibly for the purpose of displaying it at a weapons show. The transfer was allegedly carried out without a permit from the Defense Ministry.

Police suspect that the RPV was ultimately intended to be shipped to China, along with additional RPVs produced by Amit.

There is more to this story, I imagine, than has come out in the US press, although the Israeli press has been covering it heavily.

Seymour Hersh: "... The N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. 'In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in,' the consultant explained. 'But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they’re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law.' One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later. [...] Hayden’s public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. 'The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive,' a Pentagon consultant told me. 'It’s intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you’re looking and what you’re after.'"

Hard to see how the case against Jefferson is anything but airtight.

WP, "Confronting the worst poll numbers seen in the West Wing since his father went down to defeat, President Bush and his team are focusing on the fall midterm elections as the best chance to salvage his presidency and are building a campaign strategy around tax cuts, immigration and national security. [...] And Bush remains a firm believer in the 'Iraq first' strategy. The war has overshadowed everything else and, in the White House's view, to a large extent has poisoned the public against other messages — to the point that many Americans fault Bush's handling of the economy even though economic performance has been strong. So the White House calculates that if the public sees any improvement in Iraq and a withdrawal of even some U.S. troops, Republicans will be rewarded. Aides point to the president's last spike in the polls late last year after Iraqi elections and a series of Iraq speeches by Bush. A top adviser said Rove and White House political director Sara M. Taylor are advising candidates not to duck the issue of Iraq, but rather to make it a centerpiece of their campaigns."

The Death of Yugoslavia, part XIV. With turnout at over 86% of eligible voters, Montenegro votes for independence, by 56.3%. Reuters: "A divorce will have little practical effect. The republics already have different laws, policies and currencies, sharing only defense and diplomacy. The joint parliament rarely meets."

I think the otherwise always wise Kevin Drum misses the key word here that turns this into something other than a denial. The key word is "randomly." If you're writing about Hollywood or Massachusetts State House politics, you're probably fine. If you're writing about national security, on the other hand, and not doing what Stephen Colbert recommends, which is just typing what they tell you from the podium and running spellcheck, the approach favored by generations of Pravda reporters and their now extinct political masters, you may not be. Gonzales very pointedly in his interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos was not-committal about whether reporters themselves would be prosecuted for publishing stories such as CIA black sites prisons and the NSA warrantless domestic surveillance programs. More from Walter Pincus, Eric Lichtblau and Crooks and Liars.

Newsweek profiles Steve Kappes, the veteran CIA officer Hayden wants as his deputy, who's coming under some criticism from a few on the political right the past week for at least symbolizing everything they were hoping to get rid of at the Agency under Goss. Hayden told Sen. Mike DeWine under pointed questioning to this effect at the hearing the other day, he can be more of a "change agent" at the Agency with Kappes by his side because Kappes has the respect of the building.

Firedoglake hosts its book salon on Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, joined by Rick and Crooked Timber's Henry Farrel, today at 5pm. And TPMCafe is discussing Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism this week.

Michael Massing wades where others fear to tread.

Historian David Greenberg sifts out the historical roots of the tensions between the liberal and leftist traditions in the Democratic camp. Excellent piece, worth reading, and reminds me that I have to get to Peter Beinart's book... Recently, though, I would say those tensions have been overtaken by something larger than an internal partisan divide, outside of the blogosphere anyhow; as something like 69% of Americans say they now regret the decision to have ever gone to war in Iraq, Americans, not just Democrats, are united in disillusion and uncertainty about when the US should use force. Talk to some Republicans on the Hill about being on the front lines next fall with the war hanging around their necks like an albatross. And then think back to ten years ago, who was leading the opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia, supported by the Clinton administration? As I remember, it was House Republicans, however much such opposition was inspired by anti-Clinton animus. The Republican Party has a long tradition of isolationism as well, and opposition to use force in wars of choice (to protect American values, stop genocide, etc.). This is a way of saying the tensions between the interventionist and anti-interventionist camps Greenberg writes about crosses partisan lines and comes from a deeper American dilemma over the US role in the world, as well as the domestic politics of the moment.

The top 9/11 plotter we never heard of. Pretty remarkable story about a key logistics officer for the 9/11 attacks, Ammar al-Baluchi, a.k.a Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a relative of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Youssef, who managed to use such tradecraft and different aliases that until recently most people didn't realize he was directly connected as a financier, travel agent and logistics officer to the 9/11 attacks, the Cole bombers, the Jose Padilla plot, and an apparently more recent failed plot to bomb US gas stations. They didn't realize it was the same guy, using various aliases with various compartmentalized terrorists, until he was described as such in government evidence at the end of the Moussaoui trial. And this is just incredible:

In summer 2004, then-Deputy Atty. Gen. James B. Comey testified on Capitol Hill about the Padilla case. Padilla was arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare International Airport, after allegedly returning to this country from Central Asia to scout for fresh bombing targets.

Comey said Padilla told interrogators that Baluchi was Mohammed's "right-hand man." He said Baluchi gave him $10,000 in cash, travel documents, a cellphone and an e-mail address to notify him once he landed in Chicago.

"Padilla also said something else remarkable," Comey said. "He said that the night before his departure, he attended a dinner with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with Ramzi Binalshibh and with Ammar al-Baluchi. That is, the night before Jose Padilla left on his mission to the United States, he was hosted at a farewell dinner by the mastermind of September the 11th and the coordinator of those attacks."

They have all been taken into custody in Pakistan since that 2002 dinner.

OK, explain this discrepancy: that private polling conducted for the RNC apparently shows Bush's personal approval rating at 60%, while "six public polls in recent weeks showed the opposite of Rove's account - that Bush's personal approval ratings have dropped since he was re-elected in 2004," according to Knight-Ridder. Can they both be true? Is the RNC just getting the answers it likes? Are the public polls somehow missing real public opinion? Is it all in how the questions are designed? Is Rove just bluffing? Explain. Update: Here's one explanation from Professor Charlie Franklin (be sure you read the update), forwarded by a reader, and accompanying graph.

Muckraker: "Did Telcos Hire Third Party 'Scapegoat' To Give NSA Phone Records?" Eric Umansky suggested a similar theory a few days ago. More from Greg Sargent, who got Bell South on the phone.

Lindsay Beyerstein is worth reading here. (Via the Agonist).

This came out a couple days ago, but a friend in Sarajevo has now pointed me to its significance. Basically the US government is hiring contractors to move arms from Bosnia to Iraq. And credible sources say one of the dealers in the mix that the contractors have turned to is notorious blood diamonds arms dealer Viktor Bout. Here's the Guardian on a piece based on a new Amnesty report:

The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.

According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.

Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.

A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war. [...]

A complex web of private firms, arms brokers and freight firms, was behind the transfer of the guns, as well as millions of rounds of ammunition, to Iraq at "bargain basement prices", according to Hugh Griffiths, Amnesty's investigator.

The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, named in a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is now defunct, but its assets and aircraft are registered with another Moldovan firm, Jet Line International.

Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago. [...]

The Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos and CACI - which is known for its involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison controversy in Iraq - to orchestrate the arms purchases and shipments. They, in turn, subcontracted to a welter of firms, brokers, and shippers, involving businesses based in Britain, Switzerland, Croatia, Moldova, and Bosnia.

Doug Farah explains the Bout connection.

Given the legal troubles of a recent member of the House Intel committee, Duke Cunningham, it's hard to quite comprehend by what internal political logic the Democratic leadership would want to appoint to be the ranking Democrat on the committee someone who has been impeached for conspiracy and perjury. Update: It seems Steve Clemons picked up on this a while back too.

Apropos of the Hayden CIA director hearings I have just spent a few hours at, trust me, you will want to read the latest from Ken Silverstein. The long and short of it is that a series of CIA station chiefs in Iraq found themselves farmed out of their jobs after reporting developments on the ground that did not comport with the administration's hopes for Iraq; those who had rosier reports got promoted:

A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration's war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA's ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales.” [...]

The fate of those two station chiefs had a predictable effect. In 2005, I'm told, the Baghdad station chief filed but a single Aardwolf. The report, which one person told me was widely derided within the CIA as “a joke,” asserted that the United States was winning the war despite all evidence to the contrary. It was garbage, but garbage the Bush administration wanted to hear; at the end of his tour, that Station Chief was given a plum assignment. “This is a time of war,” said one former intelligence official. “Every day American kids are getting killed over there. We need steady, focused reporting [from Baghdad] but no one is willing to speak out since they know they'll get shot down.”

“The CIA's ability to speak honestly is gone,” concluded the official, “which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country.”

Go read. It would seem to be quite a delicate incentive system Agency hands and their prospective leadership have to navigate.

The Hayden hearing was fascinating. A close listen to his testimony offered a glimpse of a far more complex internal debate and concern about recently revealed intelligence policy decisions and their legal bases than you might expect. Hayden notably responded to a question from Sen. Feinstein that he himself had not read the Justice Department's legal rationale for the expanded domestic telecom data collection -- suggesting perhaps that legal finding is not in writing, or if it was, has not been shared with him. He also noted that three of his advisors at NSA -- who he said agreed the President had the Article 2 authority to authorize the domestic telecom data collection -- had never issued written legal rationales for the decision; does someone not want to have their signature on this? One got a sense that Feinstein's series of questions and Hayden's careful answers were in a kind of code about what was in writing whose significance they both understood very well. Similarly, under questioning from Senators Olympia Snowe and Ron Wyden, Hayden never to my ears quite answered their question of who had determined that only the "Gang of Eight" should be briefed on the domestic surveillance programs - rather than the full Intelligence committee (which was finally briefed in full yesterday), as normally required by the 1947 National Security Act. And yet he managed to imply quite strongly that it would have been his preference to brief everybody. More here.

More from the NYT:

... If there's one thing senators can't stand, it's being left out of the loop by the White House. And if there's another thing they can't stand, it's reading about how they have been left out of the loop in their morning newspaper.

So when Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked why the full panel had been forced to wait until Wednesday afternoon, the eve of General Hayden's hearing, the nominee sat impassively, his hands clasped in front of him, his back stiff in his dress blues, four silver stars twinkling on each epaulet.

"Sir," he said steadily, "it was not my decision. I briefed fully whatever audience was in front of me, and I wouldn't attempt to explain the administration's decision."

That did not appear to satisfy Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine. Earlier in the day she had complained that the small number of lawmakers who were briefed before Wednesday were "handcuffed" because they were not permitted to share information with colleagues.

"The notification to a very limited group — they could do nothing much with that information, essentially — is not the kind of checks and balances that I think our founding fathers had in mind," Ms. Snowe said.

The hearing put General Hayden in an awkward position. President Bush has tried to keep secret the details of the eavesdropping, in which the security agency monitored, without seeking court warrants, the international communications of those suspected of having links to terrorists. Yet White House officials keep getting dragged into talking about the program, especially in the effort to get General Hayden confirmed.

Reader/blogger Alexander Harrowell writes me that Archer Logistics, the company created for Brent Wilkes to get CIA contracts, got a federal small business loan as recently as last year. "Here's one for you: Find in this page: Archer. Archer Logistics of Chantilly, VA got a Federal small business loan of $75,000 on 03/05/2005." Hmm. Kind of small change?

A source tells me that after Wilkes got the water contract from the CIA, his nephew Joel Combs, the ostensible proprietor of Archer Logistics, called up a third party to say that they had the means to ship pretty much anything into Iraq. The gasket was now open. Perhaps more valuable than the $2.3 million Wilkes got from the initial Agency contract, was the "designated CIA seller" stamp he seemed to get with it. And I also was given to understand that, given Wilkes' friend Foggo's position as a top logistics officer for the Agency responsible for getting supplies to Agency personnel in the Afghan and Iraq theaters at the time of the contract, Wilkes wasn't likely responsible for shipping the water, just providing the actual bottled water. In other words, the $2.3 million doesn't really represent the value of the contract at all, which seemed to come with something more valuable: free international shipping into a goldmine of a war zone (something Combs seemed to be suggesting others in their business/social circle might piggyback off of). Similarly, I learned, it was widely known among the group of Wilkes associates in Washington that Combs was Wilkes' nephew and employee. In other words, it is implausible that Foggo, who was very close to Wilkes, would not have known that a company headed by Combs awarded a CIA contract was essentially a front for Wilkes.

