The Next Hurrah

You Don't Introduce New Products in August

by emptywheel

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 was Congress 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]

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

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 Andy Card's roll-out of Iraq warmongering in September 2002--with the help of WHIG and Judy Miller, of course--ranks near the top of Card's lifetime successes with such things.

Far be it for Karl Rove to deprive Andy Card of his due for that particular market launch.

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

by emptywheel

"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 a humanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our basic security as Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and diplomatically prepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world. Pakistan may be the next 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 United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that. [my emphasis]

Note, "could not stand by" ... "should it come to that." They're only considering action if Pakistan "descends into the abyss." Otherwise, here we are standing by.

Couple that with their ignorant assertion that, "There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan was mostly a humanitarian worry," and you see the problem. They would not--and did not--consider action at a time when non-military solutions were the obvious solution to the problem, when AQ Khan and his nukes didn't have us by the nuts. As I said last year when I was earning Matt Bai's wrath, the time to address these problems is before they've exploded, while we're still nominally allies. Because we're going to have to do nation-building anyway, whether or not Pakistan falls into the abyss, if we want to prevent its extremists from accruing more power. Had we done it six years ago, when Musharraf took the risk of cooperating with us after 9/11 and when he was begging for a textile trade agreement so he could create jobs, we ignored him. Now, it's going to take a lot more than some textile factories to find a solution to the crisis, peaceful or no.

But O'Hanlon and Kagan apparently can't see that, because they're looking in all the wrong places.

More on the FBI's Own Falafel

by emptywheel

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 tell NBC News that Nada Nadim Prouty had a much bigger role than officials at the FBI and CIA first acknowledged. In fact, Prouty was assigned to the CIA’s most sensitive post, Baghdad, and participated in the debriefings of high-ranking al-Qaida detainees.

A former colleague called Prouty “among the best and the brightest” CIA officers in Baghdad. She was so exceptional, agree officials of both agencies, the CIA recruited her from the FBI to work for the agency’s clandestine service at Langley, Va., in June 2003. She then went to Iraq 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 case says there is no evidence she was a spy and noted that the CIA and FBI have a good record in prosecuting spies, particularly in their own agencies.

He says her role was limited.“This is not John Dillinger or Reilly Ace of Spies,” said the official.

All of which got me looking at some details of her plea agreement. First, she pled guilty to three crimes, with a combined maximum sentence 16 years and $600,000 in fines. But her recommended sentence (it requires her cooperation with the CIA) is just 6 months to 1 year.

It's the last crime she plead to, though, which is most interesting. She plead guilty to Naturalization Fraud. The statute of limitations had run out on that crime for her, so she had to agree to waive the statute of limitations so they could charge her with it. Which is how they got the following language into her plea:

The defendant admits that she is a native of Lebanon, that her U.S. citizenship will be automatically revoked as a result of her guilty plea to count 3, and that she is removable from the United States ... as a result of her guilty pleas in this case. The defendant further waives any right that she may have to receive notice of intent to request judicial removal and a charge containing factual allegations regarding the removal. The defendant understands and knowingly waives her right to a hearing before an immigration judge or any other authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act, on the question of her removability from the United States. The defendant further understands the rights she would possess in a contested administrative proceeding and waives these rights, including her right to examine the evidence against her, to present evidence on her behalf, and to cross-examine witnesses presented by the government.

The defendant further waives any rights that she may have to apply for relief from removal and requests that an order be issued by this court for her removal to Lebanon. The defendant agrees to accept a written order of removal as a final disposition of these proceedings and waives any rights she may have to appeal the order issued.

The order of removal shall also include a grant of withholding of removal to the country of Lebanon ... Defendant hereby agrees to make both the judicial order or removal and the grant of withholding of removal to Lebanon a public document, waiving her privacy rights.... At the request of the U.S. Attorney's Office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will provide its concurrence to the government's request for a judicial order of removal coupled with a grant of withholding of removal to Lebanon as set forth above at sentencing. [my emphasis]

She has waived the statute of limitations so they could charge her with Naturalization Fraud, which they promptly used to take away any all legal immigration status she has. So obviously, she has agreed to be very--very--cooperative. Presumably not just with the CIA, in explaining how much information she disseminated to whom. But also more generally, to get those sentences (and whatever larger sentence got her to agree to waive the statute of limitations on the Naturalization crime instead).

Not only that, she's completely at the mercy of whomever she's cooperating with. She's got no US citizenship; plus she's got an order of removal hanging over her head, with that order being withheld courtesy of the US government. On their say so, she gets kicked out of the country.

And not only is she in this legal limbo--but the US government required her to allow them to make it public. Now who--or what group--do you suppose the government would want to know that Prouty was going to be sticking around in the US at the sole discretion of the US government?

One detail I find really tantalizing about this, though, is the possibility that her cooperation may be nothing more than silence (aside from clarifying what info she stole from the CIA). After all, she apparently witnessed--if not participated in--interrogations of high level Al Qaeda detainees, as early as 2003. There's a whole range of people the government would like to keep information she knows secret from--most of all the American people. So it's possible she's going to be very cooperative with the CIA in telling what she knows; it's equally possible she's going to be very cooperative in other ways, perhaps most of all, her silence.

