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Dr. iRack: "... Emphasizing Iranian involvement provides a useful public 'explanation' for the difficulty U.S. and Iraqi forces have had, thus far, in quelling violence in Sadr City. Blame it on Iran, not Sadr/JAM. Why go this route? Because it allows the United States to maintain the fiction that it is only the 'special groups' that are fighting the coalition instead of rank-and-file JAM, thus preserving the illusion that the Sadr "freeze" declared last August--a major (perhaps the major) reason for declining violence during the later part of the "surge" period in 2007--has not collapsed."
"Intel to die for." The NYT reports that nuclear analysts are studying 48 photographs released by Iran of Ahmadinejad and company making an April 8 tour of its enrichment facility at Natanz:
Most important, the pictures give the first public glimpse of the new centrifuge, known as the IR-2, for Iranian second generation. There were no captions with the photographs, so nuclear analysts around the globe are scrutinizing the visual evidence to size up the new machine, its probable efficiency and its readiness for the tough job of uranium enrichment. They see the photos as an intelligence boon.
“This is intel to die for,” Andreas Persbo, an analyst in London at the Verification Research, Training and Information Center, a private group that promotes arms control, said in a comment on the blog site Arms Control Wonk.
One surprise of the tour was the presence of Iran’s defense minister, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar. His attendance struck some analysts as odd given Iran’s claim that the desert labors are entirely peaceful in nature. In one picture, Mr. Najjar, smiling widely, appears to lead the presidential retinue.
Nuclear analysts say the tour opened a window into a hidden world previously known only to the Iranians and a few international inspectors.
“I don’t see anything to suggest this is propaganda,” Houston G. Wood III, a centrifuge expert at the University of Virginia, said in an interview. “They seem to be working on an advanced machine.” [...]
Of the 48 photographs Iran released, Western analysts gave special scrutiny to one showing Mr. Ahmadinejad and his entourage viewing a disassembled IR-2, its guts arrayed on a table. Clearly visible are its casing, inner rotor, motor and several other critical parts.
Arms Control Wonk, which Dr. Lewis of the New America Foundation runs, led a discussion of the photo. Most comments focused on parts. But Geoffrey E. Forden, an arms expert at M.I.T., noted that the table also held an Iranian flag.
“Indigenous manufacturing of sophisticated components is something to be very proud of,” he wrote. “And showing them with an Iranian flag is a very good way of graphically proclaiming it.” [...]
More generally, analysts say, Iran is slowly but steadily gaining the industrial experience needed to make reactor fuel, or, with the same equipment and a little more effort, bomb fuel — the hardest part of the weapons equation. [...]
Given the high stakes and international jitters, why did Iran release the photos? Analysts cite everything from a spirit of cooperation to blasts of disdain.
“Maybe it’s an invitation for engagement, or maybe it’s just to show off their achievement,” said R. Scott Kemp, a centrifuge expert at Princeton. ...
Nick Baumann: Was Mexican government aide's scooping up of White House Blackberrys an innocent action, or intended espionage?
Jacob Heilbrunn: Former Reagan national security advisor Robert McFarlane says McCain presidency would be run by neoconservative hawks, not realists, at least initially.
To bookmark: McClatchy's delightfully-named new national security blog, Nukes & Spooks.
Economic times are tough but, as Roll Call and Harper's Ken Silverstein reports, Congressman Peter Hoekstra seems to have some unusually good stock tips.
The Hill: "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has requested nearly $2.3 billion in federal earmarks for 2009, almost three times the largest amount received by a single senator this year."
FT: Oil could go to $200 a barrel:
Opec’s president on Monday warned oil prices could hit $200 a barrel and there would be little the cartel could do to help.
The comments made by Chakib Khelil, Algeria’s energy minister, came as oil prices hit a historic peak close to $120 a barrel, putting further pressure on global economies.
His remarks suggest Algeria wants Opec to continue to resist calls by US and European leaders for the cartel to pump more oil to help ease prices. But Mr Khelil blamed record oil prices on the weak dollar and global political insecurity. [...]
Some US senators have pinned the blame for high oil prices directly on Opec and Saudi Arabia, its largest and most powerful member.
In a letter to President George W. Bush last week, they said Riyadh had cut its oil production by about 2m barrels a day over the past three years, even though oil prices had continued to rise.
Wolfowitz: We were 'clueless' on counterinsurgency.
Update: Thoughts from Abu M and Blake Hounshell.
WP: From chief prosecutor to chief critic at Guantanamo. " ... Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working. His testimony in a small, windowless room -- as a witness for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an alleged driver for Osama bin Laden -- offered a harsh insider's critique of how senior political officials have allegedly influenced the system created to try suspected terrorists outside existing military and civilian courts. Davis's claims, which the Pentagon has previously denied, were aired here as the Supreme Court nears a decision on whether the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that laid the legal foundation for these hearings violates the Constitution by barring any of the approximately 275 remaining Guantanamo Bay prisoners from forcing a civilian judicial review of their detention. Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have 'strategic political value.'"
Via Steve Aftergood's Secrecy News, GulfNews.com reports that Bahrain's next ambassador to Washington will be a Jewish woman. Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo "'is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness,' said Faisal Fouladh of the Shura Council, the upper house of Bahrain's legislature. The Shura Council currently includes 11 women, including one Christian."
AP: December sentencing set for cooperating defense contractor Mitchell Wade in Duke Cunningham bribery probe.
Futurists, weapons experts, no nuke activists weigh in at the Mother Jones' nuclear energy salon. Jump in...
Fareed Zakaria: McCain vs. McCain:
On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.
In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.
We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.
John Weisman in The Washington Times: Douglas Feith's War and Decision "should be widely read so we never again make the mistakes Mr. Feith and his fellow Pentagon, State Department, CIA and White House senior political staffers made during their planning and execution of the Iraq war, or their tunnel vision abandonment of a successful Afghan campaign that has condemned us to near stalemate and a rejuvenated, opium-funded Taliban. It is obvious Mr. Feith is bright. His vacuity about the real world, however, is shocking. But not unexpected. Mr. Feith's entire professional life has been spent either in the practice of law or the development of public policy. Thus, he comes off as the textbook example of someone to whom process is more important than victory. Mr. Feith loses sight of the real battlefields — the ones on which soldiers die — in favor of the paper wars fought between competing factions of bureaucrats. [...] And if there was ever any doubt that the Bush administration became so fixated on Iraq that it allowed its initial success in Afghanistan to wither from inattention, Mr. Feith provides a smoking gun. All one has to do is check the index of his book for 'Afghanistan.' After page 165 of a tome that runs 674 pages there are but three passing citations. Obviously in Mr. Feith's mind, and by extension the administration's, Afghanistan was no longer a matter of consequence once the decision to invade Iraq was made. ..." The whole review.
A contact informs me that at a faculty meeting at Georgetown last year, "Agenda item #8 simply said 'Douglas Feith.' When we got there, the chair deadpanned that the department had exercised its option NOT to renew his contract. There was spontaneous applause from all 50 people in the room."
