Here's another important detail -- posted on TNR's blog -- on the scamliness of the Medicare bill careening through Congress. And yes I've already trademarked the word ("scamliness") for exclusive use on TPM.
--Josh Marshall
The sort of myopic foolery of which Washington is made ...
In an otherwise half-sensible Washington Post editorial about the megaphone of wealth in our political discourse ("Mr. Soros's Millions"), the Post editorialists lets this sentence fly ...
For Democrats thrilled with the Soros millions, imagine conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife opening his bank account on behalf of Mr. Bush.
Yes, imagine that.
Perhaps <$Ad$>whoever wrote this clunker needs to familiarize themselves with Mr. Scaife's giving to myriad conservative causes (think tanks, publications, pressure groups, etc.) throughout the 1990s, and before, and since.
Those of course contributed significantly to the Republican victories in 2002, and in other elections -- just as Democrats hope that Soros' largesse will contribute to hoped-for future triumphs.
The shoe momentarily finds itself on the other foot and suddenly the Post is gripped with the need to reform the non-existent disclosure requirements for giving to think-tanks and other forms of quasi-political giving. (Perhaps they should pick up a copy of John Judis' The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of the Public Trust to get their footing.)
Read the editorial, let the fullness of the myopia roll over you, and you'll learn a lot about how elite opinion works in this city, and its essential corruption.
A Special Thanks to TPM reader DL for the tip.
--Josh Marshall
Remember Khidhir Hamza? He was a rather famous figure in Washington a year ago. He was “Saddam’s Bombmaker” according to a book he co-wrote a few years back.
Hamza was the originator -- or at least the prime proponent -- of the theory that Saddam was enriching uranium through a highly unorthodox but devilishly concealable method --- with very small uranium enrichment facilities scattered and hidden throughout the country.
Here’s a graf from an article by Eli Lake last year in The New Republic …
Shortly after Wolfowitz took his post in February 2001, for example, Chalabi and Brooke brought 1994 defector Khidir Hamza, one of Saddam's most senior nuclear scientists, to meet the new deputy defense secretary. In the meeting, Hamza described how Saddam was trying to refine uranium for his nuclear program using a centrifuge technique in small labs scattered throughout the country. Initially, there had been skepticism within the intelligence community--and specifically the CIA--that Saddam could be refining uranium in this way. But Hamza was insistent, claiming that Baghdad was purchasing from abroad a specific kind of aluminum tube needed for the process. And ultimately, Hamza's intelligence seems to have been borne out. Just last week, The New York Times published an article reporting that "$(i$)n the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."
People who actually make nuclear weapons never thought too highly of Hamza’s story (and that probably should have been a bit more of a warning sign). But, as <$Ad$>Lake implied, many at the CIA eventually came around.
Whether or not Saddam had procured yellowcake from Niger didn’t matter so much, reasoned many Iraq hawks, since he could just mine his own. Richard Perle told me in April of last year, for instance, that Saddam had already been “enriching the natural uranium that’s found in Iraq for some time.”
Not everyone bought Hamza’s story. Late last year, according to the Times of London, former weapons inspectors and proliferation specialist David Albright said Hamza's claims were “often inaccurate . . . He sculpts his message to get the message across . . . (He) wants regime change (in Iraq) and what interferes with that is just ignored." Many, however, found Hamza’s claim both compelling and chilling.
Here’s what Ken Pollack said about Hamza when TPM interviewed him in January of this year …
I will say flat out [that] I was under the same impression: that we had a very good grip on their nuclear program and there really wasn't much of a nuclear program well into the 1990s. I was constantly being assured that by the IAEA and by the intelligence community. And then all of a sudden we had a slew of defectors come out in the mid- and late 1990s and what they told us was that everything that we had thought was wrong. You know Khidhir Hamza is the only one who's gone public. So he's the only one I can really talk about. But in 1994 we really thought the IAEA had eradicated their nuclear program. And the IAEA really thought that they'd eradicated their nuclear program. And they were telling us they'd eradicated their nuclear program. And Khidhir Hamza comes out and says 'No, the nuclear program in 1994 was bigger than it had ever been before.'
