President Bush will no doubt be talking about this new National Strategy for Victory in Iraq Report.

I am reading it now but wanted to get it out quickly to TWN readers.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: George Bush's speech this morning is almost entirely a counter-point response to James Fallows' important cover story in the Atlantic Monthly this month. Bush seems to be asserting that Fallows' assessment and math are wrong.

I'll be commenting on this later, but my sense is that Fallows went into extensive, nearly tedious detail about the thus far failed effort to train and "stand up" Iraqi security forces. The President's assertions about the great successes training Iraqi forces do not stand up to scrutiny. SCC

TWN has just secured a copy of a letter from Al-Jazeera Managing Director Wadah Khanfar to Prime Minister Tony Blair about the secret memo which allegedly outlines President Bush's intent to bomb Al-Jazeera's headquarters and Blair's efforts to dissuade him.

Here it the text:

TO THE ATTENTION OF:

The Right Honourable Tony Blair
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Date: 26 November, 2005

Dear Prime Minister,

It is with a great deal of concern that I write to you regarding the alleged statements made in the memo reported in the Daily Mirror this past week. The statements were to have occurred between President Bush and yourself regarding our organization, Al-Jazeera Channel. As alleged in the report the memo states that President Bush disclosed his plan to target Al-Jazeera at a White House face-to-face meeting with you on April 16, 2004. The report goes on to state that you subsequently dissuaded President Bush from doing so. On hearing about the memo we were astonished but we reserved our judgement on the statements until we could verify the claims being made by the report. Consequently, we were hoping that the memo would be made public to clarify the situation. However, we recently learned that the Attorney General has placed an order not to disclose the contents of the memo.

We are troubled and deeply concerned that this latest development is only increasing the outrage and shock felt by both our organization and news organizations across the world as well as by the public. Our profession is built on the value of the freedom of speech, and institutions such as ours struggle hard to maintain and champion these values.

We are calling upon you and your government to put an end to this widespread speculation and to set the record straight. We hope that you would agree with us that disclosing the contents of the memo would be in the best interest of the truth. The idea of either seriously or humorously suggesting the targeting of civilian news organisations is to us abhorrent in an age where the world is struggling for the ideals of democracy and freedom of speech. This is especially critical as the alleged discussion is supposed to have taken place between Mr. Bush and yourself, two world leaders who have stated their public commitment to these values.

Dear Prime Minister, we therefore call upon you to bring transparency to this situation in the best interest of the public good. I request a meeting with you to discuss this urgent matter directly.

Sincerely,

Wadah Khanfar
Managing Director
Al-Jazeera Channel

This "bombing memo" matter is going to continue to boil for a while, and the UK Attorney General is apparently intent on prosecuting two bureaucrats for leaking the contents of the memo.

Eventually, the memo will be made public, and it will add yet another few news cycles of attention to this matter and potentially implicate all of those who said that Bush said no such thing.

Obsession with secrecy and covering up mistakes is characteristic of the Bush administration, which now seems to be paying a high price for this undemocratic behavior.

-- Steve Clemons

For those of you in Washington, feel free to stop by at 4 p.m. for a program on Sino-Japanese Relations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, organized by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

Charles Kupchan will be moderating a session featuring University of Tokyo Professor Akio Takahara. Yang Bojiang of Brookings and I will be offering reactions and comments.

And later this evening, I will be talking about the latest on John Bolton on Air America Radio's Majority Report. I'll be on at about 8:30 p.m. ET.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Former State Department Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson continues to hammer the White House over torture and detainee abuse revelations -- but is also suggesting that as he learns more from various sources, his original views that the White House was not involved in duplicity regarding Iraq WMD intelligence is evolving.

In a very important BBC interview this morning, Wilkerson speculated that the White House did cherry-pick and try to manufacture intelligence estimates that matched its biases.

From an AP report on CNN:

"You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder -- Was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did in fact the American people get fooled? I'm beginning to have my concerns," Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in an interview broadcast Tuesday.

And more commentary on WMD Intel:

Wilkerson said he had believed that intelligence supported the view that Iraq had or was seeking to build weapons of mass destruction, and when none were found he accepted the argument that the administration had simply been fooled.

Lately, however, he said he had been troubled by disclosures that an informant known as Curveball, who supplied information about alleged mobile biological laboratories, was not reliable, and new information casting doubt on statements made by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda military instructor, claiming support from Iraq.

Al-Libi's information, Wilkerson said, "led Colin Powell to say at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 that there were some pretty substantive contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad."

It now appears, Wilkerson said, that al-Libi's statement "were obtained through interrogation techniques other than those authorized by Geneva (Conventions)."

"More important than that, we know that there was a Defense Intelligence Agency dissent on that testimony even before Colin Powell made his presentation," Wilkerson said. "We never heard about that."

Wilkerson is getting real traction in his criticism of White House war planning.

Hopefully, his leadership will inspire others inside the administration to find ways to make public what they know.

-- Steve Clemons

I can't attend today, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Peter Pace are giving a media briefing at 1:15 p.m.

One of the topics I am sure that they are going to cover -- or at least be queried about -- will be Joe Biden's oped this weekend which asserts that without serious adjustments in the deployment norms we have in place now for active duty military and the national guard, we will be compelled to draw down our Iraq-based forces simply because we don't have enough people to rotate in to maintain current force levels.

Senator Warner, on Meet the Press this weekend, challenged Biden's view stating that he had gone over the Biden oped word for word with General Pace. He said that Pace called the oped's assertions "inaccurate." However, as the discussion continued, even Senator Warner was compelled to concede that "serious adjustments" would have to be made to get either more National Guard over, or alternatively, to train troops for Iraq deployment who were trained for other tasks. Biden said that that kind of step was, in fact, a serious adjustment.

The other item that may come up in discussion is whether or not field battalion commanders have asked for more troops or not. This is important as Rumsfeld has harped on and on that he always gives his generals what they ask for to accomplish their mission. There are many in Washington who think that General Abizaid and Pace and others censor their requests for more troops because they know Rumsfeld wants them to. Again, on Meet the Press this weekend, Senator Biden made the case that he has yet to meet a field commander who has NOT asked for more troops.

So, let's wait for Don Rumsfeld's "aw shucks" excuses and side-stepping today, but still it should be an interesting meeting.

-- Steve Clemons

Today in a long interview session with a number of Associated Press correspondents, former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson offered important commentary on the White House's role in establishing a permissive environment that led to detainee abuse and torture.

This from a breaking AP report by Anne Gearan, which has just hit the wires:

A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.

In an Associated Press interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush's detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and likeminded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined support for the Iraq war.

Cheney's office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued "that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases," Wilkerson said.

On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Wilkerson said.

Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: "Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?"

Wilkerson said Bush tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002 that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don't belong to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.

Bush's stated policy, which was heatedly criticized by civil liberties and legal groups at the time, was defensible, Wilkerson said. But it was undermined almost immediately in practice, he said.

In the field, the United States followed the policies of hardliners who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, Wilkerson said.

Read the rest.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a powerful critic of the administration -- not only because of his proximity to then Secretary of State Colin Powell -- but also because he was diligent about keeping records of interactions with and directives from the White House on the subject of prisoner treatment.

-- Steve Clemons

I thought that Frank Gaffney's outrageous comments last week that, under certain circumstances, it would be laudable for U.S. forces to bomb Al-Jazeera's Doha headquarters were the first time he had suggested destroying this important Arab media network.

However, I just ran across an article by Frank Gaffney titled "Take Out Al Jazeera," which ran on Fox News on September 29, 2003.

In the piece, Gaffney argues:

Under present wartime circumstances, though, the United States has the ability -- and, indeed, an urgent responsibility -- to take more comprehensive action against Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Unless the two networks adjust their behavior so as no longer to act as the propaganda arm of our enemies, they should be taken off the air, one way or another.

To those who will decry this as censorship, they should be reminded of President Bush's injunction shortly after we were attacked two years ago: In the War on Terror, you are either with us or with the terrorists. It would be no more sensible for us to construe the masquerading of enemy propaganda, the communication and amplification of its calls to jihad and the legitimacy that attends transmission of such messages and images via television than it would be for us to regard bin Laden's messages, or Saddam's, as mere "news."

Luckily, saner heads prevailed, and we did not bomb Al-Jazeera's headquarters -- but as other posters on TWN have noted -- the U.S. did bomb (. . .accidentally?) Al-Jazeera's offices in Baghdad and Kabul.

Those who have promoted the Iraq War have been obsessed with information control -- afraid that a free media in the U.S. or abroad would undermine the will of American citizens to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I am not really supposed to write about it as I recently saw a pre-screening of an important film that addresses the government's effort to control journalistic commentary.

The film is called "Why We Fight," and it will be extremely important -- opening around the country on January 20th. I will write more later about this -- but the so-called Bush-Blair memo about bombing Al-Jazeera is only relevant in that it is a tangible manifestation of the kind of dangerous thinking that those who have been the biggest proponents of this war, like Frank Gaffney, have engaged in and sold to this country.

-- Steve Clemons

The repugnant Duke Cunningham -- who was involved as well in the old Tailhook scandal -- has finally resigned his House seat after admitting that he took bribes.

An Associated Press report just posted on the New York Times website:

Rep. Randy ''Duke'' Cunningham pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy and tax charges, admitting taking $2.4 million in bribes in a case that grew from an investigation into the sale of his home to a wide-ranging conspiracy involving payments in cash, vacations and antiques.

Randy Cunningham "enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there," U.S. Attorney Carol Lam said.
Cunningham, 63, entered pleas in U.S. District Court to charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud, and tax evasion for underreporting his income in 2004. Cunningham answered "yes, Your Honor" when asked by U.S. District Judge Larry Burns if he had accepted bribes from someone in exchange for his performance of official duties.

Cunningham, an eight-term Republican congressman, resigned after his guilty plea. He had announced in July that he wouldn't seek re-election next year.

Here are two posts on TWN from August 26, 2004 and October 4, 2004 on Cunningham's race against Democrat Francine Busby -- who will hopefully now take this seat in 2006.

I have spoken with Busby in the past -- and can vouch for the fact that California's 50th District desperately needs someone of her caliber and character to clean up the damage from years of neglect and corruption by Cunningham.

Progressives had best not get over confident, but momentum certainly is on the side of those who want to restore health to America's system of checks and balances.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: Laura Rozen has a great Duke Cunningham timeline that interested folks should check out. Also, a mutual friend of mine and Laura Rozen's, JR, sent this:

I didn't "know" Cunningham, but I flew with him.

In 1983 I was in the Phillipines for an exercise and then-CDR Randy Cunningham was there flying in it as well. He was revered as a national hero for being one of only two pilot aces of the Vietnam War. (The USAF ace was basically "set up" with repeated trips to Hanoi until he got five kills).

Later, in 1984 Cunningham was squadron commander of an A-4 aggressor squadron in a huge exercise in the California-Nevada desert that was a practice for a showdown with the Soviets in Iran. Our two squadrons, based at Nellis AFB, were the "Red" air simulating the bad guys, and again we Air Force fighter pilots lionized this legend.

I have no sympathy for him, given what he has done, and it has been a long time coming. However, it is a national tragedy nonetheless, that someone who performed so heroically in combat could allow himself to become so corrupted by Washington. I think it speaks to the corrupt environment as well as to the man.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE II: Media Matters just sent out this fascinating bit of empirical work on the amount of coverage some of the news networks gave to the Duke Cunningham resignation. According to their report, CNN devoted 17 minutes to Cunningham between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. today (Eastern time).

During the same period, MSNBC gave the Cunningham announcement 4 minutes of air time -- and Fox News just 3 minutes. That's Fox for you -- fair and balanced. . .not.

-- Steve Clemons

I think that they hate us for not making clear that "their" lives matter.

Read this clip in the Sunday Telegraph that only compounds the damage done by prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. It looks like private defense contractors under contract with the United States government have serial killers out just randomly shooting people.

Who is to blame for this?

It has always been under Donald Rumsfeld that these abuses have occurred. He should have been forced to resign two years ago, but he still stands strong -- giving his "aw shucks, it's not my fault" responses to these disasters.

Over the weekend, Tim Russert pushed Senator John Warner on the subject of battalion commanders' alleged requests for more troops to accomplish their missions in Iraq. Warner would not comment on what was said in a private meeting with these field commanders, but word leaked out that nearly all field commanders have been requesting more troops -- and made a major plea for such troops in August 2005.

Rumsfeld continues to say that he has not been asked by his commanding officers for more troops and would give them whatever they need. This is clearly a political optics game. Rumsfeld is lying and knows that U.S. commanders on the ground do not believe that they have the troop levels to do the job being requested -- and that their commanders in the Pentagon are not asking for more troops because Rumsfeld does not want them to.

Rumsfeld is destroying the U.S. military, its morale, and its nuts-and-bolts operations.

Because of Abu Ghraib, this Aegis Defense video, and many other incidents that have exposed immoral behavior by American operatives engaged in what appears to average Iraqis to be an occupation and not a liberation -- our soldiers cannot do much more than flounder in current circumstances. To really get hold of Iraq again would take, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, 500,000 troops -- four times what we have currently deployed.

The situation is a genuiune mess -- where greater deployments are no longer politically acceptable, and about which Rumsfeld has been lying anyway. A gradual withdrawal -- which some are calling a "strategic redeployment" of Iraq-based U.S. troops -- will not help matters unless the mission of those forces left behind is also radically decreased.

We need new management at the Pentagon and have needed such for a very long time -- but the morale of the United States as a nation is being sacrificed because of the massive ego and constant missteps of Donald Rumsfeld.

Fire him.

-- Steve Clemons

John Bolton is having a public feud with Great Britain over his effort to withhold the UN's budget until various reforms are adopted. This was a classic Jesse Helms tactic of the past and shows that Bolton is tipping towards bludgeoning the United Nations rather than using diplomatic skill to achieve his objectives.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Britain has angered John Bolton, America's combative ambassador to the United Nations, by breaking ranks with him over the need for reform.

The rare public disagreement between the two close allies comes as the showdown over reforms at the UN's New York headquarters becomes increasingly acrimonious.

Britain has rebuffed a Bolton move to join him in refusing to pass the organisation's 2006 budget until member states approve wide-ranging management reforms.

Hopefully, the recess-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the UN will drop the feuding theatrics and get back to diplomacy -- but in the words of one high-ranking State Department official with whom I spoke on Wednesday, "We are lucky Bolton is no longer here (at headquarters)."

If you would like a refresher on Bolton's views of the United Nations, click here.

-- Steve Clemons

The Los Angeles Times editorial page is sizzling with anger today about the Bush administration's missteps in Iraq.

The piece starts with the sardonic note that although Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish leaders all agree on one thing: America has to leave, the Bush administration has not yet tied them to Michael Moore (as they did with Congressman Murtha) because they have not yet set a departure schedule.

Read the entire editorial, but it opens:

IRAQ'S SUNNI, SHIITE AND KURDISH leaders have finally found an issue on which they agree: a timetable for the U.S. to leave Iraq. That's fine. They have also agreed it's permissible for insurgents to kill U.S. soldiers. That's dreadful. But it's also the realization of prewar fears that if the aftermath of the invasion went poorly, American troops would be viewed not as liberators but as occupiers.

The politicians did not spell out an exact date for U.S. troops to leave. That may be the reason the White House so far has not linked them to filmmaker Michael Moore, as it did 10 days ago in smearing decorated combat veteran Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) when he called for a immediate withdrawal of troops.

Although President Bush long ago declared victory in Iraq -- remember that "Mission Accomplished" banner? -- both the fighting and the administration's campaign against its critics continue at a torrid pace. The death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq topped 2,100 in the same week that Vice President Dick Cheney called some critics of the war "dishonest and reprehensible."

The editorial also exposes to greater public daylight the administration's obsession with finding evidence, even bad intelligence, that made its case for war:

Last Sunday's Times report on the Iraqi informant with the apt nickname "Curveball" was a devastating portrait of the deeply flawed prewar intelligence constantly promoted by the administration as it lined up the tanks, planes and troops in 2003.

The report quoted German intelligence officials as saying they warned U.S. colleagues of the unreliability of Curveball, a defector who was critical to the administration's claims that Saddam Hussein possessed biological weapons. If those red flags did not get to top officials, who hid them? Who's accountable?

Cheney's speech on Monday worked in the usual reference to 9/11 in the same sentence as Hussein. Yet once again it's necessary to point out that Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The vice president also cited the prewar declarations from many nations that Hussein probably had the most devastating weapons. But he neglected to say that Hussein at the eleventh hour allowed U.N. weapons inspectors into the country, that the initial inspections turned up nothing and that the administration refused to wait for more complete searches.

