Gratification expanded.

Expect an announcement soon that the President has authorized Secretary of State Condi Rice to join directly in the EU-3 talks with Iran...under the condition that Iran agree to a verifiable halt to its uranium reprocessing activities.

Experts say not to expect Iran to immediately respond in the positive...in fact, it will likely be a strong negative. But they also predict that a counter-offer will come within days...basically throwing a “temporary suspension pending developments” offer onto the table.

The US moves and anticipated Iranian counter-moves come in the context of progress at the UN Security Council on a resolution with Chinese and Russian support which seems headed in the general direction desired by the US, but with the critical compromise that NO possible use of force would be authorized in the event of failure.

Still being negotiated, sources say, is whether the latest resolution would contain language also banning economic sanctions, as has been demanded by both Moscow and Beijing.

In any event, the US decision is seen as throwing the ball back into Iran’s court, after weeks of the US being seen as the stumbling block through its refusal to agree to direct talks.

Rice and other officials started calling key Capitol Hill and other players in Washington last night, and through the morning. Initial response is favorable, to quote one, “this will bring us into line with the EU-3 and put the onus on Iran to respond.”

From the Nelson Report, care of Laura Rozen. There's some speculation (from, for example, Kevin Drum) that the Bush team is making the cost of coming to the table prohibitively high for the Iranians - but, honestly, at this point I'd consider even that kind of cynical blame-shifting a step up from the previous pattern of sneering, claiming the high ground, and signaling a willingness for war. At least it would be meant to be a little bit constructive, if only as far as our reputation goes.

But, hey, some unnamed senior administration official has told the Washington Post that the Chinese and the Russians have actually been swayed by Ms. Rice's proposal, and - if true - that's a big deal. The threat of sanctions will be stronger, the Bush administration's own misdeeds and mistakes will be less of an issue . . . for the first time in months, I'm actually daring to think about the Iranian issue with an underlying emotion other than dread.

Here's hoping it lasts!

Gratifying.

In a policy shift toward a long-time foe, U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday the United States would open talks with
Iran if Tehran verifiably suspended its nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities.

Rice announced the United States was prepared to join
European Union powers Germany, France and Britain to meet Iran if it abandoned this part of its nuclear program.

A tentative thank you, Ms. Rice. [Link here.]

Careless whispers?

Meanwhile, there's a short piece in today's tomorrow's New York Times on the latest odd ruling from the US Supremes. I guess I should add that, as far as I can tell, the ruling was odd because the case itself was odd - limited in scope to the point where it starts seeming almost abstract to the outside eye. It all seems to have hinged solely on the matter of an internal memorandum in a legal case; the lawyer who wrote it did so (along with some other actions not directly relevant to the proceedings) to draw attention to an affidavit he considered in some way suspect, his bosses didn't want to hear it, and he contends he was punished (denied promotion and inflicted with an unpleasant transfer) as a result.

And that's apparently okay.

The Court seems to have ruled that public officials who try to pursue a course of whistle-blowing within the normal channels of their profession enjoy fewer protections than those who just speak out publicly, because . . . well, the consequences to actions taken pursuant to official duties apparently deserve extra protection from frivolous judicial intervention. Or something.

Ordinarily, my main objection would be that - in the current climate - whistle-blowers on the public payroll need all the protections they can get. This time, though, that's compounded by this first early whiff of unintended consequences: Supreme Court guys, did you really mean to tell everybody on a government payroll that their first response to possible impropriety is mailing a brown paper bag full of damning photocopies to the local TV news outfit? Or did you just like the lawyers involved in this case and hope that they come back for clarification really soon?

[Pre-emptive apologies if I've wildly misunderstood what I read - the sleep-dep is particularly acute this evening.]

Minor update.

Okay, last week was supposed to be my week for slacking off on the blog, but it didn't work out that way. This week, on the other hand, I've been pretty bad - so maybe this'll work out to be my vacation time after all.

Unless it doesn't.

Meanwhile, the biggest story I've failed to follow over the last several days is almost certainly Saturday's earthquake in Indonesia. There's not a lot of point to linking to the weekend's reporting on the catastrophe now, so I'll just note that relief organizations seem to be getting fully in gear, and that's a very good thing. Anyone interested in donating to charities on the scene can scan about halfway down this page to a small, but helpful, list.

Peace out.

Memorial Day.

Schuyler Colfax, Ulysses Grant's vice president (from 1869 to 1873, anyway), said of our dead that "These martyrs of patriotism gave their lives for an idea." In most of the world, over most of human history, crusades and jihads and stupid ethnic hatreds have marked our wars over ideas - but the United States, for all our faults, has often been different. Has often been better.

Everyone who has ever died deserves to be remembered for human dignity alone, and everyone who's ever died in war deserves more, for having been lost roughly in fear and fire and the greatest chaos determined men could invent. But today is especially a day for those who died serving the hope that their fellow men and women could be safe and strong and free to profess any thought that might animate them.

RIP.

Wond'ring aloud (Krauthammer edition).

I don't consistently read Charles Krauthammer, and I don't think I've ever blogged about anything he's written before - but today he's agitating against direct negotiations with Iran, and since I find the subject fairly important, I thought it was worth seeing if he has anything persuasive to say.

I think the first thing I should note is that his opening paragraph . . .

All of a sudden, revolutionary Iran has offered direct talks with the United States. All of a sudden, the usual suspects -- European commentators, American liberals, dissident CIA analysts, Madeleine Albright -- are urging the administration to take the bait.

. . . is slightly misrepresenting the context (along with trying to undermine the pro-negotiation argument with a little ad hominem sneering about its mostly anonymous proponents). The Iranian offer is a reversal from the odious Mr. Ahmadinejad's previous public stance, true, but it's not the first deal the Bush administration has been offered. It's not even the best.

There's an article in the forthcoming American Prospect - already available online - tracing the history of diplomatic overtures the Iranians made to the US in 2003. [I apologize for the length of the following excerpt, but it's informative.]

Bush’s axis-of-evil speech was followed by public charges and press leaks from the administration that Iran was deliberately “harboring” al-Qaeda cadres who had fled from Afghanistan. In fact, the Iranians had made a serious effort to cooperate with Washington on al-Qaeda, according to Leverett. When the administration requested that the Iranian government send more guards to the Afghan border to intercept al-Qaeda cadres, Iran did so. And when Washington asked Iran to look out for specific al-Qaeda leaders who had entered Iran, Iran put a hold on their visas.

The effect of the Bush administration’s signals of hostility was to discredit the idea of cooperation with Washington as a means of obtaining U.S. concessions to Iranian interests. Reflecting the mood in Tehran, in May 2002, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced the idea of negotiations with the United States as useless.

But Iranian calculations were dramatically altered by the impending U.S. attack on Iraq. In late 2002, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad met with Iranian officials in Geneva, asked for assistance for any American pilots downed in Iranian territory, and requested that Iran refrain from putting forces into Iraq. Journalist Afshin Molavi was told by Iranian sources that the Iranians agreed to both requests but insisted on a pledge by the United States not to attack Iran after it had removed Saddam, to which Khalilzad gave an equivocal answer.

Iranian national security officials were convinced that the Bush administration intended to move against their country once the United States had consolidated its position in Iraq. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who has had extensive interviews with officials of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council as well as the Foreign Ministry, says, “They believed if they didn’t do something, Iran would be next.”

The only way Iranian officials could head off that threat was to offer Washington things it needed in return for things that Iran needed. In early 2003, the Iranians believed they had three new sources of bargaining leverage with Washington: the huge potential influence in a post-Saddam Iraq of the Iranian-trained and anti-American Iraqi Shiite political parties and military organizations in exile in Iran; the Bush administration’s growing concern about Iran’s nuclear program; and the U.S. desire to interrogate the al-Qaeda leaders Iran had captured in 2002.