The problem is that Hamza’s story now seems almost certain to have been false. Now, people get things wrong for many reasons. But given the minute detail of the highly unconventional methods Hamza alleged were being used and his own self-described central role in Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, it’s really hard to see how Hamza could have seen and done the things he told us he saw and did.
Really hard.
As I said above, in the couple years leading up to the Iraq War, Hamza was ubiquitous. And his story was endlessly mentioned. I saw him speak at a panel at the Council of Foreign Relations here in DC in the spring of 2002. And when I went up to try to ask him a few questions afterwards there were so many other folks trying to do the same that after a few pleasantries I got whisked aside to chat with his publicist.
Recently, he’s been a bit hard to come by. In fact, I did a nexis search on his name and I only got a couple dozen hits since the invasion last March.
I had figured that Hamza had just dropped off the radar screen --- which would be sort of understandable, given what I’ve noted above. But a memo prepared by a US government official after two stints working in post-war Iraq suggests that Hamza is still working with the US occupation authorities in Iraq, specifically in the new Ministry of Science and Technology. And the memo, written in late October, says Hamza will be coming to Washington in November.
So where is Khidhir Hamza? What’s his explanation? And if he doesn’t have a good one, why are we still working with him?
--Josh Marshall
That’s it. I’m old.
Today I was making my way between my usual haunts --- my Starbucks, my favorite Mexican restaurant, my bookstore, and other stops: the places where I break up the time between reading, writing or reporting in my office. And from mid-day on, everywhere I went, there they were: roving gaggles of young people flooding into every place I spend my time, overcrowding them, and just downright getting in the way.
At first I couldn’t figure out what it was about them that seemed different and put me a bit on edge. And then it hit me: teenagers.
The real McCoy, not college underclassmen, but high schoolers --- a bit shorter than the rest of us, and each in their accustomed roles: the popular and the shy, the jocks, the pimply-faced, the fat and skinny, the geeky outcasts hovering on the edges of the crowd, the strutters and the preeners. The whole bit. Teenagers.
To the best of my recollection I once was one. But in the age-group isolation of my thirty-something bachelordom it’s a species with which I realize I’ve become almost wholly unfamiliar. Yes, of course, in their ones or twos, I see them all the time. And that's fine -- wonderful folks. But when they’re running in herds, that’s an altogether different experience. And one I now realize I’ve become weirdly unaccustomed to.
Certainly, somewhere in DC this weekend there’s some rally or Model UN, or National Association of High School Rabble-rousers convention or some such thing. Hopefully that’s it, and it’s just for the weekend. Otherwise, there goes the neighborhood.
--Josh Marshall
"Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists."
Is that how it is?
That's the line from a Republican party ad about to go on air in the primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth we have a batch of unsettling news from the real war on terrorism.
In Turkey, the jewel of the democratic, western-oriented muslim Middle East, two more horrific suicide bombings kill 27 and wound hundreds.
As Craig Smith notes perceptively in the Times: "The attacks appeared aimed at disrupting the pro-Western secular axis many people in the Middle East believe the United States and Britain are trying to drive through the region with Iraq war. Such an axis would create a swath of territory friendly to the West from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf."
A five-member UN panel says it is "just a matter of time" before al Qaida attempts a chemical or biological attack.
And the Washington Post reports on an ominous process of what we might term 'alqaidogenesis' ...
Leaders of the al Qaeda terrorist network have franchised their organization's brand of synchronized, devastating violence to homegrown terrorist groups across the world, posing a formidable new challenge to counterterrorism forces, according to intelligence analysts and experts in the United States, Europe and the Arab world.The recent attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Iraq show that the smaller organizations, most of whose leaders were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, have fanned out, imbued with radical ideology and the means to create or revitalize local terrorist groups. They also are expanding the horizons of groups that had focused on regional issues.