Rezko Trial and -- Rove? Newsweek: " ... Last week, prosecutors [in the Rezko trial] threw a curveball, telling the judge that one of their witnesses is prepared to raise the name of another prominent Washington hand: Karl Rove. Former Illinois state official Ali Ata is expected to testify about a conversation he had with Rezko in which the developer alleged Rove was "working with" a top Illinois Republican to remove the Chicago U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald. The allegation, which Rove denies, quickly reverberated in Washington. Democrats in Congress now want to question Ata. They believe he can help buttress their theory that Rove played a key role in discussions that led to the firings of U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department in 2006. The House Judiciary Committee "intends to investigate the facts and circumstances alleged in this testimony," panel chairman Rep. John Conyers of Michigan said in a statement to NEWSWEEK. Investigators are intrigued by the timing of the alleged conversation about Fitzgerald. According to the Rezko prosecutors, it took place in November 2004—weeks after Fitzgerald had subpoenaed Rove to testify for the third time in another matter he was aggressively investigating, the Valerie Plame CIA leak case."
What have I missed in a week abroad? Well, for a start, Doctor iRack is blogging up at a storm at Abu Muqawama: see Iran in Iraq Part I here, Part II here, Sadr City here, Iraq's Arab neighbors here and Basra here to start. (And the good doctor got an early start blogging here, close observers may note). You'll definitely want to bookmark the whole site dominated by the counterinsurgency mafia if you haven't yet already. (Also, COIN godfather David Kilcullen writes on "political maneuvering in counterinsurgency" at SmallWarsJournal, drawing on a recent case study of road building in Kunar province, Afghanistan.)
On a related topic to Dr. iRack's postings, the Post reports that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said "the Pentagon is planning for 'potential military courses of action' as one of several options against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's 'increasingly lethal and malign influence' in Iraq." It's all part of an increased rhetorical campaign by the administration to get Iran to reverse an alleged uptick in bad acting Iraq, the Post further reports: "Mullen's statements and others by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently signal new rhetorical pressure on Iran by the Bush administration amid what officials say is increased Iranian provision of weapons, training and financing to Iraqi groups that are attacking and killing Americans. In a speech Monday, Gates said Iran 'is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.' He said war would be 'disastrous' but added that 'the military option must be kept on the table, given the destabilizing policies of the regime and the risks inherent in a future Iranian nuclear threat.'"
Meantime, the NYT reports that questions and doubts linger on the administration case that Iran has recently intensified its bad acting in Iraq: "... Some intelligence and administration officials said Iran seemed to have carefully calibrated its involvement in Iraq over the last year, in contrast to what President Bush and other American officials have publicly portrayed as an intensified Iranian role. It remains difficult to draw firm conclusions about the ebb and flow of Iranian arms into Iraq, and the Bush administration has not produced its most recent evidence. But interviews with more than two dozen military, intelligence and administration officials showed that while shipments of arms had continued in recent months despite an official Iranian pledge to stop the weapons flow, they had not necessarily increased. ..." Since many of the allegations aren't new, what has prompted the latest round of saber rattling, as Senator Dianne Feinstein put it to the Times? The dust settling after the recent Iraqi government operation in Basra, the paper reports: "Much of the new evidence of Iranian activity in Iraq emerged during the Iraqi-led operation last month to seize control of Iraq’s second largest city, Basra. A senior administration official described the fighting in Basra as 'a clarifying moment' for the Iraqis, as well as the Americans, about the extent of Iran’s involvement."
Just Out: "Bin Laden Hates This Car": a tour through the green convictions, home and garage of James Woolsey 
Here's the whole piece. The current "future of energy" May/June issue is worth a read.James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is making me a fresh cup of Trader Joe's coffee. We are sitting around his kitchen island, two cats afoot, in the tasteful, solar-powered farmhouse where he lives with his wife near Annapolis, Maryland. Looking out the windows at the fields rolling to the West River, Woolsey excitedly describes his plans to plant camelina, a hardy Eurasian plant whose oil he hopes to convert to biofuel to supplement his geothermal heating system. ...
Like many clean-energy enthusiasts, Woolsey is part geek, part zealot. He's happy to spend a Saturday morning showing off the three rows of photovoltaic panels on his roof, the meter in his basement that displays when his house is feeding electricity back to the grid, and his white hybrid with a "Bin Laden Hates This Car" bumper sticker. ...
NYT:
A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.
Dock workers at the port, backed by South Africa’s powerful unions, refused to unload the ammunition and weapons on Friday, vowing protests and threatening violence if the government tried to do it without them.
Meanwhile, the Anglican archbishop of the province appealed to South Africa’s High Court to bar transporting the arms across South Africa, arguing that they were likely to be used to repress Zimbabweans. The court agreed, and by late Friday the ship had pulled up anchor and set sail.
What's Karl Rove up to this election season? National Journal's Peter Stone reports:
More on Freedom's Watch here.Publicly, Karl Rove is busy penning columns, appearing on television, giving speeches and writing a book, but the former White House political guru is spending time out of the limelight trying to nurture new independent political groups aiming to raise tens of millions of dollars to boost the entire Republican ticket in November. Six GOP consultants and lobbyists — with varying knowledge of Rove’s activities — told National Journal that Rove has been working for a few months to help line up resources and devise strategies for spending that money to help his party keep the White House and stave off losses in the House and Senate. Rove has had regular chats with GOP operatives he has worked with in Washington, and several prominent Republican donors nationwide — including some billionaires who were active in similar groups during the 2004 election cycle.
“Karl is up to his eyeballs in this,” says one prominent GOP consultant who has met with Rove a few times this year. “They’re trying to figure out who is going to do the presidential, who is going to do the Senate and who is going to do the House. They’re trying to assign resources to maximize the dollars and minimize duplication. Karl has taken it over.” To be effective, he adds, they need to raise “at least $100 million,” a sum that is likely to be at least what similar Democratic outside groups will spend. Rove didn’t return four phone calls in recent weeks seeking comment for this story.
Rove’s Rolodex is expansive, and sources say he has been on the phone or meeting with old friends from Texas like oilman T. Boone Pickens and Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who are expected to pony up millions of dollars this cycle to a few outside groups set up as either 527 or 501 (c) (4) entities. In the 2004 elections, two GOP 527 groups — Progress for America and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — together spent over $60 million on television ads that were instrumental in boosting the re-election bid of President Bush.
One new group being cobbled together includes old associates of Rove from the lobbying and communications firm DCI Group, including Tom Synhorst. The firm was heavily involved in the two major 527s in 2004. So far this election cycle, the key GOP group to run ads has been Freedom’s Watch which has relied almost entirely on the wealth of Adelson, the third richest man in the nation, whose worth has been pegged at $28 billion by Forbes magazine.
ISIS (.pdf):
ISIS obtained the document below from several sources. It summarizes a briefing given in Vienna by Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's Deputy Director General of Safeguards in February 2008 to member states, including Iran. The notes describe the technical basis for the IAEA's outstanding questions about the scope and direction of Iran's alleged nuclear weaponization studies. Specifically, it describes some of the information contained on a laptop obtained in Iran by an intelligence operation in 2004, as well as additional information provided by IAEA member states to the IAEA more recently. The information presented, which included multimedia files, describes several aspects of what could be nuclear weapons development-instructions on how to communicate internally using first names only, missile re-entry vehicle research including the chronology of events-separation of the missile, loss-of-tracking, switching on of altitude detectors, timing of firing devices-leading to an explosion at an altitude of about 600 meters. The IAEA notes that the altitude described in the documents excludes the possibility that the warhead was designed to accommodate conventional explosives or chemical and biological charges.