As the United States was beginning its military occupation of Iraq in April, the Iranians were at work on a bold and concrete proposal to negotiate with the United States on the full range of issues in the U.S.-Iran conflict. Iran’s then-ambassador to France, Sadegh Kharrazi, the nephew of then–Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, drafted the document, which was approved by the highest authorities in the Iranian system, including the Supreme National Security Council and Supreme Leader Khamenei himself, according to a letter accompanying the document from the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, who served as an intermediary. Parsi says senior Iranian national security officials confirmed in interviews in August 2004 that Khamenei was “directly involved in the document.”

The proposal, a copy of which is in the author’s possession, offered a dramatic set of specific policy concessions Tehran was prepared to make in the framework of an overall bargain on its nuclear program, its policy toward Israel, and al-Qaeda. It also proposed the establishment of three parallel working groups to negotiate “road maps” on the three main areas of contention -- weapons of mass destruction, “terrorism and regional security,” and “economic cooperation.”

The document was sent to Washington just in time for a meeting between Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif and Khalilzad in Geneva on May 2, 2003. One copy arrived at the State Department by fax, and a second copy was taken to State in person by an American intermediary, according to a source who has discussed the letter with the intermediary.

The proposal offered “decisive action against any terrorists (above all, al-Qaeda) in Iranian territory” and “full cooperation and exchange of all relevant information.” It also indicated, however, that Iran wanted from the United States the “pursuit of anti-Iranian terrorists, above all MKO” -- the Iranian acronym for the Mujihedeen e Khalq (MEK), which had fought alongside Iraqi troops in the war against Iran and was on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations -- “and support for repatriation of their members in Iraq” as well as actions against the organization in the United States.

At the May 2 meeting in Geneva, a separate proposal involving exchange of information about al-Qaeda detainees and the MEK was spelled out by Ambassador Zarif. According to Leverett, Zarif informed Khalilzad that Iran would hand over the names of senior al-Qaeda cadres detained in Iran in return for the names of the MEK cadres and troops who had been captured by U.S. forces in Iraq.

To meet the U.S. concern about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, the document offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology.” It proposed “full transparency for security [assurance] that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD” and “full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols).” That was a reference to new IAEA protocols that would guarantee the IAEA access to any facility, whether declared or undeclared, on short notice -- something Iran had been urged to adopt but was resisting in the hope of getting something in return. The adoption of those protocols would have made it significantly more difficult for Iran to carry on a secret nuclear program without the risk of being caught.

The Iranian proposal also offered a sweeping reorientation of Iranian policy toward Israel. In the past, Iran had attacked those Arab governments that had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Tehran had supported armed groups that opposed it. But the document offered “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration (Saudi initiative, two-states approach).” The March 2002 declaration had embraced the land-for-peace principle and a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to 1967 lines. That position would have aligned Iran’s policy with that of the moderate Arab regimes.

The document also offered a “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory” and “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967.” Finally it proposed “action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon.” That package of proposals was a clear bid for removal of Iran from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The document appears to have assumed that the United States would be dependent on Iran’s help in stabilizing Iraq. It offered “coordination of Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilization and the establishment of democratic institutions and a nonreligious government.” In return, the Iranians wanted “democratic and fully representative government in Iraq” (meaning a government chosen by popular election, which would allow its Shiite allies to gain power) and “support for Iranian claims for Iraqi reparations,” referring to Iranian claims against Iraq for having started the Iran-Iraq War.

Finally, its aims included “respect for Iranian national interests in Iraq and religious links to Najaf/Karbal.” Those references suggested that Tehran wanted some formal acknowledgement of its legitimate interests in Iraq as next-door neighbor, and of the historically close relations between the Shiite clergy in Iran and in those Iraqi Shiite centers.

The list of Iranian aims also included an end to U.S. “hostile behavior and rectification of status of Iran in the U.S.,” including its removal from the “axis of evil” and the “terrorism list,” and an end to all economic sanctions against Iran. But it also asked for “[r]ecognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region with according [appropriate] defense capacity.” According to knowledgeable observers of Iranian policy making, the ambition to be recognized as a legitimate power in the Persian Gulf, with a seat at the table in any regional discussions, has been a major motivation for many years for the Iranian national security establishment to reach an agreement with the United States.

Now, Mr. Krauthammer would probably first stress that the offer itself arose from the implicit threat of force, and maybe there's even something to that. My first response, though, is that they offered basically everything we've ever publicly admitted we want: the reduction of their nuclear program to something incontrovertibly civilian and transparent, a shutdown of terrorist ties, and support for some path of normalization with Israel. Even if the deal wasn't perfect, it was an opening.

So, of course:

Iran’s historic proposal for a broad diplomatic agreement should have prompted high-level discussions over the details of an American response. In fact, however, the issue was quickly closed to further discussion. Leverett believes the document was a “respectable effort” to provide a basis for negotiations. Yet he recalls that there was no interagency meeting to discuss it. “The State Department knew it had no chance at the interagency level of arguing the case for it successfully,” he says. “They weren’t going to waste Powell’s rapidly diminishing capital on something that unlikely.”

The outcome of discussion among the principals -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell -- was that State was instructed to ignore the proposal and to reprimand Guldimann for having passed it on. “It was literally a few days,” Leverett recalls, between the arrival of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of the message of displeasure with the Swiss ambassador.

So, first of all, let's not pretend that the current state of diplomatic disharmony is entirely the doing of the bad guys in Iran, and let's not say that the current feelers are untrustworthy because they're a total break from tradition. They're not.

Anyway, Mr. Krauthammer goes on to observe that introducing the matter of direct talks between the US and Iran shifts attention away from the Iranian nuclear program, jeopardizing the current bid for sanctions.

No, wait. First, he whacks at a straw man.

Just yesterday the world was excoriating the Bush administration for its unilateralism -- on Kyoto, the ABM Treaty and, most especially, Iraq -- and demanding that Washington act in concert with the "international community." Just yesterday the Democratic nominee for president attacked President Bush's foreign policy precisely for refusing to consult with, listen to and work with "the allies."

Another day, another principle. Bush is now being pressured to abandon multilateralism and go it alone with Iran.

Actually, the world is still excoriating the Bush administration for Kyoto, the ABM Treaty and, most especially, Iraq, but "unilateralism" there means something like "acting in defiance of internationally accepted norms (and common sense)." Engaging in potentially constructive diplomacy is something completely different, hence the lack of global protest at the mere idea.

Besides, as Kevin Drum observes, direct communications between two parties don't automatically mean the end of parallel multilateral talks. It really is just a bogus issue.

Anyway, back to Mr. Krauthammer:

Remember: In September 2003, after Iran was discovered cheating on its nuclear program, the United States wanted immediate U.N. action. The allies argued for a softer approach. Britain, France and Germany wanted to negotiate with Tehran and offer diplomatic and economic carrots in return for Iran's giving up its nuclear weapons program. The United States acquiesced.

After 2 1/2 years of utter futility, the E.U. Three had to admit failure and acknowledge the obvious: Iran had no intention of giving up its nuclear ambitions. Iran made the point irrefutable when it broke International Atomic Energy Agency seals and brazenly resumed uranium enrichment.

The full understanding we had with our allies was that if the E.U. Three process failed, we would go to the Security Council together and get sanctions imposed on Iran. Yes, Russia and China might still stand in the way. But even so, concerted sanctions by America, Europe and other economic powers could have devastating effects on Iran and its shaky clerical dictatorship.

Which is why the mullahs launched this recent initiative. They know, and fear, that if the West persists on its present and agreed course, they face sanctions so serious that their rule, already unpopular, might be in jeopardy. The very fact that Iran is desperately trying to change the subject, change the venue and shift the burden onto the United States shows how close the mullahs believe we are to achieving major international pressure on them.

Pushing Washington to abandon the multilateral process and enter negotiations alone is more than rank hypocrisy. It is a pernicious folly. It would short-circuit the process that, after years of dithering, is about to yield its first fruits: sanctions that Tehran fears.

