Read here.

Heritage, AEI and the Hudson Institute have issued a statement decrying the Human Rights Council proposal issued by UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson and have lauded John Bolton's stand.

Where were they when Bolton was uninvolved with the negotiations.

More later on this serious issue.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is my quick read on America's rejection of the UN Human Rights Council proposal that some -- including the New York Times -- argue is a sham that undermines genuine international commitment to more rigorous global human rights protection.

The odd thing is that many of the leading NGOs don't see it that way.

However, behind the "white hat" that Bolton is wearing right now as a crusader for more rigorous human rights protections -- and TWN will tip its hat that this is something we all should be working for -- he nonetheless tried to secure permanent membership on the Human Rights Council for the Permanent 5 of the UN Security Council -- including those inspiring defenders of human liberty, Russia and China.

This package negotiated to create a new Human Rights Council may not go far enough and perhaps should be renegotiated, but there must also be some better ground between Bolton saying "my way" or "no way".

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note works hard to provide constructive, serious critiques of Bush administration foreign policy and attempts to avoid reckless typecasting or tractionless hyperventilation regarding what this administration is up to.

We try instead to characterize honestly the power grab that the Executive Branch has been engaged in since 9/11, but we also recognize that the administration is not monolithically united behind the adminstration's most outrageous positions -- and that the loyal minority has not done its part. On both the Democratic side and among Republican moderates, those who believe in checks-and-balances have done little to compellingly challenge this White House.

I want change in policy -- not shrillness for its own sake -- but this excellent summary of the vital debate about Executive Branch power by Sidney Blumenthal has hardened my resolve to do whatever I can to delegitimate and defang Cheney's operation.

I know Bush is the big boss, but Bush's tactic has been to allow two -- and perhaps three -- contending groups inside his White House to wage war with each other while he tilts in the final analysis towards the group that seems to win out in these private gladiator contests. Most often, the winning tag-team has been Cheney-Rumsfeld over all others.

Cheney's team have been the architects of both a kind of Presidency that is exactly what the Roman "dictatorships" were defined as -- a temporary provision of unchecked executive power to a ruler -- as well as the mercurial rise in power of the Office of the Vice President. And Cheney's team is the scary sort of lot that is hell-bent on establishing a kind of permanence to their power that threatens in very, very real terms the genuineness of our democracy.

Roman dictators still had constraints on what they could do. For instance, absolute authority was granted for distinct periods of time. Certain informal norms of continued consultations with the Roman Senate continued during the period of dictatorship.

The word "dictator" in modern language implies far vaster power and many negative connotations than the Roman application of the concept carried with it.

Nonetheless, Bush has become the epitome of a Roman dictator in the 21st century in his assertion of "unitary executive" authority which this White House has argued has "inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances." The problem is that unlike Rome, where the Senate granted the dictator great powers, Congress has not -- in fact -- given Bush the authority to operate beyond his Constitutional authority. Bush has, instead, asserted that authority and taunted Congress to stop him.

This power grab should dominate our media and our civic discourse. Our President -- via a deranged, anti-democratic team of power-obsessed thugs in Vice President Cheney's office -- is engaged in a clear assault on the core architectural joists of American democracy.

Sidney Blumenthal writes in his excellent piece:

Bush operates on the radical notion of the "unitary executive," that the president has inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances. By his extraordinary order, he elevated Cheney to his level, an acknowledgment that the vice president was already the de facto executive in national security. Never before has any president diminished and divided his power in this manner. Now the unitary executive inherently includes the unitary vice president.

The unprecedented executive order bears the earmarks of Cheney's former counsel and current chief of staff, David Addington. Addington has been the closest assistant to Cheney through three decades, since Cheney served in the House of Representatives in the 1980s. Inside the executive branch, far and wide, Addington acts as Cheney's vicar, bullying and sarcastic, inspiring fear and obedience. Few documents of concern to the vice president, even executive orders, reach the eyes of the president without passing first through Addington's agile hands.

To advance their scenario for the Iraq war, Cheney & Co. either pressured or dismissed the intelligence community when it presented contrary analysis. Paul Pillar, the former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."