The briefing notes also summarize the reactions of Iranian diplomats at the meeting. They insist repeatedly that the allegations are groundless and the documents fabricated.
The news media have discussed the laptop documents extensively. In particular, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have provided extensive coverage. But the IAEA briefing is the most detailed public information on these documents and Iran's alleged weaponization studies. As such, its release allows a more informed public debate about Iran's nuclear program and the IAEA's actions to understand that program. ...
Via Bruce Falconer, the Huffington Post's Sam Stein reports that McCain strategist Charlie Black vouched for "convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and failed business owner."
Former House Appropriations committee senior staffer Scott Lilly, now with the Center for American Progress, analyzes McCain's proposal to cut earmarks. "What’s important is ... the utter lack of real substance contained in the economic proposal he has spent the last three days touting to the country."
WP:
The public's ratings of the national economy continue to sour, with assessments deteriorating faster than at any point in Washington Post-ABC News polling. Views on the Iraq war have also turned more negative, with six in 10 now rejecting the notion that the United States needs to win there to effectively battle terrorism.
Nine in 10 Americans now give the economy a negative rating, with a majority saying it is in "poor" shape, the most to say so in more than 15 years. And the sense that things are bad has spread swiftly.
Posted by Laura at 12:42 AM
Harpers' interviews Jeff Morley about his new CIA book, "Our Man in Mexico." Morley: " ...The book documents the previously unknown story of [Win]Scott’s friendship in the late 1940s with Philby, a genial British intelligence official who was actually a Soviet spy. Michael Scott showed me his father’s pocket calendars from 1946. “Drinks with Kim,” his father had scrawled. They had dined out together, arranged play dates for their kids, and, at the office, organized covert operations against the Soviet Union. The book also provides the most detailed account yet of how Scott supervised the surveillance of Oswald, as Oswald was making contact with communist diplomatic officials in Mexico City in October 1963, six weeks before he allegedly killed President John F. Kennedy. When Scott died of natural causes in 1971, his longtime friend, James Angleton, the Agency’s legendary counterintelligence chief, went to Mexico City and seized the memoir and a trove of other material from Scott’s home office. (Angleton specialized in such ghoulish work. In October 1964, he had snagged the personal diary of Jack Kennedy’s favorite girlfriend, Mary Meyer, after she was murdered in Georgetown.) Angleton seized the manuscript and tapes because he wanted to make sure that Scott’s account of Oswald’s actions, before and after Kennedy was killed, never came into public view."
This interesting too:
5. The CIA’s destruction of the Oswald tape can’t help but bring to mind the recent story of the agency’s destruction of a videotape of the torture of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayda… Both stories reflect the same underlying reality: When a clandestine service is assigned the dirty work of a democratic power to combat a real threat (communism in 1963, Islamist terrorism today), that agency is loathe to disclose its sources and methods to those who seek real accountability. It’s worth noting that Jose Rodriguez, the covert operations chief that destroyed the torture tape, previously served as chief of station in Mexico City. Like Win Scott, he preferred to cover up material evidence in a criminal investigation rather than come clean for history. ...
Newsweek's Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff: the Prince and the Prime Minister -- on the shut-down UK serious fraud office BAE inquiry.
Nonproliferation experts Jacqueline Shire and Joseph Cirincione propose how to disarm Iran on bloggingheadstv.
HRW: "The alleged kidnappers of an Egyptian cleric in 2003 will go on trial in Milan on April 16 in what is the first ever legal challenge to the CIA’s controversial rendition program, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch urged the newly-elected Italian government to seek the extradition of 26 American CIA agents implicated in the abduction. [...] The Milan prosecution involves nine Italian defendants, who are being tried in person, and 26 American defendants, who are being tried in absentia. Human Rights Watch is concerned that trials in absentia do not afford defendants an adequate opportunity to present a defense. The Italian defendants include Gen. Nicolò Pollari, the former head of SISMI, Italy’s military intelligence service, who was forced to resign over Abu Omar’s abduction and rendition, and Pollari’s former deputy, Marco Mancini. The American defendants consist of 25 alleged CIA operatives – including former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady and former Rome CIA station chief Jeffrey Castelli – as well as US Air Force Lt. Col. Joseph Romano, who was stationed at the Aviano military base in northeastern Italy at the time the events occurred. Besides shedding light on the kidnapping itself, the trial may also highlight the ineffectiveness of the diplomatic assurances that the US government says it receives from states to which it renders suspected terrorists." More from the AP.
A years long gag order lifted, Ha'aretz's Yossi Melman reports on "a Soviet spy-turned-double agent [who] led to the 1983 arrest of Professor Avraham Marcus Klingberg, the highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught by Israel. The military censor allowed on Monday the publication of this incident, which had been previously suppressed for security reasons. ... Klingberg, who was the deputy head of the top-secret Israel Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tziona, immigrated to Israel in late 1948." Link.
Just Out: J Street: "New 'Pro Israel, Pro Peace' Political Group Launches in Washington: 'J Street' Hopes to Prod Washington Middle East Policy Back Towards the Center"
Read the whole thing here.... So began the motivation for the creation of J Street and J Street PAC, a new nonprofit lobby group and affiliated political action committee being launched today in Washington, whose leadership describes the new organizations as “pro Israel, pro peace.” And unlike most other small Washington MidEast-oriented policy shops that primarily issue position papers and opeds, J Street was designed to be distinctly political.
“It’s the first time that there has been a political arm for those of us who are pro Israel but pro peace, and who believe that reaching a negotiated settlement in the Middle East is absolutely essential for the security of both Israel and the United States,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street and J Street PAC told me. “That is the reason for this effort. We believe the majority of American Jews and many other Americans friendly and supportive to Israel really do recognize that a policy both here and there that would be geared towards really pushing for a two state solution is in Israel’s and the US’s best interests.” [...]
One of J Street’s Israeli supporters in Washington, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, says Israeli leaders need encouragement from Washington to make concessions that could contribute to the peace process. “I think there comes a point when, if the Israeli leadership actually wants to see this thing resolved, it’s clearly easier to say yes to the president of the United States, rather than to the [Palestinian Liberation Organization],” Levy says. “You need to have the president of the United States to help carry you there.”
For now, Ben-Ami tells me he is working out of his basement, the organization has no headquarters and doesn’t plan for one, and plans to operate heavily in the online world. “We’re following the MoveOn model, of being virtual, and heavily online,” he says. “Part of our goal and plan in the coming year is to develop an online presence in the way that Obama and Dean and MoveOn have done … and to tap into that and have a large base of small donors.” ...
More from the Post, MJ Rosenberg, Gershom Gorenberg, Daniel Levy, Ron Kampeas, Matt Yglesias, Ben-Ami, and Dana Goldstein.