Or perhaps they're going to turn her into a super-interrogator, with no legal rights in this country, and lots of incentives to continue doing as they say.

"This problem will not be discussed in public"

by emptywheel

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 official who is trying to manage the crisis and insisted on anonymity because the 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 are institutionalized, 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

by emptywheel

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 intelligence committee members in the dark. We are among the very few who were briefed, but we have been sworn to secrecy on this matter. However, we are prepared to state, based on what we have learned, that it is critical for every member of Congress to be briefed on this incident, and as soon as possible.

[snip]

We want to remind President Bush that the Constitution invests Congress with various powers and authority over foreign policy. Not only does Congress have an obligation to conduct oversight over these matters, but it is accountable to the people of this country to ensure that their security and interests are safeguarded.

The proposed deals with North Korea will involve substantial expenditures of U.S. funds to pay for heavy fuel oil deliveries. Congress will be asked to approve the authorization of funds for this expenditure. We cannot carry out our duties when we are being denied information about these critical national security matters.

We all want to secure agreements that address the proliferation of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and unconventional weapons. However, for these agreements to have long-term viability, they must be transparent, and based on close consultations and collaboration with the Congress.

If the Israeli airstrike last month is related to covert nuclear collaboration involving Syria and either North Korea, Iran or other rogue states, this may or may not be an issue that can be easily addressed by negotiations alone. It is certain, however, that such a serious international security issue will not stay secret forever.

Congress, therefore, needs to be fully briefed, not just on the details of the airstrike, but on how to address this matter and how, if press reports are true, rogue states will be held accountable for what could amount to a very serious case of WMD proliferation.

Hoekstra seems to suggest that he was briefed that the airstrike really was a response to attempted nuclear proliferation (though I'm still doubtful that's what it was).

Nick Schwellenbach did some follow-up on this question, asking whether Congress has yet been briefed. And he found that the Administration is compartmentalizing information about the Syrian bombing as closely as they compartmentalized their illegal wiretap program.

However, a congressional staffer told me that "the issue has been closely held. The leadership of the defense committees and Intel committees have been briefed, but not the general membership of the Congress as you correctly noted in Ros-Lethinen’s OpEd."  Other sources told me that they were not aware of their full committees being briefed yet either.

Perhaps of greater practical concern for congressional oversight is, though a few select members have been briefed, none of their staff, which members depend upon for their expertise and knowledge, have not been allowed to accompany them, POGO has been told.

Schwellenbach thought of precisely what I did upon learning that staffers hadn't been briefed--of Jello Jay Rockefeller's complaint (or, for that matter, telecom lobbyist John Ashcroft's) that his staffers hadn't been briefed and so he was helpless to exercise oversight over it. In other words, they're only telling wingnuts like Hoekstra, and not the people who can inform Hoekstra that the story doesn't make any sense.

I'm reminded of what ArmsControlWonk said of Stephen Hadley's compartmentalization of this same information within the Intelligence Community.

Suddenly, I understand why the intelligence from Israel, as Kessler reported, was “restricted to a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community unaware of it or uncertain of its significance.”

Because we’d already looked at the building and Hadley knew what the IC would say.

State Loses Its Army

by emptywheel

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. Gates agreed to the measure at a lunch on Tuesday after weeks of tension between their departments over coordination of thousands of gun-carrying contractors operating in the chaos of Iraq.

Mr. Gates appears to have won the bureaucratic tug-of-war, which accelerated after a Sept. 16 shooting in central Baghdad involving guards in a Blackwater convoy who Iraqi investigators say killed 17 Iraqis. Military coordination of contractor convoys will include operations of not only Blackwater, formerly known as Blackwater USA, but also those of dozens of other private firms that guard American diplomats, aid workers and reconstruction crews. [my emphasis]

Much as I may believe that Condi is an incompetent jerk, this is not a good thing. It means that anything State tries to do will be beholden to the political interests of those running DOD. This was a fatal problem in summer 2003--when Rummy was able to pre-empt Colin Powell's more mature plans for Iraqi reconstruction by withholding logistical support. And it may become a fatal problem to Condi's attempts to support diplomacy over bombing. I've long believed this fight was about retaining the mercs in Iraq long enough to defend the military in the event of bombing campaign in Iran, and DOD control over the mercenaries makes this an easier scenario.

In other words, Condi's charm offensive appears to have failed. Gates has won the round. And that may well mean the advocates of diplomacy have lost the critical round.

Blackwater Guards Given Immunity from Prosecution

by emptywheel

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 immunity from prosecution in its investigation of last month's deadly shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians, The Associated Press has learned.

[snip]

Three senior law enforcement officials said all the Blackwater bodyguards involved _ both in the vehicle convoy and in at least two helicopters above _ were given the legal protections as investigators from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security sought to find out what happened. The bureau is an arm of the State Department.

[snip]

An initial incident report by U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in Iraq, also indicated "no enemy activity involved" in the Sept. 16 incident. The report says Blackwater guards were traveling against the flow of traffic through a traffic circle when they "engaged five civilian vehicles with small arms fire" at a distance of 50 meters.