Only after the successful military campaign did the thorough search occur; as everyone now knows, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. That was the selling point for the war. Later justifications of removing the dictator and transforming the nation into a beacon of democracy shining throughout the Middle East were runners-up in the explanation derby.

The administration used too few troops for postwar reconstruction, misunderstood how occupation forces would be viewed, did not dispatch enough who understood the language and culture and refused to listen to those experienced in nation building.

The world understood the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the source of the 9/11 attacks. The Iraq war has squandered the goodwill. A survey of 16 nations in June found the U.S. "remains broadly disliked" in most countries surveyed, with the Muslim world "quite negative." Even more ominous was another survey that found 42% of Americans agreeing that the U.S. should "mind its own business internationally" and let other countries do as best they can.

So far, George W. Bush has traveled off to major summits in Latin America and Asia -- both failed trips from the perspective of securing U.S. deals the administration hoped to secure. Such trips are often used to "change the topic of conversation" with the American public, or to distract Americans from some other issue.

But the Bush administration, thus far, has been unable to get away from the now constant drum beat from critics angry about the administration's abuse and misuse of Iraq-related WMD intelligence, its efforts to cover up this abuse, and its arrogance in matters like the Valerie Plame affair. Even nominating an anti-abortion conservative to the Supreme Court has made only a modest dent in the public's anger about America's Iraq mess.

-- Steve Clemons

. . .but two quick items.

First, I posted this short piece on Joe Biden's Washington Post oped this morning over at TPM Cafe.

Also, I don't know what to think of this, but check out the Durex global sex issues survey.

It seems that the Japanese public is the most undersexed in the world, with an average number of sexual sessions per capita yearly at only 46. America is at 111, and the French are at 137. Wow.

-- Steve Clemons

Fascinating. A British Parliament Member has offered to do jail time to get the controversial Bush/Al-Jazeera memo into public view.

Someone please slip him a copy.

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday in a Wall Street Journal article, "Plan for Iraq: Shareholders Don't Shoot Each Other," Charles Wolf, Jr., a long-time economist with the RAND Corporation, suggests something similar to an April 2003 article I wrote suggesting that the Alaska Permanent Fund model might create more cohesivness among Iraqis, prevent the return of kleptocracy in Iraq, and build a class of political and economic winners that is an essential part of any successful occupation (and there are very, very few).

Here is part of Wolf's article:

Privatizing Iraq's oil assets, and vesting all citizens with shares, can provide incentive for every Iraqi -- including Sunnis, the insurgency's core -- to view commerce as a better path than violence. Ownership would provide 28 million citizens with a prospective increase in per-capita income of about $5,800, substantially raising their present income. This is unlikely to persuade hard-core terrorists to change course. But turning all Iraqis into stockholders of the nation's oil wealth can win over the support of the bulk of the Sunni population that now backs the insurgency through provision of foot soldiers, intelligence, cover, safe houses or passive acceptance.

Iraq's oil reserves, estimated at 115 billion barrels, are the world's third-largest after Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, the geographic location of these reserves within the ethnically divided federal Iraqi state presents a problem: 80% of the oil is located in southern Iraq where the Shiites, who constitute 60% of the population, predominate; 15%-18% of the oil is in northern Iraq where the Kurds, who constitute 20% of the population, are concentrated.

Less than 5% of reserves are located in Al-Anbar, Nineveh and Salahuddin provinces, where most of the 20% of the population that is Sunni lives.

In a federal, democratic Iraq whose majority is Shiite and whose most lucrative assets are located in areas where Shiites and Kurds predominate, the future appears gloomy for Sunnis when benchmarked against the Saddam years, in which Sunnis had it all: privilege, status, as well as the oil assets regardless of their geographic location.

A readily, though perhaps not easily, available innovation can go a long way toward redressing this portentous Sunni outlook. At present, oil assets are a government monopoly.

Privatizing them and giving every Iraqi an equal share in ownership can be accomplished by turning over the assets to private companies -- two in the south and one each in north and central Iraq -- and vesting all citizens with equal shareholdings in each company, e.g., five or 10 shares issued to each Iraqi in each company. Shares could be traded at market-determined prices, but trading would be limited to Iraqis, at least for an initial period of 5-10 years, after which the market might open to foreign participation.

When I wrote my New York Times article, there was quite a bit of attention paid to the idea -- and many, many endorsements from both Republicans and Democrats and editorial boards around the country. According to the New York Times' John Tierney, who later did a story on the proposal, calling it a "wonky idea with mass appeal," about 3/4 of the then Iraqi Governing Council liked the notion.

What I learned later is that Ahmed Chalabi and his minions were lurking in the background preempting any serious move towards such a proposal. Some have recently reported that Chalabi, who now serves as Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, is now positively predisposed to the concept.

But be careful, if Chalabi now likes the idea, those implementing it must make sure that Chalabi's brand of structural corruption and fraud does not find a way to milk these privatized assets for Chalabi's corrupt purposes.

Wolf's proposal, in general, should have been implemented early in the occupation. But now, it may be too late. Forces have been unleashed that won't allow Iraq to congeal along old lines, once forcefully and ruthlessly held together by Saddam Hussein.

-- Steve Clemons

This is an interesting geographic depiction of George W. Bush's favorability levels.

It's not all that surprising that Bush's popularity is worst in "blue states" and markedly better in the south and midwest. However, if the election in November 2004 had been held tomorrow, George W. Bush could not win with a map like this.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: hat tip to CS for sending this graphic to TWN.

This is rather big news in Japan.

A senior government panel in Japan has decided that women should be allowed to ascend to Japan's imperial throne. This is a major hurdle cleared in the legal process of changing Japan's Imperial Household law to allow 3-year-old Princess Aiko -- the daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito and his wife, Masako (the former Masako Owada who worked on semiconductor trade issues in Japan's Foreign Ministry) -- to become eventually Japan's reigning empress.

Why so important?

For one, it finally brings into line Article 14 of Japan's Constitution and Imperial Household Law.

When Japan's current emperor Akihito ascended, a group of female Japanese attorneys filed lawsuit against the government arguing that the law asserting male-only heirs to the throne was unconstitutional. This case never saw the light of day and was probably thrown out by Japan's courts as I never found any action on the lawsuit.

Article 14:

All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin. 2) Peers and peerage shall not be recognized. 3) No privilege shall accompany any award of honor, decoration or any distinction, nor shall any such award be valid beyond the lifetime of the individual who now holds or hereafter may receive it.

I'm not a fan of Japan's imperial system, but I do think that allowing female empresses will have a positive effect on the treatment of women in Japan at all levels of society. Many of the most talented women in Japan get out of the country as soon as possible and enroll in foreign universities (as Masako Owada did), looking for opportunity and advancement outside their home country.

Perhaps Aiko-mania will shame Japan's institutionalized stunting of women in Japanese society.

If you read the article closely, you will note that one of the points of opposition to this imperial rule change comes from Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, often called "Prince Mikasa." This guy has many of the far-right in Japan lurking behind his shadow, hoping one day for the restitution of real imperial power in Japan. He has an arrogance about his position and role in Japanese society that the actual emperor and his children do not have.

Tomohito of Mikasa married Nobuko Aso, who happens to be the sister of Japan's current Foreign Minister Taro Aso as well as Asako (Aso) Arafune, who is an old friend of mine. These Aso children were the daughter of Kazuko Aso, the daughter of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru who governed Japan through most of the period of U.S. occupation of the Japanese islands. Kazuko Aso served as Japan's first lady during the years that Yoshida ruled as prime minister.

I got to know Kazuko Aso when she visited Los Angeles frequently to meet her grandchildren there -- as her daughter and son-in-law, Kiyohiko Arafune (a Foreign Ministry official), were stationed there at the Consulate General of Japan in Los Angeles.

Kazuko Aso and I actually watched the marriage of Prince Ayanomiya -- son of the current emperor and brother to the crown prince -- and Princess Kiko on television in L.A. Her grandkids were into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ultra-Man type stuff -- and I'd let them beat me up. But as we watched and the kids wrestled me, Aso showed me her daughter on television, with Prince Mikasa, and lamented what a "prison" the Imperial Household was. Aso had a good deal of disdain for the Imperial Household bureaucrats -- and though she was clearly a blue-blood aristocrat herself -- she was a tougher-than-nails independent woman who had extreme confidence in her abilities and views.

I think Kazuko Aso would be pleased by the thought that a woman might become Empress of Japan and break out of the role of being the person to stand "behind" her spouse. And I think that she didn't like the arrogance of the Imperial household bureaucrats and the way in which they preserved a veil of secrecy around the imperial family and its retainers.

Taro Aso has evolved into a clever politician and thoughtful economic policy force in Japan -- but he's also tethered a bit too much to deeply conservative, "old right" forces.

I don't know if Aso agrees with the crowd that his brother-in-law, Tomohito of Mikasa, runs with -- but those who watch Japanese politics and who are in touch with Taro Aso would do well to advise him to think of his ferociously independent and historically important mother -- who advocated women's equal rights and to discount those who flirt with ascendance of a more powerful, male-dominated imperial institution in Japan.

-- Steve Clemons

The White House has stated that claims that George Bush suggested bombing Al-Jazeera's Qatar-based headquarters are "outlandish."

Is the White House being truthful this time? Or is the President, through his spokesman, lying?

There allegedly is a meeting brief/memo that recounts Blair's efforts to dissuade President Bush from giving orders to bomb the Middle East media network.

Either the memo reflects this -- or it doesn't.

But while Britain's former Defense Minister Peter Kilfoyle has just called for the memo to be released and made public, the UK's Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has threatened legal action against any who make it public.

From the BBC:

According to press reports, the memo includes a transcript record of Tony Blair attempting to persuade Mr Bush not to take military action against the al-Jazeera headquarters.

The station is based in Qatar, a close ally of Washington and the location of US military headquarters during the Iraq war. The White House has dismissed reports of the conversation as "outlandish".

UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has warned media outlets not to publish the contents of the memo, citing the Official Secrets Act.

I had originally thought it "too crazy" to imagine George Bush himself having a discussion with anyone about bombing as important a media center as Al-Jazeera. I know many think that Bush thinks this way all the time, but I have not shared that view.

But I have to admit -- squarely -- that when the UK Attorney General goes to work to block a secret memo's publication with the ferocity Goldsmith has put into this, it affirms that there must be some serious basis for concern, and that the memo implicates Bush in a serious way.

Bush, himself, should call for the Brits to make public the secret memo and then stand by its contents. If Blair and Bush, through their discussion, came to a consensus that bombing Al-Jazeera was a rotten idea, then we should applaud that interaction, despite Bush's original intent.

But if Bush thought that such a bombing run was legitimate, he owes Al-Jazeera and the rest of us an apology for thinking it's appropriate, in any circumstances, to stab a dagger into the heart of journalism -- theirs and ours.

He should simply apologize -- and say we didn't do it. And then invite Al-Jazeera to an exclusive interview with the President in the Oval Office.

This is the first case I know of, if true, in which British Prime Minister Tony Blair actually got Bush to move on something. And it's not a small matter.

-- Steve Clemons

I just wrote this piece for TPM Cafe and invite any debate about what I'm suggesting.

I have recently received some friendly criticism for focusing on things that are "too inside DC." I think my writing and commentary are pretty diverse -- but I'll think about broadening the subject matter in coming months.

But this article on Brookings' personnel decisions is very much an 'insider' type of commentary. I think that those thinking about what it takes to build a healthy foreign policy debate in Washington need to think about the institutions that are involved. Brookings has generally been the home anchor of centrist/progressive foreign policy work, even when Richard Haass headed its foreign policy team.

For various reasons, Brookings was missing in action during the build up to the Iraq War in 2002 and early 2003, and Brookings being AWOL contributed, in my view, to the pathetic, inchoate response by Democrats to Bush's foreign policy vision.

I recently got the list of candidates that were being considered to succeed Brookings VP and Foreign Policy Director James Steinberg who is off in two weeks to become the new Dean at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas Austin. The list included Ivo Daalder, Richard Falkenrath, Philip Gordon, Charles Lutes (I think this is right -- I just got the last name Lutes and am speculating that Col. Lutes of the National Defense University INSS program is the person), Paul Stares, and Carlos Pasqual.

Strobe Talbott should have selected Ivo Daalder in my view because he's the foreign policy guy with vision, publications, and a tenacity to be the kind of warrior our current foreign policy debates need. I don't agree with Daalder on everything -- but do in a significant number of areas.

But my objection is not based on whether I agree with Daalder or not, it's based on my view that Talbott has selected a candidate who will keep Brookings AWOL -- rather than get it deeply enmeshed in the foreign policy scramble that is going on.

The piece at TPM Cafe is long, very insider-DC. Just wanted to give fair warning.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I do too.

-- Steve Clemons

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been failing in their efforts to "set the record straight", as their press team calls it, on the subject of Iraq-related WMD intelligence access before the invasion.

I am rushing off to a meeting tonight, and the material I'd like to comment on is piling up. Since I don't want to entirely miss this subject, let me provide some links that I think are very compelling and important in exposing the serious flaws in White House claims.

1. Jofi Joseph, "It's Not About the Yellowcake," Foreign Policy, November 2005

2. Murray Waas, "Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept from Hill Panel," National Journal, 22 November 2005 (allegedly the brief states that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11)

3. Mel Goodman, "The President's Exclusive Access to Sensitive Intelligence," Truthout Editorial, 20 November 2005

4. Senator Bob Graham, "What I Knew Before the Invasion," Washington Post, 20 November 2005

5. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) & Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), Response to White House Regarding Intelligence Community Statements on Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

I do believe that Democrats were knocked off balance by 9/11 and demonstrated few "profiles in courage moments" in the spending spree after 9/11 and in the key decisions that led to the Iraq War. However, the combination of a low Congressional bar for this war combined with the President's preconceived desire to take out Hussein and invade Iraq led to distortion, fabrication, and manipulation of fundamental realities about Iraq's WMD capacity.

Moreover, even among serious analysts who believed that Iraq might have nascent bio or chemical weapons programs, few believed that they were robust -- justifying an invasion of the scale America engaged in. Brent Scowcroft and James Baker were leading opponents of such an invasion, arguing that even if Hussein had modest programs, he was containable and manageable as a threat.

Bush and Cheney wanted to go to war and punished and beat up all those who stood in their way -- and that was the beginning and end of the story.

-- Steve Clemons

Just about every government in the Middle East has been ticked off at the reporting by Al-Jazeera. This fact, more than anything else, indicates that Al-Jazeera is doing a lot right.

I have made no secret of my respect for Al-Jazeera and its ability to dominate the Middle East media market with its reporting. I have appeared on several Al-Jazeera shows and was recently interviewed in a major production underway on the subject of "rendition."

The forthcoming Al-Jazeera production on rendition is a dicey one for its chief producer, Yosri Fouda -- a brilliant Egyptian senior Al-Jazeera investigative reporter based in London -- because there are usually three types of nations involved in the "rendering" of detainees: American CIA planes that allow transiting from or through other countries, to a final destination -- that is frequently in the Middle East -- including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Egypt.

Though I don't know how that show will turn out, the productions will reveal practices America engages in with the complicity of other national governments, particularly Middle Eastern governments. I think that this is high quality reporting and runs counter to those who think that Al-Jazeera is a flack for any particular Arab interests.

I have also invited Yosri Fouda to speak about his knowledge of al Qaeda terrorism at three events: Al Qaeda 2.0 in December 2004, at the "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose" Conference in September 2005, and recently at the New America Foundation in October 2005. (video here of NAF event) In October, I also worked with producers at C-Span's Washington Journal to get Fouda on that show. After each of these sessions, I received calls and correspondence from American national intelligence officials who congratulated me on organizing sessions with Fouda whom they found forthcoming and extremely important to our understanding of the currents of thinking in the Middle East regarding our terrorist foes.

I have also watched Al-Jazeera shows that featured no punches pulled interviews with former CIA bin Laden Unit founder and chief Michael Scheuer, in which Scheuer bluntly stated that while America needs to hear what the goals and objectives of al Qaeda terrorists are so as to better understand them and their motivations, Scheuer believed that his job and that of the CIA is to "kill Osama bin Laden."

Peter Bergen, my colleague at the New America Foundation and CNN's terrorism analyst, has also appeared on Al-Jazeera and doesn't parrot the line that Al-Jazeera is sympathetic with al Qaeda style terrorism.

But Frank Gaffney, presently one of the most media-visible neoconservative spear-carriers, has said on BBC that the controversy about President Bush possibly saying to Tony Blair that we should bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters may not have been so inappropriate.

First of all, TWN takes no position at all on whether Bush said this outrageous statement. It could be a fabrication, and it is tough at this point to validate or confirm -- but because Gaffney has speculated about it and given his blessing to the bombing of Arab media, under certain circumstances, TWN feels comfortable reporting on this.

