You Don’t Introduce New Products in August

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How nice of Andy Card to call Karl Rove on his bullshit claim that the Democrats pushed the Iraq war before the 2002 elections.

Karl Rove asserted on the Charlie Rose show recently that it wasCongress that pushed the Bush administration into war with Iraq. “The administration was opposed” to voting for a war resolution in the fall of 2002, Rove claimed. “It seemed it make things move too fast,” he argued.

[snip]

Thismorning, former White House chief of staff at the time, Andrew Card,appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and completely discredited Rove’sargument:

SCARBOROUGH: We have to start with something that we all are talking about a couple of days ago where Karl Rove went on Charlie Rose and he blamed the Democrats for pushing him and the president into war. Is that how it worked?

CARD: No, that’s not the way it worked.

It’s a good thing Card is willing to do so–because lord knows Joe Klein wouldn’t call Karl on his blatant lies.

But I doubt that Andy Card did so out of generosity or a dedication to the truth. No, I think Card just wanted credit where credit is due. You see, Card has spent much of his career in the auto industry. It’s hard to have a successful product launch if you’re working with the Big Three. So I rather suspect that Read more →

No, Pakistan Was the Last Big Test. And We Failed It.

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"Serious Person" Michael O’Hanlon and  escalation surge architect Fred Kagan end their op-ed with the following words.

There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan was mostly ahumanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our basic securityas Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and diplomaticallyprepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world. Pakistan may be thenext big test. [my emphasis]

I’m just a DFH and not a "serious person" or anything. But I am certain they have this wrong–dead wrong. It highlights the problem of neoconservatism–an acute myopia that therefore cannot see a problem until we’re already in the thick of it and until they can make an argument–however specious–that the only solution is military.

The way in which O’Hanlon and Kagan conceive of Pakistan "becoming the next big test" is the perfect illustration of this. They describe the events that need to occur for them to take some action–and of course, action is exclusively military.

AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the UnitedStates simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descendedinto the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw ourforces from an improving situation in Iraq Read more →

More on the FBI’s Own Falafel

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There’s a bit of a squabble over how important Nada Nadim Prouty, the FBI/CIA agent who got unauthorized access to Hezbollah information at the CIA, was to the agency. Via Laura, NBC reports that she was very important.

Current and former intelligence officials tellNBC News that Nada Nadim Prouty had a much bigger role than officialsat the FBI and CIA first acknowledged. In fact, Prouty was assigned tothe CIA’s most sensitive post, Baghdad, and participated in thedebriefings of high-ranking al-Qaida detainees.

Aformer colleague called Prouty “among the best and the brightest” CIAofficers in Baghdad. She was so exceptional, agree officials of bothagencies, the CIA recruited her from the FBI to work for the agency’sclandestine service at Langley, Va., in June 2003. She then went toIraq for the agency to work with the U.S. military on the debriefings.

“Early on, she was an active agent in the debriefings,” said one former intelligence official. “It was more than translation.”

But the same story has a senior official reporting that she wasn’t that important.

A senior U.S. official familiar with the casesays there is no evidence she was a spy and noted that the CIA and FBIhave a good record in prosecuting spies, particularly in their ownagencies. Read more →

“This problem will not be discussed in public”

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I do intend to return to my planned series on Matt Bai and the Serious People. But for now, David Sanger asks a question that really needs to be asked: what is going to happen to Pakistan’s nukes? Before I look at the answer Sanger offers, let me point to this one line in the story.

“It’s a very professional military,” said a senior American officialwho is trying to manage the crisis and insisted on anonymity becausethe White House has said this problem will not be discussed in public.“But the truth is, we don’t know how many of the safeguards areinstitutionalized, and how many are dependent on Musharraf’s guys.” [my emphasis]

Understand: the threat that Al Qaeda could get nukes was the single most important driving force behind the Iraq war. And now, because BushCo has seen fit to put Cheney in charge of its Pakistan policy, and Cheney has seen fit to make a spokesperson one of the main architects of that policy, there is a very real possibility that our "ally" Pakistan will provide nukes to the guys that hit us on 9/11. And the White House’s response is to dictate that, "this problem will not be discussed in public."

