Twenty-eight percent of the public is aware that nearly 4,000 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq over the past five years, while nearly half thinks the death tally is 3,000 or fewer and 23 percent think it is higher, according to an opinion survey released yesterday.
The survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that public awareness of developments in the Iraq war has dropped precipitously since last summer, as the news media have paid less attention to the conflict. In earlier surveys, about half of those asked about the death tally responded correctly.
Related Pew surveys have found that the number of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined this year, along with professed public interest. “Coverage of the war has been virtually absent,” said Pew survey research director Scott Keeter, totaling about 1 percent of the news hole between Feb. 17 and 23.
It’s really just incredible. You wouldn’t suppose it has anything to do with this story appearing on Page A12, would it? Alongside the one about the rocket attack killing 3 soldiers yesterday?
Because Juan Cole asked me to, here’s the AP’s report on the even more deadly day for US troops on Monday:
It’s all good though, because Tucker Carlson has been replaced by a show called “Race For The White House,” filling that crucial campaign coverage gap, and in addition to telling us who said what about whom and who played what race or gender card, I’m sure David Gregory will keep us completely informed about the latest from Iraq.
This last bit, from the original article, is noted, in closing, without comment.
Compared with those Americans surveyed who correctly identified U.S. casualties at around 4,000 (3,975 as of yesterday morning, according to the Pentagon), 84 percent identified Oprah Winfrey as the talk-show host supporting Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) for the Democratic presidential nomination…
OK, one comment… they’ve really deep-sixed this war, haven’t they? All the more to dodge their own culpability, I guess.
…adding, it’s of course harder for some media outlets to report the news when the White House Pentagon actively seeks to censor it.
The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.
The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.
It won’t be emailed to reporters and it won’t be posted online.
How can we expect reporters to cover it? They won’t even GET AN EMAIL! (Not that it’d matter much if they did, particularly to those who need to inform the public on exactly how many times Eliot Spitzer used the call-girl service and who the actual prostitutes were. No shit, that appeared in the NYT today.)
As Glenzilla says, “The goal is to raise as much money as possible to run local ads against one or two of them, alerting as many possible voters in their districts of their endless complicity with the most radical, corrupt aspects of the Bush administration’s chronic lawbreaking and illegal domestic spying.” Thanks to you, we have a lot of options. Let us know who you think deserves to be the target of our efforts for joining with the Republicans to try and pass retroactive immunity for Dick Cheney and the telecom criminals. Cast your vote here
According to Steve Clemons and others with contacts inside the national security community, Fallon was fired for insubordination and it doesn’t portend any change in Iran policy. As I wrote yesterday, Fallon was arguably insubordinate so that isn’t something to be taken lightly. The principle of civilian leadership is important. Fallon’s disagreements with the administration left him only one option — resign, and then talk to the press. You can’t do it while in uniform.
However, there are a few other things to consider. First, is the article I flagged yesterday which indicates that the Bush administration (and yes, our European allies) are intent upon isolating Iran on the basis of nuclear proliferation when the evidence suggests that they have stopped their program. Pardon me for being suspicious that these countries might just be watching the price of oil hit 110 dollars a barrel and keeping their options open for reasons other than those stated.
I have no idea if Bush will attack Iran. But depending upon them being logical and rational about it is a mistake. They truly did go into Iraq with the idea that they could install Ahmad Chalabi as their puppet and that was just delusional.So, while I am sure that it’s true that most people believe that it’s impossible for them to get away with it, I do not trust in such calculations. More importantly, they are playing with fire and I certainly don’t trust their competence. As long as they are mucking around, as that article suggests they are, the greater possibility of somebody making a mistake. These are not competent people. Anything can happen.
Finally, even if they do not launch an attack before they leave office, they are laying the groundwork to either back-up President McCain, who has never met a war he didn’t want to fight, or to relentlessly criticize President Obama or Clinton for failing to launch said attack. They create infrastructure for these sorts of things that make them extremely influential when they are out of power and which they use to pressure their political rivals for both policy and political reasons.