About two years into a couple of the biggest corruption scandals in Congress ever, the House ethics committee rolls up its sleeves and gets to work. Just as officials from the DOJ/IRS/FBI/etc are carrying out the boxes.

Jonathan Turley: "What Congress hasn't done, the news media have — at least until those voices are silenced, too." Well worth reading.

AP: "Secret documents that allegedly detail the surveillance of AT&T; phone lines under the Bush administration's domestic spying program can be used in a lawsuit against the telephone giant, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, but the records will remain sealed. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected a bid by AT&T; Inc. to return the records that were given to the privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation by a former AT&T; technician. But Walker said the records would remain under seal until it can be determined whether they reveal trade secrets. [...] The hearing is the first in a lawsuit challenging the administration's secretive domestic surveillance program. The lawsuit, filed by EFF in U.S. District Court, accuses AT&T; of illegally cooperating with the National Security Agency to make communications on the company's networks available to the spy agency without warrants."

Bill Arkin: "Is the fantastic NSA data mining effort our modern equivalent, a multi-billion bonanza for the information technology industry based on a dream of perfect defenses, ultimately unrealizable because the world, and technologies, will change and transform even as the surveillance system emerges? We don't know what the NSA and the intelligence communities are spending on this, what they are really doing, whether they are pursuing the right path even within their own objectives. There is a dream of a surveillance system that will intercept terrorists before they strike, a system that may or may not work given terrorist tradecraft and behavior and an ever more cluttered and complex signals environment."

Greg Sargent deconstructs the Verizon and Bell South slow-mo denials about providing their customers' calling information to the NSA. More from Eric Umansky and CAP.

I got an interesting letter from a reader, a retired litigator:

... This reminds me of 1973-74. Starting in 1972, I was a young lawyer working in DC for the law firm [xxx] and had a pretty close look at the unraveling of the Nixon administration. What was interesting in hindsight was the extent to which the senior administration team banded together in public, putting enormous pressure on the second and third line staff, who almost certainly had misgivings which they had to keep private. But despite the Nixon administration's recent victory and hard edged public stance, by the end of 1973 they had lost the ability to maneuver, to take risks and, eventually, to govern.

In this position the current administration is more vulnerable than you can imagine. They will run rather than fight the difficult issues whenever possible, because they cannot stand another loss or even another damaging controversy. That is the significance of [this article]... -- the administration caved in rather than stand on the principles that they had been so adamant in supporting. ...

Appreciate the perspective. Posted with permission. I think I can safely say his firm was fairly closely tied to the Nixon administration.

In the National Interest editor Nikolas Gvosdev posts some excerpts of Graham Fuller's forthcoming article, "Superpower Fatigue," at his blog. And on the topic of international affairs blogs and websites, check out the new and improved Council on Foreign Relations website, edited by journalist Michael Moran.

Juan Cole does capture the Orwellian absurdity of the current situation in a couple sentences. "Raw Story says that the Bush administration is tracing the telephone calls of ABC and other reporters in an attempt to find the source of leaks. The leaks are of things like the fact that the Bush administration is tracing people's phone calls."

In a piece on Mitchell Wade's apparent extensive cooperation with prosecutors in the Duke Cunningham corruption case, the San Diego Union Tribune points out that Congress is giving itself more time off than at any time since World War II:

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are complaining that the widening corruption investigation could impede their ability to govern.

House officials told the congressional newspaper Roll Call this week that federal prosecutors in San Diego have subpoenaed “boxloads of documents” from committees Cunningham was involved with.

The officials warned that the probe could “shut down” the House Appropriations, Intelligence and Armed Services committees.

But Congress-watchers say the committees' work is already slowing down because legislators have given themselves so much time off.

Congress is scheduled to be in session only 97 days this year, the least amount of time since World War II.

“The congressmen are coming in as late as 6 p.m. on Tuesday and by Thursday noon, they're lining up at Reagan Airport,” said Scott Lilly, a former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.

“With that kind of schedule, it wouldn't take much for a subcommittee to be knocked back so it couldn't get its job done,” he said.

As Muckraker pointed out yesterday, the representatives apparently need the time off to go home to their districts and raise money.

What's happened to Tom Friedman?

President Bush has slipped in one recent poll to a 29 percent approval rating. Frankly, I can't believe that. Those polls can't possibly be accurate. I mean, really, ask yourself: How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency?

Personally, I think the president can reshuffle his cabinet all he wants, but his poll ratings are not going to substantially recover — ever. Americans are slow to judgment about a president, very slow. And in times of war, in particular, they are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I think a lot of Americans in recent months have simply lost confidence in this administration's competence and honesty.

What has eaten away most at the support for this administration, I believe, has been the fact that time and time again, it has put politics and ideology ahead of the interests of the United States, and I think a lot of people are just sick of it. I know I sure am....

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack? No. In his excellent book on the Iraq war, "The Assassins' Gate," George Packer tells the story of how some of the State Department's best Iraq experts were barred from going to Iraq immediately after the invasion — when they were needed most — because that didn't pass Dick Cheney's or Don Rumsfeld's ideology tests. And that is the core of the matter: the Bush team believes in loyalty over expertise. When ideology always trumps reality, loyalty always trumps expertise.

Yes, Mr. Bush has seen the error of his ways and has sacked the Goss crew, but we just wasted a year and saw a number of experienced C.I.A. people quit the agency in disgust. ...

And even I am surprised to find that our long obsession Mr. Foggo makes an appearance in this piece to make Friedman's point.

Amitai Etzioni has an interesting idea to solve the need for intelligence oversight not forthcoming from the Congress -- civilian review boards.

Gitmo names released. "But none of the most notorious terrorist suspects were included, raising questions about where America's most dangerous prisoners are being held."

David Ignatius, "Spy Tools in Need of a Law."

Shake up at MZM, as official steps down after it was revealed his wife works for Pentagon spy czar Steve Cambone, the Martinsville (Va) Daily reports. Via Justin Rood.

TNR's Spencer Ackerman finds common ground with Reverend Dobson, on the subject of Senate Judiciary committee chairman, Arlen Specter.

First her workout routine, now her iPod. Is Condy running?

George Crile, author of the stupendous Charlie Wilson's War (aren't we grateful for that book, those of us following the Duke Cunningham corruption scandal), has died, the WP reports. Leaving unfinished a sequel. (Via Romenesko).

Dana Milbank on Karl Rove's speech yesterday at AEI. (Via Steve Clemons).

Bruce Jentleson: The Lesson of Libya? Behavior change of rogue regimes is possible.

Another thought on the subject of domestic surveillance. These policies of vastly expanded warrantless domestic surveillance may have been undertaken in good faith, but they have a way of taking on a life and logic of their own totally divorced from their original purpose, and becoming self-justifying. Consider that, as the government has apparently gone to some length to track every single AT&T; and Verizon customer's communications, it has still not managed to find Osama bin Laden, the ostensible reason for the war we are involved in in the first place. Bin Laden probably doesn't even use a phone, so he's seemingly a difficult target for the NSA. We Americans and our telephones and Internet, on the other hand, offer a target rich environment, it's hard not to see, given the devotion of what seems increasingly substantial US government resources to targeting our communications. Kind of like when there were not enough good targets in Afghanistan, the Defense Secretary expressed the thought that Iraq might have some better ones.

I guess this is a long way of saying, they've got a hammer, and they appear to be searching for the perfect nail. And it may be us, because the terrorists don't seem to be very suitable nails at all, or else conceivably we would not be hearing bin Laden and Zarqawi and Zawahiri on TV so recently.

And isn't it how these things always go? The war turns inward. I saw it in the Balkans, and those a little older saw it with McCarthy, Watergate, Nixon.

LAT's Jeff Fleischman:

Germany's foreign intelligence service has been accused of keeping files on journalists and paying reporters to spy on their colleagues, in a widening scandal that echoes the days of Cold War secret dossiers.

The charges, contained in a confidential government report, have unnerved media organizations and further damaged the reputation of the foreign intelligence agency, which is also under investigation by Parliament for its role in the Iraq war. Parts of the report were leaked to newspapers over the weekend, and lawmakers quickly blamed the agency for violating press freedoms. [...]

The controversy centers on attempts by the foreign intelligence agency, known as the BND, to find leaks in its own organization after several embarrassing stories, including allegations that its own agents were involved in plutonium smuggling. Begun decades ago, the surveillance program gradually enlisted journalist informants to spy on other reporters covering the intelligence community. [...]

Many reporters and politicians also are questioning why a foreign intelligence agency was preoccupied with monitoring journalists at home.

A familiar arc, isn't it?

Kissinger: "The recent letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Bush needs to be considered on several levels. It can be treated as a ploy to obstruct U.N. Security Council deliberations on Iran's disregard of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This consideration, and the demagogic tone of the letter, merited its rejection by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But the first direct approach by an Iranian leader to a U.S. president in more than 25 years may also have intentions beyond the tactical and propagandistic, and its demagoguery may be a way to get the radical part of the Iranian public used to dialogue with the United States. America's challenge is to define its own strategy and purposes regarding the most fateful issue confronting us today."

ABC: "Journalists' Phone Records are Fair Game." (Via Kevin Drum). Seriously, who is going to catch the terrorists? Remember them? ... I wonder if the news organizations ABC identifies tonight as having confirmation of being the victim of this overreach (ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post), will consider suing the government. Should the government really be secretly monitoring who the independent media in America is calling, who they are talking to, not just confidential sources, but all of their sources? All of the numbers they dial and everyone who calls them? And poor you, right, if you have ever talked to someone in the government's crosshairs from one of those organizations even to talk about their kids' bake sale, I guess, because you're on their radar now too. What fun. So who is catching the terrorists again? Because the FBI and NSA seem awfully and increasingly busy monitoring innocent Americans. More from the NY Sun.

This December 2004 Rockefeller objection to a classified satellite acquisition program in the intelligence authorization bill has been nagging at me since reading Tice's letter.

Do you remember the controversy that generated the whole leak and subsequent leak investigation on the now sadly defunct West Wing? About this secret military space program that could rescue the astronauts, if only it could be revealed? I was reminded of that today, reading former NSA official Russell Tice's letter (.pdf), and what seems to me its hint that the matter to be disclosed involves military satellites being used to spy on Americans. It would be staggering if true. The specter of this whole architecture of futuristic warfare, being used to experimentally target the communications of the American citizenry, is profoundly disturbing. Perhaps Orwell could have imagined it, but even the West Wing never fully took on the most ominous elements of the current moment: that the war could be used to justify vast domestic surveillance.

Update: I made an acknowledged leap from Tice's letter to my sense that his concerns involve military satellites being used in domestic spying. Here's the line of the letter that jumped out at me:

I intend to report to the Armed Services Committee probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involve the Director of the National Security Agency, the U.S. Air Force Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

We know Tice is a whistleblower on the NSA being involved in warrantless domestic spying. Now we see that he's also pointing to the Air Force Air and Space Operations leadership, as well as the leadership of the NSA and DoD being involved in some special access program that he feels is illegal. Hence, my (acknowledged) leap/presumption that this has to do with space, with satellites, with domestic surveillance. But I could be wrong. [I've since been assured that my hunch is basically in the right neighborhood.]

Update II: It turns out Tice sent a letter outlining similar concerns to Intel committee chairman Pat Roberts -- last month. And that was already Tice's second letter to Chairman Roberts, outlining similar concerns, back in December:

As the responsible committee for intelligence in the Senate, I have been waiting for your directions on this matter. If another committee is the proper place for me to testify, I believe it is your responsibility to forward my request to that committee and keep me informed of the process. You are also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and, as such, should know if SAP related intelligence programs fall within the jurisdiction of intelligence and/or the military committees. If the SSCI is indeed the proper place for me to convey this intelligence related misconduct, I likewise believe it is your responsibility to inform me of such. This, of course, has not been the case.

In the absence of any direction, I recently have been researching this question of jurisdiction. In doing so, I have stumbled upon a directive that seems to address the question of who in congress is cleared to know about these SAP programs...

Ouch. The guy is pratically begging for guidance. Where is he supposed to go? Is there really no Congressional committee that is cleared to listen to his concerns? How is that possible?

