I wonder how long this speech is going to stay on the White House website. I was directed to it by a thoughful lawyer/blogger Glenn Greenwald today

In a speech in Buffalo, NY on April 20, 2004, Bush states that "a wiretap requires a court order." He goes on, "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important to 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."

Mr. President, square that with the nation now. You are implying that constitutional law requires you -- as President of the United States -- to secure a court order before wiretapping.

You said it. Plain as day.

How do we know when you are telling the truth to Americans -- on sacred matters dealing with the Constitution, presidential authority and its limits, and the system of checks and balances in this country?

Were you lying? Will you admit it? Or was this obfuscation, to give you the benefit of the doubt, permitted because we are in a so-called national security crisis and you are President?

Compare the Constitution and the Bible for us, Mr. President. I hate making this kind of comparison because I believe that the Constitution of this country is more sacred than the Bible, but I want to get on your turf Mr. President.

If you were to talk to parishioners about some message from Jesus Christ and then behind your book orchestrate the opposite, what would and should people think?

Or are the Constitution and the Bible there to be paid attention to when its convenient?

In my book, the Bible may be adhered to or ignored casually -- but not the Constitution of the United States.

Will you be telling the truth tonight, Mr. President? How in the world do you expect Americans to know?

It's pretty clear that the constituents of Congressmen Quinn and Reynolds as well as Governor George Pataki, up at your Buffalo speech, were lied to with you defending the Constitution in your lobbying for the authority for the Patriot Act.

Here is the full speech, and below the relevant grafs:

So the first thing I want you to think about is, when you hear Patriot Act, is that we changed the law and the bureaucratic mind-set to allow for the sharing of information. It's vital. And others will describe what that means.

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.

But a roving wiretap means -- it was primarily used for drug lords. A guy, a pretty intelligence drug lord would have a phone, and in old days they could just get a tap on that phone.

So guess what he'd do? He'd get him another phone, particularly with the advent of the cell phones. And so he'd start changing cell phones, which made it hard for our DEA types to listen, to run down these guys polluting our streets.

And that changed, the law changed on -- roving wiretaps were available for chasing down drug lords. They weren't available for chasing down terrorists, see? And that didn't make any sense in the post-9/11 era. If we couldn't use a tool that we're using against mobsters on terrorists, something needed to happen.

President Bush tarnished the Constitution of the United States before the people of Buffalo on April 20, 2004.

And Senator Chuck Hagel would like to hear more from the President about this gap between what he has publicly stated and secretly done.

-- Steve Clemons

Greetings Web Geniuses:

If you click on the comments below, you will get an error message. My web buddies have not yet responded to panicked calls.

If any of you have any thoughts on what a quick fix might be, let me know.

Thanks.

-- Steve Clemons

The State Department website is going to "audio stream" tonight's State of the Union address by President Bush in several languagues.

From a State Department release:

President George W. Bush will deliver the annual State of the Union Address to a Joint Session of Congress, Tuesday, January 31, 2006. The Department of State will provide live audio streams of the State of the Union Address at 9:00 pm EST (0200 GMT) in the following languages:

English, Arabic, Farsi, Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, French, Russian.

To access these streams, log onto www.state.gov.

At 1:00 am EST (0600 GMT) Wednesday, February 1, audio files of the following languages will also be available:

Portuguese, Swahili and Turkish.

At 12:00 pm (1700 GMT) on Wednesday, February 1, an audio file in Hausa will be available.

Additionally, these audio streams will be available as podcasts on Wednesday, February 1 at 12:00 pm (1700 GMT).

I am actually glad that the State Department is reaching out to people across the English language wall, but there are some obvious missing biggies:

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Korean, Japanese

Asia has some of the densest points of DSL deployment in the world, particularly in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taipei, and Hong Kong.

Many of the targeted language groups have low internet penetration, though some may tune in anyway.

But a question for State, will the rebuttal also be aired?

To show that America has some belief in "the rights of the political minority" not airing the rebuttal would send all the wrong signals.

-- Steve Clemons

Today, the Program on International Policy Attitudes is releasing a new World Public Opinion poll on Iraqi public opinion.

Here are the poll results.

Among the findings:

The poll has found that 80% of Iraqis believe that the U.S. plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq.

76% thought America would not withdraw if asked. 70% want Americans to be asked to withdraw in a time-line from within six months to two years.

47% of all Iraqis approve of attacks on US-led forces in Iraq.

If the Kurds were exluded from counting, then by TWN's estimation, 62% of Iraqis would support attacks that target American troops.

64% of Iraqis believe that violent crimes and attacks will decrease when the United States withdraws.

a majority would prefer the UN, rather than the US, to oversee Iraq's reconstruction

Sunnis and Shia are deeply divided over whether the recent election was legitimate and fair

As an aside, I was with General Brent Scowcroft last night and discussed his powerful and well-reported comments at the New America Foundation a year ago -- that Iraq may very well be entering a period of incipient civil war.

From these numbers, it doesn't look like the circumstances Scowcroft was diagnosing have changed a bit -- even after a full year of American efforts to turn things around.

-- Steve Clemons

I don't have much time at the moment, but I have been told that all or part of our morning forum, "The Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006" will be airing on C-Span just after 8 p.m. C-Span will probably air the progam in segments as there were four sections to the conference (yours truly haunts all of them -- but is primarily in the first).

On other fronts, this is sad news. I have mixed feelings about this last minute filibuster, that should have been planned a month ago.

Alito will contribute to a vast expansion of Executive Power, and this will seriously harm our democracy. No one "owned" this battle in the progressive community, and those who rallied troops at the end were encouraged by the cynical electioneering stances of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and others. I believe Ted Kennedy's opposition was real, as was Pat Leahy's -- but the machine against Alito should have been launched day one.

David Frum and Bill Kristol were out within minutes of Harriet Miers' nomination -- while many of the leading Dems were off getting seduced by Davos.

Dems will rue the day that they let Alito pass; so will moderate Republicans; and so will independent-minded Americans who value our system of checks and balances. I think that there have been some real heroes doing their best against Alito -- but the Democratic establishment is still inchoate and without the backbone to fight consistently against the White House.

Quite unbelievably, Alito's win reverses the lame duck status of the Bush presidency, the night before the State of the Union address.

An honest accounting puts Bush back in the game with a lot of juice -- and Dems and Republican moderates have to figure out how to throw him off-balance again. It will take a while.

I'm off to a black tie Nixon Center Awards Dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel honoring Senator Pete Domenici and James Schlesinger tonight and am going with CNN's cool blog mistress and Situation Room producer Jacki Schechner.

At 9 p.m. eastern (and middle of the night in the UK), I am doing BBC Radio's "Five Live" show on DC Blogs and the President's State of the Union Address.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Truth in advertising. I have friends involved with the Partnership for a Secure America ad posted above, which will appear as a purchased full page in tomorrow's New York Times.

This ad and what it represents will be one of the primary topics of my speech tomorrow at the "Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006" conference starting at 9 a.m. and taking place in SD-G50 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The conference can be watched on C-Span 3 live, or over the internet on C-Span's site.

America as a nation -- depicted in a bull's eye target -- is a way to enhance fear and certainly does draw people together -- shivering and paranoid clustered together.

But in my view, this type of campaign perpetuates the false notion that if we check every container that comes into America, hassle every tourist, and convince people that leak-proof ballistic missile defenses are possible that they will be SAFE.

But it's a false campaign, designed not to promote trust -- but rather to keep the beneficiaries of a high-fear world in place.

Much of the world is at odds with America not because of who we are but because of policies that are blind to both their aspirations and their grievances.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has articulated this perspective brilliantly -- and the absence of his name on this ad sponsored by the Partnership for a Secure America which Brzezinski originally signed on to -- is a clear indicator that he doesn't buy the bipartisan "fortress mentality" perpectuated here.

The list of signers of this document are for the most part good people who really do have concerns about the welfare and safety of the nation. But I would just appeal to them to broaden their focus.

Doing what we can as a nation to deal with grievances and to remove incentives from the rest of the world to "target" us seems like a far more effective strategy than tinkering with the amount of spectrum available for emergency disaster relief (of which the Pentagon already sits on a vast amount by the way).

Here is the signed letter.

Here is the pdf (BEWARE: VERY LARGE FILE) of the New York Times ad.

Because it's tough to read above, the signers include:

Warren Rudman US Senator (R-NH) 1980-92

Lee Hamilton US Congressman (D-IN) 1965-99, Vice Chair, 9/11 Commission

Madeleine Albright Secretary of State 1997-2001

Howard Baker US Senator (R-TN) 1967-85

Warren Christopher Secretary of State 1993-97

Slade Gorton US Senator (R-WA) 1981-87, 1989-2001, Commissioner, 9/11
Commission

Gary Hart US Senator (D-CO) 1975-87

Rita Hauser Chair, International Peace Academy 1992-present

Carla Hills US Trade Representative 1989-93

Richard Holbrooke Ambassador to UN 1999-2001

Nancy Kassebaum Baker US Senator (R-KS) 1978-97

Thomas Kean Governor, New Jersey 1982-1990, Chairman, 9/11 Commission

Anthony Lake National Security Advisor 1993-97

Richard C. Leone President, Century Foundation 1989-present

Robert McFarlane National Security Advisor 1983-85

Donald McHenry Ambassador to UN 1979-81

Sam Nunn US Senator (D-GA) 1972-96

William Perry Secretary of Defense 1994-97

Thomas Pickering Undersecretary of State 1997-2000

Ted Sorensen White House Special Counsel 1961-63

John C. Whitehead Deputy Secretary of State 1985-88

Frank Wisner Undersecretary of State 1992-93

The really sad thing about this ad sponsored by the Partnership for a Secure America is that it is indistinguishable from the kind of ad that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or the Committee on the Present Danger would put together.

There, in that place of fear -- we can all stand together -- liberals, conservatives, centrists (even 'radical centrists'), libertarians, and neoconservatives. We can all use fear to tie ourselves together in common purpose.

But isn't that what the President and Dick Cheney have been trying to orchestrate the last several years?

It's important to be smart about national security at home, but we achieve nothing unless we get smarter about our diplomatic achievements that undo the "root cause" problem abroad. This ad does little to get America back on to a "smart security track".

Again, I respect many signers of this letter and proponents of the AMERICA NEEDS TO FEAR ad, but it is wrong-headed, and I think that they need to rethink their position, retool, and issue an ad that gets us back in the game of enlightened diplomacy and smart national security policy making.

-- Steve Clemons

Today, on This Week with George Staphanopoulos, Senator Barack Obama was queried on whether he was 'the unnamed Senator' mentioned by Senator Harry Reid in a blogger conference call, on which TWN reported several days ago.

The quote that Stephanopoulos highlighted was:

"(A)n unnamed Democratic Senator had come to him with a proposal on "ethics reform" ala Abramoff that could be bi-partisan. Reid told this person that this was the wrong time to be engaged in construtive "reform" proposals with the other side. He said that this was the time to draw a line and to show how "our side" differed dramatically from 'their side.'"

Summary by Steven Clemons
www.TheWashingtonNote.com January 18, 2006

Here is the Audio Podcast of today's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Senator Obama did not deny that he was the unnamed Senator referred to. He went on to state that he believed that the approach needed on ethics reform had to be bipartisan, even though the current Abramoff scandal rested solely at the footsteps of the Republican Party.

When queried whether Reid had given him marching orders to focus more on contrasting Democratic ethics positions with Republican ones, Obama said that Reid knew he'd speak his mind in support of credible, bipartisan approaches.

And when George Stephanopoulos pushed him further, asking whether Obama and Reid were really on the same page, Obama said that he was sure that Reid was on the side of taking credible steps that would substantively clean up the current ethics mess in Washington.

In other words, reading between the lines:

1. Obama was the so-called unnamed Senator;

2. Reid did try and give Obama marching orders on ethics reform strategies, which Obama is bucking; and

3. Reid and Obama are not "exactly" on the same page.

There are valid reasons from my point of view why Reid's strategy on drawing a line between the Dems and Republicans -- particularly on the Abramoff scandal and all the mess tied to Tom DeLay -- makes a lot of sense.

But at the same time, the Dems have to initiate credible reform packages that would appeal to the sensibilities of well-meaning Republicans.

Credible reform that seduces part of the other side to Democratic objectives is the way for Dems to eventually win Congress, or at least half of it, back.

I was pleased that George Stephanopoulos's team checked out TWN and am glad that this national conversation is taking place.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is the final schedule for Monday's forum that my colleagues and I have organized titled "The Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006".

The meeting will take place from 8:30 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. on Monday, January 30th, in the SD-G50 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Among those speaking are General Wesley Clark, former National Review Editor-in-Chief and Hudson Institute Senior Fellow John O'Sullivan, TWN blogger and New America Foundation foreign policy programs director Steve Clemons, CNN Terrorism Analyst and bin Laden tracker Peter Bergen, New America Foundation Senior Research Fellow Anatol Lieven, Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation Michael Lind, Scowcroft Group Partner and former senior State Department oficial Kevin Nealer, Nixon Center President and National Interest publisher Dimitri Simes, Albright Group Partner and former Counsel to the Secretary of State as well Special Presidential Envoy on North Korea matters Wendy Sherman, former Special Advisor to President Clinton and political journalist Sidney Blumenthal, World Policy Journal founding editor and New America Foundation Global Middle Class Program Sherle Schwenninger and Economic Strategy Institute President and former Reagan administration senior official Clyde Prestowitz.