On domestic spying conducted without legal approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Addington and his minions isolated and crushed internal dissent from James Comey, then deputy attorney general, and Jack Goldsmith, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

On torture policy, as reported by the New Yorker this week, Alberto Mora, recently retired as general counsel to the U.S. Navy, opposed the Bush administration's abrogation of the Geneva Conventions -- by holding thousands of detainees in secret camps without due process and using abusive interrogation techniques -- based on legal doctrines Mora called "unlawful" and "dangerous." Addington et al. told him the policies were being ended while continuing to pursue them on a separate track. "To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values," Mora said.

More later on this theme, but David Addington, Rasputin's Rasputin, needs to be outed, vilified, and removed from power.

I'm not pleased about the theatre of Scooter Libby's defense fund charade, but at least he is now occupied in a way that keeps Americans mostly safe from the harm he was unleashing.

The reality though -- hard as it is to admit -- is that Vice President Cheney shrugged off the Libby indictment in a few weeks and has roared back to a robust role in national security affairs and is now trying to strangle Condoleezza Rice's foreign policy agenda.

Addington's rise and those of his acolytes -- have given the neoconservative agenda some new faces, lesser known, but in many ways far more insidious.

-- Steve Clemons

(Saudi King Abdullah greets Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr)

I'm about to get on a plane -- and I have no idea what this news alert I just received from MSNBC entails:

Explosion, gunfire reported at oil refinery in eastern Saudi Arabia. Details soon.

But if Shia-Sunni tension is boiling over into Saudi Arabia despite King Abdullah's recent efforts to reach out to Saudi Arabia's Shia minority and his personally hosting Muqtada al-Sadr during January's Haj, we will have an even more catastrophic mess in the Middle East in which America has sigificant complicity.

-- Steve Clemons

(John Poindexter and Ronald Reagan)

National Journal's Shane Harris has discovered that the "Total Information Awareness" program conceived in part under the direction of Iran-Contra tainted former Reagan National Security Advisor John Poindexter was not terminated.

Only the name was.

Instead of TIA (Total Information Awareness), the program was passed off to a public-private host and re-branded "Basketball".

Shane Harris writes:

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

At the time the program was discontinued, people thought that it was immoral and just disagreeable to create a system that essentially accumulated "bets" and created a market to attempt to indicate where people most thought the next terror strike would occur.

While I see problems in the approach, I always thought that there were interesting possibilities in an approach that would try and absorb the vast amounts of information that marketplaces develop.

But when a program is killed by Congress, the program should die -- and it didn't.

This reminds me of the old adage about Henry VIII's wives: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

Perhaps that is in bad taste and no insult meant to Henry's unfortunate spouses, but it just seems to me ridiculous and consistent with Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial-complex that a single weapons system can be divorced and beheaded, and in the end, survive and even thrive.

Eugene Jarecki's film, Why We Fight, gets at this. See it.

-- Steve Clemons

I have several posts going up tonight in quick succession on different topics. Have been delayed because of travel gremlins but arrived in snow-covered Casper, Wyoming a short bit ago.

A herd of antelope were waiting for me at the airport. Seriously, they were. Without the snow, they looked a bit like what was above -- about 50 of them.

Really cool. Anyway, more tonight -- promise.

-- Steve Clemons

When I first heard about www.ScooterLibby.com, I thought that John Aravosis had bought the URL address and done something fun with it.

But, it's genuine Scooter -- and it's good for some laughs.

Libby has launched a vanity site soliciting donations for his legal defense against 5 indictments brought by Patrick Fitzgerald in the Valerie Plame investigation.

On other fronts, TWN is off to Casper, Wyoming to speak to the Casper Committee on Foreign Relations tomorrow.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

(German citizen Khaled El-Masri who was a victim of mistaken identity and kidnapped and 'rendered' by American intelligent agents to a foreign secret interrrogation and detention center)

TWN had a productive adventure in London, where I had been asked to give a talk and then invited to participate in meetings with a number of Arab intellectuals and public officials.

I also met with journalists from The Economist, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Al Jazeera Channel, and the BBC to discuss how they were covering the American and British occupation of Iraq, revelations about 'extraordinary rendition', secret detention centers, and the increasing number of kiss-and-tell stories by national security bureaucrats whose loyalties to the US President and British Prime Minister have been shredded by duplicity, moral and political recklessness, and in some cases illegality that they witnessed as insiders.

