Read here.

Heritage, AEI and the Hudson Institute have issued a statement decrying the Human Rights Council proposal issued by UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson and have lauded John Bolton's stand.

Where were they when Bolton was uninvolved with the negotiations.

More later on this serious issue.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is my quick read on America's rejection of the UN Human Rights Council proposal that some -- including the New York Times -- argue is a sham that undermines genuine international commitment to more rigorous global human rights protection.

The odd thing is that many of the leading NGOs don't see it that way.

However, behind the "white hat" that Bolton is wearing right now as a crusader for more rigorous human rights protections -- and TWN will tip its hat that this is something we all should be working for -- he nonetheless tried to secure permanent membership on the Human Rights Council for the Permanent 5 of the UN Security Council -- including those inspiring defenders of human liberty, Russia and China.

This package negotiated to create a new Human Rights Council may not go far enough and perhaps should be renegotiated, but there must also be some better ground between Bolton saying "my way" or "no way".

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note works hard to provide constructive, serious critiques of Bush administration foreign policy and attempts to avoid reckless typecasting or tractionless hyperventilation regarding what this administration is up to.

We try instead to characterize honestly the power grab that the Executive Branch has been engaged in since 9/11, but we also recognize that the administration is not monolithically united behind the adminstration's most outrageous positions -- and that the loyal minority has not done its part. On both the Democratic side and among Republican moderates, those who believe in checks-and-balances have done little to compellingly challenge this White House.

I want change in policy -- not shrillness for its own sake -- but this excellent summary of the vital debate about Executive Branch power by Sidney Blumenthal has hardened my resolve to do whatever I can to delegitimate and defang Cheney's operation.

I know Bush is the big boss, but Bush's tactic has been to allow two -- and perhaps three -- contending groups inside his White House to wage war with each other while he tilts in the final analysis towards the group that seems to win out in these private gladiator contests. Most often, the winning tag-team has been Cheney-Rumsfeld over all others.

Cheney's team have been the architects of both a kind of Presidency that is exactly what the Roman "dictatorships" were defined as -- a temporary provision of unchecked executive power to a ruler -- as well as the mercurial rise in power of the Office of the Vice President. And Cheney's team is the scary sort of lot that is hell-bent on establishing a kind of permanence to their power that threatens in very, very real terms the genuineness of our democracy.

Roman dictators still had constraints on what they could do. For instance, absolute authority was granted for distinct periods of time. Certain informal norms of continued consultations with the Roman Senate continued during the period of dictatorship.

The word "dictator" in modern language implies far vaster power and many negative connotations than the Roman application of the concept carried with it.

Nonetheless, Bush has become the epitome of a Roman dictator in the 21st century in his assertion of "unitary executive" authority which this White House has argued has "inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances." The problem is that unlike Rome, where the Senate granted the dictator great powers, Congress has not -- in fact -- given Bush the authority to operate beyond his Constitutional authority. Bush has, instead, asserted that authority and taunted Congress to stop him.

This power grab should dominate our media and our civic discourse. Our President -- via a deranged, anti-democratic team of power-obsessed thugs in Vice President Cheney's office -- is engaged in a clear assault on the core architectural joists of American democracy.

Sidney Blumenthal writes in his excellent piece:

Bush operates on the radical notion of the "unitary executive," that the president has inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances. By his extraordinary order, he elevated Cheney to his level, an acknowledgment that the vice president was already the de facto executive in national security. Never before has any president diminished and divided his power in this manner. Now the unitary executive inherently includes the unitary vice president.

The unprecedented executive order bears the earmarks of Cheney's former counsel and current chief of staff, David Addington. Addington has been the closest assistant to Cheney through three decades, since Cheney served in the House of Representatives in the 1980s. Inside the executive branch, far and wide, Addington acts as Cheney's vicar, bullying and sarcastic, inspiring fear and obedience. Few documents of concern to the vice president, even executive orders, reach the eyes of the president without passing first through Addington's agile hands.

To advance their scenario for the Iraq war, Cheney & Co. either pressured or dismissed the intelligence community when it presented contrary analysis. Paul Pillar, the former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."

On domestic spying conducted without legal approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Addington and his minions isolated and crushed internal dissent from James Comey, then deputy attorney general, and Jack Goldsmith, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

On torture policy, as reported by the New Yorker this week, Alberto Mora, recently retired as general counsel to the U.S. Navy, opposed the Bush administration's abrogation of the Geneva Conventions -- by holding thousands of detainees in secret camps without due process and using abusive interrogation techniques -- based on legal doctrines Mora called "unlawful" and "dangerous." Addington et al. told him the policies were being ended while continuing to pursue them on a separate track. "To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values," Mora said.

More later on this theme, but David Addington, Rasputin's Rasputin, needs to be outed, vilified, and removed from power.

I'm not pleased about the theatre of Scooter Libby's defense fund charade, but at least he is now occupied in a way that keeps Americans mostly safe from the harm he was unleashing.

The reality though -- hard as it is to admit -- is that Vice President Cheney shrugged off the Libby indictment in a few weeks and has roared back to a robust role in national security affairs and is now trying to strangle Condoleezza Rice's foreign policy agenda.

Addington's rise and those of his acolytes -- have given the neoconservative agenda some new faces, lesser known, but in many ways far more insidious.

-- Steve Clemons

(Saudi King Abdullah greets Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr)

I'm about to get on a plane -- and I have no idea what this news alert I just received from MSNBC entails:

Explosion, gunfire reported at oil refinery in eastern Saudi Arabia. Details soon.

But if Shia-Sunni tension is boiling over into Saudi Arabia despite King Abdullah's recent efforts to reach out to Saudi Arabia's Shia minority and his personally hosting Muqtada al-Sadr during January's Haj, we will have an even more catastrophic mess in the Middle East in which America has sigificant complicity.

-- Steve Clemons

(John Poindexter and Ronald Reagan)

National Journal's Shane Harris has discovered that the "Total Information Awareness" program conceived in part under the direction of Iran-Contra tainted former Reagan National Security Advisor John Poindexter was not terminated.

Only the name was.

Instead of TIA (Total Information Awareness), the program was passed off to a public-private host and re-branded "Basketball".

Shane Harris writes:

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

At the time the program was discontinued, people thought that it was immoral and just disagreeable to create a system that essentially accumulated "bets" and created a market to attempt to indicate where people most thought the next terror strike would occur.

While I see problems in the approach, I always thought that there were interesting possibilities in an approach that would try and absorb the vast amounts of information that marketplaces develop.

But when a program is killed by Congress, the program should die -- and it didn't.

This reminds me of the old adage about Henry VIII's wives: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

Perhaps that is in bad taste and no insult meant to Henry's unfortunate spouses, but it just seems to me ridiculous and consistent with Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial-complex that a single weapons system can be divorced and beheaded, and in the end, survive and even thrive.

Eugene Jarecki's film, Why We Fight, gets at this. See it.

-- Steve Clemons

I have several posts going up tonight in quick succession on different topics. Have been delayed because of travel gremlins but arrived in snow-covered Casper, Wyoming a short bit ago.

A herd of antelope were waiting for me at the airport. Seriously, they were. Without the snow, they looked a bit like what was above -- about 50 of them.

Really cool. Anyway, more tonight -- promise.

-- Steve Clemons

When I first heard about www.ScooterLibby.com, I thought that John Aravosis had bought the URL address and done something fun with it.

But, it's genuine Scooter -- and it's good for some laughs.

Libby has launched a vanity site soliciting donations for his legal defense against 5 indictments brought by Patrick Fitzgerald in the Valerie Plame investigation.

On other fronts, TWN is off to Casper, Wyoming to speak to the Casper Committee on Foreign Relations tomorrow.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

(German citizen Khaled El-Masri who was a victim of mistaken identity and kidnapped and 'rendered' by American intelligent agents to a foreign secret interrrogation and detention center)

TWN had a productive adventure in London, where I had been asked to give a talk and then invited to participate in meetings with a number of Arab intellectuals and public officials.

I also met with journalists from The Economist, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Al Jazeera Channel, and the BBC to discuss how they were covering the American and British occupation of Iraq, revelations about 'extraordinary rendition', secret detention centers, and the increasing number of kiss-and-tell stories by national security bureaucrats whose loyalties to the US President and British Prime Minister have been shredded by duplicity, moral and political recklessness, and in some cases illegality that they witnessed as insiders.

As I reported yesterday, I was going to a screening in London of Yosri Fouda's 46-minute, made for Al Jazeera Channel (in Arabic), production on the topic of 'extraordinary rendition' of terror suspects to third countries for interrogation, and as the cases have turned out, frequent application of torture.

Fouda and his project producer, Giles Trendle, have transformed the Arabic-language production into an English-language version, and the result is seriously provocative. The clip will run on Al Jazeera International, the new English language Arab satellite network.

TWN has made arrangements with the management at Al Jazeera International to be the first blog to provide web-based access to the production. Details are still being worked out regarding whether the digital version will be based on TWN's servers, or Al Jazeera International's -- but as matters firm up, I will keep readers posted.

"Triangle of Anger" is a must see for those worried about a global-war-on-terror practice whose mistaken application against innocents has undermined the American brand among many Muslims (as well as non-Muslims) around the world.

As one friend of mine who was a senior intelligence and foreign service official who has worked in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan told me, rendition has a decades long history in the US national security arena. But rendition in the pre-al Qaeda era was generally used by American police and intelligence agencies to pick up non-American criminals or likely criminals -- usually in the narcotics racket -- who often were in the US illegally without visas or faked passports. In these cases, the suspects would be apprehended and deported to the nation of which they were a citizen.

However, what has happened in the era of al Qaeda is that American intelligence agencies are kidnapping terror suspects and without providing any public record of the act essentially are 'disappearing' people to detention and interrogation centers in various countries around the world. In many cases, the recipient country is not the rended individual's home of national citizenship.

One particularly outrageous case that Fouda documents was that of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who while vacationing in Macedonia was arrested and packed off to a detention/interrogation facility in Afghanistan. After authorities discovered that the man they had was innocent and was taken on the basis that he had the same name as a wanted al Qaeda operative, they still held him incommunicado for an extra two months.

Even after he was released -- without passport or identity papers or any gesture of apology from American officials -- on the border of Albania and Macdenia, El-Masri was later refused entry into the US and had to fly back to Germany because the known to be innocent German was still on border watch/reject lists.

Condoleezza Rice herself had to personally intervene to compel the immigration and border bureaucracy to allow him entry into the US on his next trip, when he met with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to appropriately file suit against the US government.

I don't know the rules for submitting documentary productions at the Sundance film festival, but Yosri Fouda's film should compete in this year's competition as it is a highly revelatory depiction of an intelligence practice that most know nothing about -- and in my view is extremely fair-minded.

Fouda takes no below-the-belt shots and interviews not only victims of extraordinary rendition, innocent cases and some perhaps not, and their family members and associates -- but he interviews a few of the architects of America's rendition policy.

Former CIA official Michael Scheuer is one of the primary backbones of the film. Scheuer helped construct the contemporary rendition program and applie it to al Qaeda operatives. On the film, he openly and self-critically questions the utility of the rendition program, which he thinks has done more harm than good to the perception of America in the world, and has not contributed much to American safety that could not otherwise be achieved by existing laws.

One thing I did not realize and learned from Fouda's and Giles Trendle's treatment on rendition history is that the founding fathers of the policy were President Bill Clinton, then National Security Council official Richard Clarke, and National Security Advisory Sandy Berger. Scheuer gave the program its practical legs and application, but these other three conceptualized and authored the program.

George W. Bush's team ratcheted up the use and broad application of extraordinary rendition as a key part of their actions against targeted terrorists and collaborators.

The film was finished the week that Dana Priest's blockbuster scoop on secret European detention centers hit the Washington Post, so those themes were not developed in this production, but it seems to me that a program on 'extraordinary rendition' itself

Some of the best footage comes from a Swedish journalist who first broke the story on America’s fleet of private planes commissioned by the CIA to render suspects from third countries and the US to other nations. The journalist actually tracked down the CIA front company that operated one of the planes and pulled of a 'sting' phone call by implying he was a Swedish intelligence official and had a suspect who needed to be 'rendered' elsewhere -- and was the plane available. His answer from the firm was "of course, when and where?"

Another journalist got a good film clip of the plane as it landed on a refueling stop in Iceland and got the tired crew and operators of the flight on camera, though they actually tried to hide their faces behind the nose of the plane when they saw that they were being filmed.

Fascinating production. 150 people attended the Frontline Club standing room only screening in London, and the folks I spoke to gave it rave reviews.

One reason the film is very brave is that it indicts governments in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and elsewhere that have received the 'rendered' victims.

I highly recommend it and will have it linked when it becomes available.

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note just arrived in London a short while ago and will be connecting with Al Jazeera London Bureau Chief and senior terrorism investigative correspondent Yosri Fouda tonight.

Fouda and his colleague and producer Giles Trendle are screening a new film they produced (46 minutes long) titled "The Triangle of Anger" about America's 'extraordinary rendition' practices since September 11, 2001.

This film was first broadcast on Al-Jazeera in January 2006 as an episode of the satellite channel's flagship current affairs documentary program, "Top Secret". It has now been translated into English and will be screened at the Frontline Club tonight at 7:30 p.m.

I will be there at about 6:45 p.m., perhaps earlier and am happy to have drinks with any TWN readers who may wander by. Frontline also has a restaurant, open to the public, on the ground floor.

Just go in to the restaurant and ask for the screening, which is on the second floor, and which I think may run five pounds if you are not a member of the club (perhaps if you are very nice and say you are a friend of Yosri's, they'll cut a deal. . .but can't promise that).

The good news is that there is a bar up on the screening floor as well.

More later. Just truth in advertising, TWN's proprieter appears as one of the commentators in this "Triangle of Anger" show.

-- Steve Clemons

My colleagues Nir Rosen and Peter Bergen -- both fellows in foreign policy at the New America Foundation (where I also work) -- are leading American interpreters and chroniclers of the world's two most dangerous and intriguing personalities -- Osama bin Laden in Bergen's case and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Rosen's.

Peter Bergen's new book, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History or al Qaeda's Leader just earned a stunning review as the lead piece in the just issued edition of the New York Review of Books. I highly recommend the entire long piece.

But the opener sets out a path for a quality accounting of bin Laden:

When Osama bin Laden speaks, people listen. They tend, however, to hear different things. Take the coverage of his latest voice-from-the-mountain tape, released in mid-January. The New York Times and The Washington Post both headlined with the words "Bin Laden Warns of Attacks."

The equivalent two highbrow Arabic-language newspapers, al-Hayat and al-Sharq al-Awsat, led instead with the news that the al-Qaeda leader had offered a truce.