Okay, never mind the fact that this seems to imply that Europe is simply waiting for an excuse to declare a nuclear Iran someone else's problem - though they're obviously not the corner of the world one could best accuse of ignoring the question so far. I think it now becomes fair to ask what Mr. Krauthammer sees as the ultimate endgame here - if it isn't that international pressure leads to unease among the mullahs which leads to some negotiated settlement, then what the hell is it? Abject surrender on the Iranian part? War, followed by abject surrender? Or, if a negotiated settlement is a viable destination, then why is it necessarily an act of bad faith if the Iranians ask for direct talks with their most vocal opponents?

Regardless, most projections I've seen put Iran five to ten years away from a functioning nuclear weapons program - even assuming that that's what they're after, despite a fatwa to the contrary (to say nothing of the terms of the 2003 diplomatic offer). Even if the Iranians are approaching bilateral negotiations dishonestly - which I'm not so quick to assume as Mr. Krauthammer - we can afford to test them for a few months. Doing so would give us more leverage with the Europeans, not less, and even with the Iranian public, and in exchange . . . well, seriously, what do we lose? Maybe it's just that we're running out of time in the Bush administration proper, and nobody else is likely to be as eager to pick this fight, and maybe Mr. Krauthammer really believes that Iran, "despotic, internally weak, feeling the world closing in" though it may be, has to be assumed to be farther along in its nuclear weapons production than any expert on the planet seems to believe.

I dunno. Maybe there's an answer in Mr. Krauthammer's concession to me and my fellow yap-yap advocates. We can have our talks if . . .

If the allies, rather than shift responsibility for this entire process back to Washington, will reassert their responsibility by pledging support for U.S. and/or coalition military action against Iran in the event that the bilateral talks fail, then we might achieve something.

You want us to talk? Fine. We will go there, but only if you arm us with the largest stick of all: your public support for military action if the talks fail. The mullahs already fear economic sanctions; they will fear European-backed U.S. military action infinitely more.

Okay, there's the question posed above, a bit recast: what would the goal of military action be, exactly? Blowing up nuclear facilities we can't even conclusively identify? Overthrowing the regime, overextending our military still further, terrifying the Muslim world, and sparking still more anarchy right next door to Iraq and Afghanistan both? Showing the world America can still attack other countries without enduring the kind of provocation that would've been required at any point in the last half-century or so? Big it may be, but this is a bad stick. Any serious bombing incursions into Iran would ultimately fortify the political positions of Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei, while a shot at forcible regime change . . . well, shit, a big part of why Iran's the way it is now is because we got in the way of Mohammed Mossadeg's ascent to power in the 1950s. Set up next to our fumbling in Iraq, I'd think this would be worse.

Economic sanctions are really the best lever we have, and Mr. Krauthammer himself seems to concede that the threat of them is already working. Why does he want the rhetoric to move toward violence? What's gained?

A lot of it may be purely domestic. This sort of rhetoric obviously builds up a sense of urgency, a sense of threat - a few weeks ago, Time ran a piece on what President Bush's new chief of staff has in mind for the run-up to the mid-term elections, and a big part of that (point four of five, I believe) was playing up the menace of Iran so that the Republicans could play the party of security again.

But I think it's also true that some of Mr. Krauthammer's friends in the administration may really just be spoiling for a fight, and telling him stories to set the stage. The Prospect article quoted above has a bit about how a previous diplomatic possibility was scuttled . . .

Although Bush did not approve an al-Qaeda–MEK deal, he did approve the disarming of the MEK who had surrendered to U.S. troops in Iraq, as the State Department requested, and allowed State to continue the talks in Geneva.

But on May 12, 2003, a terrorist bombing in Ryadh killed eight Americans and 26 Saudis. Rumsfeld and Feith seized the occasion to regain the initiative on Iran. Three days later, Rumsfeld declared, “We know there are senior al-Qaeda in Iran … presumably not an ungoverned area.” The following day someone obviously reflecting Rumsfeld’s views gave David Martin of CBS News an exclusive story. “U.S. officials say they have evidence the bombings in Saudi Arabia and other attacks still in the works were planned and directed by senior al-Qaeda operatives who have found safe haven in Iran,” Martin reported.

But in fact U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iranian government was intentionally allowing al-Qaeda to remain on Iranian soil. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s disingenuous statement, U.S. intelligence did not conclude that the government knew where the al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan were located in Iran. “The Iran experts agreed that, even if al-Qaeda had come in and out of Iran, it didn’t mean the Iranian government was complicit,” recalls Wilkerson. “There were parts of Iran where the government would not know what was going on.”

Nevertheless, within a few days, Rumsfeld and Cheney had persuaded Bush to cancel the May 21 meeting with Iranian officials. In a masterstroke, Rumsfeld and Cheney had shut down the only diplomatic avenue available for communicating with Iran and convinced Bush that Iran was on the same side as al-Qaeda.

. . . and, remember, apart from Doug Feith, all the major players are still working in the White House and the Pentagon. [Whereas the reformers are pretty much gone from Iran's upper echelons. Funny how that worked out.]

Seriously, Mr. Krauthammer isn't explaining what assumptions make the clenched fist compelling to him. We're clearly meant to take Iran as an urgent threat, and we're meant to believe that the Iranians would be risking less in expanded negotiations than we would be, but it's not clear why. If he's really that distrustful, why not propose preconditions for the Iranians instead of just rejecting the idea of out hand? And what are his benchmarks for progress?

And why should we believe that the approach he endorses would stop at anything short of catastrophe?

Give me my "Gotcha!" moment.

A couple of days ago, the New York Times ran a story about the state of Hillary Clinton's marriage - I didn't read it, and I'm not going to link to it. I'll link instead to Atrios tearing it and its stunted offspring apart; even if America weren't going off the rails, this kind of voyeurism wouldn't be appropriate, but we are and it's really not.

But the superficiality of it all reminds me: earlier this week, Margaret Carlson wrote a very positive review of Al Gore's new movie - I'm pretty sure I came across it in the Op/Ed page of the Post, though the embedded link goes to Bloomberg. Her closing paragraphs amount to a coy mea culpa for press coverage of the 2000 campaign:

The movie comes at a time when some pundits (including me) might wonder if we should give a rest to that old saw about likeability. Maybe Americans prefer to have a beer and burger with the charming frat boy to the student who always does his homework. But is that a wise basis for choosing a president?

With all the needless death from a ill-conceived war, the wasteful corruption of sweetheart contracts in Iraq and New Orleans, debt and deficits as far as the eye can see, gas prices through the roof with no energy policy in sight, and with a president who delegates to incompetents and cronies, I'm ready to give the class nerd his due and raise a glass to a serious man. Here's to you, Al and a huge box-office gross.

It's cute. It's well-written. It's even deceptively graceful, airily and backhandedly conceding that "some pundits" (including her) may have approached certain elections with less responsibility than we'd ask from high schoolers voting for their student council. But we take from the playfulness of her tone that it's a bit of an exaggeration - she's just having some fun as she sets up the punchline to her thesis.

Or not.

An old post at the Daily Howler stars an equally playful quote from an appearance Ms. Carlson made on Don Imus's show in October, 2000.

CARLSON (10/10/00): Gore’s fabrications may be inconsequential—I mean, they’re about his life. Bush’s fabrications are about our life, and what he’s going to do. Bush’s should matter more but they don’t, because Gore’s we can disprove right here and now…You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get in the weeds and get out your calculator or you look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun, to disprove Gore.

. . .

CARLSON: I actually happen to know people who need government and so they would care more about the programs, and less about the things we kind of make fun of…But as sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us. And we can disprove it in a way we can’t disprove these other things.

And America's deeply grateful for their judgement there. Fun, fun.

I don't really mean to pick on Ms. Carlson - she just had the misfortune of being reasonably honest and getting caught. But it really bears emphasis: we need our journalists to do more than run giant society pages and pretend that they're the key to domestic policy. We don't need to know about the Clintons' marriage, or Newt Gingrich's divorces, or Rick Santorum's whole bestiality scene (as long as he keeps it legal) - their biographers can piece together how that shit impacted what they did in public office. What we do need to know is how they're doing their jobs, and how those patterns may play out in the public arena in future years.

Anything else is bread and circuses.

But . . . but . . . everybody's misbehavin'!