ABC's heard some disturbing news:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Spying on journalists, like spying on one's own domestic population, is a police state tactic, and one can't help but wonder had Congress been doing a more robust job of oversight, if journalists would be playing this heightened investigation and exposure role alone. But as it is, that's where we are. It's a dangerous moment, and an unsustainable one. Something really has to give. The oversight mechanisms have to kick in. The excesses, the overreach, the suspencion of the law, have gone too far, far beyond a partisan argument. This has nothing to do with the war on terror or national security. This has to do with an attempt at intimidation to evade any sort of accountability. And it's done a huge disservice to this country.

(Thx to JR for the link).

More from CJR, and Digby & Rick Perlstein (including a sneak preview of Perlstein's new book, Nixonland).

AP: Libya back in the fold.

Really interesting NPR show on NSA domestic surveillance, with the NYT's Eric Lichtblau, EPIC's Mark Rotenberg, and former Reagan era Justice Department official David Rivkin.

Corruption Probe Closing House for Business? TPMMuckraker's Justin Rood:

Federal prosecutors working the Cunningham case have requested so much information from Congress, three committees might have to "shut down" to comply, Roll Call's John Bresnahan reports.

U.S. Attorneys want boxloads of documents from the House Armed Services, Intelligence, and Appropriations committees, Bresnahan writes. They also want to interview at least nine current or former staffers.

It's clear from the requests that "the corruption probe that began with Cunningham has now clearly moved beyond the actions taken by the imprisoned former lawmaker to other Members," sources tell Roll Call, which notes recent stories naming Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), appropriations committee chairman, as another target of the feds.

Wow.

And from the Roll Call piece, note this comment from the chairman of the House Appropriations committee, Jerry Lewis.

"I have never, under any circumstances, told or suggested to someone seeking federal dollars for a project that they would receive favorable treatment by making campaign donations. If I learned that anyone on my staff made such a suggestion, they would no longer be working for me," Lewis said in a statement released by his office on Thursday.

In any case, it's hard to believe this is what the GOP needed a few months before midterms.

From a reader in San Diego:

... Also, I read your thoughtful piece today on the culture of the GOP in Southern CA. To take it back even a bit further, San Diego got its real start as a city during WWII when the Navy used it as a launching pad for troops headed to the South Pacific. Afterwards, we became major players in the burgeoning "military industrial complex" the Cold War funded. All of this would have been the milieu Brent came of age in. And the culture that promoted a not-very-bright ex-fighter pilot into a Congressional seat. Can you imagine the corruption potential with all those Cold War contracts? It kind of fits with my impression that Brent didn't actually even think there was anything wrong with what he was doing. Also, San Diego is pretty infamous for its swindlers (see: J. David Dominelli, C. Arnholt Smith, et. al. This is a good article). ...

I've strayed far beyond my pay grade, but it is an interesting subject ...

And more interesting from this same reader:

Also, it's important to understand that Brent was a nobody in the San Diego business community, so this must have been incredibly seductive for him. He was an SDSU alum - not a bragging point in the elite circles in this town. (Although that is totally unfair. San Diego RUNS on SDSU alums.) He was an Athletics booster and a BMOC in that small world, but strictly NOT connected in La Jolla, Del Mar, Coronado, Point Loma or Rancho Santa Fe, where the money and power lives. They would look down their patrician noses at him. He's not the least bit sophisticated in any way and San Diego has developed a whole 'nother power base in the past 20 years with its biotech, basic medical research, academic communities and he does NOT fit into that highly educated, internationally connected world. He was a CPA for crying out loud! So, the Washington, CIA, connection would be an extremely big deal. The political influence through Cunningham etc. was something he bragged about a lot...

Kevin Drum notes an interesting trend in current movie/TV themes:

The current season of 24 revolves around a president of the United States who aids and abets a terrorist plot so that it will scare the hell out of everyone and provide him with an excuse to launch massive retaliatory actions. (As if the previous four seasons haven't done that job already.)

In V for Vendetta, a British politician aids and abets a terrorist plot so that it will scare the hell out of everyone and provide him with an excuse to launch a fascist dictatorship.

In Mission Impossible 3, the story revolves around a high-ranking intelligence officer who aids and abets a terrorist plot so that it will scare the hell out of everyone and provide him with an excuse to launch ever bigger and badder counterattacks.

What accounts for such a wave of paranoia and conspiracy theories?

Mark Hosenball has a pretty damning portrait of Foggo. (Via Muckraker).

Looking Past the Corruption. From the AP: "Cunningham case at start of sprawling federal probe":

... The link in all these strands isn't Cunningham, who pleaded guilty to taking $2.4-million in bribes from defense contractors. It's San Diego businessman Brent Wilkes, who is described as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Prosecutors allege Wilkes paid Cunningham more than $626,000 in bribes from 2000 to 2004 to win government contracts for his companies. But it's Wilkes' links to other lawmakers and government officials that have expanded the case.

Exactly. In some ways, Wilkes has a lot in common with Jack Abramoff, including their shared southern California GOP roots going back to the era that elevated Reagan and which accompanied him to Washington. Early on, Abramoff earned his anti-communist street credentials serving the apartheid cause in South Africa and maintaining support for it among a certain faction of Congress; Wilkes did his version of that lobbying targeted congressmen for support for arming and funding the contras in Central America. The common theme being picking the anti-communist team, no matter how morally unsavory, and backing them aggressively, even when Congress writ large had outlawed it. This was the price of admission to a certain club that flourished in the Reagan era, that has echoes in the present one. Abramoff eventually got tied in with DeLay. While Wilkes, through his San Diego College Republican connections, got tied in with Bill Lowery (who, the SDUT reports today, led the effort to get Congressional support for arming the contras), and several others from the southern California GOP delegation, including but not only Cunningham. And of course, Abramoff and Wilkes are both now at the center of separate wheels whose spokes touch various (and some mutual) congressmen now under investigative scrutiny for corruption.

But what has particularly interested me about the Wilkes case is the controversial national security policies he has been connected to, via his lobbying and contracting work, recently and going back to the Reagan era. The fact that he and his former partner Wade were going for not just any federal contract that fell off the truck, but for defense and intelligence contracts, including increasingly in recent years off-the-books, "black" contracts. What is the common theme, if there is one, between the policies that generated those black and gray contracts, and the unusual degree of corruption that seemed to accompany them? I've been thinking about this a lot, and it's not an obvious one. Why is it in some ways the more prosaic, superficial issue -- the corruption -- that gets surfaced and investigated -- rather than the policies connected to it? Is it an easier, or politically safer, topic to investigate how they got the contracts, than to investigate the underlying purpose of some of the more controversial contracts doled out to Wilkes and Wade? Including, in an earlier era, the covert backing of the contras Wilkes (and Foggo) were involved with, and more recently, the Pentagon domestic intelligence program Cunningham co-conspirator Wade was contracted to perform, and the covert extraordinary rendition program -- conveying terror suspects for torture -- that Wilkes was allegedly in discussions to get a contract to provide a plane network for? I gave a go to thinking about that here. Garance Franke-Ruta offers her thoughts here.

Certainly the fact that black contracts -- along with the secret policies that generate them -- have zero public scrutiny is a factor in the accompanying propensity for corruption. 'We can get away with it, because who's going to know but us?' And Wilkes might have thought he was protected, because of the covert work he would seem to know about and discussed doing for the US government, and perhaps that made him take unnecessary risks other contractors might avoid. Or maybe corrupting some number of officials was even a deliberate strategy to build a measure of protection for himself. (Conceivably, Wilkes would seem to have information about public officials that a prosecutor might want to trade in exchange for leniency.) But I don't think any of these theories quite gets at what was going on here.

It seems there is perhaps something deeper, a mutual buying-into a philosophy of governance, combined with a set of deep common cultural experiences from a certain era in southern California Republican circles, that connects those who doled out these contracts to those who received them, lavishing favors in return. These people -- Cunningham, Wilkes, Foggo, Lowery, Brant "Nine Fingers" Bassett, and perhaps others -- were truly sympatico. They came from similar backgrounds, had many shared experiences, and were on the same wave length. One senses that in some way, they felt themselves to be part of a fraternity, this club that had as one of its principals unquestioning supporting for perhaps controversial national security policies (arming the contras, the anti communist cause, the extaordinary renditions, the Top Gun stuff, etc.). That's my theory, looking at how long and overlapping the history is, the common experiences in the southern California GOP and San Diego's Naval aviation community and the SDSU College Republicans, Wilkes' and Bassett's ancestral roots in Mormon Idaho, the common tour many of them took to central America to be part of the covert US effort to arm the contras, the later flocking together to almost a southern Californian/Hollywood idea of Washington power, from the Watergate to the houseboats, etc. They were their own sort of fraternity, with a fraternity's peculiar sort of self-selecting cultural insularity, debauchery, and ritual displays of machismo -- and a fraternity's tradition of helping each other out later professionally.

It will be interesting to see what comes out about the nature of some of the recent contracts Wilkes was pursuing as the various interrelated corruption cases proceed. It's also worth noting that one contract Wilkes was expecting to get was so big, he had already promised $40 million as a gift to his alma mater, according to a source with direct knowledge I've been in touch with. Think about that. To date, we have heard that Wilkes had received about $90 million total in US government contracts. Something in the pipeline apparently dwarfed that.

And then think about this: that the only reason we are learning any of this -- the allegedly largest Congressional corruption scandal in U.S. history, the disturbing nature of some of the contracts -- is because of a journalistic investigation launched by Marcus Stern. The news story did not follow a prosecutor's investigation. The prosecutor's investigation was prompted by the detailed revelations in a news story. Nothing else would seem to be proactively protecting the public from this type of behavior going on for years and years. And there's a policy correlary to that as well.

(Editor's note: This post has been updated).

Good news for a Knight Ridder Baghdad journalist.

Mark Schmitt, who has the nicest looking blog, has an interesting post on President Bush and the CIA, on a theme I've been expecting Maureen Dowd to pick up and run with for a couple weeks.

San Diego Union Trib:

... Foggo quit the police force in 1979 to work as an investigator with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office. About two years later, he was recruited into the CIA. Sources who knew Foggo at the time say the CIA appointment came with the help of political ties he had forged at the Young Republicans club.

Foggo's first foreign posting was to Honduras, the center of the U.S.-backed Contra guerrilla fighters who were trying to topple the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

About that time, Wilkes launched a Washington-based financial firm and accompanied lawmakers on trips to Central America, where they met with Foggo and Contra leaders.

Three of Wilkes' former friends say he told them he was involved in assignations between some of the legislators and prostitutes in Central America. The former friends – each of whom has known Wilkes and Foggo since high school – would speak only on the condition that they not be identified.

“Brent Wilkes adamantly and vehemently denies ever being involved in getting anybody prostitutes, and that includes congressmen and any other officials,” Wilkes' attorney said.

The only congressman who has been publicly identified as traveling with Wilkes in Central America is former Rep. Bill Lowery of San Diego. During the mid-1980s, Lowery was part of a Republican task force formed to build congressional support for President Reagan's aid to the Contras.

Lowery “strenuously denies” that he was involved with prostitutes on the Central American trips, said his attorney Lanny Breuer. Lowery has declined to answer questions about what he was doing in Honduras with Wilkes and Foggo.

Wilkes and Lowery knew each other from Young Republican meetings at San Diego State, which was also Lowery's alma mater. In his current career as a lobbyist, Lowery has been paid at least $200,000 by Wilkes since 1998.

After the Nicaraguan government was overthrown, Foggo was transferred to other CIA stations, including Vienna, Austria, and Frankfurt, Germany, while Wilkes established a career as a defense contractor in the United States.

Over the past decade, Wilkes has made more than $90 million selling technology to the government. According to papers filed in the Cunningham case, those sales were often at inflated prices.

In the beginning, most of Wilkes' sales were to the Defense Department. But in the past six years, Wilkes has concentrated more on the CIA, said several of his former business associates. They said Cunningham shifted funding for Wilkes' projects into the CIA's so-called “black budget” because it is hidden from public scrutiny.

As Wilkes lobbied for business on Capitol Hill, his hospitality suites in the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels were the sites of frequent poker games with high-ranking CIA officers, including Foggo, as well as legislators and staffers of the House Intelligence Committee.