C-Span will be covering the entire conference LIVE. However, we have learned that the progam will most likely appear on C-Span 3, which is usually available with many digital television packages -- and also available for live streaming over any PC.

This will be a significant foreign policy discussion -- that I think will have some impact on the journalistic environment just preceding the President's Tuesday night State of the Union address.

So, please join us -- in person or over C-Span -- for a discussion of the "Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006".

My comments will be one of the first two in the conference -- and I'm paired with former National Review editor-in-chief John O'Sullivan.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

We learned in the last U.S. presidential election that one has to tiptoe carefully through exit polls, which are often wrong and distracting, but this news out of the Palestinian election rings true to me. If anything, the Palestinians may even perform better than figures being released because of the cohesiveness of their party list.

Some exit polls are showing that Hamas placed a close 2nd, behind Fatah, in the election -- garnering about 40% of the popular vote.

The tension is that while few in "official corridors" of Israeli government would say this publicly, many of them privately told TWN that Israel expected and "could deal" with Hamas at 30%. One important Labor Party official told my colleagues and me though that one vote for Hamas beyond 30% and "all bets were off."

The question though is what happens when a public votes democratically for a group like Hamas? My view is that one hopes Hamas learns to play in a heterodox political order and matures beyond its commitment to violence. Most serious Israeli officials believe that that is happening inside Hamas and say that the threat is no longer Hamas -- but rather the lesser-organized, self-initiating jihadist terrorists that are tougher for all parties to control.

So, 40% is certainly not 30% -- but the result was achieved democratically.

Secretary of State Rice is leaving for London on Sunday, returning on Tuesday afternoon -- just in time for the President's State of the Union address.

TWN has a 'hunch' that there will be some discussion with the Brits of how to move the ball forward in the Israel-Palestine situation and to manage the electoral outcome in Palestine as well as manage matters during the lead up to Israel's March elections.

Despite Ivo Daalder's interesting critique of Secretary Rice's diplomacy that just appeared in Dutch in the NRC Handelsblad, I actually see that she has pulled off quite a number of successes, some of them low-hanging fruit, but nonetheless many are in the positive column.

But my sense is that she has "a plan" on Palestine and final status negotiations that she is not disclosing. Her moves are calculated and appear as if on her own personal road map. She's putting more time into the Israel-Palestine problem than the media seem to be aware of or acknowledging -- and the way she is working in my view is designed to keep Cheney's thugs from undermining her.

More later. Stay tuned.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: Huge news is breaking. The Fatah Party has announced that it has calculated that Hamas has won a majority of the 132 seats being contested.

The Palestinian cabinet has resigned and has given instructions to Hamas to form a new government.

To some degree, the formation of the Kadima Party in Israel crippled Fatah and empowered Hamas, not because Ariel Sharon and his hard-line on establishing what he considered would be Israel's permanent border radicalized many Palestinian voeters but because it compelled Palestinian President Abbas to begin shaking up his own party, working behind the scenes to generate semi-rival lists and splinter groups. This gave Hamas the ability to win more seats than its rival, even though Fatah may have won a greater percentage of the popular vote.

Gut instinct leads me to believe that many Israelis will now tilt toward the right, but much depends on the first moves made by Hamas. The new leaders of the Palestinian government have seven weeks to reinvent themselves or Israeli voters may feel compelled -- sadly -- to entrench themselves with the far right again.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I really like Bartlesville, Oklahoma -- a small town there just 35 miles north of Tulsa.

I was actually born in Salina, Kansas at a military hospital there, but I've always considered Bartlesville the anchor spot of my family even though I have lived practically everywhere else as an Air Force brat other than Bartlesville (except on long vacations).

The picture above is of my great-grandfather, William Franklin Clemons, who was one of the early ministers in Bartlesville and his son, my grandfather. If you have time and want to go back in time, my great grandfather's journal from the year 1900 is a fascinating read.

This article ran today in the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise and caught me by surprise as I thought the writer needed a few more weeks to find anything worthy of reporting on some of my work.

I don't have a copy but I hear from some other Bartlesville residents that there is a nice picture of Lawrence Wilkerson and me having lunch at Restaurant Kolumbia in D.C. (I highly recommend it -- not only because of the food but because you can actually 'hear' the person you are having lunch with and not be overwhelmed by the clatter and chatter echo chambers that so many modern restaurants have become).

So, a shout out to those in Bartlesville who have been supportive of my crusades. It's a conservative place, but people there have always been open to hearing my less predictable takes on political issues and foreign policy.

And of course...I need to say...hi Mom!

Also, I want to thank the three groups I met in the Bay area -- one group of bloggers and blog fans at Berkeley, another in North Beach, and then the members of the San Francisco Committee on Foreign Relations last night. One loyal TWN reader, Kim, was kind enough to work her way into the dinner and pay the rather steep price for the meal. It was a pleasure to meet all of you.

To be completely self-critical, I found my blogger conversations more focused, gritty, and really fascinating communal learning exercises.

I'm usually on fire in my talks and fairly focused -- but I think I was too broad and unfocused until questions before the hyper-distinguished crowd (federal judges, academics, former ambassadors, vineyard owners, top SF city managers. . .a very informed and capable group of folks) I had dinner with. I think it still went well, but it just reminds me that this country's population is very diverse, and people are in very different places when they approach the big questions of American power in the world, what to do with it, and what our limits and opportunities are.

In any case, a great two days in California. Thanks to all.

-- Steve Clemons

General Wesley Clark is going to keynote a conference my New America Foundation team and I are putting together on the Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006, and this will take place on Monday, January 30th in the Senate (Senate Dirksen G-50) from 9 a.m. until 1:45 p.m.

General Clark's speech, "The Real State of the Union: A No Nonsense Discussion America's Foreign Policy and a Call to Action" will start at 12:15 p.m.

TWN readers are invited. If you would like to attend the conference (the whole thing), let me know via steve@thewashingtonnote.com -- but if you RSVP yes and your plans change, please let me know.

President Bush, as you know, will be providing his own views on America's foreign and domestic policy state of affairs in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. So, General Clark's commentary will perhaps be of interest to the White House and the public.

Other details of the program are still being prepared, but I will post the rest of this exciting program when I have them ready to go.

And yes, I will ask General Clark what a courageous and visionary President in these times should do with Iran. . .and Iraq.

-- Steve Clemons

Last Friday, TWN reported that Paul Wolfowitz was engaging in personnel appointment strategies that were beginning to smell of partisan cronyism.

By Monday, a staff letter was sent to Wolfowitz expressing sentiments of significant "dismay" about the President's appointment of political hacks in key positions that should be open to transparent competition -- with decisions made on the basis of merit.

Today, Paul Blustein of the Washington Post adds more to the story and reports on the letter and Wolfowitz's troubling pattern of management decisions.

From Paul Blustein's piece:

Tensions flared yesterday between World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz and bank employees, as the bank's staff association criticized some of Wolfowitz's recent appointments and Wolfowitz fired back that he was trying to correct lax enforcement of the bank's internal corruption rules.

The controversy is the starkest sign of discontent among the staff nine months after President Bush chose Wolfowitz to head the bank. Wolfowitz is a former deputy defense secretary best known for his role in planning the invasion of Iraq.

In a letter circulated yesterday evening to bank staffers, the staff association chair, Alison Cave, raised pointed questions about last week's appointment of Suzanne Rich Folsom, a bank official with Republican party ties, to head the Department of Institutional Integrity, a unit that investigates misconduct and corruption at the bank. The letter also cited the recent naming of Kevin S. Kellems, a former aide to Vice President Cheney, as the bank's top communications strategist.

Their selection, the letter suggested, had been undertaken without a properly open and competitive process, potentially undermining the bank's ability to persuade developing countries to adopt transparent and clean procedures in hiring and procurement. "We are concerned . . . that the positions were not filled in accordance with established recruitment procedures, which exemplify our commitment to good governance," the letter said.

Those at the bank who have thoughts on this evolving situation -- or insider information -- on Wolfowitz's agenda, feel free to contact me.

-- Steve Clemons

I have not been there yet but have been assured that Cafe Sappore is a nice place to hang out, grab a coffee, and discuss political stuff or anything folks want to know about Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner (without NSA eavesdropping).

I'm going to be there between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m. today -- and have to leave just before 6 p.m. to give a talk for the San Francisco Committee on Foreign Relations.

I have had about a dozen people contact me about meeting -- so those whose schedules fit -- feel free to stop by.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note

Tuesday, 24 January, 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.

Cafe Sappore

790 Lombard Street (cross street is Taylor)

San Francisco

Cafe Phone: (415) 474-1222

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report runs one of the single best daily US-Asia policy and national security issues analysis letters in Washington. Normal beings can't subscribe, and it's not available on the web.

Whenever I get asked how to get on his list by TWN readers, my response is that 'hiring' Chris Nelson via his consultancy at Samuels International is probably the only sure way. A second approach could be a subscription fee equal to about a dozen high end sushi dinners (with sake. . .from Niigata, heated) for two people over a year. The other is to have information that one can 'trade' with Chris to earn one's way into his network. His stuff is great; typos and all. (He and I have bonded over typo tantrums from our readers).

On occasion, I will repost the entire Nelson Report with Chris Nelson's permission because they are just too useful and important not to get very broad play.

Today's entry is about Iran and North Korea -- but really, mostly about Iran.

THE NELSON REPORT -- Friday, 20 January 2006

IRAN AND KOREA. . .NASTY PEAS IN THE SAME POD

SUMMARY: This week, we've featured long quotes from patient Loyal Readers who have the advantage of long experience in thinking and dealing with non-proliferation issues, with a focus on Iraq. As an Asianist, we don't pretend to enjoy waxing (word inserted by TWN) on the Middle East, the olympian self assurance on Korea which no doubt many find irritating. So we will continue to offer informed commentary from the proven competent.

In that regard, Carnegie's Joe Cirincione, and Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, have been instructing us all on Iran et al, and the gist of their thinking, below, has been posted on Carnegie's website. To start tonight's discussion, here is Joe's version for the Loyal Readership, followed by Jeff's reaction, and finally, a brief critique from a Loyal Reader we've been relying on for similar commentary, if sometimes differing conclusions.

Please note especially Cirincione's point that this is not a nuclear bomb crisis, but a nuclear regime crisis, and that press accounts of an Iranian bomb being "imminent" are dangerous nonsense from the same folks who brought us the political sales job (our phrase, not his) on Iraq WMD:

"Chris, are we seeing a coordinated [scare] campaign on Iran? The same neoconservative pundits who championed the invasion of Iraq are now beating the drums on Iran. They all got the same talking points this week. On Monday, urging us to keep military options open, William Kristol claims Iran's 'nuclear program could well be getting close to the point of no return.' Wednesday, Charles Krauthammer said, 'Instead of being years away from the point of no return for an Iranian bomb. . .Iran is probably just months away.

"This is complete nonsense. There is no need for military strikes against Iran. The country is five to ten years away from the ability to enrich uranium for fuel or bombs. Even that estimate, shared by the Defense Intelligence Agency and experts at IISS, ISIS, and Carnegie assumes Iran goes full-speed ahead and does not encounter any of the technical problems that typically plague such programs. In the next few months, they will be lucky to get a test centrifuge cascade up and running. Hardly a "point of no return."

"This is not a nuclear bomb crisis, it is a nuclear regime crisis. US Ambassador John Bolton has correctly pointed out that this is a key test for the Security Council. If Iran is not stopped the entire nonproliferation regime will be weakened, and with it the UN system.

"But it will have to be diplomats, not F-15s that stop the mullahs. An air strike against a soft target, such as the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan would inflame Muslim anger, rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular government and jeopardize further the US position in Iraq. Finally, the strike would not, as is often said, delay the Iranian program. It would almost certainly speed it up. That is what happened when the Israelis struck at the Iraq program in 1981. Israel knocked the Osirik reactor, but Saddam went underground, expanding from 500 to 7000 workers on a more ambitious program that escaped detection until 1991. By then he was closer to producing a bomb than he ever would have been with Osirik. It went from a side project to an obsession.

"Your other Loyal Reader is correct that we could not destroy it in 1991 war. Even 43 days of coalition bombing failed to destroy the program, which ended only when U.N. disarmament teams methodically destroyed the equipment on the ground. This is the lesson to keep in mind as simplistic 'solutions' to the Iran program come churning out of the neocon machine."

-0-

Arms Control Wonk Jeff Lewis comments on his frequent-collaborator: "Joe is dead-on correct. I have one comment -- I don't like saying this is a crisis. As Joe noted, we have lots of time. More important, we are so focused on the question of when Iran could have a bomb, we underestimate the real depth of our interests here. The current situation, where Iran does not have a bomb -- but gives everyone the impression it is moving in that direction -- is almost as bad as an Iranian deterrent -- the day in, day out haggling creates a slow, steady erosion of confidence in the Nonproliferation Regime.