Neither version was wrong. As all four papers went on to explain, bin Laden had done both things: threatened to strike America again, and proposed a hudna, or cease-fire. Yet the difference in emphasis pointed to the roots of deeper misapprehensions. How, more than four years after September 11, and after so much subsequent bloodshed, can this fugitive terrorist still command the respect and admiration of a good number of his fellow Muslims?

And why, after the mobilization of so many resources, has America's campaign against him produced such unsatisfactory results?

One simple answer is that neither most Americans nor many Muslims have been listening closely enough. As a result, neither has fully understood the man, his motivations, or his aims.

Whereas bin Laden continues to manipulate and mislead his Muslim audience, America has failed either to undermine him effectively or to speak persuasively to the Muslim public.

When finished with the glimpses of bin Laden's personality and goals unearthed by Peter Bergen from those who know him, the next vital read for those interested in the personalities of hard core Islamic radicalism need to read the brilliant New York Times Magazine piece, "Iraq's Jordanian Jihadis", by Nir Rosen.

Rosen tells the surprising story of how al-Zarqaqi and Jordan have become part of the epicenter of modern Islamic terrorism.

This important article opens:

Jordan has long been thought of as the quiet country of the Middle East. People called it the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom and went there for a rest. King Hussein and his son, King Abdullah II, who assumed the throne in February 1999, were friendly enough with the United States, respectful toward Israel and measured advocates of modernization.

As for the Islamist stirrings that have roiled the region since the Iranian revolution of 1979, it was widely believed that the king's domestic security service, the Mukhabarat, had infiltrated every group that might think to stir unrest. But in truth Jordan had not been insulated from the radicalism that has engulfed the Mideast in our time: in 1970 and '71, Jordan's Palestinians, who then, as now, made up a majority of the country's population (today, 5.6 million), erupted, and their insurrection was brutally put down.

And in the course of finding ways to sustain its political dominance, the Hashemite monarchy gave the Muslim Brotherhood -- the local variant of an Islamist movement that began in Egypt in the 1920's -- control of educational policy, which would hold dark implications.

Now we know that the quiet kingdom was producing the man thought to be spearheading the deadliest aspects of the Iraqi insurgency -- and who brought the fight back to Jordan in three hotel bombings last December: Ahmed Fadeel Nazal al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after his hometown of Zarqa, a poor city an hour's drive north of Amman.

How the quiet kingdom of Jordan could produce a man who has become known as the Sheik of the Slaughterers is a question at the heart of contemporary jihad.

Zarqawi is exceptionally cruel, but he is otherwise not such an exception. Jordan is home to many jihadis, young men from much the same milieu that produced Zarqawi, and especially since the United States invaded Iraq nearly three years ago, Jordan has increasingly become a not-so-quiet place, a place where local Islamists cross easily into Iraq and back, a place where a jihadist underground can seem almost a normal part of a nation's life.

And if such an underground can become normal in quiet Jordan, what is to keep it from becoming normal in any Muslim country?

Let's jump out of terror-watch mode for a moment though and consider another interesting race -- that for Secretary General of the United Nations.

Interestingly, a name that appears on every serious list as a potential successor to Kofi Annan, whose term ends on December 31st of this year, is Prince Zeid Raed al-Hussein of Jordan.

Richard Holbrooke identifies Prince Zeid as a "dark horse" candidate for the UN Secretary General job, but he has a major ally working quietly (believe it or not) on his behalf: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Bolton is currently the President of the UN Security Council (during the month of February) and is encouraging earlier deliberation on the potential successor to Annan than is traditional. What is traditional is for a name to come out of nowhere at the end of a complicated, opaque international negotiation and be announced practically at the very last moment.

Sources close to Bolton report that he has been meeting quite a number of the leading candidates for the Secretary General position, interviewing them as it were, and according to one source, the candidate who stands out so far among all others -- in Bolton's mind -- is Prince Zeid.

UN Protocol dictates that Asia be the home of the next Secretary General, but Bolton has been arguing that "merit alone" should determine who is hired for the job and who not.

But perhaps Bolton shouldn't push so hard. Last week, I had dinner with one of Asia's leading Ambassadors to the U.S. who told me that Asia would consider Prince Zeid as one of theirs. A leading Chinese diplomat told me the same thing.

Given that the Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand, the Korean Foreign Minister, Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore, and an Indonesian candidate all have their hats in the Secretary General ring, this comment about the Jordanian prince is fascinating.

But geopolitically, the other compelling reason to support Prince Zeid is that he'd be a leading alternative archetype to Jordan's other well known personality, Zarqawi.

Zeid is a Muslim and descends from the royal line of princes and kings who claim direct descendency from Muhammad.

I agree with John Bolton that merit should dictate who takes the helm as UN Secretary General, but I find myself also agreeing with him that elevating someone like Zeid to the position of Secretary General might send a number of constructive signals to the Muslim world -- that they matter and have leaders engaged in constructive stake-holding in the global system.

-- Steve Clemons

Though he has low favorability ratings and an increasingly large chorus of critics, President Bush has established a template for bold and decisive executive power that seems monarchially ill-disposed to the checks-and-balances of a healthy democracy. In many ways, he has pushed the powers of the Executive Branch beyond the high water mark established by Nixon's presidency at its zenith.

One of the odd but real consequences of Bush's power is that Americans seem to be perceiving other world leaders through a Bush-modeled prism. This is particularly the case with Iran's populist demogogue president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is clearly hell-bent on creating collisions -- first with Israel, less over its existence than in wanting to do some regional head-butting to establish Iran as a hegemonic rival and in order to embarrass and emasculate Egypt's and Jordan's Muslim leaders. Secondly, Ahmadinejad wants a collision with the West over Iran's nuclear activities to legitimate his revolutionary faction as the authentic national voice of Iran.

But what is strange is that there are numerous forces inside Iran working overtime to impede Ahmadinejad from fulfilling his ambitions -- while America and Europe are doing much to empower him and give him exactly what he wants.

The question of checks-and-balances in Iran is important -- whether they are theocratic or democratic institutions. We need to understand how executive authority in Iran flows -- or Europe and the U.S. may, out of ignorance, empower Iran's president while undermining other players who keep the blustery rhetoric of Ahmadinejad just that.

This fiery, anti-Israel, nuclear-obsessed President in Iran failed to get his preferred Oil Minister past the Majles-e-Shura-ye-Eslami, or Islamic Consultative Assembly three times. Finally, he had to compromise with other power centers in Iran's government -- who wanted competent manager in that post rather than one of Ahmadinejad's retainers.

This informed comment by Nasrin Alavi gives a picture of the Ahmadinejad-control facility that Iran's other power centers are building:

In fact the president has less power than any of his Islamic Republic predecessors. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, has seemingly been startled enough by Ahmadinejad's disruptive tendencies to grant the expediency council (a non-elected body headed by Rafsanjani) oversight of the presidency.

This weakness goes back to Ahmadinejad's election victory in June 2005, when accusations of vote-rigging were made by three of his rival candidates (among the seven allowed to compete for the office, from the 1,010 who registered in the attempt) as well as many other observers. The candidates who alleged foul play -- Mehdi Karroubi (onetime speaker of parliament), Mostafa Moin (ex-education minister), and Hashemi Rafsanjani, (ex-president) -- each represent factional power-blocs within Iran, and have continued to chide Ahmadinejad since his power was confirmed.

Ahmadinejad's struggles to install an oil minister after a three-month political deadlock further exposed his political frailty, and the divisions among Iran's conservatives. After three failed attempts, he was finally forced into a major compromise by proposing an acceptable candidate for the post -- one who had backed a political rival during the presidential elections.

And read this analysis titled "Factional Infighting in Iran Complicates Nuclear Diplomacy". (The writer, Kamal Nazer Yasin, is writing this excellent material from inside Iran under a pseudonym.)

He writes:

An ultra-conservative faction in Tehran, headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not interested in exploring compromise on the nuclear issue, according to several political analysts in Tehran.

Hardliners evidently believe that confrontation with the West on the nuclear issue could help regenerate a sense of national purpose among Iranians. Political apathy has proliferated in Iran in recent years, due in large measure to the government's inability to address pressing economic problems.

It seems that one of the highest objectives of European and American nuclear negotiators should be to pursue a diplomatic track with Iran that chokes off fuel to Ahmadinejad's nuclear populism -- and working with elements beyond his office and which appeal to Iran's broader public would be a constructive step.

Yasin continues his excellent essay with insights into how factions are lining up to constrain Iran's president:

The hardliners are facing rising opposition from a moderate faction, which appears to enjoy support from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary, Ali Larijani, recently praised some aspects of the Russian plan and emphasized that Tehran did not intend to withdraw from the NPT. Larijani is widely viewed as a political protege of Ayatollah Khamenei's.

Ahmadinejad enjoyed the backing of Ayatollah Khamenei during the initial stage of his presidency. But Ahmadinejad's pursuit of a radically conservative political agenda quickly prompted Ayatollah Khamenei to distance himself from the president's faction. The supreme leader, apparently seeing a need for Iran to have a political counter-balance to the presidential faction, has reached out to centrists led by Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The Rafsanjani-led faction is willing to engage the international community on the nuclear issue. Former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rouhani, who is considered a Rafsanjani protege, suggested in a February 9 interview with the Iranian Student News Agency that a confrontational approach would be counterproductive to Iran's national interests. "Shouting alone won't help us achieve our goals," Rouhani stated. "To stand up to our enemies, we need a multi-pronged, proactive and dynamic strategy."

This isn't to say that other elements of Iran's political sphere are going to be America- or Europe-huggers, but they clearly understand the high costs of both isolation and hot collision.

Another part of this equation that must be further explicated -- another day -- is that isolating Iran, or bombing it, could have staggering and profound consequences for American engagement in the Middle East for decades.

There are dangers -- and complicated costs and benefits -- for Europe, the U.S., Iran, and other players in the Middle East.

But we need to get our antennae working regarding what is real and not on the Iran side of the equation and resist inflating Ahmadinejad's powers to look like those of the "makes-his-own-reality" George Bush.

-- Steve Clemons

TWN has just been sent some very interesting material posted at OutragedModerates.org.

A blogger's FOIA request has yielded Steven Cambone's handwritten notes of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld's instructions to General Myers at 2:40 pm on September 11, 2001.

Some of the lines are fascinating:

"Go massive. . .Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Judge whether hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) @ same time -- Not only UBL (Osama bin Laden)

Hard to get a good case

Need to move swiftly

This material first surfaced on CBS News' September 4, 2002 report, "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11" -- as Thad Anderson of Outraged Moderates reports -- but is not referenced in the 9/11 Commission Report or other accounts of 9/11 post-attack planning.

Here is one of the key pages from Steven Cambone's notes that was not revealed in its entirety on the CBS report -- and the full package of notes can be seen here.

Blogging today up in Deep Creek, Maryland -- in the middle of a small snow storm -- and hanging at Trader's Coffee House on Highway 219 in case there are any TWN loyal readers up here.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I had to pause between a set of non-stop meetings today after briefly seeing an email from the Council on Foreign Relations highlighting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's complaint about the "globally hostile media environment."

He lamented that today's terrorist arsenal includes "e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs."

A CNN report captures his point:

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

"Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted," Rumsfeld said.

"For the most part, the U.S. government still functions as a 'five and dime' store in an eBay world," Rumsfeld said, referring to old-fashioned U.S. retail stores and the online auction house respectively.

U.S. military public affairs officers must learn to anticipate news and respond faster, and good public affairs officers should be rewarded with promotions, he said.

The Pentagon's propaganda machine still operates mostly eight hours a day, five or six days a week while the challenges it faces occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rumsfeld called that a "dangerous deficiency."

He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of "Saddam Hussein's mass graves."

A couple of quick points.

First, perhaps Secretary Rumsfeld ought to go back and look at the images that were PRODUCED by Americans -- not al Qaeda.

Secretary Rumsfeld, take a good look at these horrific, grizzly, and detestable depictions of what soldiers under your command did at Abu Ghraib.

Second, no one in senior levels of command has been held accountable for the Abu Ghraib outrage -- no one in your immediate circle, Mr. Secretary -- nor you, yourself.

I think it's going to take more than spin, and more than a multi-billion dollar PR budget to turn our public diplomacy around -- it's going to require a GENUINE "hearts and minds" strategy, but thus far we've been more focused with torturing and disappearing those hearts and minds.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I've seen Mary Matalin in a photo on the cover of the Washington Post walking with Cheney the day after news hit that the Vice President shot his hunting acquaintance. Matalin's even been out in the press taking a few shots for Cheney.

Karl Rove is in the Cheney shooting stories. So is the President's Chief-of-Staff Andy Card.

And there are probably other White House aides-de-camp who are getting some nods in the press as the media tries to squeeze this story to its farthest possible end.

But one name is oddly missing -- completely (well, nearly). He's not mentioned in a single blog or news article on this story.

And that is Cheney's replacement for Scooter Libby as his Chief-of-Staff David Addington.

For the record, Tom DeFrank, Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Daily News, did reference David Addington's disdain for the press in a Charlie Rose Show segment on the Cheney shooting incident:

CHARLIE ROSE: How about the fact that "Scooter" Libby is not there? Is that a factor?

TOM DEFRANK: Well, I think so. David Addington, the new chief of staff, a very accomplished lawyer, a very hard liner, is basically even more disdainful of the press than many of the people around the vice president, and certainly more disdainful than, I`m told, than - than Cheney himself. And so you`re not going to have a chief of staff in there saying, "Chief, we`ve got to get this out. We`ve got to do something quickly." So for all of those reasons, I think, those - those -- those factors all kind of came together to create a perfect little political firestorm here.

TWN has been concerned that the shooting fiasco -- and the way that it has streteched out for days -- has helped the VP skate past the much more serious charge at hand that he has illegally promulgated leaks of classified national security information on numerous occasions.

My hunch is that David Addington has been lurking in the shadows -- busy at work -- preparing for the battles ahead regading the leak controversy, working to preserve the White House's prerogatives on warrantless wiretapping, rebuffing calls for any alterations in our detainee practices in Guantanamo, and just overall keeping the emergent Bush-Cheney monarchy in good shape.

It is useful to remind ourselves of Addington's objectives and tactics.

Here is a clip from this week's February 20th edition of Newsweek in a piece titled "Bush's Bad Connection" by Mike Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas:

The White House is likely to be defiant. Cheney's chief aide and counsel, David Addington, has advised his bosses that even if the intelligence committee votes to subpoena secret documents from the executive branch, the demand will not be upheld by the courts.