As I reported yesterday, I was going to a screening in London of Yosri Fouda's 46-minute, made for Al Jazeera Channel (in Arabic), production on the topic of 'extraordinary rendition' of terror suspects to third countries for interrogation, and as the cases have turned out, frequent application of torture.

Fouda and his project producer, Giles Trendle, have transformed the Arabic-language production into an English-language version, and the result is seriously provocative. The clip will run on Al Jazeera International, the new English language Arab satellite network.

TWN has made arrangements with the management at Al Jazeera International to be the first blog to provide web-based access to the production. Details are still being worked out regarding whether the digital version will be based on TWN's servers, or Al Jazeera International's -- but as matters firm up, I will keep readers posted.

"Triangle of Anger" is a must see for those worried about a global-war-on-terror practice whose mistaken application against innocents has undermined the American brand among many Muslims (as well as non-Muslims) around the world.

As one friend of mine who was a senior intelligence and foreign service official who has worked in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan told me, rendition has a decades long history in the US national security arena. But rendition in the pre-al Qaeda era was generally used by American police and intelligence agencies to pick up non-American criminals or likely criminals -- usually in the narcotics racket -- who often were in the US illegally without visas or faked passports. In these cases, the suspects would be apprehended and deported to the nation of which they were a citizen.

However, what has happened in the era of al Qaeda is that American intelligence agencies are kidnapping terror suspects and without providing any public record of the act essentially are 'disappearing' people to detention and interrogation centers in various countries around the world. In many cases, the recipient country is not the rended individual's home of national citizenship.

One particularly outrageous case that Fouda documents was that of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who while vacationing in Macedonia was arrested and packed off to a detention/interrogation facility in Afghanistan. After authorities discovered that the man they had was innocent and was taken on the basis that he had the same name as a wanted al Qaeda operative, they still held him incommunicado for an extra two months.

Even after he was released -- without passport or identity papers or any gesture of apology from American officials -- on the border of Albania and Macdenia, El-Masri was later refused entry into the US and had to fly back to Germany because the known to be innocent German was still on border watch/reject lists.

Condoleezza Rice herself had to personally intervene to compel the immigration and border bureaucracy to allow him entry into the US on his next trip, when he met with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to appropriately file suit against the US government.

I don't know the rules for submitting documentary productions at the Sundance film festival, but Yosri Fouda's film should compete in this year's competition as it is a highly revelatory depiction of an intelligence practice that most know nothing about -- and in my view is extremely fair-minded.

Fouda takes no below-the-belt shots and interviews not only victims of extraordinary rendition, innocent cases and some perhaps not, and their family members and associates -- but he interviews a few of the architects of America's rendition policy.

Former CIA official Michael Scheuer is one of the primary backbones of the film. Scheuer helped construct the contemporary rendition program and applie it to al Qaeda operatives. On the film, he openly and self-critically questions the utility of the rendition program, which he thinks has done more harm than good to the perception of America in the world, and has not contributed much to American safety that could not otherwise be achieved by existing laws.

One thing I did not realize and learned from Fouda's and Giles Trendle's treatment on rendition history is that the founding fathers of the policy were President Bill Clinton, then National Security Council official Richard Clarke, and National Security Advisory Sandy Berger. Scheuer gave the program its practical legs and application, but these other three conceptualized and authored the program.

George W. Bush's team ratcheted up the use and broad application of extraordinary rendition as a key part of their actions against targeted terrorists and collaborators.

The film was finished the week that Dana Priest's blockbuster scoop on secret European detention centers hit the Washington Post, so those themes were not developed in this production, but it seems to me that a program on 'extraordinary rendition' itself

Some of the best footage comes from a Swedish journalist who first broke the story on America’s fleet of private planes commissioned by the CIA to render suspects from third countries and the US to other nations. The journalist actually tracked down the CIA front company that operated one of the planes and pulled of a 'sting' phone call by implying he was a Swedish intelligence official and had a suspect who needed to be 'rendered' elsewhere -- and was the plane available. His answer from the firm was "of course, when and where?"

Another journalist got a good film clip of the plane as it landed on a refueling stop in Iceland and got the tired crew and operators of the flight on camera, though they actually tried to hide their faces behind the nose of the plane when they saw that they were being filmed.

Fascinating production. 150 people attended the Frontline Club standing room only screening in London, and the folks I spoke to gave it rave reviews.