"Moreover, talking about this as a crisis leads to hasty conclusions about what happens if Tehran "gets" the bomb -- the world will not end, though we will be less secure. Assuming that Iran masters enrichment, we have a variety of interests to protect even if Iran stockpiles a few nuclear weapons. I would rather Iran have one, than ten. I would rather Iran have fuel, but not assemble the bomb. I would rather Iran not test it nuclear weapons or master the process of miniaturization that would allow delivery by ballistic missile. Most important, I want Iran to understand that it's deterrent is only good for retaliation, not coercion; that transfer of any of its nuclear materials to terrorists would result in the elimination of the Islamic Republic and its elites; and the use of nuclear weapon would be a prelude to the historical conclusion of Persian civilization.

"My advice, not fashionable these days, is to take a page from LBJ after the Chinese nuclear test. We need to act confident that the acquisition of Iranian nuclear weapons does nothing to enhance their security and everything to further isolate and weaken them.

"But our political system tends to reward the hysterical at the expense of the calm."

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To close on this subject for tonight, commentary on Cirincione and Lewis from an informed Loyal Reader we often quote: " 'The point of no return' is a great phrase. The Israelis are quite fond of it, and it doesn't surprise me to see pundits cribbing it. I have no idea what if anything it is supposed to mean in technical terms, but the Israelis routinely put it forward before IAEA Board of Governors votes. It won't surprise you that Joe C.'s reasoning by analogy doesn't work for me. I haven't arrived at strongly determined views on the question of bombing, so he's not appealing to my prejudices. A strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would cut both ways: it would presumably end all restraint on the regime's part, accelerating their efforts. It would also reverse a lot of their labors to date."

Think about it, this critique continues, "It is not at all obvious to me which effect would overwhelm the other, but I do note that Jeff and others have written a fair bit about the difficulties Iran has experienced in trying to master conversion and enrichment. It's difficult to work out the kinks in large-scale operations when you no longer have facilities to operate! So there is a potential rationale here that should not be dismissed. The less restraint the Iranians show in operating their facilities, moreover, the better such a move for short-term advantage looks, since there is less to lose by it. There are also some uncertainties in the 5-10 year estimates for Iran's going nuclear that we could discuss at greater length later. These questions cut both ways when it comes to arguments for military action -- it's not cut-and-dried..."

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Obviously, until we know if the Iranians will re-seal Natanz, and what, if anything, the IAEA will do in two weeks, this critical debate can but continue. Many thanks to the many informed Loyal Readers who have taken the time to help us Asianists navigate these highly relevant, but dangerously obscure waters.

Joe Cirincione and Jeffrey Lewis have offered blazingly logical, unsentimental assessments of America's current Iran problem.

In my own view, Iran's nuclear pretensions are a direct result of America removing Iran's chief antagonist in the region, Iraq under secular (and yes, fascist) rule -- as well as from the sad fact that America's mystique of power and capability has been greatly damaged by bogging down in the Iraq quagmire. When the perception of American power declines, allies are prompted not to count on the US as much and enemies have an incentive to move their agendas.

Other factors that Charles Krauthammer, Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey, Clifford May, Michael Ledeen and other neoconservatives fail to mention in their commentary is that Iran's current president had his preferred Oil Minister rejected four times by Iran's National Assembly. What was that about? What system of checks-and-balances exists in Iran (that seems to be less evident in America of late) that we are not discussing? Does that tension inside Iran's political system between the assembly and president offer any opportunities? Is Ahmadinejad attempting to outmaneuver his legislative shackles with his "wipe Israel off the map" jingoism, and is this having a positive or negative effect on his executive authority?

Iran's president is not a monarch -- and as nasty a character as I feel he is, he is not a Saddam Hussein. He's teasing deeply held theocratic convictions to try to legitimate himself and thus is doing what any rational power-maximizer would try and do when constrained. We need to apply our intelligence and thinking to this puzzle and familiarize ourselves with the factors that are driving his behavior.

We need to become more knowledgeable about Iran's internal government processes that enhance and constrain his abilities to move.

All that said, I do believe that Iran's nuclear pretensions run deeply and are morphing into a benchmark of ascendant nationalism. Even "healthy" nationalists in Iran would have robust nuclear power -- and perhaps even nuclear weapons -- on their list of what a "great nation" must have in its tool kit.

I believe that there are a great many options between war with Iran and doing nothing regarding its nuclear activities, but I am also convinced that Iran -- in the long run -- will probably have nukes. Iran has 70 million people and is a rich nation with a great past. As China reclaims some of its historical prestige, others who aspire to past glory also will -- and there is little that America or the world can do to permanently preempt such pretensions.

Economic sanctions, political and econoic carrots -- even harsher sticks -- can slow Iran's nuclear program, but the blowback from a harsh, military intervention will produce the single worst outcome in such an encounter: a significantly isolated, angry, democratically empowered hypernationalist nuclear power that will be focused more on the emotional need for revenge than on the pragmatic objective of regional balance with Israel, and general order and security.

Recently, both Senator Hillary Clinton and newly inaugurated Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine spoke about Iran -- and argued for a "tough policy." What does this mean? Their prescriptions are not only shallow on the facade -- but dangerously weak conceptually because Iran is a far more complicated and dangerous threat than Iraq was to the US.

America's objectives are to hopefully preempt Iran's move to nuclear weapons, but if this proves impossible over the next five to ten years -- which is the amount of time the intelligence community believes exists between today and when Iran could conceivably process the fuel and overcome technical handicaps in assembling a warhead -- then the better option is to find some way, either directly or through proxies, to slow Iran's progress towards a robust system that it will eventually develop.

One objective might be to keep Iran's program covert and undeclared, much like Israel's. And in the interim to begin cultivating a rhetoric and language of regional balance of power, and of nuclear deterrence in the region.

These are radical ideas -- but if Israel's regional nuclear monopoly is going to end, as America's nuclear monopoly once did, it is vital to educate all parties about (as Jeffrey Lewis states above) nuclear weapons in their "deterrent role", not as an instrument of coercion.

The only presidential candidate who has been talking semi-sensibly about the "realities" in the Middle East as they are and not in some fictionalized sketch is Wesley Clark.

While Clark believes that we need a great deal more diplomatic effort to redirect Iran from its current nuclear course, he also knows that one can't deal with either Iran or Iraq in a bubble unto themselves. General Clark has stated publicly that America needs to do a deal with Iran. He believes we cannot manage Iraq and potential explosive realities in the region without buy-in from Iran. In that, there may be opportunities to appeal to Iran's desire to be less isolated on the international stage and dealt with in a more dignified way given its size and importance in the region.

This is no proposal to appease Iran -- and no call for America and Europe to "bless" Iran's nuclear activities. The truth is that American military power, allied with our allies' military capacity -- properly and lethally constructed -- should be in our "last resort tool kit" if Iran shows no interest in negotiating on any front -- and is demonstrably bent on using its eventual nukes actively rather than holding them for security. But the James Woolsey types of this era want such military options much higher on the list, without much regard for consequences to America's overall security or the viability of its military and foreign policy objectives.

A strong, visionary U.S. president would go to Iran and do a deal akin to what Kissinger and Nixon accomplished with China. Maybe such a deal involves a covert nuclear program and maybe not -- but what is extremely important for US policy makers to know is that a replay of the mistakes that America made running up to our Iraq mess may finally be the punctuation point that ends America's role as a globally powerful, mostly benign hegemon.

America loses if it forfeits its ability to marshall like-minded powers on objectives the US feels are important to its own and global security.

Woolsey and his colleagues from Scoop Jackson circles are doing serious harm to America's national security portfolio -- and they will not stop, not ever -- until the Congress, rational parts of the Bush administration and Pentagon, civil society and the American public shut down these dangerous pundits.

-- Steve Clemons

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Committee on the Present Danger, two front organizations in the neoconservative network, will try and move a "military strike" against Iran a notch closer tomorrow.

Monday morning, 9:30 a.m., in SC-6 of the U.S. Capitol, war-profiteer and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey will be joined by former RNC Spokesman and President for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies President Clifford May and Arizona Senator (and staunch supporter of the recess appointed John Bolton) Jon Kyl to help roll out public opinion research that allegedly states that Americans support military action against Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program.

Some may try and laugh this off -- but it's no funny matter.

James Woolsey successfully master-minded the mass communication fiction that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11/2001 al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington by alleging that connection on major news stations on the day America was under siege. And while connecting Iraq to America's new terror problem, Woolsey failed to disclose that he was assisting his legal client Ahmed Chalabi who had everything to gain from a war against terror that included Iraq.

Woolsey & Co. are at it again on Iran.

From the press advisory:

As President Bush prepares to deliver his sixth State of the Union address (Jan. 31), the CPD (Committee on the Present Danger) will release a new Iran Policy Paper calling for stronger actions to prevent Iran -- ruled by the most radical regime in the Middle East and a long-time sponsor of international terrorism -- from acquiring nuclear weapons. The paper will argue that it is time to impose tough economic sanctions and to take action to promote regime change in Iran.

FDD (Foundation for Defense of Democracies) will release new polling data from Public Opinion Strategies showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans strongly opposes Iran's development of nuclear weapons. In addition, most Americans would support the U.S. joining with other countries to initiate "a limited military action to destroy Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons."

What is fundamentally disturbing about Woolsey's move is that they coincide with other movement.

I cannot validate the accuracy of a report I have -- but with the caveat that this may be erroneous information -- TWN has been told that senior Congressional leaders, including senior Democratic officials, were given a top secret briefing on Tuesday, 17 January, on potential military options against Iran. No Congressional leaders have publicly stated that they received such a briefing, but others close to the intelligence community have conveyed that information to TWN.

This briefing date coincides with Secretary of State Rice's meetings with European officials over next steps to take with Iran.

Another disturbing part of the brewing Iran problem is a classified Air Force bombing study that allegedly reports that it is possible for an American bombing campaign to destroy and/or incapacitate 85% of Iran's nuclear program.

This study is classified but has been informally referred to repeatedly by many intelligence and American military officials. The study is not new and has been making the rounds for more than a year, but there seems to be significantly greater confidence in the report now than a year ago -- and more celebration of the potential "85%" number.

Others in the government, the intelligence community, the nuclear weapons laboratories, and the military with whom I have spoken think that it is lunacy to adopt a highly confident position that the U.S. Air Force can knock out Iran's nuclear program.

And stating the obvious, there has been no discussion of what such a strike might do to undermine America's standing in the Middle East for years, if not decades and permanently.

There is much more that needs to be said about Iran -- and I will be at it tomorrow. However, for now -- people need to be aware that there is a serious effort underway to legitimate "early military action" against Iran.

This is a time when the "Nixon went to China" moment would be a presidential secret trip to Iran to hammer out new arrangements.

More on this tomorrow.

But those of you who may get a chance to hear Woolsey, Kyl, and May tomorrow, please drop us a line -- and give Mr. Woolsey TWN's regards.

-- Steve Clemons

Oakley really does not want me to leave town again. But I must.

For those of you who are in the San Francisco Bay area, TWN is planning a trip out there tomorrow, arriving in the morning. I return to Washington on Wednesday.

Tuesday night, I will be giving a talk titled "America's Middle East Distraction: What Iraq Has Done to Trigger Bigger Challenges Ahead" for the San Francisco Committee on Foreign Relations.

If any bloggers or political junkies want to assemble Monday evening or Tuesday during the day, drop me a line.

-- Steve Clemons

Jim VandeHei, White House Correspodent for the Washington Post, gave a nice plug to TWN on Friday in the Post's daily online political discussion.

In the early part of discussion, a reader asked VandeHei what sources he uses to "get his news":

Baton Rouge, La.: Jim - as a reporter, where do you go to get your news? You're obviously well-informed about the topics that you cover and you gather a lot of information yourself, but do you utilize other newspapers and blogs to get information as well?

Jim VandeHei: we get our information from taking to sources, reading other publications and sifting through records or documents. I do not find blogs a useful source of information.

The comment that VandeHei is not into blogs got some riled up. However, I think that he has highly valid concerns about the still un-evolved standards in blog journalism and commentary.

Here is the exchange:

Rochester, N.Y.: "I do not find blogs a useful source of information" Boy are you out of touch.

Jim VandeHei: I hope I am not out of touch. Blogs, or at least those I have read, seem to react more to what we write.

There are a few exceptions where bloggers are acting as serious reporters and digging up information. Steve Clemons, who writes The Washington Note, comes to mind as one source of information on national security matters I might not find elsewhere. Unfortunately, I also find a lot of misinformation on other blogs.

There are other bloggers out there that work hard at adding value to their published product -- and who do some very good investigative journalism -- but they are few.

I don't know Jim VandeHei personally and was proud of the comment he shared, but the occasion of his mention makes me raise a second point that I think that the liberal and conservative blogging communities need to seriously address.

Blogging, to some degree, has taken some elements of political journalism back to the days of "Scandalmongering" which to me seems like an appropriate description of the rampant political pampleteering in the early period of America's birth as a nation.