The constitutional clash pitting Congress against the executive branch escalated Wednesday as the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House demanded the immediate return of materials seized by federal agents when they searched the office of a House member who is under investigation in a corruption case.

The demand, by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, underscored the degree of the anger generated among members of both parties on Capitol Hill by the search on Saturday night at the office of Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, who has been accused of accepting bribes.

"The Justice Department was wrong to seize records from Congressman Jefferson's office in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers, the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, and the practice of the last 219 years," Mr. Hastert and Ms. Pelosi said in a rare joint statement.

Man, this is just a perfect storm of bad actors in government. As far as I can tell, there really may be a separation of powers issue here - I've seen fairly convincing arguments to the effect that the Justice Department, as an agency of the executive branch, really was constitutionally out of line. Of course, the underlying constitutional assumption is that Congress, when presented with a member with as much of a criminal stink about him as has Representative Jefferson, will police itself and kick the guy out should he not leave on his own. But, so far, the most leverage that's been brought to bear against the man - despite the fact that he's taking bribes on videotape - is a public request from Nancy Pelosi that he pack his bags and leave Capitol Hill.

To which he said no.

No sudden, decisive action from the House Ethics Committee so far - though I believe his case is now on the docket - and no serious hope that Congress will fight off the infection by, say, the end of the week on its own. Not good.

So, anyway, I'm not at the moment as exasperated by executive overreach as one might expect - though I'm not at all happy with the precedent set. There's a lot of blame to go around on this one.

Apologies to Matt . . .

. . . but there's no way that this is just Team DeLay not getting the joke - after the Correspondents' Dinner, everyone in Washington has got to know Mr. Colbert's insanely awesome schitck. Nah, I think this is just a majestic act of political judo; selective quoting nullifies the satire, so anybody who's not in on the game is going to read it straight - and in Republican America, where Al Gore can be compared to Joseph Goebbels without too much fuss, nobody's going to realize "Who hates America more, you or Michael Moore?" is meant to be over the top.

At least, that's what I'm guessing Team DeLay is figuring. Colbert may well punch back on his show when it comes off hiatus, but so what? He'll be playing to his audience, which presumably doesn't overlap much with the hardcore DeLay fringe. In real political terms, Tom wins a small win and Stephen gets zinged (unless somebody in Texas - other than Molly Ivins - makes a lot of noise about what's really going on in the Colbert Report's interviews): it's probably not that big a deal in the great scheme of things, but everybody celebrating the Bugman's inability to distinguish theater from fact is almost certainly daydreaming.

And, given that, why not just cut straight to the chains and the orange jumpsuit?

Theory versus practice.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about the state secrets privilege. It recognizes the reasonable proposition that even simple lawsuits against the government—tort suits, breach of contract claims—can sometimes involve issues that would be genuinely harmful to national security if they saw the light of day. Say, for instance, that a janitor in Los Alamos, N.M., tripped over a box of uranium lying in the hallway in 1943. It would hardly do to have the evidence used in the subsequent slip-and-fall case scuttle the entire Manhattan Project. So, tough though it is on individual plaintiffs, the courts have historically deferred to government claims that some evidence in certain litigation must be shielded as "state secrets."

Traditionally, this privilege was most often used to prevent plaintiffs from getting a hold of very specific, sensitive evidence in an ongoing lawsuit; it was seldom invoked to dismiss entire cases. Maybe that hypothetical Los Alamos plaintiff couldn't have discovered exactly what was in the box that he tripped over. But, generally speaking, if the lawsuit could have proceeded without his knowing the contents of that box, it would.

The troubling shift today is that in el-Masri and other similar lawsuits—almost all of which involve important challenges to the government's conduct since Sept. 11—the administration has been routinely asserting the privilege to dismiss the suits in their entirety by claiming that for it to participate in the trials at all would mean revealing state secrets. In other words, in addition to relying on the state secrets doctrine to an unprecedented degree, the administration is now well on its way to transforming it from a narrow evidentiary privilege into something that looks like a doctrine of broad government immunity.

From an article by Henry Lanman, up at Slate.

Good reporting, bad story.

It's a day or two old, so if you're the sort of person who's predisposed to care, you've probably come across it already - but, if not, let me just fill you in: the Times has run some work from Michael Moss and his colleagues on the state of Iraqi police and internal security services. These are two very good articles - together, a nice, reasonably substantive overview of what's been going on and how we've gotten to where we are now.

An initial effort by American civilians to rebuild the police, slow to get started and undermanned, had become overwhelmed by corruption, political vengeance and lawlessness unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

A year later, with the insurgency spreading with an unimagined ferocity, the United States military took charge of a second, broader campaign to reconstitute the police. On the ground, however, the military's plan for police units that could help restore order in Iraq would be no match for the forces tearing at the country in places like Basra and Baghdad. And along the way, it would help fuel some of those forces.

The Americans had to reconstitute the police since officers fled in droves after the invasion, ahead of gangs of looters. But the rush to replenish the ranks lacked proper controls, American, British and Iraqi officials said, and in the process political loyalists of the newly powerful were made officers, and there were reports of police jobs sold for kickbacks of $100.

In recent background checks, police investigators found more than 5,000 police officers with arrest records for crimes that included attacks on American troops, American officials said.

When the rebuilt skeletal force became a target of the rapidly spreading insurgency, Americans turned to heavily armed police commando units that had been assembled by the Iraqis. They added firepower, but at a price.

An Iraqi official who helped create the special units said he warned Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that they could become a weapon in Iraq's sectarian strife, much as Mr. Hussein's police had repressed the Shiite majority. Now, after a year in which a Shiite interior minister controlled the police, some special units stand accused by many Sunnis of operating as Shiite-dominated death squads.

The Iraqis have reined in some units, but others have received less attention. In one notorious incident, a brigade in northern Baghdad is suspected of kidnapping and killing 36 Sunni Arab men last August. Although a judge ordered the unit's commander, Brig. Gen. Bassem al-Gharrawi, arrested for murder, the arrest warrant was never executed, according to court records.

There's more, and it all speaks for itself, but I would like to emphasize that, once again, it looks like the gang in charge approached a really formidable problem in a fundamentally half-assed way, and we're all paying the price.

As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

. . .

In [a] March [2003] meeting, General Garner raised an ambitious plan by Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, to send 5,000 American and foreign advisers to Iraq. Mr. Mayer said his detailed, inch-and-a-half-thick plan included organizational tables, budgets and schedules.

The proposal was sweeping but not unprecedented. In Kosovo, one-tenth the size of Iraq, the United Nations fielded about 4,800 police officers. In Bosnia, 2,000 international police officers trained and monitored local forces.

Two lessons had emerged from the Balkans, Mr. Mayer said. "Law and order first," a warning that failing to create an effective police force and judicial system could stall postwar reconstruction efforts. Second, blanketing local police stations with foreign trainers also helped ensure that cadets applied their academy training in the field and helped deter brutality, corruption and infiltration by militias, he said.

General Garner said he and others on his staff also warned administration officials that the Iraqi police, after decades of neglect and corruption, would collapse after the invasion. The police were "at the bottom of the security food chain," General Garner said in an interview. "They didn't train. They didn't patrol."

In February, Robert M. Perito, a policing expert and a former official at the National Security Council and the State and Justice Departments, recommended to the Defense Policy Board that 6,000 American and foreign police officers be dispatched to Iraq. The board advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But at the meeting with N.S.C. officials, General Garner's proposal was met with skepticism by council staff members, who contended that such a large training effort was not needed. One vocal opponent was Mr. Miller.

"He didn't think it was necessary," General Garner said in an interview.

Mr. Miller, who left the government last year, confirmed his opposition. He said the assessment by the C.I.A. led administration officials to believe that Iraq's police were capable of maintaining order. Douglas J. Feith, then the Defense Department's under secretary for policy, said in an interview that the C.I.A.'s prewar assessment deemed Iraq's police professional, an appraisal that events proved "fundamentally wrong."

But Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., said the agency's assessment warned otherwise. "We had no reliable information on individual officers or police units," he said. The "C.I.A.'s written assessment did not judge that the Iraqi police could keep order after the war. In fact, the assessment talked in terms of creating a new force."

A copy of the document, which is classified, could not be obtained.

Kevin Drum has a little more on that last point up at Political Animal.

According to Jay Garner, a plan to dispatch 6,000 police officers to Iraq was opposed by Frank Miller, a former NSC official who coordinated the American effort to govern Iraq. Is that true?

. . .

If Doug Feith says it, it's a pretty good bet that exactly the opposite is the case. Still, why is this report classified? Surely this would be one of those cases that Scott McClellan told us about in which declassification would be in the public interest? Right?

Pardon his cynicism - he's had a long five years.

Anyway, let's jump back in:

What attempts there were to train the police were marred by poor coordination, civilian and military officials said. During the first two years of the war, three different government groups developed three different plans to train Iraq's police, all without knowing of the existence of the other.

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner sent to Iraq in 2003 to lead the police mission, said Pentagon officials gave him just 10 days notice and little guidance.

"Looking back, I really don't know what their plan was," Mr. Kerik said. With no experience in Iraq, and little time to get ready, he said he prepared for his job in part by watching A&E Network documentaries on Saddam Hussein.

And, of course, as Matt Ygleasias notes, the only reason Mr. Kerik was seen to be the right man for the job in the first place was because of the political value inherent in embracing a Giuliani man.

But, again, I digress.

On May 18, Mr. Kerik arrived in Baghdad and found "nothing, absolutely nothing" in place. "Twelve guys on the ground plus me," he recalled. "That was the new Ministry of Interior."

Mr. Mayer, the author of General Garner's police training plan who worked in the Department of Justice, had fallen ill in the United States, and the Justice Department team was apparently unaware of his prewar plan. Working from scratch, the team pulled together a new plan to train 50,000 to 80,000 members of an Iraqi police force.

"If you took all of the postconflicts from the 1990's and combined them together, it would not equal what you're up against in Iraq," recalled R. Carr Trevillian IV, the senior Justice Department official on the team. "Even if it were a benign environment."

At first, members suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of academy training, the amount trainers settled on in Kosovo. Mr. Kerik said he "started laughing," and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force.

The team reduced academy training to 16 weeks, and eventually 8 weeks. Later, a 2005 State Department audit found that translating classes from English to Arabic ate up 50 percent of training time. With translation, Iraqi recruits received the equivalent of four weeks of training.

To make up for the shortened classes, the Justice Department team proposed a sweeping field training program similar to Mr. Mayer's. The team calculated that more than 20,000 advisers would be needed to create the same ratio of police trainers to recruits in Iraq as existed in Kosovo.

Deeming that figure unrealistic, they recommended placing 6,600 American and foreign trainers in police stations across the country to train Iraqis and, if necessary, enforce the law.

DynCorp, the Texas company that was to provide the trainers, had already located 1,150 active and retired police officers who had expressed interest about serving in Iraq.

Two weeks after the Justice Department team arrived in Baghdad, they submitted their proposal to Mr. Bremer. The administration now had a second plan for training the Iraqi police. On June 2, Mr. Bremer approved it, he and Mr. Kerik said.

. . .

The 6,600 police trainers never showed up.

Over the next six months, just 50 police advisers arrived in Iraq, officials said, even as the widening insurgency was presenting an additional, and much more lethal, set of problems.

Officials at the State and Defense Departments blame one another for the police plan unraveling.

"We and DynCorp were ready to go by June," said a senior State Department official involved in the police training effort who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "But no money was provided for this purpose."

Mr. Miller, the former National Security Council official, said Mr. Bremer never made the need for field trainers a major issue in Washington.

"If at any point Mr. Bremer had said, 'I just saw a report and I need 6,600,' that would have made this a front burner issue," Mr. Miller said. "I don't recall that as an issue."

Mr. Bremer said he repeatedly pushed for more trainers during the summer of 2003 but was told that no foreign countries were willing to send large numbers of police officers, and that DynCorp was unable to find Americans.

"DynCorp was not producing anybody," Mr. Bremer said. "We were doing the best we could with what we had."

Mr. Kerik and two dozen retired American police officers and other workers, meanwhile, tried to reopen academies and stations, screen thousands of Iraqis claiming to be policemen and choose new police chiefs. Across Baghdad, 2,600 military policemen carried out joint patrols with Iraqis and tried to secure a city twice the size of Chicago.

Outside Baghdad, American military commanders desperate for police support declared local tribal leaders new police chiefs or welcomed repentant former supporters of Mr. Hussein back on the job. Enterprising American soldiers began ad hoc police training programs that varied from three days to three weeks.

Working frantically as insurgent attacks intensified, advisers managed to bring back 40,000 Iraqi police officers nationwide and reopen 35 police stations in Baghdad. But as time passed it became clear that large problems existed with the fledgling Iraqi police force. Insurgents and former criminals were successfully posing as policemen, corruption was rampant and some officials chosen on the fly to be police chiefs were mistrusted by large parts of the population.

By August, the field training plan had shrunk. Mr. Bremer said his staff, frustrated by the inability to get enough manpower, dropped the target number to 3,500 trainers from 6,600. By September, it fell to 1,500.

By the end of the year, the State Department opened a sprawling center in Jordan that would train 25,000 police recruits in the next 12 months, but few field trainers would be in place to monitor them once they took up their posts.

At the same time, no American officials publicly sounded the alarm about the troubled situation. After spending three and a half months in Iraq, Mr. Kerik returned to the United States and praised the police during a news conference with President Bush on the South Lawn of the White House.

"They have made tremendous progress," Mr. Kerik said. "The police are working."

Just in case you were still inclined to trust White House press conferences.

Look, there's more. There's a lot more. I encourage you to read it.

If you don't have the stomach, and just want to hope that everyone involved is approaching the matter with a bit more seriousness now . . . well, let me wrap up with a passage about and from Major General Joseph Peterson - the man currently in charge of the military's efforts to train Iraqi police (and the third man to hold that job since March, 2004).

He is the third general to be assigned to the Pentagon's third plan for the Iraqi police. He conceded that he was a peculiar choice for the job since he had never created any organization from scratch, much less a police force of nearly 190,000.

"I'm an armor officer, which doesn't qualify me for anything but combat," General Peterson said.

No offense to the general, who seems to have a working head on his neck, but: good God.

A bad day at the races.

I've never really been much of a man for the ponies. I write that sheepishly, because I think both sets of grandparents could well come back and haunt my feeble urban ass for my defiance of a whole host of family traditions, but it's true. I've enjoyed the races when I've gone, but I haven't gone often, and I don't love the sport well enough to be anything but annoyed by the bland cuts and jumps you get on TV - I want to see the whole track and where the horses are in it, not just a little knot of big animals and short men thundering around context-free distances as a unit.

But I did see the Preakness on Saturday, and it just about broke my heart. I've lived enough of my life with gentle, domesticated animals to know how simple their needs are, and to see the life of one big, graceful one undone in a moment - without him even having the capacity to understand - is wrenching. Absolutely wrenching.

At this point, the good news is that Barbaro is out of surgery, and doing as well as can be expected; the bad news is that he's a horse, and is going to be confined for the length of his recuperation, and when one says that equines aren't built for standing still it's not just a matter of rhetorical excess, or a flighty way to comment on a beast's mood. Inactivity comes with health risks all its own, apparently.

But at least he's got a chance now.

Word to the wise.

I'm thinking of taking the next week off from blogging - I've got a couple of other projects taking up unusual amounts of my time, and I think proper paying work may start coming a little heavily as well. [The Senior Partner is gearing up for a trip to Uganda, so panic is building locally.]

Plus, I could really use a vacation from this. It's honestly not a lot of work, but I've been at it for more than a year now, and it's coming to feel like homework used to feel, half a lifetime ago - I'm finding there are way too many days when I'm in too much of a hurry to meet my posting quota to really care about the quality of what I write.

Anyway, if something catches my eye, I'm sure I'll come back to rant about it. If not, I hereby reserve the right to slack off.