Last month, the FBI began investigating reports that Wilkes was providing prostitutes at the Watergate and Westin to curry favor with lawmakers during his campaign to win contracts.

Wade has told federal prosecutors that Cunningham was one of the lawmakers for whom prostitutes were provided, said sources close to the investigation.

Through official CIA channels, Foggo has denied there were any prostitutes at the poker games he attended.

“If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more,” said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise-Dyck.

More on Foggo's time in Honduras from Harper's.

Were you in the College Republicans with Dusty and Brent at San Diego State University? Been to the Poway Taj Mahal? Digitized Pentagon documents for Wilkes in Panama? Done business with Tommy Kontogiannis? Drop me a line.

Newsweek: "Hand-written notes by Cheney surface in the Fitzgerald probe":

The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a "junket" to Africa.

Cheney's notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were "acutely focused" on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence. [...]

In the margins of the op-ed, Cheney jotted out a series of questions that seemed to challenge many of Wilson's assertions as well as the legitimacy of his CIA sponsored trip to Africa: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. [sic] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for Cheney's own notes to be made public. The notes-apparently obtained as a result of a grand jury subpoena-would appear to make Cheney an even more central witness than had been previously thought in the criminal probe. ...

More from the Next Hurrah's EmptyWheel, who also provides a link to Cheney's marginalia (.pdf).

More from Andrew Sullivan.

NYT: "Cheney Pushed US to widen eavesdropping."

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials. But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

On a related note, here's a new Newsweek poll on public attitudes to the latest domestic telecom surveillance revelations. Glenn Greenwald is worth reading on this too.

Starting with the San Diego Union Tribune back in December, in the piece that still remains the Bible on the Dusty Foggo-Brent Wilkes relationship, there have been hints of this intriguing era in Foggo's early career in the CIA, as a money man helping fund the Contras in Central America in the mid 1980s. But we haven't seen more than a hint of what was going on down there, at a moment when Foggo was not only becoming the go-to guy for a network of CIA officers and associates who saw their fortunes rise in the Goss era, but also when Foggo's best friend Brent Wilkes was launching his career as a Washington lobbyist, by bringing congressmen, starting with Bill Lowery, down from Washington for a front row view of the action -- and some entertainment. Various lesser forms of which they would recreate at the Watergate and on houseboats in Washington in the 1990s.

Now Harper's Ken Silverstein has interviewed a half dozen former CIA officials who know Foggo and his work as an apparently quite talented Agency fixer, who knew how to keep the VIPs happy, and put together a glimpse of Foggo's somewhat cinematic time in Honduras, beginning at the Maya Hotel's casino Gloria:

The sources said that Foggo was a regular at the Maya Hotel's casino in Tegucigalpa; in 1993, the Chicago Tribune described the hotel as having once been “the unofficial headquarters for those who came here to help—or watch—the U.S. try to purge neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador of communist threats” Foggo, said my sources, was also a regular at a local bar named Gloria's, which one source said was chiefly known for having “a brisk hooker trade.” While my sources had no direct knowledge of Foggo consorting with prostitutes, several said that simply being at a place like Gloria's was deemed to be a serious security problem and that Foggo's nocturnal habits were a source of great concern within the local CIA station...

Go read.

Also, check out Time's piece on the investigation of Foggo reaching abroad, to his time as the logistics officer at a secret CIA base in Frankfurt, when a front company for Wilkes got its first CIA contract. I've already explained here why I think it's extremely implausible that Foggo didn't know Wilkes was a beneficiary of that contract, and the other contract I heard was until recently under discussion.

Ha, ha, ha:

(NYT: "Gen. Michael V. Hayden, nominee to head C.I.A., reacted Friday after Senator Susan Collins said microphones were 'eavesdropping' on them.")

The Poway Taj Mahal. From someone who did business with Wilkes in San Diego two years ago:

I am SO not surprised at the Wilkes scandal. I had a business connection with him in San Diego about two years ago and came away thinking that sooner or later I'd be reading about him on the front page, and not in a good way. I've toured the ADCS facility in Poway. It's like a corporate Taj Mahal, everything is super high-end. Lavish flower arrangements in the lobby, toilet paper in the bathrooms folded like a hotel room, marble everywhere. Weird thing is NO ONE seems to actually work there! Brent showed us his production floor and it was completely empty. Tons of huge, elaborate, obviously incredibly expensive equipment and no one using it. (Can you say "your tax dollars at work"?) This was when he'd just done the Panama mapping project and he was telling us about that. The only people I saw there were 4 or 5 20-something women wearing club clothes and fetching coffee and water for the all-male meetings. Every single one of them was in a tight-fitting, completely office-inappropriate outfit with major cleavage showing. It was so striking and so weird. They were like Bond girls, only not as classy. (Prediction: a sexual harrassment lawsuit or two in addition to his other problems. I'm sure those gals could tell some tales!)

Brent was known as a major wheeler-dealer and bragged about his lobbying connections a lot. He was hard to contact because he was always flying back to Washington. He promised a lot in the situation I knew him from but never delivered, just kept everyone hanging endlessly. I can't elaborate any further but suffice it to say, he lost all credibility with us and wasted a lot of our time. One other weird thing was that for such a high-roller his business advisors were not quality, talented people. Mostly yes-men and oily salesmen as far as I could see

Check out all his "businesses". The special events one is especially interesting. He'd throw a party in an elaborate, high-tech room at ADCS and give the catering business to his special events firm rather than paying for it directly. I'm not sure how this worked but it seemed very fishy at the time and seemed like he could make the company look successful this way. ...

Recollections of Dusty Foggo, supreme ladies man. From a reader C in La Mesa CA, whose name I am withholding: "I was just reading your article....I about fell on the floor this morning when I saw Dusty's name across the bottom of the Fox News channel. I don't think I have anything to tell that you haven't already heard. I knew Dusty approx 1976-ish. I met him at the Sears store in Chula Vista. I was 18 and shopping with my mom. He popped out from behind the refridgerators, charming as hell. He was stalking a possible 'crook' and was recently made a security guard. Although, he seemed more interested in flirting with me than chasing the bad guys. We kept in touch for a few years, and then he kinda disappeared off the face of the earth. I knew his mom lived on [] for a long time after that. A total ladies man, for sure. I've never forgotten him." That's the gist of what you hear about Dusty from his early days. This reader adds in a subsequent email, "I doubt that the press will round up every woman he was ever with, they don't have the time."

So -- who's going to play him in the movie? Wilkes? Cunningham? Marcus Stern?

Let me point your attention to something interesting. Today, the San Diego Union-Tribune/Copley News Service's Dean Calbreath and Jerry Kammer reported on the newly opened investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as of several other committee members. And their article highlights an interesting paragraph from the government's evidence of corruption in the Duke Cunningham plea agreement:

According to government and defense industry sources, Lewis and Cunningham worked together to help Poway military contractor Brent Wilkes as he pursued contracts on Capitol Hill. Cunningham admitted taking bribes from Wilkes, who has been identified as co-conspirator No. 1 in Cunningham's plea agreement.

On April 15, 1999, three months after Lewis was named chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, he received $17,000 in campaign contributions from Wilkes and his associates. At the time, Wilkes was vying for a project to digitize military documents in the Panama Canal Zone, which the United States was about to return to Panama. [...]

But the Panama project hit a snag. The Pentagon did not want to give Wilkes as much money as he requested.

On July 6, 1999, Wilkes wrote to Cunningham saying “We need $10 m(illion) more immediately . . . This is very important and if you cannot resolve this others will be calling also.”

Wilkes' memo – contained in federal documents accompanying Cunningham's guilty plea – then named two people whose names were blacked out by the prosecutors.
According to military and defense industry sources, Lewis and Cunningham got the money for Wilkes, founder of ADCS Inc., by using their clout to threaten the funding of the Pentagon's F-22 fighter jet.

I've posted the physical image below so you can see this for yourself (thanks to kevin drum as always for graphics help). Meantime, if you have Adobe Acrobat, click on this link, and scroll all the way down to page 75 as indicated in the .pdf document (Government Exhibit 15).

This is the July 6, 1999 fax from a staffer to alleged Cunningham co-conspirator one Brent Wilkes, founder and CEO of ADCS Inc., to Cunningham, providing Cunningham with "talking points" to get the Defense Department to make an additional $10 million available to Wilkes for the Panama project. "We need $10 million more immediately" you'll see in Point 1.

Point 3 is what I want to draw your attention to. "This is very important, and if you cannot resolve this, others will be calling also -- i.e. [two blacked out names."

Check out the two blacked out names. The second one begins with a "J" and looks to have about ten letters. Any guesses?

Update: Reader C says, "Duncan Hunter and Jerry Lewis."

SDUT: "Federal Agents raid home of CIA's former No. 3 Boss." Also his CIA office.

Call me crazy: but imagine if Foggo's CIA office and his home were raided a week ago -- when Porter Goss was still there? That would have been quite a politically embarrassing headache for his well known protector, mightn't have been?

More than Poker. Must-read David Ignatius column about how the Gosslings' elevation of Foggo to be the CIA's Executive Director was emblematic of the problems central to the tenure and fall of Porter Goss at the Agency. More from Mark Hosenball about how Foggo literally was the tip of the spear in terms of Agency friction with Negroponte's Office of the Director of National Intelligence over intelligence reforms and restructuring.

More on Foggo also from the New York Times. You'll notice in it that Foggo's new attorney claims Foggo didn't have any idea that a company awarded a CIA contract was linked to Wilkes. Well, let me push back on that. I believe I was the first to report, back in December, based on a tip, that the vehicle for CIA contracts to Wilkes was a company called Archer Logistics, which is ostensibly owned by Wilkes' nephew Joel G. Combs (who is also a lobbyist with Wilkes' lobbying firm, Group W Advisors and was a former senior executive of Wilkes' main defense contractor firm, ADCS). Archer Logistics is co-located at ADCS' Chantilly Virginia offices. And Archer Logistics' name is close to Archer Defense, another overt Wilkes' property. In other words, I find it hard to believe someone like Foggo, who was so close to Wilkes since junior high that he named his son after him, shared a wine locker with him, played poker with him, vacationed with him, and had an office in Wilkes' ADCS headquarters, didn't know that a CIA contract to Archer Logistics would benefit Brent Wilkes. What a coincidence! Come on. Go read the piece. And don't forget that the source on Archer Logistics later pointed me to something else potentially far more explosive: that Wilkes was in discussions to get a huge contract -- a few hundred million dollars -- from the CIA to set up an off the books plane network for the Agency, that was only scuttled pretty deep into the Cunningham revelations.

"I Imagine that since their whole flying operation has been outed, it makes it tough to operate clandestine flights," the source explained. "I bet it would cost a bundle to set up a whole new operation that no one knew about ... How do they operate a secret fleet of aircraft now that everyone knows about the planes we have? If I were high up in the CIA, this would be a big priority for me, and I would need a solution outside the normal range of solutions."

Why was Wilkes coming around the Agency this past year? My guess, it wasn't a purely social visit.

Yikes. Is it time to cash out of dollars and buy gold bars or something? Store food and water?

Update: More from Ezra Klein.

Time: Foggo brought Wilkes to hang out at the CIA in the past year. And according to sources, those office visits were reciprocated. Wilkes according to two sources kept an office -- a "playpen" -- for Foggo at ADCS full of the "Sharper Image" type technological gadgets that Foggo apparently loved. See here for more on why Wilkes may have been coming round to Langley.

More from Kevin Drum on the Luttig resignation from the US Court of Appeals.

But a knowledgable Washington reader J has a different take: "Shocked to see the Luttig resignation. You don't give up a lifelong seat on a powerful appellate court to rake in some cash. My guess is that Luttig, who was a runner-up for the Roberts and Alito nominations, has been given a hint that he's in line for the next opening. By resigning now, he can put away some serious cash for the family and avoid any controversial cases that could come up in a future confirmation hearing."

Ivo Daalder: A second Iranian letter.

Some key Republican lawmakers, including new House majority leader John Boehner, are expressing concerns about the latest USA Today revelations on the scope of the domestic telecom surveillance going on, and what it means for General Hayden's nomination. This from deep down in an NBC piece:

...The report came as the former NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden — President Bush’s choice to take over leadership of the CIA — had been scheduled to visit lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday. However, the meetings with Republican Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were postponed at the request of the White House, said congressional aides in the two Senate offices.