Cheney's attitude seems to be: bring it on. Last week the veep told cheering activists at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that the White House intends to trumpet NSA wiretapping as a winning issue in the fall campaign. "With an important election coming up," said Che-ney, "people need to know just how we view the most critical questions of national security and how we propose to defend the nation."

The Washington Post's David Ignatius also offered a prescient profile of Addington in early January. In the piece he opened with:

Who is David Addington? The simple answer is that he's Vice President Cheney's former legal counsel and, since the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby in October, Cheney's chief of staff.

But behind the scenes, the polite but implacable Addington has been a chief advocate for the interrogation and surveillance policies that have created a legal crisis for the Bush administration.

But the zinger line in Ignatius' piece is:

Friends and former colleagues describe Addington as a man who thrives on his invisibility. He lives in a modest house in Northern Virginia, takes the subway to work, and shuns the parties and perks of office.

He usually has the same simple meal every day -- a bowl of gazpacho soup. Though born in Washington, he styles himself as a "rugged Montana man" in the image of his boss, and he has a photo in his office of Cheney shooting a gun.

TWN has more on the way on Mr. Addington -- but for today, we'd like to ask some folks who are on the trail of Cheney to ask "Where is David Addington?"

This guy can't be permitted much time in the shadows -- and the Cheney quail-poaching distraction (that's what they call it when the upland game tax stamps aren't paid for) has probably helped strengthen Addington's hand in the battles ahead that DO matter.

-- Steve Clemons

In my view, the law says "No". . .but I have little doubt Alberto Gonzales and his minions will construct a rationale that says otherwise.

But I have run across some interesting information -- and have some questions that we should all pose to those at the helm in the White House.

Executive Order 12958 on "Classified National Security Information" was promulgated by President Clinton on April 17, 1995.

This Executive Order "prescribes a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information."

In this 1995 Executive Order, the VICE PRESIDENT is mentioned only one time -- and only in such a way that the automatic, 25-year declassification of historically important documents can be preempted if declassification would "impair the ability of responsible United States Government officials to protect the President, the Vice President, and other individuals."

Now, let's move to the March 25, 2003 Executive Order by President Bush, No. 13292, that amends President Clinton's Executive Order on National Security Information.

The Vice President's "presence" in the Executive Order increased by 1000%. Instead of just one mention in the Executive Order, Cheney's office is referred to eleven times.

This hyping of Cheney's and his staff's role in the management of secrets is a further testament to the historically unique power that Cheney's vice-presidency amassed in the period after 9/11/2001.

Briefly, in the amended Executive Order, Dick Cheney and presumably future VPs are affected by this National Security Information presidential order in the following ways:

1. The Vice President, in the context of his duties, has the authority to "classify" information;

2. The Vice President, in the context of his duties, can give a "top secret" classification to information;

3. The Vice President can give a "secret" or "confidential" classification to information;

4. Like in the previous 1995 Executive Order, the automatic, 25-year declassification of national security information can be preempted if it would impair the ability to "protect" the Vice President from physical harm;

5. Mandatory declassification review (by a designated process) is required of information originating from the Vice President;

6. Mandatory declassification review is required from the Vice President's staff;

7. Access to certain national security information can be provided to individuals who occupied policy-making positions appointed by the Vice President (or President of course)

8. Rules barring access to certain classified national security information will be waived for the Vice President;

9. Waivers to rules of access to classified national security information will only apply to Vice Presidential appointees in areas of their policy work while working as an Executive Branch appointee;

10. This mention of the VP only relates to the above line saying that access to classified national security information will only be provided to Presdidential and Vice Presidential appointees in the area of his or her policy work that was done during the tenure of that respective President or Vice President;

11. "'Original classification authority' means an individual authorized in writing, either by the President, the Vice President in the performance of executive duties. . ." This is a definitional item in the Executive Order.

There is NOTHING HERE that indicates that the Vice President has any embedded authority to be a declassification machine unto himself.

This matter is important because Vice Presdident Cheney slipped into his interview with Brit Hume yesterday his belief that he has the ability to declassify national security information -- and implying that there is an Executive Order that allows him to do it.

Here is the exchange:

Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q There is.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Have you done it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --

Q You ever done it unilaterally?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

Vice President Cheney is right that he has the ability to classify materials; that is clear from the Executive Order.

It is also clear, however, that the rules and processes for CLASSIFYING national security information are completely different than DECLASSIFYING information. That is evident from reading the structure of the Executive Order itself.

So, Cheney is engaged in Executive Branch over-reach again, implying he has a power that is not designated.

This is the issue that the nation should be focused on -- and in TWN's view, it is far more important than Cheney's hunting accident and even his obsession with making the White House opaque to this country's citizens.

If Cheney authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified national security secrets, then Cheney broke the law and should be investigated. GOP presidential hopeful George Allen agrees.

One lucid observer shared with me the thought this morning that there may, in fact, be "classified" aspects to the March 2003 Executive Order that we mere members of the public are not privy too.

But let's warn the White House now: Secret Orders that give the President or Vice President secret new powers are not consistent in any way with democracy and this nation's heritage.

TWN doubts that the authority to classify or declassify information would have been issued in a secret way -- as it is clear that one of the purposes of the 2003 Executive Order amendment was to give Vice President Cheney and his office much more presence in the management of secrets -- and the White House wanted to make VP Cheney's role overt, not hidden.

-- Steve Clemons

(Ed. note: Many thanks to GP for sending the EO links.)

Update: Here is an excellent link to thoughtful commentary whether the VP has declassification authority to out covert agents or to release classified sections of the national intelligence estimate.

Here are two links -- link one & link two -- that add a bit more information about the empowerment of the Vice President's role in the executive orders on national security information.

One other factoid is that President Clinton did amend his Executive Order to give the Vice President "original classification authority," but this is still not relevant to "declassification authority." Just want to have all the correct information out there.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

First of all, congratulations to Fox News' Brit Hume on this super, hard-hitting, ground-breaking interview with Vice President Cheney (not).

Just for fun, imagine Hume interviewing Al Gore if Gore had shot someone and hidden the news for a day -- and stuck in the material that he could unilaterally declassify information. Where is the "executive order" about that?

Here is the transcript:

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Vice President

6:00 P.M. EST -- Wednesday, February 15, 2006

INTERVIEW OF THE VICE PRESIDENT

BY BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS

Vice President's Ceremonial Office

Eisenhower Executive Office Building

2:01 P.M. EST

Q Mr. Vice President, how is Mr. Whittington?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is he's doing very well today. I talked to him yesterday after they discovered the heart problem, but it appears now to have been pretty well resolved and the reporting today is very good.

Q How did you feel when you heard about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until he's home. He's going to be in the hospital, apparently, for a few more days, and the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in somebody who is 78-79 years old. But he's a great man, he's in great shape, good friend, and our thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family.

Q How long have you known him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I first met him in Vale, Colorado, when I worked for Gerry Ford about 30 years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever hunted with him.

Q Would you describe him as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, an acquaintance.

Q Tell me what happened?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, basically, we were hunting quail late in the day --

Q Describe the setting.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's in south Texas, wide-open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it's wild quail. It's some of the best quail hunting anyplace in the country. I've gone there, to the Armstrong ranch, for years. The Armstrongs have been friends for over 30 years. And a group of us had hunted all day on Saturday --

Q How many?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, probably 10 people. We weren't all together, but about 10 guests at the ranch. There were three of us who had gotten out of the vehicle and walked up on a covey of quail that had been pointed by the dogs. Covey is flushed, we've shot, and each of us got a bird. Harry couldn't find his, it had gone down in some deep cover, and so he went off to look for it. The other hunter and I then turned and walked about a hundred yards in another direction --

Q Away from him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Away from him -- where another covey had been spotted by an outrider. I was on the far right --

Q There was just two of you then?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Just two of us at that point. The guide or outrider between us, and of course, there's this entourage behind us, all the cars and so forth that follow me around when I'm out there -- but bird flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there. Didn't know he was there --

Q You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.

Q What was he wearing?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was dressed in orange, he was dressed properly, but he was also -- there was a little bit of a gully there, so he was down a little ways before land level, although I could see the upper part of his body when -- I didn't see it at the time I shot, until after I'd fired. And the sun was directly behind him -- that affected the vision, too, I'm sure.

But the image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.

Q Then what?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we went over to him, obviously, right away --

Q How far away from you was he?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm guessing about 30 yards, which was a good thing. If he'd been closer, obviously, the damage from the shot would have been greater.

Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.

Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have no idea. I mean, you focused on the bird, but as soon as I fired and saw Harry there, everything else went out of my mind. I don't know whether the bird went down, or didn't.

Q So did you run over to him or --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ran over to him and --

Q And what did you see? He's lying there --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding. You could see where the shot had struck him. And one of the fortunate things was that I've always got a medical team, in effect, covering me wherever I go. I had a physician's assistant with me that day. Within a minute or two he was on the scene administering first-aid. And --

Q And Mr. Whittington was conscious, unconscious, what?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was conscious --

Q What did you say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --

Q What did he say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him. The doc was fantastic --

Q What did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to you to be?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no idea how serious it was going to be. I mean, it could have been extraordinarily serious. You just don't know at that moment. You know he's been struck, that there's a lot of shot that had hit him. But you don't know -- you think about his eyes. Fortunately, he was wearing hunting glasses, and that protected his eyes. You -- you just don't know. And the key thing, as I say, initially, was that the physician's assistant was right there. We also had an ambulance at the ranch, because one always follows me around wherever I go. And they were able to get the ambulance there, and within about 30 minutes we had him on his way to the hospital.

Q And what did you do then? Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I had -- I told my physician's assistant to go with him, but the ambulance is crowded and they didn't need another body in there. And so we loaded up and went back to ranch headquarters, basically. By then, it's about 7:00 p.m. at night. And Harry --

Q Did you have a sense then of how he was doing?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we're getting reports, but they were confusing. Early reports are always wrong. The initial reports that came back from the ambulance were that he was doing well, his eyes were open. They got him into the emergency room at Kingsville --

Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.

Q So by now what time is it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't have an exact time line, although he got there sometime that evening, 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m.

Q So this is several hours after the incident?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would say he was in Kingsville in the emergency room probably within, oh, less than an hour after they left the ranch.

Q Now, you're a seasoned hunter --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.

Q Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this? What was the responsibility here?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.

Q Now, what about this -- it was said you were hunting out of vehicles. Was that because you have to have the vehicles, or was that because that's your -- the way you chose to hunt that day?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, the way -- this is a big ranch, about 50,000 acres. You cover a lot of territory on a quail hunt. Birds are oftentimes -- you're looking for coveys. And these are wild quail, they're not pen-raised. And you hunt them

-- basically, you have people out on horseback, what we call outriders, who are looking for the quail. And when they spot them, they've got radios, you'll go over, and say, get down and flush the quail. So you need --

Q So you could be a distance of a miles from where you spot quail until the next place you may find them?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, usually you'll be, you know, maybe a few hundred yards. Might be farther than that; could be a quarter of a mile.

Q Does that kind of hunting only go forward on foot, or is it mostly --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, you always -- in that part of the country, you always are on vehicles, until you get up to where the covey is. Then you get off -- there will be dogs down, put down; the dogs will point to covey. And then you walk up on the covey. And as the covey flushes, that's when you shoot.

Q Was anybody drinking in this party?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --

Q So he wasn't, and you weren't?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters. Then we took about an hour-long tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m.

The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.

Q Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been shot. And that was important, too.

But we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how -- whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay.

Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the ranch --

Q Right, what about his children?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made. One of his daughters had made it to the hospital by the next day when I visited. But one of the things I'd learned over the years was first reports are often wrong and you need to really wait and nail it down. And there was enough variation in the reports we were getting from the hospital, and so forth -- a couple of people who had been guests at the ranch went up to the hospital that evening; one of them was a doctor, so he obviously had some professional capabilities in terms of being able to relay messages. But we really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be okay, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ. And that's when we began the process of notifying the press.

Q Well, what -- you must have recognized, though, with all your experience in Washington, that this was going to be a big story.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, true, it was unprecedented. I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this. We've had experiences where the President has been shot; we've never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody.

Q Not since Aaron Burr.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not since Aaron Burr --

Q Different circumstances.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Different circumstances.

Q Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.

Q But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct.

Q And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today, really, finally.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so --

Q Had you discussed this with colleagues in the White House, with the President, and so on?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I did not. The White House was notified, but I did not discuss it directly, myself. I talked to Andy Card, I guess it was Sunday morning.

Q Not until Sunday morning? Was that the first conversation you'd had with anybody in the -- at the White House?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q And did you discuss this with Karl Rove at any time, as has been reported?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, Karl talks to -- I don't recall talking to Karl. Karl did talk with Katherine Armstrong, who is a good mutual friend to both of us. Karl hunts at the Armstrong, as well --

Q Say that again?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we're both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katherine Armstrong. And Katherine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this.

And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the website, which is the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.

Q What do you think now?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I still do. I still think that the accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me, I didn't have any press people with me. I was there on a private weekend with friends on a private ranch. In terms of who I would contact to have somebody who would understand what we're even talking about, the first person that we talked with at one point, when Katherine first called the desk to get hold of a reporter didn't know the difference between a bullet and a shotgun -- a rifle bullet and a shotgun. And there are a lot of basic important parts of the story that required some degree of understanding. And so we were confident that Katherine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it. She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.

Q By the next morning, had you spoken again to Mr. Whittington?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: The next morning I talked to his wife. And then I went to the hospital in Corpus Christi and visited with him.

Q When was that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, it was shortly after noon on Sunday.

Q Now, by that time had the word gone out to the newspaper?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe it had. I can't remember what time Katherine actually talked to the reporter. She had trouble that morning actually finding a reporter. But they finally got connected with the reporter, and that's when the story then went out.

Q Now, it strikes me that you must have known that this was going to be a national story --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.

Q -- and it does raise the question of whether you couldn't have headed off this beltway firestorm if you had put out the word to the national media, as well as to the local newspaper so that it could post it on its website. I mean, in retrospect, wouldn't that have been the wise course --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, who is going to do that? Are they going to take my word for what happened? There is obviously --

Q Well, obviously, you could have put the statement out in the name of whoever you wanted. You could put it out in the name of Mrs. Armstrong, if you wanted to. Obviously, that's -- she's the one who made the statement.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Exactly. That's what we did. We went with Mrs. Armstrong. We had -- she's the one who put out the statement. And she was the most credible one to do it because she was a witness. It wasn't me in terms of saying, here's what happened, it was --

Q Right, understood. Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of Texas.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing.

Q When did you first speak to -- if you spoke to Andy Card at, what, mid-day, you said, on Sunday?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sometime Sunday morning.

Q And what about -- when did you first -- when, if ever, have you discussed it with the President?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I talked to him about it yesterday, or Monday -- first on Monday, and then on Tuesday, too.