James Callendar was one such famous "scandalmonger", but there were many others. William Safire wrote a fun but not widely read book titled Scandalmonger about yellow journalism and the early political feuds between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Although a used copy in "good condition" of Safire's book can be acquired for a mere penny plus shipping from Amazon, it is worth considerably more and should be read to remind us what out of control, sloppy, and often slanderous journalism looked like.

I am going this direction because I was planning to write about VandeHei before he had said anything nice about my blog.

While I'm really happy with what he said, to some degree I wish he hadn't because some will suspect that it seems too coincidental that I would defend him here after he made a comment on a public forum on Friday. Well, the timing is coincidental and people will have to accept my position on that or not.

What has bothered me is that for the last several days, there have been clusters of liberal bloggers who have been hyperventilating over the fact that VandeHei's wife used to be a social/family policy advisor in the office of Congressman Tom DeLay, when he was Majority Whip. They have used this as evidence in their assessments that VandeHei must be an "unfair" journalist, tilting to the right, allegedly not asking conservatives the "tough questions" and giving liberals a tough time -- particularly in his coverage of the Valerie Plame investigation.

This just is not true. VandeHei is breaking big news -- "without fear or favor" as great journalism should -- and it's obvious just by reading his pieces.

I have linked to a number of them on TWN. But a quick review shows that there is one here questioning the Libby-Cheney relationship in the Plame indictment story.

Here is another on the Plame story, co-written with Walter Pincus, who would not give the time of day to a political hack.

Here is another TWN reference and article exposing Colin Powell as a behind-the-scenes opponent of John Bolton's nomination to the United Nations.

There are others as well on this blog -- and just hundreds of them this past year on the Washington Post site.

There are reporters that do a sloppy job, and some do cross lines that they shouldn't. I've written enough about Judith Miller to indicate my belief that she galloped past many of these lines.

However, if we are going to begin engaging in whisper campaigns against writers, thinkers, policy intellectuals, administration officials, Hill staff, and others because of who they are married to or where they were born or other irrelevant, private factors -- rather than make an empirical assessment of their work and thinking -- then we are in real trouble.

I can't and won't divulge the source or specific commenters who have raised questions about VandeHei. I value my relationships with the blogging and pundit networks I am in, but I also just need to send a signal that stuff that sounds slanderous often is -- and in my increasingly less humble view -- we need to orient our debates about issues, about policy, about the quality of one's thinking and work.

There is nothing wrong about political agendas, or political advocacy, or even seeking to undermine talented good people on the other side of the political equation to push a new political direction or candidate.

But savaging journalists who have very clear records is not a wise move. We all make mistakes. I have. VandeHei probably will, but quality journalists work on those mistakes and work to build trust with their readers and sources in such a way that credible news is delivered.

Who he is married to, or who I hang out with bars on the weekends, or who you spend time with is not relevant in any debate about whether journalism is high quality or not. I hope that my friends in the blogging community will agree and move on to better challenges that do deserve their scrutiny.

-- Steve Clemons

Paul Wolfowitz, architect of America's failing foray into Iraq as Rumsfeld's former Deputy at the Pentagon, now heads the World Bank and finally seems like his true self is coming out of the closet.

In recent months, picking up steam in recent weeks, there has been a massive exodus of top talent from the World Bank. According to reports, the senior Ethics Officer at the Bank has departed. Also on the exit roster are the Vice President for East Asia & Pacific, the Chief Legal Counsel, the Bank's top Managing Director, the Director of Institutional Integrity (which monitors internal and external corruption), the Vice President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development, and the head of ISG (Information Solutions Group).

According to one senior insider who feels as if Wolfowitz is gut-punching the most talented teams at the bank and indicated that morale is plummeting, "Wolfowitz just does not talk to his Vice Presidents. He speaks to a few close advisors -- Kevin Kellems, Robin Cleveland, Karl Jackson, some others -- but a lot of very good people are leaving."

What Wolfowitz has done that has started a serious wave of negative sentiment against him among his ranks is that he has appointed Kevin Kellems -- Vice President Cheney's former Communications Director and Spokesman -- as a "director" of the bank, which formally reports to a Vice President of the Bank -- while at the same time making him Senior Advisor to Wolfowitz.

In other words, Wolfowitz is forcing a political appointment at the "director level" of the bank -- which is never done. "Director" positions are fairly low in the World Bank bureaucracy and are filled by a competitive process and the merits of one's work -- not political imposition.

However, Wolfowitz on January 10, 2006 made Kellems Director of Strategy in the External Affairs, Communications and United Nations Affairs Vice Presidency while at the same time Senior Advisor to the President of the Bank.

In addition, the senior Bank staff are bristling at the behavior and antics of Robin Cleveland, a long-time aide to Senator Mitch McConnell who was considered by this writer to be one of the few genuinely monstrous personalities among Congressional staff. She has been shaking World Bank staff and programs on governance and anti-corruption agendas "in her normal, predictable tirade-style" according to one senior World Bank official.

The irony here is that Robin Cleveland was herself deeply involved in the Boeing tanker ethics mess. While soliciting then Secretary of the Air Force James Roche to help her brother get a job at Northrop Grumman, Roche wroter her a reply after receiving his resume:

Be well. Smile. Give tankers (Oops, did I say that? My new deal is terrific.) :) Jim.

While the Financial Times reported that Roche was found guilty of breaching defense department ethics rules, the Pentagon inspector general did not have the authority to inveestigate Robin Cleveland.

Senior bank staff see Wolfowitz withdrawing from his team and senior players -- and relying instead on a group of political zealots -- Wolfowitz's "dobermans" one staffer told TWN.

Here are some comments that have been shared with TWN this morning and yesterday:

"Wolfowitz is not talking to his VPs. He is withdrawing -- and instead using Robin Cleveland and the likes of Kevin Kellems to do his bidding, and they are building massive ill will inside the Bank."

"He is appointing political hacks into positions that should be filled by highly qualified personnel through competitive and transparent processes."

"Cleveland and Wolfowitz talk about anti-corruption and good governance, but she herself was in the midst of the Boeing tanker scandal and he is appointing a hack at the director level, circumventing the VP, and making this same hack his Senior Adviser. Cleveland in particular rankles as she is the single most arrogant and abusive person at the senior level of the bank without anything to be arrogant about. She makes John Bolton look sheepish."

"Wolfowitz is Sovietizing the bank by placing his political watch dogs in key positions in the bank -- and is more interested in political symbolism than the substantive work and challenges of the Bank."

What is clear to TWN is that whatever honeymoon Paul Wolfowitz had at the World Bank -- externally and internally -- is over. ANY major bureaucracy will resist change and attempt to thwart some of the more extensive objectives of its leader. So, some of this resentment of Wolfowitz may be similar to the same kind of resistance that James Wolfensohn encountered when he was shifting things around inside the institution.

However, after having recently listened to Karl Jackson at an informal lunch where Jackson recounted his work on Indonesia and interaction with Paul Wolfowitz, with whom Jackson is very close, I have concerns about the quality of interaction between Wolfowitz and other senior level personalities in the Bank's hierarchy. I can't comment on Jackson's precise comments as they were not for attribution -- but I got a "feel" for some of the problems that others have been describing.

Jackson now serves as an advisor to Wolfowitz and is a former colleague at the Johns Hopkins/Nitze School of Advanced International Studies where Wolfowitz served as Dean. But after just mentioning the names Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems to a few Bank staff in phone interviews, people gushed with resentment against them and Paul Wolfowitz.

This simmering tension between Wolfowitz and his staff seems to be deeper and more serious than even the drama of staff reorganization can explain.

Wolfowitz may be showing his stripes now -- and may be finally tilting the Bank into a groove where it becomes a harsher instrument of U.S. foreign policy -- rewarding friends and punishing those who don't fall into lockstep behind George W. Bush's vision.

-- Steve Clemons

Although I disagreed with the primary thrust of Dana Priest's book, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military, there is little doubt that she is one of the best intelligence and defense correspondents in the business.

In her book, Priest comes to the conclusion that the only entity in the great sphere of American institutions that can build nations and civil societies as well as topple the world's bad guys is the American military. She is absolutely right that the Department of Defense is becoming the "do it all" institution, but that does not mean it should be that way. In fact, I feel it's important that it not.

She argues that America's defense attaches are our de facto diplomats and that there is no institution with the teeth, budgets and deep personnel capacity to do the nation-building work that a world with more failing states needs. My view is that we have to build that capacity outside of the Department of Defense and become more attuned to the fact that the Pentagon's security deliverables have been declining, not increasing, with greater budgets and responsibility.

But I was very pleased to host Dana Priest when her book first came out for a genuine discussion about the issues she provoked. And I've been impressed by the quality and temerity of her work since.

Among her many news coups, Dana Priest broke the story on secret detention centers in Europe, and while Republican Senators tried to knife each other in the back for being "the leak" to the press, TWN was able to establish that Priest's sources on that story were many -- and that what positioned her on it was two years of diligent, tough investigative work.

As I also wrote recently, she and Washington Post colleague Mike Allen were also at the front of the pack of those journalists getting insider administration operatives to tell much of what Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were up to in outing Valerie Plame's CIA identity. As I wrote, it's clear that the insider who cooperated with Priest and Allen has not yet publicly surfaced -- either in Fitzgerald's indictment materials or statements, or in any other journalistic reporting on the Plame investigation.

I think that there is much that can be learned from an encounter with Dana Priest and encourage those interested to engage her.

Priest will be on line today in a Washington Post forum at 12:30 p.m. eastern. Click here to get the information on how to participate in a discussion with her about these national security and intelligence issues.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

As I have stressed a number of times on TWN, I am not into ideological zealotry -- from the right or the left.

My agenda in the coming several years is to do what modest things I can to help Democrats get back into the foreign policy/national security game and to help Republicans restore a moderate, sensible core as its defining edge. Many of my readers disagree with this agenda, but that is mine -- to help both sides get back into constructive, competitive engagement on important policy challenges facing the country.

Tactics, and even primary objectives, will differ between many progressively minded writers and public intellectuals, but it seems to me that the country will be in much safer hands when we get out of the high-fear dynamic that parts of the Bush administration are using to grab, justify, and consolidate power.

As I have written before, I had a nasty experience long ago when the Democratic members of the Los Angeles City Council and then Mayor Tom Bradley were bought off by Armand Hammer and Occidental Petroleum who sought permits to drill for oil off the Pacific Palisades. This was a local deal, but at that time, the Dems were engaged in Abramoff like behaviors. Democrats don't have a monopoly on decency or fair play.

But people like me who are progressively-concerned centrists have to accept the fact that the current administration's dominant personalities are not "playing well" with the rest of the political system. Bush's model of government is sending out disastrous signals to potential democratic change agents around the world -- teaching them that checks and balances can easily be up-ended and ignored. This is not the kind of foreign policy leadership that any realist or liberal internationalist can support.

What has triggered my thinking about these matters are two conversations I had yesterday.

One was a dinner with an unnamed Senior Administration Official who confirmed my view that there are many thoughtful, fair-minded, and deeply concerned senior Bush administration Republicans who think that the administration must turn itself around and get out of the "thumb in their eye" national security positions it has taken.

The other was an interesting conference call between bloggers and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

The administration official I spoke to yesterday -- and others of similar perspective scattered through the administration -- believe that there have been huge public relations and policy disasters surrounding Guantanamo, the management of accountability after Abu Ghraib, the rendition of prisoners abroad, the administration's battle with John McCain over torture policy, and even the NSA intercepts.

While TWN and these various officials may disagree over the 'substance' of some of these policy matters, the fact is that the public relations disasters that have occurred have preempted any honest debate about policy substance -- and this official acknowledges that. This person is introspective and self-critical about these problems and wants to fix them. He wants to address the problem and to reconnect to real debates.

This is exactly the right strategy -- and this writer and pundit is more than happy to help those inside the Bush administration try to get to more constructive ground than that on which the administration currently stands.

That brings me to the phone encounter with Harry Reid, who was extremely forthcoming by the way. Among the matters he discussed were the Alito confirmation vote and hearing, his new proposal restricting any acceptance of lobbying gifts, the NSA wiretaps, and his Rule 21 effort to compel the Senate Intelligence Committee to move forward on its Phase 2 report.

Senator Reid shared with us that just that day an unnamed Democratic Senator had come to him with a proposal on "ethics reform" ala Abramoff that could be bi-partisan. Reid told this person that this was the wrong time to be engaged in construtive "reform" proposals with the other side. He said that this was the time to draw a line and to show how "our side" differed dramatically from "their side."

Given the 2006 elections ahead, this strategy makes sense on many levels. But this reminds me somewhat of the attitude of the AFL/CIO in 1996-1997, when I worked for a Democrat in the Senate, that "we needed to be about defining the problem, not about fixing things."

I think that there will be more than enough problems and failed policies and brewing scandals for contrasting images to be juxtaposed to Democratic party benefit in the next elections.

However, generating constructive and positive policy proposals -- that fix problems and that would appeal to "most Americans" meaning Dems, reasonable independents, and independently minded Republicans" -- are vital parts of a successful political strategy, in my view.

I complimented Senator Reid for invoking Rule 21 and shutting down the Senate to compel Senator Pat Roberts and the Republican Senate establishment to stop dragging its feet on its investigation into the administration's use and potential abuse of WMD intelligence. Reid relished telling the tale of how it all unfolded.