One reason the film is very brave is that it indicts governments in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and elsewhere that have received the 'rendered' victims.

I highly recommend it and will have it linked when it becomes available.

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note just arrived in London a short while ago and will be connecting with Al Jazeera London Bureau Chief and senior terrorism investigative correspondent Yosri Fouda tonight.

Fouda and his colleague and producer Giles Trendle are screening a new film they produced (46 minutes long) titled "The Triangle of Anger" about America's 'extraordinary rendition' practices since September 11, 2001.

This film was first broadcast on Al-Jazeera in January 2006 as an episode of the satellite channel's flagship current affairs documentary program, "Top Secret". It has now been translated into English and will be screened at the Frontline Club tonight at 7:30 p.m.

I will be there at about 6:45 p.m., perhaps earlier and am happy to have drinks with any TWN readers who may wander by. Frontline also has a restaurant, open to the public, on the ground floor.

Just go in to the restaurant and ask for the screening, which is on the second floor, and which I think may run five pounds if you are not a member of the club (perhaps if you are very nice and say you are a friend of Yosri's, they'll cut a deal. . .but can't promise that).

The good news is that there is a bar up on the screening floor as well.

More later. Just truth in advertising, TWN's proprieter appears as one of the commentators in this "Triangle of Anger" show.

-- Steve Clemons

My colleagues Nir Rosen and Peter Bergen -- both fellows in foreign policy at the New America Foundation (where I also work) -- are leading American interpreters and chroniclers of the world's two most dangerous and intriguing personalities -- Osama bin Laden in Bergen's case and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Rosen's.

Peter Bergen's new book, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History or al Qaeda's Leader just earned a stunning review as the lead piece in the just issued edition of the New York Review of Books. I highly recommend the entire long piece.

But the opener sets out a path for a quality accounting of bin Laden:

When Osama bin Laden speaks, people listen. They tend, however, to hear different things. Take the coverage of his latest voice-from-the-mountain tape, released in mid-January. The New York Times and The Washington Post both headlined with the words "Bin Laden Warns of Attacks."

The equivalent two highbrow Arabic-language newspapers, al-Hayat and al-Sharq al-Awsat, led instead with the news that the al-Qaeda leader had offered a truce.

Neither version was wrong. As all four papers went on to explain, bin Laden had done both things: threatened to strike America again, and proposed a hudna, or cease-fire. Yet the difference in emphasis pointed to the roots of deeper misapprehensions. How, more than four years after September 11, and after so much subsequent bloodshed, can this fugitive terrorist still command the respect and admiration of a good number of his fellow Muslims?

And why, after the mobilization of so many resources, has America's campaign against him produced such unsatisfactory results?

One simple answer is that neither most Americans nor many Muslims have been listening closely enough. As a result, neither has fully understood the man, his motivations, or his aims.

Whereas bin Laden continues to manipulate and mislead his Muslim audience, America has failed either to undermine him effectively or to speak persuasively to the Muslim public.

When finished with the glimpses of bin Laden's personality and goals unearthed by Peter Bergen from those who know him, the next vital read for those interested in the personalities of hard core Islamic radicalism need to read the brilliant New York Times Magazine piece, "Iraq's Jordanian Jihadis", by Nir Rosen.

Rosen tells the surprising story of how al-Zarqaqi and Jordan have become part of the epicenter of modern Islamic terrorism.

This important article opens:

Jordan has long been thought of as the quiet country of the Middle East. People called it the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom and went there for a rest. King Hussein and his son, King Abdullah II, who assumed the throne in February 1999, were friendly enough with the United States, respectful toward Israel and measured advocates of modernization.

As for the Islamist stirrings that have roiled the region since the Iranian revolution of 1979, it was widely believed that the king's domestic security service, the Mukhabarat, had infiltrated every group that might think to stir unrest. But in truth Jordan had not been insulated from the radicalism that has engulfed the Mideast in our time: in 1970 and '71, Jordan's Palestinians, who then, as now, made up a majority of the country's population (today, 5.6 million), erupted, and their insurrection was brutally put down.

And in the course of finding ways to sustain its political dominance, the Hashemite monarchy gave the Muslim Brotherhood -- the local variant of an Islamist movement that began in Egypt in the 1920's -- control of educational policy, which would hold dark implications.