The White House offered no reason for the postponement to the lawmakers.

Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 to 2005, would have overseen the call-tracking program during his tenure, USA Today said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who has spoken favorably of Hayden’s nomination, said the latest revelation “is also going to present a growing impediment to the confirmation of Gen. Hayden.”

A key House Republican also voiced reservations.

Hayden will “have a lot more explaining to do,” Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters.

Boehner said he knew nothing of the program before the revelations, adding that he is “concerned” and determined “to find out” what is going on, NBC News reported Thursday.

“I’m not sure why it would be necessary to have that information,” he said of the phone records.

What's so interesting is how timing plays a role in this story's impact, versus the information itself about the role telecom companies were being asked to play by NSA, which has come out in various forms the past few months, in places like this.

Here's an interesting accompanying USA Today Q & A on the program, beginning with the Q:

Q: Does the NSA's domestic program mean that my calling records have been secretly collected?

A: In all likelihood, yes. The NSA collected the records of billions of domestic calls. Those include calls from home phones and wireless phones. [...]

Q: Who has access to my records?

A: Unclear. The NSA routinely provides its analysis and other cryptological work to the Pentagon and other government agencies.

Howard Fineman:

This fall’s election season is going to make the past three look like episodes of “Barney.”

The conventional notion here is that Democrats want to “nationalize” the 2006 elections — dwelling on broad themes (that is, the failures of the Bush Administration) — while the Republicans will try to “localize” them as individual contests that have nothing to do with, ahem, the goings on in the capital.

That was before the GOP situation got so desperate. The way I read the recent moves of Karl Rove & Co., they are preparing to wage war the only way open to them: not by touting George Bush, Lord knows, but by waging a national campaign to paint a nightmarish picture of what a Democratic Congress would look like, and to portray that possibility, in turn, as prelude to the even more nightmarish scenario: the return of a Democrat (Hillary) to the White House.

Rather than defend Bush, Rove will seek to rally the Republicans’ conservative grassroots by painting Democrats as the party of tax increases, gay marriage, secularism and military weakness. That’s where the national message money is going to be spent.

LAT: The US attorney's office in Los Angeles has opened an investigation into Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the powerful chair of the House Appropriations committee, and his connections to congressman-turned-lobbyist Bill Lowery:

The government is looking into the connection between Lewis and his longtime friend Bill Lowery, the sources said. Lowery, a lobbyist, is a former congressman from San Diego.

As chairman of the Appropriations panel, Lewis has earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts for many of Lowery's clients, one of the sources said.

Here's some extensive background on the Lewis-Lowery relationship, from Copley News Services' Jerry Kammer.

USA Today: NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls. What do we call that part of the program? The innocent Americans suspected of no crime surveillance program? Update: And Kevin Drum notes the lone telecom carrier, Qwest, that told the NSA, get a FISA warrant. Which of course, would have involved the NSA telling the FISA court what they were up to, which was apparently considered undesirable, for some reason.

UK: Close Guantanamo.

The San Diego ABC affiliate has an interesting piece on defense contractor Brent Willkes and his high school football teammate, Dusty Foggo, recently resigned from the CIA. And don't miss this:

Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, a security guard at Sears in Chula Vista, became third in command at the CIA.

Brent Wilkes lived a millionaire's dream in Poway and ran a booming defense company.

"They're doing the same thing they did in high school. They're just 30 years older," added Jimmy.

Jimmy said Wilkes and Foggo always had wild parties, women, and fast cars.

The FBI is now investigating whether the two Hilltop High grads used poker parties and prostitutes at the Watergate Hotel to get votes in Congress. [...]

"I knew Brent a lot better than Dusty," said Wally Hartin.

Hartin remembers when CIA agent Dusty Foggo visited Wilkes and recalls their conversations. [...]

Hartin said the two talked about partying together in Central America where Foggo was a CIA agent during the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Hartin added, "He told everybody about his deals in El Salvador. You'd walk into Mulvaney's here on Broadway in Chula Vista and that's what everyone was talking about, Dusty's secret missions."

In 1991, Wilkes brought Iran-Contra front man Oliver North to San Diego for a book signing.

Now, the FBI is looking specifically at how Wilkes received a CIA contract worth $2.4 million.

Did Foggo help his high school pal land the no-bid contract

Ollie North? Yowza.

And don't forget this little tidbit. Guess who else is apparently from San Diego? Another Iran Contra alum who's found a measure of career advancement in the Bush administration: John Negroponte.

In all honesty, I've tracked down or been contacted by a half dozen of Dusty and Wilkes' high school football teammates, girlfriends, friends, and truly, some of their parents, in and around San Diego a few months ago, and gotten a lot of stories -- mostly about how they behaved in high school. But if anyone has any interesting stories, I'd be interested to hear from you.

Spooked. Kevin Drum makes an interesting point here, about Republican misgivings over the Hayden nomination:

Do we really think that all these Republicans are truly concerned about the possibility of a military officer running the CIA? That hardly seems likely, does it?

Here's my alternative guess: they're just completely spooked (no pun intended). After Harriet Miers and Katrina and the Dubai port deal, Republicans in Congress now have an almost Pavlovian response to any George Bush nominee with even a hint of controversy: oppose him! And do it quick before Democrats beat them to the punch.

That actually seems quite shockingly plausible. As the world turns...

Spencer Ackerman, "The Manual of Torture and Forgetting," on Pentagon intel czar Steve Cambone's rewriting of the US Army field manual guidance on coercive interrogation techniques.

Bill Arkin analyzes Ahmadinejad's letter. Iranian sources tell me that Ahmadinejad's letter and its talk of failed liberalism of the west sounds an awful lot like the gist of many editorials of a hardline Tehran daily, Kayhan, closely affiliated with the Iranian security services. "Kayhan is very famous in Iran," one source tells me. "In the history of journalism it is unique because, in the last fifteen years, whenever Kayhan writes against somebody, a few days later he will be arrested." Frankly, I am kind of surprised key Bush administration officials -- including President Bush -- have spent so much time even thinking about the letter, when one might expect they would have dismissed it out of hand as a theatrical gesture, at least publicly. They are doing that, but not without paying what seems an awful lot of attention to what it might signify.

Department of what does one's lawyer pick signify? Tea leaves. Recently resigned CIA Executive Director Kyle Dustin Foggo has, according to Time, retained an attorney, Bill Hundley. And who is Hundley? Among other things, he used to be the lawyer for Clinton golfing pal Vernon Jordan during Monica gate, and is a former law partner of Plato Cacheris.

Remember when the Bush administration got a thrashing over its flip flop over whether Jose Padilla should be deemed enemey combatant or not from an ultra conservative appeals court judge a few months ago? Well, that judge, J. Michael Luttig, is resigning his seat on the US Court of Appeals in Richmond Virginia, the WaPo reports:

Appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative jurist and a short-list Bush administration candidate for the Supreme Court, announced today that he is resigning from the bench to serve as senior vice president and general counsel of the Boeing Co.

Luttig, who sits on the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, wrote the most important appellate decision yet in support of the Bush administration's powers to detain individuals without recourse to ordinary legal protections. But he had a significant falling-out with the Justice Department late last year when he protested, in a follow-up opinion, what he suggested was the administration's inappropriate manipulation of the legal system in order to avoid a further Supreme Court test of the president's wartime authority.

His public thrashing of the Justice Department was known to have been deeply upsetting to political appointees in the department. [...]

In a telephone interview today, Luttig said his criticism of the administration "had nothing whatsoever to do with this decision, which is more far-reaching than any particular case."

The Post also notes that the move to Boeing could mean a doubling or tripling of an appeals court judge's salary.

Time: "Another Goss Aide is Linked to Military Contracting Scandals."

Bassett was paid $5,000 in May 2000 as a consultant to ADCS Corp., a company headed by Wilkes, Foggo's friend since childhood, according to disclosure forms Bassett filed when he was a House intelligence committee aide to Goss while the former Congressman was the panel's Republican chairman. Bassett was not working for the CIA at the time of the payment. Still, it may not look good for yet another of Goss's right hand men to be associated with Wilkes — whom prosecutors allege, in Cunningham's guilty plea, provided more than $600,000 of the $2.4 million in bribes that landed Cunningham a more than eight-year federal prison sentence in March.

As part of its mushrooming Cunningham probe, the Justice Department has been looking into whether Foggo received improper gifts such as lavish travel from Wilkes, according to a source familiar with the case. Wilkes' business held at least one contract with the CIA as well as technology contracts with the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials and other sources. An investigator for the House intelligence committee is also scrutinizing Bassett's link to Wilkes, according to government disclosures obtained by TIME.

When Goss became CIA director in late 2004, he brought Bassett back for a second stint at the agency as a consultant in the directorate of operations, according to a person who spoke on behalf of Bassett. Bassett knew Foggo from the days when both served in the CIA's directorate of operations, according to one official. ...

And Goss has a third lieutenant who was apparently involved with the Wilkes'-group, Harper's reported yesterday.

Duke Cunningham not the big fish in the wider Duke Cunningham corruption case? Since when do prosecutors go for the biggest fish first, in any case? What does it mean that they have evidence not only that Cunningham took bribes, but on three others involved with bribing him, but haven't indicted the latter yet? It would seem to mean they have reason to think that those who did the bribing can lead them to other big fish, e.g. public officials.

David Ignatius says we're moving to the British-model intelligence org chart, and he raves about proposed CIA deputy director Steve Kappes.

NYT: "Americans have a bleaker view of the country's direction than at any time in more than two decades, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Sharp disapproval of President Bush's handling of gasoline prices has combined with intensified unhappiness about Iraq to create a grim political environment for the White House and Congressional Republicans. [...] Mr. Bush's overall job approval rating hit another new low, 31 percent, tying the low point of his father in July 1992, four months before the elder Mr. Bush lost his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton. That is the third lowest approval rating of any president in 50 years; only Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter were viewed less favorably."

Wow. Some of the Gosslings seem to be on the take from alleged Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Brent Wilkes. I mean, actual checks. And Ken Silverstein finds a third Gossling in the mix at the poker parties, along with Foggo and Bassett, aka Nine Fingers.

Thanks for kind words from Professor Berube. In a world of Lincoln Groups, ramped up psy ops, etc. I am still perplexed how the most successful media operation of the past several months hasn't been fully appreciated. This should truly be written up as a case study. The White House and CIA public affairs seem to have genuinely managed to disconnect the timing of Goss' resignation from the wider Duke Cunningham case, with exceptions I have been noting here the past week (notably Newsweek, Harpers, the San Diego Union Trib, TPM Muckraker, POGO, Sullivan, the WSJ, Digby, David Ignatius, David Corn, the Washington Monthly, Atrios, etc.). They've gotten most of the bigs to dutifuly report the Goss resignation and the Foggo/Wilkes/Watergate/Cunningham affair/resignation/investigation as entirely separate, disconnected story lines, when guess who was there playing poker regularly with the as-of-yesterday-resigned-and-under-FBI-investigation CIA executive director appointed-and-protected by Goss, Mr. Foggo, at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels? but a top Goss deputy from both the House intelligence committee and the CIA, Mr. Nine Fingers, aka Brant Bassett, who like Mssrs. Wilkes, Foggo, Cunningham, and the ever-present Bill Lowery, also hails from San Diego. (Update: Oh. And who also took $5k from Wilkes!). If the CIA is so good at creating alternate realities, we should be feeling more confident, I guess. As Sullivan says, this is some of the strongest recent evidence that the administration is not dead.

More kind words -- or kind enough -- from BloggerheadTVniks Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus, and the post they think gets it close. [Bush, Ahmadinejad, Bloggerheads TV? hmm.]

More on Mr. Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush, from the NYT:

The Iranian president also extends to Mr. Bush an "invitation" to return to governing the United States based on the values of Jesus Christ, whose name in the letter is followed each time by the letters "PBUH," which stands for "Peace Be Upon Him."

Frequently quoting passages from the Koran, Mr. Ahmadinejad calls for a return to a religious basis of government.