Q There is reporting to the effect that some in the White House feel you kind of -- well, look at what Scott McClellan went through the last couple days. There's some sense -- and perhaps not unfairly so -- that you kind of hung him out to dry. How do you feel about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Scott does a great job and it's a tough job. It's especially a tough job under these conditions and circumstances. I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.

Q Well, perhaps so, but isn't there an institution here present at the White House that has long-established itself as the vehicle through which White House news gets out, and that's the pool?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no press person with me, no coverage with me, no White House reporters with me. I'm comfortable with the way we did it, obviously. You can disagree with that, and some of the White House press corps clearly do. But, no, I've got nothing but good things to say about Scott McClellan and Dan Bartlett. They've got a tough job to do and they do it well. They urged us to get the story out. The decision about how it got out, basically, was my responsibility.

Q That was your call.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was my call.

Q All the way.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: All the way. It was recommended to me -- Katherine Armstrong wanted to do it, as she said, and I concurred in that; I thought it made good sense.

Q Now, you're talking to me today -- this is, what, Wednesday?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Wednesday.

Q What about just coming out yourself Monday/Tuesday -- how come?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it obviously has to do with the status of Harry Whittington. And it's a difficult subject to talk about, frankly, Brit. But most especially I've been very concerned about him and focused on him and feel more comfortable coming out today because of the fact that his circumstances have improved, he's gotten by what was a potential crisis yesterday, with respect to the developments concerning his heart. I think this decision we made, that this was the right way to do it.

Q Describe if you can your conversations with him, what you've said to him and the attitude he's shown toward you in the aftermath of this.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's been fantastic. He's a gentleman in every respect. He oftentimes expressed more concern about me than about himself. He's been in good spirits, unfailingly cheerful --

Q What did he say about that? You said, "expressed concern" about you -- what did he say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, when I first saw him in the hospital, for example, he said, look, he said, I don't want this to create problems for you. He literally was more concerned about me and the impact on me than he was on the fact that he'd been shot. He's a -- I guess I'd describe him as a true Texas gentleman, a very successful attorney, successful businessman in Austin; a gentleman in every respect of the word. And he's been superb.

Q For you, personally, how would you -- you said this was one of the worst days of your life. How so?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened to my friend as a result of my actions, it's part of this sudden, you know, in less than a second, less time than it takes to tell, going from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love -- to, my gosh, I've shot my friend. I've never experienced anything quite like that before.

Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt. I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think about it.

Q Some organizations have said they hoped you would find a less violent pastime.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's brought me great pleasure over the years. I love the people that I've hunted with and do hunt with; love the outdoors, it's part of my heritage, growing up in Wyoming. It's part of who I am. But as I say, the season is ending, I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future.

Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.

Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q There is.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Have you done it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --

Q You ever done it unilaterally?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

Q There have been two leaks, one that pertained to possible facilities in Europe; and another that pertained to this NSA matter. There are officials who have had various characterizations of the degree of damage done by those. How would you characterize the damage done by those two reports?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There clearly has been damage done.

Q Which has been the more harmful, in your view?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into just sort of ranking them, then you get into why is one more damaging than the other. One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.

Q Mr. Vice President, thank you very much for doing this.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Brit.

END 2:28 P.M. EST

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I've been totally socked in because of a line of non-stop meetings, but big stuff is up.

Cheney talks about his shooting shame.

However, More Abu Ghraib photos punctuate our national shame.

In its exclusive interview with Cheney on the hungting accident, Fox News should have asked Cheney what torture looks like to him.

But I need to get back to these topics later today.

Those who want to catch up, I'll be speaking (and drinking?) at DC's Drinking Liberally tonight at 6:45 (approximately).

But right now, the faux spring weather demands that I take Oakley for a run.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

One of the traditions that The Washington Note has established is that I'm happy to meet aspiring bloggers as well as policy and political junkies -- and of course TWN loyal readers -- at cool coffee shops (or pubs or saloons as the case may be) on my trips.

Nothing too organized. Folks read here what cities I'll be in -- and they email me ideas of places to meet. I then email back or post on the blog time and place. (places with free wifi really make my day)

Next Monday and Tuesday, I will be in London.

Wednesday afternoon -- Pittsburgh.

Thursday midday -- Casper, Wyoming

Friday -- exhausted. . .and back with Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner in western Maryland.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I was able to break away from my obsessive interest in the Cheney hunting accident and tax evasion scandal to hear my colleague, Nir Rosen. speak about Iraq's unacknowledged but significantly expanding civil war.

There are a number of observers such as Al Jazeera's Yosri Fouda, Al Quds' Abdel Barri Atwan, author Amos Oz, Peter Bergen, the University of Chicago's Robert Pape, and the eminent Juan Cole who are high on my list of thoughtful commentators on what is unfolding in the Middle East, but Nir Rosen combines in his excellent commentary the grit that comes from being there and hanging out with insurgents, terrorists, clerics, Iraqi nationalists, and American soldiers.

This Sunday, Nir Rosen will have a major article that focuses on Jordanian jihadists in the New York Times Magazine. I've had a preview -- and it's fascinating and important commentary.

The most disturbing part of our meeting today with Rosen is his view that a civil war in Iraq is raging now, and spreading beyond Iraq's borders. The tempo of violence is increasing.

He reports that there have been several significant failed efforts to unite Shia and Sunni Muslim elements, and these have all failed. I'm not going to go into the fascinating detail that Nir Rosen did today, as I think that much of this will be in his piece on Sunday.

What is really depressing about this growing regional tension, spinning out of Iraq, is that sectarian-fueled identity and violent rage has been aggravated and deepened by the transition from Saddam Hussein, who identified himself more tribally as a Tikriti than as a Sunni, to American occupation.

The Saudis and Jordanians are informally exporting youthful, religious zealots to join the insurgency, particularly Zarqawi's organization -- who are fighting the Americans and the Shia. Muqtada al-Sadr, whose organization is opposed to American occupation, is the leading nationalist Shia cleric -- who does not want the nation torn apart, but neither is a beacon of Shia-Sunni reconciliation.

That said, al-Sadr did attend this year's Haj in Saudi Arabia as the guest of Saudi King Abdullah, a Sunni, who is looked at by many Saudis as the first incorruptible and competent king since Faisal.

So, perhaps there is some strand of hope -- but after spending an hour with Nir Rosen, fresh from trips to Iraq and Jordan, I think that we need to do some reality-checking and testing of the rosey assessments that have recently been issued about the state of Iraq's efforts to stabilize and democratize.

In case you did not see it, read Nir Rosen's important Atlantic Monthly piece "If America Left Iraq: The Case for Cutting and Running".

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Paul Hackett had a Howard Dean-like organically grown following out there that saw his type of candidacy as the sort that would transform the sclerotic Democratic Party into something more real and relevant to progressives.

Unfortunately, he's announced that he's out of the race.

This is the sort of time when angry supporters tend to call for the scalps of those responsible.

Markos at DailyKos has a quite informed, balanced take on the Hackett - Sherrod Brown - Rahm Emanuel -- Mike DeWine mess.

I'm not going to wade far into this story. But I do want to share a few thoughts with the progressive blogging/activist community.

There aren't many silver bullet solutions to America's political problems broadly or to the problems in either the Democratic or Republican parties. Hackett's war service profile, near win in the last election, and general attitude about policy and politics was refreshing to a progressive grassroots constituency that wants to change the course of the Democratic Party.

Let's presume for a moment that I endorse that impulse.

To accomplish what is essentially a hijacking of the party -- or at least to wrestle away the helm of party control -- the insurgents who were behind Hackett need to have weight in a good 25-30% of other key races that Democrats are wresling with (if not more). The 25-30% is enough inside the party to play a controlling or significant co-stakeholder role in party decision-making.

Furthermore, to win this battle for control -- some candidates, like Hackett, will have to vigorously run until the end, even if their candidacy looks doomed, or cash-strapped. It is certainly true that a slug-fest between Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett may have harmed the Democratic Party -- and may even help Mike DeWine -- but to win a seat at the table and to chair the meeting when decisions are being made, the insurgent Dems will have to line up behind a number of candidates willing to go all the way.

One can't change the Democratic Party establishment if one remains dependent on that party's good graces and preferences. In this case, Rahm Emanuel and Co. began to choke Hackett because he wasn't playing ball the way that Rahm wanted or needed him to.

A successful insurgency won't care what Emanuel does. The insurgents will see victory behind both short-term defeats and short-term wins. Hackett needed to go all of the way -- win or lose -- to give the insurgents validation and strength in the Democratic Party.

Dem insurgents also over-invested in Hackett without lining up the rest of the insurgent candidacies. There are some out there, of course, but not enough. Hackett became the face of their overall campaign which I believe was a mistake.

I'm not endorsing this strategy of insurgency -- but I think that the characteristics of a successful attack on the Democratic Party establishment need to be articulated. I do think that the Democratic Party needs to have a few civil wars over policy and strategy.

Dem insurgents are vital if the Democratic Party is going to get itself out of a rut of political irrelevance and incompetence.

Hackett dropping out may help Dems win a Senate seat in Ohio; I'm not sure. I think that there are a number of problems with Sherrod Brown.

But in the long run, Hackett's departure has undermined some of the clout of the Dem insurgent movement.

And that's not a good thing.

-- Steve Clemons

I know it's a big story, but I don't like it. Everyone wants to talk about who Cheney shot, why he shot him, what it ALL means. . .

I've received 73 emails about Cheney's hunting fiasco today, but to reiterate what I said on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show this morning, the only semi-large issue that I see in all of this is that the White House's press team sat on the news for more than a day. Bad.

But now some major news has just hit that has changed my mind on the whole thing. Cheney didn't pay his taxes.

This from the Office of the Vice President a few moments ago (which, all of a sudden, is just pumping out information on the "shooting"):

It has been brought to the Vice President's attention by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department this afternoon that, although he had acquired a 125 dollar Texas non-resident season hunting license, he lacked a 7 dollar stamp for hunting upland game birds. To address any questions about the licensing:

-- A member of the Vice President's staff wrote a check for 140 dollars understanding that this would purchase a Texas non-resident season hunting license that would permit the Vice President to hunt quail in Texas. It appears now that the license itself cost 125 dollars, and an extra 15 dollars covered the cost of a Federal migratory bird stamp. The Vice President did not need the Federal stamp, as he already possessed one.

-- The staff asked for all permits needed, but was not informed of the 7 dollar upland game bird stamp requirement.

-- Because the requirement is new, the Department has informed us that it is issuing warnings, and the Vice President expects to receive one. He will take whatever steps are needed to comply with applicable rules.

-- In the meantime, the Vice President has sent a 7 dollar check to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which is the cost of an upland game bird stamp.

Here is a link to the Texas Parks & Wildlife Upland Game Bird Stamp Endorsement information, which states:

Upland Game Bird Stamp Endorsement (Type 167): $7

Required to hunt turkey, pheasant, quail, lesser prairie chicken, or chachalaca.

Non-residents who purchase the Non-resident Spring Turkey License are exempt from this stamp endorsement requirement.

TWN's theory is that this entire fiasco is part of a new 'politics of distraction'.

This shooting accident has gotten our minds off of Cheney's role in instructing Scooter Libby to leak classify information; off the role the Vice President has played in manipulating the national security bureacracy to support his war; and many other vital matters.

But seriously, I think that this whole Cheney shooting affair is overdone. . .except the $7.00 upland game stamp.

That's tax evasion isn't it?

-- Steve Clemons

An important and provocative report has just been published that suggests that Iran was the target of much of Valerie Plame's covert investigative work and that outing her identity had far worse consequences than has thus far been acknowledged.

This information also dovetails with information TWN has been digging up on Iran's interests in Niger uranium.

Raw Story has just published this piece by Larisa Alexandrovna.

The core of the article is:

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

This is rather huge news. TWN had some knowledge of this Raw Story article before it hit the net and mentioned it was on the way on the WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show earlier today.

There are different directions this story may go.

The first might be that one of the reasons that Plame was outed had to do with bureaucratic and/or political enemies who were predisposed against the intelligence results of her team's Iran WMD-watching efforts. I would have to be further convinced of that case -- as I think that internal pettiness inside the Bush White House over Joe Wilson's public outing of the contrived Iraq-Niger-Uranium gambit is a pretty compelling rationale for Cheney's machine to out Plame.

But another dimension of this story has to do with an assessment of the damage that her outing caused this nation. As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.

One other piece to this that TWN needs to go back to in notes -- so please take the following with a grain of salt until further sourced -- has to do with Joe Wilson's findings in Niger.

Someone with knowledge of the classified report that Joe Wilson "orally" filed after his now famed investigative trip to Niger shared with me that there were two notes in that report that had nothing to do with Iraq and its purported activities in Niger.

These two notes focused on Iran's interests and possible activities in Niger.

The question is "why would Iran be interested in Niger uranium when it has more than adequate domestic sources of uranium?"

The response that has come from various intelligence sources that I have consulted is that if Iran was trying to access external sources of uranium -- somewhere like Niger -- it is because those "secret efforts" would be outside the international intelligence monitoring of Iran's domestic mining operations.

I do not have the fully articulated "notes" from Joe Wilson's Niger report (in fact, I have just learned that those written "notes" were destroyed), but I have just learned that these Iran-Niger references appear in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Joe Wilson's Niger trip. (I will link as soon as I secure the electronic version).

What is fascinating is that one of the staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence mistakenly recorded in the published report that Iraq -- rather than Iran -- attempted to purchase 400-500 tons of uranium. Wilson apparently made clear that it was Iran and not Iraq attempting to make such purchases.

The Washington Post, which reported this inaccuracy -- had to issue a correction that the purchase effort, as reported by Joe Wilson, was made by Iran and not Iraq.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: From the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report:

The intelligence report also said that Niger's former Minister for Energy and Mines [redacted]. Mai Manga, stated that there were no sales outside of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) channels since the mid-1980s. He knew of no contracts signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of uranium. He said that an Iranian delegation was interested in purchasing 400 tons of yellowcake from Niger in 1998, but said that no contract was ever signed with Iran.

Mai Manga also described how the French mining consortium controls Nigerien uranium mining and keeps the uranium very tightly controlled from the time it is mined until the time it is loaded onto ships in Benin for transport overseas. Mai Manga believed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange a special shipment of uranium to a pariah state given these controls.

Thanks to NS for forwarding.

-- Steve Clemons

I just spent an hour on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, and I was impressed by the quality of Brian's thinking, analysis, and understanding of the major political issues of the day.

I'm sorry to say that I don't often find many commentators and show hosts who have invested the time he has in driving past the facade of important topics.