It is, it would seem, a process which is proceeding a pace with little connection, for a good or for ill, to anything we are accomplishing or not accomplishing in Iraq.
--Josh Marshall
Not so deep background <$NoAd$> (from a piece in tomorrow's Post) ...
Bush raised the possibility of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. When a reporter mentioned the United States' announced plans to reduce troop levels, the president responded: "We could have less troops in Iraq, we could have the same number of troops in Iraq, we could have more troops in Iraq -- whatever is necessary to secure Iraq."A top aide to Bush, who briefed reporters after the news conference on condition that she not be identified, said that Bush was not announcing a change in policy and that expectations remained that troop levels would be reduced. "There is simply nothing to suggest that the number of American forces would need to increase," the official said. "In fact, the conversations with the commanders have gone the other way."
Who could that possibly be?
--Josh Marshall
Marvelous, marvelous piece on Dick Cheney by Frank Foer and Spencer Ackerman in the new issue of The New Republic.
I can't say enough good things about this piece. It not only goes into fascinating detail about the back-and-forth between Cheney's Office of the Vice President and the CIA over the last two years, it also gives an insightful reading of the evolution of Cheney's own foreign policy views going back into the mid-1980s, placing that development in a sometimes rightly sympathetic light.
I think I have some quibbles with Foer's and Ackerman's judgment about the role of 9/11 as a transformative event for Cheney. But that's a small difference of opinion, and one I'm going to need to give some more thought to, before I make a final judgment.
But for now this is the piece on Cheney, the intel wars, and Iraq. It convinces me even more of something I've thought for some time: that Cheney's office is a rogue operation in this administration and one with the defining influence.
--Josh Marshall
Money talks, and AARP walks.
To find out more about the ugly truth and what you can do to make your voice heard, go to this page at the Campaign for America's Future website.
--Josh Marshall
Interesting update.
In late May, the UN's senior humanitarian relief official in Iraq, Ramiro Lopes da Silva, warned that the US reconstruction effort was too driven by "ideology" and said, in the paraphrased words of the British paper The Guardian, that "the sudden decision last week to demobilise 400,000 Iraqi soldiers without any re-employment programme could generate a 'low-intensity conflict' in the countryside."
This comment gets at another point. To disband or not to disband was not an either/or or a black and white question. At a minimum it would have been necessary at some point to purge the army of unreconstructed Baathists and those responsible for the worst sorts of human-rights offenses.
The question was whether it made sense to disband the institution and give these guys nothing else to do at a point when none of the infrastructure -- either physical or political -- of a stable post-war settlement had been created. Perhaps a year on, if things were proceeding in a good direction, it could have been done then.
As it happened, the decision didn't so much solve the problem of Iraq's almost half a million soldiers. It just left them unsupervised and jobless.
--Josh Marshall
Here's an interesting question: whose idea was it to disband the Iraqi army? Formally, the decision was Paul Bremer's. But that only means that he executed the plan, not that he originated the idea or even necessarily agreed with it. He's taking the rap for it in a lot of corners. But I doubt very much the idea originated with him.
Here's what today's Washington Post article on the subject says ...
The demobilization decision appears to have originated largely with Walter B. Slocombe, a former undersecretary of defense appointed to oversee Iraqi security forces. He believed strongly in the need to disband the army and felt that vanquished soldiers should not expect to be paid a continuing salary. He said he developed the policy in discussions with Bremer, Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz."This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at the last minute and done at the insistence of the people in Baghdad. It was discussed," Slocombe said. "The critical point was that nobody argued that we shouldn't do this."
Slocombe recalled discussing the issue with Wolfowitz on May 8 and with Feith several times, including on May 22, the night before Bremer issued the formal order. Trying to put the army back together at that point, he said, "would've been a practical disaster."