I told him that such demonstrations of backbone needed to be less rare -- and that the absence of such resolve in the Alito confirmation process was disheartening. He said that he was meeting today with the Democratic caucus to see if there are 41 Senators willing to say no to Alito -- and really say no (meaning a filibuster). He indicated that there was only a 50/50 chance that there were 41 Senators and sounded doubtful.

But while I am all for constructive policy proposals, I also believe that "winning" is important. Alito should be filibustered in my view. He is the wrong judge to go to the Supreme Court in these times -- and Dems should send that message.

However, as I told Senator Reid yesterday, Democrats have too much of a tendency to concede defeat before the battle has really been fought -- and many Republicans, in contrast, are declaring victory even if they may be losing.

Dems need a combination of hard-edged tactics and serious resolve as well as good vision and proposals.

But we have three years left of one of the most dramatic and often disturbing presidencies in decades -- and I believe that the reasonable and sensible personalities in the Bush administration should be supported while the clan that holds close to Vice President Cheney -- and which is responsible for the worst disasters of Bush's term -- need to be exposed and vilified.

More on this later.

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: Two things to add at this point.

First, Jim Lehrer will be interviewing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid tonight on the News Hour and rumor has it that a number of the PBS staff have been intrigued that Reid is doing conference calls with bloggers. . .

Secondly, I was notified that CNN is doing some sort of story today based on the blog post above -- and focusing on Reid's statement during the conference call that he was more interested in showing the difference between Democrats and Republicans on political ethics reform than in bridging them. Senator Reid's staff has contacted me to emphasize that while TWN's account is accurate, the intent of his statement was to not allow Republicans a "duck and cover" strategy that would allow them to escape responsibility and accountability for the behaviors we have seen unfold in the Abramoff case.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I have to admit that I have never had a hard time constraining my enthusiasm for either Al Gore or John Kerry, but at the same time, Gore's recent speeches have been stemwinders and offer us a glimpse into the kind of appealing president he might have been.

Yesterday, Gore took President Bush to task on the warrantless wiretapping authorization he gave the National Security Agency to spy on Americans.

He has called for a "Special Counsel" to be appointed.

From Ron Brownstein's piece this morning:

Former Vice President Al Gore, charging that President Bush's record on civil liberties posed a "grave danger" to America's constitutional freedoms, on Monday urged the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.

In a detailed and impassioned speech sponsored by liberal and conservative groups, Gore said that although much remained unknown about the spying program, "what we do know. . .virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently."

Gore, the Democratic nominee who lost to Bush in the bitterly disputed 2000 presidential race, also said Congress "should hold comprehensive. . .hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the president."

I couldn't agree more with Gore that Bush does not seem to know the definition of democracy or of checks-and-balances:

If the president has the power "to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?" Gore asked.

It is this kind of spirit -- combined with smarts -- that appeals not just to the left that will get a Democrat into the White House.

Maybe losing the White House helped Gore find his inner Truman. Brownstein speculates that he may try to run again.

Whether he does or not, the template he is setting is impressive for any of the candidates that may finally make it.

-- Steve Clemons

This piece in the Boston Globe today is well worth spending some time reading and thinking through.

To share the beginning of the article:

In 1973 the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published a book called The Imperial Presidency, tracing the way in which the White House had, over the course of American history, grabbed more and more power until it threatened to overwhelm the rest of the federal government.

Then-president Richard Nixon-who carried out a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia, eavesdropped on his domestic rivals, and impounded federal funds that Congress had earmarked for programs he didn't like-was to Schlesinger only the latest and most brazen example.

President George W. Bush, say his Democratic critics (and even a few Republicans), has demonstrated Caesar-like proclivities of his own. The past week's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. reflected increasing concerns in Congress that Bush is pushing the envelope of presidential power like few before him. He has approved warrantless surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency, issued a "signing statement" reserving the right to waive a congressionally mandated ban on torture, and attempted to game the federal courts in cases involving terror detainees.

With John Roberts, a former White House lawyer known for an expansive view of presidential prerogative, now presiding as chief justice, the widely-predicted confirmation of Alito, whose record suggests a similar bent, could well make the Supreme Court even more accommodating of executive power.

Yet the branch of government Schlesinger exhorted to resist the executive's slow-motion coup was not the Supreme Court. It was Congress. And although throughout most of Bush's presidency the legislative branch has been, in the words of Thomas Mann, a government scholar at the Brookings Institution, "remarkably weak and supine," there are signs that the president's assertions of power have finally roused the nation's legislature. The same day that it overwhelmingly approved the defense bill including the anti-torture amendment, Congress refused to give the administration its desired extension of the USA Patriot Act. And several members of Congress, most importantly Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, have called for hearings on the NSA's surveillance program.

But even as Congress bestirs itself to seek limits on the president's power, the question remains: How much can it do? Over the last half century, historians and political scientists observe, Congress's clout has waned as dramatically as the executive's has grown, especially in national security matters. And Congress itself is largely to blame.

Instead of jealously guarding its institutional prerogatives, Congress has been complicit in the diminution of its powers, in a way that seems to run counter to the very logic of the Constitution's system of checks and balances. Whether Congress manages to impose its power over the executive branch, then, depends on whether the body has the will to reverse its own history.

This is an interesting article and poses questions not unlike others that have been pursued in TWN posts. However, while I believe that Congress has been complicit in its own decline, the Executive Branch's surge in relative power is not explainable just by the collapse and corruption of Congressional leadership.

I do believe that Tom DeLay and his machine took Washingtonian structual corruption to new heights, but the fact is that Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby, Gonzales, and other close cronies also warped the way the administration itself works. They cut out dissent inside the administration.

One of the most disturbing but rarely acknowledged aspects of the NSA warrantless wiretap scandal is that it was not the FISA court approvals that were the problem for the administration. Bush's problem was holding his own team together on the requests. The Deputy Attorney General thought they were wrong and perhaps illegal. State got cut out of the loop. Some in NSA were outraged. Even John Ashcroft did not want to sign off on the order.

Bush avoided the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court because the Executive Branch was not cohesive on this issue. Checks and balances usually occur between branches of government, with civil society as an added check on the behavior and performance of government. However, the NSA case is one in which checks and balances external and internal to the Executive Branch failed to work -- because of the perversion of the system of law and process that Bush and his team engineered.

We are four and a half years late in rectifying the problem of an out of control presidency. Congress, the media, NGOs, and others engaged in our democratic system must forcefully knock back the expansive powers of a wannabe monarchy.

The White House will not self correct; it's not designed to. But it's absolutely essential that the White House be curtailed.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to GS for sending this piece.

As TWN reported a few weeks ago, we are preparing to launch a new zone in the blogosphere dedicated to reporting on the work and activities of recess-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

I've been keeping my powder dry on Bolton since his confirmation as Ambassador Bolton deserved a chance to prove his confirmation critics wrong and to demonstrate that he was going to bring to a more credible edge a reality of U.N. reform and improved American diplomacy in that institution.

Regrettably, Bolton has done the opposite and proved those of us who had serious concerns about his objectives correct.

Just to be clear -- we aren't out to create a Bolton-bashing space. He has the job now. This is about making sure he does his job. Cheney's crew loves to use the United Nations as a punching bag during elections. If the UN becomes an issue in 2006, then we need to be sure that the "whole story" is being told.

This effort is about John Bolton disrupting his own AMERICAN negotiators trying to achieve diplomatic ends that the Secretary of State and her staff have set. This is about last minute major disruptions in fragile diplomacy that Bolton undermines in the name of reform -- but actually seems designed and patterned to stop the reform process.

Bolton Watch will work to keep a record of Bolton's work and activities, his diplomatic pattern, and his statements and the contradictions between what he does and what he has testified to Congress that he is doing.

Among many of the objectives that we have with Bolton Watch, one of them will be to give Secretary of State Rice a hand in managing this turbulent and often destructive ambassador. She said she'd manage him -- but we feel that she may not always know what John Bolton is up to.

We'll give him credit when he deserves it. But the bottom line is that his days are numbered.

The failure to get confirmation in the Senate means that John Bolton can only serve through the end of this Congressional session -- and that means that by mid-January 2007, John Bolton will need a new job. He can't be recess appointed again.

Josh Marshall, proprieter and publisher of Talking Points Memo and TPM Cafe, is the person who deserves the most credit for my entry into blogging. He nudged me for two years to launch TWN and I finally did it.

Well, the new space for Bolton Watch will be housed at TPM Cafe with links back to both TWN and TPM.

The launch date for Bolton Watch has now been set for January 23rd.

Those of you who have donated to help support Bolton Watch, thank you very much. Your financial support has enabled us to broaden our team for this and to get some other folks on board to do some of the research and writing.

If more of you want to support this project, which TWN greatly appreciates, feel free to use the PayPal link at the right hand corner of the blog -- or to send contributions to:

The Washington Note/Bolton Watch

1915 17th Street NW

Washington, DC 20009

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

If you have the time and interest, watch for an interesting program this evening on C-Span featuring John Siegenthaler, a distinguished journalist and first editorial page editor at USA Today as well as the founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University; Jim Brady, Executive Editor of Washington Post.com, and Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation and The Washington Note on the topic, "The Reliability of Online News and Information Services."

The show is moderated by the insightful regular anchor of C-Span's Close Up Program John Milewski.

I was there. It's a very interesting program and deals with the recent controversy of John Siegenthaler's Wikipedia biographical entry being sabotaged by all kinds of false and defamatory material alleging his connection to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy as well as other falsehoods. The program also discusses blog content and sourcing.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Despite the fact that Pat Robertson has apologized to Ariel Sharon's son and to the Israeli and Jewish people for the "insensitivity" of the timing of his remarks that God struck down Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin because they were "dividing God's land", the Israeli government is going to shut Robertson out of the major Biblical theme park "deal" planned for the Sea of Gallilee.

As reporte In an AP story today:

Rami Levi, director of marketing for Israel's tourism ministry, told The Associated Press that the government remains "outraged" by Robertson's remarks.

Israel's tourism minister, Abraham Hirchson, said Wednesday that Robertson's help was no longer welcome for the proposed center.

The Biblical park will proceed, but the funders that Israel has lined up to finance it will not include Pat Robertson. To give him that prize now, whether his apology was sincere or not (and I'd argue that it was not), would outrage too many Israelis from the right to the political left.

This is precisely the kind of wedge action that needs to be more regularly deployed -- dividing the nonsensical wing of fundamentalist conservatives from traditional conservatives and moderates.

Bravo.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman has the cover of tomorrow's Nation, and I suspect that it will become the script for those on the left who will be organizing, protesting, advocating, and clamoring for George W. Bush's impeachment.

The article, "The Impeachment of George W. Bush" has just now been posted, but I have been thinking about her argument for two days, wondering what I could add to the mix or say about this that she has not.

Holtzman has written a powerfully argued piece with which I mostly agree -- but to be honest -- could have been even more powerful if it had embedded more Republican disgust with what Holtzman appropriately terms the "President's systematic abuse of power." Nonetheless, it's an important brief.

While Holtzman was a steadfast liberal in Congress, her writing about the Nixon impeachment in which she participated and voted for as a Member of the House Judiciary Committee, reaches beyond her party affiliation as it's clear that for her, considering "impeachment" of a president is as grave as "declaring war", which she argues is the toughest and most serious call a president can make.

She compares Bush's "high crimes and misdemeanors" to those of Nixon -- and makes a very compelling case.

In her methodic and reasoned indictment of President Bush, Holtzman states that she has been "deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for international treaty obligations under the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions." She proceeds to outline the torture scandal and violations of U.S. criminal law which reach to the highest levels of government but for which there has been virtually no application of accountability.

Part of her argument follows a course that I (if writing the article) would not have so strongly emphasized: resurrecting the assertion that Bush deliberately misled the country into war against Iraq. Bush and Cheney did mislead the country, in my view, but in a matter of court of law -- it's tough to prove and no longer has the weight that either the NSA intercepts controversy or torture policy have at this point.

She does proceed into the NSA matter and argues that "President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."

She compares these to the crimes committed by Nixon and suggests that she "felt the same sinking feeling as (she) did during Watergate" and argues that in some cases, the legal breaches are worse under Bush than Nixon -- in part because of the lengths that Bush went to circumvent Congressional controls enacted in the wake of Watergate.

Holtzman's most powerful and compelling case rests on her blow by blow treatment of the case of "warrantless wiretaps". As she points out, after the Vietnam-rationalized warrantless wiretaps that Nixon authorized against his list of enemy journalists and suspected traitors on his White House staff, Congress imposed explicit controls on the White House. But these constraints which required the President to get court approval for wiretaps still allowed ex post facto approvals after a wiretap began -- as long as secured three days after the wiretap was initiated.

Holtzman tells us that over 28 years, more than 10,000 wiretaps have been approved and only four rejected. Four.

The article posits that the White House is pursuing power for its own sake and attempting to restore a Nixon-style imperial presidency. She suggests that the warrantless wiretaps are less about securing national security objectives than they were of establishing new precedents for unconstrained, expansive Executive Branch authority during a war.