Now we know that the quiet kingdom was producing the man thought to be spearheading the deadliest aspects of the Iraqi insurgency -- and who brought the fight back to Jordan in three hotel bombings last December: Ahmed Fadeel Nazal al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after his hometown of Zarqa, a poor city an hour's drive north of Amman.

How the quiet kingdom of Jordan could produce a man who has become known as the Sheik of the Slaughterers is a question at the heart of contemporary jihad.

Zarqawi is exceptionally cruel, but he is otherwise not such an exception. Jordan is home to many jihadis, young men from much the same milieu that produced Zarqawi, and especially since the United States invaded Iraq nearly three years ago, Jordan has increasingly become a not-so-quiet place, a place where local Islamists cross easily into Iraq and back, a place where a jihadist underground can seem almost a normal part of a nation's life.

And if such an underground can become normal in quiet Jordan, what is to keep it from becoming normal in any Muslim country?

Let's jump out of terror-watch mode for a moment though and consider another interesting race -- that for Secretary General of the United Nations.

Interestingly, a name that appears on every serious list as a potential successor to Kofi Annan, whose term ends on December 31st of this year, is Prince Zeid Raed al-Hussein of Jordan.

Richard Holbrooke identifies Prince Zeid as a "dark horse" candidate for the UN Secretary General job, but he has a major ally working quietly (believe it or not) on his behalf: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Bolton is currently the President of the UN Security Council (during the month of February) and is encouraging earlier deliberation on the potential successor to Annan than is traditional. What is traditional is for a name to come out of nowhere at the end of a complicated, opaque international negotiation and be announced practically at the very last moment.

Sources close to Bolton report that he has been meeting quite a number of the leading candidates for the Secretary General position, interviewing them as it were, and according to one source, the candidate who stands out so far among all others -- in Bolton's mind -- is Prince Zeid.

UN Protocol dictates that Asia be the home of the next Secretary General, but Bolton has been arguing that "merit alone" should determine who is hired for the job and who not.

But perhaps Bolton shouldn't push so hard. Last week, I had dinner with one of Asia's leading Ambassadors to the U.S. who told me that Asia would consider Prince Zeid as one of theirs. A leading Chinese diplomat told me the same thing.

Given that the Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand, the Korean Foreign Minister, Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore, and an Indonesian candidate all have their hats in the Secretary General ring, this comment about the Jordanian prince is fascinating.

But geopolitically, the other compelling reason to support Prince Zeid is that he'd be a leading alternative archetype to Jordan's other well known personality, Zarqawi.

Zeid is a Muslim and descends from the royal line of princes and kings who claim direct descendency from Muhammad.

I agree with John Bolton that merit should dictate who takes the helm as UN Secretary General, but I find myself also agreeing with him that elevating someone like Zeid to the position of Secretary General might send a number of constructive signals to the Muslim world -- that they matter and have leaders engaged in constructive stake-holding in the global system.

-- Steve Clemons

Though he has low favorability ratings and an increasingly large chorus of critics, President Bush has established a template for bold and decisive executive power that seems monarchially ill-disposed to the checks-and-balances of a healthy democracy. In many ways, he has pushed the powers of the Executive Branch beyond the high water mark established by Nixon's presidency at its zenith.

One of the odd but real consequences of Bush's power is that Americans seem to be perceiving other world leaders through a Bush-modeled prism. This is particularly the case with Iran's populist demogogue president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is clearly hell-bent on creating collisions -- first with Israel, less over its existence than in wanting to do some regional head-butting to establish Iran as a hegemonic rival and in order to embarrass and emasculate Egypt's and Jordan's Muslim leaders. Secondly, Ahmadinejad wants a collision with the West over Iran's nuclear activities to legitimate his revolutionary faction as the authentic national voice of Iran.

But what is strange is that there are numerous forces inside Iran working overtime to impede Ahmadinejad from fulfilling his ambitions -- while America and Europe are doing much to empower him and give him exactly what he wants.

The question of checks-and-balances in Iran is important -- whether they are theocratic or democratic institutions. We need to understand how executive authority in Iran flows -- or Europe and the U.S. may, out of ignorance, empower Iran's president while undermining other players who keep the blustery rhetoric of Ahmadinejad just that.