Slocombe's an interesting possible author of the decision since he's a highly respected former official from the Clinton Pentagon and a Democrat, if one with a fairly non-partisan hue.
I have heard, reliably, that Cheney was the key force in the decision. And that he was convinced by Chalabi and others in his circle.
On the other hand, an article in the new Newsweek says this ...
When Bremer arrived in Baghdad in mid-May, the insurgency was just getting started, and clots of former Iraqi troops were reappearing, asking to be remobilized. Bremer, who has been widely blamed for reversing the decision of his predecessor, Jay Garner, to hire such men and pay them, was warned he would cause chaos by demobilizing the Army instead. The CIA station chief told him, “That’s another 350,000 Iraqis you’re pissing off, and they’ve got guns.” According to one official who attended the meeting, Bremer replied: “I don’t have any choice ... Those are my instructions.” Then Bremer added: “The president told me that de-Baathification is more important.”
Needless to say, the word coming directly <$Ad$>from the president is not at all inconsistent with Chalabi convincing senior officials, including Cheney, that this was the way to go.
A few other thoughts on this.
First, I sat down for an interview with a well-known defense policy expert at the very end of June. And the first thing out of his mouth was how bad an idea this was, and that no one could understand what they were thinking.
So I really don't think that it's correct to say that this is one of those ideas that seemed good at the time but has produced unintended results. Most people seem to have seen this as a pretty bad idea from word 'go'.
Second, the issue here, I think, isn't so much whose idea this was, as in a particular person, as just how it originated. Was it just bad decision-making by the people in charge -- not every call can be made correctly? Or was it another example of ideologues or those under the influence of Chalabi getting it into their heads that this was a great idea and then pushing it through over the objections of region experts, the CIA, the military, folks at State, etc.?
--Josh Marshall
The Post on Thursday has an <$NoAd$>article on the growing consensus that disbanding the Iraqi army was a fundamental error and how the CPA is now racing to build a new Iraqi army in its place to help bolster security now and defend a new Iraqi government in the not-too-distant future.
In the course of the piece there's this section with views from different players.
"This was a mistake, to dissolve the army and the police," said Ayad Alawi, head of the security committee of the Iraqi Governing Council. "We absolutely not only lost time. The vacuum allowed our enemies to regroup and to infiltrate the country."Retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a vocal opponent of the war, calls the move the Bush administration's "worst mistake" in postwar Iraq.
Supporters of the decision counter that the army posed a potential threat to a fledgling Iraqi governing authority and U.S. forces -- and that it was so second-rate and so infiltrated with Baath Party figures that it could not be salvaged.
"The Iraqi army was a pretty sick organization in a lot of respects," said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, who played a role in the demobilization decision. "There was quite a bit of cruelty -- abuse by the senior officers of the junior people -- and there was quite a bit of corruption."
Imagine that. Doug Feith thought (and still thinks) it was a good idea. And his judgment is usually so on the mark.
On the other hand, Chalabi convinced Cheney that disbanding the army was a dynamite plan. So he probably convinced Feith too.
--Josh Marshall
Newsweek, in an article by Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, has come in to bat clean up on the Feith Memo and the whole purported Saddam-al Qaida link. They even note the same sputtering performance by Fred Barnes praising the thing on Fox over the weekend that TPM mentioned Sunday morning. (Hmmmm...) It's good stuff. Definitely take a look.
The first, admittedly lengthy and multistoried, sentence sums it up:
A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an “operational relationship” between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s former regime is mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago—and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
Meanwhile, some are expressing the thought that what’s happening here is that interested parties in the <$Ad$>Intelligence Community and national security bureaucracy are scheming to keep the truth from us about the existence of the Saddam-al Qaida link.
Now, anything’s possible in this fallen world of ours. One never knows what the future holds. And certainly every possibility deserves to be looked into.
But sometimes simple logic can help give us a preview of what we might find.