-- Steve Clemons

George Allen, former Governor of Virginia and of course now Senator, wants to run for the presidency, but also has to keep his Senate seat in the 2006 race.

Former Navy Secretary James Webb is going to try and take that seat away from him.

But even George Allen thinks that to be politically competitive, he needs some space between himself and the wannabe-monarchy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

On Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace (in an exchange with Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island), George Allen said, basically, that Vice President Cheney should be investigated if he authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified information.

Here is the exchange:

WALLACE: You're saying he should be investigating the vice president?

REED: Well, whoever the superiors are that are supposedly allegedly leaked or authorized a leak by the individual in question, Mr. Libby. I think the investigation has to go forward.

WALLACE: Senator Allen?

ALLEN: The prosecutor here, Mr. Fitzgerald, seems to me to be a very articulate, professional prosecutor. And I think the facts will lead wherever they lead, and I think he will prosecute as appropriate.

WALLACE: Well, there doesn't seem to be any legal issue here. The issue seems to be more of kind of a political issue as to how you feel about the possibility that the vice president, because he would seem to be the obvious superior who was authorizing Scooter Libby, was telling him to release information which as far as we know was at that point still classified.

ALLEN: I don't think anybody should be releasing classified information, period, whether in the Congress, executive branch or some underling in some bureaucracy.

TWN agrees.

Vice President Cheney should be next on Patrick Fitzgerald's dance card.

-- Steve Clemons

The government was always right and never apologized;

Any dissent was suppressed, ridiculed, banned or worse;

Secret prisons were denied and never acknowledged or spoken about;

The torture of captives was condoned;

State incarceration was not subject to the checks and balances of a legal system;

Economic plans, like for oil, were established/determined in closed sessions between politicos, commissars and production managers, far outside public view, and where government claimed privilege in so doing;

Wages were set at the lowest common denominator, no matter what Bloc country you were in;

Government agents had access to your medical records, your library records, your telephone, and your e-mail.

A place where judicial power and judicial review were proclaimed concepts, but simply ignored in application;

Where criminal records of young adults were closed to all but the military;

Where a Constitution was a mere facade and ignored by state actors.

Any dissent, debate and protest were deemed unpatriotic;

The public media was bought, paid for, and provided by the state;

The military clandestinely and shamelessly influenced the national media and public opinion;

A place where wrong was declared right;

Where tapping a phone was like tapping a pencil;

Where lying was considered a patriotic skill;

The extraction of natural resources was paramount to any concern for the environment and the impact on the health of its people;

Where the use of “state secrets,” (those things embarrassing to the government) were confused with legitimate issues of “national security”;

A place where "secrecy" and "national security" were used to control debate;

Where legitimate secrecy, was subject to political use and abuse;

Where "legislators" were mere mouthpieces for and rubberstamps of whoever was in power;

Where you lived and died with the permission of the government;

A place where foreign policy was more important than domestic concerns;

Where fear was used as a political weapon and an acceptable means of control;

Where the best medical care was reserved for the influential;

Where wealth was concentrated in the top 5%;

A place where there was no middle class -- just a small economic and political elite, and the working poor.

This is from a speech by former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, now running for Congress in Michigan's 8th District.

These remarks were delivered in Washtenaw County, Michigan on February 8, 2006

He was referring to the now dissolved Soviet Union, against which America presented itself as a vibrant and inspiring contrast -- well, most of the time.

We have become a nation led by those contriving fear, selling fear, validating fear, legitimated by fear -- and we run the risk of becoming what we fought for decades.

-- Steve Clemons

Hopefully, this will not become more of a tragedy than it is -- but news out that Vice President Cheney just accidentally shot someone on a hunting trip.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed Note: Hat tip to The Agonist.

I just posted this piece regarding John Bolton's fortress strategy against the New York Times' UN-watcher Warren Hoge.

There is something wrong when the recess-appointed Bolton thinks its great to speak at the Jesse Helms Center but won't give the time of day to the New York Times.

But that's the way TWN thought he would behave all along.

-- Steve Clemons

Congressional Research Service Director Daniel Mulhollan has his key expert on separation of powers and Congress's legislative prerogatives vis-a-vis the Executive and Judicial Branches, Louis Fisher, in his cross-hairs.

He needs to stand down.

Congress needs all the help it can get in reminding itself it has the obligation of oversight in its Constitutional genetic code.

Director Mulhollan, you are not the White House's geisha (and no offense meant to geisha.)

Say it to yourself, aloud, 535 times.

-- Steve Clemons

I am a bit sick to my stomach right now, taking the train from New York to D.C. and just got off the phone with a retired general and just prior to that one of the more senior military strategists in the country who happens to have deep Southern roots.

Both have been long-term Republicans -- and both began denouncing Bush & Co. some time ago, one more publicly than the other.

But what has me sick is that the military had significantly more capacity for airlift and quick deployment on the levee break than has been publicly acknowledged.

Many reports -- including those by TWN -- had suggested that the Louisiana National Guard was stretched because of Iraq deployments -- but the U.S. military was cognizant of the disaster Katrina was brewing and, according to some reports, planned for action.

To my knowledge, and I may just be poorly informed, I have seen very little public commentary about the fact that the White House's failure was not only a sluggish response on the FEMA front -- but also for ignoring assets that were offering themselves as the storm was unleashing its wrath.

FEMA and Michael Brown were not the only players informing the White House that immediate action was needed, apparently a number of senior military officials in the region "offered" immediate assistance, particularly with regard to the levee. I do not know if these appeals for action and offers of assistance by the military were formalized or informal.

However, the particular officers who had concerns about what was unfolding with Katrina felt as if they had no authority to take any kind of action in a domestic humanitarian relief and disaster effort without getting cleared by the White House.

Their concerns make sense to me -- but while they waited and watched, and made appeals to the White House through, at minimum, informal channels, many people drowned who did not need to die.

-- Steve Clemons

British author Philippe Sands has a fascinating and important new book out, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules -- From FDR's Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush's Illegal War.

Interestingly, the book jumped from 15,052 on Amazon's sales rank to 3,471 today.

In Lawless World, Sands recounts a discussion between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which Bush proposed painting a plane with the identifying marks of the United Nations and prompting, hoping, that Saddam Hussein would shoot it down.

Speculation is rife that current British Ambassador David Manning wrote the memo recounting this discussion between Blair and Bush.

Here is a reminder about various other Bush-Blair pre-war discussions from Manning's predecessor, former British Ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyer.

After the Downing Street Memo -- written by my old friend Matthew Rycroft (now British Ambassador to Serbia); the Al Jazeera bombing memo, and a number of other memos -- it is clear as day that the Brits are far better note-takers than the Americans.

The Los Angeles Times' John Daniszewski writes this about Sands' book:

It was the end of January 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was five days away from giving a critical speech at the U.N. Security Council, laying out the case that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and posed a danger to world peace.

But huddled with aides at the White House, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were not sure there was enough evidence to convince the Security Council. Without the council's explicit authorization, their plans for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein could be difficult to defend under international law.

Bush proposed an alternative: paint a U.S. spy plane in United Nations colors and see if that didn't tempt Hussein's forces to shoot at it. In any case, he said, the war was "penciled in" for March 10 and the United States would go ahead with or without a second U.N. resolution.

Blair replied that he was "solidly with" the president.

That is the gist of an account of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting contained in the new edition of "Lawless World," a book by British author Philippe Sands. He has not identified the writer of the memorandum on which the account is based, but British media reports say it was one of the aides in attendance: Sir David Manning, then security advisor to Blair and now the British ambassador in Washington.

A spokesman for Blair on Friday refused to address the allegations but repeated Downing Street's insistence that there was no decision to commit British forces to war in Iraq until after it was authorized by Parliament on March 18, two days before the invasion was launched.

A spokesman for Manning said the ambassador would not comment.

Here is a thought experiment, and I don't have the answer.

If Bush had, in fact, painted an American military plane with UN markings and had provocatively flown the plane into Iraqi combat fire and it had been shot down, with lives potentially lost -- with a written record making clear the pre-meditation -- would Bush have violated any laws?

I'd be interested in any thoughtful responses.

-- Steve Clemons

(Ed. Note: thanks to LF for the book review link.)

TWN has posted a number of items about the depiction of John McCain in the Sundance Festival award-winning film by Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight.

I think McCain comes off as the Eisenhower-ian hero of the film, but there are tensions that have brewed up between McCain's office and the director regarding whether the film implies too much distance between the Senator and those in the Bush administration at the helm of the military-industrial complex.

So, some truth in advertising.

I like the film -- though I wish that Jarecki had not included Gore Vidal's voice and had edited out some of the more sweeping generalizations about the "American empire" and contrived threats in the world made by Chuck Lewis. These are honest differences, but I think that the film has a very important message -- relevant to the struggles of this nation today to match resources and will against genuine rather than contrived contingencies -- and people should see it.

I do believe that McCain has been a key voice in the federal government for trying to do something about the structural corruption of the defense industry, military, and Congress -- most evident recently in the Boeing Air Tanker deal which McCain helped squash. I also like Mark Salter and have known him since 1993, when Senator McCain was an Advisory Board I was affiliated with.

All that said, I wrote a post that elaborated on some of Mark Salter's objections to the film and encouraged calmer discourse.

I believe in constructive debate, and fair play -- and agreed to post Mark Salter's objections to the Jarecki film here.

Now, back to New York. . .have a meeting shortly with someone in John Bolton's world.

-- Steve Clemons

Great day in New York today, but very cold. Thanks to the TWN readers I met in Soho.

Tonight. . .8:34 p.m., on the dot. Air America Radio Majority Report's Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder and I are going to 'catch up' in their studio.

Don't know the topics, but Bolton Watch will no doubt be on the list.

Maybe Abramoff's light 9-year sentence:

1 Count Conspiracy

1 Count Mail Fraud

1 Count Income Tax Evasion

Straight guilty plea with allocution.

25M in restitution plus IRS

108-135 months under 2003 guidelines, though court may order supervision afterwards and even ignore these guidelines.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm off to New York this morning, writing this from the Metro-liner train, scanning the news.

I'm going to post a series of links today of things people should either know or just be very angry about. I'll add more commentary later, but there's too much to tell today not to get some of it out now.

First and foremost is Eric Lipton's powerful New York Times report that the White House lied when stating that it "had been caught by surprise" that a levee had broken in New Orleans:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

Investigators have found evidence that federal officials at the White House and elsewhere learned of the levee break in New Orleans earlier than was first suggested.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought -- also a number of fires."

Secondly, the White House promulgated a culture of leaking classified information. Vice President Cheney and his key staff had significant power in the post-9/11 power and they abused it and undermined the national security of this country.

However, the White House -- and particularly David Addington -- have excoriated and villified other potential leakers of materials who were responding to a loyalty to the nation -- rather than a loyalty to Cheney. More on this issue later -- but read the linked story by Neil Lewis.

Third, although I'm not sure how much more confirmation we need, former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia Paul Pillar has just published one of the most devastating critiques of the Bush administration's manufactured war, or what former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson recently called, "a hoax on the American people."

The sad fact is that we seem to need ongoing waves of confirmation of White House blindness and missteps as it approached the War against Iraq.

A summary of Pillar's important, controversial article, "Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq" in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs:

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

From Walter Pincus's excellent profile of Paul Pillar today in the Washington Post:

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of intelligence.

This is all powerful, important -- and at some level, just harder confirmation of things we all know already.

We have become too tolerant a nation regarding official lies.

The President now reveals top secret information that a serious al Qaeda effort to destroy what I used to know as "Library Tower" in Los Angeles as a justification for the many nefarious things that his administration has done.

This is unbelievable on so many fronts. First, I believe that the U.S. government did stop a terrible attack from occurring in Los Angeles. That is the government's job, and it does need robust intelligence capacity to stop, inderdict, and deter very bad people from doing horrific things.

The REASON why Bush did not previously disclose this thwarted terrorist attack has more to do with not want to reveal "means and methods" or not wanting to compromise sources so that more information can be generated such means and sources in the future.

Very possibly, the President has just sacrificed key sources or exposed some of our means in order to cover himself politically. This was an incredibly cynical gesture on his part -- disclosing an intelligence success as implied justification for the suspension of American civil liberties, privacy, and warrantless wiretaps.

This is just wrong and a serious violation of our Constitution.

I will post more later today.

Greetings to all New Yorkers.

I'm sure I'll be lurking in numerous coffee shops around town today, seeing some foundations, filmmakers, and bloggers.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

The ousted, indicted, but not-yet-out-of-the-action-by-a-longshot Tom DeLay has just secured Duke Cunningham's seat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Particularly worrisome is that the Republican Party establishment has seen fit to allow DeLay a seat on the Subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, currently chasing down the "influence-peddling scandal involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his dealings with lawmakers" (particularly DeLay).

DeLay thrives on conflicts of interest.

The question is what do ethical Republicans and an angry and not-gonna-take-it-anymore Democratic establishment thrive on?

Clearly, Tom DeLay mocks them by the day.

-- Steve Clemons

Senator John McCain comes off as a major political star in Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight which is opening soon in Washington, but his chief of staff, Mark Salter, has blown a gasket over a cute clip in the film in which Vice President Cheney calls him during that interview. At that moment, McCain is saying that Americans deserve a serious investigation into contracting improprieties surrounding the Iraq War.

According to Mary Ann Akers in Roll Call's gossip column, Heard on the Hill, this morning:

Attention, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.): You're not the only punching bag for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). The 2008 presidential hopeful is also really mad at the producer of the Sundance Film Festival award-winning film "Why We Fight."

Forget about his nanosecond blip on Monday night's episode of "24." McCain -- and especially his chief of staff -- think the movie producer intentionally twisted McCain's few lines in the film so that he comes off as critical of Vice President Cheney.

"We're actually pretty mad about it," McCain's chief of staff, Mark Salter, told HOH. He accused the producer, Eugene Jarecki, of "doing manipulative editing" to make it look like McCain is questioning Cheney's involvement in the awarding of military contracts to Halliburton, the company the veep used to run.

McCain says in the movie: "It looks bad. It looks bad and apparently Halliburton, more than once, has overcharged the federal government. That's wrong."

Then, asked how he would tackle the problem, McCain says, "I'd have a public investigation of what they've done." At that very moment, coincidentally, the phone rings in McCain's office ... and an aide announces the vice president is calling. Scene ends.

While McCain said nothing about Cheney in the context of Halliburton, Salter is angry because McCain's scene immediately follows one in which Richard Perle is defending Cheney, saying the veep wouldn't dare use his power to help Halliburton get contracts.

Then McCain pops on the screen saying, "It looks bad" -- as if he's talking about Cheney, when in fact he's not, Salter argues. To the contrary, Salter said -- McCain has "complete respect for Mr. Cheney's integrity." "It's editorial manipulation," Salter said of the film.