In this news clip, Gaffney is asked whether, if true, isn't it outrageous that President Bush would suggest bombing a civilian news agency?

Gaffney: If it has some truth to it, I'm not sure it is outrageous.

Reporter: Seriously?

Gaffney: I believe that Al-Jazeera is an instrument of enemy propaganda in a war we are obliged to fight and win, not just for Americans and not just for Iraqis but for freedom-loving people everywhere, and I think that, to the extent that Al-Jazeera is actively aiding our foes, it is certainly appropriate to talk about what you do to neutralize it to prevent it from doing that sort of harm to the cause and even to the lives of servicemen fighting this war.

Gaffney continues in the interview:

Gaffney: We're talking about a news organization, so called, that is promoting bin Laden, that is promoting Zawahiri, that is promoting Zarqawi, that is promoting beheadings, that is promoting suicide bombers, that is other ways enabling the propaganda aspects of this war to be fought by our enemies, and I think that puts it squarely in the target category.

Whether the best way to do it is with bombs or through other means is something we could discuss, but I think it's fair game, under these circumstances, given the way it conducts itself.

So, an alert to ALL who attend the next public session with Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes. Please ask her whether she agrees -- at any level -- with Frank Gaffney.

Does Stephen Hadley agree with Frank Gaffney? How about Karl Rove? And of course, make sure that we ask Condoleeza Rice, Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick, and Scott McClellan in the next press gaggle. . .

When neoconservative zealots like Frank Gaffney even implicitly (and under certain conditions) advocate the bombing of the Arab world's most significant news organization, then the administration should be forced to choose between the Gaffneys of this world on one hand, and a sensible, reasoned foreign policy that must rid itself of this kind of pugnaciousness on the other.

Frank Gaffney is the same person who wrote that Israel withdrawing from Gaza was appeasement of Osama bin Laden. Obviously, I disagree with him and don't think that 'enlightened U.S. foreign policy' should be dictated by terrorists, other countries, or any forces other than the interests and concerns of America as a nation.

I do interviews now and then with Gaffney on the other side of many debates, most recently about John Bolton -- and we have been able to agree to disagree and manage a civil discourse -- but for political and ethical reasons, the White House should be compelled to disown entirely this brand of commentary.

To add one other interesting dimension to this debate about Al-Jazeera, one of my friends asked novelist Tom Clancy what he thought about the mid-term future of the arab network at the major September terrorism conference where Clancy spoke. Tom Clancy replied that he thought that in five years, Al-Jazeera would be just another mouthpiece of American interests.

Fascinating, counter-intuitive statement -- in TWN's view -- that I hope is wrong, but which many inside the Al-Jazeera network feel strikes close to home and the realm of likelihood.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to CR for the link.

If I happened to be in charge of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, I'd award one to neocon-friendly Claudia Rosett for her work on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and the other to Dana Priest for her writing on America's secret intelligence institutions and her recent revelations about secret Eastern European detention centers.

Rosett's and my views on U.S. foreign policy diverge pretty significantly, and I think that her writing about Kofi Annan and some aspects of the oil-for-food scandal are over-zealous, there is no doubt that she broke the story, cultivatated it, and made it a significant policy matter for the U.S., the U.N., and the world. The United Nations will have to overcome the credibility problems that oil-for-food has created in the minds of many -- and I think it will -- but it doesn't alter the significance of Rosett's work.

But Dana Priest of the Washington Post also has broken important ground on all sorts of stories -- from rendition policies and practices, to WMD intel hyping in the White House, to the revelation that the U.S. government was hiding some detainees in hidden detention centers in Eastern Europe.

TWN has been hounding Dana Priest lately, in as friendly a manner as possible. She is impeccably professional and hasn't helped me on any aspect of any of the stories I've been digging into. I think if she had helped me know who a source was -- or had helped me learn directly whether she had spoken to a grand jury investigation or not, she would have been violating some node of trust somewhere in the chain.

The other day, I wrote about a September 28, 2003 article that she co-authored with Washington Post writer Mike Allen. That article identifies a senior administration source who was bothered by the behavior of two other officials engaged in a Valerie Plame leak campaign. I speculated that this official might have been John Bellinger, Stephen Hadley, or Richard Armitage. Others on this blog have suggested it was George Tenet himself, or Colin Powell, or others.

I have been digging into subsequent reporting by Mike Allen and Dana Priest on the Valerie Plame outing -- and two things appear. First, there has been no retraction or softening of the statements by the unnamed source in later pieces; in other words, no modification of the story. But at the same time, the senior administration source disappears from view in later stories.

Since Dana Priest could not or would not help us understand more about this source and would not answer queries about whether she or Mike Allen had been interviewed by Fitzgerald's investigators, I had to develop other sources -- and learned that neither Priest nor Mike Allen had testified before the grand jury. My source indicated that it is unlikely that they had met with Fitzgerald's investigators either, but my source was not definitive on that front. I have since found another source who indicated that the Washington Post senior management anticipated that Mike Allen and Dana Priest would be called to testify before the grand jury -- and then were surprised when this did not happen.

Thus, I have speculated that Fitzgerald knows who Dana Priest's and Mike Allen's source was and that this source -- who was disdainful of what appears to be Rove's and Libby's behavior -- was cooperating in a non-public way with Fitzgerald.

You can read my longish post on this the other day, but there is another possibility. I spoke to a well-informed and connected Washington Post reporter recently with some familiarity with these national security topics, and this source -- who did not state that he/she was familiar with the Priest/Allen source -- did suggest that sources can get wobbly. In this particular case, according to the person to whom I was speaking, a source might have become "confused" as to what occurred before the Novak article and what after.

Wow. Well, that is another possibility. The source who was cooperating with Priest and Allen might have dried up -- or might have become "unsure" about dates, actions, and people. If this did happen to the Priest/Allen source, then the individual may have confessed to Fitzgerald he was the source but had made errors in his story -- or alternatively, the source may be real, may not have faltered, and may still be lurking out there as Fitzgerald's "Deep Throat".

I felt it was important to share this possibility about a potentially wobbly source, because sources can go wobbly -- and at that point -- there should be an accounting and reconciliation with what is real and what is not. This happened to TWN on the subject of Patrick Fitzgerald expanding his office space. Once my two sources collapsed, I felt it important to immediately correct what I had originally reported.

The individual with whom I was speaking about the Priest/Allen source simply shared a scenario with me that I had not considered -- so I wanted to share that. I would be very surprised if this scenario is correct because it would have put a burden on Mike Allen and Dana Priest to indicate that their "insider source" had faulty recollection about the Plame outing campaign. I have read their story carefully, and the individual they cite states that two individuals in the White House engaged in a campaign of revenge against Joe Wilson by outing to journalists the covert identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. This reporting implies that the source believed that the outing was purposeful and involved the conveyance of secret information that the White House knew to journalists.

That sounds like a materially important observation to TWN.

But Dana Priest has had other major scoops as well -- perhaps the greatest recent one being the revelations about secret detention centers abroad where American authorities and/or their proxies are detaining prisoners in an "off the books" manner.

Immediately, after Priest's story, Senate Republicans began attacking each other -- thinking that one or more of them had spilled classified information to Dana Priest as the revelation of such detention centers was allegedly made by Vice President Cheney at a Republican caucus meeting in the Senate. Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert actually called for an investigation of who leaked the information to Priest rather than calling for an investigation of the secret detention facilities.

TWN has spent the last several days groveling, promising baby-sitting sessions, trading information I had from some research in areas others were interested in for information on Dana Priest's work -- and it has been tough. Dana Priest is an astoundingly good investigative journalist and does not leave a large footprint.

But TWN has confirmed from multiple sources that the Senate Republican blame-fest after the Dana Priest article was even more theatrically absurd because Priest had no single source on that story. She had many, many sources in the U.S. and in Europe.

We have reached such a level of obsession with information and sources -- and have personalized and celebritized some of these sources and commentators -- that we incorrectly assume that a single person walks out with information that a reporter like Dana Priest might use. Her work deserves a Pulitzer because it is based on old-fashioned, disciplined investigative journalism that involved interviews with literally hundreds of people.

The detention center story is ripe for others to write more. There is evidence out there on these centers -- and more work can be done. But don't look for a single source; look for the dozens who will convey what has been happening and confirm.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: Needlenose has some other interesting commentary on this same subject. Well worth reading. SCC

Yesterday evening, I went to another in a series of dinners and movies hosted by Margaret Carlson, Washington political commentator and Editor-at-Large of The Week Magazine, and this relatively new newsy weekly, The Week.

The last of these was hosted by Margaret Carlson and Senator Lindsey Graham. At these insiders-mostly Washington dinner and movie sessions, Margaret asks the Senator of the night to pick a favorite classic movie to see. Graham's movie pick was "Seven Days in May," a provocative and politically loaded selection given the times we are in. I wrote about that night here.

Last night, Senator Chris Dodd was the movie picker, and he selected "A Man for All Seasons," the film which depicts the sainthood-earning battle of wills between Sir Thomas More and a divorce-hungry Henry VIII.

The room was packed with interesting people beyond Margaret Carlson and Senator Dodd and his wife. Chris Matthews, Terry McAuliffe, Erick Mullens, Matt Cooper, Walter Pincus, Thomas Dodd, Carl Leubsdorf, Kip O'Neill, Tony Blankley, Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette.com, and others were there for the fun cocktails and dinner before the three hour long classic film.

Pincus was great, and we did discuss some things that I shouldn't discuss here. Chris Matthews seemed quite interested in getting Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on his show and also told me that he was planning to give the commencement address at a small liberal arts college I'm involved with -- Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland -- and wanted to get some tips on how to beat every other commencement address ever given there. My partner, who teaches at Washington College, suggested that he mimic the Saturday Night Live impersonations of him.

On top of that, Senator Chris Dodd "unofficially" conveyed his interest in running for the presidency in 2008. He said this pretty directly to Terry McAuliffe who was there -- but then Dodd's press secretary had a near stroke. By the time official sounding remarks were made, Margaret Carlson introduced Dodd as the Senator who might or might not be running.

Dodd was revved up and did a fine job introducing the film. But he gave his intro little of the "punch" that Senator Lindsay Graham gave his movie preamble when Graham warned that the demagoguery depicted in the film was something America had to be wary of today. It was a stunningly revealing comment from a significant Southern Senator.

However, while Dodd didn't go the political path last night, this line of exchange in the movie has profound implications today -- particularly with regard to the recent revelations about torture and inhuman treatment of detainees and prisoners under American supervision.

From "A Man for All Seasons":

Sir Thomas More

-- There's no law against that.

William Roper

-- God's law!

Sir Thomas More

-- Then God can arrest him.

William Roper

-- While you talk, he's gone!

Sir Thomas More

-- Go he should, if he were the Devil, until he broke the law.

William Roper

-- Now you give the Devil benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More

-- Yes, what would you do?

William Roper

-- Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil? Yes. I'd cut down every law in England to do that.

Sir Thomas More

-- And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you...

...where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast...

...Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down...

...and you're just the man to do it...

...do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then?

Yes. I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.

More's statement sheds light on the debates we are having today. And I feel that the norms of any society are not able to be seen or known unless observed under stress.

Today, America is under stress -- and how we conduct ourselves as a nation determines how the world will and should see us. That's why Vice President's hard work on behalf of a CIA exemption from constaints on torture and inhuman treatment of detainees DOES become the lense through which the rest of the world will see us.

Cheney is a menace to this nation's security -- because in his zeal to pursue the devil -- he is undermining our nation's norms and very essence. He is handing our nation to the devil by engaging in terms of battle that are not constrained by law.

I'll stand by Thomas More's imagined and scripted words:

I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: Sure enough, my friend at The Agonist got this angle up before I did, so be sure to enjoy his site as well. Thanks Sean-Paul.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

That's what one of the covers of a high school book I had on Machiavelli asked. Machiavelli, of course, is one of the patron saints of high octane realism.

Nikolas Gvosdev (pictured above) is Editor of The National Interest and is a Senior Fellow at the Nixon Center. He's a thoughtful, provocative guy -- who likes to wrestle with people and ideas. . .but more ideas than people. He's one of the folks I had guest blog when I was traveling in the summer -- and he provoked some of you to such a point that you were very eager for me to return.

Gvosdev is launching his own blog, The Washington Realist, today -- and we look forward to applauding and jousting with him frequently.

Recently, Nikolas Gvosdev and Nixon Center President and latter-day-Kissinger to Richard Nixon, Dimitri Simes, penned this response to Charles Krauthammer's bitter October 30th Washington Post rebuke against Brent Scowcroft's revelations in a recent New Yorker Magazine article. It's well worth reading.

Congrats on the blog launch, Nick.

-- Steve Clemons

Bob Woodward should have recused himself from any public commentary about the Plame case given that he knew all along that he was a material witness to the investigation. Previously on Larry King Live, Woodward downplayed the significance of the investigation, said it would be insignificant in the long run, and called Patrick Fitgerald a "junkyard" investigator.

Well, he's now going to tell us ALL he knows tonight, again on Larry King Live. . .supposedly.

If this ends up being another media charade to stroke Woodward's celebrity needs, he really needs to be fired by the Post. Otherwise, we need to know who the source was -- and why he felt comfortable commenting on a case about which he definitely should have RECUSED himself. Stop the duplicity, Bob.

-- Steve Clemons

There is a high level official in the Bush administration who helped give the "inside scoop" on the earliest moves by the White House in the Valerie Plame investigation -- but who is it?

On September 28, 2003, Washington Post writers Dana Priest and Mike Allen clearly note the existence of a source with knowledge about the outing campaign conducted as "a vendetta" against Joe Wilson by senior officials in the Bush White House.

This source clearly had concerns about the behavior of these officials, and to some degree, this Washington Post source appears to be a key "counter-leaker" in the Valerie Plame investigation, i.e. someone attempting to make sure that the real story about the Plame leak and reasons for it were told.

From the Washington Post story on September 28, 2003:

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.

The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law.

The officer's name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials.

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility. They alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."

A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game."

The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said there was no indication that Bush knew about the calls.

It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

Stepping back for a moment, it seems that this source noted above would not be the source that Bob Woodward has suggested -- not if Woodward is being truthful that the information about Plame was passed off as a side-bar in a larger, longer conversation. Clearly, the source for Dana Priest and Mike Allen knew that the information on Plame was secret -- and was angry about its promulgation.

Thus, there is a political personality out there -- who is on the side of good -- who is part of this story. Who is it? And is this person a "Deep Throat" source for Patrick Fitzgerald? Is this source helping guide Fitzgerald through the terrain?

TWN contacted Dana Priest today to ascertain whether she was either interviewed by Patrick Fitzgerald or his legal team -- or whether she testified before the Plame case grand jury -- and she would not comment on this.

Through another source close to Fitzgerald's investigation, TWN was informed that Dana Priest and Mike Allen were not interviewed as far as the individual commenting to me knew. Specifically, he said, "I am unaware of any interviews with Dana Priest and Mike Allen of the Post, and I'm certain that they did not testify before the grand jury."

This is interesting because it would be unlikely given the tenaciousness that Patrick Fitzgerald has shown towards reporters with important knowledge of players involved in the Plame outing that he would have ignored the important article by Priest and Allen.

Deduction leads one to surmise that this source for Dana Priest and Mike Allen is already known to Fitzgerald -- and thus their testimony about this source would be both disruptive and unimportant.

So, if someone is engaged in helping Fitzgerald, it would be useful to know who it was. This seems to be someone who was not compelled to cooperate like David Wurmser and John Hannah were forced to do -- but rather someone who cooperated out of conscience.

Could this insider source be Stephen Hadley? Seems odd to me. To many, Hadley still ranks fairly high as Bob Woodward's source -- and at least to my knowledge -- Hadley has only "hinted" that he was not Woodward's source. Unlike Rumsfeld, Rice, and others, he has not "denied" he was Woodward's source.

If he was Woodward's source, I don't think he would have taken the moral tone that laces the commentary in the Dana Priest/Mike Allen story.

Might it have been John Bellinger, who was Senior Associate Legal Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council? He is now Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Bellinger is a straight-shooter, fair, and not an ideologue. The activities of Libby and Rove would have offended his sensibilities.

Another potential person is Richard Armitage, who is as publicly loyal to the President as one can be -- but who deploys brilliant knife-in-hand tactics against others inside the bureaucracy and administration whom he thinks are undermining the nation's interests.

Of course, Rich Armitage was Colin Powell's Deputy at State. It is unclear to me how much Armitage would have known about Libby's and Rove's campaign against Plame -- but his sources throughout the Bush White House, in the national security and intelligence communities are legendary -- and Armitage is one of the few people who would have had early warning about the Libby/Rove efforts. So, is Armitage secretly helping Fitzgerald?