"Will you not accept this invitation?" Mr. Ahmadinejad asks Mr. Bush. "That is, a genuine return to the teachings of prophets, to monotheism and justice, to preserve human dignity and obedience to the Almighty and His prophets?"

"Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity," he wrote. "Today these two concepts have failed."

He also throws his lot in with Mr. Bush, saying that as world leaders, they will both be ultimately judged.

"The people will scrutinize our presidencies," Mr. Ahmadinejad writes.

It seems he wants a dialogue about civilization. And it seems inevitable to quickly become the basis of a skit on Saturday Night Live.

Here's the whole letter, from Le Monde.

Volz Plea. Reader B writes, "I was struck by these three lines from today's Washington Post story on the Volz plea":

Volz, who has been talking to prosecutors for three months, is providing information on other lawmakers and staff, according to a source close to the ongoing investigation.

Volz's plea agreement lists 16 acts Ney undertook for Abramoff's team, including seeking a visa for one of Abramoff's Russian clients, sponsoring the issuance of a Congressional Gold Medal to a tribal chief, and meeting with the secretary of housing and urban development to help Abramoff clients.

Ney also acted to press the gambling interests of Abramoff's tribal clients, as well as the interest of a garment manufacturer who opposed minimum-wage laws in the Northern Mariana Islands, according to the court papers.

"As Ney's chief of staff and the recipient of an Abramoff-funded trip to the Northern Mariana Islands, Volz is in a position to confirm that Rep. DeLay accepted a 'stream of things of value' in exchange for killing legislation extending U.S. minimum wage laws to the islands."

Firedoglake's Christy Hardin Smith is pretty hilarious here.

For fellow DCists, WaPo writer Dana Priest will be on WAMU's Kojo Nambe show tomorrow (Wednesday) at noon.

Via Tapped, a nice NYT profile of American Prospect -- and my frequent -- editor Mike Tomasky. We're all wondering when he got his hair cut.

The WP has excerpts of Mr. Ahmadinejad's curious letter to President Bush. It's hard to know what to make of some of these:

"History tells us that repressive and cruel governments do not survive. God has entrusted the fate of men to them."

And

"Can one deny the signs of change in the world today? Is the situation of the world today comparable to that of 10 years ago? Changes happen fast and come at a furious pace."

And this:

Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems."

Finally, more international intrigue. Richard Perle has been meeting with an Iranian dissident in an undisclosed location, the NY Sun reports:

Mr. Fakhravar yesterday said that his conversations with Mr. Perle were important for his morale when he was on the run from the Iranian authorities. But he also said he sought out him out in part because he believed that neoconservatives in America could help "lower the cost" of Iranian freedom.

"There have been some contacts with some Democratic senators. There are people in our organization that are talking to them to organize," Mr. Fakhravar said. "But most of the support is coming from the Republicans, Mr. Perle, and his friends. We have the interest of the Iranian people. We want to achieve freedom at any costs. We will take help from wherever we can get it to reduce the costs of obtaining our freedom."

While some critics have accused Mr. Perle of endorsing another Iraq-style invasion for Iran, Mr. Perle says this is a gross mischaracterization. "I'm doing the sort of thing I have been doing my whole life, with Iraqi dissidents and Soviet dissidents. I think they deserve support," he said.

"Along with a lot of others I am vilified for the war in Iraq. If people look at my writing it was always to support the opposition. It was the failure to do that before 9/11 that left us with no choice but to use force."

Check out my friend Sharon Otterman's dispatch from Tunisia.

This line from UPI/Shaun Waterman's analysis on why Goss resigned really is a classic: “There may be underlying reasons for Goss’s departure that are . . . prosaic—he was seen by some as lacking vision and criticized by others as a lousy manager—but the rumor–mill was stoked by the fact that his departure on Friday had the unconvincing choreography of the Andropov-era Soviet Union.” (Via Harpers.)

LAT:

Administration allies said Monday that by reviving debate over the spy program, which Hayden oversaw when he led the National Security Agency, his nomination would provide a welcomed opportunity to reopen a tried-and-true election-year playbook in which Republicans portray Democrats as weak on national security. ...

Still, there were signs Monday that the White House might have miscalculated. Rather than Democrats leading the charge against Hayden, some of the most vocal opposition came from Republicans, including steadfast White House backers such as House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who will lead Hayden's confirmation hearings, has declined to endorse him.

Those unexpected turns of events further underscored how difficult Bush is finding it to govern with approval ratings that have dropped to the low 30s. And they muddied the message being promoted by White House strategist Karl Rove, who recently predicted that the terrorist wiretapping program would portray Democrats as operating with a "pre-9/11 mindset."

The political calculations over Hayden's nomination reflected the uneasy terrain facing Republicans just six months before voters decide whether to keep the GOP in control of Congress. White House strategists are angling to exploit the party's traditional strength on national security issues, but some Republicans are wary of being tied to a president whose approval ratings seem to drop by the day.

WP: "The FBI is investigating whether a top-ranking CIA official who announced his resignation yesterday steered contracts to a boyhood friend at the center of a congressional bribery scandal, law enforcement officials said."

Harpers, "Why did the CIA's chief resign so suddenly?" More from Justin Rood.

UPI: Foggo quits.

Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the CIA's executive director, announced his resignation in an e-mail message to agency staff, a U.S. official told United Press International on condition of anonymity.

His departure follows Goss' hasty resignation Friday, which some reports have linked to the broadening bribe probe centered on disgraced former California GOP Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham.

More from Newsweek.

(NYT, "A demonstration today demanding that a United Nations force replace the African Union soldiers here turned violent.")

New poll numbers. "Bush's fall is being fueled by erosion among support from conservatives and Republicans. In the poll, 52% of conservatives and 68% of Republicans approved of the job he is doing. Both are record lows among those groups."

ABC's Brian Ross: Foggo's almost out. "Outgoing CIA Director Porter Goss had refused to remove Foggo from his powerful post after Foggo came under investigation by the FBI and the CIA Inspector General."

Via Justin Rood, WSJ's Washington Wire is reporting that Steve Kappes, a former senior CIA operations officer much respected by old Agency hands -- and chased out by the Gosslings -- is being floated by the administration as Hayden's deputy:

The White House is floating the name of Stephen R. Kappes as a potential deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency under its newly appointed chief, Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Kappes briefly served as the CIA’s deputy director of operations, and oversaw all foreign operations, in 2004 before resigning after clashes with aides to CIA [...]

That would surely boost morale at the Agency -- and therefore potentially become politically untenable with the President's base, one might think? After all, Goss wasn't there chasing out people like Kappes because that was his personal agenda. He was there because the White House wanted him to clamp down on Langley, and root out those perceived not to be toeing the White House's line. Right? Or has that much reported story line also gone by the wayside of late? Or more momentous, has the White House had a change of heart based on the advice of some place like PFIAB? Kappes have some supporters in Negroponte's office? A combination?

Meantime, Steve Clemons has an interesting, contrary to conventional wisdom take on the nomination of Hayden to be CIA director. Steve's take -- Negroponte wants to get his troops, so to speak, in position to take on Rumsfeld.

Update: I should add that at least yesterday, I was hearing a different name than Kappes.

Update II: Apparently Negroponte mentioned Kappes by name in his press conference this morning.

Justin Rood has an interesting find here. The deputy to CIA Director-nominee Michael Hayden when they were at NSA is currently the CEO of a firm that was formerly headed by Mitchell Wade, who has pled guilty to bribing Duke Cunningham.

Check out Jason Vest's, "The CIA's Existential Crisis." The CIA is being dismantled. What's to assure what comes after is any better? And do we really as a democratic society want the military to be the primary player in intelligence?

Lunch with Goss. From a reader who was at the CIA -- with Goss -- on Friday morning:

Hi Laura,

An interesting anecdote. On Friday, [I was part of a small working group invited to the CIA.] Our group received unclassified briefings on topics from China to Iran, but the highlight was a luncheon with the Director. Goss made some opening remarks, and then took approximately ten questions or so before he was summoned away by an aide. He was very engaging and somewhat frank -- he made no secret of his distaste for the intel reform legislation that created the ONI. He was very adamant that the CIA did not engage in any form of torture, at one point asserting that no good facts are ever derived from torture. Finally, in response to a (prescient) question on what he expects as his legacy, Goss sharply defended his efforts to rebuild the Agency and restore its clandestine service. During his remarks, he also took several potshots at what he termed a pattern of inaccurate reporting by the news media on the Agency's activities.

As I said, he had to cut short his appearance due to what he called "the press of the day". Less than two hours later, we heard the announcement of his resignation. Amazing!

Regards.

Amazing indeed. Then again, it's hard to know how to take his comments in light of his remarks Saturday to a graduating college class in Ohio, "Goss told the graduating students that if he were addressing a graduating class of CIA case officers, he would advise them, 'Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations.'"

Incidentally, I subsequently asked this reader if he got the sense Goss didn't have a clue he was about to become administration road kill. Here's his response:

Hard to tell. He certainly was more frank that I ever expected, but that may have been due to the fact that the event was held in his private dining room and it was not for public consumption. He made several references to the fact that it was a busy day, the "press of business" and noted that he may have to be pulled away, which did happen.

But I have to think he did not see it coming, if only because I am sure he would have cancelled the luncheon if he knew it was going to be his last day and his name would be splashed across the papers. Wouldn't you and I do the same thing?

(Posted with permission).

Is Josh Bolten still looking for his telephone directory? Is it possible that the White House didn't call the head of the House intel committee before telling the media that it would nominate Michael Hayden to be the new CIA director? This would be the White House with a new chief of staff who wants to improve relations with Congress? Or did they call and hear opposition and proceed with their choice anyhow?

Incidentally, was told that Rockefeller was not told in advance that Goss was out, Roberts was given a heads up, and according to his staff, at least Hoekstra's staff director did not know about it until it was on CNN. Jane Harman's staff seems to indicate she had a heads up too.

NY Sun:

A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated "he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon."

The source also pointed out that the Pentagon has requested increased budget authority to prepare for the acquisition of the CIA's targeted military operations. The intelligence overhaul of 2004 envisioned that they would remain under the purview of the CIA.

The authority to commission and plan these secret military operations has been a point of contention since 2004 when Congress and the White House began reorganizing the intelligence community.

The proposed change would give the Pentagon unfettered authority to plan and conduct these operations without consulting an intelligence bureaucracy its civilian leaders have deemed hostile to the president's war policy. [...]

But the senior intelligence community official yesterday said he expected almost everything except for the human intelligence collection role of the CIA to be removed from the agency. This source said that Mr. Negroponte "is going to strip analysis, strip out covert operation, science, and technology."

The LAT's Peter Pae and Dan Morain have a long profile of alleged Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Brent Wilkes, filling out many details of insider-government officials and other congressmen seemingly connected to Wilkes obtaining federal contracts. Among them, Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations committee:

The Pentagon was slow to pay Wilkes because Army officials in the field preferred Audre's rival system, according to an inspector general's report. So in July 1999, co-conspirator No. 1 faxed Cunningham "talking points" on how to bully a Pentagon manager into releasing more government funds. These documents were included in Cunningham's sentencing hearing.

The memo instructed the lawmaker to demand that the Defense Department official shift money from another program to cover funds designated for ADCS. "We need $10 m[illion] more immediately," Cunningham was to tell the official.

If the official didn't cooperate, Cunningham was to say his next calls would be to two high-ranking Pentagon officials. The script called for Cunningham to add: "This is very important and if you cannot resolve this others will be calling also" — two names in this passage are blacked out in the memo. Despite Cunningham's threats, the Pentagon manager was unmoved, according to grand jury testimony.

A week later, Cunningham and Lewis called a Washington news conference to announce that they had slashed $2 billion in funding for the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, one of the Pentagon's prized programs, citing cost overruns. Both congressmen had been key supporters of the project, and their comments shocked Pentagon officials.

Within days, the same Pentagon manager who had been resistant to Cunningham's appeals sent the congressman a list of other programs where money could be "reallocated" to Wilkes' firm, according to court documents. "The Defense Department spends $1 billion a day, so the [Wilkes] contract was like a rounding error. It just wasn't worth putting our big programs at risk," a senior Pentagon official said on condition he not be identified.