The FBI took over the case early this month, officials said, after prosecutors in the Justice Department's criminal division realized it could not bring charges against Blackwater guards based on their statements to the Diplomatic Security investigators.

And here's today's candidate for credulous reporting award:

Garrity protections generally are given to police or other public law enforcement officers, and were extended to the Blackwater guards because they were working on behalf of the U.S. government, one official said. Experts said it's rare for them to be given to all or even most witnesses _ particularly before a suspect is identified.

[snip]

It's not clear why the Diplomatic Security investigators agreed to give immunity to the bodyguards, or who authorized doing so.

Gosh, I couldn't imagine why the State Department would immediately immunize all the guards in this investigation, can you?

Anyway don't you think that's something Condi should have told Waxman's committee the other day ... that these guys had already been given immunity from prosecution and that, therefore, the FBI investigation is likely to end up--like all other investigations of Blackwater--holding no one responsible?

Once again, nobody for Attorney General.

by Kagro X

One by one, Senators are coming out to express their reservations about the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General. From John McCain and Lindsey Graham (both of whom, to be frank, everyone should expect to roll over in the end), to John Kerry, to Bernie Sanders, Senators have expressed puzzlement and astonishment at Mukasey's inability to take a clear position on whether or not waterboarding is torture.

Still worse, if that's possible, is the fact that Mukasey remains unwilling to say definitively whether or not the President of the United States is bound by statutory law of any kind.

In a NYT op-ed published last week, Prof. Jeb Rubenfeld of Yale Law School identified an answer given by Mukasey that should prove far more troubling than the horrifying but considerably narrower answer he gave to the torture question:

AT his confirmation hearings last week, Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for attorney general, was asked whether the president is required to obey federal statutes. Judge Mukasey replied, “That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country.”

Update on Gaming Intelligence to Justify War

by emptywheel

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 a solid record for candor and accuracy. He avoided political doublespeak. And then something strange happened. He became a shameless and irresponsible 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:

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has reversed the recent practice of declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligence estimates, a top intelligence official said Friday. Knowing their words may be scrutinized outside the U.S. government chills analysts’ willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell.

He told congressional aides and reporters that McConnell recently issued a directive making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments of national intelligence estimates, which are forward-looking analyses prepared for the White House and Congress that represent the consensus of the nation’s 16 spy agencies on a single issue. The analysis comes from various sources including the CIA, the military and intelligence agencies inside federal departments.

Now we know that the NIE has been done and gathering dust for more than three months. We also know that Vice President Cheney’s office, which promptly leaks NIEs when it finds them useful, absolutely hates this NIE and has been doing everything it can think to do to put it off. Why might that be?

Sources close to the NIE tell me that it would work at cross-purposes with the Administration’s fall roll-out of its new war effort against Iran. The NIE will apparently conclude that Iran is diligently pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and that Iran is pursuing a delivery system. It will also conclude that even on the fastest possible track it is still a couple of years away from having anything meaningful. Which means this threat does not become an acute one until some time after Bush and Cheney leave office. In other words, it’s an NIE that the Vice President badly wants to drop somewhere behind a filing cabinet. And the best way to do that is to declare it’s so super secret that no one can 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

by emptywheel

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.

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 of an attack by Israeli jets last month has been razed, according to a new satellite image that shows only a vacant lot in the place where Syria was recently constructing what some U.S. officials believe was a nuclear reactor.

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

"They are clearly trying to hide the evidence," Albright said in an interview. "It is a trick that has been tried in the past and it hasn't worked."

Here's what I don't get. The site was bombed. By Israelis. If you have doubts about their ability to destroy things from the air, just ask the Lebanese. What these pictures show is a site that was razed. It doesn't show anyone doing the razing. It doesn't show the site just after it was bombed. All it shows is a site that was completely destroyed. It shows no evidence of how or who destroyed it.

So why do we believe a site that has clearly been destroyed, that we know to have been bombed, was destroyed after it was bombed?

Update: From Arms Control Wonk:

• The pictures showed a large building near a river. That’s about it. If the building was a reactor, it was very far from completion. Absent reliable human intelligence, I see nothing that conclusively demonstrates the building was a reactor although IAEA inspections would have been decisive on this point.

• Assuming it was a reactor, it is much too early to make design determinations based on imagery. Overhead identifications of reactors can, and are, often wrong as they were in the cases of Baotou — a fuel fabrication facility in China mistaken for a plutonium production reactor — and the gigantic North Korean whole in the ground that is Kumchang-ri. As I noted the other day, IC estimates of the size and type of the Yongbyon reactor, at a comparable stage, were incorrect.

• The people leaking are those dissatisfied with US policy. “A sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration,” Mazetti and Helen Cooper reported, about “whether intelligence that Israel presented months ago to the White House … was conclusive enough to justify military action by Israel and a possible rethinking of American policy toward the two nations.” Obviously, that rethinking hasn’t happened yet. The people who lost that debate are leaking national security information, appealing to the press. That is precisely why Hoekstra (R-MI) and Ros-Lehtinen called for more information — this is about North Korea, not Syria.