This fiery, anti-Israel, nuclear-obsessed President in Iran failed to get his preferred Oil Minister past the Majles-e-Shura-ye-Eslami, or Islamic Consultative Assembly three times. Finally, he had to compromise with other power centers in Iran's government -- who wanted competent manager in that post rather than one of Ahmadinejad's retainers.

This informed comment by Nasrin Alavi gives a picture of the Ahmadinejad-control facility that Iran's other power centers are building:

In fact the president has less power than any of his Islamic Republic predecessors. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, has seemingly been startled enough by Ahmadinejad's disruptive tendencies to grant the expediency council (a non-elected body headed by Rafsanjani) oversight of the presidency.

This weakness goes back to Ahmadinejad's election victory in June 2005, when accusations of vote-rigging were made by three of his rival candidates (among the seven allowed to compete for the office, from the 1,010 who registered in the attempt) as well as many other observers. The candidates who alleged foul play -- Mehdi Karroubi (onetime speaker of parliament), Mostafa Moin (ex-education minister), and Hashemi Rafsanjani, (ex-president) -- each represent factional power-blocs within Iran, and have continued to chide Ahmadinejad since his power was confirmed.

Ahmadinejad's struggles to install an oil minister after a three-month political deadlock further exposed his political frailty, and the divisions among Iran's conservatives. After three failed attempts, he was finally forced into a major compromise by proposing an acceptable candidate for the post -- one who had backed a political rival during the presidential elections.

And read this analysis titled "Factional Infighting in Iran Complicates Nuclear Diplomacy". (The writer, Kamal Nazer Yasin, is writing this excellent material from inside Iran under a pseudonym.)

He writes:

An ultra-conservative faction in Tehran, headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not interested in exploring compromise on the nuclear issue, according to several political analysts in Tehran.

Hardliners evidently believe that confrontation with the West on the nuclear issue could help regenerate a sense of national purpose among Iranians. Political apathy has proliferated in Iran in recent years, due in large measure to the government's inability to address pressing economic problems.

It seems that one of the highest objectives of European and American nuclear negotiators should be to pursue a diplomatic track with Iran that chokes off fuel to Ahmadinejad's nuclear populism -- and working with elements beyond his office and which appeal to Iran's broader public would be a constructive step.

Yasin continues his excellent essay with insights into how factions are lining up to constrain Iran's president:

The hardliners are facing rising opposition from a moderate faction, which appears to enjoy support from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary, Ali Larijani, recently praised some aspects of the Russian plan and emphasized that Tehran did not intend to withdraw from the NPT. Larijani is widely viewed as a political protege of Ayatollah Khamenei's.

Ahmadinejad enjoyed the backing of Ayatollah Khamenei during the initial stage of his presidency. But Ahmadinejad's pursuit of a radically conservative political agenda quickly prompted Ayatollah Khamenei to distance himself from the president's faction. The supreme leader, apparently seeing a need for Iran to have a political counter-balance to the presidential faction, has reached out to centrists led by Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The Rafsanjani-led faction is willing to engage the international community on the nuclear issue. Former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rouhani, who is considered a Rafsanjani protege, suggested in a February 9 interview with the Iranian Student News Agency that a confrontational approach would be counterproductive to Iran's national interests. "Shouting alone won't help us achieve our goals," Rouhani stated. "To stand up to our enemies, we need a multi-pronged, proactive and dynamic strategy."

This isn't to say that other elements of Iran's political sphere are going to be America- or Europe-huggers, but they clearly understand the high costs of both isolation and hot collision.

Another part of this equation that must be further explicated -- another day -- is that isolating Iran, or bombing it, could have staggering and profound consequences for American engagement in the Middle East for decades.

There are dangers -- and complicated costs and benefits -- for Europe, the U.S., Iran, and other players in the Middle East.

But we need to get our antennae working regarding what is real and not on the Iran side of the equation and resist inflating Ahmadinejad's powers to look like those of the "makes-his-own-reality" George Bush.

-- Steve Clemons

TWN has just been sent some very interesting material posted at OutragedModerates.org.

A blogger's FOIA request has yielded Steven Cambone's handwritten notes of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld's instructions to General Myers at 2:40 pm on September 11, 2001.