. . .

Right after the next couple of posts.

Matt Yglesias, helper monkey.

Giving Pat Roberts the fish to the face he so deserves.

So evil it's actually funny!

I swear I'm not making this up.

"New Ads Funded by Big Oil Portray Global Warming Science as Smear Campaign Against Carbon Dioxide."

Just look on in wonder.

The long escape.

In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.

The school system offers another clue: Since 2004, the Ministry of Education has issued 39,554 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. The number of such letters issued in 2005 was double that in 2004, according to the director of the ministry's examination department. Iraqi officials and international organizations put the number of Iraqis in Jordan at close to a million. Syrian cities also have growing Iraqi populations.

I don't blame the émigrés for a second, but this is a whole other kind of bad news for Iraq. I haven't found any terribly current information, but as of a year ago five out of six Iraqi universities were apparently out of service, and it's hard to imagine that there's been a major turnaround since.

So, basically, Iraq isn't generating too many people with the training to sustain an advanced economy and its attendant infrastructure, and those people who do have the expertise (and, presumably, the wealth) to contribute are giving up and getting out. The longer the violence goes on, the lower the number of drained brains that are likely to return.

Just something else to worry about.

Disgusting.

My last comment on the current gang's approach to "state secrets" was playful; this isn't.

Our courts have just dismissed a suit brought by a German citizen who's made credible claims of having been mistakenly kidnapped by the CIA, taken to Afghanistan for months (because a CIA handler had a "hunch"), tortured, and then released in the woods somewhere between Macedonia and Albania without identification in the hopes that he'd get so tangled up in local security services that he'd never be able to air his grievances against us. The judge in this particular instance didn't cast any doubts on this gentleman's story - instead, he said simply that in times of war, the executive branch needs room to do whatever it's going to do.

When this comes up in the history books, it's going to be cited as an example of a strange national panic. Future generations won't understand it, and won't try to defend it - apart from the occasional neo-Michelle Malkin - and we can only hope they won't repeat it. The Founding Fathers simply never intended to give anyone in government the power to make people simply disappear, nor can I imagine that they'd be content to learn that there would be no avenue of redress once it had happened.

And even if they had so intended and they would have been thereby content, we shouldn't be. We live in a democratic republic, and we have the responsibility to decide the nature of our state, and we should by God choose to live as though we believed individual men and women deserve to be free from fear of arbitrary imprisonment and physical abuse. We're the richest, strongest nation on earth, and if we don't have it within ourselves to embrace principle over panic, then we have no right to expect anyone else to do better.

This is disgraceful stuff, and I hope Judge Ellis has the decency to feel ashamed when he's alone with himself. Our descendants will be ashamed for him.

Pavlovian conditioning.

I happened to see a few seconds of Senator Pat Roberts (R-Bush's Ass) speaking at the Hayden confirmation hearings, and it occurs to me that America needs more helper monkeys.

A well-trained helper monkey could be assigned to Senator Roberts at all public functions, and whenever the senator began to fulminate about leaks that "hurt America" or "aid terrorists" by revealing illegal, unethical, or embarrassing facts about the Bush administration's intelligence-gathering operations, the monkey could then swat him in the face with some kind of dead fish. Something simple and Osteichthyean, I should think - your average lamprey, while thematically appropriate, just doesn't have the same visual power.

This, obviously, would only be a pilot program. If Senator Roberts found himself stopping and thinking, "I could make a transparently cynical effort to shift attention from the misdoings of my White House masters and to intimidate other people who might otherwise bring further misdoings to light, but were I to do so I'd catch a mug full of trout! Perhaps I will instead take this opportunity to remind the American people of Kansas's top-notch arborea!" then similar monkeys could be assigned to Joe Lieberman or Chris Matthews.

[Unfortunately, the program could not be extended into the Office of the Vice President at the current time. Helper monkeys are notoriously susceptible to evil.]

Not something to be proud of.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

From Eric Lipton's Times piece on a proposed new "virtual wall" along the Mexican border. The plan involves bringing in private contractors not just to lay down the technology, but also to work on devising border control strategy.

The government can't do that as well itself, apparently.

Holy crap!

We may suddenly have a North Korea policy with a goal beyond showing the world how cool we are!

President Bush's top advisers have recommended a broad new approach to dealing with North Korea that would include beginning negotiations on a peace treaty, even while efforts to dismantle the country's nuclear program are still under way, senior administration officials and Asian diplomats say.

Aides say Mr. Bush is very likely to approve the new approach, which has been hotly debated among different factions within the administration. But he will not do so unless North Korea returns to multinational negotiations over its nuclear program. The talks have been stalled since September.

North Koreans have long demanded a peace treaty, which would replace the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War.

For several years after he first took office, Mr. Bush vowed not to end North Korea's economic and diplomatic isolation until it entirely dismantled its nuclear program. That stance later softened, and the administration said some benefits to North Korea could begin to flow as significant dismantlement took place. Now, if the president allows talks about a peace treaty to take place on a parallel track with six-nation talks on disarmament, it will signal another major change of tactics.

The thing is, nobody - nobody - can say in good faith that the president's previous tactics have gotten us any closer to stability in the Korean peninsula; the administration has just taken a five year snit and pretended it was a sign of moral seriousness.

I don't know where this new approach may lead, but if we can take it at face value it's long overdue - even if it's only happening to clear the table for familiar but fresh stupidity with Iran.

In passing, one other point: the Times article notes, "With the war in Iraq and the nuclear dispute with Iran as distractions, many top officials have all but given up hope that North Korea's government will either disarm or collapse during Mr. Bush's remaining time in office. Increasingly, they blame two of Mr. Bush's negotiating partners, South Korea and China, which have poured aid into North Korea even while the United States has tried to cut off its major sources of revenue."

Not only is the public sulking unbecoming, it kinda misses one basic point: China is . . . well, China, and South Korea was pointedly making efforts toward rapprochement with the North well back into the Clinton administration. The Bush team may have found these details awkward, or lamentable, or infuriating, but they were the pre-existing facts on the ground. That Bush policy didn't take them into account represents a failure on the American side, not elsewhere.

Sigh.

Still, again, they may be doing better today. A grudging nod, if so.

A small war in São Paulo.

It's gotten almost no press in my local bits of the US, but the largest city in South America turned into a crazy video game for a few days - prison gangs out to make some kind of a point called their colleagues in the city proper and launched a wave of violence that has, to date, left 115 (or 128) people dead, and area residents no doubt scared witless - or in a condition that rhymes.

Apparently, Brazilian newspapers are contending that the abatement of violence isn't due to the police pushback (which has been quite bloody and possibly heroic), but instead to some covert dealmaking between the government and the imprisoned gang leaders. I don't know how likely that is, but the fact that it's on the front pages probably says something about the amount of respect the state currently commands.

Huh.

I'd give good odds that this story is going to prove to be a lot less than it seems - but, in the spirit of optimism, I pass it along regardless:

The White House, in an abrupt reversal, has agreed to let the full Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees review President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House panels disclosed the shift two days before a Senate confirmation hearing for Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden as the new
CIA director, which is expected to be dominated by concern over the program.

The chairmen said separately that Bush had agreed to full committee oversight of his Terrorist Surveillance Program rather than the more limited briefings allowed up to now.

Of course, it's not the same as judicial review, and everyone on the committee will still be legally bound to keep quiet about whatever their shown, no matter how awful - but, hell, for this administration, this could still amount to a striking triumph of constitutional principle: the president may be obeying a law that restricts the powers of the executive!

. . .

Really having a hard time trusting it.

How `bout that?

We still have no way to know exactly what the administration has had the NSA up to with its wiretapping and data-mining operations, but Brian Ross and Richard Esposito can offer some insight into the FBI: they're apparently using powers granted by the Patriot Act to do some warrantless searching of journalists' phone records (see here and here). I guess if there's a chance a CIA whistleblower might once have talked to you, you're not entitled to privacy after all.

Or, y'know, if you've just written things the FBI doesn't like.