I fully expect a new Team B to be instituted the minute the Republicans are out of power. And they will use that supposedly cowardly NIE as their excuse. There’s just too much right wing influence pressing for intervention in Iran for them to give up, from nuts like Hagee, to the usual neocon suspects to the Israel lobby to the GWOT fetishists. If nothing else, they are setting themselves up for a very lucrative “Iran lobby” practice once out of power.
There have often been paranoids and imperialists in our country agitating for war with somebody, particularly since the modern conservative movement emerged after WWII and caught the anti-communist bug in a big way. But this is different. We are entering a period of economic turbulence, one of the biggest factors causing it being the cost of energy and political instability in the areas that provide it. Add to that the threat of global warming (and the paralysis of the rich countries of the world in dealing with it) and we are looking at a right wing that is likely to renew itself around various permutations of “economic national security.” (They will, needless to say, find some way to pin the whole thing on dark foreigners who are trying to kill us in our beds and destroy the American way of life.)
As the great conservative philosopher Ann Coulter put it, “Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil.” It’s not a lot more complicated than that.
Update: Dover Bitch just emailed me with this recent article from Wired about Kissinger and Nixon’s “madman theory.” New documents were just released outlining an operation called “Giant Lance.”
The article points out that the madman concept is actually game theory, which has formed a huge part of military planning for decades:
One of the starting points for Cold War game theory was President Eisenhower’s proposed doctrine of “massive retaliation”: Washington would respond viciously to any attack on the US or its allies. This, the thinking went, would create enough fear to deter enemy aggression. But Kissinger believed this policy could actually encourage our enemies and limit our power. Would the US really nuke Moscow if the Soviets funded some communist insurgents in Angola or took over a corner of Iran? Of course not. As a result, enemies would engage in “salami tactics,” slicing away at American interests, confident that the US would not respond.
Cluster bombs, designed with “submunition” ordnance to set off a chain-reaction of explosions, became an important part of the US conventional military arsenal in the 1960s. In Southeast Asia, cluster bombs allowed the US military to inflict widespread damage on the enemy from the air, without resorting to nuclear weapons. Video: The National Archives
The White House needed a wider range of military options. More choices, the thinking went, would allow us to prevent some conflicts from starting, gain bargaining leverage in others, and stop still others from escalating. This game-theory logic was the foundation for what became in the ’60s and ’70s the doctrine of “flexible response”: Washington would respond to small threats in small ways and big threats in big ways.
The madman theory was an extension of that doctrine. If you’re going to rely on the leverage you gain from being able to respond in flexible ways — from quiet nighttime assassinations to nuclear reprisals — you need to convince your opponents that even the most extreme option is really on the table. And one way to do that is to make them think you are crazy.
Consider a game that theorist Thomas Schelling described to his students at Harvard in the ’60s: You’re standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to another person. As soon as one of you cries uncle, you’ll both be released, and whoever remained silent will get a large prize. What do you do? You can’t push the other person off the cliff, because then you’ll die, too. But you can dance and walk closer and closer to the edge. If you’re willing to show that you’ll brave a certain amount of risk, your partner may concede — and you might win the prize. But if you convince your adversary that you’re crazy and liable to hop off in any direction at any moment, he’ll probably cry uncle immediately. If the US appeared reckless, impatient, even insane, rivals might accept bargains they would have rejected under normal conditions. In terms of game theory, a new equilibrium would emerge as leaders in Moscow, Hanoi, and Havana contemplated how terrible things could become if they provoked an out-of-control president to experiment with the awful weapons at his disposal.