On Friday, Lewis said "there was no connection whatsoever" between his position on the F-22 program and Cunningham's effort to pressure the Pentagon on Wilkes' behalf. "If I knew about it, I would have stopped it," Lewis said.

The Pentagon agreed to send $5 million more to Wilkes' firm, according to court documents. The F-22 funds were later restored. In subsequent years, Cunningham and Lewis supported full funding for the warplane.

Oh, and Lewis remembers going with Wilkes -- to Guatemala.

The paper also identifies one of the Pentagon officials who seemed to help Wilkes on the inside with procurement issues:

Another Washington insider who was part of Wilkes' circle was Mark Adams, deputy undersecretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. Adams oversaw contracts awarded to ADCS in the late 1990s. Within a month of leaving his government post, Adams joined Wilkes' payroll. Adams could not be reached for comment.

The Pentagon inspector general is now reviewing contracts that were awarded to Wilkes, a Pentagon source said.

Andrew Sullivan is on the same page:

The administration is not dead. You can see that from the very skillful way it has massaged the news treatment of Porter Goss's resignation. Sure, there's a great deal of truth behind the Negroponte context, and the bureaucratic tensions and policy disputes that contributed to Goss's demise. But even if this were the case to an even greater extent, does anyone believe the Bush administration would actually want to lose its CIA director so soon after appointing him, and when the president himself cannot give a good reason for it? [...]

Why so damaging? Because the scandal involves old-fashioned corruption and bribery, it involves military-corporate deal-making, and it involves sex. If the party of evangelical fundamentalism is revealed as one in which several key members are quite comfortable being bribed by booze, gambling and prostitutes, it cannot exactly help wrench the depressed base out of growing surliness. This is how metastasizing scandals are successfully headed off. Cut your major losses early; create a persuasive cover-story to hide that fact; then hunker down and hope you can weather the tawdry details that will doubtless emerge. That's still not good news for the White House. But it's surely better than having your CIA director forced to resign in September in "Hookergate". Karl is refocused. And, of course, the MSM ate it up. At least, that's my take.

One reader who covers the White House writes in with what he's hearing. I post with permission:

First, yeah, there was a turf war, and it did play a role in how Goss was fir---uh, I mean, "left suddenly." It's not WHY Goss was canned, but it had an impact: He. Had. No. Defenders. Not at CIA, not at DNI, not in DoD, not in Cheney's office (which would rather see Hayden as DCI anyway). [...]

I'm told that Goss was canned because of the pending nastiness, or hilarity, or justice (depending on your view) regarding Foggo. My sources differ on precisely what the problem was: One says Goss refused to fire Foggo; another says the WH worried that Goss and Foggo would go down together and drag the WH and the GOP Congress down with them (a la Kerik).

My best guess for the groupthink is who's doin' the writin'. National security folks [...] are going to talk to national security sources and get national security explanations. Sometimes that's all it takes for this kind of narrative to develop. Daily News and others, though, are going with non-nat/sec sources, and as a result they are getting a different explanation (that may also happen as Congressional correspondents sink their teeth into the story).

Update: Not to mention, the gossip columnists. Here's deep Kremlinological analysis from the NY Post's Cindy Adams. Sounds right to me!

Nine Fingers on the Charles. Looks like the Harvard Institute of Politics has been running some pretty interesting lectures:

Thursday, March 17
"Saving Boxer: Porter Goss and the return of CIA to core mission"

Guest: Patrick Murray, former HPSCI chief counsel and staff director and currently chief of staff to DCI Goss, will speak.

For years, Republican staffers on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) have warned that the CIA was in the last chapter of Animal Farm: They claimed that CIA was trading off its core intelligence mission overseas to create new layers of programs and a larger, "risk-adverse" bureaucracy back at its headquarters in Langley, VA. We will ask a former, senior HPSCI staffer, now in a powerful position at CIA headquarters, whether he found such problems when he arrived at CIA and what he thinks Porter Goss, the new Director of Central Intelligence, should do about it. Do we want the kind of CIA he and the DCI have in mind?

Goals:

To assess the reform effort underway within CIA and its meaning for our national security and our posture as a nation.

Thursday, March 24
"You'll never work in this town again: Congress and the sin of oversight"

Guest: Brant Bassett, [editor's note, aka "Nine Fingers"] a retired CIA case officer and former Hill staffer, will speak (tentative)

Leakers from within CIA would have us believe that the Republican staffers from the House Intelligence Committee now at CIA are odious, partisan evildoers. You will hear from formerly odious, partisan evildoers from the Hill on the resistance within CIA to congressional oversight, and we'll discuss the proper role and extent of such oversight. Do we want or need intrusive oversight from Congress? Is there another, and better, way to watch a secret organization?

Goals:

To understand the oversight role of Congress in intelligence and assess its effectiveness.

Can we get transcripts?

Hey, Harvard: soon they may be available for more lecturing.

More here.

It's official. Firedoglake's ReddHedd passes along that ABC's George Stephanopoulos just reported that Michael Hayden will indeed be named the new CIA director nominee tomorrow. Interesting nomination hearings, to be sure.

Update: And apparently Congress is not sure it likes this choice. Bloomberg, "House Intelligence chairman opposes Hayden as next CIA chief."

``I've got a lot of respect for Mike Hayden, and he's done a good job, but I do believe he's the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time,'' said U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican. ``We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.'' [...]

``Putting a general in charge, regardless of how good Mike is, is going to send the wrong signal through the agency here in Washington and also to our agents around the world,'' he said.

Hear that, Josh Bolten?

Apparently Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss are expressing similar reservations on the other shows. Will be interested to hear what Sen. Pat Roberts says about it on Late Edition today. Update II: He says that perhaps a solution would be if Hayden retires from the military. More from Michael Levi.

Thank you, Mark Hosenball:

If there was one government agency that needed to improve after 9/11, it was the CIA. Apparently, however, the spy agency has only weakened. Forced out last week as CIA director, Porter Goss leaves an outfit that has far more resources than it did five years ago, but still seems to be struggling with low morale and turf battles. Emblematic of the CIA's woes is its number-three man, Executive Director Kyle (Dusty) Foggo. His story is a depressing tale of reform gone awry. [...]

Foggo was an old CIA hand, but not a member of the elite Clandestine Service running foreign agents. Rather, he was a logistics expert well known to junketing congressmen who visited Frankfurt, Germany, where Foggo was based.

At the agency, Foggo soon became embroiled in a turf struggle between the agency's Counterterrorist Center and the newly created National Counterterrorism Center under the control of the new director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. (Ironically, the DNI was set up by post-9/11 intel reformers to help end turf battles.) Negroponte complained to President George W. Bush, who was also hearing loud grumbles about Goss's poor leadership of the CIA from old intel hands and experts on the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Though Bush had once been friendly with Goss, a fellow Yale man, he was persuaded to let Goss go, offering only a few words of faint praise at an Oval Office farewell for the cameras.

But the agency's problems may only get worse, and one reason is Foggo. Federal investigators are looking at the ties of the CIA's "Ex Dir" to a congressional bribery scandal. Foggo was a high-school football teammate and college buddy of Brent Wilkes's, a defense contractor who was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator when former San Diego congressman and ex-Navy air ace Randy (Duke) Cunningham pleaded guilty. The CIA has acknowledged that its internal watchdog is investigating if Foggo helped steer any contracts to Wilkes. According to three sources who declined to be identified commenting on the details of a government probe, there are also indications that the Feds are interested in Foggo's role in the wider Cunningham bribery scandal. ...

Go read. Hosenball, Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff tie together all the moving parts here -- personality and personnel issues, including Foggo, and how they may have played a role in the apparently larger Negroponte-Goss strain (as they often do, right? which of your friends describes their work situation as an org chart?) -- better than I've seen most anywhere else.

And Newsweek solves another mystery: They identify "Nine Fingers."

David Ignatius, "The CIA at Rock Bottom":

CIA employees were sitting at their computers Friday afternoon when they saw a message advising them to toggle to the agency's in-house television channel. On their screens they saw CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly announcing his resignation. In at least one office at the agency, and I suspect many more, there were quiet cheers. The Goss years have not been happy ones at the CIA.

Goss was dumped by a president who doesn't like to fire anyone. That was a sign of how badly off track things had gotten at the CIA. Goss and his aides were feuding with the agency's staff and with officials of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the new bureaucratic canopy that overlays the CIA and 14 other intelligence agencies. One of Goss's senior aides was facing potential legal troubles in a bribery investigation; another he had brought over from Capitol Hill was scrambling to submit his resume to investment banks and other potential employers. Against this background, a White House emboldened by new chief of staff Josh Bolten decided it was time for "executive action," the euphemism the CIA once used for taking someone out. ...

(Via Kevin Drum).

The Guardian: "The two crucial mistakes that cost Jack Straw his job." Among them, Iran:

Mr Straw has said repeatedly that it is "inconceivable" that there will be a military strike on Iran and last month dismissed as "nuts" a report that George Bush was keeping on the table the option of using tactical nuclear weapons against Tehran's nuclear plants.
But Mr Blair, who sees Iran as the world's biggest threat, does not agree with his former foreign secretary. The prime minister argues that, at the very least, nothing should be ruled out in order to keep Iran guessing. Downing Street phoned the Foreign Office several times to suggest Mr Straw stop going on the BBC Today programme and ruling it out so categorically.

Walter Pincus reports on a really important and much overlooked aspect that one encounters in microcosm in the Cunningham case -- that so much intel work is being contracted out at this point to private companies including by the Defense Department, that it has essentially zero oversight. And what might this intel work include? WP:

An online ad by Lockheed Martin Information Technology-Professional Services seeks a counterintelligence analyst to work in Iraq doing research on intelligence capabilities of countries in areas of operations under the Central Command. Additional work, according to the ad, would be "on substantive intelligence matters involving terrorist groups and networks . . . Centcom experience is a plus," the ad notes.

So just war, terrorism, Iraq. Nothing that requires oversight anyhow, right?

One more thing. It's my understanding that the CIA has been hearing detailed allegations about Foggo from reporters since as early as the first week of December. I don't mean gossip. I mean multiple-sourced, first hand accounts, going back thirty years, as well as outlines of contracts. The natural thing for CIA public affairs to do is: push back very hard on the press. But also -- to go upstairs and tell the boss's staff that there may be a problem.

The thing is, it wasn't only CIA that got early warnings about Foggo - and that he legitimately could be a subject of the FBI corruption investigation surrounding Duke Cunningham and Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, etc. Those details were also shared with the House Intel committee, HPSCI, it is my understanding. Detailed memos. With information that would become known to federal investigators. (Perhaps Hoekstra "wasn't surprised" by the recent prostitution allegations connected to the wider Cunningham corruption case, because he had been alerted to some of the alleged details before.)

And then come around late December/early January, HPSCI decided to investigate the matter of whether Cunningham had improperly steered any intel business to those involved in the bribery scheme using his position on the House intelligence committee. But in an interview with a former leading Senate Intel committee member, he suggested that given his past experience, that HPSCI would almost certainly also be asking the Director of the CIA to check into the Foggo matter on his end, and tell them, whether he's clean or if he is going to pursue further investigation.

As far as I can tell, there was no sign of any CIA investigation of any Foggo role in the wider Cunningham matter even opening until March. And perhaps they thought that it might all be able to be handled very quietly.

So -- Negroponte, or HPSCI, and perhaps others may have been disturbed to get what seems like a heads up from law enforcement in the past week's leaks to the Wall Street Journal, etc. that Foggo is under investigation, and that a whole very messy story with potentially explosive aspects that are not inconsequential to Congress looks about to blow up.

And don't forget this detail reported by Jason Vest: that the woman now serving as Negroponte's #3, Mary Margaret Graham, left the Agency after raising concerns about the appointment of a certain Kyle Dustin Foggo to be the CIA's Executive Director in the first place; her departure was accompanied by a shouting match in which Goss's deputy Patrick Murray -- in apparently his typically charming style -- threatened Graham, then the CIA's counterintel chief, that if anything about Foggo's past ever leaked out, she would be held personally responsible.

So when the Foggo stuff leaked out, quite independent of anything to do with Graham, but because of a federal corruption probe into a Congressman, all the pieces were in place for a long history of people having staked out their positions on this. And it speaks to how Goss let his staff mishandle personnel issues in a larger sense as well.