Again, there are many reasons to doubt that these individuals are the sources for Dana Priest and Mike Allen -- but they also might be.

The hunch I have now is that Fitzgerald knows the source and has squeezed a lot from him or her. What is important now is whether or not the Woodward revelations fill in pieces for Fitzgerald or disrupt the entire picture.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to BB for assistance on this piece.

It's a coldish, overcast day in Washington, D.C. -- and for local blog friends -- I'm over at the Starbucks at Connecticut & R Streets if you want to grab a latte and talk about the big issues of the day.

This place was the birthplace of not only The Washington Note but also Talking Points Memo. In fact, I'm sitting in a chair where Josh Marshall's used to be. I think that they have taken his over to the Smithsonian for preservation.

I am catching up with a lot of stuff today -- but I keep reading items that I feel deserve some serious attention, like the article by James Bamford that just appeared in Rolling Stone titled "The Man Who Sold the War." It's a profile of John Rendon, but also has quite a bit on Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, whom I think not only successfully seduced America in a major disinformation intelligence effort but also marketed American secrets to Saddam Hussein (in an earlier coup effort) and to Iran.

For those of you who don't know James Bamford, you must go back and read his seminal book on the National Security Agency titled Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization.

This book was first published in 1982, and I met James Bamford that year at UCLA when he was there for a ritzy conference on publishing, with Maxine Hong Kingston, and other writers. I gravitated towards Bamford at that conference and was intrigued by the fact that his book had opened up the super-secret NSA and that Bamford had been threatened with legal action and probable imprisonment by the U.S. government for proceeding with publication. He did proceed and he broke down one of the important doors of opaqueness in our democracy -- and probably inspired me to get into this business.

I had not met or seen James Bamford for 23 years -- though I have read everything he has produced -- and he showed up at the political hurricane-triggering event that I organized at the New America Foundation with Lawrence Wilkerson.

This preamble on Bamford is important because I think that it's useful for us to remember that the debates we are having today about the importance of transparency in national security decisions, the battles over Executive Privilege and checks and balances in our government, and the importance of robust civil society engagement in these debates -- in which the public holds the government accountable for its actions -- rests on the shoulders of giants like James Bamford who engaged in a serious wrestling match with the high priests of national security two and half decades ago.

Now, Bamford provides extraordinary detail about how the Bush administration hired John Rendon to do "what needed to be done" to get America positioned to invade Iraq. I am going to post a rather long excerpt of a much longer article that has appeared in Rolling Stone this week.

Read the entire thing -- but this will give you a sense of it:

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

We should salute John Murtha for his leadership and honesty last week, but I also want to salute James Bamford for this important journalism and his bravery in creating a much more confident style of press reporting on national security issues. A "Dana Priest"-type would be hard to imagine if Bamford had not done what he did on the NSA.

-- Steve Clemons

Former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who spoke at the New America Foundation several weeks ago, deepened his commitment to truth-telling about the administration's role in promoting torture and abuse of detainees under American control.

According to a CNN report:

A former top State Department official said Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney provided the "philosophical guidance" and "flexibility" that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.

"There's no question in my mind that we did. There's no question in my mind that we may be still doing it," Wilkerson said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"There's no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated -- in the vice president of the United States' office," he said. "His implementer in this case was [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department."

At another point in the interview, Wilkerson said "the vice president had to cover this in order for it to happen and in order for Secretary Rumsfeld to feel as though he had freedom of action."

I admire Lawrence Wilkerson for many reasons -- mostly for his forthrightness and honesty about these very heavy, complicated issues -- but also because he is not only speaking to the American media but is spending considerable time talking about these matters to the international press, which usually are not given the time of day by major American national leaders.

I think that it's important that Wilkerson speak to the European, Japanese, Chinese, Latin American, and Middle Eastern media -- because his doing so demonstrates the importance of government transparency -- and the fact that the Bush administration is not monolithic; that there are others with views about the world and America's place in it that are not comfortable with the concentration of power, secrecy, and suspension of American norms in war that Cheney and Rumsfeld have promulgated.

-- Steve Clemons

Democratic hawk John Murtha is sort of like a living version of John Wayne in Congress. He was a marine. He put his life on the line for his country in time of war. He's a guy of few words. He doesn't really like reporters or spinning stories. He hangs out on weekends with soldiers who have had amputations or are recovering from other war wounds at Walter Reed Hospital.

To put it simply, Murtha is one of those tough dudes -- out of a Tom Clancy novel -- that is patriotic to the core and yet sees this nation's security, military forces, and economy going over a cliff. And he's now said so.

The importance of his introduced House Resolution calling for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq is that he's compelling Republicans and other Congressional colleagues to put their political identities on the line one way or the other. If his colleagues want to stay in Iraq, then get a strategy, a game plan, something that's just an amorphous, never-ending fuzziness of dead troops and wasted supplemental budgets. But he's saying that the status quo is indefensible, and he's right.

Senator Chuck Hagel has been saying the same exact thing for months.

I just heard that the House Republicans, who feel mugged by Murtha, have just proposed this silly resolution -- idiotic in its simple-mindedness -- for a vote this afternoon:

RESOLUTION

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Seems pretty transparently dumb to me. Murtha is not calling for an immediate end, but I guess Hastert and Blount think they can get most to oppose because of the perceived irresponsibility of just leaving tomorrow.

I'm just off of a plane -- and there may be more to this story that I need to absorb, but just for comparison, here is Murtha's original resolution:

RESOLUTION

Whereas Congress and the American People have not been shown clear, measurable progress toward establishment of stable and improving security in Iraq or of a stable and improving economy in Iraq, both of which are essential to "promote the emergence of a democratic government";

Whereas additional stabilization in Iraq by U, S. military forces cannot be achieved without the deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional U S. troops, which in turn cannot be achieved without a military draft;

Whereas more than $277 billion has been appropriated by the United States Congress to prosecute U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan;

Whereas, as of the drafting of this resolution, 2,079 U.S. troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom;

Whereas U.S. forces have become the target of the insurgency,

Whereas, according to recent polls, over 80% of the Iraqi people want U.S. forces out of Iraq;

Whereas polls also indicate that 45% of the Iraqi people feel that the attacks on U.S. forces are justified;

Whereas, due to the foregoing, Congress finds it evident that continuing U.S. military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the people of Iraq, or the Persian Gulf Region, which were cited in Public Law 107-243 as justification for undertaking such action;

Therefore be it

1) Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in

2) Congress assembled,

3) That:

4) Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is

5) hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable

6) date.

7) Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S Marines

8) shall be deployed in the region.

9) Section 3 The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq

10) through diplomacy.

I'll have more on the question of whether to leave Iraq or stay -- and on what terms -- later today or tomorrow.

But until then, a John Wayne quote -- that I think John Murtha is familiar with:

Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much.

I'm definitely not the John Wayne type.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I traveled out to the heartland yesterday -- to Dubuque, Iowa. Just got back to Washington minutes ago.

It was impressive to meet so many deeply interested in the great debates of the day, in America's foreign policy, in the scandals in the White House, and in American politics in general. I spoke to the Dubuque Area Committee on Foreign Relations, which assembled about 70 people to hear some of my thoughts on the state of America's national security portfolio. The room covered the complete spectrum from folks with Vietnam-era peace buttons and Anti-Bush buttons on their lapels to deeply conservative, pro-Bush Republicans.

Two of the people who helped escort me around Dubuque were brothers -- one a retired high school principal and the other a retired doctor. They started their lunch conversation with me with tales of "Lonely Planet" guided trips they had made to Syria, Jordan, Libya, Laos, Cambodia, and Tunisia. I think Nepal and India are on the list -- and both are trying to think of ways to get into Myanmar (Burma). Just regular fun guys who have no fear and like seeing the world. They both said that most of the people that they encounter around the world are able to distinguish between them, as Americans, and President Bush or the U.S. government -- which are exceeding unpopular today.

They both said that more youthful Tunisians, Jordanians, and others tend to blur Americans and the American government -- and they pose greater risks.

I'm sharing this because it's impressive to go into the center of this country and so easily find Republican, Democrat and Independent believers in enlightened American engagement in the world.

Here is an article that did a pretty decent job getting my story repeated in the regional paper, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald:

Dubuque Telegraph Herald -- 18 November 2005

SPEAKER CRITICAL OF BOTH DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS

Washington think tank official says foreign policy is in 'dire' shape

By Mary Rae Bragg

TH staff writer

Steven Clemons is a man with friends in high places in Washington, D.C., and what they are telling him does not speak well for either Republicans or Democrats.

Clemons, a program director for the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, describes Democrats as leaderless and without a vision, while Republicans are at odds with their leaders and led by a president who isolates himself from all but a few.

Clemons was in Dubuque Thursday as a guest speaker to the Dubuque Area Committee on Foreign Relations.

America's foreign policy is in a "dire" state, according to Clemons, partially because of President Bush's failure to take opposing views into consideration.

"This is a president who thinks he makes his own weather," Clemons said. "The cost of being surrounded by 'yes' men has been very high, resulting in military overreach in Iraq."

The result of recent foreign policy decisions such as invading Iraq "is that your allies don't count on you and your enemies move their agendas," Clemons said. His sources inside the White House tell him there have been major divisions in the White House over where the nation's foreign policy should be going, he said.

Clemons objects to those in the administration who foster "ballot-ocracies," nations where one election is held and it calls itself a democracy.

"If a small player can't sue and win against a big player, you don't have a democracy," he said.

Clemons believes that Democrats don't think Bush can change and feel that he is so defensive that they only need to keep questioning his Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, make accusation against Rove and oppose the Iraq War.

"They are defining the problems, not fixing them," Clemons said. "It's a 'blame them' time."

Clemons, who publishes a popular political blog, www.TheWashingtonNote.com, describes himself as an "ethical realist," with sources and friends all over the political spectrum.

"Reasonable people of different mindsets can agree to disagree, but at least put things on the table," he said.

The one thing I'll add is that Ben Bradlee is WRONG to think that there isn't strong interest around the nation in the recent journalistic misbehavior of Bob Woodward. I received no less than a dozen questions yesterday about Woodward -- and what the revelations he made meant to the Libby investigation -- and whether Bob Woodward had become the "Judy Miller of the Washington Post."

Bradlee, like Woodward, have both been irritatingly dismissive of the importance of the Plame investigation -- and what both need to realize is that NEITHER of them has much to do anymore with establishing the appetite for news in the country. The political marketplace has already determined that the Plame CIA leak is enormously consequential to this White House -- and the American public is interested.

They certainly were in Dubuque.

-- Steve Clemons

Washington Post Managing Editor Len Downie will chat online with the public via this Washington Post site at 10 a.m.

I'd really like to know what Downie is going to do to punish Woodward for commenting publicly on a case in which he privately knew he was a central witness.

Woodward's behavior has been outrageous. I think it's a good move by Len Downie to engage the public transparently about Woodward's duplicity.

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday evening, the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program organized a thoughtful session debating the future of American strategy vis-a-vis China.

The participants were Jim Pinkerton, Michael Lind, Sherle Schwenninger, Ted Halstead, Barry Lynn, Jennifer Buntman, Robert Wright, and myself.

Jim Pinkerton and I both have published major articles on China -- and the subject is getting quite a bit of attention today. Barry Lynn, who fears the overconcentration of American and European productive capacity in China, has this well-received book out and has a major article he plans to have out in February on the China dimensions of his new book.

Though I'm on the road today and can't link it, Jay Solomon has a terrific front page subject on exactly what we were discussing in today's Wall Street Journal.

I am linking my article here, which was published in the Ripon Forum, a monthly magazine sponsored and supported by moderate Republicans. Pinkerton's column is linked here and appeared in the increasingly must-read American Conservative.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Apropos of yesterday's post on the "Right Brothers", my good friend and TWN's legal guru Brian Greer just ran this piece on the "Junkyard Prophet" and the use of high school networks to push social conservative jingles.

I'm off to Dubuque, Iowa today -- my first time -- to give a talk on American foreign policy to the Dubuque Committee on Foreign Relations.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

This is no joke. And it's just hilarious.

A conservative music duo out of Nashville, the Right Brothers, has just released this song.

Listen along while reading the lyrics below:

"Bush Was Right" by The Right Brothers

Lyrics by Frank Highland

Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban
Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up
Osama's staying underground, Al Qaida now is finding out
America won't turn and run once the fighting has begun
Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too
Syria is forced to leave, don't you know that all this means

Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave All over the middle east, dictators walk with shaky knees
Don't know what they're gonna do, their worst nightmare is coming true
They fear the domino effect, they're all wondering who's next

Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Ted Kennedy -- wrong!
Cindy Sheehan -- wrong!
France -- WRONG!
Zell Miller -- right!

Economy is on the rise kicking into overdrive
Angry liberals can't believe it's cause of W's policies
Unemployment's staying down, Democrats are wondering how
Revenue is going up, can you say "Tax Cuts"

Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Cheney was right, Condi was right,
Rummy was right, Blair was right
You were right, We were right, "The Right" was right
and Bush was right. . .
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Perhaps I've got it wrong, but this is the sort of spoof that Jon Stewart would have a ball with. I can imagine a whole Saturday Night Live show -- several skits -- themed on "Bush was Right!"

Maybe Al Franken can tease Fox & Friends a bit with this silly jingle.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: For more, check this link to Think Progress.

Sam Alito needs to be stopped.

Enough has now been unearthed to show that, if confirmed, he is going to be an activist Supreme Court Associate Justice taking America back into the deeply divisive wars over abortion, gender equality, and racial equality that all legislative means should be deployed to stop his confirmation.

TWN wishes that Senator Joseph Biden had kept his powder dry. There are things worth fighting for -- and leading Democratic Party pundits need to mature beyond their adolescent need to predict defeat even before the battle has begun. Republicans, in contrast, have the exact opposite tendency of declaring victory even when they are losing. They are sometimes so convincing that they eke out wins they do not deserve.

The New York Times editorial page offers today a decisively written, compelling opposition to Alito -- and highlights the fact that Alito declared in his job application his clear, unmitigated view that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Alito is downplaying what he wrote saying that he was just "positioning himself" politically for a job. His defense is that he 'lied' on his application -- my words, not his.

This guy needs to be rejected.

From the Times:

First, he has extreme views on the law. Judge Alito said he was particularly proud of his work on cases that tried to establish that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." He did not merely oppose Roe v. Wade in the abstract - he worked to reverse it.

He also noted his "disagreement with Warren Court decisions" in many important areas, including reapportionment. The reapportionment cases established the one-person-one-vote doctrine, which requires that Congressional and legislative districts include roughly equal numbers of people.

They played a key role in making American democracy truly representative, and are almost uniformly respected by lawyers and scholars.

Second, Judge Alito does not respect precedent. Judicial nominees who appear extreme often claim that because they respect precedent, they will vote to reaffirm decisions they disagree with. When Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court, he told the Senate about his deep respect for precedent - and then immediately began voting to overturn important precedents when he joined the court.

The Senate has specific reason to be skeptical about Judge Alito. Not only did he work to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he also said he had been inspired to go to law school by his opposition to Warren Court precedents - presumably by a desire to see them overturned.

Third, he is an ideologue. The White House has tried to present Judge Alito as an impartial judge without strong political views. But he said just the opposite in the 1985 statement. "I am and always have been a conservative," he wrote.

He called himself a "life-long registered Republican" who contributed to "Republican candidates and conservative causes" including the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the super-PAC of the Reagan era. He strongly suggested that he would have been active in Republican politics if the law had not prohibited him, as a federal employee, from doing that.

Judge Alito is already trying to distance himself from the memo. He cannot say it was merely a lawyer's representation of an employer's views because it was undeniably a statement of his personal beliefs. He cannot call it an excess of youth because he was 35 when he wrote it. According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, Judge Alito told her yesterday that when he had written it he had merely been "an advocate seeking a job."

Oddly, Alito would be more respectable if he stated that those were his views, are his views. He could say, "That's what I wrote. That's what I meant. That's what I believe." He could tell us all to "deal with it."

Then the fight would be honorable -- but he is choosing a duplicitous course, trying to disavow what he wrote -- and not affirming what his mother has already said: "Of course my son opposes abortion."

Alito turns out to be a weak conniver. This is one that moderates and progressives should sink their teeth into and shake really, really hard.

-- Steve Clemons

I just got an email noting that Fox News' Tony Snow had the quote of the day. After a bit of digging, I found that it wasn't Tony Snow but rather Tony Blankley in his Town Hall column.

