President Bush’s claim the other day that no one ever claimed a connection between Iraq and 9/11 got me thinking. Judy Miller reported extensively on Al Qaeda before 9/11–both the previous World Trade Center bombing and on terrorist financing. We know she tried to report on imminent threats from Al Qaeda in summer 2001. She did some of the most celebrated reporting on Al Qaeda just after the attack. And even in fall 2002, she continued to report on Al Qaeda threats that had nothing to do with Iraq–the discovery of possible weapons lap in Kandahar and a report on Saudi financial ties to Al Qaeda. But she never made the claim of an Al Qaeda-Iraq link.

That’s particularly remarkable considering her famous September 8, 2002 article on aluminum tubes (actually her article co-author Michael Gordon apparently got the aluminum tube leak first) included every other complaint the US had against Iraq. That article describes Iraq’s purported nuclear program, chemical and biological weapons programs, and its missiles capabilities. In the article, she listed almost exactly the same things administration officials (Condi, Rummy, Dick, and Powell all appeared) did on the Sunday shows the morning her article appeared and almost exactly the same things that would appear in the NIE written a month later. Almost exactly … except administration officials included claims about an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. (I’ll lay this all out in a future post, but for now, you’ll have to take my word for it.)

The administration did have a shill to publish these claims for them–the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes. But it wasn’t until November 2003 that he published the (classified) memo Dougie Feith had written alleging a whole range of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections.

So I’m wondering–why didn’t they launder the Al Qaeda claims through Judy as well?

Justin Rood points to this Observer article which supports two of my past speculations.

emptywheel, 8/18

But I suspect he may be misreading theadministration’s dominant impulse with regards to information. Roodargues that because the administration hates leaks, the leak musteither have been sanctioned or just something the administrationmissed.

Most likely, the leak was sanctioned. Alternatively, it was originally unsanctioned but aided the administration’s goals, so they let it slide.

ButI would argue–and (as Rood himself admits) you can ask Valerie Plameabout this–that the administration doesn’t so much hate leaks. Itsprimary motivating impulse is that it hates losing control of the information. If leaks serve its immediate political purpose, they’re all well and good, according to the administration.

Observer, 8/21

Anti-terror police in Britain have made an angry request to their UScounterparts asking them to stop leaking details of this month’ssuspected bomb plot over fears that it could jeopardise the chances ofa successful prosecution and hamper the gathering of evidence.

TheBritish security services, MI5 and MI6, are understood to be dismayedthat a number of sensitive details surrounding the alleged plot -including an FBI estimate that as many as 50 people were involved -were leaked to the media.

Justin Rood points out an interesting leak–the tidbit that some of the people arrested in last week’s alleged terrorist plot made phone calls to the United States.

That’s why my antennae started buzzing when I read this paragraph from an Aug. 12 AP story about U.S. government efforts to trace possible domestic links to the recently-foiled London terror plot:

Two. . . U.S. counterterrorism officials, speaking oncondition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation,said the British suspects placed calls to several cities in the UnitedStates before their arrests. At least some of the calls were placed topeople in New York, Washington, Chicago and Detroit, one official said.The suspects are all British citizens, mostly men in the 20s and 30s ofPakistani descent.

Now, that appears to be remarkably specific intelligence leaked fromwithin an ongoing terror investigation — classified information thatcould not only reveal sources and methods, but also tip off possiblesuspects before the Feds got to them

But I suspect he may be misreading the administration’s dominant impulse with regards to information. Rood argues that because the administration hates leaks, the leak must either have been sanctioned or just something the administration missed.

Atrios links to Andrew Sullivan being skeptical  who links to Craig Murray being even more skeptical. And Murray raised a point that I had raised earlier. Here’s Murray:

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance forover a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not justMuslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the needfor early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazingplot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, hadnot turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogatorsof the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing likecanaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the mostextraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to givethe interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effortto stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.

Now I’m frankly not as skeptical as Murray; Meteor Blades has made a pretty convincing case, after all, that we need to be skeptical in all directions (and I believe Meteor Blades unquestioningly). But I do want to raise a question I’ve already asked.

mamayaga makes a superb point, in response to Byron Calame’s explanation that withholding the NSA domestic spying story was an issue of fairness:

[C]andidatesaffected by a negative article deserve to have time — several days to aweek — to get their response disseminated before voters head to thepolls.

To which mamayaga asks:

By the same logic, shouldn’t the major news media have held the storyof bin Laden’s conveeeenient new videotape until a few days after theelection? Or did they only want to be "fair" to one candidate?

Well, Calame doesn’t really speak for all the major news media. But let’s see how the NYT treated the OBL video:

So here’s how the plot was going to work. 20 men of South Asian descent, traveling in pairs, buy tickets for flights the US on-line. They pack their carry-ons carefully, with their bottles of acetone and hydrogen peroxide. They’re a little nervous as they approach Check-In, but confident that things will go well. And then the woman behind the desk asks the first question:

Tickets and passports?

The two South Asians look at each other, start stammering right away, their nervousness showing.