WP: "Bipartisan groups in Congress are pressing to place new controls on the FBI's ability to demand troves of sensitive personal information from telephone providers and credit card companies, over the opposition of agency officials who say they deserve more time to clean up past abuses. Proposals to rein in the use of secret 'national security letters' will be discussed over the next week at hearings in both chambers. The hearings stem from disclosures that the FBI had clandestinely gathered telephone, e-mail and financial records 'sought for' or 'relevant to' terrorism or intelligence activities without following appropriate procedures. [...] The House bill, sponsored by Nadler, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), would tighten the language governing when national security letters could be used, by requiring that they clearly pertain to investigations of a foreign power or an agent instead of just being considered 'relevant' to such investigations."
An explosion in Shiraz prompts some analysts to speculate on what may be Iran's al Qaida problem.
CBS: Kidnapped CBS journalist freed in Iraq. Richard Butler had sought an interview with Muqtada al-Sadr.
Investigative journalist Scot Paltrow reports at Portfolio about the Pentagon's accounting mess, on a dizzying scale:
For the first three quarters of 2007, $1.1 trillion in Army accounting entries hadn't been properly reviewed and substantiated, according to the Department of Defense's inspector general. In 2006, $258.2 billion of recorded withdrawals and payments from the Army's main account were unsupported. It's as if the Army had submitted multibillion-dollar expense reports without any receipts.
Via Matt Yglesias, Blake Hounsell writes at Foreign Policy that in Iraq, the U.S. has created another failed state:
Such critiques miss the larger point. Surge or no surge, it’s extremely doubtful the U.S. occupation can ultimately produce a successful Iraq—a stable, unitary, democratizing state at peace with its neighbors. The surge is merely the most preliminary precursor to this intended outcome, and even Petraeus admits that it could all come undone overnight. For that matter, Iraq is just one part of a larger strategic picture, as former CENTCOM commander Adm. William J. Fallon tried to impress upon the Bush administration before he resigned. A myopic, irrational focus on Iraq has impaired the United States from making progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict, managing the rise of China, and everything in between. In short, the Iraq war is long past being worth the $120 billion a year being spent to wage it—an amount that exceeds Iraq’s entire annual economic output. [...]
The arguments for staying in Iraq are drearily familiar. There will be a “blood bath” if the United States leaves. Withdrawing will only “embolden” al Qaeda. Iraq’s oil will be taken off the market. Iran will seize control of the country. These risks are not only overblown, they are also deeply uncertain. They must be weighed against the well-known costs of sticking around—a U.S. military stretched to the breaking point, a Middle East becoming more radicalized and anti-American, continued distraction from the real fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the real diplomatic action in Asia, to name but a few. Most importantly, we must not forget that even a perfect surge would still have left the United States chasing an expected strategic payoff—a stable, democratic Iraq—that is extremely unlikely to be realized for decades, if at all.
It’s one thing to ask American soldiers to lay their lives on the line for freedom and democracy, or to safeguard their country from weapons of mass destruction. But who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?
WP: US says Iran top threat to Iraq:
Similarly, NYT: Iran fighting proxy war in Iraq, US envoy says.... President Bush reiterated yesterday that if Iran continues to help militias in Iraq, "then we'll deal with them," saying in an interview with ABC News that "we're learning more about their habits and learning more about their routes" for infiltrating or sending equipment.
But he also reaffirmed that he has no desire to go to war with Tehran. Saying that his job is to "solve these issues diplomatically," Bush suggested heightened interest in reaching a solution with other countries. "You can't solve these problems unilaterally. You're going to need a multilateral forum." ...
"Get me a terrorist and some WMD, because that's what the Bush administration wants!" Francis Brooke cited in the latest excerpt of Aram Roston's Chalabi book posted by MSNBC. Roston is scheduled to be on The Daily Show tonight.
WP: Carter to meet with Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal. Update: Also see this Gershom Gorenberg post, with an English translation of excerpts of Meshal's recent interview with the Palestinian paper Al-Ayyam.
The Golden Shield. Interesting piece, which seems to be sourced by one who wants to do damage to Rice and image she has as trying to moderate White House policy on torture, interrogations and detentions. As I have reported, sources have suggested to me that as an aide to a top CIA official in the 2002-2003 time frame, former CIA officer John Kiriakou saw the detailed interagency traffic signing off on interrogation techniques, and took notes and wrote memos for his boss:
As such, he would have had a window into who in the Principals' meetings signed off on what. And to be rankled by the White House and Congress tendency later to put responsibility for those decisions all on the CIA.Not only in Pakistan, but back at Langley, Kiriakou was in a position to know about important debates inside the CIA, regarding interrogation techniques and other high-level matters.
In the summer of 2002, after returning from a posting as the Counterterrorism Center chief in Pakistan, where he was involved in the questioning of Zubaida, Kiriakou served as the executive assistant to Robert Grenier, then the CIA's Iraq mission manager.
The NYT reports on "the fight for McCain's" foreign policy soul:
Isn't it clear that those who have McCain's ear don't believe such an analysis is a mistake at all? The pragmatists overestimated their influence on this president when he came into office and have shown few recent signs of having McCain's foreign policy ear or influencing his foreign policy education. Save for the odd boilerplate about working with others, which sounds as deeply felt as Bush's pre-presidency 'US should be more humble' rhetoric, and which means nothing (of course nice if the rest of the world wants to go along, and too bad when it doesn't, true of Clinton to some degree as well as Bush), the preponderance of national security advisors in McCain's inner and outer circles would seem to make clear he leans heavily to the hawk camp. Which makes all this talk of Rice as his Veep just silly. Never going to happen. Why? Because it would alienate the strongest base of support McCain has among conservatives, national security conservatives, who deeply resent the strain of pragmatism she has brought to Bush's second term foreign policy.Still, as prominent pragmatists and neoconservatives have started to part company over the war, they appear to be jockeying for influence in Mr. McCain’s campaign and, should he be elected, in his administration.
One of the chief concerns of the pragmatists is that Mr. McCain is susceptible to influence from the neoconservatives because he is not as fully formed on foreign policy as his campaign advisers say he is, and that while he speaks authoritatively, he operates too much off the cuff and has not done the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.
In a trip to the Middle East last month, Mr. McCain made an embarrassing mistake when he said several times that he was concerned that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq. (The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, a Sunni insurgent group.) He repeated the mistake on Tuesday at hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Update: CNN: new poll says McCain-Rice ticket would beat Dems in New York.
McClatchy's Nancy Youssef: "Pentagon officials said they're aware of the growing public frustration with the war. At times, though, Petraeus and Crocker seemed flummoxed by the tenor of questions on Capitol Hill, which was starkly different from the warm reception they received during their September appearance."
The WP's Ellen Nakashima with the latest on what Jack Balkin calls the surveillance state:
When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect's telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico.
The circuits -- little-known electronic connections between telecom firms and FBI monitoring personnel around the country -- are used to tell the government who is calling whom, along with the time and duration of a conversation and even the locations of those involved.
Recently, three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chairman John D. Dingell (Mich.), sent a letter to colleagues citing privacy concerns over one of the Quantico circuits and demanding more information about it. Anxieties about whether such electronic links are too intrusive form a backdrop to the continuing congressional debate over modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs federal surveillance. [...]