The nuclear-armed B-52 flights near Soviet territory appeared to be a direct application of this kind of game theory. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote in his diary that Kissinger believed evidence of US irrationality would “jar the Soviets and North Vietnam.” Nixon encouraged Kissinger to expand this approach. “If the Vietnam thing is raised” in conversations with Moscow, Nixon advised, Kissinger should “shake his head and say, ‘I am sorry, Mr. Ambassador, but [the president] is out of control.” Nixon told Haldeman: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace
A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
“Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
The article concludes with this conversation:
More than 35 years after Giant Lance, I asked Kissinger about it during a long lunch at the Four Seasons Grill in New York. Why, I asked, did they risk nuclear war back in October 1969? He paused over his salad, surprised that I knew so much about this episode, and measured his words carefully. “Something had to be done,” he explained, to back up threats the US had made and to push the Soviets for help in Vietnam. Kissinger had suggested the nuclear maneuvers to give the president more leverage in negotiations. It was an articulation of the game theory he had studied before coming to power. “What were [the Soviets] going to do?” Kissinger said dismissively.
But what if things had gone terribly wrong — if the Soviets had overreacted, if a B-52 had crashed, if one of the hastily loaded warheads had exploded? Kissinger demurred. Denying that there was ever a madman theory in operation, he emphasized that Giant Lance was designed to be a warning, not a provocation to war. The operation was designed to be safe. And in any case, he said, firm resolve is essential to policymaking.
Last week a reader sent me this and considering today’s news about Admiral Fallon, it takes on new urgency:
I just saw your post about Fallon being canned. I had a similar, sinking feeling as I was reading this William Broad piece from last Friday on how the recent Iran NIE report conclusions were a result of a “rules change” allowing the focus in the NIE to shift from uranium enrichment to weapon design.
He pointed out that the article sounded very much like it could have been written by Judy Miller and that this looked like a conscious strategy to put last December’s bombshell NIE back on the shelf. The Bush administration will not accept its conclusions, and according to the article, many of our European allies were dismayed as well.
They are apparently seeking to discredit the conclusions and the New York Times is on board, once again, with an article that makes the administration’s case better than the administration itself can. (I’m just surprised we didn’t see Cheney on the Sunday shows saying he’s “just read a report in the NY Times” that backed up the administration’s claim — which they’d fed to the NY Times.)
Anyway, the article does quote David Kay saying the administration is in disarray, but then lays out a case that pretty much says the intelligence community changed the criteria for determining the threat (from the development of fissile material to weapons design) because they were chickenshit after being wrong on Iraq.
If you read closely, you conclude that it’s just possible that they did it because they got some very reliable evidence that the Iranians had shut down its weapons development in 2003, while the evidence of fissile material was still the sort of sketchy “curveball” type stuff that led them astray on Iraq. It sounds as though the idea that everybody just *knows* that Iran is enriching uranium to build a bomb didn’t seem all that compelling to them this time so they went with what they knew, which was actually pretty convincing. Apparently the intelligence community is trying to find its way back to some semblance of rationality.
But if you read this article, that’s not what you come away witht The recent Iran NIE is based upon frightened analysts afraid of making a mistake and the Bush administration and all of our allies are very upset about it. So, they’re going to ignore it:
Mr. Bush and Mr. McConnell have both acknowledged that the December estimate damaged the effort to isolate Iran. Recently, the administration has taken steps to counter that effect.
It decided to let the atomic energy agency confront Iran with what it says is the best evidence of Iranian weapons work, some of which was revealed last Monday in Vienna. The United States had previously shown some of that evidence to selected countries, but it had declined to declassify all of the material, which was contained on a laptop apparently slipped out of Iran by a technician with access to the nuclear program. While American and energy agency officials say the documents appear real, they cannot definitively authenticate them or tie them to Iran.
If I understand the article correctly, the intelligence community has what it thinks is reliable information that weapons work ceased in 2003. But the administration and the IAEA has “other information” from some purloined laptop of unreliable provenence that indicates otherwise and that’s what they’re going with. Meanwhile, the administration is also slyly suggesting that the intelligence community “changed the rules” in midstream — and the New York Times backs it up. (Apparently it’s impossible that information from the alleged weapons program could be compelling enough to overwhelm the traditional threat matrix.) But just in case, they are now floating a bunch of hinky evidence about the weapons program too, to muddy the waters.