Some of the lines are fascinating:

"Go massive. . .Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Judge whether hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) @ same time -- Not only UBL (Osama bin Laden)

Hard to get a good case

Need to move swiftly

This material first surfaced on CBS News' September 4, 2002 report, "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11" -- as Thad Anderson of Outraged Moderates reports -- but is not referenced in the 9/11 Commission Report or other accounts of 9/11 post-attack planning.

Here is one of the key pages from Steven Cambone's notes that was not revealed in its entirety on the CBS report -- and the full package of notes can be seen here.

Blogging today up in Deep Creek, Maryland -- in the middle of a small snow storm -- and hanging at Trader's Coffee House on Highway 219 in case there are any TWN loyal readers up here.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I had to pause between a set of non-stop meetings today after briefly seeing an email from the Council on Foreign Relations highlighting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's complaint about the "globally hostile media environment."

He lamented that today's terrorist arsenal includes "e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs."

A CNN report captures his point:

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

"Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted," Rumsfeld said.

"For the most part, the U.S. government still functions as a 'five and dime' store in an eBay world," Rumsfeld said, referring to old-fashioned U.S. retail stores and the online auction house respectively.

U.S. military public affairs officers must learn to anticipate news and respond faster, and good public affairs officers should be rewarded with promotions, he said.

The Pentagon's propaganda machine still operates mostly eight hours a day, five or six days a week while the challenges it faces occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rumsfeld called that a "dangerous deficiency."

He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of "Saddam Hussein's mass graves."

A couple of quick points.

First, perhaps Secretary Rumsfeld ought to go back and look at the images that were PRODUCED by Americans -- not al Qaeda.

Secretary Rumsfeld, take a good look at these horrific, grizzly, and detestable depictions of what soldiers under your command did at Abu Ghraib.

Second, no one in senior levels of command has been held accountable for the Abu Ghraib outrage -- no one in your immediate circle, Mr. Secretary -- nor you, yourself.

I think it's going to take more than spin, and more than a multi-billion dollar PR budget to turn our public diplomacy around -- it's going to require a GENUINE "hearts and minds" strategy, but thus far we've been more focused with torturing and disappearing those hearts and minds.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I've seen Mary Matalin in a photo on the cover of the Washington Post walking with Cheney the day after news hit that the Vice President shot his hunting acquaintance. Matalin's even been out in the press taking a few shots for Cheney.

Karl Rove is in the Cheney shooting stories. So is the President's Chief-of-Staff Andy Card.

And there are probably other White House aides-de-camp who are getting some nods in the press as the media tries to squeeze this story to its farthest possible end.

But one name is oddly missing -- completely (well, nearly). He's not mentioned in a single blog or news article on this story.

And that is Cheney's replacement for Scooter Libby as his Chief-of-Staff David Addington.

For the record, Tom DeFrank, Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Daily News, did reference David Addington's disdain for the press in a Charlie Rose Show segment on the Cheney shooting incident:

CHARLIE ROSE: How about the fact that "Scooter" Libby is not there? Is that a factor?

TOM DEFRANK: Well, I think so. David Addington, the new chief of staff, a very accomplished lawyer, a very hard liner, is basically even more disdainful of the press than many of the people around the vice president, and certainly more disdainful than, I`m told, than - than Cheney himself. And so you`re not going to have a chief of staff in there saying, "Chief, we`ve got to get this out. We`ve got to do something quickly." So for all of those reasons, I think, those - those -- those factors all kind of came together to create a perfect little political firestorm here.

TWN has been concerned that the shooting fiasco -- and the way that it has streteched out for days -- has helped the VP skate past the much more serious charge at hand that he has illegally promulgated leaks of classified national security information on numerous occasions.

My hunch is that David Addington has been lurking in the shadows -- busy at work -- preparing for the battles ahead regading the leak controversy, working to preserve the White House's prerogatives on warrantless wiretapping, rebuffing calls for any alterations in our detainee practices in Guantanamo, and just overall keeping the emergent Bush-Cheney monarchy in good shape.

It is useful to remind ourselves of Addington's objectives and tactics.

Here is a clip from this week's February 20th edition of Newsweek in a piece titled "Bush's Bad Connection" by Mike Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas:

The White House is likely to be defiant. Cheney's chief aide and counsel, David Addington, has advised his bosses that even if the intelligence committee votes to subpoena secret documents from the executive branch, the demand will not be upheld by the courts.