Wiretaps to obtain the content of a phone call or an e-mail must be authorized by a court upon a showing of probable cause. But "transactional data" about a communication -- from whom, to whom, how long it lasted -- can be obtained by simply showing that it is relevant to an official probe, including through an administrative subpoena known as a national security letter (NSL). According to the Justice Department's inspector general, the number of NSLs issued by the FBI soared from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005.
Just Out: an article on conservative frustration with Freedom's Watch and one of its primary backers:
Go read. In other news, Adelson is now reportedly trying to buy Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv from owner Ofer Nimrodi. Among the reported competition for the paper, Israeli daily Ha'aretz.... Last year, when Adelson helped to establish Freedom's Watch, a group that late last summer launched a $15 million media campaign in support of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, hopes were high—both for Adelson and for Freedom's Watch. As former White House press secretary and Freedom's Watch official Ari Fleischer put it in August, "The cavalry is coming."
Almost eight months later, some Freedom's Watch watchers are wondering whether some of the cavalry got lost. Even as the group has mounted a new campaign to coincide with General David Petraeus' testimony on Iraq to Congress this week, there has been conservative grumbling about Freedom's Watch—and Adelson. And several Freedom's Watch staffers, including its first president, Bradley Blakeman, have left the group. Now Washington conservatives are worrying that Adelson may not be the white knight they had wished for.
In not-for-attribution interviews, a few conservative think tank hands and activists expressed frustration that Freedom's Watch has yet to develop a comprehensive strategy, and they gripe that it has been slow to set up a MoveOn-style infrastructure. Freedom's Watch hasn't realized its full potential, they say, in part because Adelson overly involves himself in the group's decision-making and won't heed the good advice of…well, people like them.
"He is both meddlesome and attached to his own agenda," says a conservative think tanker. "And he is not listening to people who are giving him good political and strategic advice.… Everyone I know comes away very frustrated from their experience" with Freedom's Watch. "They are late to the game and they need to recognize that," he adds. "MoveOn has had a microphone to itself for a number of years. Freedom's Watch is not entirely ineffective, but they are not well organized or maximizing their impact." ...
Update: See related: Steve Clemons on the right's "Soros envy," the Las Vegas Gleaner, and The American Prospect's Mori Dinauer.
Go read Scott Horton on a tale of three lawyers. "... A system that punishes and shames Matthew Diaz, yet obstructs any investigation into the misconduct of John Yoo and Jim Haynes, and particularly their focal rule in the introduction of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, is corrupt. Indeed, it persecutes the innocent and rewards the guilty. A bar association that disbars Matthew Diaz and leaves Yoo and Haynes free to practice is fundamentally corrupt. In essence, this choice reflects a legal profession that puts upholding the will of the Executive, even when it commands the most egregious and unlawful conduct, over the Rule of Law. It reflects the abnegation of the bedrock principles of the profession and the principles of the American Constitution and the Revolution which gave rise to it. ..."
Human Rights Watch: CIA Transfer of Suspects to Jordan for Interrogation Violates International Law.
Report will be available shortly here.The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred at least 14 terrorist suspects to Jordanian custody for interrogation and torture since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
The 36-page report, “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan,” documents how Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) served as a proxy jailer and interrogator for the CIA from 2001 until at least 2004. While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan.
“The Bush administration claims that it has not transferred people to foreign custody for abusive interrogation,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “But we’ve documented more than a dozen cases in which prisoners were sent to Jordan for torture.”
Based largely on firsthand information from Jordanian former prisoners who were detained with the non-Jordanian terrorism suspects, the report describes eight previously unknown cases of rendition. The new cases include Ibrahim “Abu Mu’ath” al-Jeddawi, whose statements may have been relied upon as evidence in US status review proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, and Khayr al-Din al-Jaza’eri, whose alleged activities were mentioned in a high-profile terrorism prosecution in France. None are known to have been charged with a criminal offense.The report also excerpts a handwritten note from one of the rendered prisoners, Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, which he wrote while in Jordanian custody in late 2002. The note, which al-Sharqawi marked with his thumbprint, says that GID interrogators beat him “in a way that does not know any limits.”...
Ted Gup: "So Much for the Information Age: Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault."
Times of London: "IRANIAN forces were involved in the recent battle for Basra, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress this week. Military and intelligence sources believe Iranians were operating at a tactical command level with the Shi’ite militias fighting Iraqi security forces; some were directing operations on the ground, they think. Petraeus intends to use the evidence of Iranian involvement to argue against any reductions in US forces."
Ha'aretz: Israeli vice premier Haim Ramon: Reoccupying Gaza will hurt Israel more than help it.
Sadr to Disband Mehdi Army? Reuters: Iraq's Sadr to disband Mehdi Army if clerics order
Comments a knowledgeable friend:NAJAF, Iraq- Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will consult senior religious leaders and disband his Mehdi Army militia if they instruct him to, a senior aide said on Monday.
The surprise announcement came on the day Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in a television interview, ordered the Mehdi Army to disband or Sadr's followers would be excluded from Iraqi political life.
It was the first time Sadr has offered to disband the Mehdi Army, whose black-masked fighters are principle actors in Iraq's five-year-old war and the main foes of U.S. and Iraqi forces in a recent upsurge in fighting.
Senior aide Hassan Zargani said Sadr would seek rulings from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shi'ite cleric, as well as senior Shi'ite clergy based in Iran, on whether to dissolve the Mehdi Army, and would obey their orders.
That effectively puts the militia's fate in the hands of the reclusive Sistani, 77, a cleric revered by all of Iraq's Shi'ite factions and whose edicts carry the force of Islamic law, but who almost never intervenes in politics.
"Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his offices in Najaf and Qom to form a delegation to visit Sistani in Najaf and (other leaders) in Qom to discuss disbanding the Mehdi Army," Zargani said.
"If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders," he told Reuters. Najaf in Iraq, where Sistani is based, and Qom in Iran are the main seats of Shi'ite authority.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said he could not comment on the statement by Sadr's aide. Sistani's spokesman, Hamed al-Khafaf, declined to comment.
This shows 2 things: (1) It reconfirms that Sadr ultimately wants to be part of the political process; and (2) once again shows what an important player Iran is in all of this. If he indeed orders the technical dismantling of JAM, I would expect more fighting in the short-term (including with U.S. forces) as "rogue" elements rebel against his order and we seek to take them out. It could be bloody couple of months, especially if the movement splinters into a thousand violent pieces in the context of impending provincial elections (and the inevitable, and likely violent, competition with ISCI/Badr). Plus, even if most obey and stand down, it raises the question of what we'll do with the 60-100K armed JAM members. It will be the mirror image problem to the one we have with the Sunni "Sons of Iraq." The end result might be a leaner, more co-opted JAM, which would be a good thing--but the "birth pangs" of democracy could be particularly painful.
The Plumbers. NYT's David Carr: Why did Conde Nast hire one of accused Hollywood tapper/private eye Anthony Pellicano's "technicians?"
How long until the Pellicano case becomes a movie??On Thursday, it was the turn of Wayne Reynolds, a close associate of and a former audio technician for Mr. Pellicano. When he took the stand, he was asked where he now works.