There doesn't seem to be any burden of proof if you're getting a "National Security Letter" instead of a warrant, so we'll never know exactly what they're doing or why. The fact, though, is this: the federal government is using its cool new anti-terror powers to monitor reporters.

And God only knows what else.

Thanks go to Josh Marshall for flagging the story.

Full disclosure.

A couple of days ago, I publicly hoped that congresspeople would try to score some points with the American people by making big moves on the latest NSA revelations. My underlying assumption, of course, was that the American people would be repulsed.

My bad.

A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

A slightly larger majority--66 percent--said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.

Greg Sergeant raises a valid point over at TAPPED: the questions asked gloss over some important aspects of the NSA's activities, legality high among them.

Still, the gut response to this seems much less hostile than I'd originally expected. Consider me tentatively eating crow.

Flashback a-go-go!

President Bush, 2004:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

Reprinted just for yucks - the quote actually comes care of Senator Russ Feingold.

Below's a timeline of key NSA beats to date, care of the New York Times. Here's hoping they keep it updated.



Meanwhile, there's a legal analysis of what we know about the NSA's hijinks over here, care of Kate Martin, director of the Center of National Security Studies (thanks go to Glenn Greenwald for the link). The theory can't be trusted `til it's tested in court, but it's certainly compelling.

If that's the word.

Hey, for a real hoot, let's go back to then-candidate Bush, in September 2000!

The appearance is really disturbing. Americans are tired of investigations and scandal, and the best way to get rid of them is to elect a new president who will bring a new administration, who will restore honor and dignity to the White House.

Yeah. Funny how that worked out.

Because you can never have too much abuse.

Reprinted in full from the New Republic's blog, the Plank, because I'm just not sure if it's subscription-only.

In the midst of Eric Schmitt's profile of Steve Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, comes this:

In an effort to enhance military interrogations, Mr. Cambone is also overseeing the politically sensitive task of rewriting the Army's field manual. Just last week, he and other top Pentagon officials briefed senior senators on a Pentagon proposal to have one set of interrogation techniques for enemy prisoners of war and another, presumably more coercive, set for the suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said Senate aides, who were granted anonymity because the discussions were confidential.

Feel free to smack yourself on the forehead. (If that's permitted by the Geneva Conventions.) To create differing sets of interrogation techniques for different sets of captives is to ensure that, in practice, they "migrate," as the Schlesinger commission on Abu Ghraib famously put it. This isn't even controversial--it's the official, Pentagon-sponsored explanation of how Abu Ghraib happened. To give a sense of the real, practical concerns involved: What happens when you're an elite task force hunting Al Qaeda insurgents, whom the Bush administration says aren't protected by Geneva safeguards for enemy POWs, in a battlefield like Iraq, which the Bush administration says falls under Geneva? The answer is you get the Black Room at Camp Nama, whose motto, according to Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall, was "No Blood, No Foul."

The rewrite of the Army's interrogation field manual--formerly known as FM 34-52 and formerly mandating compliance with the Geneva Conventions--was supposed to clear up precisely this ambiguity. So, of course, was John McCain's amendment to last year's defense bill, which mandated that all interrogations conform to the Geneva-compliant field manual. Cambone's response is to remove Geneva's protections from at least some section of the manual. If this goes through, absolutely no one should be surprised when another Abu Ghraib happens, and no one in the Office of the Secretary of Defense can plead ignorance.

My watchword is still "oversight."

That and "anger."

. . .

Mostly "anger," actually. This is my country these idiots are breaking.

But wait! There's more!

The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.

The inquiry headed by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.

“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

From the AP.

Y'know, I know I'm not blogging as well as I used to. At least, I don't feel like I do.

My head's in other places, and the overwhelmingly depressing nature of the stories I tend to follow seems to've deadened my capacity for real passion. Every week - sometimes, every day - there's some new repudiation of the entire idea of a government that seeks to serve the will of an informed electorate, and it just wears me down. Sometimes I honestly worry if some kind of premature senescence is setting in, because I just feel like my brain is pushing against cotton.

Well, it's amazing what real anger will do for you.

What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this? Are the people in power really so goddamn cravenly submissive to the mythology of their political party that they're willing to accept that members of the government can break the law with impunity and choke off any kind of investigation on the grounds that no investigator can be found with the standing to know what's going on? Can they not see the contempt in that? Can they not see the damage that these fuckers are doing to the most basic ideals this country was meant to honor?

Here's what the Constitution has to say about the powers of the Executive Branch, as personified by the president:

Section 2 - Civilian Power over Military, Cabinet, Pardon Power, Appointments

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Section 3 - State of the Union, Convening Congress

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

That's it. That's what he and his branch of government can do. He can command the military, he can make appointments, and he can execute the law. He is a servant of the people. He is an instrument toward an end - that end being the establishment of justice, tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty.

For this man we've got and his underlings to subvert the workings of the law and to claim a unilateral right not only to do so, but to render their workings beyond the scope of any other representative of the people of the United States is disgusting. It's grotesque.

And they do it over and over and over again.

Fuck them. Fuck this. And fuck Congress if they keep sitting still and letting it happen.

Dammit.

Hey. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, anyway?

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

. . .

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

From USA Today.

I haven't seen much analysis of this yet, and I don't have a legal background myself, so for now I have to keep quiet on the matter of whether there's anything currently in the books that specifically precludes this kind of action. There may well not be - meta-surveillance on this scale probably wasn't feasible when Cold War intelligence law was being drafted. [That said, it looks like the telecoms might be breaking a 1934 law in turning the information over to the NSA - though the FCC is unlikely to make a big deal of it.] There are ways in which the duller knives at the NSA could take the information they've been given and use it illegally, and I'm certainly willing to worry that they have, but so far there's no indication.

Not least because there's no oversight.

Which is a problem.

Still, even if I trusted that the people in power today, my gut reaction is that I'd probably consider this an unjustified (if minor) violation of privacy - and I suspect a fair number of the people who read this article will feel the same. In a working system, Congress would look into how the program functions, weigh its merits against the public good (and, more specifically, the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure), hold an honest debate, and beat out whatever law the collective conscience demanded.

In ours . . . well, let's hope the Republicans see November coming and decide to win some points with the American people by trying to take their duties seriously.

Ha.

What do you do when your oversight guy believes in oversight?

Obviously, if you're the Bush administration, you get your friends in Congress to work around him. The short form is this: Stuart Bowen is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and he's been diligent at the job.

So, naturally, at the White House's request, Congress has mandated that the next batch of money earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction (Tim Grieve, over at Salon's War Room, puts it at $21 billion, but I think that might be a misreading of the original WSJ article - which, alas, I can't access) be routed through a separate State Department program - one whose monitors are already overextended. Some members of Congress tried to introduce an amendment to extend Mr. Bowen's reach to cover this little reallocation, which would presumably have met any reasonable "simplification" needs currently on the table - but the Republican leadership denied them a floor vote.

So there's something to ponder: maybe graft is okay if exposing it might embarrass powerful people! Update your civic textbooks!

A big Digby quote.

Hal Wallace, head of the anti-fucking activist group that's deliberately mislabeleld as"Physicians Consortium," believes that vaccinating an 11 year-old girl against cervical cancer would send a message "that you just take this shot and you can be as sexually promiscuous as you want." And the equally loony Family Research Council (James Dobson's band of self-righteous prigs) says "it would oppose any measures to legally require vaccination."

Since it is likely to win approval (sounds like there's at least some integrity left somewhere at the FDA), let's assume here that the vaccine is as effective as Merck claims. And that it's safe. It would border on the criminal to withold this vaccine, to ensure that every child receives it at the optimum age to guarantee efficacy. It would be simply insanely stupid to advocate such an idiotic reason as fear of increased promiscuity to oppose its administration to pre-pubescent girls. (Oh, for those of you who like to waste time refuting utterly stupid arguments with facts that are irrelevant to the stupid, it turns out, that according to Discover, there is proof that such vaccinations will not alter the sexual habits of the vaccinated. Duh.)