Does anyone feel a sense of deja vu vu?
I have often observed that one of the biggest problems with the march to war in 2002 (aside from the obvious immorality, mendacity and illegality) was the fact that the Bush administration pissed away any mystique the US ever had about it’s intelligence capabilities. One of the reasons a powerful country should never show its hand like that is that when they turn out to have been lying they have no credibility the next time. (Just like when our mommies told us not to cry wolf when we were four year olds.) It’s hard to imagine that anyone believes the administration now, but I have recently realized that a new credibility has replaced the old one — the credibility that sociopaths have when they threaten to kill you. You know they are capable of anything. This is the foreign policy of crazy that little Tommy Friedman enthusiastically recommended after 9/11 (and which Nixon and Reagan also used, to a lesser degree.) They proved they meant it with Iraq.
There is tremendous freedom of action in that sort of thing. No longer does this powerful country have to adhere to international law or worry about having to make a coherent, rational case for war. They just make assertion, ignore reality and carry on with a kabuki foreign policy that basically says, might makes right. (Otherwise known as the the “Fuck ____, we’re takin’ im out” theory.) With a compliant press and a paralyzed congress, this can work. (Unless the military starts to rebel…)
Forcing any government to make a coherent case to its citizens, its allies and the world for going to war is a requirement for any civilized society. Indeed, after WWII, there was a consensus among those left standing that made blanket prohibitions against preventive war (at least on paper, if not in reality.) But this pomo presidency has finally relegated all that 20th century nonsense into the garbage bin of history. They blatantly change the rules and openly “fix the facts”, without much pretense of adhering to previously recognized norms. In fact, that’s the whole point. As with refusing to declare waterboarding torture, they truly believe it’s useful to have the world believe the United States is run by bloodthirsty tyrants. (It’s especially effective when it actually is.)
If the Bush admnistration attacks Iran as lame ducks, based upon another laptop full of questionable secret evidence, they will have proven that the office of the president of the United States is basically a four (or eight) year dictatorship. But then, it is, isn’t it? As long as he has 34 solid Senate cronies in safe seats, he can get away with anything. If he has a 72 year old would-be successor who is unlikely to get elected, then he might as well go for those oil fields while he has the chance. With oil over a hundred dollars a barrel and rising, an economy on the brink and an approval rating in the 20s, this would be the perfect time shoot the moon and show the world exactly what the unitary American president is capable of.
There’s video now of George Bush’s “farewell song” at last weekend’s Gridiron Club dinner. He hits all the high notes, treating tragedy, destruction and the end of any pretense of justice in America as misty water-colored memories, like he was some disinterested observer, like Billy Joel just recounting the history in “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
And I can’t believe what I’m saying, and it may get me banned from Hullabaloo for life, but… what Chris Matthews said a few minutes ago:
Well, that was quite a hoot. All that joking from the President about Brownie, that guy in charge of the New Orleans disaster, and of course Scooter Libby, the guy involved in the CIA coverup. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s reporters, the best of them, laughing at events and political acts that warrant anything, I mean, anything but laughter. There is nothing, nothing funny about Bush’s reference to Brownie, that disastrous appointment followed by that catastrophic handling of the Katrina horror in New Orleans. Nothing funny about a war fought for bad intelligence, and a top aide, Scooter Libby, who committed perjury and obstruction of justice to cover it up. Nothing funny about a President, who commuted that sentence to keep the coverup protected. Otherwise, I’m sure it was an enjoyable get-together between journalists and the people they’re charged with covering.
This is of course true. I don’t know if Chris Matthews, who met his wife at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner 20 years ago and who has attended pretty much every one since, is really the guy to deliver the message. But it seems every so often he has to spout off like this to prove to himself that he has some sort of independence from the Village, that he’s some anti-establishment rabble rouser.