Jarecki can't believe that McCain's office is so upset. He says McCain didn't impugn Cheney in any way, nor did he, as the filmmaker, intend for it to look that way. "I'm mystified by the whole thing," he said. "My view of John McCain is extremely glowing."

A big part of the film is about Dwight Eisenhower, who, in his 1961 farewell address as president, warned America about the "military-industrial complex" -- a term he coined in that speech. "If there's anybody today who carries that spirit ... it's John McCain," Jarecki said, adding, "What I see when I see John McCain in the film is a good man in a weary world. He's working so hard every day to make Washington a better place."

The love, apparently, only goes one way. Salter calls Jarecki a "a slippery son of a gun" and says that McCain doesn't like the film, at least not the part involving him. "He thought it was dishonest," Salter said.

The miffed chief of staff said Jarecki was misleading from the get-go. McCain thought he was doing an interview on Iraq with the BBC. "Turns out to be a theatrically released film in the United States."

Well, it turns out that Salter is right. Jarecki originally made his film for the BBC. Then he hit the big screen.

"I never imagined we'd win Sundance and be picked up by Sony [Pictures]," he said. With that, he headed over to the Motion Picture Association of America for a second Washington, D.C., screening.

The "first screening" obliquely referred to was co-hosted by TWN.

I've seen the film three times now, and Senator McCain comes off as a 21st century Eisenhower in the movie -- the type of potential President who can be a 'big national security president' but not let the military-industrial complex, a term coined first in Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address, run amok.

Salter, who has been a key aide to McCain for many years and has written with McCain Faith of My Fathers and Why Courage Matters, is someone who understands the importance of editing. Not everything makes it into the book, or the film in this case. Salter's demands veer dangerously close to thin-skinned censorship. Not good for any team considering a run at the most admired, feared, pilloried, and lampooned job in the world -- the Presidency of the United States.

TWN has gone to some effort to learn about some of the background on the interview, what was in the larger interview -- tough to get as the director has not wanted to release the material because it would undermine his editorial prerogatives.

TWN has confirmed that the McCain office essentially ignored Jarecki for months, despite calls, a mailed DVD of the film, and various interactions as Jarecki had hoped to involve McCain in the roll-out of the film (figuring that he would like it).

It wasn't until the film became "big" that Salter and the McCain staff paid any attention to the director. They called Charlotte Street Films in a huff, according to one source, demanding a copy of the film. As it turned out, McCain's office had had one already on their shelves, unwatched.

So, while I do not have (yet) the text of the McCain interview, some of the things he said were extremely provocative.

My apologies to both Senator McCain and Eugene Jarecki for sharing some of this, as I admire both, but in my view, Jarecki actually protected McCain's interests in this film -- and Mark Salter is behaving in a surly, oppressive way -- not what Senator McCain deserves.

And this blog has gone way out of its way in the past to underscore its respect for McCain (though a good chunk of TWN readers let me know how misplaced my respect is).

That said, "flaming out" makes people look small, emotionally rather than rationally driven, and out of control. When someone like McCain, or Mark Salter on his behalf, flames out -- it better be about something huge.

In any case, my source has shared with me some of the other talking "nodes" in the McCain interview. As I said, I'm trying to sneak out text, but Jarecki is not allowing it out from his office.

These were some of the things that McCain allegedly uttered in a long interview:

(paraphrased)

John McCain said he was in fundamental agreement with the neocons, that spreading democracy and freedom in the world was vital in this time -- but not spreading it through pre-emptive strikes and unilateralism

He said that neoconservatism evolved during the Vietnam era and in some ways McCain admitted that he was one. He said that the roll backs against military capabilities occurred during this period, and the neoconservatives organized to counter this trend.

McCain said that Bush was out of step with core conservative values on the international front. He said that domestically tax cuts and fiscal responsibility were core Republican values and Bush hit those buttons, but on the international front, Bush's aggressive internationalism was beyond core Republican values. McCain didn't offer a positive or negative assessment of this -- just stated that this was the case.

McCain said that the government was rife with contributors giving millions of dollars to the Party, buying access with this money, seeking favors in contracting, and getting it. He said that Halliburton style no-bid contracts were part of this picture and that Americans should be worried. He said that Americans deserved a serious public investigation.

McCain also said that if there was a serious, imminent threat directly threatening to Americans that a preemptive strike could be understood, but if American lives are lost on something that was not an imminent threat, well. . .that can't stand.

McCain said that Bush ran on a platform of disengaging from a lot of American commitments and was opposed to nation-building. Now Bush is for nation-building. McCain just noted that the Bush America voted for is not the Bush they got after he'd been in office.

McCain also said that while he supported the Iraq War, Americans were "not fully informed" and deserved to have been.

McCain stated that while he didn't think America could precipitously leave Iraq, the war will have been won even when we see "a badly functioning democracy" there.

There's more, but I don't have it yet.

McCain's commentary above is sensible, thoughtful. I don't agree with all of it, and frankly -- I see McCain as more of an ethical realist than I do a neoconservative, but that's irrelevant.

What is significant is that any editor with anywhere near the amount of information above could clip and edit McCain in a number of different ways.

The neocon material or the commentary on Bush, or shady defense contractors seducing his own Party, the comment about Americans not being appropriately informed -- all of that -- could have been far more damaging to McCain's efforts to appear to the Republican establishment that he is behaving, so to speak.

For some time, McCain has been working hard to charm the mainline Republican establishment and not needlessly provoke Bush and Cheney, which makes sense as McCain has said in the past that it was not the Republican right wing that beat him in his last presidential run, it was the fact that the mainstream Republican establishment had pre-positioned itself with Bush.

Politically, this sensitivity matters -- and tactically, perhaps McCain and Salter see it as beneficial to beat up a film that actually makes the Senator look good, but perhaps too good.

The reason that Salter is probably testy about this is BECAUSE Cheney DOES represent in the minds of many Americans the kind of politician who hides behind veils of official secrecy. Before McCain took on the administration over corruption in the Boeing air-tanker deal, McCain was one of the major behind-the-scenes players exposing the Bush administration's nefarious dealings with Enron and other energy companies. And who was in the middle of that escapade? Dick Cheney.

Eavesdropping last night, one of my sources reports that a Republican Senator -- and close friend of McCain's -- said that the Cheney-McCain call was cute but that the film shows McCain as close to Bush and also close to Eisenhower. "What could be better?" this Senator said.

McCain is an American hero in my book. Despite the critique that comes from many on the left and the right (and which will no doubt come towards me from some of my well-intentioned readers after I post this) -- McCain ought not to "lose it" when he gets to play Eisenhower, when he is lauded for being the white knight in national security affairs who can keep the military-industrial-complex under some form of democracy-preserving scrutiny.

And if Cheney calls him during an interview, then Cheney calls him during an interview -- that's how Washington works. It was a cute moment that did nothing but show that even major national leaders like Cheney and McCain who probably disagree about defense-contracting ethics must still work together in this town.

I've known Mark Salter from a distance for a long time, ever since I worked at the Nixon Center in Washington.

I admire his passion for his Senator and friend, John McCain, and for the country. He supports the Iraq War, as Senator McCain does; I do not. We move on -- but I still feel that McCain's voice is vital as we sort out what kinds of "norms" this nation really holds true during times of national stress.

Mark Salter, on behalf of his boss John McCain, is losing it over the wrong issue -- and frankly -- as a friend of the McCain camp -- they are "losing it" too much lately.

Senator McCain is reportedly appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman on Thursday evening -- and this clip of McCain and Cheney may run (I am told...but you know how things can change).

Let's hope by then that we see humor and insight rather than the boiling over we have seen of late.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Joe Gandelman has a thougtful response at The Moderate Voice.

(photo credit: Max Blumenthal)

TWN has heard that former Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Per Ahlmark would like to borrow this sign from Southern New Mexico.

Sweden's Liberal Party Leader has just nominated John Bolton and Kenneth Timmerman for the Nobel Peace Prize. More here at Bolton Watch.

Fun, fun, fun -- it just doesn't stop.

-- Steve Clemons

There are roughly 25 million people in Iraq.

Yesterday, the cost for invading and occupying Iraq raced past the $300 billion mark.

Per capita costs in Iraq from America's efforts $12,000.00.

This doesn't include wounded and dead Americans, wounded and dead Iraqis, shattered families, ill will, and future "blowback".

It also does not include the leverage America has lost in global affairs -- failing to put out of business North Korea's nuclear program, creating an atmosphere in which Iran felt emboldened to push forward its nuclear pretensions, failure of the President of the United States to secure run-of-the-mill economic deals in Latin America and China, and collapse of American moral credibility in global affairs.

$12,000 per person -- in a nation where per capita income is about $2,000 and most people live realistically at about $500 a year.

Lawrence Lindsey was more right than his White House foes about the financial costs -- but even he missed the costs incurred for the entire world seeing America at its limits, when enemies have incentives to move their agendas and allies won't count on us as much.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to BG for forwarding NY Daily news item.

When I was recently in London, I learned through my sources that Senator McCain and his wife were over in the UK for one primary reason, even though it might not have been the official reason, and that was to see the London production of Mamma Mia.

The Senator and Mrs. McCain apparently really relax and have fun listening to ABBA.

But today, it's clear that the Senator needs another trip to the theatre -- or maybe needs to get some ABBA time on his Ipod.

The Senator wrote one of the most disdainful letters to another Senator that TWN has seen in a long time.

McCain's letter isn't quite up as high as Dick Cheney's "Go Fuck Yourself!" comment to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate -- though it does go neck-and-neck with Bill Frist losing it and calling Harry Reid untrustworthy for the rest of the Congressional Session after Reid invoked Rule 21 and shut down the Senate.

The opening paragraph is tough enough -- but the rest of the letter keeps sizzling:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership's preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable.

Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the same mistake again.

Some of this tension became evident after a report TWN made about a blogger conference call with Senator Harry Reid in which he suggested that an unnamed Democratic Senator had come to him to suggest a way forward on bipartisan ethics reform. Reid told those on the call that this was not a time to work with the other side but was rather a time to contrast the Republicans with Democrats.

I reported this -- and George Stephanopoulos used a clip from TWN for his show in an exchange with Barack Obama. When asked if he was the "unnamed Senator", Obama evaded the question and then confirmed that there were differences between his and Reid's approaches, though subtle ones, and declared his commitment to genuiune bipartisan reform.

TWN has since confirmed that Senator Obama was in fact "the" unnamed Senator.

Apparently, Reid's "us vs. them" admonition to Obama won out in the end, and McCain lashed out at Obama, flaming him in such a way as to let the public know that a bridge is being torched, blown up, and burned.

The ball is now in Obama's court. Will he flame McCain back? Will he keep silent? Will he offer some constructive direction that gives McCain a chance to calm down and join forces again in a common effort on ethics reform?

McCain is going on the Late Show with David Letterman Thursday night.

This imbroglio will probably generate some pretty good content in Letterman's banter with McCain, but if he isn't heated up enough already, TWN hears through other sources that the American public will be treated to a cute cut from the newly released Eugene Jarecki film, "Why We Fight," in which while talking about the importance of ethics in defense contracting and suggesting that a serious investigation into Halliburton contracting is warranted, Vice President Cheney calls him on the phone.

McCain comes off great in the film -- but the episode with Cheney's call out of the blue -- is priceless.

We suspect that if McCain is back in control, he'll be calm when Letterman rolls the film clip, but if that and Obama hit simultaneously on Lettermans's show, watch out.

-- Steve Clemons

There is an interesting first amendment attorney in town, Glenn Greenwald, who has been working hard to make sure that Senate Judiciary Committee Members pose the most important lines of questions to Attorney General Gonzales.

I have been out of the office most of the day and will have to watch the hearings later, but I want to highlight two pieces of his. The first is a short op-ed that appeared today on Alternet and the second is a set of "10 questions" that should be posed in today's hearings.

In his op-ed today, Greenwald points out that the debates over FISA, the rush to modify FISA rules, and all that FISA hullaballoo was simply subterfuge for the fact that the White House had gone monarchial -- uncontestedly monarchial.

From his piece:

The theories embraced by the Bush Administration are both radical and unprecedented. These theories hold that, with regard to responses to the threat of terrorism both abroad and within the U.S., decisions are "for the President alone to make" and neither the Congress nor the courts can limit the president in any way.

Thus, the question faced by the Congress is whether it will continue to stand by and allow the administration to claim unchecked power and relegate the Congress to an impotent, useless appendage.

The first chance the Congress has to answer that question will be on February 6 when it questions Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and it is not hyperbole to say that what is at stake are the founding and most fundamental principles for how our government operates.

And here are the ten questions that Greenwald poses, which I find useful in framing this debate:

Questions 1-5

Questions 6-10

I don't know if Glenn Greenwald has made a dent in the hearings today, but I will listen in later to find out, and some of you may already know.

Here are some other resources, however,

First, National Journal's Intelligence & Homeland Security Correspondent Shane Harris has a fantastic article titled "Spying 101: A Legal Primer" on these hearings regardling wireless wiretaps and what we should be looking for and trying to understand in these debates.

(Sorry it was not up earlier but should be a good resource for those watching re-runs)

Here is the pdf of Shane Harris's piece, which I am posting with permission.

Secondly, here are a number of links recently posted by Think Progress, all quite useful. Just scroll down and read them as there are too many to list individually. One of the most interesting to me was Lindsey Graham's comment that by Gonzales's definition, there seemed to be no "natural boundary" to Executive authority.

Exactly.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I just posted a short piece at Huffington Post on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's antics about not letting the press see any aspect of DoD budget specifics until "after" the press meeting with him.

Talk about controlling information flow!

I hear that John McCain, a prominently featured voice in Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight, will be on the Late Show with David Letterman Thursday night.

McCain comes off great in the film and makes the case that the ethics lapses that surrounded Halliburton contracting in the Iraq War, and a lot of the other war-profiteering that has run rampant in this town, deserves investigation.

I would love to see some TWN reader in the Letterman-world prompt Dave to ask John McCain a question regarding the imperial, non-transparent way Rumsfeld manages his Pentagon empire.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I have my doubts, but I also think that we have no choice as a nation but to try and purge the self-destructive, anti-democratic, politically hackish behaviors out of the military and national intelligence bureaucracies.

This fight is vital as I don't believe that America is going to get out of the intelligence business, though I increasingly agree with Chalmers Johnson that a serious cost-benefit analysis of America's net gain or net loss from a vastly expensive national intelligence establishment would be "negative". That said, it's going to be here -- and those who believe in healthy democracy have got to work over-time in getting that intelligence capacity back in decent shape (meaning generating excellent intelligence untwisted by the likes of Dick Cheney's David Addington and John Bolton's Frederick Fleitz), but in confines consistent with real rather than faked democracy.