He is trying to rally support for Bush with a lot of sticky sophism. He clearly needs some time off:

Now the Watergate babies have grown old -- and age has not improved them. They plan to finish their careers as they started them -- in defeatism, betrayal and national dishonor. Oh, that America might see the last of these fish-eyed sacks of loathsome bile and infamy: Unwholesome in their birth; repugnant and stench-forming in their decline.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Today is one of those overflowing with so much news and commentary that it's hard to know where to begin.

First of all, Bob Woodward has revealed new information in the Valerie Plame case that could be staggering in its importance. But the only problem is it's difficult to validate what Woodward is saying -- and some of the best reporters in the Washington Post that Woodward has spun into his tale say he's got the story wrong.

Woodward said that he heard that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA covert operative a month before Scooter Libby divulged that information to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

In part, Woodward's story must be, at least in part, true because a source reporting to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald brought it to the investigator's attention. This new theatre in the Plame case was seemingly not promulgated by Woodward.

But here is some of the more disturbing context for Woodward's revelations. The Post reports that Woodward never mentioned this high level contact of his and involvement in the Plame outing to Washington Post Managing Editor Leonard Downie until a month ago:

Woodward never mentioned this contact -- which was at the center of a criminal investigation and a high-stakes First Amendment legal battle between the prosecutor and two news organizations -- to his supervisors until last month. Downie said in an interview yesterday that Woodward told him about the contact to alert him to a possible story. He declined to say whether he was upset that Woodward withheld the information from him.

Woodward has apparently testified that he passed on what he knew to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, who denies this. I happen to know Pincus -- and this veteran reporter is meticulous with detail. From the report today:

Woodward's statement said he testified: "I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst."

Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.

"Are you kidding?" Pincus said. "I certainly would have remembered that."

Pincus said Woodward may be confused about the timing and the exact nature of the conversation. He said he remembers Woodward making a vague mention to him in October 2003. That month, Pincus had written a story explaining how an administration source had contacted him about Wilson. He recalled Woodward telling him that Pincus was not the only person who had been contacted.

But the MOST OUTRAGEOUS statement by Bob Woodward follows, and I credit the Washington Post for exposing this man's vanity and idiocy. The Post reports that Woodward pooh-poohed the Fitzgerald investigation into the Valerie Plame/CIA case -- even though he had vital information that was relevant to the investigation all along -- and knew it.

The President put his credibility on the line regarding this CIA case. The first White House official in 130 years was indicted because of this case -- and Bob Woodward is saying that it is an insignificant matter. And now he has a "smoking gun"?

From the Post:

Woodward, who is preparing a third book on the Bush administration, has called Fitzgerald "a junkyard-dog prosecutor" who turns over every rock looking for evidence. The night before Fitzgerald announced Libby's indictment, Woodward said he did not see evidence of criminal intent or of a major crime behind the leak.

"When the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter," he told CNN's Larry King.

Woodward also said in interviews this summer and fall that the damage done by Plame's name being revealed in the media was "quite minimal."

"When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," he told National Public Radio this summer.

Woodward's celebrity-status has seriously blinded him and affected his judgment about quality journalism and his responsibilities to the public. He should never have been making such comments on television about the Plame case if he was, in fact, involved. He should have RECUSED himself in such discussion.

Now, his revelations must become central to the Plame story -- and they threaten significantly the direction that Fitzgerald takes in the investigation.

Woodward should tell what he knows -- and he should be responsible to what really occurred -- but he must be held ACCOUNTABLE for his irresponsibility in the Plame case.

Tomorrow, the Post -- in an editorial penned by Leonard Downie -- better make clear that Bob Woodward gets no "Judy Miller"-like protection or nod of support from the reporting staff of the paper. He has violated the public trust by both withholding information he had in a key investigation, while playing pundit on Larry King, and now upending things late in the process.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: Atrios has transcript of Woodward exchange with Larry King. Woodward crossed lots of lines.

Lawrence Wilkerson has been in the news a lot because of the no-nonsense framing he has given to discussion of the Vice President's role in detainee abuse; the manner in which the U.S. military has been wrecked by this administration; and by the depiction of a Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal" in the White House that Condoleeza Rice deferred to in order to build "intimacy" with the President.

However, Wilkerson's comments don't just depict the sorry state of affairs in the White House -- he has serious thoughts about reforming the system we have. It's easy to bitch and complain -- but tougher to put a better idea on the table, and Wilkerson has been working on exactly that.

Tonight, you can catch Col. Wilkerson on the national public radio station, Open Source with Christopher Lydon, from 7 til 8 p.m.

You can also post your comments for Wilkerson on this site (just scroll down).

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

The New York Times has its piece out this morning on the end-of-year departure of CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. (Mine from yesterday is here.)

Holtz-Eakin spoke truth about fiscal matters and often irritated weak-minded Congressional leaders who wanted political rather than empirical responses from the CBO Director and his team.

From the Times:

Within weeks of his appointment by Republican leaders in early 2003, Mr. Holtz-Eakin declared, to their dismay, that Mr. Bush's tax and spending plans would do little or nothing to stimulate long-term economic growth.

Subsequently, the budget office released a report that found that Mr. Bush's tax cuts were heavily skewed in favor of the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin rejected Republican demands that budget forecasts take account of strengthened economic activity from tax cuts without analyzing the drag caused by increased spending.

Under his direction, the budget office often took issue with the political goals of Republicans. It raised doubts about proposals to partly privatize the Social Security system, concluded that abolishing estate taxes would reduce charitable contributions and calculated that allowing same-sex marriages would slightly increase federal revenues.

I admit that I had not read the CBO report that permitting same-sex marriages would increase the treasury. But good for Holtz-Eakin for telling things as they are.

For a bit more on how "terrified" Holtz-Eakin and other economists on the right and left are about America's economic portfolio, this will wake you up. this article

-- Steve Clemons

Actually, my headline is misleading.

CBO Director Doulas Holtz-Eakin has been offered a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," according to him, to serve as the Paul A. Volcker Fellow in International Economics and the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He assumes his post on December 30th. I guess he plans to work through New Year's. . .

This move seriously bums me out (is that how it is said?).

Holtz-Eakin is a Republican -- though few would know that. He has been fastidiously non-partisan in his management of the Congressional Budget Office and set an impressively high bar regarding what empiricism in good public policy debate should look like. He reminded me a lot of a younger version of former SEC Chairman William Donaldson, who thought that ideology was the sign of a weak mind.

Holtz-Eakin's term was not set to end until February 3, 2007 -- and while TWN takes him at his word (or his email) that he is departing government service because of a next great opportunity, one wonders whether the political climate in Washington has yet again driven out another excellent, talented policy practitioner. I sincerely hope not.

Holtz-Eakin is the kind of person who owed no one for his views and position. He has moved in and out of Washington policy circles and academia -- and is the "model" of an elite-level civil servant that both parties should have in mind when staffing important positions (the antithesis of course, Michael Brown. It is interesting to note that while the Bush administration normally leaves "former" senior officials' bios up on websites for long periods after their departure, Michael Brown's bio has been stripped off and is only available on the FEMA site in a cached version or in Spanish.)

If Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mark Warner, Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden, or some other of that sort wins the presidency in 2008 -- they would be well served to put political affiliations aside and get Holtz-Eakin either situated as an "empowered" National Economic Advisor to the President -- or quickly on to the Federal Reserve Board.

-- Steve Clemons

TWN has previously argued that Libby has probably been covering up Cheney's role in outing Valerie Plame Wilson.

Carol Leonnig and Jim VandeHei have a good piece on this in the Post this morning:

Libby, according to Fitzgerald's indictment, gave a false story to agents and, later, to a grand jury, even though he knew investigators had his notes, and presumably knew that several of his White House colleagues had already provided testimony and documentary evidence that would undercut his own story.

And his interviews with the FBI in October and two appearances before the grand jury in March 2004 came at a time when there were increasingly clear signs that some of the reporters with whom Libby discussed Plame could soon be freed to testify -- and provide starkly different and damning accounts to the prosecutor.

To critics, the timing suggests an attempt to obscure Cheney's role, and possibly his legal culpability. The vice president is shown by the indictment to be aware of and interested in Plame and her CIA status long before her cover was blown.

Even some White House aides privately wonder whether Libby was seeking to protect Cheney from political embarrassment. One of them noted with resignation, "Obviously, the indictment speaks for itself."

In addition, Cheney also advised Libby on a media strategy to counter Plame's husband, former ambassador Wilson, according to a person familiar with the case.

"This story doesn't end with Scooter Libby's indictment," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), giving voice to widespread Democratic hopes about the outcome of Fitzgerald's case. "A lot more questions need to be answered by the White House about the actions of [Cheney] and his staff."

Heading back to D.C. today from Prague.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

What is America if it doesn't believe that all citizens have the rights of habeus corpus? What will America's message to the world be? Most of you are ok -- but some of you evil ones will be tossed into prisons with no recourse, none. Is that what America's beacon will pulse in the future: impunity?

This is shameful -- and promulgated by Senator Lindsey Graham:

The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.

The vote, 49 to 42, on an amendment to a military budget bill by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, comes at a time of intense debate over the government's treatment of prisoners in American custody worldwide, and just days after the Senate passed a measure by Senator John McCain banning abusive treatment of them.

If approved in its current form by both the Senate and the House, which has not yet considered the measure but where passage is considered likely, the law would nullify a June 2004 Supreme Court opinion that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had a right to challenge their detentions in court.

Nearly 200 of roughly 500 detainees there have already filed habeas corpus motions, which are making their way up through the federal court system. As written, the amendment would void any suits pending at the time the law was passed.

My former boss who is one of the smartest people in the Senate but not a media hog, Jeff Bingaman, is leading the effort against Graham's legislation. Bingaman thinks that he can engineer a different vote that strips the Graham motion of the parts limiting habeas corpus.

We'll have to see if Jeff succeeds -- but Graham got 49 votes -- and Joe Lieberman was with them (no surprise) -- but also Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and even Ron Wyden. Ron Wyden?

More later from Berlin.

-- Steve Clemons

Update:

I am still in Berlin and have not yet had time to read everything regarding this amendment that passed in the Senate yesterday. I have had lots of people contact me that there is an important difference between citizens and non-citizens designated as "enemy combatants".

At first look and without much thought, I think that the difference noted by others and made in Senator Graham's legislation only exacerbates my problems with this. America should not be in the business of indefinite detentions for ANYONE. It is vital to our democracy that all enemies, evil-doers, terrorists and all those suspected of such sorts of crimes be tried in a court of law in a SYSTEM of LAW and JUSTICE. All of those held for crimes need to be able to challenge those who are making charges. Otherwise, impunity occurs. Mistakes happen. And we should not allow a system of no recourse in a world where mistakes happen -- particularly in the case of non-Americans.

This is a quick note. There may be dimensions to this that I have not considered, but given the track record of the U.S. in many "suspected" terrorist charge claims that turned out wrong, I think it is a huge mistake to empower the federal government with this type of uncontested authority. Call me a conservative if you will -- but I don't trust a government that can not be challenged by all people, citizen or not, in a court of law.

-- Steve Clemons (checking in from Berlin)

I thought Bill Frist still had a chance to eke out a decent performance in the Republican presidential primary, even though the White House has been jacking him around like a raggedy-Andy doll -- but no more.

He admits that his priority is secret-keeping, not legal behavior behind that shroud of secrecy. He can't be President; Americans won't trust him. Read this CNN story in which Frist flushes his own presidential aspirations right down the toilet.

I hear that few people showed up for the Chalabi protest, but that the AEI forum was packed -- and that people asked reasonably tough questions. David Corn has some material up -- and other bloggers, that I'll post later.

I'm surprised few showed given the number of organizations that said they were sending people. Maybe a lot of people who wanted to be at the protest were stuck at the Prague Airport like I was for six and a half hours yesterday. In any case, I do think that Chalabi got the luke-warm, semi-hostile treatment he deserves.

More later -- and best to all of you from Berlin.

-- Steve Clemons

Just got word that Congressman George Miller and Senator Richard Durbin, in a joint news conference later TODAY, will be calling for Ahmad Chalabi to be subpoenaed.

Good call.

-- Steve Clemons

Democrats won big in the New Jersey and Virginia Governor's races -- and a pragmatist who happens to be Republican won big in New York City. Lots of folks don't like Bloomberg, but in my mind, he's an old-line Republican centrist, and we need those back in bigger numbers.

The centrist Governor in California who went astray by getting in the way of gay civil rights and cuddling up too much with fundamentalist zealots got chastened -- BIG TIME -- with all four of his ballot initiatives crashing and burning. Maybe Arnold will now isolate the far right.

And Ron Fournier of the Associated Press gets today's prize for giddiest lead into an election story:

Iraq, Katrina, CIA leak, Harriet Miers. Things couldn't possibly get any worse for President Bush.

Wait, they just did.

Bush put his wispy political prestige on the line in the Virginia governor's race and lost Tuesday when the candidate he embraced in a last-minute campaign stop was soundly defeated. While there are many reasons for Jerry Kilgore's defeat, chief among them his poor campaign, giddy Democrats said the Virginia race as well as a Democratic victory in New Jersey prove that Bush is a political toxin for Republicans.

BUT THAT WAS YESTERDAY. . .

I just met a room full of smart people in Prague, ages ranging from 18 to 68, and all of them think Chalabi is a huckster who deceived the White House into taking on his war. They think the White House then deceived the American public -- and now wants to keep the lies going. I am impressed with level of awareness of Inside-the-Beltway scandals here in the Czech Republic.

Today, 2 p.m. -- 1150 17th Street, NW. In case, the Deputy Prime Minister has been reading this blog, you might want to stop by at 1:45. Lots of folks will be there. Talk to the press. They want to talk to you.

And be sure to talk to Mr. Chalabi. If it's pretty noisy with all the traffic and all -- clear your throat, fill your lungs, and greet him loudly. Poke him with the right questions. . .and then there is that "Citizen's Arrest" matter -- discussed below (this was a fantastic idea of Josh Marshall's). But if anyone does try this, don't get hurt -- Chalabi is not worth it. He has burly, armed thugs -- and I don't want any of you going down on the steps of AEI, though the thought of martyrs against him gets well. . .I'm not going to go there.

In any case, don't be rash. Be loud, peaceful, constructive, non-violent. . .if you plan to attend. The same goes for those greeting Deputy Prime Minister Chalabi on Friday afternoon at the Council on Foreign Relations.

To remind yourself of some of the outrageous schemes and lies Chalabi has hoisted on us -- as well as some token commentary from people like Colin Powell about Chalabi, let me share something that the Think Progress issued (excerpts):

Remarks by Colin Powell, 12 June 2003:

I can't substantiate [Chalabis] claims. He makes new ones every year.

A Short Rap Sheet on Ahmad Chalabi:

PENTAGON FUNDED CHALABI TO PROVIDE RATIONALE FOR WAR: The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency paid the INC $335,000 a month in the lead-up to the Iraq war to gather intelligence. In all, the Bush White House has given the INC at least $39 million over the past 5 years.

CHALABI'S IRAQI NATIONAL CONGRESS WAS MAJOR SOURCE OF DATA FOR PENTAGON OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS: According to a report in the New Yorker, analysts based in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans "relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi." "You had to treat [the I.N.C.] with suspicion," a former Middle East station chief said of Chalabi's people. 'The I.N.C. has a track record of manipulating information because it has an agenda. It's a political unit -- not an intelligence agency.'"

CHALABI ATTENDED PLANNING MEETING AT THE PENTAGON JUST DAYS AFTER 9/11 ATTACKS: On September 18, 2001, Richard Perle convened a two-day meeting of the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises the Pentagon. Chalabi, who was a guest speaker at this meeting, made a presentation on the Iraqi threat.

CHALABI STOVEPIPED INTEL TO BUSH; DISSENTING CIA AND STATE ANALYSES REMAINED SECRET: According to The New Yorker, "Chalabi's defector reports were. . .flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President's office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals." State Dept. Intelligence expert Greg Thielmann said, "There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi's sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President." The INC also takes credit for providing raw, unsubstantiated information directly to John Hannah, then-special assistant for national security in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

CHALABI PROVIDED AGENT CURVEBALL TO AFFIRM SUPPOSED EXISTENCE OF SADDAM'S BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS LABS: "A U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization had provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies. 'It's safe to say he tried to game the system,' the official said." A discredited INC defector to Germany who was code-named 'Curveball' was the chief source of information on Iraq's supposed fleet of mobile germ weapons factories. Curveball was the brother of a top lieutenant to Ahmed Chalabi, the group's leader and now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.

