Archive for category: War

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 →

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.

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 →

I’m still following up on the question of the way in which the Rather complaint invokes the debate on Hamdi. I wanted to draw extended attention to this article. In it, Tim Grieve susses out precisely what seems to be the reason Rather included the Abu Ghraib details in his complaint.

Did Clement know he was misleading the justices, or was he kept out ofthe loop so that he could avoid revealing truths that would underminethe administration’s "trust us" arguments in the enemy combatant cases?Did Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers persuade CBS to delaybroadcasting the photographs from Abu Ghraib to protect the lives ofU.S. soldiers — or to spare the administration embarrassing questionsduring the Supreme Court arguments in the enemy combatant cases?

[snip]

Clement was a natural choice to appear on behalf of Rumsfeld whenthe Supreme Court took up the cases of Padilla and his fellow "enemycombatant," Yaser Hamdi, in April. The question is,what did Clement know when he climbed the steps of the Supreme Courtbuilding on the morning of April 28? Did he know what his client knew– that the Department of Defense was investigating grave abuses at AbuGhraib, that the brigadier general in charge of the prison had alreadybeen removed from her post? Did he know what his client’s staff knew –that Joint Chiefs chairman Myers had been working to keep CBS frombroadcasting photographs of the abuse?

And we wouldn’t be fun if we weren’t remembering Monica Goodling, um, "fondly."

The Justice Department won’t say. An employee in Clement’s officereferred a call from Salon last week to Justice Department spokespersonMonica Goodling. Asked what Clement or Ashcroft knew of the Abu Ghraibsituation at the time of oral arguments in the Hamdi and Padilla cases,Goodling said: "We wouldn’t have any comment." Pressed further,Goodling said the Justice Department would not have any comment at allabout the Padilla or Hamdi cases.

I’ll remind you, Goodling was the protege of Barbara Comstock, who blackballed Eric Lichtblau for getting too close to the truth.

Go read the whole Grieve article–I had forgotten that Padilla was argued at the same time as Hamdi. In other words–it may not have been Hamdi’s torture Clement was covering up, it may have been Padilla’s.