The White House and various administration appointees bullied, pummeled and cajoled various members of the Intelligence Community into signing off on all manner of shaky, disputed, unsubstantiated and downright bogus intel because it suited the White House storyline. Now the same White House can’t get the Intelligence Community to come clean about rock-solid intelligence demonstrating a Saddam-al Qaida link --- information which, if revealed, would greatly bolster the White House?
That make sense to you?
--Josh Marshall
In an article today in Slate, Jack Shafer wonders why almost no media outlets outside the Murdoch media empire have picked up on Steve Hayes’ story in the Weekly Standard. That’s the story --- ‘Case Closed’ --- about the Feith Memo and the alleged Saddam-al Qaida connection.
Among the possible explanations Shafer puts forward is the notion that the mainstream press is too invested in the idea that there were no connections at all between Saddam and al Qaida.
But, to me, that explanation doesn’t even come close to passing muster. The big papers and cable networks have grabbed on to so many weak but sensationalistic Intel related stories about WMD and Iraq-al Qaida connections --- even since the revelations about the Niger-uranium story --- that I don’t find that remotely credible.
A more probable answer --- which I set forth in greater depth today in my column in The Hill --- is that this information is not at all new.
If you’ve been following the intel wars you know that the group that put together this dossier started working in Doug Feith’s office shortly after 9/11 and that they presented these findings --- absent a few details subsequently culled from detainee interviews --- at Langley in August 2002. The methods used by Feith’s Pentagon analysis shop were widely panned and the consensus within the intel community was that the findings didn’t pass the laugh test.
It is almost certain that the dossier --- or rather the memo summarizing it --- was leaked now because Feith and his ideological soul-mates at the Pentagon are profoundly on the defensive because of the WMD debacle and poor planning for post-war Iraq.
Indeed, even within his group, Feith’s stock is close to its nadir --- partly because of these sorts of mad-scientist shenanigans, but for other reasons too. The Senate intel investigation, of course, looms. And perhaps Sen. Roberts (R-Kans) won’t be able to force all the blame on the CIA.
For all these reasons, they are trying to push back anywhere and everywhere they can.
So that’s the main reason, I think, that people haven’t picked up the story. No liberal media conspiracy. Sorry. Rather, the people who are following the intel story know that this is raw intelligence which the people in a position to know, and with access to all the information, say is either unreliable or doesn’t amount to anything.
Part of the difficulty in reporting it out, I suspect, is that the memo includes, say, allegation X. On background people at the CIA might tell a reporter that the report is unreliable. But, because it’s all classified, the reporter can’t get the actual details which are that the report that Saddam and bin Laden were brothers separated at birth actually came from Ahmed Chalabi’s aunt’s maid’s doorman who offered the scoop in exchange for getting bailed out of prison in Cairo where he’d gotten arrested for fencing gold crenellated TV sets smuggled in from Yemen.
In any case, presumably a different sets of facts, but you get the idea.
Also, having gotten burned so bad on the WMD mumbo-jumbo and earlier al Qaida Saddam stories, reporters are wary of these guys, especially since the hawkers of this stuff are just much better, much more effectively political than their opponents.
Having said all this, let’s get it all out there. I agree with Andrew Sullivan when he says that it would be worthwhile to get out on the record which of the Feith-based claims are utterly without merit (most), which are shaky (some) and which may turn out to be true (a few).
(While we're at it, let's also do some decent reporting into the administration's strenuous and comical warping of the intel process and some decent investigations into the now-well-covered-up Valerie Plame story. Note to Mike Allen: get your source on the phone again. What happened to him?)
It seems clear that there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaida during the 1990s. Yet, in the shadowy world of intel and global nogoodnikism all sorts of people meet up now and then. Meetings, contacts in themselves don't necessarily amount to much. And all that we have been able to verify has been extremely limited --- nothing to merit the claims of active collaboration the Iraq hawks made.
And when you consider that we now essentially own Iraq --- the regime leaders, most all the government records that survive, and so forth --- we shouldn’t need to go on hints and allegations. We should know something close to the whole story. And from what we know now, there's not much of a story.