CHALABI PLANTED FABRICATED NEWS STORIES: Chalabi was the source for discredited news stories about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction which were penned by New York Times reporter Judith Miller. In 2001, Miller wrote a front-page story about claims that Saddam had twenty secrety WMD sites hidden in Iraq. The information turned out to be bogus. Chalabi's group arranged Miller's interview with the source and, according to the New Yorker, Miller's exclusive story came just "three days after [the source] had shown deception in a polygraph test administered by the C.I.A. at the request of the Defense Intelligence Agency."

CHALABI SHRUGS OFF MISLEADING U.S.: "Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. 'We are heroes in error,' he told the Telegraph in Baghdad."

CHALABI ACCUSED OF PASSING U.S. SECRETS TO IRAN: In June 2004, Chalabi came under investigation for allegations that he passed secret intelligence to Iran. Chalabi is accused of telling the Iranian government that the U.S. had broken the code it used for secret communications. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice promised Congress a full investigation into the allegations. But the Wall Street Journal reports that "there is little sign of progress in a federal investigation of allegations that he once leaked U.S. intelligence secrets to Iran."

CHALABI ACCUSED OF ENGAGING IN COUNTERFEITING OPERATION IN POST-WAR IRAQ: The AP reported in August 2004 that Iraq had issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Chalabi on counterfeiting charges. The warrants "accused Ahmad Chalabi of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars -- which had been removed from circulation following the fall of Saddam's regime last year. . .Police found the counterfeit money along with old dinars in Ahmad Chalabi's house during a May raid." A judge later dismissed the counterfeit charges for lack of evidence.

CHALABI CONVICTED FOR EMBEZZLEMENT: Critics have questioned the credibility of Ahmad Chalabi because in 1992 he was convicted by a Jordanian court of embezzling funds from a bank where he was employed. According to the Independent, "By 1992 he [Chalabi] was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud, and his sentence of 22 years hard labour stands to this day. Jordan claims the debacle cost the state $300 million."

CHALABI CURRENTLY HEADING IRAQI OIL MINISTRY: Chalabi has maintained leadership over the oil ministry while also retaining the post of deputy prime minister in Iraq.

I and others have done quite a number of media interviews on Chalabi's attempts to burrow back into Washington respectability -- but I think that quite a bit of repellant has now been deployed.

I'll be watching closely on-line and will be on the phone all afternoon (eastern time) with the press.

I hope that those of you who care about making sure that Chalabi has an absolutely miserable time in the nation's capital followed by harrassment and headache in New York -- and skeptical headlines wherever he goes -- will be sure to greet him in the way he should be greeted today at 1150 17th Street, NW.

And those of you "in the room", be bold -- but reserved. Don't come off as a flamer when a public policy meeting is going on. Engage Chalabi seriously.

Your questions and views are important. AEI President Chris DeMuth may try to protect Chalabi -- or alternatively, Chris may be rough on him -- who knows? He may let Chalabi handle his own zinger queries -- but in either case, your views matter.

And your questions of Chalabi -- if constructed to make him accountable -- will put him on the line in front of a great number of cameras and scores of print journalists.

Good luck.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the time to greet Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi at 1150 17th Street, NW in Washington, D.C. A couple of posts below, I have suggested that a citizen's arrest might very well be in order for this duplicitous intel swindler who has undermined America's interests and helped cause thousands of deaths among Iraqis as well as among American, British and other forces.

The event is full. But lots of press will be on the street asking YOU for YOUR VIEWS about this character. Be sure to give DPM Chalabi my personal message that I hope his trip to Washington and New York proves to be a miserable experience.

Not everyone can make it tomorrow -- so those of you in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Camden, Pittsburgh, Albany, Bangor, Portsmouth, and the rest of the country who have time and an air ticket or car handy -- you can greet Ahmad Chalabi in NEW YORK on FRIDAY AFTERNOON.

Chalabi will be speaking at the members-only Council on Foreign Realtions at The Harold Pratt House at 58 East 68th Street.

This is another chance for American soldiers and other citizens to show up and greet Chalabi and give him a bit of their thinking on this whole Iraq escapade. I think supporters and detractors should go. Show him what heterodoxy and political diversity mean -- and let him know that most of the country is angry at what has happened and wants to know more about his role in conspiring to hype and fabricate intelligence about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that did not exist.

CFR members will show up just before 3:45 for coffee and tea -- followed by Chalabi speaking at 4 p.m. I suggest 3 p.m. would be a great time to greet Chalabi in New York. The date is Friday, 11 November -- this week.

If he sneaks in early, don't worry, he'll be exiting at 5 p.m. and you can share your thoughts -- loudly -- then.

Johns Hopkins SAIS Professor Fouad Ajami will preside at the meeting. I only wish CFR President Richard Haass was going to chair the meeting as I know Haass would make the event "real."

Haass is demonstrating some real magnanimity by hosting Chalabi because I'd bet that there is no love lost between Richard Haass and Chalabi. Haass says publicly that the "Iraq War was a war of choice" for the U.S. -- and that means to a realist like Haass that we had other options that we should have considered. Chalabi was part of the 'cabal' that took this nation to war.

I don't have anything against Ajami. He's intellectually pro-war and I differ with him on that, but these are differences that can be debated -- but I do think that Ajami should have recused himself as Chairman of this event.

The CFR should be a place for honest discourse and exchange -- and perhaps that will happen with the audience -- though usually the Chair of the event tries to "protect" the speaker and buffer that individual from the terrain he or she is entering.

Chalabi and Ajami are close pals according to this clip:

In the shifting landscape of Iraqi politics, holding onto power is a full-time job that leaves Chalabi unable to pursue his many intellectual interests. His Lebanese wife and their four children live mostly outside of Iraq, and his taxing schedule seldom permits travel abroad.

In the past week, however, Chalabi entertained a houseguest: the Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami, a pariah among many Arab intellectuals for his cozy relationship with Israel and the United States. Ajami, director of Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, had accompanied Chalabi on the solemn trip to Musayyib.

Over a traditional Iraqi meal of cinnamon-spiced rice and okra stew later that evening, the like-minded men skewered their mutual critics, lambasting an array of self-proclaimed Iraq experts, the Arab intelligentsia, famous journalists and Washington lawmakers. After dinner, Ajami and Chalabi's aides, exhausted by the grueling day, sank into plush chairs.

Chalabi disappeared for a moment to swap his dusty suit from the bombing tour for a crisp navy blazer. He said good night to his guests and set off for a Cabinet meeting. "We'll rest now," said Qanbar, one of Chalabi's closest aides. "But he'll keep going until midnight."

Before Ajami left town, Chalabi did manage to carve out a leisurely summer day at the picturesque, poolside Baghdad estate built by his father in 1934. They lounged in a room where the television was tuned to coverage of Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beirut, and a boxed set of "The Sopranos" sat on a shelf. The men discussed authors and debated Arab contributions to science as Moroccan folk music, Palestinian rap and Lebanese pop boomed from a stereo.

Chalabi's nephew, the finance minister, joined them for lunch.

It's basically ok for Ajami to chair the Chalabi event. I have certainly hosted friends for public speeches before. However, Haass would be far better. This is not a normal CFR event; it's very high profile -- and Chalabi owes America an explanation for the nuke WMD fabrications, for the Iran spies he nurtured and nurtures, and for the mountains of missing money that many believe his gang took out of the pockets of the negligent Coalition Provisional Authority.

One hopes that CFR members plan to grill him -- and I hear that a few are sharpening their questions and prods.

But for those New Yorkers who want to show him what an angry democracy that wants answers looks like -- you have a chance at 3 p.m. and then 5 p.m. -- entry and exit -- in New York on Friday afternoon.

The rest of you -- tomorrow, 2 p.m. -- 1150 17th M Street, NW -- Washington, D.C.

-- Steve Clemons

Arianna Huffington reports that Judy Miller is doing a gig in New York tomorrow evening (Wednesday) that will run guests $375.00 a head.

Bill Clinton charged $15,000 to enter the Clinton Global Initiative -- so tough to compare -- but at least the Clinton Foundation devoted the money to worthy global causes -- for the needy.

But the big news tomorrow is Ahmad Chalabi and the many folks gathering in front of the American Enterprise Institute to greet him.

It's all happening at 2 p.m. at 1150 17th Street, NW.

All I can urge is to make this trip a miserable one for him -- something that he will regret for some time. I'm sure he'll offer his trademark sneer at those Americans who are invoking their democratic privilege to tell him exactly what they think of his pre-war duplicity.

For those who aren't Chalabi fanatics, the word from many I know in the CIA is that Chalabi was the person who tipped off Saddam Hussein before a coup attempt against the Iraqi leader. The CIA had cut Chalabi out of the action -- because of misinformation that Chalabi had allegedly passed on and irresponsible management of sensitive information. For that, Chalabi tipped off Hussein.

Whether you are pro-war or anti-war in the Iraq case, Chalabi worked against American intelligence authorities. That is why the CIA and State Department hate him so deeply. Douglas Feith helped set him up. Others empowered him. I'll never forget the day I had lunch with him at the offices of the New Republic in an editorial meeting organized by Marty Peretz.

He was slick in all the bad ways, compelling -- but his obsession with power was clear, and it was not obvious to me that this guy had a respect for the tug-and-pull of real democratic discourse. He seemed like a mafia boss.

From Arianna on Chalabi and Miller:

Tomorrow will be a red letter day for fans of discredited neocon idols. In the afternoon, Ahmad Chalabi will be in Washington, giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. And in the evening, Judy Miller will be in New York, taking part in a panel discussion on reporters’ privilege at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers (7th Ave and 53rd St.), being sponsored by the Media Law Resource Center.

Tickets are $375, which includes dinner.

Still time to book seats on the D.C./NY Shuttle!

Miller's fellow panelists include Time's Matt Cooper, Jim Taricani, a TV reporter who served four months of home arrest for refusing to reveal a source, and Rep. Mike Pence, co-sponsor of a bill that would create a federal shield law.

The panel was originally going to be moderated by Diane Sawyer -- and, as late as today, she was still listed on the MLRC's website. But according to the organization, due to a "last-minute cancellation", the panel will now be moderated by Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran.

So a "last-minute cancellation" caused Sawyer to cancel? Don't you hate when that happens?

Maybe it's just as well. It was hard to imagine Sawyer putting her journalistic credentials at risk to moderate a panel that included Judy Miller not as a target of derision and scorn but as an esteemed member of the fourth estate blabbering on about the need for a federal shield law that wouldn't have protected her anyway even if one had been in place.

Just got some other interesting news in.

Will be back shortly. While folks are spending big bucks on Judy Miller's "revelations" about her experience, I'm spending big bucks (well, sort of) blogging over the Atlantic Ocean on a Lufthansa flight. (Thanks for the financial support for those contributing to the blog!)

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. Here is another nice note from Arianna about DPM Chalabi's visit with some suggestions to visit the FBI, Congress, and Arlington National Cemetary to do some confessing of sins. . .

Iraq Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Duplicity and Deceit before America's Iraq Invasion Ahmad Chalabi has arrived in Washington.

He is going to speak at the American Enterprise Institute at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow.

The event is so full that several of my New America Foundation colleagues have been uninvited. That's right -- uninvited even though they made reservations before the event closed. The reason is allegedly over-crowding and we'll hope that is the case. They state that there are others from New America attending, but I can't find any -- and I'm going to be in Prague regrettably.

I am racing to post a number of Chalabi's crimes on the blog tonight -- but they may be here first thing in the morning, so keep checking in. Lots of other bloggers are getting into this as well. Check David Corn and Arianna Huffington who have important rosters of Chalabi's misdeeds.

This man must be held accountable for his role in America's mystique-destroying venture into Iraq.

Chalabi is back in Washington attempting to rehabilitate himself and position his candidacy for the Iraq premiership. He doesn't deserve anything but disdain and contempt until he engages in an honest accounting of his role in hyping intelligence about Iraq nuclear WMD programs, comes clean about his ongoing connections to senior Iran authorities (this alone should drive Michael Ledeen at AEI crazy -- but one wonders why not), and should divulge all he knows about the intelligence leaks to Iran and Israel in which he played a role, along with Larry Franklin who has been charged. He has also hovered close to former Under Secretay of Defense Douglas Feith, who helped create Chalabi's machine -- as well as former CIA Director James Woolsey who was the first on 9/11 to allege the direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda on national TV without disclosing for television viewers the fact that Woolsey was the LAWYER for Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.

Chalabi is a nefarious player in the Iraq WMD intel mess in which the White House is now mired.

There are a great number of organizations -- bloggers in the middle of the road, center left, and left -- who are not able to get into the AEI meeting. But they are going to meet Ahmed Chalabi and share their views with him about his role in America's screwed up foreign policy.

While the Citizen's Arrest Law in D.C. seems to require the actual real-time witnessing of a felony, I'm not so sure that Chalabi's violations of American law in the past don't already constitute grounds for Citizen's Arrest. Others may have more to say on this.

Watch for his burly and probably armed body guards -- but American citizens have my support issuing a citizen's arrest against Ahmad Chalabi.

Here is one link on Citizen's Arrest Law:

In the most crime ridden spot in the country, our nation's capitol, District of Columbia Law 23 -- 582(b) reads as follows:

(b) A private person may arrest another --

(1) who he has probable cause to believe is committing in his presence --

(A) a felony, or

(B) an offense enumerated in section 23-581 (a)(2); or

(2) in aid of a law enforcement officer or special policeman, or other person authorized by law to make an arrest.

(c) Any person making an arrest pursuant to this section shall deliver the person arrested to a law enforcement officer without unreasonable delay. (July 29, 1970, 84 Stat. 630, Pub. L. 91-358, Title II, S 210(a); 1973 Ed., S 23-582; Apr. 30, 1988, D.C. Law 7-104, S 7(e), 35 DCR 147.)

So, do what your conscience tells you to do -- at 2 p.m. (show up earlier if you can) -- at 17th and M Streets NW -- 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.

I have already been notified by CNN, AFP, Reuters, AP, and others that they are as interested in the protests about Chalabi's presence as they are about Chalabi's speech tomorrow inside AEI.

I also think that we have some good folks inside AEI to pose some legitimate questions -- constructively -- about Chalabi's role in our current Iraq mess.

More later. I'm not done with Chalabi.

For the record, I do support AEI's right to invite Chalabi to speak and to subject him to public questioning about his past behavior and views. I also support the right of the public to share their views and to engage this major player in the Iraq War on city streets and at AEI's meeting.

Share your views with Chalabi. Make him respond. And give him my personal greetings when he steps on to the sidewalk at 2 p.m.

Gotta run.

-- Steve Clemons

Sometimes in this business of political commentary and blogging, certain things happen that just push one over an emotional edge. I like to give people -- including politicians -- the benefit of the doubt. I also tend to want to give our elected leaders and policy practitioners a chance to redeem themselves after bad decisions.

We all make mistakes. I have -- many times -- and I try to be honest about them and correct these.

But the letter that has just been posted at Raw Story shakes me to my marrow. I have so many other things to post now -- particularly about the visit to Washington today of Ahmed Chalabi and his AEI speech tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. -- but I had to link this letter.

Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have asked House Intel Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra and Senate Intel Committee Chairman Pat Roberts NOT to look into the subject of the hidden sites America has for secretly holding prisoners and detainees -- but to look into who LEAKED that information to Dana Priest at the Washington Post.

Here is an excerpt of the letter:

We request that you immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information to the media alleging that the United States government may be detaining and interrogating terrorists at undisclosed locations abroad. As you know, if accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks.

The purpose of your investigation will be to determine the following: was the information provided to the media classified and accurate?; who leaked this information and under what authority?; and, what is the actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States and our partners in the Global War on Terror? We will consider other changes to this mandate based on your recommendations.

Any information that you obtain on this matter that may implicate possible violations of law should be referred to the Department of Justice for appropriate action.

We expect that you will move expeditiously to complete this inquiry and that you will provide us with periodic updates. We are hopeful that you will be able to accomplish this task in a bipartisan manner given general agreement that intelligence matters should not be politicized. Either way, however, your inquiry shall proceed.

This just makes me sick. Frist still has not learned that the White House has burned him over and over again. And now he is playing their shill once more.

But though I have opposed Frist's general take on the war and these issues for some time -- it's still very difficult for me, just as an American citizen -- to watch any leader, Republican or Democrat, implicitly endorse the notion that America has the right to indefinitely hold without due process any prisoners or detainees in some systemized fashion.

This is what the Soviet Union did. This is what Maoist China did. This is what America fought the Cold War against! Yes, we are fighting and dealing with horribly dangerous people in the world -- but they must be brought to justice in courts of law before American and global peers.

Frist and Hastert have both blighted their careers with this letter. It's outrageous -- and they should immediately retract this effort to lynch leakers rather than holding the Executive Branch accountable for serious infractions of human rights and our legal norms.