Cheney's attitude seems to be: bring it on. Last week the veep told cheering activists at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that the White House intends to trumpet NSA wiretapping as a winning issue in the fall campaign. "With an important election coming up," said Che-ney, "people need to know just how we view the most critical questions of national security and how we propose to defend the nation."

The Washington Post's David Ignatius also offered a prescient profile of Addington in early January. In the piece he opened with:

Who is David Addington? The simple answer is that he's Vice President Cheney's former legal counsel and, since the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby in October, Cheney's chief of staff.

But behind the scenes, the polite but implacable Addington has been a chief advocate for the interrogation and surveillance policies that have created a legal crisis for the Bush administration.

But the zinger line in Ignatius' piece is:

Friends and former colleagues describe Addington as a man who thrives on his invisibility. He lives in a modest house in Northern Virginia, takes the subway to work, and shuns the parties and perks of office.

He usually has the same simple meal every day -- a bowl of gazpacho soup. Though born in Washington, he styles himself as a "rugged Montana man" in the image of his boss, and he has a photo in his office of Cheney shooting a gun.

TWN has more on the way on Mr. Addington -- but for today, we'd like to ask some folks who are on the trail of Cheney to ask "Where is David Addington?"

This guy can't be permitted much time in the shadows -- and the Cheney quail-poaching distraction (that's what they call it when the upland game tax stamps aren't paid for) has probably helped strengthen Addington's hand in the battles ahead that DO matter.

-- Steve Clemons

In my view, the law says "No". . .but I have little doubt Alberto Gonzales and his minions will construct a rationale that says otherwise.

But I have run across some interesting information -- and have some questions that we should all pose to those at the helm in the White House.

Executive Order 12958 on "Classified National Security Information" was promulgated by President Clinton on April 17, 1995.

This Executive Order "prescribes a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information."

In this 1995 Executive Order, the VICE PRESIDENT is mentioned only one time -- and only in such a way that the automatic, 25-year declassification of historically important documents can be preempted if declassification would "impair the ability of responsible United States Government officials to protect the President, the Vice President, and other individuals."

Now, let's move to the March 25, 2003 Executive Order by President Bush, No. 13292, that amends President Clinton's Executive Order on National Security Information.

The Vice President's "presence" in the Executive Order increased by 1000%. Instead of just one mention in the Executive Order, Cheney's office is referred to eleven times.

This hyping of Cheney's and his staff's role in the management of secrets is a further testament to the historically unique power that Cheney's vice-presidency amassed in the period after 9/11/2001.

Briefly, in the amended Executive Order, Dick Cheney and presumably future VPs are affected by this National Security Information presidential order in the following ways:

1. The Vice President, in the context of his duties, has the authority to "classify" information;

2. The Vice President, in the context of his duties, can give a "top secret" classification to information;

3. The Vice President can give a "secret" or "confidential" classification to information;

4. Like in the previous 1995 Executive Order, the automatic, 25-year declassification of national security information can be preempted if it would impair the ability to "protect" the Vice President from physical harm;

5. Mandatory declassification review (by a designated process) is required of information originating from the Vice President;

6. Mandatory declassification review is required from the Vice President's staff;

7. Access to certain national security information can be provided to individuals who occupied policy-making positions appointed by the Vice President (or President of course)

8. Rules barring access to certain classified national security information will be waived for the Vice President;

9. Waivers to rules of access to classified national security information will only apply to Vice Presidential appointees in areas of their policy work while working as an Executive Branch appointee;

10. This mention of the VP only relates to the above line saying that access to classified national security information will only be provided to Presdidential and Vice Presidential appointees in the area of his or her policy work that was done during the tenure of that respective President or Vice President;

11. "'Original classification authority' means an individual authorized in writing, either by the President, the Vice President in the performance of executive duties. . ." This is a definitional item in the Executive Order.

There is NOTHING HERE that indicates that the Vice President has any embedded authority to be a declassification machine unto himself.

This matter is important because Vice Presdident Cheney slipped into his interview with Brit Hume yesterday his belief that he has the ability to declassify national security information -- and implying that there is an Executive Order that allows him to do it.

Here is the exchange:

Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q There is.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Have you done it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --

Q You ever done it unilaterally?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

Vice President Cheney is right that he has the ability to classify materials; that is clear from the Executive Order.

It