Behind the backdrop of the NSA warrantless wiretap hearings today, some are trying to think through strategies to put pressure on the administration to clean up our "intel act" and to find some way to communicate to the American public that we are not just being duped again into believing that we have a Presidency that believes in checks and balances on executive authority -- even in times of so-called war.

One of the proposals I just read through this morning comes from the webpage of the upcoming Intelligence Summit, scheduled to take place on February 17-20 in Crystal City, VA. This is reportedly a non-partisan, non-profit educational forum.

I haven't quite figured out how credible the summit is. I can't say that I'm too impressed with the purposeful sensationalization of a promised revelation of Saddam Hussein's personal WMD tapes, but maybe they've got something none of the rest of us have heard before. But sounds a bit too much like Geraldo for my taste.

But the board is bi-partisan and has credible people attached to it. Well, mostly credible. James Woolsey, who has personally profited a bit too much from this "global war on terror" is on the board. During Harry Truman's time, Woolsey and many others riding high in this town would have been exposed as "war-profiteers".

But the interesting piece is a personal proposal by Brent Budowsky, linked on the Intelligent Summit's homepage:

In his essay, Budowsky writes:

Specifically I propose the President create a Bipartisan National Security Committee of Wise Men and Women who have high level security clearances, a history of crediblity and national leadership, a proven stature and integrity that transcend party affiliation and political ideology, and an understanding of the roles of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

The Bipartisan National Security Committee would report to the President, Congress and the Supreme Court; would have access to all classified information and executive orders; would have no have legal or juridical powers but would be empowered to assess and report in public recommendations and advice on the great matters that today divide the nation.

This Bipartisan National Security Commission would be empowered to review whatever matters they choose. Hopefully they would arrive at unamimous agreements on matters that balance our respect for human rights and appropriate interrogation practices, our respect privacy and appropriate rules for eavesdropping under agreed upon rules of conduct, the legitimate need for any commander in chief to retain some inherent powers during time of war with the appropriate checks and balances by legislative and judicial branches of government, and the need for secrecy in the conduct of war and counter-terrorism with the reasonable right to know in a free society where 'we the people" ultimately decide our national destiny.

This is actually a useful idea.

No matter what evolves on the NSA in the upcoming hearings today and forward, it won't solve the problem that there is huge national skepticism about the national security establishment.

Even at the fringe, the warrantless spying on ANY Americans undermines trust and threatens slippery-slopism to broader, unchecked national powers. When a government justifies violating the laws of a nation to protect the citizens of that nation, not on an exceptional basis but in a routenized way, then America is not the great democracy it purports to be.

If we are going to fix this -- and have a national security and national intelligence establishment in the future -- then we have to have TRUSTED Americans have access to EVERYTHING and give us a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down".

Budowsky recommends for this Commission these people:

Justice Sandra Day O'Conner. Senators or former Senators Sam Nunn, Howard Baker, Richard Lugar, Warren Rudman, Alan Simpson, and George Mitchell who is also a former Federal Judge. Retired Generals Anthony Zinni (United States Marine Corps) and Tommy Franks (United States Army).

I think it's a great list. I would incude some others perhaps like former Congressman Amo Houghton, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, international law expert and co-pillar of the New York Republican establishment Rita Hauser, former Senator Gary Hart, and former former Oklahoma Congressman and Electronics Industry Alliance President Dave McCurdy. These people would add to the diversity and credibility of Budowsky's list.

We will eventually need some way for the public to benchmark whether reforms in the intelligence establishment are real or contrived.

Such a Commission might help.

-- Steve Clemons

Dennis Ross is raising money for Scooter Libby's Legal Defense Fund.

Some might ask why I'm bothered by this.

After all, James Woolsey, an alleged Democrat from Tulsa who once headed Bill Clinton's CIA, was Ahmed Chalabi's lawyer.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith -- one of the dumbest people ever to work in government according the memoirs and recollections of too many people to recount -- housed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in his law office while also working with Israeli groups.

The now indicted and jailed State Department Israeli spy Lawrence Franklin facilitated cozy relationships between Douglas Feith, Harold Rhodes, Manucher Gorbanifar, Richard Perle, and Michael Ledeen.

Why should it be surprising that one of the titans of America's Middle East Peace Business cartel would find himself beholden to Dick Cheney's chief political and national security architect?

There's just no other way around it. This looks damn slimey, with all due respect to Dennis Ross.

Libby is the first indicted White House official in over a century -- and is involved in a crime that the President of the United States himself was an outrageous violation of our national security. The involvement on the Libby Legal Defense Fund of Ross -- no matter how much he makes the case that he is a 25-year long friend of Libby -- looks like he is there to reinforce the Cheney/Libby connection to Israel -- and that those concerned about Israel should bail out Libby.

It's just wrong.

I'm not all that happy with other members on the board of the Legal Defense Fund, but they have to make their own way on this issue. Former Senator Alan Simpson, former Senator Fred Thompson, Francis Fukuyama are all a cut above and a cut different than the hard-core neoconservative that Libby is.

But Ross can't be considered as just a Libby personal pal in this.

He works and operates at the nexus of America's relations in the Middle East -- and those relations in Israel, Iran, with the Palestinians are fragile on all fronts and at all levels now.

His involvement with Libby's funding needs won't come off to anyone as just personal. He's there for big time institutional reasons -- representing Libby's interests to another nation, and representing that nation's interests to those in Libby's circles -- particularly Dick Cheney.

More on this soon, but this just makes more clear why Washington's Middle East Peace Business cartel needs to be broken.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: I should have posted this interesting NY Times piece from yesterday titled "Handling Hamas," which is an interview with Dennis Ross.

I am all for people helping each other when in need -- even bad guys who may be friends -- but Ross symbolizes too much to have had anything more to do with Libby's Defense Fund than a private donor.

More later. Thanks to LF for sending the NY Times link.

-- Steve Clemons

Ward Sutton says it all (well, most of it anyway):

reprinted with permission

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to Jim Terr for sending this my way.

Air America Radio's Al Franken wants to discuss what John Bolton is up to and has some thoughts on the launch of Bolton Watch.

Listen in tomorrow (Monday) at 1:30 p.m. Eastern

In anticipation of the show, here is my latest post on a good chunk of John Bolton's "shake the UN apart" agenda.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Bolton Watch is up! This section will always appear at TPM Cafe, but TWN will frequently link to what I and others are writing there.

However, today, I am reposting the first Bolton Watch post here.

It seems appropriate to launch Bolton Watch now as the United States holds the rotating presidency of the 15-member Security Council for February 2006.

The recess-appointed John Bolton chairs the UN Security Council this month and already has shaken up the system by demanding that all members of the Security Council attend a daily 10 a.m. morning meeting.

The other ambassadors are grumbling -- but all in all, Bolton Watch supports John Bolton's ploy here. It's good to have him engaged on a daily basis with the rest of the world.

While he may think these will be strong-arm sessions, Bolton and the Ambassadors from the other Security Council nations may find that these morning briefings focus their collective minds on serious global problem-solving. Bolton will be beaten up on a daily basis by these Ambassadors if he doesn't learn to ratchet up his diplomatic tact and objectives.

On another front the International Atomic Energy Agency has referred Iran's nuclear activities to the UN Security Council. Bolton was never put in the UN to genuinely reform the place, though reform is something that we should support -- he was put there to muscle the UN Security Council and the broader UN on Iran.

Ambassador Bolton is a pugnacious nationalist. There's nothing wrong with nationalism in my view -- but nationalism can exist side-by-side with respect and engagement in international institutions, particularly when those institutions protect and enhance our national interests and security.

But this kind of in-your-face, hyper-nationalism taunts the rest of the world to attempt to constrain American power and interests.

Bolton has stated in the past that he does not believe in "the concept of the United Nations", that the "UN only works when America wants it to work", that if one whacked off the top of the UN Secretariat, no one would miss it.

When he arrived at the UN, one of the first meetings he had with other Security Council principals had him stepping in and saying:

I'm John Bolton, and I'm here to pursue the interests of the United States.

Those who are here to pursue the interests of the world, please yourself.

Bolton needs to learn that the interests of the United States are enhanced and strenthened -- not weakened -- by collective engagement with other global stakeholders in responding to the major pandemics, natural disasters, environmental challenges, and transnational security problems that face the world.

While a single nation, like the U.S., can approach some of these unilaterally, the bottom line is that nearly all of the great challenges require a convergence of American and global competencies and effort.

Bolton's theatrics undermine good will and are preempting credible reform. Not only has he been disruptive to the UN Secretariat, Bolton has undermined the negotiations of his own team at the U.S. Mission.

I've been flooded with new information on John Bolton and his work == some of it is small time, and some macro stuff that is pretty shocking.

As a friend of mine inside the State Department recently told me, I have a slew of friends inside the Department and in the nooks and crannies of Bolton's world who want Bolton Watch to play a constructive role in helping Condoleezza Rice to supervise him.

We are happy to oblige.

More soon, from both myself and a number of other new Bolton Watch bloggers.

-- Steve Clemons

This is great news.

Some time tonight, Bolton Watch will launch at www.BoltonWatch.TPMCafe.com. (The site is not loaded yet, so clicking now will only take you to TPM Cafe.)

Talking Points Memo and The Washington Note are jointly launching this site to keep tabs on John Bolton during the 11 months he has left in his term.

Today, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran's nuclear activities to the UN Security Council. Whether people believe it's a bad step, too soon, or the right call -- I don't believe that John Bolton can be left unsupervised to manage American interests in the UN.

I have written extensively about Bolton -- and argued that the real reason Dick Cheney fought so hard to get Bolton to his UN perch was to pave the way for an Iraq-replay against Iran. It has begun.

Josh Marshall has also written much on Bolton and the consequences of his pugnacious, hyper-nationalism and what it hss done to undermine American interests.

More later, but watch for the first Bolton Watch post tonight.

-- Steve Clemons

Danny Glover of National Journal's "Beltway Blogroll" has a superb piece on the question of what lines ought to divide elite political bloggers and the subject of their posts.

His article today, "A Warning about Blogger Conference Calls" links to my post today -- and also to a great article that he wrote on this same subject.

His piece, "The Courtship of the Blogosphere" perfectly complements mine as he focuses on trends in the conservative blogging community, whereas I discussed some of the trends in Democratic blogging circles.

Glover's perspective tracks extremely closely with my own, and I wish I had read this before I posted my own note today.

Here is how he opens:

Fifteen years ago, just a few months into my first full-time job as a reporter, I covered a speech by Iran-Contra figure Robert McFarlane. It was a defining moment in my career.

I say that not because of the speech, which was both predictable and unspectacular, or because of the story I wrote, which was ordinary and uninspiring. I say it because of what happened afterward: One of my journalistic brethren approached the disgraced national security adviser to former President Ronald Reagan and requested an autograph.

I was floored. How could a supposedly objective journalist solicit the autograph of a controversial news subject, especially before finishing his story? How objective could his story possibly be if he were so enthralled as to publicly request a favor from his source?

I felt the same way last week when reading the accounts of conservative bloggers handpicked by the Republican Party to cover the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito from Washington. The communications experts in the party took to new heights the courtship of the blogosphere that they began last fall -- and they found a most receptive audience.

The bloggers not only welcomed the lavish treatment and exclusive access bestowed upon them by the Republican National Committee and the Senate Republican Conference; they basked in it without reservation. They dropped names (White House adviser Karl Rove was the favorite), heaped praise on their news subjects and celebrated their chance to imbibe in the trappings of power.

After my post on this subject today, I have been flooded by emails both applauding and excoriating the questions I posed. The most interesting response came from one person I won't name. I have anonymized this email with this person's permission:

It is incredibly unfair to broadly paint every blogger who participates on these calls as "journalists" with some sort of ethical problem.

I am on the other side of the spectrum of some on this list, and consider myself an activist first. I also acknowledge that there are other liberal bloggers who consider themselves reporters first; that's fine, it's just not what I'd call myself. And of course there is a big mushy middle in between.

However, as an activist, I DO have a common interest in helping frame issues for candidates via my blog. I DO have a common interest in helping the party I support get their message out. Why? Because I want to help them win. My agenda is absolutely clear to everyone who stops by my site and should be clear to everyone who's ever met me.

There is no blurring of the lines there. I am openly partisan. Why is that wrong? How is my participation in conference calls unethical in any way? I wonder if Steve C thinks that people like me should be dis-invited from these calls.

And to be painted a syncophant... I can't even express how disappointed I am.

I'm not sure Steve C. realised that his comments would be taken so personally, but believe me, they are. Because by applying that broad brush, you've smeared me and many other folks who are working our asses off.

I sincerely doubt that anyone on those conference calls is there to suck up to the candidates, especially those of us on the activist side. And I would also bet an inordinate amount of money that if some politician threatened to "disinvite" any blogger who didn't write about a call, they'd be called out so fast it would make their head spin.

With all due respect to Steve C, I really think you got that article wrong. You tried lumping us all together. We're not GOPbots. And those of us activists who get on these calls get there for one purpose only: to help good candidates get elected. And we openly admit that. We aren't hiding anything. I would hope you will take that into consideration if you expand on that article.

This perspective is important and, in a way, reinforces my point that there is a clear identity quandary evolving in these calls.

Some of the blogger conference calls are managed by the communications staff of the Senator or House Member. Others are organized by PR shops. Some are organized by the web/blog staffer in the Member's employ. Some are organized by the election office of the Member.

But most of the sessions in which I have participate have the trappings of a press conference with the Member making a statement and bloggers issuing questions for response.

But the blogger above has a point. He/she is an activist and wants to collude and is open about it. Non-profit blogs can't play this game as they'd lose their 501c3 status, though there are few blogs of course that are incorporated.

The Washington Note is a private LLC corporation and operates as a center of opinion journalism. It does take on causes, like keeping John Bolton from securing his Senate confirmation, but it approaches the political game with both "attitude" and respect for the different players and the roles that they have to play. To have credibility, I need to be able to report without colluding, and I maintain a centrist sensibility with progressive objectives.

If I were on the far left or the far right, I would still need to maintain some distance from the subject of my writing. This is a nuanced and complicated subject because in the Bolton battle, I did make common cause with a number of Senators and players in that battle, but in my own mind and sense of things, I also maintained a cautious distance -- as did all of my interlocutors.

Danny Glover's great piece from a few weeks ago raises the same point as the blogger above:

By this point, you're probably thinking, "So what? They're bloggers, not journalists. Nobody expects them to be objective." I thought the same thing -- especially of the writers who attended the forums for sites like Blogs for Bush and GOP Bloggers.