-- Steve Clemons

Chris Nelson has a dynamite commentary tonight in the much-sought-after but hard-to-get Nelson Report.

My obligations to Chris Nelson are growing as he allows me to share with you in the non-paying public excerpts (long excerpts) of his let-things-fall-where-they-will commentary on the big debates of the day.

Today, Nelson focuses on the White House's torture policy -- and he has some real zingers, including the view in the White House that various abuses short of organ failure and death do not constitute torture. Is this the "it's not sex if there is no intercourse" line of thinking?

If that notion of what is and is not torture is the prevailing attitude in the White House, then we really do have a rampage of immorality masquerading in grotesque and false righteousness at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Nelson also adds some nice context regarding the incentives that McCain and Hagel have to beat up the White House on its torture policy, as both have presidential ambitions. He also notes that the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear a case on whether America can hold terrorism-linked prisoners in undisclosed military prisons or detention centers. Chris Nelson thinks John Roberts may have to recuse himself in the case. (Update: I didn't originally think Roberts would recuse himself, but the Washington Post reports that he has already done so.)

Chris Nelson also adds some more on Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's revelations about the White House promotion of torture-like techniques on those America has been detaining.

Here is the whole segment on torture in Chris Nelson's Nelson Report:

TORTURE. . .just ask yourself what it means for America that a topic head can have this title, and that will help explain why you see increasingly harsh denunciations of the President and his torture policy by leading Republicans like John McCain and Chuck Hagel, not coincidentally possible rivals for the GOP nomination to succeed Bush.

Both men know that they must reinforce their existing credentials as men of decency, honor and principle who know what they are talking about, both being decorated combat veterans. . .unlike most in the Administration, from Bush on down.

Bush's torture policy, rejected in the Senate last month by a 90-9 vote, was much in the news today. In addition to McCain and Hagel's efforts, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on whether it's OK to keep terrorism war prisoners in secret and/or military prisons (non-combatants in international law terms) and subject them to military tribunals, and indefinite incarceration. . .not to mention the tender mercies of their interrogators.

Where this gets particularly difficult is that the new Chief Justice, John Roberts, may be forced to recuse himself, since as an Appeals Court judge he voted with the majority to allow the government to carry on these policies, despite a lower court decision against the Administration. Roberts' recusal apparently would increase the chances for a 4-4 tie, which would uphold the Appeals Court (that is, Roberts) against the suspect. . .thus continuing the controversy in a particularly controversial manner.

On TV over the weekend, McCain and Hagel, echoing the warnings of another of the few real combat vets to serve Bush, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, urged Congress to approve a ban on torture as defined by the Administration. . .in an amendment (by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.) strenuously opposed by VP Dick Cheney, who has made a career of tough talk on military matters, but who made a point of not serving in the military during the Vietnam war.

This confrontation reinforces the irony that both McCain and Hagel are seen as "liberals" in the GOP, and probably have less chance of winning the nomination than any other major Republican candidate. That they would both be more likely to be able to over-come, in a general election, the Republican malaise created by the Bush Administration has never been a recommendation to the Party Faithful, but presumably there is time for Darwinian principles to be re-discovered by the GOP. . .survival of the fittest.

Republicans seem likely to receive an object lesson in that tomorrow, in Virginia's gubernatorial election. Although President Bush tried to "nationalize" the race by campaigning today for the Republican candidate, Jerry Kilgore, polls had the Democrat, Tim Kaine, with as much as a 9 point lead, with Bush's personal negatives increasing, even in conservative Virginia.

Although torture has not been an issue per se, the morality of politics certainly has, and it's been the disgustingly distorted Kilgore TV ads which seem to have played a major part in the rise of Democrat Kaine, with his strength being reinforced by Bush's growing unpopularity.

Bush spent the weekend in Latin America, failing to revive the FTAA, and observing from a safe distance the large, anti-American riots. In one of his infrequent press conferences, the President was unable to avoid torture, however, and it's notable that his responses continue the performance on Iraq which has amazed even his fellow Republicans. . .see no wrong, hear no wrong, and above all, confess to no wrong.

Instead, Bush left the really heavy lifting, pun intended, to Cheney, who graced the TV airwaves over the weekend saying torture is an important weapon against terrorists, and that the CIA must be exempted from current Congressional efforts to legislate against the Administration's torture policies.

Bush today refused to comment directly on Cheney's performance, nor would he directly deny reports that the CIA has maintained torture centers in some Eastern European nations. . .instead claiming that whatever facts are eventually revealed to or by Congress, we will discover that whatever torture which took place was done strictly according to his Administration's legal guidelines.

And that, of course, goes to the crux of the matter. . .the President's infamous "torture memo" which authorized CIA and military interrogators to torture someone up to but not past the point of "organ failure and death" in order to make them talk. A friend with an interesting intelligence analysis approach to all this suggests: "Bush sincerely, albeit conveniently, believes physical abuse without intent to to cause permanent injury or loss to vital organs is not torture, and believes the CIA black op is staying within boundaries most of the time." (The best historical analogy: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.")" Maybe. . .but even if true, it's hardly exculpation.

We are going to keep writing on this until it sticks: Col. Larry Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, has been making a series of increasingly detailed charges about the development and implementation of Bush's torture policy. So far, we have heard nothing to refute these claims by either Powell, or his Deputy Secretary, Rich Armitage. And if we do, they will either be not telling the truth now. . .or they were lying back then, when they told friends and colleagues about the curses and sarcasm hurled at them in Cabinet and Sub-cabinet debates on torture, well before Abu Ghraib.

Time to step up, guys. And we say that with respect. . .you fought and bled in Vietnam, as did McCain and Hagel. . .this one is causing the US to bleed to death all over the world. The torture memo was the logical result of Bush Cabinet debate...right? Or wrong?

Democrats have been slow to pick up on all this, but are now coming on strong, led primarily by Sen. Levin's anti-torture amendment, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, and his comrades on the ironically named Senate Committee on Intelligence. Some success so far, despite Republican Leadership opposition. . .it's now been agreed there will be a commission, like the 9/11, to really go into it all.

Whether that is too late to help American public diplomacy is one question; what should be of greater concern to Bush, Cheney et al is whether it's too late to salvage the morale of US troops overseas, much less whether it might head-off the torture of captured US soldiers in Iraq, or the terrorism war.

Chris Nelson has laid it out as it should be. President Bush claims he is opposed to torture but then his Vice President (and Bush by definition) is lobbying for exemption.

One of the best quotes in Lawrence Wilkerson's New America Foundation speech was "I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn't mean we make a radical change in the nature of America."

Wilkerson is absolutely right.

-- Steve Clemons

Chris Matthews is on Hardball right now laying out the case in a Special Report on the CIA leak investigation (and more) that the so-called "Iraq Group" in the White House deceived the Congress and America as a whole about WMD intelligence.

Matthews interviews Senator Carl Levin on the embellished "aluminum tube issue" and also outlines the very early Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA objections to the Iraqi source who was asserting that Saddam Hussein's government had given biological and chemical weapons training to al Qaeda operatives.

Matthews asks Levin "how analytically, did the Vice President and his staff look at the evidence regarding going to war, or not going to war?" Levin responded that Vice President Cheney and other key members of the administration IGNORED any evidence that went against their pre-conceived decision to go to war. Levin makes the case that this time around the intelligence community was RIGHT about the absence of any link between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda, and they were completely ignored and side-lined.

Levin pulled no punches in his level-headed criticism of the White House's early obsession to go to war with Iraq as the central response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Levin's account is supported by former UK Ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyers who is telling his story today in the Guardian -- as well as in recent commentary by former Department of State Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson AND former Bush 41 National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

This show is great. I rarely live blog -- but this show airs again at 7 p.m. -- and people should see it.

E.J. Dionne and Tony Blankley are both on now -- and they have all remarked that Carl Levin has a high degree of credibility. He voted against the Iraq War the first time around -- but his commentary about the White House's "Iraq Group" and its missteps were not propogandistic but "analytical" -- according to Matthews.

I am going to close this up now -- but Matthews says he'll have more on the White House "Iraq Group" as well as former Senator Tom Daschle who designed the gameplan for invoking the Rule 21 "Closed-Door Session" that Harry Reid used to shock Bill Frist and the Republican majority to pay more attention to the abuses on Iraq intelligence and America's right to know more about what exactly led this nation into war with Iraq.

Update:

I am back.

On the show, Tony Blankley refused to stand by Ahmed Chalabi -- speaking Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute at 2:30 p.m. Matthews implied that Chalabi is not a good guy -- and essentially questioned whether any institution, including the Washington Times editorial board or any other institution should host Chalabi to sell his wares. Blankley didn't take the bait.

He just basically said that the Pentagon pushed Chalabi -- and the CIA and State Department opposed him.

David Shuster is now on with his own segment that focuses on the White House "Iraq Group" whose job it was to "sell" the Iraq War. He starts with Andy Card who said that the marketing effort required working with a brand people new -- Saddam Hussein. Then the administration pumped the Iraq WMD story to Judith Miller, whose story was then trumpeted and echoed by Vice President Cheney on the television talk shows. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers and Condi Rice added to the tilt.

The report excerpts Bush's UN address on September 12, 2002 asserting that Iraq was acquiring aluminum tubes designed to build a nuclear weapon. Bush and Rice were both stating exactly the same thing, word for word, "we do not want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

When the CIA discounted the aluminum tubes as probably designed for artillery shells and not nukes -- the Bush administration warned the CIA to make no such disclosure. When ElBaradei's International Atomic Energy Agency made the same assessment as the CIA, the White House discounted the IAEA findings.

This Shuster report is excellent. Even Matthews patted him on the back for this excellent report, which ended with a quote from the current President of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass that the "Iraq War was a war of choice."

Daschle is now on arguing that the White House engaged in duplicitous manipulation -- but appropriately, Matthews challenged Daschle about the sad fact that John Kerry, Richard Schumer, and other leading Democratic senators argue that still given what they know they'd still vote to give the President the power to go to war against Iraq. Daschle ducked that and said that it is understandable that Senators, in times of crisis, would give the nation's Commander-in-Chief the benefit of the doubt. But I don't buy that.

Given what we know today, the Senate should never have empowered President Bush. They need to not only say this -- which they aren't -- but need to believe it.

Daschle was the designer of the "Rule 21" plan -- and knew that it would be one of the tools that a minority party could use in the absence of subpoena power to get the American public's attention back on the White House's abuse and fabrication of WMD intel to justify the Iraq invasion.

Daschle also said that Karl Rove should resign his post -- and that he has been bad for the nation and American politics. That is a predictable position -- but his clarity is refreshing.

Watch the show -- replays at 7 p.m.

-- Steve Clemons

Not when your Vice President is seeking to exempt important organs of the U.S. government from the McCain provision that would ban any agent of U.S. interests from subjecting detainees under its control to "torture or inhuman treatment."

Reuters reports that Bush defended these exemptions with an assertion that we are bringing terrorists to justice in accordance with American law.

Bush seems to think that his personal assessment about what is within the interests of the United States should be good enough for the citizens of the United States. The problem is that the American public doubts the Bush team's truthfulness -- particularly after the lies and mistruths that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove offered to colleagues like Scott McClellan, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and the American public in the Valerie Plame outing case.

From the Reuters report:

The United States will do what it takes to protect itself but "we do not torture," President Bush said on Monday in response to criticism of reported secret CIA prisons and the handling of terrorism suspects.

Bush defended his administration's efforts to stop the U.S. Congress from imposing rules on the handling of terrorism suspects.

He did not confirm or deny the existence of CIA secret prisons that The Washington Post disclosed last week and would not address demands by the International Committee of the Red Cross to have access to the suspects reportedly held at them.

"We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice," Bush said at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos. "We are gathering information about where the terrorists might be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law."

Vice President Dick Cheney has been spearheading an effort on Capitol Hill to have the CIA exempt from an amendment by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

More soon on Ahmad Chalabi. I wonder how many individuals on Chalabi's enemies list were tortured and/or inhumanely treated by American authorities or their agents.

-- Steve Clemons

I will be arriving in Prague Wednesday morning this week and there during the day.

I fly to Berlin Wednesday evening and will be there for a conference until Saturday morning, when I fly back to Prague. Sunday afternoon, I return to Washington.

I'm always interested in meeting those who are trying to engage in political commentary via blogs, or regular journalism. If any folks want to meet, drop me a line.

-- Steve Clemons

If the former Rector George F. Regas of All Souls Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California had given a sermon that was both pro-war and pro-Bush, would the IRS then have written a letter threatening the church's IRS exemption?

This is outrageious news. Read a slice of this piece by Patricia Ward Biederman and Jason Welch in the Los Angeles Times:

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California's largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church's former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.

In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991's Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that "good people of profound faith" could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support.

But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, "Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster."

On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that "a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church. . . " The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.

The letter went on to say that "our concerns are based on a Nov. 1, 2004, newspaper article in the Los Angeles Times and a sermon presented at the All Saints Church discussed in the article."

The IRS cited The Times story's description of the sermon as a "searing indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq" and noted that the sermon described "tax cuts as inimical to the values of Jesus."

As Bacon spoke, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a co-celebrant of Sunday's Requiem Eucharist, looked on.

I do not have the time at the moment to pursue the IRS communications staff, but here are the IRS contact points for journalists if any others are interested.

Here are the questions to ask:

1. Were there any inquiries regarding any ministers, pastors, or priests who turned over church parish rosters to principles or agents working for the Republican National Committee so that this "Dems Will Ban the Bible" election flyer could be mailed? (Here is a bit more commentary on that RNC mailer.)

2. What other churches, operating in the U.S., have had their IRS tax-exempt status challenged? I am referring to churches of Christian denomination -- not the Church of Scientology.

3. When Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other politically-directed ministers rant about Democratic political contenders or moderate Republicans -- like John McCain, as they did with McCain during the confederate flag controversy -- has the IRS issued any warning letters whatsoever? (I should be clear here that there are many evangelical ministers who do not feel it appropriate to engage in political endorsements one way or the other from the pulpit -- but this is not true with Robertson and Falwell).

4. Have any churches or ministers been challenged for pro-Bush commentary, or explicitly pro-Iraq war sermons that had a political tinge to it? Has even one church been challenged?

I am off to Prague and Berlin this week -- and have a number of other efforts underway -- particularly with regard to Ahmed Chalabi's visit to Washington this week -- but I may try to pose these questions to the IRS. But other bloggers and journalists out there should ask these sorts of questions.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. note: Thanks to SH and LF for sending me this piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Part of the serialization of former British Ambassador to the U.S. Sir Christopher Meyer has just hit the press in tomorrow's Guardian newspaper.

Ambassador Meyer, whom I had the pleasure of meeting many times during his tenure here in Washington, pulls no punches in this run-down of his prime minister's dance with Bush in the months before the Iraq invasion.

His intro says a lot, but read it ALL:

Hindsight usually follows failure. As I write, things looked bad in Iraq. At regular intervals over the last two years I have asked the same question of former colleagues in the British and American governments: in Iraq, is the glass half-empty or is it half-full? With one exception the answer has been "half-full".

The exception was a trusted American friend and government official, who, after paying a recent visit to Iraq, returned to tell the White House: "We're fucked."

The excerpt on Libby and Cheney is interesting -- mostly because Cheney's "Darth Vader" reputation preceded him. Meyer wanted to see Britain's options kept open -- and wanted to show that Britain was moving America on at least part of its agenda. It seemed instead Bush and Cheney were successfully seducing Blair, who was forfeiting Britan's points of leverage with "unconditional support" of Bush's regime change plans.

Here is the Cheney bit:

Something then occurred to me: Britain was acquiring the status of indispensable ally. I had depressed myself by the thought that Blair's unconditional support for Bush had destroyed British leverage; but it dawned on me that the Americans really needed us by their side if it came to war. "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, said to me later that we were the only ally that mattered. That was a powerful lever. Bush's decision to take the UN route was welcome, as far as it went, but it left a host of questions unanswered.

Just before Blair arrived at Camp David, I received a phone call from one of the most experienced and prominent foreign policy practitioners of the Clinton administration.

The familiar voice warned me that Cheney, Bush's sometimes intimidating vice-president, would be present throughout Blair's discussions with the president. "How the hell do you know?" I asked. "Don't ask, don't tell," was the enigmatic reply. "But Blair had better watch out."

The voice was right. Cheney attended all the meetings, including those where Blair and Bush were alone with their closest aides. After one of these conclaves Bush emerged to announce that Blair had "cojones", I may have been the only member of the waiting British team who understood this meant balls. It was a tribute to Blair's unequivocal reaffirmation to Bush of his earlier commitment to stand by the Americans, including in a war. This was what the Americans wanted from the Camp David summit.

Bush, in return would go to the UN to give Saddam one last chance to meet his international obligations.