Even if some sympathize with the President's view -- for a short crisis -- Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld have argued that this "war against terrorism" will go on for years, perhaps indefinitely. Thus, the power the White House has tried to grasp is one rationalized by them as having no finite end -- and having no legitimate constraint.

What is dictatorship, if not that? Holtzman asks the same question.

The article quotes a poignant comment by Sandra Day O'Connor that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

If only Samuel Alito carried any of O'Connor's sensible judicial DNA. . .

Holtzman adds to her brief against Bush many other counts -- such as asserting a false connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, pushing war using false intelligence, not firing or punishing any senior staff -- particularly Donald Rumsfeld -- after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, not providing armor for soldiers, not planning for the demands of occupation after the invasion of Iraq, and other crimes.

But to be honest, this article could have quoted a roster of Republicans like Congressman Chris Shays, former Congressman Amo Houghton, Senator Chuck Hagel, Senator John McCain and others -- particularly other Republicans knowledgeable and present during the Nixon impeachment like William Cohen and Howard Baker -- to make her Nixon-Bush impeachment case even more powerful.

I think that this country, and its elected Congressional representatives, are far away from any serious impeachment effort. The Republicans control both chambers of Congress and are highly unlikely to unleash a process that would lead to the most serious kind of legal challenge to the President, particularly if the only ones calling for this sort of ultimate accountability are on the left.

The fact is that there are many moderate Republicans and Democrats who are disgusted by many of the same issues that Holtzman documents.

I also feel that one of the connections that Holtzman and the media are not making is that while Bush authorized a great number of warrantless wiretaps using al Qaeda as the rationale, the fact is Bush took his eye of the Osama bin Laden/al Qaeda ball -- and distracted resources that might have quickly shut down the man, myth and rabid ideology of bin Laden so that they could settle old scores with Saddam Hussein.

On one hand, Bush has engaged in serious abuses and violations of the law in the name of fighting al Qaeda and protecting Americans -- and yet he failed in this very cause when he chose to make Hussein the number one enemy over bin Laden. As Cheney said to Bob Woodward, Hussein was a more tangible target to Americans in contrast to the more ephemeral bin Laden. That seems admission enough.

Holtzman calls for "full investigations" of the President's crimes -- which won't happen, not as Congress is currently comprised. But Arlen Specter might launch relatively fair and serious hearings into the wiretap issue, but he won't get much assistance from colleagues or the White House.

While Holtzman recognizes this constraint, she really doesn't outline ways to draw Republicans into the process, to cultivate the currents of disgust that do flow in Republican circles.

But whether impeachment is the right strategy or not -- LEGALLY challenging the White House and Bush on every front is important and is ultimately the only effective way of curbing Executive Branch authority -- which is forcing America's system of checks and balances to force the White House back if there are going to be any checks at all.

To some degree, the legal assault against and dethroning of Tom DeLay, the Fitzgerald investigation into the Valerie Plame case and indictment of Scooter Libby, the relatively fragile position of Karl Rove, and the scrutiny of Cheney and his role have all been helpful in getting some momentum going against Bush's unchecked power.

However, the process -- if it continues to have traction -- has only begun. It's important for someone to paint the big picture of what Bush could face if the Congress were controlled by Democrats -- but there are many other iterations of legal challenge that can and should be launched against Bush than impeachment.

And to win -- as Holtzman implies but does not say loudly enough -- a consensus must be cultivated in the country, ACROSS party lines that these abuses deserve serious punishment.

While Holtzman has written a powerful brief against Bush -- and it should be read and kept on hand -- I'll settle for squashing DeLay, further exposing Abramoff's corrupt networks, exposing the truly heinous crimes of Cheney and his staff, and knocking one pillar out after another under Bush.

That may not be impeachment -- but it will help to get controls back in place on White House power.

-- Steve Clemons

At least, Oakley wears his sunglasses outside.

When I went to see Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World this weekend at a Regal Cinemas event hosted by the Center for American Progress, actor and director Albert Brooks wore his sunglasses in the theatre.

I really wanted to like this film. I tried hard. The peer pressure was intense.

Seated around me were very luminescent luminaries and some semi-luminescent ones. Some were just normal folks out to watch the flick for free.

Paul Begala was there. John Kerry and former Senator Fred Thompson, who also appears in the movie, sat a couple of rows in front me. David Brock seemed to enjoy it, though I'm not sure he really did. I just heard him say that he liked it but it could have been just what he needed to say to get out of the room. John Podesta was the host. Even Grover Norquist was there.

I've hosted Washington, D.C. film premieres in the past for the policy crowd -- for Thirteen, Kinsey, In America, and Gunner Palace -- but I always insist on seeing the film before I screen it. I don't require that the film necessarily be "great", but I feel I need to be able to pitch it to 'my audience' in a way that permits honest discussion and debate about the respective policy issues raised.

After Thirteen, which starred Holly Hunter and was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, the Economist devoted a full "Lexington Page" to the event and the complicated family and teenage issues.

The way Looking for Comedy was presented, it sort of constrained honest discussion rather than opened it up. However, Brooks did say that the film got more intense support when he showed it in Dubai.

But with all due respect to Albert Brooks and the Center for American Progress, this film -- which I think many progressives will find themselves trying to like -- is a counterproductive movie.

Brooks told us that he made this film about looking for comedy and humor in the Muslim world to try and make the case that movies need to start addressing (again) the world we find ourselves in today. He said that the leading films of the year like Brokeback Mountain, Goodnight and Good Luck, Capote, and others were period pieces set in the past. He said that the complexity of our times was making us look back -- rather than to the present, or even the future.

Brooks has a point.

However, without giving away anything I probably shouldn't about the film -- the two "types" of humor that Brooks depicts working in the Muslim world are "stupid pet tricks" and "Jewish jokes." In one particularly bizarre seen, Al Jazeera tries to recruit Brooks for a new comedy sitcom that it is appearing for its new (fictional) Al Jazeera E Channel called "That Darn Jew."

I walked out of the theatre near a group of Muslims who were in the audience -- and in barely audible whispers and quiet commentary -- they were furious with the film.

What's odd is the premise of the film. I happened to attend a "Christmas Party" that was also a farewell luncheon hosted by the London Al Jazeera office when I was last in the U.K. -- and hung out with various staff from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Jordan and other places, and their humor was way better than mine -- and this movie's (. . .and Al Brooks' -- at least in this film).

I don't really like coming down hard on this movie as I generally like Brooks, and I have been involved in the past with movies that were controversial and not considered to be great successes either. I was the "talk show host" and technical advisor on the Sean Connery/Wesley Snipes film Rising Sun -- but that's a topic for another year.

But the way to reach the Muslim world, or to get Americans to break through the tension that they may feel about our problems there, is to get beyond the caricatures of bad Jewish jokes and silly animal tricks.

There's very rich humor in the Middle East. I showed this recently when I hosted Yosri Fouda of Al Jazeera at the New America Foundation. Not only was he a thoughtful and articulate observer and commentator about the Muslim world and terrorism issues, but he can be hilarious.

John Kerry, Paul Begala and the rest all looked quite satisfied with the film, but as anything in Washington or Hollywood, appearances can be deceiving.

And what really bothered me is that the film could have been great and might have been a vehicle that "humanized" the Middle East and helped Americans gain more insight into the "lighter" side of Muslim life.

-- Steve Clemons

Much of Washington has been consumed with the coverage of the Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination hearings, and I suppose that I should have been glued to C-Span as well -- but I wasn't.

Instead I have been assembling some of the pieces for the upcoming launch of Bolton Watch and readying myself for a New America Foundation staff retreat.

Nonetheless, I have been hoping that something I saw in the published transcripts of his statements or in other news reports would lessen my profound unease with this appointment.

Alito has been a distinguished conservative judge whose long record of decisions give a clear portrayal of his work and opinions. However, his brand of conservatism should remain in the periphery of our court system and not be allowed to ascend to the highest court in the land.

He is firmly anti-abortion. His mom said so. His record -- formal and informal -- attests to this. And despite holding views that would roll back a woman's right to control her reproductive circumstances, he carries a solidly far-right wing sensibility in many other areas, particularly with regard to general egalitarianism in our society and race.

But the clincher is that he is committed to a vision of expansive Executive Branch power in our government at a time when the other branches sorely need to be propped up -- and need to get back in the business of curbing Executive authority. Our democracy is in fragile shape on many fronts -- and the Courts and Legislature must reassert themselves and end the de facto monarchy America has tripped into.

When John Kerry lost the election, I felt that he had never really made the case to the American people that that election was mostly about the Supreme Court choices the next president would make. Kerry failed to connect on this issue -- but the Congress, particularly if Democrats hold mostly together -- could conceivably draw some Republican votes from those who know he will undo Roe v. Wade and who are uncomfortable with his strong embrace of unlimited presidential authority.

He is just the wrong guy. When John Roberts was nominated, I endorsed him -- much to the consternation of some of my liberal and progressive friends. John Roberts was no John Bolton, whom I opposed in the foreign policy sphere, and Samuel Alito is no John Roberts.

I can't run this campaign against Alito. Others are working it -- but those moderate Republicans, who are pro-choice and minimal government type conservatives, should feel real pain -- profound citizen pressure -- if they plan to endorse Bush's choice.

To win this, Alito's candidacy needs to be killed by freezing moderate Republican votes.

-- Steve Clemons

Sorry for being AWOL folks. I've been lining up some interesting stuff to share with you shortly.

But the trial of two British bureaucrats, David Keogh and Leo O'Connor -- charged with leaking the contents of a secret document to the media -- has resumed today.

It is alleged that there are ten lines in a five page memo capturing a discussion between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush in which Blair is attempting to dissuade Bush from his interest in bombing Al Jazeera's Doha, Qatar headquarters.

I will have more on this later, but a good source of someone watching this matter closely is BlairWatch.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

I may get the full page scanned later, but the JOBS page (Section K, page 1) of the Washington Post had me choking on and spitting up my coffee this morning.

The above-the-fold page has multi-colored job ads from the FBI and the National Security Agency. Below-the-fold ads are from the City of Alexandria, PostNewsweek Tech Media, Koons Auto Dealership, and GEICO (with that odd little Gecko pointing at the reader).

Interestingly, the CIA has its quarter page ad on the back page (page K20) of the section.

Just for the record, I'm not against people working for the CIA, FBI, and NSA. I happen to think that we need to get very smart people -- who also demonstrate rock solid committment to our sort of government and democracy -- into these jobs.

But there's just something bizarrely and inappropriately bold about this ad.

In the (temporary) absence of a scan, let me capture some elements of the NSA ad for you. It's colored in yellow, blue, read, brown, black and white.

national security agency NSA

WHERE INTELLIGENCE GOES TO WORK

It's about solving the toughest challenges. Taking the path never traveled. Using your intelligence and imagination to impact the world.

NSA is looking for intelligent and imaginative people to produce foreign intelligence information and protect U.S. information systems.

If you're ready to give your intelligence some competition, join NSA, where the top intelligence really matters.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES:

-- Computer/Eletrical Engineering

-- Computer Science

-- Mathematics

-- Foreign Language

-- Intelligence Analysis

-- Cryptanalysis

-- Signals Analysis

For other career opportunities, more information, and to apply online, visit our Web site, www.NSA.gov/careers

SECURING TOMORROW TODAY

U.S. citizenship is required for all applicants. NSA is an equal opportunity employer and abides by all applicable employmnent laws and regulations.

Too bad the NSA doesn't abide by ALL American laws and regulations.

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has determined that the administration was "probably" out of line in authorizing the NSA to engage in non-court approved wiretaps:

The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.

The report also concluded that Bush's assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.

"It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here," the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration's legal justification "does not seem to be . . . well-grounded," they said.

The NSA is currently embroiled in one of America's most serious and potentially convulsive battles over Executive Power, our system of checks and balances, and individual liberty.

And without flinching even a bit, the NSA runs a multi-colored JOBS ad with a line: "Taking the path never traveled."

Let me give the human resources team at NSA some advice. If you continue to run ads like the one you ran today in the Washington Post and that you are no doubt running elsewhere in the nation, they better start exhibiting some respect for American democracy and what it means.

I'm all for national security -- but not won at the expense of this country's democratic norms.

Rather than saying that you are looking for "intelligent and imaginative people" to "protect U.S. information systems", the line should be that you are looking for such people to protect the Constitution and Democratic government as well as the general welfare and liberty of the American people.

There are lots of ways to improve what I just wrote, but there are not enough "embedded reminders" in our national security bureaucratese to remind American civil servants that they have a duty to uphold the democratic governance norms of the United States.

Fix it.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. Please note that if you visit the National Security Agency website, the NSA has been known to install hidden cookies on your computer to track other websites that you might visit. The NSA now reports that it is "abandoning" that practice.

However, TWN assumes that it is constantly tracked by these folks. SCC

Tom DeLay has finally been knocked out of Congressional Republican leadership -- and he is accepting that reality.

This is excellent news.

From the New York Times:

In letters sent Saturday to fellow House Republicans and to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Mr. DeLay said he supported the call for an election for a new leader and was stepping aside to avoid becoming a political liability as Republicans battle to hold their majority.