“I have two sources of employment. I work for Condé Nast Publications and I serve in the Marine Corps Reserve,” he said. At Condé Nast, he said, “I manage the information technology security department.”
I later checked and, indeed, Mr. Reynolds has a Condé Nast phone number in New York (he did not return my call) and is listed in the company directory. Now, Mr. Reynolds may be a whiz with technology — he testified with a great deal of specificity about the black boxes used to record intercepted calls — but his testimony raised a troubling question: why would Condé Nast hire him?
Plenty of interesting information came out in court. Mr. Reynolds was first questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the Los Angeles offices of Condé Nast early in 2003. Mr. Pellicano, who is serving as his own lawyer, asserted in his cross-examination that Mr. Reynolds had bragged about bugging his own supervisor — no name was mentioned — at Condé Nast and that Mr. Reynolds had provided him with a prepublication copy of a Vanity Fair article (widely assumed to be about the Hollywood “superagent” Michael S. Ovitz).
Mr. Reynolds emphatically denied both assertions, but just to thicken the plot, a story about the Pellicano case in the June 2006 issue of Vanity Fair written by Bryan Burrough and John Connolly stated that Mr. Reynolds had become a government witness, but it did not say where he worked.
When I phoned Condé Nast about Mr. Reynolds, the company reacted as if I were a dead fish left on its dashboard. A spokeswoman eventually confirmed that Mr. Reynolds had worked at the company in both Los Angeles and New York for “a number of years” and was still an employee, but the company had nothing to say about the accusation that he wiretapped one of its executives.
A spokeswoman for Vanity Fair, Beth Kseniak, said, “If Mr. Ovitz did in fact obtain a copy of an article prepublication, he did not ask for any changes. We never heard from him.” She said she had no comment when asked about Condé Nast’s decision to employ someone who worked for a man who was accused of being in the business of terrorizing journalists. ...
MSNBC is excerpting Aram Roston's biography of Ahmad Chalabi, The Man Who Pushed America To War. Roston had a piece on Chalabi's lobbyists including Charlie Black here. I interviewed Roston here.
WP:
The Justice Department has dropped 22 out of 24 cases of alleged detainee abuse by civilian employees and contractors referred by the CIA and the Defense Department. A U.S. official said the Yoo memo's legal arguments that interrogators are exempt from such criminal liability could have been part of the reason why those cases were dropped.
"Could it conceivably have played a role in deciding whether to prosecute or not? Certainly, in theory," said a law enforcement official involved in the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If there was a memo blessing behavior at a certain point in time, and someone relied on legal guidance, could they have formed the necessary intent" to break the law?
Charles Gittins, a lawyer representing Army Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr. in his appeal of his abuse convictions tied to Abu Ghraib, said Yoo's memo appears to show that President Bush suspended maltreatment laws for the military during a time of war. He said he plans to submit the document to Graner's parole board when it meets in a few weeks.
Ha'aretz: Zigzag response to Syrian tensions doesn't signal war:
A Syrian intelligence officer, putting together Barak's statement, his canceling a trip to Germany, the cabinet's decision to redistribute gas masks and the national emergency maneuver next week, would probably conclude that Israel was interested in escalation.
Despite this, Syria also made an effort yesterday to calm things down. A member of parliament, Mohammed Habash, told Al Arabiya television that the Syrian army was not on alert, and that his country had no intention of attacking Israel.
To sum up, the north is expected to remain tense at least until Hezbollah's revenge attack and perhaps afterward, too.
Meanwhile the calm in the south seems to be coming to an end after a month. The Qassam rocket and mortar fire is increasing, although Hamas is not taking part in the shooting. In Israel, the restraint imposed on the Israel Defense Forces in the past few weeks is loosening. Seven Palestinian militants were wounded by IDF troops yesterday east of Khan Yunis. The IDF engaged in similar acts almost every night this week.
Gaza is once again becoming a barrel of explosives, especially since the talks on reopening the Rafah crossing have stalemated again. The economic situation in the Strip is deteriorating. Dozens of drivers are waiting near every gas station, sometimes for more than two days, just to buy a little fuel. Wishing to avert the population's fury, Hamas may direct its fire against Israel again.
Go read Kai Wright in The American Prospect: "Dr. King, Forgotten Radical."
And NPR's coverage this week of the fortieth anniversary of his death and yesterday the anniversary of his mountain top speech has been remarkable.America began perverting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message in the spring of 1963. Truthfully, you could put the date just about anywhere along the earlier timeline of his brief public life, too. But I mark it at the Birmingham movement's climax, right about when Northern whites needed a more distant, less personally threatening change-maker to juxtapose with the black rabble rousers clambering into their own backyards. That's when Time politely dubbed him the "Negroes' inspirational leader," as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff point out in their excellent book Race Beat.
Up until then, King had been eyed as a hasty radical out to push Southern communities past their breaking point -- which was a far more accurate understanding of the man's mission. His "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the terms of social change. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, later adding, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Shame that quotation rarely makes it into the sort of King remembrances that will mark today's 40th anniversary of his assassination. Generations after the man's murder, our efforts to look back on his life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans' lives. Today, I don't mourn King's death so much as I do his abandoned ideas. ...
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman press release: "Today, Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent the following letter to [Mike] McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, asking him to release an unclassified summary of key conclusions and assessments included in the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Kennedy and Levin state that there is no reason for this request to be denied, and ask that the information be provided before General Petraeus’s and Ambassador Crocker’s forthcoming testimony before Congress."
...The memo's application of these canons to these statues (especially the torture statute) is, in my opinion, fairly outrageous, for reasons I'll discuss in further posts. And this section is the heart of the Opinion -- the belts and suspenders in support of the basic conclusion that the military need not worry itself about all of these (and other) criminal laws in interrogation of al Qaeda suspects.
Here's the remarkable thing: Page 11 of the Opinion states that "[t]he Criminal Division concurs in our conclusion that these canons of construction preclude the application of the assault, maiming, interstate stalking, and torture statutes to the military during the conduct of a war."
In other words, John Yoo checked with the Criminal Division as to whether the military could torture and maim detainees in a war, and that Division, which ordinarily strongly resists narrowing constructions of criminal statutes, agreed that the torture and maiming (and other) statutes were inapplicable.
The head of the Criminal Division at the time was Michael Chertoff (now Secretary of Homeland Security). Nine days before the memo was issued, President Bush nominated Chertoff, like Bybee, to be a federal judge on a U.S. Court of Appeals.
Update: A former Hill lawyer finds this testimony by Chertoff on this issue:
SEN. CARL LEVIN: Now, do you agree with the definition of torture contained in the August 1, 2002 memo?
MICHAEL CHERTOFF: Let me begin by saying first of all, of course, torture is illegal. We begin with that proposition. And, in fact, the President has said that on a number of occasions. Second, I don’t—since I saw a draft of what I believe became this memo, I don’t remember if that language was in it, or if it was in it, whether it was used as—or purported to be kind of a bottom line definition.
SEN. CARL LEVIN: My question is, do you agree, not did you agree? I’ll get to the “did” in a moment.