Obviously, if the vaccine is not as safe or effective as Merck claims, the case for widespread use becomes morally complex. But as it stands, the only reason to oppose this cancer vaccine is because you believe that fucking should harm, if not kill, you. Unless, that is, you refrain from sex until you've received a state license to procreate. And you don't fuck anyone else. Especially if you're a woman.

The full piece is here.

Excellent.

Middle East mediators have agreed a plan to channel aid directly to the Palestinians, bypassing the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

The EU, UN, Russia and the US said they would set up a "temporary international mechanism" to channel the money for a three month trial period.

. . .

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told Israel Army Radio the plan was acceptable to Israel.

"As far as we are concerned, the Quartet's decision to give further humanitarian support to the Palestinian Authority, bypassing the Hamas government, is definitely okay," she said.

This rare good news comes care of the BBC.

"Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president?"

Wow.

[Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso] Jackson, a former president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, was among the featured speakers at a forum sponsored by the Real Estate Executive Council, a national minority real estate consortium.

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'

"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

Government of the partisan, for the partisan? What's really impressive is that the guy's bragging about it in public.

Care of Political Animal, care of the Carpetbagger.


UPDATE (11:00 pm): And now for the (presumably first) official explanation - it was all a misunderstanding! People took him too literally! He was speaking . . . um . . . "anecdotally?"

. . .

I do not think it means what they think it means.

This is stupid.

The Senate unanimously adopted a resolution to the effect that the national anthem should only be sung in English. Heaven forfend people express patriotism in a way they find meaningful, right? It's not worth it if it makes the gringos nervous!

But, of course, what's more absurd still is that our Congress is paying itself in tax dollars for putting out crap like this while two wars are underway, the deficit is exploding, and the executive branch is running secret prisons and illegal surveillance campaigns without so much as a pretense of oversight. I've got a higher tolerance for meaningless political theater than most, I think, but this is just offensive.

Partners in brinksmanship.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written a letter to President Bush with suggestions on how to resolve current international tensions, Iranian officials said today, but there was no immediate information about whether he was proposing a solution to differences over Iran's nuclear program.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Associated Press that the letter did not seriously address the standoff over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.

"This letter isn't it. This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort," Ms. Rice said. "It isn't addressing the issues that we're dealing with in a concrete way."

I'm not in the habit of extending Condoleezza Rice the benefit of the doubt these days, but this time around I bet she's not wrong - whatever else he's up to, I wouldn't expect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to unilaterally give any ground on the nuclear issue in an unsolicited letter. The simplest explanation probably applies: this is a superficially conciliatory gesture the Chinese and the Russians can underline when the UN gets down to talking sanctions, and President Ahmadinejad can only benefit from that.

That said, the nature of the thing is exceptional - there are more routine ways to demonstrate a willingness to be reasonable - and it's something I'd think a reasonably deft, reasonably serious diplomatic team could use; President Ahmadinejad has tied his own personal prestige (and possibly even his air of religious obedience) to an artifact of dialogue, and that could make a countering overture unusually hard to refuse. [Some optimists even think it's actively being invited.] As I've said before, I'm more or less siding with the likes of Sandy Berger - direct diplomatic contact seems like it's going to be necessary if we're to have any hopes of shutting Iran's nuclear project down. A little public diplomacy/PR wouldn't hurt either.

As it stands, though, direct diplomacy isn't anywhere in sight, and we seem to be taking no effective steps to encourage even the most sympathetic sectors of the Iranian public to look past the narrative the Ahmadinejad crowd is laying down; last year, the Hoover Institute's Professor Abbas Milani wrote . . .

Recently, Iran’s political leaders have described their agreement—for another “temporary suspension” of enrichment activities, signed in October 2003 with England, France, and Germany—as essentially a diplomatic ploy to isolate the United States. More important, on the domestic side, they began an astute propaganda blitzkrieg portraying the United States as the sole government trying to deprive Iran of its sovereign and legal right to a nuclear program and themselves as the champions of Iranian national interests. It is a measure of the failure of public diplomacy in the West and of opposition politics among the Iranians that the very Islamic regime that disparaged “nationalism” and “popular sovereignty” as concepts concocted by the colonialists to undermine and divide Islamic solidarity has now become the champion of Iranian nationalism and popular sovereignty.

. . . and it pretty clearly still stands so today. [Professor Milani's paper, "Beyond Incrementalism," is available as a pdf here.]

The fact of the matter is, George W. Bush declared Iran an enemy of primary importance in his "Axis of Evil" speech, and we've invaded countries on either side of its borders. Iranian radicals don't have to work hard to portray us as being a threat to Iranian society, as opposed to simply concerned about specific Iranian policies, or even its government - and they use those perceptions to trick their people into seeing higher concerns than the shittiness of their economy, the brutality of their rule, and their rather humiliating lack of international standing. We're not doing a whole damn lot to address that.

We're also not giving President Ahmadinejad any particular reason to think we're serious about opposing him on the nuclear issue, either. Yes, I'm still afraid that elements of the Bush administration are contemplating military action (probably just surgical strikes on potential nuclear facilities, but maybe worse), but they're not giving off the political signals you'd expect from a responsible government that was planning so much as a hard push for sanctions. I'd think President Bush's first big step would be telling the American people we might have to do without Iranian oil for the common good - `cause God knows withholding it is the highest card President Ahmadinejad is likely to play - but, of course, that wouldn't play well in the context of the mid-term elections. So the Iranians feel relatively free to push, and the administration is just growling and barking and, if we're all very unlucky, plotting to blow some stuff up.

In short, it isn't addressing the issues that we're dealing with in a concrete way.

. . .

Now where have I heard that before?


UPDATE: I haven't found a translated copy of the Ahmadinejad letter yet, but Reuters is characterizing it as "a long rambling treatise that focused on American wrongdoings and did not contain ideas for ending the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions." So maybe it just represents the pathologies of its author, and its strategic value needs to be examined with a little more caution than I displayed above. We'll see what develops.

Is our long national nightmare of safe sex finally coming to a close?

It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. "The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage," says William Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Siecus has been around since 1964, and as a group that supports abortion rights, it is natural enemies with many organizations on the right, but its mission has changed in recent years, from doing things like promoting condoms as a way to combat AIDS to, now, fighting to maintain the very idea of birth control as a social good. "Whether it's emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they'd like to see obliterated," Smith says.

Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, an abortion rights Republican who has sponsored legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraception, has seen a major change. "Two decades or more ago, I don't think there was much of a divide on contraception and family planning," she says. "It was one area both sides could agree on as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Now it becomes embroiled in philosophical disputes."

The Guttmacher Institute, which like Siecus has been an advocate for birth control and sex education for decades, has also felt the shift. "Ten years ago the fight was all about abortion," says Cynthia Dailard, a senior public-policy associate at Guttmacher. "Increasingly, they have moved to attack and denigrate contraception. For those of us who work in the public health field, and respect longstanding public health principles — that condoms reduce S.T.D.'s, that contraception is the most effective way to help people avoid unintended pregnancy — it's extremely disheartening to think we may be set back decades."

From a very, very scary article from the New York Times Magazine. Sure, we knew the American cultural right was out to promote abstinence before marriage in schools and in countries that receive foreign aid (children and foreigners presumably being equally deserving of guidance), and nothing verging on the topic of abortion can startle us anymore, but the idea that real power brokers - including Republican congressmen and at least one Bush appointee to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee - believe that even contraception inside of marriage is inappropriate comes as kind of a surprise to me.

. . .

Okay, maybe it doesn't. But I am surprised that they'll admit it publicly - I think most of the American public isn't quite as enamored of the Dark Ages as these guys.

Incidentally, the paragraphs covering the "controversy" over Plan B deliver one beautiful glimpse into what these fine students of human nature are out to deliver us from:

Meanwhile a government report later found that Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy commissioner for operations at the F.D.A., had also expressed a fear that making the drug available over the counter could lead to "extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B."

Oh, lawd above, the cults! The cults! It's plan B for Beelzebub, I tell you! Can no one smell the foul brimstone of damnation in aisle seven at the CVS?!