I don't think this is the only reason for Goss's departure, but I think it might be a factor in the timing of Goss's departure -- a management issue concerning Foggo, some assurance Goss might have given Negroponte or HPSCI that this was all being taken care of, that there was a lid on it, or perhaps that there was nothing there. And then they recently discovered to their chagrin, the lid was coming off.

That would actually be technically consistent with the official timeline, however misleading the spin of this is.

(This post has been updated).

So, the verdict is in. According to the WP, the NYT, Time, etc. Goss was forced out yesterday after months of tension between him and John Negroponte over the CIA's reduced turf, and that President Bush lost confidence in Goss "almost from the beginning" (WP).

So then he was forced out on very short notice? No notification to the House Intelligence committee? What about the months of press about the suddenly well-known tension between Goss and Negroponte, with Negroponte ascendant? Not really. (Indeed check out the recent coverage about Congressional raised eyebrows over the empire Negroponte is building, and his alleged frequent lunchtime visits to a fancy DC club for swim and cigar breaks).

The story line until today has been far different: that much of the operative camp of the Agency perceived Goss as a political enforcer, someone who wasn't seen to be looking out for them but for the White House's interests; that Goss was rather passive and out of touch and overly delegated day to day affairs to his staff, "the Gosslings," led by the fiercely partisan Patrick Murray. I don't believe I have ever heard from people in that world a sense that Goss was looking out for them. The newspaper coverage has suggested rather that a lot of the experienced bench strength cadre at the Agency had left in fights with Goss and his staff during his rocky tenure, and that the Agency had never been more demoralized. So all that time, during all those departures, Goss was covertly fighting for his folks against the new intel reorganization? He was a misunderstood champion of the Agency?

Does something about this story line that Goss suddenly left because of his long-standing tension with Negroponte, his fraternity brother from Yale, over Goss fighting to hold CIA turf seem a bit canned to you?

The main question is why Goss's departure suddenly became a matter of the deepest urgency yesterday.

Think back to yesterday morning. The top news after the Patrick Kennedy crash was that Bush's poll numbers were at an all time low, and that he was starting to see a real erosion of support from conservatives. Gas prices and immigration and Iraq. So Bush gets briefed by his staff that day, and decides: hey, let's fire Porter Goss. He's killing morale at the Agency. He's just seen as far too political. And John Negroponte is threatening to quit if he stays. He's given me an absolute ultimatum. Let's get this out today.

Come on. That's just not how this White House has responded to these sorts of tensions in the past. They never move fast. They withstand criticism of appointments for months. They resist criticisms of unpopular agency heads for weeks (Michael "heckuva job" Brown), months (Snow), years (Rumsfeld). Think how much speculation there was in the press before Card's and McClellan's announced retirements, and how warm and friendly were those departures. It's hard not to believe that something moved very quickly on the radar this week that prompted an unusually quick decision. One that took a lot of people who would normally have been advised by surprise. (It's my understanding that the heads of Congressional intel committees were not informed in advance).

Negroponte has President Bush's ear every single day when he delivers the President's daily intel brief. If he had been lobbying to get rid of Goss, and the President was inclined to support that decision, there were a hundred ways to do it in a way that would project stability, confidence, normalcy. There was hardly a show of that yesterday. They could have named a successor. There could have been a leak to the press about Goss being tired (remember all the foreshadowing in the press about how tired Andy Card was after all those 20 hour days that preceded his departure?) and wanting to spend more time with his family, or that Bush was unhappy with him. There was none of that. It was a surprise move. What happened this week that Negroponte and Bush acted so swiftly?

Does the way it happened resemble the slo-mo, warm and fuzzy way Andy Card and Scott McClellan were retired? Or does it rather have more in common with the swiftly announced departures of Claude Allen and David Safavian from their posts, a few days before we hear of federal investigations?

Update: Comments a knowledgable former Hill staffer:

I understand that Negroponte went to the President early last fall and said that Goss and Co. were doing irreparable damage to the agency and our government wide collection capabilities. One explanation for Negroponte's 3 hour lunches was his disillusionment with his job over his inability to get the President to move on Goss.

The question that is not being asked is what changed in that long running standoff at 1:00 pm on Friday. My guess is the IG investigation on Foggo -- a bizarre appointment for which Goss was fully responsible.

That would be my guess too. And don't miss that Foggo has telegraphed his retirement from the Agency as well, in the papers overnight. And how the Agency press staff has bent over backwards to disconnect the two departures. "Today is about Goss" they told my colleague Spencer Ackerman yesterday. "Don't connect the two." Right.

More here and here.

Larry Johnson on Goss.

Dana Priest:

Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq's weapons capability.

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

And don't miss this, further down in the same piece:

The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department's more optimistic scenarios.

WP: Foggo tells colleagues he will resign next week.

WP: "Porter J. Goss was forced to step down yesterday as CIA director, ending a turbulent 18-month tenure marked by an exodus of some of the agency's top talent and growing White House dissatisfaction with his leadership during a time of war.":

But senior administration officials said Bush had lost confidence in Goss, 67, almost from the beginning and decided months ago to replace him. In what was described as a difficult meeting in April with Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, Goss was told to prepare to leave by May, according to several officials with knowledge of the conversation.

Knight-Ridder: "Bush administration refuses to talk with its main foes":

In spring 2003, shortly after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, Iran sent a secret, one-page proposal to Washington offering a dialogue to resolve U.S.-Iranian differences, according to former White House official Flynt Leverett, who said he saw the document.

Leverett said the offer, which apparently had the backing of the Iranian government's many factions, was rebuffed. The U.S. response, he said, was to complain to Switzerland that the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, who forwarded the proposal, had exceeded his authority.

This photograph, which I posted last week, has become only more ironic with today's news.

Talk about Saturday night massacre. And Goss's close staff are almost certain to depart with him, Rep. Jane Harman just said on NPR. Will the last one left turn off the light?

Meantime, Justin hears of concerns other than Foggo, and that Goss's staff had already been putting out feelers for other jobs in the past couple weeks.

Kevin Drum has rounded up more theories.

Update: Spencer Ackerman gets a flat out denial from CIA public affairs that Goss's resignation has anything to do with CIA Executive Director Dusty Foggo. Bill Kristol seems a tad skeptical that Goss would resign so suddenly without a connection to a very recent event.

More from Time, on the tension between Negroponte and Goss.

Update II: The Agency spokespeople think they may be out soon too, with the kind of housecleaning that goes on when directors change.

Update III: NBC, "Negroponte, with the backing of the White House, raised with Goss the prospect that he should leave, and the two talked about that possibility, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide a fuller account of what happened."

Yes, that is part of it. But why the sudden, surprise decision; why did Goss not say, as one would traditionally expect to project stability, that he would be staying on until his successor is confirmed, as Bill Kristol pointed out; why did the kind of turf war tensions that have long plagued every administration and certainly this one result in this sudden resignation, when such turmoil hasn't resulted in the departure of a half dozen other high level officials?

I hear that when Porter Goss went to meet with Negroponte today, he didn't know he was going to be leaving the job. And that it would have been the President's decision, not Negroponte's. And that this may have to do with how Goss handled a management issue concerning Foggo. And perhaps with a tie in to HIPSI. And I hear that Fran Townsend has already been approached about taking Goss's job -- and turned it down. And I hear that agency folks are worried this is the end of the Agency as they know it -- Pentagon role over intelligence will only increase. "I think there's another shoe to drop," said one source. Justin Rood has more on this.

The statement put out by Goss via CIA public affairs is one of those bizarre historical documents ("distinct pleasure" ... "smooth and professional transition" ... "I am proud of the CIA's management team") for failing to hint why he's leaving, when one can imagine that some of the back story is going to come out between now and tomorrow morning.

Update: Pentagon undersecretary also to go? ?

Update II: I'm told if you watch the video at this MSNBC link, there's a shot of Dusty.

Update III: Are you coming to this story late, and haven't a clue what's going on and who's who?

Here's your Bible, useful intelligence, and two decent background stories that caught the drift of this early on. And a profile of Goss's helm at the Agency.

Update IV: Hill source: they were totally surprised. When the announcement of Goss's resignation came on a bank of TVs turned to CNN today, "Literally people were running" -- to their offices, etc. to figure out what's going on.

CIA public affairs just told me they will be releasing a statement this afternoon.

From a reader: "Dana Priest is on MSNBC right now saying we'll have to wait for tomorrow's paper to find out why he resigned. The Post must have called him for comment on a story running tomorrow about his involvement with Brent Wilkes."

Porter Goss Resigns

Bush's Personnel Announcement: So, will it be Snow, Rove, Rumsfeld, or Cheney? Any bets? And what is it about Friday afternoons?

Meantime, Bush isn't the only one rearranging his cabinet. Tony Blair apparently just fired one of Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice's closest European collaborators, Jack Straw. I am amazed, given how central he has been to US-UK strategizing on Iran. What's the back story to this?

UPDATE: HOLY XXXX. It's GOSS. Paging Ken Silverstein.
More here. "Era of transition," indeed.

Update II: We heard about photos. Maybe that reporting wasn't so "wildly irresponsible" after all?

In a week in which there have been more developments in the wider Duke Cunningham corruption case than you can shake a stick at, Judd Legum and friends at Think Progress have done a really fine wrap-up of the latest developments. Spies, Congressional defense appropriators, the Watergate, strange doings in Central America and a certain let's say entertainer in Vienna -- it has the makings of a thriller.

Front Company Inc.? Harper's, with an assist from POGO, has found some truly strange stuff about the limo company owned by the longtime driver for alleged Cunningham coconspirator Brent Wilkes. Among the information they've unearthed, that Shirlington Limo operates under four different names, and that it has $25 million in federal contracts currently. Is Shirlington a kind of vehicle (cough) or front company for laundering federal money to more friends of Wilkes?

A Lowery connection to the limo service used in L'Affaire Cunningham.

One official says he occasionally went to the poker games at the Watergate, but didn't see anything improper. More from Matt Yglesias and Justin Rood.

Exit Berlusconi -- for now at least. "Ministers quoted Mr Berlusconi as telling them: 'We completed our programme. We have been the best government in the history of the Italian republic.'”

Harper's: How did the long-time personal driver for alleged Cunningham co-conspirator Brent Wilkes become the recipient of a $21.2 million DHS limo service contract last year? Jason Vest and Nick Schwellenbach at POGO are also curious about that.

Ivo Daalder: War with Iran is not inevitable. The perception of its inevitability is "based on a misreading of what happened in 2002-03," Daalder writes. "What made war possible then was not the threat (nuclear or otherwise) that Iraq supposedly posed, but the context within which Bush made the decision to go to war. And in decisions about war and peace, context matters." He further argues how the context has changed. Update: Bill Arkin has more ratcheting down the hysteria.

The Darfur rally. A reader's take:

It was huge.

I brought my dog - who loves being around tons of people, so in that way, it was also kind of fun.

But in a way it was a bit depressing. It was a very Jewish rally - tons of school kids from around the country. Darfur is apparently a huge issue in the reform Jewish community synagogues and day schools. [[ed. note: more on this]] ...

Anyway, the reason it was a bit depressing is that Elie Weisel and a few other speakers kept comparing what was going on today to the Holocaust - the theme of the rally being "never again" - which is fine, I agree - never again.

But now it's Monday and the rally is over and famous people like George Clooney are on flights back to L.A. - and what is going to happen? Never mind the fact that we've so screwed up in Iraq that people won't trust us to intervene even if we wanted to (which I don't think we do). Russell Simmons spoke and was the only one to speak out against some kind of intervention force. It was weird - Darfurian after Darfurian asking for some sort of NATO/Bosnia style
response, and then Russell Simmons going up there talking about Uranium deposits under the ground, and not to trust the government and that there can never, ever be any military force used to end this conflict.

Meanwhile, the Darfurian rebels just said no to a peace agreement yesterday too - lots of hopeful voices at the rally for that route - the peace talks in Abuja - but not amongst the Darfurians there who don't think the Janjaweed will be stopped by any peace talks and want the West to help.

So yeah, long answer - it was emotional, interesting, but ultimately, a bit depressing. ...

And there were powerful people there - Barak Obama, Nancy Pelosi, etc....

We'll see.