--Josh Marshall
For years -- literally years -- I've been writing about Astroturf organizing and that trendsetting operation in the trade, DCI -- home of that Johny Appleseed of the plastic and the green, Tom Synhorst.
Simply put, Astroturf organizers are in the business of creating phony grassroots support, or rather the appearance of grassroots support, for this or that cause.
You got the money and the cause? They'll bring the front groups, the push-polls, the oped payola, you name it.
(For more details, see this post from last year.)
The secret of 'turf is a simple one.
Advertisements and paid spokesman may influence us to some degree. We hear their opinions, see them on TV and such. But because they're paid, because they're essentially advertisements, we also tend to tune them out, or at least bracket them off in our minds.
If you're someone who wants to press an opinion, or get support for your company, what you'd really want is to have community groups coming forward to support your company line. Because if you or I see the Associated People of Podunk demanding this or that piece of legislation, then we'll probably think, 'Hey, there must be something to this.' Or if some respected scholar supports it, same thing.
For years, the trendsetter in Astroturf has been DCI. And a couple days ago, if you were watching really closely, a tiny sentence changed on an out-of-the-way page on the TechCentralStation website.
The sentence that read ...
"Tech Central Station is published by Tech Central Station, L.L.C."
now reads ...
"Tech Central Station is published by DCI Group, L.L.C."
It wasn't an accident. It was because this article -- 'Meet the Press' by Nick Confessore -- was about to be published by The Washington Monthly.
--Josh Marshall
Imagine that. The wildly anti-Semitic article about George Soros ("Satan lives in George Soros") authored by James Hall and published at GOPUSA.com has been taken down off the site. (For the grisly details, see the prior post.) No explanation of why, no apology, just gone --- poof!
I should have known to make a copy before they snatched it from the site.
But that turns out not to be necessary since the author, James Hall, has the piece up on his own website, with the helpful addition of a caricature drawing of Soros sprawling out on a mountain of US currency.
--Josh Marshall
Oh Boy ... Something pretty big is coming down the pike tomorrow apparently. The world of Astroturf organizing may be shaken all the way down to its phony-baloney roots.
--Josh Marshall
A conservative website called GOPUSA.com (though, let's be clear, *not* affiliated with the Republican party) is running a column with these pleasant things to say about George Soros ...
No other single person represents the symbol and the substance of Globalism more than this Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock. He is the embodiment of the Merchant from Venice. His public reputation as an astute currency speculator is generous, while his skills as a manipulator and procurer of pain and suffering is shrouded in the footnotes of the financial journals. Claiming to be a philanthropist, his record is literally one of being a patron for indentured enslavement....
Double standards for an advocate of a permissive, yet regimented globe? If you think he is a friend of humanity, beware of his public attempt to influence his tribe, by insulting their benefactors. Before the Jewish Funders Network, he recently made these remarks: "There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that," Soros said. "It's not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I'm critical of those policies." The inevitable outcry from the usual suspects, just illustrates the orchestrated nature of the Soros effort to rationalize his own social agenda, while deflecting criticism back to his ancestral blood line.
Hmmmm. Trafficking <$Ad$>in anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes? Wouldn't want to go out on a limb or anything. And that's actually the more temperate part of the piece.
Also, it's not like the site is some obscure outlet with no mainstream conservatives connected to it. In addition to the author of this particular column, James Hall, the site's other regular columnists include Austin Bay, Linda Chavez, David Horowitz (a TPM fav), Alan Keyes, and Star Parker.
Meanwhile, various other right-wing luminaries and Republican members of Congress, as Atrios notes, spoke at their conference just a couple weeks ago.
--Josh Marshall
The new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows President Bush with a substantially higher approval rating than all the recent polls -- namely, at 57% approval and 39% disapproval. That contrasts with the slightly more recent Gallup/CNN/USAToday poll which showed him at 50% approve and 47% disapprove.