This is something that deserves some celebration.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

President Bush: Why does Donald Rumsfeld STILL have his job?

If Abu Ghraib wasn't enough -- why isn't negligence on the job that has resulted in many deaths?

The New York Times has acquired a secret Pentagon study showing that had appropriate body armor been distributed to military personnel, 80% of Marines who died from upper body wounds might have survived.

According to Michael Moss' Times report:

A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.

For the first time, the study by the military's medical examiner shows the cost in lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops.

Officials have said they are shipping the best armor to Iraq as quickly as possible. At the same time, they have maintained that it is impossible to shield forces from the increasingly powerful improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq. Yet the Pentagon's own study reveals the equally lethal threat of bullets.

The vulnerability of the military's body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine officials acknowledge.

This armor fiasco has rumbled along for quite awhile -- to the point where the Pentagon was unwillingly dragged kicking and screaming by Congress to start reimbursing military families for their private purchases of armor.

Rumsfeld believes -- like Robert McNamara once did -- that he is one of the nation's best "managers." He cleary has failed on so many management fronts that his self-confidence is delusion, but each of these manifestations of his failure need to be heard by the nation.

After the President's State of the Union address, which may be January 31st, Bush needs to retire Rumsfeld.

-- Steve Clemons

The wedge strategy is in play. The White House has now denounced Pat Robertson calling his comments about Ariel Sharon "wholly inappropriate and offensive."

Now let's see if we can get the Israeli government to strip from Pat Robertson and his allies the right to build a "biblical theme park by the Sea of Gallilee". Leon Hadar has a nice write-up about this 'Pat Robertson Holy Adventure Land' today.

According to Conal Urquhart's report in The Guardian:

The Israeli government is planning to give up a large slice of land to American Christian evangelicals to build a biblical theme park by the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is said to have walked on water and fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.

A consortium of Christian groups, led by the television evangelist Pat Robertson, is in negotiation with the Israeli ministry of tourism and a deal is expected in the coming months. The project is expected to bring up to 1 million extra tourists a year but an undeclared benefit will be the cementing of a political alliance between the Israeli rightwing and the American Christian right.

Robertson, who ran as candidate for President of the United States, is an outrageously offensive hypocrite who should be shunned by those who follow him. And the Israeli government should kill the deal over the theme park.

Interestingly, despite Robertson's constant Holier-than-thou-isms, the way to shut him down is by squeezing off his ability to make money. He's all about money and notoriety.

In any case, good for the White House today.

-- Steve Clemons

Who and what will be blamed when Pat Robertson is finally "struck down"?

Today on CBN's The 700 Club, Robertson said that God struck down Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin for dividing his land:

ROBERTSON: I have said last year that Israel was entering into the most dangerous period of its entire existence as a nation. That is intensifying this year with the loss of Sharon. Sharon was personally a very likeable person. I am sad to see him in this condition.

But I think we need to look at the Bible and the Book of Joel. The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, "divide my land." God considers this land to be his.

You read the Bible, he says, "This is my land." And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, "No. This is mine."

And the same thing -- I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead.

And now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God's land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or United States of America.

God said, "This land belongs to me, you better leave it alone."

If you like, watch the video here.

A while back, I offered a somewhat pained confession on TWN that I had saved Robertson from a nasty fall that otherwise might have ended his career in punditry -- and I have been wondering if I could make him feel as if he owed me one and get him to stop with the ridiculous and offensive missives about bad weather, tragedies, and God's alleged wrath.

I was no fan of Ariel Sharon, but no one deserves this kind of perverse commentary.

Perhaps a good initiative to try and inject some divisions among the social conservative right would be to query whether Congressmen and Senators endorse or condemn Pat Robertson's statement.

Robertson has long been a potential wedge issue for the sensible parts of the Republican and Democratic parties to push. Maybe we should start seriously pushing.

-- Steve Clemons

Howard Fineman has a punchy, interesting piece on who loses and wins in the wake of the Abramoff guilty plea. He notes that one of the big losers is Abramoff's best buddy Tom DeLay.

TWN has been arguing since nearly the inception of this blog that forcing DeLay from power would automatically improve all other realms of public policy from gay rights to environmental protection to getting U.S. foreign policy back on track. He was a guy that mattered -- and was that bad.

While my colleague Ted Halstead has often held out hope that a third party worth the effort would emerge from the muddle of America's two party system, I have never believed it could really take shape. While there are more Americans who self-identify as Independents rather than Republicans or Democrats in addition to there being more independent-minded Republicans and Democrats than we've seen before, the party structure is highly seductive and tough to break.

I've always believed that it would be easier and better to hijack a moribund or wayward party rather than to create a new one.

Fineman though has an interesting view on this and suggests that a Third Party Reform Movement is a big winner because of the Abramoff scandal.

He writes:

WINNERS:

Third-party reform movement:

If Sen. John McCain doesn't win the Republican presidential nomination, I could see him leading an independent effort to "clean up" the capital as a third-party candidate.

Having been seared by his own touch with this type of controversy (the Keating case in the '80s, which was as important an experience to him as Vietnam), McCain could team up with a Democrat, say, Sen. Joe Lieberman.

If they could assemble a cabinet in waiting -- perhaps Wes Clark for defense, Russ Feingold for justice, Colin Powell for anything -- they could win the 2008 election going away.

Many TWN readers will go bonkers when they read about McCain and Lieberman -- a suggestion I made tongue-in-cheek a while back -- but the notion of a McCain, Lieberman, Feingold, Wes Clark, Powell arrangement while highly unprobable is not impossible.

John McCain feels that it was not the "religious right" who beat him last time. He believes that the "Republican establishment" had already pre-committed to Bush and there was not enough space for him. One of the reasons why he has been picking his battles -- like the anti-torture stand he took -- and otherwise playing way, way nice with the Bush White House is to win over that establishment that is not yet precommitted to another candidate.

If McCain did lose to George Allen in the Republican primary, he might just pull an Independent run -- and I don't think it would be bad for the country.

The interesting reality is that if McCain was nominated by the Republican Party, I think that Hillary Clinton has a very, very tough challenge -- as she is far more polarizing than he is. If George Allen and John McCain were both in the race vs. Hillary, her chances dramatically increase -- unless McCain is able to draw off support from both of them in relatively equal amounts.

These are all hypotheticals that I find interesting to ponder. Some will argue that pondering this sort of line up is advocating it. It's not, so settle down.

More soon. I just got a call from Israel that Ariel Sharon's condition appears to be dire.

More on that later.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to SD for the catch on this.

The "powers" of Israel's Prime Minister's Office have transferred to Ariel Sharon's Deputy Ehud Olmert after hospital officials announced that Sharon has suffered a "significant stroke."

More here.

-- Steve Clemons

Doug Bandow offers a realistic picture of the shoddy state of think tank and public intellectual punditry in Washington in this confessionary op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times.

He writes:

My deal with Abramoff created an appearance of a conflict of interest; it made it seem that I spoke for him (or his clients) rather than for myself when I wrote. That was a mistake, and I'm paying a high price. Fair enough.

But this episode ought to do more; it ought to spur a serious discussion about the punditry game. After all, isn't it a little unseemly for Washington to be suddenly shocked, shocked at the fact that those with interests in what government does (such as Abramoff and his clients) seek out like-minded advocates (such as me and hundreds of other commentators and organizations)?

Doug Bandow could write an interesting and revealing book on the ideas industry and who owns it. He admits to being part of the machine, but he is by no means anywhere near the worst violators of public trust.

I have written quite a bit already about the structural corruption that undergirds much of the policy industry and have regularly called for a "best practices" effort that may help restore public confidence and trust in this important sector of civil society. I may write the book myself (but I keep telling myself that I have two others I need to do first).

As one extremely prominent but unnamed former Republican official wrote to me recently:

If Abramoff had had the sense to simply contribute his money to a 501(c)3 that then paid Bandow, there would be no problem.

Tax exempts aren't required to divulge their contributors. Doug and Jack would both be off the hook.

Any number of so-called think tanks would be happy to broker the deal for a small commission.

As they say in Washington, it isn't the illegal things people do that is a scandal, it’s all these thing they can do that are perfectly legal.

Read those lines again carefully. They are absolutely true. Most of the systematic corruption that pervades Washington is legal but in my view violates the public trust as well as the spirit, if not the law, of the IRS tax code providing exemptions to "public-minded" institutions.

I have always felt that non-profit think tanks were important, even vital, parts of Washington's public policy industry and of American civil society. However, many of them -- and there are reportedly more than 1,500 think tanks in Washington alone -- have become money launderers for lobbyists and corporate consulting organizations. Most of the worst violations occur in the small boutique shops rather than the larger institutions, but the reality of lack of transparency is becoming a systemic rather than a micro problem.

I am going to be speaking on this subject of money, influence and think tanks in an event next week on Friday, January 13th from 12-2 p.m. The session is sponsored by the Nixon Center and will include Anatol Lieven who is Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, Blair Ruble of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center and myself.

It's my understanding that I am going to be giving a general overview of the issues that matter -- and don't -- in this debate. Anatol Lieven and Blair Ruble are going to discuss the Russian-American dimensions of this topic.

I believe that Doug Bandow's article should help trigger a broader conversation about what is ethical and not in the think tank/punditry sector. James Fallows, John Judis, Steven Clemons (yes, this writer), and others have been savaged when they tried to push forward a constructive discussion about where "the lines should be drawn" and enforced -- to paraphrase Bandow.

An acquaintance of mine who is an extremely successful corporate lobbyist used to (and may still) teach a course on lobbying at Georgetown University. The second item on his "Lobbyist's Tool Kit" which he would distribute to students was "Think Tanks". Another item on the list was "Op-Eds".

If this sector of American civil society is going to remain in a protected part of the American tax code and continue to play a role akin to schools, AIDS hospices and other credible charity and public good organizations, then it must clean up its act.

To his credit, Doug Bandow suggests that we should get to work on that effort, debate where the ethical lines should be drawn, and do them in such a way that those committed to good public policy can still make a living and do what they are good at.

I think that the answer is in more routinized transparency, but there are many other tracks as well.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed Note: Thanks to LF and many others for the notes about this op-ed.

TWN has been inundated with emails asking why I have not written more about revelations about non-court approved NSA intercepts of electronic phone and email transmissions within the United States and the connection to John Bolton's requests for NSA intercept material when he served as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

My response will no doubt frustrate many, but it is an honest one. I don't believe that John Bolton was involved with electronic monitoring or spying domestically -- with a couple of potential exceptions.

There is a remote chance that Bill Richardson's activities with North Korean diplomacy may have been monitored by the NSA. Richardson had discussions with Colin Powell over his private diplomacy as well as electronic interactions with the North Korean mission to the United Nations.

The NSA does monitor transmissions in and out of the United Nations and is one of the ways that John Bolton was able to get hold of discussion transcripts with IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. The United Nations, I am told, is not considered part of the definition of and prohibitions against "domestic" eavesdropping.

Bill Richardson thinks he was monitored. I am not sure, but Bolton would have had an interest in what Richardson was doing with the North Koreans. It is not clear to me why it would be inappropriate to monitor North Korean interactions with anyone, including Richardson -- whose name would have been redacted from the intercepts. What does bother me was Bolton's interest in a policy area as well as the names of specific people in an arena he had been fenced off from. Bolton was working overtime to undermine Colin Powell and staff on its Korea Peninsula diplomacy.

Of the ten intercepts that Bolton requested to know the identities of 18 American individuals whose identities had been redacted, we know that two of the intercepts were based on international communications.

One of these transcripts was leaked to Douglas Jehl of the New York Times and had to do with American corporate activity in China. Another of these intercepts -- or at least the contents of such -- came the way of TWN and dealt with American policy towards Libya. The name of the individual requested by Bolton was then Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs William Burns.

Although TWN has not had any other direct contact with the actual content of other Bolton-related NSA intercepts, we have had contact with some who are knowledgeable about such intercepts and have had discussions with those who have made sophisticated calculations about what the transcripts were about.

TWN also suspects -- but has not confirmed -- that the U.S. government official who was congratulated by Bolton after Bolton read something in an intercept was former Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation John Wolf. But this is speculation -- not confirmed information.

In all of my discussions with people about these intercepts, none -- other than the Richardson/North Korea matter which might have been monitored domestically -- ever had a "domestic spying" dimension to it.

The names that most suspected of being on the roster of names requested by Bolton might have been John Wolf, Richard Armitage, William Burns, and others. Or, they might have been names we simply do not know and which would not be easily recognized except by those familiar with working staff inside the national security and diplomatic bureaucracy.

In my view, Bolton was spying on his colleagues. He was engaged in a turf war with others in his Department and was attempting to systematically undermine his overseers, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. Someone quite familiar with Bolton's activities -- and not Lawrence Wilkerson (just to make that clear) -- told me that his intercept activity demonstrated no high crimes but rather "poor judgment and personal vanity."

There is also the possibility that John Negroponte's name was among those requested by John Bolton -- and Negroponte, who now serves as Director of National Intelligence but served previously as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq as well as to the United Nations -- did not want Bolton's antics regarding colleagues put out for public consumption.