Glover continues in the piece:

Pat Cleary of the Manufacturers' Blog attended some of the GOP forums and said in an e-mail interview that "the beauty of blogging" is its unfiltered nature. "You get what people are saying without benefit of my bias or filter. ... My job isn't to pin them, debate them, argue with them. I'm glad to be invited, happy to write what they have to say."

I agree to an extent. But blogging also is beautiful because the people who are doing it are outsiders. They are neither part of the media establishment -- the MSM they hate so much -- nor the political establishment. Their ability to see the world differently than people inside the Beltway is precisely what moved them to outrage against former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., three years ago, when the establishment initially yawned.

The blogosphere lost some of that edge last week. I hope the loss is only fleeting.

As I've said repeatedly in emails today, I like the blogger conference calls. They are an interesting and potentially great innovation in citizen blog journalism (and activism).

However, I have to approach these call sessions with the view that the Member of Congress or Bush administration official is going to try and use me, to sell something to me, to co-opt me. That's what they are supposed to do. We need to be aware that we bloggers are becoming power centers -- and that is why the Senators are speaking to us.

So, it's important to remember, in my view, that sometimes we'll endorse and write favorably about a policy action, and sometimes criticize it. When politicians engage regularly with any part of the public -- whether its trade associations, regular media, or bloggers -- there needs to be an understanding that bloggers may be activists or they may be journalists who blog.

But the presumption of a collusive relationship damages all sides. To my blogging acquaintance above, I would not advocate that blogging activists be dis-invited from calls. I just think that there should be different types of calls. Serious journalists who want to compete with the media should develop and establish norms that institutionalize a constructive distance from the politician or party being written about.

Activists who mingle with journalists on these calls need to realize that journalist bloggers have to be very cautious about environments in which total cooperation is presumed.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: A great think piece by Matt Stoller on the same subject.

David Neiwert also has a thoughtful, long piece on the difference between journalism and blogging. He doesn't address the question of the nexus between politicians and bloggers, particularly if routenized, but he's written an important piece. (thanks to P for sending)

Here is another thought-provoking piece by Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice blog.

On the libertarian/conservative front, I just found this quite thoughtful post recounting some experiences with Republicans on blogger conference calls. McQ makes great sense.

Chris Nelson shares some fun insider gossip in today's Nelson Report about Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick's recent "Panda Diplomacy" at a "Principals Meeting" in the White House:

BUSH NAMES...in the amusing gossip department, we hear Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick was presented with a large stuffed Panda at a Principals Meeting at the White House yesterday by an unknown assailant dressed in a laboratory smock and rubber sterile gloves (you remember the photos which went around the world of Zoellick embracing a baby panda in China, showing Zoelleck being forced to wear gloves by his Chinese hosts?).

The White House drama unfolded when the "attendant" burst into the room asking for "Dr. Zoellick"??

Startled, Zoellick raised his hand and identified himself, and the masked man said "wait", disappeared into the corridor, returned with a large stuffed Panda, rushed over to the still bemused Zoellick and then took several incriminating photographs.

"Evidently, the place was in hysterics. . .but,rumor has it that Zoellick was not amused," our source gleefully reports.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a bit of a bummer.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton wanted Libby's trial to begin in September 2006, which would have been a nice reminder to American citizens of the abuses of power that have occurred in the lead up to and prosecution of the war against Iraq.

However, Libby's lead lawyer is "busy" in September, and so the trial has been set (conveniently for the White House) for January 2007.

-- Steve Clemons

I have been doing a lot of blogger conference calls lately.

They are fascinating, and I've learned something in every one.

However, I've recently surmised that there are some landmines in this blogger conference call business and that some serious reporters are scratching their heads wondering whether these calls enhance journalism or are violating some ethical norms in political reporting.

I have done a lot of these calls now -- with House Members and Senators, all Dems. Interestingly, I hear through the grapevine that Hillary Clinton won't do them.

I don't know if Republicans are doing them or not as I've not been invited to one -- though I was pleased to be invited by the Communications Directors in Senator John McCain's and Senate Majority Bill Frist's office to cover as a blogger/journalist a press conference that they gave last year advocating John Bolton's confirmation. To their credit, and despite knowing the principled opposition my blog had taken to Bolton's confirmation, they invited me along with the other press.

In the standard press conference, I -- as a blogger -- knew the rules. We were there not to be co-opted but rather to hear the Senators and to pose questions. We weren't there as sycophants. Our job was to push the angles and report truthfully. We weren't there as enemies of McCain and Frist, but as competitors regarding how to frame and tell the story of the political debate.

In contrast, the lines inside political blogger conference calls are fuzzier.

I have approached every blogger conference call I have been in with the norms and attitude of a journalist.

I have kept notes and believe that all the content on the call was fair game for reporting. Unless stated otherwise, I treat everything said as "on the record".

However, it seems increasingly clear to me that those on the call -- both the Member of Congress and the bloggers -- are engaged in an informal collusion of interests. This may be too harsh a term. The Senators and Members look at bloggers as being co-participants in a political operation. The Members want to share their priorities and objectives with bloggers so that they can become the "noise machine" for the Dems. Some bloggers want to be NGO-like on one hand, advocating the Democratic Party's line on some issue -- while on the other, they want to be seen as journalists reporting on something they "got" from a Reid or Kennedy call.

On some levels, I'm OK with that. In the Bolton Battle, I certainly worked hard to advocate his defeat, to publicize as best I could the many problems in his work portfolio, and his attitude that made him inappropriate to represent the interests of Americans at the United Nations. But as a journalist with a view, I worked closely with Republicans and Democrats. Both sides fed me material. In fact, more came from Republican sources, far more, than Democratic.

I worked with NGOs and others in advocating a defeat of his confirmation in the Senate, but again in a way that was consistent with my views, work and writing and which worked across aisles.

In the case now, I think it's fine that Senators or House Members annoint some "favored bloggers" as ones they want to reach out to, but the bloggers have an obligation to maintain some distance and objectivity in the process. Otherwise, the blogs will be seen as mouthpieces and noise machines of that Member's operation, and as part of the "explicit" operation of a political organization.

Last night, I heard a disturbing rumor that I have not confirmed (I should add that none of the calls I was on required what I am about to report) that there has been one organizer of liberal blogger conference calls who imposed a "publish or perish" rule requiring all participants in a call to write about that call, and favorably. This person apparently required bloggers on the call to report and write about the meeting with some respective Member of Congress or not be invited back in the future.

Why would anyone impose such a rule? Why would a Senator or Representative and his or her staff put the Member in a position of making it look like they are trading access for manufactured web press? If this rumor is true, then bloggers are being put in the position of being "agents" of that Member -- and there are serious legal consequences to that.

The bigger issue for me with the Blogger conference calls is the sycophancy that seems to be developing in these meetings -- and the unwritten norm that those bloggers on the call are the running dogs for that particular Senator. There is clearly a 'community' of interests where the line between the journalistic and reporting objectives of the blogger and the interests of the Senator or Representative are becoming practically invisible.

Again, I think it's OK for like-minded journalists and politicians to share views, even share objectives for the country and world -- but the implied norm of the call feels as if there is an obligation of the bloggers to watch the Senator's or Rep's back -- to write not necessarily truthfully about the call, but to "frame" or "shape" the call in such a way that fits a politically acceptable groove.

In Japan, there is a word, giri, that means "mutual obligation". Giri can exist between journalists and politicians, between subordinates and seniors in a company, between different households in a community, between bank regulators and banks.

Quite simply, if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. If I do something for you, then you owe me something in the future.

The well-known Dutch Japan analyst, Karel van Wolferen, once wrote that giri was akin to 'hostage-taking'.

When a Japanese or an American politician provides a journalist or reporter favored access in exchange for favored reporting, one of the key elements of civil society is corrupted. Sometimes the corruption is slight, sometimes serious. But over the long run, with the long term habits of journalistic practice, most politicians -- at least in America -- realize that they can't necessarily buy favorable articles with gifts of access. Both sides have tended to "respect" the process, at least until recent years.

There have tended to be just enough checks and balances in media to offset serious corruption -- until the age of Fox News, Judith Miller, journalists turned celebrities, and others where clearly the lines of co-optation have become evident. But because the practice exists in the main stream media to a degree does not validate in the blogosphere.

Blogging is a new industry and new kind of journalism. Many bloggers are very young and not nearly as jaded as this writer about Washington. For them, getting on to a call with Kennedy or Reid or Durbin is a career mountain climbed. They are thankful to be there -- and they know that their presence is fragile.

There are exceptions, however. I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton had a blogger conference call, Markos Moulitsas (aka Kos) would not be sycophantic. There's a confidence in Kos's position that doesn't yield just because of the provision of access.

But that kind of confidence around power is rare in the blogging world.

What is more common in these calls is a great desire by bloggers to be the vessels of Members -- when what they should be is in dialogue with these Members, challenging them, engaging them, and reporting fairly -- even if the views of each side are somewhat similar.

In our system of government and in our civil society, we have governance rules that require regulators and the regulated not to corrupt their competitive objectives with strategies of co-optation or "mutual obligation".

It may be important for these proliferating blogger conference calls to make clear from the outset that the Senator or Member has views he or she wants to share -- and that bloggers can pose questions or even offer comments of enthusiastic support.

But everything not taken off the record should be on the record -- and none faulted for accurately depicting the content of such a call.

I ran into this recently in which some well-respected bloggers (whom I like) challenged me on my reporting about a blogger conference call with Senator Harry Reid. Reid's office felt that I depicted his comments accurately -- and after some serious media interest in my report -- issued a "clarification" of his comment that I posted.

But the opposition to my own report was not over the "accuracy" of my report -- but rather that I had written something that conservative bloggers and pundits were running with to attack Reid. They felt as if there had been some minor betrayal of Reid in what I wrote.

A week after this, This Week with George Stephanopoulos used the piece from my blog in a conversation with Senator Barack Obama about ethics reforms strategies.

The bottom line is that my report on Reid helped surface a seemingly genuine difference of views about strategies on ehtics reform inside the Democratic Party.

I did not argue that Reid's strategy was wrong and that Obama's was better. I simply reported that there were mutiple views in play.

If bloggers are positioning themselves to be the mouthpieces of a Member, then neither the interests of the Member nor the bloggiing community will be served. Any pretense of balance or even of credible, logical thinking will be undermined if Members of Congress view blogs as predictable appendages of their work and interests.

There needs to be polite distance, and all sides on these interesting calls need to respect the responsibilities they have in these debates about politics and policy.

I will continue to participate in these blogger conference calls as long as I'm asked.

I hope I am, but i will also be there using journalistic norms when reporting as a journalist blogger.

That's the only way that these "blogger conference calls" can remain healthy.

-- Steve Clemons

Tonight, come watch the film and meet director Eugene Jarecki for a Washington, DC pre-release premier of "Why We Fight".

The Washington Note, the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation, the NYU Center on Law & Security, and the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy are co-hosting this evening's screening.

You must RSVP to me -- soon -- today. E Street Cinema (555 11th Street, NW). RSVP at clemons@newamerica.net

But be warned if you RSVP that you are attending and fail to show -- you are keeping someone else from a seat. That will be remembered, frowned upon, and you will be cast out of the village (mura hachibu for those in the know).

We are gathering at 6:30 p.m. The screening starts at 7:00 p.m. sharp. At 8:40 p.m., we will have a brief exchange and discussion with the film's director Eugene Jarecki.

This film won the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize and has opened in Los Angeles and New York -- and will open this next week in Washington, D.C.

The personalities depicted in this film, which plays off the old pre-WWII Frank Capra films of the same title include:

Wilton Sekzer -- Officer, NYPD

Fuji & Tooms -- Stealth Fighter Pilots, U.S. Air Force

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski -- Officer, Pentagon Middle East Desk

William Solomon -- New Recruit, U.S. Army

Anh Duong -- Explosives Expert, Indianhead Naval Center

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff, Department of State

Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

Chalmers Johnson, CIA 1967-73; President, Japan Policy Research
Institute

Joseph Cirincione, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Gore Vidal, author

Charles Lewis, Center for Public Integrity

Richard Perle, Pentagon Advisor; American Enterprise Institute

William Kristol, Editor, The Weekly Standard

Col. Richard Treadway, Commander, Stealth Fighter Squadron

James Roche, Secretary of the Air Force

John S.D. Eisenhower, Son of Dwight Eisenhower

Susan Eisenhower, Granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower; Eisenhower
Institute

Gwynne Dyer, Military Historian

Donna Ellington, President, Raytheon Missile Systems

Col. Wally Saeger, U.S. Air Force Munitions Directorate,

Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, Pentagon Systems Analyst (ret)

Dan Rather, CBS News

It's a powerful film that you should see.

My friendly critique of it is that it should not have included Gore Vidal, as much as I admire Vidal. And Chuck Lewis -- who is also a great and old friend -- give some sweeping generalizations about U.S. foreign policy that seemed gratuitously left-ish to me. But the rest of the film is empirical and informed by the candid commentary of real practitioners of foreign and national security policy, war, and intelligence.

On the subject of last night's "we don't need to make any choices" State of the Union address, I was at a pre-party hosted by the Atlantic Monthly at the Library of Congress. There, I hung out with Congress Jim Kolbe who has seriously depressed me with the news that he is retiring from Congress this next year. He is one of the decent moderates on the Republican side.

The place seemed to have more Republicans milling around than Dems -- though they were there, semi-hiding.

Grover Norquist and I spoke about the need for a right of center American Civil Liberties Union. Grover's wife has just returned from a two month stint on an US AID project helping to build capacity in the Palestinian arena. I was there with Helga Flores Trejo, the German director (of Mexican descent; I note this because Germany needs many more such Helgas) in Washington, D.C. of the German Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Boell Foundation.

The Atlantic didn't have a place to actualy "watch" the State of the Union (my intel sources told me that the Atlantic's real VIPs ensconced themselves at Charlie Palmer's), so we hurried over to the Center for American Progress which was packed with hundreds of people.

Air America's Majority Report with Sam Seder operated from CAP as President Bush gave his speech.

I'm letting the speech percolate in my head a bit. It was too soothing of a speech; no sense of the big choices facing the nation.

But what most critics won't say -- but I have to admit -- is that George Bush and his team have shaken off most of the constraints that have been tying them down the last several months. Newly sworn in Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito was a taunting ornament in the evening -- whose presence punctuated Bush's resurgence.

Those (like me) who had said that his lame-duckness had begun must admit that Dems and moderate Congressional Republicans failed to keep the White House off-balance and wobbly.

Bush's power was not what it once was; but make no mistake, he and Cheney are back. . .Big Time.

-- Steve Clemons