MICHAEL CHERTOFF: I do not believe that definition is a sufficiently comprehensive definition of torture.
SEN. CARL LEVIN: Now, let’s go back in time. Did you object to the definition in the memo in 2002?
MICHAEL CHERTOFF: As I said, because I don’t remember the way it was specifically worded, I can tell you that my role in dealing with the memo was limited to this: I was asked to communicate what my views were as a kind of practical prosecutor about how a statute like the torture statute would be applied. And my essential position—again, this is talking to other lawyers, so it’s really lawyer to lawyer kind of discussion—was that when you are dealing with a statute with a general standard and an intent issue, the question of good faith and an honest and reasonable assessment of what are you doing becomes critical, and whether or not a particular type of thing that someone proposes to do violates the statute is going to depend, or whether a prosecutor views it as a violation of the statute, is going to depend a great deal upon whether the particular technique is specifically mentioned in the statute, or if it’s not, whether the people who are thinking about doing it are making an honest assessment about whether what they’re going to do rises to the level of the statute. I guess my bottom line advice was this: you are dealing in an area where there’s potential criminal liability, you had better be very careful to make sure that whatever it is you decide to do falls well within the—what is required by the law.
There's always the Hague. Philippe Sands:
.. In a word, the interrogators and their superiors were granted immunity from prosecution. Some of the lawyers who contributed to this legislation were immunizing themselves. The hitch, and it is a big one, is that the immunity is good only within the borders of the United States. ...
Those responsible for the interrogation of Detainee 063 face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3.
It would be wrong to consider the prospect of legal jeopardy unlikely. I remember sitting in the House of Lords during the landmark Pinochet case, back in 1999—in which a prosecutor was seeking the extradition to Spain of the former Chilean head of state for torture and other international crimes—and being told by one of his key advisers that they had never expected the torture convention to lead to the former president of Chile’s loss of legal immunity. In my efforts to get to the heart of this story, and its possible consequences, I visited a judge and a prosecutor in a major European city, and guided them through all the materials pertaining to the Guantánamo case. The judge and prosecutor were particularly struck by the immunity from prosecution provided by the Military Commissions Act. “That is very stupid,” said the prosecutor, explaining that it would make it much easier for investigators outside the United States to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed by the justice system in the home country—one of the trip wires enabling foreign courts to intervene. For some of those involved in the Guantánamo decisions, prudence may well dictate a more cautious approach to international travel. And for some the future may hold a tap on the shoulder.
“It’s a matter of time,” the judge observed. “These things take time.” As I gathered my papers, he looked up and said, “And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.”
Congratulations to CBS' Kimberly Dozier on winning a Peabody award for her report on women veterans who lost limbs in Iraq.
Banks Write Letters. Former Financial Times Tehran correspondent Gareth Smyth informs a list we're on of a letter he received from his bank HSBC yesterday. Shared with permission:
I received a letter this morning from HSBC saying they would close my dollar accounts because they had "decided to formally suspend all US dollar banking activity involving Iranian residents".
This, says HSBC, is a "result of the latest UN sanctions". But later in the letter, the bank says: "We hope you will understand that HSBC Bank International is required to comply with the laws and regulations of all jurisdictions. This includes the provision of financial and /or other services to any persons or entities which [sic] may be subject to US sanctions".
The account is offshore UK, and any dollars in it have never been in Iran. The letter was sent to my address in London, where I am registered to vote and paying taxes.
The good news - for me - is that "if you are not living an working in Iran anymore, these sanctions are not applicable to you ..."
But the bank demands confirmation from a lawyer, embassy offiical or actuary that I no longer live in the Axis of Evil.
Interesting piece by the Forward on the Zimbabwe opposition accusing Israeli-linked firms of interfering in favor of Mugabe in elections and electronic voter roll keeping and counting. But from my limited understanding, the piece misses one of the most compelling antecedents for the accusation, however bogus or legitimate it may be: video (BBC) given by former Israeli military intel agent and infamous liar extraordinaire Ari Ben-Menashe claiming in 2002 that Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tzvangirai tried to hire him to have Mugabe assasinated (Ben-Menashe had previously long worked for Mugabe and probably still did). Tzvangirai claimed the video was doctored and he had met with Ben-Menashe about lobbying. Independent media analysts cited by the BBC determined the video was doctored. Mugabe used ben-Menashe's stunt as an excuse to charge Tzvangirai with treason.
Phillipe Sands in VF:
The principled legal arguments were a fig leaf. The real reason for the Geneva decision, as Feith now made explicit, was the desire to interrogate these detainees with as few constraints as possible. Feith thought he’d found a clever way to do this, which on the one hand upheld Geneva as a matter of law—the speech he made to Myers and Rumsfeld—and on the other pulled the rug out from under it as a matter of reality. Feith’s argument was so clever that Myers continued to believe Geneva’s protections...Feith’s argument prevailed. On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum that turned Guantánamo into a Geneva-free zone. As a matter of policy, the detainees would be handled humanely, but only to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. “The president said ‘humane treatment,’ ” Feith told me, inflecting the term sourly, “and I thought that was O.K. Perfectly fine phrase that needs to be fleshed out, but it’s a fine phrase—‘humane treatment.’ ” The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or “outrages upon personal dignity” were gone.
“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”
Investigative journalist Art Levine reports in The American Prospect about the war on voting.
Directing Federal Funds for Domestic Propaganda? More observations on White House aide Felipe Sixto's resignation, from an attorney reader:
Apparently, Mr. Sixto's strange and sudden resignation came about because the Center for a Free Cuba found out he was using federal funds to pay for a domestic propaganda campaign to support President Bush's Cuba policy.
In the original stories about Felipe Sixto's resignation, Frank Calzon said that the Center for a Free Cuba began an internal investigation in January when it first heard allegations that Sixto had misused federal funds:
The Center for a Free Cuba learned of the allegations in January, said Frank Calzon, the group's executive director. It alerted the development agency and began an internal investigation, Calzon said.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/03/29/0329aide.html
This report from January indicates that Reporters Without Borders was funded by the Center for a Free Cuba to promote President Bush's Cuba policy:
La respuesta es la financiación de RSF. En efecto, la organización está subvencionada por la organización de extrema derecha Center for a Free Cuba (17), cuyo director Frank Calzón es el antiguo dirigente de la Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana (FNCA), una organización terrorista responsable de numerosos atentados contra Cuba (18). RSF también está financiada por la oficina pantalla de la CIA que es la National Endowment for Democracy, cuyo objetivo es promover la agenda política de la Casa Blanca (19).
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=62460
It's illegal to use federal funds to pay for domestic propaganda to support the Bush administration's Cuba policy:
The publicity or propaganda prohibition appears in the annual appropriation act. Specifically, this prohibition states: “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.” Pub. L. No. 108-7, Div. J, Tit. VI, § 626, 117 Stat. 11, 470 (2003).
Yesterday, in an op-ed in Diario Las Americas, Frank Calzon said that Felipe Sixto misused federal funds by giving grants to organizations operating in the United States ... If Sixto directed funds to Reporters Without Borders for them to use to bolster support for the Bush Administration's Cuba policy in the U.S. it would be illegal.
Ha'aretz: Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal backs Palestinian state in '67 borders.