Last week CBS had him at 49% and NBC had him at 51%.
For the moment the new WaPo/ABC poll definitely looks like an outlier.
--Josh Marshall
After dinner this evening I stopped by a fundraiser for Howard Dean in Washington, DC --- one to <$NoAd$>celebrate his 55th birthday. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him in person. But it was the first time I’d seen him speak to a campaign rally. And the event was very impressive.
The intensity and engagement of the crowd were palpable. And I could understand the enthusiasm Dean supporters have for what they’re doing and what they're a part of when 
surrounded by that energy.
Union representation was very much in evidence at the rally --- intentionally so, I suspect, but effectively so as well.
There were also endorsements from Congressmen Elijah Cummings and Jim Moran, which covers a lot of territory (in every respect but geographically) in the Democratic party.
In any case, after the speech, I wanted to ask Dean a few questions about Iraq and the recent turnabout in White House policy. But the place was raucous and crowded. And Dean was wielding this big metal utensil, cutting people pieces of his enormous birthday cake. So I eventually thought better of it.
I packed up my pen and notebook and slowly made my way to the door through the sardine-packed crowd of Dean-o-philes.
--Josh Marshall
The Fox News clip with Wes Clark (noted below) was down temporarily. But now it seems to be back up. If you haven't seen it yet, definitely take a look. It's a wonder why the Clark campaign hasn't put it up on their site.
--Josh Marshall
Before they take it down, go to this page on the Fox News website. Then scroll down to the link with Wes Clark's picture and the caption "Setting the Record Straight."
It's a six or seven minute clip. But it's worth watching through. The Fox host tries the same old mumbo-jumbo on Clark and Clark goes ballistic and doesn't back down. Good for him.
Late Update: Here's a direct link to the video feed.
--Josh Marshall
Could this really be true? From tomorrow's edition of The Independent ...
The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the "coming days", Mr Solana told The Independent.
I'll believe it when I see it. See the rest here.
--Josh Marshall
Talk about burying your lede!
Today in the Washington Post Lois Romano had a piece about how the Clark campaign is trying to get back on track with a big media buy in New Hampshire and other mid-course strategy corrections.
But you have to skip down to the 19th and 20th grafs to get to what sounds to me like the big story …
[Dick] Sklar, a longtime Democratic activist, helped set up the organizational structure in Little Rock, but his gruff demeanor alienated some. He said he plans to return home to California after Thanksgiving but will still be an adviser to the campaign. Eli Segal, a Boston businessman and Clinton veteran, is now running the day-to-day campaign. Klain and Fabiani are in key advisory roles but are not involved in the daily operations.In the past month, the press office has been restructured, with Bennett and Jamal Simmons -- the traveling press secretary -- emerging as the two main spokesmen for the campaign. Kym Spell, the former national press secretary, is returning to New York where she will be a consultant to the campaign for the entertainment industry. Chris Lehane, who worked for Gore and briefly for Kerry, has become a media strategist in Little Rock.
After Clark’s first campaign manager <$Ad$>Donnie Fowler left, Sklar came on as the campaign’s ‘chief operating officer.’ Since the campaign didn’t have a campaign manager that basically meant Sklar was the campaign manager, sharing some of the duties with Segal.
As I read that sentence, it sounds to me like Sklar is out, whatever advisory role he may continue to have. The campaign’s press secretary, Kym Spell, seems to be out too. And same goes for her as far as working as a consultant.
Sklar’s departure sounds like a very good thing for the campaign since it was on his watch that the campaign made its most serious strategic blunder --- blowing the chance to get the endorsement of AFSCME. But good or bad, the departure of the de facto campaign manager and press secretary sounds to me like a pretty big deal.