TWN learned quite a while ago that John Negroponte never viewed John Bolton with much favor. They are not friends and had little contact when Bolton was at the State Department. Some speculate that Negroponte's decision to withhold the roster of NSA intercept identities of such interest to Bolton was designed by Negroponte to neither hurt Bolton -- NOR help him. It was also designed to keep -- perhaps -- Negroponte's own name out of the mix.

Negroponte's decision nearly sunk Bolton's appointment as the failure to provide the NSA intercepts, which the National Security Agency had consented to be released to the relevant Senators before being blocked by the Director of National Intelligence, stopped Bolton's Senate confirmation.

TWN is confident that the pattern of vanity, jealousy, and professional vindictiveness that would emerge from both the subject matter of the NSA intercepts that interested Bolton as well as the roster of 18 names would have been enough to turn a majority of the Senate against Bolton's confirmation in an up-or-down vote. The content of several other of the NSA intercepts that interested Bolton and his then chief-of-staff Frederick Fleitz dealt with policy matters that Colin Powell and Rich Armitage had blocked Bolton from participating in.

None of these matters were domestically focused, and my own sense is that Bolton was not interested in private American citizens who might have been chatting with al Qaeda-connected operatives. Bolton was acting as Vice President Cheney's agent inside the State Department on what they considered to be bigger policy battles involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North Korea.

Bolton's errors of judgment don't need to be stretched to include the current controversy over President Bush's duplicitous side-stepping of the courts in approving domestic wiretaps. They are bad enough as they are.

-- Steve Clemons

Thanks to all who sent materials, articles, and other materials relating to the Saudi political world.

My trip there has been postponed, until perhaps next year.

-- Steve Clemons

If there are any PowerBook G4 experts out there who know about Microsoft Entourage and downloading contact and other data via an Exchange Server from Microsoft Outlook 2003, I'd love to speak with you.

I have the Exchange Server account set up, verified, and all that -- but it still does not seem to work.

If you have any thoughts, post a note, and I can email you or call.

Thanks in advance.

-- Steve Clemons

The President's ongoing defense of a routenized system of unauthorized electronic eavesdropping is presenting one of the best opportunities for Democrat's 2006 electoral chances. Most Republicans -- at their core -- also hate this kind of "big brother" behavior that their party leader is defending.

As reported in the Washington Post today, Bush said:

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America, and I repeat limited," Bush said before flying back to Washington after six days cloistered on his ranch in Crawford, Tex. "I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking.

"If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why."

We'd like to know why a Court would not authorize you to listen to that phone call or read that email, Mr. President. Why do you -- as President of the United States -- think that it is OK to systematically circumvent the American justice system? That is the question at hand.

The White House is engaged in sleight-of-hand duplicity over what the real debate is over.

The President does not want his actions constrained or have any oversight over his actions. That doesn't wash in a democracy.

Do you know what a democracy is, Mr. Bush? Do you know what checks-and-balances means?

Would you please scribble out an essay -- in your own hand -- as to what you think the limits of Executive Power are? Or, do you feel that the Chief Executive has no limits?

We'd really like to know, Mr. Bush. Your defense of wiretaps that even John Ashcroft got ulcers about approving makes the nation's skin crawl.

You've taken this country into the Orwellian nightmare that we all accused the Soviet Union of promulgating -- and now that has become us. We are spying on ourselves without Constitutional protections and judicial regulation.

That is NOT democracy, though I'm sure that those in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East who are allegedly "learning democracy" from us are taking notes.

-- Steve Clemons

David Sanger has a stinging article in the New York Times today basically ridiculing President Bush's notions of Iraq-related legacy building. He suggests that the President's recent actions on everything from Supreme Court appointments to rhetoric about democratizing Iraq are designed to get historians to see his presidency as an FDR-type reign rather than that of a Franklin Pierce.

Sanger's piece indicates that either David has finally just had it with the White House and is ready to forfeit his White House spot to someone else -- or he, like so many others, senses real weakness in the Bush White House team and sees this as the time to begin emphasizing that the wannabe emperor really has no clothes on.

Sanger's critique is hard-hitting and would have been practically impossible for him to write three years ago without serious retribution from Karl Rove and company. One would hope that writers of David Sanger's stature would always write boldly and candidly -- and Sanger generally has, particularly on White House foreign policy and nuclear negotiations missteps -- but writing about the White House and the President is also walking a tight-rope between the public's right to know and the President's willingness and obligation to be transparent.

But bravo for today's piece.

Sanger goes after Bush for feeling that there is a "stuff of legacy" in America's Iraq invasion and occupation.

Sanger writes:

BEFORE he retreated behind the fences of his ranch here to ring out a bruising year, President Bush made it clear that even with three years to go, he already regards his presidency as a big one in the sweep of American history.

He insists that his real motive in conducting the war in Iraq is to democratize one of the least democratic corners of the earth. He regularly quotes Harry Truman, who rebuilt Japan and Germany while remaking American national security policy from the ground up. Several of his speeches have deliberately included Churchillian echoes about never surrendering to terrorists and achieving total victory, along with made-for-television imagery to drive home the message.

Mr. Bush, of course, is trying to give larger meaning to a war whose unpopularity dragged down his presidency last year. But at moments he often seems to also be talking directly to historians, tilting the pinball machine of presidential legacy. It may not be too early: the year 2006, many in the White House believe, will cement the story line of the Bush presidency for the ages. And there is growing acknowledgment, perhaps premature, that his standing will rise or fall with the fate of Iraq.

Maybe so, but presidential legacies are complicated - a point proven by Truman himself, whose reputation has aged so well that it is almost forgotten that he left office mired in the intelligence failures, early mistakes and the ultimate muddle of the Korean War.

"They have learned to love the Truman analogies in this White House because it's a reminder that legacies are built out of events that happen long after most presidents leave office, when we see things through the lens of later events and one or two ideas look like big turning points," said Richard Norton Smith, who heads the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. Only in retrospect do we regard Truman's decision to integrate the armed forces as a precursor to the civil rights movement, something he did while containing Stalin and establishing NATO.

These days, you can almost hear this administration struggling to find its own combination of domestic and foreign programs - Supreme Court appointments and education initiatives, tinkering with domestic liberties in the name of facing down foreign enemies - that makes the difference between an F.D.R. and a Franklin Pierce.

The entire article is worth reading, but pay particular attention to the comments by MIT's brilliant Japan historian John Dower:

To some historians, spinning the meaning of victory seems an exercise in futility. "It's ridiculous talk," John Dower, the historian who has chronicled war propaganda and written the definitive history of the American occupation of Japan. "People know what victory looks like," he said, and are unlikely to adopt the president's definitions.

But what truly sets Mr. Dower off are Mr. Bush's comparisons between rebuilding Iraq and the postwar rebuilding of Japan. He and others note that Japan was religiously unified with some history of parliamentary government and a bureaucracy ready to work as soon as the conflict ended.

Like Dower, I have long been irritated and incensed by the President's comparisons of the occupation of Iraq with that of Japan. Dower notes that the basic components of the Japanese state were more intact and also had a structure that could be used to manage the government and generate a representative parliamentary assembly more readily than in Iraq.

But if we gave the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt for a moment -- at the beginning of the conflict -- there were many things that the occupation of Japan should have told us. First and perhaps most importantly, a large new class of political and economic winners needed to be quickly generated because of America's presence. In Japan, we accomplished this with farmers via land reform. This might have been possible with some formula of resource-sharing or dividends from Iraq's oil wealth with every working age Iraqi citizen. Instead, the U.S. pushed buckets of money into the clutches of self-aggrandizing political elites, like Ahmed Chalabi -- and did nothing for Iraq's average citizens.

The Occupation would still have been wrong-headed in my view, but there were ways at the very beginning to get an occupation right. We seemed to check off all the steps in getting an occupation wrong.

The other practical reality that America's Japan experience should have taught us -- and about which John Dower and other historians on the Japan Occupation have written -- is that some of the early calculations about political winners and losers can be wrong. It's important to be able to maintain the option to back up and reverse course.

In the April 1946 elections that first followed the American occupation, a "liberal" in the European sense -- Ichiro Hatoyama -- cobbled together a new party and a likely government coalition that had him ascending as Japan's first prime minister.

In fact, Hatoyama was a conservative who believed in individual liberty, in real democracy, and a minimal state -- but his embrace of democratic process unnerved some in Douglas MacArthur's operation and he was "purged" literally on the eve of becoming prime minister. Instead, America helped engineer the ascension of a bureaucrat with little political party experience, Shigeru Yoshida.

Yoshida's grandson, Taro Aso, happens to be Japan's current Foreign Minister and no doubt owes a lot to America undermining Japan's early democratic process.

America's efforts in the long run somewhat backfired as Ichiro Hatoyama made a comeback, dethroned Yoshida whom he felt was a traitor, and merged the Liberal and Democratic parties of Japan into one mega-party, the LDP. Yoshida then began flirting with the Soviets and worked to normalize relations with them -- in part because it was in Japan's strategic interests to do so but also in part because America had misplayed its hand with Yoshida.

After the purge of Hatoyama, the real winners in Japanese political circles -- particularly locally -- became the Socialist and Communist parties, which had been harrassed by Japan's ultra-conservatives before and during the war.

With the Cold War breaking out, the American government saw increasing tension with a global problem of Soviet communist aggression while in Japan America was coddling the political expansion of communist and socialist political participation. America reversed course and began to purge high-ranking communist and socialist adherents and restoring to positions conservatives it had previously purged. The highest profile of these was Nobusuke Kishi, a former Class A War Criminal who had served as Minister of Munitions during the war. Kishi later became Prime Minister of Japan and was a staunch ally of the U.S.

The lesson here regarding Iraq is that we have tilted the political system towards Iran-leaning Shia theocrats, much like America did with communists and socialists in Japan. While America deployed a systematic purge of war-making and war-promoting intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians in Japan, it figured out a way to rebrand competent conservatives who could be counted on to serve in government. In contrast, America has simply booted out all former Baathists, even those who wore that distinction lightly and were drawn to serve in government no matter the regime.

America has undermined secularism in Iraq and should have always kept that door open.

Now, in contrast to Japan -- America can't back up, can't reverse course -- and has set into motion a set of realities that are likely to be convulsing and exploding for many years in the Middle East. America's mystique and global influence will dramatically suffer because of Bush's reckless gamble.

If the President had a great deal less ignorance about America's experience with Japan, he would realize that the practical realities that we learned in Japan were completely ignored in Iraq.

A quick search of America's worst presidents produces links to James Buchanan, Warren Harding, and Franklin Pierce.

George W. Bush turns out to be a bold president, willing to take huge risks and make tough judgment calls -- but by most accounts, he is not an intelligent man and made decisions on gut more than serious analysis. This makes him the worst kind of president -- a kind of anti-FDR.

As former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson recently stated, the framers of the National Security Act after World War II feared a future strong, dumb president -- and felt that much needed to be done to protect the country from someone like a George W. Bush.

Wilkerson stated (regarding the framers of the 1947 National Security Act):

But these were probably some people who I think rivaled those who got together that hot summer in Philadelphia and put together the Constitution. We have had some peaks and valleys in our history, but I think post-World War II and World War II itself was a peak, and we had some really good people thinking hard about these issues.

And one of the things that they probably wouldn't tell you if they were here today -- unless they'd had a few drinks, and Harry Truman would have had a few -- (laughter) -- is that they didn't want another FDR. They did not want another Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

They even amended the Constitution to make sure they didn't get one for more than eight years. But they didn't want the secrecy, they didn't want the concentration of power, they didn't want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they'd been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn't happen again.

I don't think even his critics would have argued that FDR wasn't a brilliant politician and a brilliant leader. But let's think about it for a moment, if you are one of the framers. How often does America get brilliant leaders? Put them down on paper. I can count them myself on one hand. You can perhaps count them on two hands and make persuasive arguments for the additions. I prefer one hand.

So we need a system of checks and balances and institutional fabric that can withstand anybody -- or at least nearly so. (Laughter.)

You know, you laugh, but I'm not trying to solicit your laughter. I think it's a real problem in our democracy. You have to have a system that is so elastic, so resilient, so able to take punches that at one time one branch can supplant another, or one branch can come up and check another. It's the old business of checks and balances.

If you concentrate power and you do it in a way that is not that different from the way Franklin Roosevelt concentrated it, but you don't have someone who is brilliant at the utilization of that power, you've got problems. You've got problems.

You may have problems even if you have someone who is brilliant. Go ask people who've written about Woodrow Wilson -- although I wouldn't say Woodrow Wilson had concentrated power quite the way FDR did.

And of course the war and the depression gave him ample opportunity to do things to abridge civil liberties, for example, that even Abraham Lincoln didn't go to in a conflict that produced far more casualties and arguably was more passionately fought, certainly in terms of the families of America. But too much power, too much secrecy -- they wanted to get rid of that.

I agree with Wilkerson that America needs a new National Security Act because the measures taken by the framers of America's post-WWII national security institutions failed to contain the damage to the country that a George W. Bush could inflict.

It's time to go back to the drawing boards.

-- Steve Clemons