Um, uh, well, um, you see, we don’t have passports. But can you let us on a plane to America anyway??

At which point the ticket clerk starts laughing hysterically at the foolishness of anyone who believes you can get on a flight to America without a passport.

But don’t laugh! The big terror bust the other day? Not only didn’t the terrorists have plane tickets yet, but some of them didn’t even have passports!!!

Fred Kaplan tries to teach BushCo a lesson about cooperating with unsavory regimes by pointing out the central role Pakistan played in yesterday’s big terrorist bust.

There’s a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bushadministration’s present jam throughout the Middle East and in otherdanger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealingwith Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria orIran (namely, it’s an evil regime, and we don’t speak with evilregimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered andspilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would havedied, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scaryterritory.

This is not one of Kaplan’s strongest articles. He makes an important point about our relationship with Syria and Iran, sure. But to play up BushCo’s short-sightedness on Syria and Iran, Kaplan pretends that only Britain cooperated with Pakistan’s ISI on this terrorist bust. Kaplan thereby ignores that the US–in both this bust and the war on terror more generally–has precisely the kind of relationship he would advocate, one cognizant of the fact that, "the concept of morality in international relations is more complex than President Bush sometimes seems to recognize." Indeed, I have a suspicion that Pakistan’s involvement here may raise some very challenging questions about our cooperation with them on the war on terror.

Consider how Pakistan itself describes its involvement in this terrorist bust.

Via Steve Gilliard I see we’re still using unsound methods to create ourselves some informers.

The story of the San Francisco resident [Yassine Ouassif] — a security guard andpart-time engineering student — is in some ways unremarkable. He is oneof many immigrants investigated, yet not charged or deported, in thepost-Sept. 11 era. But his case reveals a lesser-known aspect of thewar on terror: the federal government’s high-stakes — some say coercive— tactics to recruit Muslim collaborators.

Ouassif treaded water for seven months in a murky administrativenetherworld — facing vague accusations of terrorist activity, butgranted no court hearing — while he says he was pressed aggressively tobecome an informant.

[snip]

But lawyers and local Islamic leaders in California cite at least adozen recent cases of clients who were aggressively encouraged tobecome informants after they were detained for minor visa violations.

"They are trying to cultivate and exploit innocent people, enticingthem, bribing them, tricking them in all these ways to snitch and spy,"said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the 70-mosque Islamic ShuraCouncil of Southern California.

I say "still using unsound methods" because at different times reasonably knowledgeable people have explained that our "unsound methods" in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were designed, at least partially, to create informants. Particularly with Abu Ghraib, when we were faced with an Iraqi insurgency that we couldn’t infiltrate (not least, I’m sure, because we’ve thrown so many Arabic speakers out on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell violations), we humiliated people detained randomly so that we could later use to blackmail them. Take pictures of an Iraqi man covered in feces and wearing woman’s underwear on his head, and chances are he’s going to try to prevent you from circulating those pictures in his community.

What a dirty trick Pat Lang played, sending his friends a list of four issues with the US-French peace plan, but not addressing those four issues himself.

1. France and the United States are not at war with each other.  They cannot agree to end the fighting.
2. Hizbullah thinks it is winning both tactically and strategically.Why will it agree to anything other than a cease-fire in place?
3. Such a cease-fire will be a victory for Hizbullah.
4. Who will disarm Hizbullah if it accepts such a cease-fire?

I’m with Pat in doubting the feasability of the peace plan, as far as I understand it, and for some of the same reasons. I mean, Condi can’t even get Olmert (much less Peretz) to keep a straight face when she makes requests of them. Presumably Bolton was closely involved in this, and presumably he has more sway with Israel. But thus far the US has seemed unwilling and possibly unable to pressure Israel to play nice.

And France, as a stand-in for Hezbollah? I could see Chirac speaking with and for Rafiq Hariri’s Lebanon before his death. But Lebanon’s government has been all but castrated by the Israeli assault. So unless you’ve got a surrogate for Hezbollah, or preferably Hezbollah itself, you’ll be left with the problem of getting Hezbollah to agree to a plan it had no part in. Until Hezbollah is brought into the process, I assume they will answer, as they seem to be already, "Yeah, who’s going to disarm us? You and whose army?"

I feel like I’m watching a ping pong game being played over this giant monster, about to raise its head and knock over the entire ping pong table.

On Wednesday, the WaPo broke the news (a mere two years old now) that the 9/11 Commission strongly suspected that Pentagon officials lied about their actions on 9/11.

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concludedthat the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to misleadthe commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog ofevents on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicionof wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secretmeeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring thematter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, accordingto several commission sources. Staff members and some commissionersthought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable causeto believe that military and aviation officials violated the law bymaking false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping tohide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

Perhaps that scoop was tied to the imminent publication of a much more extensive Vanity Fair article, based on the tapes from NORAD. Perhaps both scoops are tied to the imminent publication of a book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, which will describe the discrepancy.

The tapes, the author of the Vanity Fair article, Michael Bronner, says, make NORAD look pretty good.