Clark had a very strong performance on Meet the Press this morning. Without appearing defensive, he managed to make clear that almost all the accusations of his shifting his position on the war have been a matter of grabbing a few quotes out of context and ignoring a long and clear record of skepticism about the case for war against Iraq (pace Joe Lieberman) and even more the way the president went about it. Clark even caught Russert flatfooted a couple times, especially in the exchange about the London Times column. So perhaps with some good exposure there and some much-needed changes at the home office he'll be able to get back some of the momentum he lost over the last month.
On balance, these developments all sound like good news for a campaign that has needed some.
--Josh Marshall
A few days ago we reported that plans to keep ex-Iraqi weapons scientists employed and monitored were not only woefully underfunded but held up by bureaucratic infighting between various arms of the government. This, of course, while we employ vast sums of money and personnel on an almost certainly futile search for actual stashes of Iraqi WMD.
Now comes word that Saddam's top scientist on top-range missiles design and production has gone to Iran.
--Josh Marshall
A quick note on Stephen Hayes new article Iraq-al Qaida link story, “Case Closed”, in the Weekly Standard.
(I was watching Fox News Sunday this morning and saw Fred Barnes --- Executive Editor of the Standard --- go almost apoplectic about how devastating and case-closing a piece it is.)
In any case, the quick note.
First, congratulations to Steve for a great scoop. He and I disagree about most things these days. But I'm certainly an admirer of his work.
But is it "case closed"? Not quite. More like, case restated.
What do we already know about the intelligence wars over the Iraq-al Qaida link?
We know that most of the Intelligence Community didn't think there was much there. Some contacts, but nothing substantial. We also know that Doug Feith -- along with other administration appointees -- didn't agree. And Feith set up his own intelligence shop at the Pentagon to review all the raw data and find what the CIA and others had missed, misinterpreted or buried.
They came up with a raft of purported connections between Saddam and al Qaida. But when they presented their findings to professional analysts in the rest of the Intelligence Community, most notably at the CIA, the consensus was that those findings didn't pass the laugh-test.
And who put together this new memo, the one the Standard article is based on? "The U.S. Government," as the headline of the article says?
Not exactly. As Steve's article makes clear, the authorship is a bit more specific. "The memo," writes Steve ...
dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources.
In other words, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee is doing their investigation into the pre-war intelligence. This memo is what Doug Feith sent them representing their side of the story. With the exception of some tidbits from interviews with Iraqis now in custody, this is, to all appearances, the same bill of particulars that Feith's shop put together in 2002 and which was panned by the analysts in the rest of the Intel community.
So, the first point to make is that there seems to be little if anything here that the folks in the rest of the Intel Community -- outside of Special Plans -- did not see before concluding that there were no significant links between Iraq and al Qaida.
Point two is that Feith's shop, the Office of Special Plans, the original source of this memo, gained an apparently richly-deserved reputation for what intel analysts call cherry-picking. That is, culling raw intel data to find all the information that supports the conclusion you want to find and then ignoring all the rest.
Now, of course, Feith's advocates say that everyone else was just doing their own sort of cherry-picking, picking the evidence that supported their preconceived notions, etc. But this is simply another example of a pattern which we see widely in this administration: the inability to recognize that there is such a thing as expertise which is anything more than a cover for ideological predilection (for more on this, see this article.)
More to the point, there's now a record. These are the folks, remember, who had the most outlandish reads on the extent of Iraq's WMD capacities and the most roseate predictions about the ease of the post-war reconstruction. So their record of interpreting raw intelligence is, shall we say, objectively poor.
Having said all this, I am, needless to say, not a trained analyst. I'll be commenting on various points in the piece that I know something about. But there's really little point in my speculating on the meaning of the various data points raised in this memo. Much of the value of this evidence rests on the reliability of the sources and methods used to find it. And we on the outside have little way of knowing who the sources were or how reliable they are. Also, you'd want people who could put the data points into their proper context.
So, let's read Hayes' article, but also be clear on the character and source of the memo he's discussing and wait till other knowledgeable folks weigh in with their opinion of what it means.
--Josh Marshall