Christopher Meyer is a lot like Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, for four years Chief of Staff at the Department of State under Colin Powell. Both men saw the behind-the-scenes action that led to the Iraq War and are now revealing what they know and saw because of a loyalty not to a Prime Minister or a President, but to their respective nations writ large.

The Mirror's comments on Sir Christopher Meyer revelations in The Guardian reads much like an assessment of Wilkerson:

The damning judgment of former diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer on his old master is the most devastating so far delivered.

As Our Man in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer loyally served the PM for nigh on six years.

He was Downing Street's go-between with the White House in the run-up to the Iraq war and personally backed the invasion.

A career mandarin, Meyer saw Thatcher and Major up close. And that is precisely what makes his memoirs devastating for a Premier clinging on to power as his sell-by date fast approaches.

Meyer can't be dismissed as a money-grabbing glory hunter out to settle old scores. He's donating fees for serialising his memoirs to charity.

They are dynamite because he saw the private face behind the carefully spun public image.

Blair swats away critics as if they were little more than irritating mosquitoes. Meyer is a different creature, a critic with a deadly bite.

If just half of what the ex-diplomat writes is true, Blair should lock himself in a No 10 cupboard out of embarrassment.

I am very much looking forward to Ambassador Meyer's entire book -- but these are hugely important revelations that must come out now -- to prevent the repetition of such disastrous military decisions.

What makes all of this even more intriguing is that I had some genuine hard-headed arguments across the dinner table with Meyer's Deputy Chief of Mission, Tony Brenton (this name was inserted after initial post as I could not originally remember my occasional dinner host's surname, though my arguments with him were quite memorable). This DCM sounded like a card-carrying neoconservative and was a greater proponent for the war and regime change than I think many even around President Bush were.

One prominent journalist shared this note about Brenton with me:

Tony Brenton is the man you're thinking of. He once tried to convince me that it didn't matter whether WMD were found or not and that us journos should stop focusing on the past.

I'll have to check out whether Meyer devotes any pages for his former war-happy Deputy.

-- Steve Clemons

According to AP:

President Bush, reacting to the indictment of a high-level White House aide, has ordered a refresher on ethics rules for his staff.

In a memo sent to all White House aides Friday, the counsel's office said it will hold briefings this week on ethics, with a particular focus on the rules governing the handling of classified information. Attendance is mandatory for anyone holding any level of security clearance.

The week after, there will be sessions on general ethical conduct for the rest of the staff.

"The president has made clear his expectation that each member of his Executive Office of the President (EOP) Staff adhere to the spirit as well as the letter of all rules governing ethical conduct for EOP Staff," the memo said.

It's always good to instill some sense of ethics among the staff, but the real question is whether Vice President Cheney, the source of so much that has gone wrong in the administration's national security behavior, will also enroll in the course.

Another question is that when it became clear that prisoner and detainee abuse was pervasive at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere -- why didn't the Pentagon do exactly the same and instill a more clear understanding among the troops of the moral code and human rights responsibilities of soldiers?

The answer is clear, the problem has been at the top.

Traveling today. More later.

-- Steve Clemons

If folks see this in the next couple of minutes, I will be discussing the struggle over the "national political conversation" between the White House and leading Dems on CNN's "On the Story" with Jacki Schechner in about two minutes.

It's a short clip but pretty good I think.

If you miss tonight, "On the Story" repeats at 1 p.m. on Sunday, eastern time. My clip is about 30 minutes in.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former State Department Chief of Staff, has been cooperating with the media to deepen and broaden his commentary on the breakdown of the national security decision making process in the White House.

Wilkerson's comments have continued to help keep the White House off balance and unable to distract the nation from the subject of the Libby indictments, the hyping of Iraq WMD intelligence, and prisoner detention abuse.

This morning on National Public Radio, Lawrence Wilkerson made the statement that Vice President Cheney is the individual most responsible for the pervasive and disturbing prisoner abuse scandal.

Here is an excerpt from Editor & Publisher:

His initial blast, on Oct. 19, at a luncheon in Washington, D.C. drew wide press attention. Now Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is at it again. In an interview for National Public Radio he charged that Vice President Cheney's office--and new chief aide David Addingtoon--was responsible for directives which led to U.S soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wilkerson said he had some hard evidence: a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff. The directives, he said, contradicted a 2002 order by President Bush for the military to abide by the Geneva Convention rules against torture.

The former Powell aide, in his October statements, declared that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that had hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.

President Bush tried in a Monday morning news blitz to turn the attention of the nation towards debates about the Supreme Court by nominating the controversial Appellate Court Judge Samuel Alito, Jr. and away from the Friday afternoon indictments of Vice President Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Just as fast, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid stole the focus of national attention back by shutting down public access to the Senate and invoking Rule 21, a "Closed Door Session", to focus on the failure of Senator Pat Roberts as Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to produce a long-promised report on the use and abuse of intelligence by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Reid's move was planned, purposeful, and brilliant in shutting down the White House's Alito-focused media machine.

The rest of this week, there has been a tug-of-war to control the "national conversation". However, those focused on the Iraq War, on Vice President Cheney's role in promoting torture as a tool of the state, and on Karl Rove's unresolved legal mess have one the day over those who want to compel a battle now about Sam Alito.

Saturday morning at 10 a.m., the President will use his radio address to focus solely on Alito and the Supreme Court.

But CNN reports that Bush today did what Scott McClellan did yesterday: he failed to extend to Karl Rove his legendary "full faith in the man" comment.

As CNN reports:

President Bush said Friday he would not comment on the status at the White House of deputy chief of staff Karl Rove until an investigation into his role in the leak of a CIA agent's name was completed.

Bush, taking questions from reporters on the fringes of the Summit of the Americas in Argentina, called the CIA leak probe a "very serious investigation," a week after a vice presidential aide, Lewis Libby, was indicted in the case.

"The investigation on Karl as you know is not completed," Bush said. "Therefore I will not comment about him and/or the investigation."

For those who don't watch these matters every day, the President's less than robust comment about his "architect" is highly unusual -- and means that the President is no longer making his own weather and his own reality. The White House is having to react to things happening to the administration -- and is off balance while still trying to steady matters.

So, even the President can't stay off the subject of the Iraq intel mess, Plame, and his staff.

While the American public may be getting a good case of whiplash from this back and forth struggle over the national agenda -- this is the first time in years that the Democrats -- as well as moderate Republicans like John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Lindsey Graham who are very angry about the revelations about governmental support for torture (kudos to Dana Priest) -- have been able to go punch for punch with this White House.

For those interested, I will be on CNN tonight, some time around 9 p.m. eastern, talking about this "whiplash" effect in national news struggles and how blogs see it.

More later.

The American Enterprise Institute is planning to host Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, for his first American speech in 2 1/2 years at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 9.

Chalabi should be in jail for the combination of espionage, lies, and deceit that he used to help seduce America into an invasion of Iraq that has left our nation's military and economic portfolio in tatters.

I have a lot more to write tomorrow about Deputy Prime Minister Chalabi, a man I once met and to whom I listened carefully at the offices of the New Republic some years ago.

But Chalabi's re-entry into Washington circles should be painful and embarrassing for him and his entourage.

More on this repugnant foe of American interests tomorrow.

-- Steve Clemons

During a recent major terrorism conference I organized, I hired a well-connected Republican consultant to help me fill out administration participation in the meeting. Considering that we were meeting amidst the Katrina disaster, my consultant did fairly well.

Apparently, both Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove were briefed about the conference -- and I was told that the White House, at least Karl Rove, was well aware of the role that TWN played in helping to block the Senate's confirmation of John Bolton as America's Ambassador to the United Nations.

One of my unnamed friends who worked doggedly (and successfully) on President Bush's reelection told me that my role in the Bolton fight had "been noted" by Rove, Karen Hughes and others -- and that they really, really didn't like being forced to make a recess appointment.

The reason for this preamble is that Rove allegedly stated that "Steve's conference looks important and seems mostly balanceed. We should participate, but the price for Bolton is that he won't get a 'Top Dog' but we'll give him a strong 'Deputy Dog.'"

Note that these comments were reported to me second hand.

The President's Deputy Chief of Staff may be the one in the dog house now.

Karl Rove looks like he may be suffering from the same kind of cryptic commentary from folks in the White House shoving him out the door that Rove inflicted on Trent Lott when Rove asssassinated him as Senate Majority Leader.

Check out Scott McClellan's complex, all-over-the-place response to the simple question of whether there were discussions about Karl Rove leaving White House employ.

Normally, McClellan would have just said "The President has full faith in Mr. Rove." End of story. Full Stop.

But read yourself:

Q Can you comment on The Washington Post report that there is some considerations that Rove should be leaving the White House?

MR. McCLELLAN: A couple of things. One, there's a lot of speculation going around at this time that relates to an ongoing investigation and an ongoing legal proceeding, and I'm not going to get into speculating about anything relating to that. You know, I will reiterate what I said the other day: there is no discussion of staff changes, beyond the usual vacancies that occur and beyond the ones we just announced relating to the vacancy that occurred in the Vice President's Office.

And I also pointed out that it's always the prerogative of the President to have a team in place that he feels best helps him advance his agenda and meet his needs. And we all always serve at the pleasure of the President, but that's just speaking more broadly and that's why I wanted to reiterate what I said the other day, that there is no discussion of staff changes, beyond typical vacancies and beyond the ones we've just recently filled.

Q So Rove might leave is part of a, sort of, natural staff turnover?

MR. McCLELLAN: See, this is a question trying to get me to play into all the speculation that's going on, and I'm just not going to do that. But that's why I reiterated the broader points that I've already made to you all earlier this week and those comments remain the same.

Q Well, the Post story, are you -- I'm not hearing a denial here.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm telling you I'm not going to get into all the speculation. Karl Rove is the Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the President. He continues to carry out his duties. But that's why I pointed out that, in terms of the question came up in the context of any discussion of staff changes, and that's why I reiterated what I said earlier.

Q Any discussion of an apology by him to staff?

MR. McCLELLAN: I've already addressed that question; I don't have anything else to add to it.

These are interesting times. It's hard to imagine George Bush without Karl Rove at his side. But something tells me that if Rove loses his spot as Deputy Chief of Staff, the President won't have to worry. He'll still be there, just a phone call away.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. note: I tried to link to White House press briefings site, but the press gaggle with McClellan is showing an error page. You might try this link later.

I hope my colleague, Afshin Molavi, is correct about brewing reform and civil society development in Iran. I've heard a lot over the years that Iran's theocratic rulers are very far from the democracy-pining average folks.

I think I still have to be convinced, but I chatted with Steve Kull recently who told me that his institution, Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), which has done such important policy attitude polling recently is going global -- with an important polling effort taking place in Iran. Perhaps we can get a better sense with decent poll results of what is really stirring, and what not, among Iran's citizens.

Here is an excerpt from Afshin Molavi's piece today in the New York Times:

Iran's modern middle class, which is increasingly urbanized, wired and globally connected, provides particularly fertile soil for these aspirations. The Stanford University scholar Abbas Milani has described Iran's middle class as a "Trojan horse within the Islamic republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance and civic responsibility." And so long as that class grows, so too will the pressure for democratic change.

If Mr. Ahmadinejad's foreign policy results in further global economic isolation or military intervention, however, the situation for Iran's democracy-minded middle class could deteriorate. Foreign hostility will furnish additional pretexts for the regime to frighten its people and crack down on dissent. Particularly if the European Union decides to participate in a tougher sanctions regime, liberal-minded Iranians will lose contact with the foreign investors, educators, tourists and businessmen who link them to the outside world.

Now more than ever, middle-class and other democracy-minded Iranians need to preserve and expand their network of institutions independent from the government -- institutions in which they can take refuge from the rapacious hardliners who seek to control all aspects of Iranian life. That network should include a strong private sector; a rich array of nongovernmental organizations dealing with issues like poverty, women's rights and youth unemployment; and social, intellectual and cultural associations that communicate with counterparts abroad.

-- Steve Clemons

Just got a note from the foreign policy team at the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and the Ray Suarez interview has been pushed back one more day. It will air tomorrow night.

I'll be watching it in Santa Fe, where I am heading now to give a couple of talks. I'm staying on the Plaza if anyone has some good scoops.

One interesting point though before I jump on the plane. Take a quick look (it's now 2:02 p.m. eastern) at CNN's website, www.CNN.com.

Libby's court appearance is big news. Rosa Parks' burial service is noted. Former FEMA Director Michael Brown is getting skewered.

But no where on the front page is there mention of Supreme Court nominated Sam Alito.

We'll be at Alito a lot -- but my hat is off to Senator Harry Reid whose Rule 21 tactic changed the conversation back to the abuses of intelligence and reckless administration behavior that led to the Iraq War.

This is the conversation America should be having now -- and thanks to Reid and a few others, this is beginning to happen.

-- Steve Clemons

From this morning's Washington Post:

Top White House aides are privately discussing the future of Karl Rove, with some expressing doubt that President Bush can move beyond the damaging CIA leak case as long as his closest political strategist remains in the administration.

If Rove stays, which colleagues say remains his intention, he may at a minimum have to issue a formal apology for misleading colleagues and the public about his role in conversations that led to the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to senior Republican sources familiar with White House deliberations.

While Rove faces doubts about his White House status, there are new indications that he remains in legal jeopardy from Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's criminal investigation of the Plame leak. The prosecutor spoke this week with an attorney for Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about his client's conversations with Rove before and after Plame's identity became publicly known because of anonymous disclosures by White House officials, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.

Fitzgerald is considering charging Rove with making false statements in the course of the 22-month probe, and sources close to Rove -- who holds the titles of senior adviser and White House deputy chief of staff -- said they expect to know within weeks whether the most powerful aide in the White House will be accused of a crime.

Such a move would certainly test the bounds of Bush's legendary loyalty to those loyal to him.

-- Steve Clemons

According to a new CBS poll, President Bush now has only a 35% approval rating, and a whopping 57% disapproval rating.

Richard Nixon in November 1973, at roughly the same point in the second term where Bush finds himself, had a 27% approval rating.

At the same point in second terms, Bill Clinton had a 57% approval rating, Reagan had 65%, Eisenhower had 58%.

. . .just 8 more points.

When is that next Patrick Fitzgerald press conference?

-- Steve Clemons

Tonight, President and Mrs. Bush will be hosting a very upper crust, ritzy dinner for the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.

I am not going, but I am impressed that Mary Cheney is taking her partner, Heather Poe, to the dinner. TWN applauds this.

I also think that there is an odd set of cascading ironies that Nancy Reagan is taking Merv Griffin. Let's just leave it at that -- but it's very cool.

I hope that James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, and some other anti-gay types get a little apoplectic about Laura Bush's "big tent" tonight.

Anyway, good for Mary.

-- Steve Clemons

I reported earlier that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff at the State Department the last four years, will be on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer in a fascinating interview with Ray Suarez.

However, I have just heard from the foreign policy producers, and the segment will run TOMORROW, not tonight.

What will run TONIGHT is a hard-hitting segment on Chris Matthews' Hardball that MSNBC's David Shuster has assembled that really gets at the big questions regarding Vice President Cheney's role, if any, in the Plame affair and the circumstances specified in the indictment counts against Scooter Libby.

The Hardball segment will run at about 5:20 p.m. eastern time, and then the show repeats at 7 p.m.

Chris Matthews also has a humdinger of an interview (or maybe the more appropriate word is. . .interrogation) at the top of his show with White House Counselor Dan Bartlett. Should be sizzling.

Also, I will be competing with Chris Matthews at that 7 p.m. time slot on an interesting radio program on Radio Open Source titled "The Muscular Wilsonians: What Do They Believe?"

Other guests on the program with me will be Samantha Power, Derek Chollet, and David Rieff. Should be fun.

I am told that you can listen to the show live from 7 p.m. - 8 p.m. at this link. A downloadable MP3 of the full show will be available about an hour after it finishes.

And if you read German, Stern magazine just put out this interview with Lawrence Wilkerson.

Lot's cooking. More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

The Brent Scowcroft profile and interview, "Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?" by Jeffrey Goldberg has just been posted in full on the New Yorker website.

If you haven't read it, you can read it here.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. note: Thanks to NG at Oxford for the tip.

I just posted this entry over at TPM Cafe.

I found President Bush's positive commentary about the IMF and the Argentina bail-out surprising and out of character given the intensity of the 1997-98 debate about IMF replenishment.

Some of you will not find this commentary by Bush so interesting -- but as someone who was pretty close to that battle, I'm very surprised by the unqualified, casual support that Bush implied in his comments today.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar Norm Ornstein hits the Alito ball out of the park with a powerful, incisive op-ed today in Roll Call.

Essentially, Ornstein makes