All the more reason to discuss it in public, I say.

And Sanger’s discussion is none too optimistic.

Compartmentalization, Syrian Airstrike Style

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Apparently, Crazy Pete Hoekstra’s been complaining again that the Bushies are keeping secrets from Congress. He co-authored a WSJ editorial several weeks ago to complain that only senior leaders in Congress (including Crazy Pete) knew the truth about the Syrian bombing. In the op-ed, Hoekstra sounded like he had found another casus belli.

It has briefed only a handful of very senior members of Congress,leaving the vast majority of foreign relations and intelligencecommittee members in the dark. We are among the very few who werebriefed, but we have been sworn to secrecy on this matter. However, weare prepared to state, based on what we have learned, that it iscritical for every member of Congress to be briefed on this incident,and as soon as possible.

[snip]

Wewant to remind President Bush that the Constitution invests Congresswith various powers and authority over foreign policy. Not only doesCongress have an obligation to conduct oversight over these matters,but it is accountable to the people of this country to ensure thattheir security and interests are safeguarded.

The proposed dealswith North Korea will involve substantial expenditures of U.S. funds topay for heavy fuel oil deliveries. Congress will be asked to approvethe authorization of funds for this expenditure. We cannot carry Read more →

State Loses Its Army

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I’ve imagined (and it’s largely imagination) that Condi’s little PR campaign of the last week was a desperate attempt to stave off DOD control over State’s bodyguards–an attempt to retain an army for the exclusive use of the State Department. Condi went to (for her) unheard of lengths to try to play nice and pretend that State could manage a very large band of mercenaries.

Is it just coincidence that that effort ends as it becomes clear that State tried to cover-up the September 16 killings?

All State Department security convoys in Iraq will now fall under military control, the latest step taken by government officials to bring Blackwater Worldwide and other armed contractors under tighter supervision.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gatesagreed to the measure at a lunch on Tuesday after weeks of tensionbetween their departments over coordination of thousands ofgun-carrying contractors operating in the chaos of Iraq.

Mr.Gates appears to have won the bureaucratic tug-of-war, whichaccelerated after a Sept. 16 shooting in central Baghdad involvingguards in a Blackwater convoy who Iraqi investigators say killed 17Iraqis. Military coordination of contractor convoys will includeoperations of not only Blackwater, formerly known as Blackwater USA,but also those of dozens of Read more →

Blackwater Guards Given Immunity from Prosecution

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I pointed out the other day that several of the Blackwater guards involved in the September 16 shooting have left Iraq. Now bmaz points to this AP story revealing that all the guards have been given immunity from prosecution.

The State Department promised Blackwater USA bodyguards immunityfrom prosecution in its investigation of last month’s deadly shootingof 17 Iraqi civilians, The Associated Press has learned.

[snip]

Three senior law enforcement officials said all the Blackwaterbodyguards involved _ both in the vehicle convoy and in at least twohelicopters above _ were given the legal protections as investigatorsfrom the Bureau of Diplomatic Security sought to find out whathappened. The bureau is an arm of the State Department.

[snip]

An initial incident report by U.S. Central Command, which overseesmilitary operations in Iraq, also indicated "no enemy activityinvolved" in the Sept. 16 incident. The report says Blackwater guardswere traveling against the flow of traffic through a traffic circlewhen they "engaged five civilian vehicles with small arms fire" at adistance of 50 meters.

The FBI took over the case early this month, officials said, afterprosecutors in the Justice Department’s criminal division realized itcould not bring charges against Blackwater guards based on theirstatements to the Diplomatic Security investigators.

And here’s today’s candidate for Read more →

Update on Gaming Intelligence to Justify War

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I wasn’t so disturbed by the news that DNI Mike McConnell had decided to reverse the recent practice of producing unclassified Key Judgments from an NIE … until I read Scott Horton’s take on it.

Michael McConnell started his first two months on the job with asolid record for candor and accuracy. He avoided political doublespeak.And then something strange happened. He became a shameless andirresponsible political propagandist.