McClatchy's Warren Strobel and Nancy Youssef on what US officials knew about the Basra operation:
The Bush administration was caught off-guard by the first Iraqi-led military offensive since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a weeklong thrust in southern Iraq whose paltry results have silenced talk at the Pentagon of further U.S. troop withdrawals any time soon.
President Bush last week declared the offensive, which ended Sunday, "a defining moment" in Iraq's history.
That may prove to be true, but in recent days senior U.S. officials have backed away from the operation, which ended with Shiite militias still in place in Basra, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki possibly weakened and a de facto cease-fire brokered by an Iranian general.
"There is no empirical evidence that the Iraqi forces can stand up" on their own, a senior U.S. military official in Washington said, reflecting the frustration of some at the Pentagon. He and other military officials requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak for the record.
Having Iraqi forces take a leadership role in combating militias and Islamic extremists was crucial to U.S. hopes of withdrawing more American forces in Iraq and reducing the severe strains the Iraq war has put on the Army and Marine Corps.
The failure of Iraqi forces to defeat rogue fighters in Basra has some in the military fearing they can no longer predict when it might be possible to reduce the number of troops to pre-surge levels.
"It's more complicated now," said one officer in Iraq whose role has been critical to American planning there.
Questions remain about how much Bush and his top aides knew in advance about the offensive and whether they encouraged Maliki to confront radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr.
A senior U.S. lawmaker and four military officials said Tuesday that the Americans were aware in general terms of the coming offensive, but were surprised by the timing and by the Iraqis' almost immediate need for U.S. air support and other help.
One senior U.S. military commander in Iraq said the Iraqi government originally told the United States about a longer-term plan to rid Basra of rogue elements. But Maliki changed the timing, and the nature of the Iraqi operation changed, he said.
"The planning was not done under our auspices at all," the American commander said. The plan changed because "the prime minister got impatient."
There's no evidence, however, that the U.S. tried to dissuade Maliki from executing either plan.
"My instinct is that we knew but did not anticipate" that American forces would be called on to help, said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden stressed that he's still seeking information from the Bush administration on the matter.
Another senior American military official in Baghdad said Maliki notified Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker less than two days before launching the operation.
"By then it was a done deal," this official said. .
Biden, who'll hold hearings on Iraq over the next 10 days, spoke shortly before lawmakers were to be briefed on an updated, classified National Intelligence Estimate on security, political and economic trends in Iraq.
The apparent misjudgment of the Iraqi security forces' capabilities and the strength of Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, as well as the revived political controversy over the war, come at an inopportune moment for the White House. ...
"No Rules in a Time of War." Marty Lederman offers initial thoughts on the just declassified, 81-page, March 2003 John Yoo torture memo, obtained by the ACLU today, here and here. Lederman's upshot: "the classification of this memo is entirely unjustifiable."
And, Lederman asks, when will Congress hold hearings?And it's fairly outrageous that Congress didn't release it when they received it. The classification and oversight systems are hopelessly broken.
2. The memo cites numerous other, as-yet-unreleased memos that appear to contain equally outrageous legal analysis. ... Those memos should be released immediately. ...
5. When will Congress insist upon hearings at which Geoffrey Miller, Jim Haynes, Donald Rumsfeld, and other DOD officials, explain why they kept the Yoo memo and the Working Group Report secret -- undisclosed even to the Working Group itself -- and why they briefed Miller on Yoo's multiple theories of legal absolution on his way out to Iraq? It's no longer very hard to figure out just why, all of a sudden, as soon as Miller arrived in Iraq, everyone there just suddenly and magically came to think the Geneva Conventions, UCMJ, federal assault and torture statutes, etc., simply no longer applied -- that Iraq was a law-free zone and that the gloves had come off. If you were Miller and you had been briefed on the Yoo theories, wouldn't you feel awfully confident that you could get away with, well, murder and everything short of it, in interrogation operations in Iraq? This memo is the source of the Nile for the abuse that occurred in Iraq in 2003.
WP: "Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found 'downright offensive.'"
Senate Judiciary committee chairman Patrick Leahy's response, via the Baltimore Sun:
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has repeatedly asked the Justice Department to release the memo and others like it, had this to say Tuesday evening:
It has been more than four months since I asked the White House – again – to declassify the secret Justice Department opinions on interrogation practices. Today’s declassification of one such memo is a small step forward, but in no way fulfills those requests. The administration continues to shield several memos even from members of Congress.The memo they have declassified today reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration. It is no wonder that this memo, like the now-infamous “Bybee memo”, could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn. Like the “Bybee memo”, this memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country’s status as a beacon of human rights around the world.
Yoo Torture Memo, Part 1 (.pdf)
Yoo Torture Memo, Part 2 (.pdf).
Update: Asked if Congressional hearings such as those Lederman outlines are plausible at this late date, a former Congressional attorney comments, "Agreed that congressional hearings are warranted. Not sure how likely it is that they will occur, but keep an eye on Senate Judiciary." Asked if it's delusional to wonder if Yoo might ever be held to account, the lawyer commented, "It has been suggested that Yoo could be disciplined by the bar for failing to comply with legal ethics rules. I imagine complaints will be or have been filed against him on that basis. (Of course, he is also being sued by Padilla, although I expect that will be dismissed shortly). Other than that, not sure how he can be held accountable."
NYT: Pentagon expected to close controversial intelligence unit, the Counter Intelligence Field Activity office:
... The counterintelligence office was also brought into the scandal surrounding Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican, who resigned from Congress in 2005 after pleading guilty to taking bribes from military contractors. Some of the contracts that Mr. Cunningham channeled to Mitchell J. Wade, a longtime friend, were for programs of the counterintelligence office.
Newly declassified documents released on Tuesday shed more light on another activity coordinated by the Pentagon’s counterintelligence office, issuing letters to banks and credit agencies to obtain financial records in terrorism and espionage investigations.
The Pentagon has issued hundreds of so-called national security letters, which are noncompulsory, as a tool to examine the income of employees suspected of collaborating with a foreign spy service or international terrorist network.
The documents, released as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, include an internal review begun in 2007 that examined the Pentagon’s use of the letters. The review found poor coordination and a lack of standardized training inside the Defense Department about using the letters, but uncovered no instances where the department broke any laws. ...
Over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, writer pal David Glenn launches a bit of a blog contest, spurred on by Rachel Donadio's NYT book review essay on the world of books and dating.
Russian oligarch Simeon Mogilyevich was recently arrested, arms dealer Viktor Bout too. Now, the Independent reports, the private plane of another Russian oligarch, Leonid Rozhetskin, gone missing two weeks ago has been spotted. "The mystery surrounding the disappearance of a Russian billionaire has deepened with reports that his private jet has been seen in different locations around the world since he vanished two weeks ago. Leonid Rozhetskin, 41, a Russian-born American citizen and co-founder of the free London business newspaper City AM, was reported missing from his £1m Latvian mansion on 16 March raising suspicions he may have been abducted and killed. But his £9m private jet has been spotted since in Vienna, Geneva, Norway, Newfoundland and Luton. In Norway on 27 March, two men hidden under coats were seen boarding the plane."