[snip]

With that background, it should come as no surprise that McConnell now plans to keep America in the dark as to the national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iranian nuclear programs. Pam Hess of AP reports:

NationalIntelligence Director Mike McConnell has reversed the recent practiceof declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligenceestimates, a top intelligence official said Friday. Knowing their wordsmay be scrutinized outside the U.S. government chills analysts’willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said DavidShedd, a deputy to McConnell.

Hetold congressional aides and reporters that McConnell recently issued adirective making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments ofnational intelligence estimates, which are forward-looking analysesprepared for the White House and Congress that represent the consensusof the nation’s 16 spy agencies on a single issue. The analysis comesfrom various sources including the CIA, the military and intelligenceagencies inside federal departments.

Nowwe know that the NIE has been done and gathering dust for more thanthree months. We also know that Vice President Cheney’s office, whichpromptly leaks NIEs when it finds them useful, absolutely hates thisNIE and has been doing everything it can think to do to put it off. Whymight that be?

Sourcesclose to the NIE tell me that it would work at cross-purposes with theAdministration’s fall roll-out of its new war effort against Iran. TheNIE will apparently conclude that Iran is diligently pursuing a nuclearweapons program, and that Iran is pursuing a delivery system. It willalso conclude that even on the fastest possible track it is still acouple of years away from having anything meaningful. Which means thisthreat does not become an acute one until some time after Bush andCheney leave office. In other words, it’s an NIE that the VicePresident badly wants to drop somewhere behind a filing cabinet. Andthe best way to do that is to declare it’s so super secret that no onecan have a copy of that particular decoder ring.

Honestly, the last two NIEs did seem shaded for political reasons, so I suspect unclassified Key Judgments would be in any case. But the last several NIEs on the subject have shown that Iran is nowhere near getting nukes. And if Cheney wants to bury the latest version of "not yet," then it begins to piss me off.

Meanwhile, there are two new additions to the discussion about the scary satellite pictures that may–or may not–prove that Syria was trying to build nukes. First, via Noah Shachtman, the news from the NYT that the Syria location is at least four years old.

Razed

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Okay, I mean this to be an honest question. The NYT has scary pictures up–courtesy of William Broad, who was glued to Judy’s hip on Mobile Bioweapons Lab stories in summer 2003–showing that the purported nuclear reactor the Israelis took out in Syria has been razed to the ground.

Weapons_6002

That offers proof, the accompanying article states, that the Syrians were up to no good, and that the bombed site was a nuclear reactor.

A mysterious Syrian military facility that was reportedly the target ofan attack by Israeli jets last month has been razed, according to a newsatellite image that shows only a vacant lot in the place where Syriawas recently constructing what some U.S. officials believe was anuclear reactor.

The new photograph, taken by a commercial satellite yesterday,suggests that Syrian officials moved quickly to remove evidence of theproject after it was damaged by Israeli bombs on Sept. 6, said DavidAlbright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research group.

"They are clearly trying to hide the evidence," Albright said in aninterview. "It is a trick that has been tried in the past and it hasn’tworked."

Here’s what I don’t get. The site was bombed. By Israelis. If you have doubts Read more →

Shorter GOP: It’s Okay if Maliki’s Govt Supports Insurgents, So Long as It’s Not OUR Money

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I’d like to return to an interchange between Waxman and Condi from the hearing today. Condi made a verygenerousoffer to let Waxman’s committee review documents pertaining to corruption. Waxman pointed out that that offer did not allow the committee to discuss what it discovered in those documents publicly.

He raised the example of whether Iraqis were laundering money for use in militias. And Condi admitted that some of the corruption in Iraq contributed to funding militias. "Particularly in the south."

Someone must have been reading the blogs, because the Republicans (in a pretty smart strategy) saved some time for their designated attack dogs, Shays, Cannon, and Davis at the end so they could clarify what Condi meant with that answer (Darrell Issa must be busy in California trying to dilute that state’s electoral votes while Rome burns, because this is usually his role on Oversight). At least Davis and Cannon (and I think Shays, though I was in the other room) got Condi to clarify that US money isn’t going to Shiite militias who kill our troops. Iraqi money does.

Frankly, I’d sure like to see the accounting (though Condi correctly pointed out that State Department’s relevant budget never goes directly to Read more →

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