What’s more, it’s fine for Matthews to make this statement, but then following up and asking his cadre of reporters who he has on his show every day whether or not they attended, laughed and cheered at the President’s warblings, etc., would be nice.
UPDATE: From the comments:
Nah, he can be right from time to time, but the sackless part of this is that Bush is on his way out. The players can find that spine because the fucker isn’t up for re-election.
If McCain give this speech, Chris becomes butter. Funny. Ironic. Only a real-man can do this.
Instead, look at Bush’s WMD hilarity from the 2004 thing — only David Corn was pissed that everyone found it uproarious. Or look at how Matthews reacted to the Colbert situation from 2006.
It’s the measure of the man that he waited until just now to be sickened by the president’s cavalier attitude toward death, destruction and lies.
Yes, I was looking for some example of this for a little while here, and Google has finally given up the gold.
MATTHEWS: The funniest line of the night last Saturday night at the press dinner, which was — the president was excellent. We’re going to show a piece of the president and his body double, which is really funny, and quite nice of the president to do it, because it was kind of humble.
WALLACE: Self-deprecating.
MATTHEWS: Self-deprecating, yeah, to say the least. He said something about how the vice president, [Dick] Cheney, said he is a good man with a big heart. And then he paused and he goes, “Well, he is a good man.”
WALLACE: Yes. My favorite line was that he survived the shake-up.
MATTHEWS: Oh, that he did. Bush did. You’re great, Nicolle. You’re a great person. Thank you for coming over here to Hardball to our own home court. It’s very courageous for a White House person.
WALLACE: Thank you for having me. It was very nice.
MATTHEWS: Are you going to bring Dick Cheney along with you next time?
We talked about this the other day. He was clearly fired. His resignation letter mentions the Esquire article and how it makes it impossible to continue. He was arguably insubordinate, but this is such a high profile firing that it seems clear that this disagreement over Iran was very real.
Update: CNN military expert General David Grange (ret.) says that this is how an officer responds when he disagrees with an administration’s policies and feels decisions have been made that he can’t in good conscience carry out. I don’t know if Grange knows Fallon or knows his motives, but he seems to think that Fallon resigned in protest — which is actually worse than if he were fired. Read that Esquire article and you’ll see why.
For a good summation of Fallon, the Esquire piece, and the resulting furor, check out this Tom Ricks piece in the Post from last week.
Gates said in a press conference just now that no one should think the move reflects any substantive change in policy. That sure won’t be how Teheran sees it. The Iranians will consider Fallon’s resignation to indicate that the bombing begins in the next five minutes. If the new Central Command chief is General Stanley McChrystal, who ran special operations in Iraq until recently (read: responses to Iranian activities), that’ll be a pretty solid indicator that Bush is going to make the most of his last months in office. McChrystal just got a different command, but that, of course, was before the military’s most prestigious combatant command just opened up. Teheran will look verrrrry closely at who gets the job.
Dear Friend, At this point it seems that all is lost on FISA. It looks like in the process of negotiating a compromise with the Senate, the House will be forced to have an up-or-down vote on retroactive immunity. We shouldn’t expect that vote to go our way. But rather than getting mad while we watch the Fourth Amendment go up in flames, we’re going to start getting even. We’ve picked out some of most reactionary Democrats, and are turning it over to progressive activists like you to decide who the worst offenders are. We’ll then run ads and robo-calls in their congressional districts to let their constituents know how poorly their Representative is representing their rights. Go here to cast your vote and chip in to the effort to hold Congress accountable: http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/getevenforfisa We’re starting our effort to get even on several of the Blue Dog Democrats: John Barrow (GA-12), Leonard Boswell (IA-3), Chris Carney (PA-10), Brad Ellworth (IN-8), Zack Space (OH-18), and Heath Shuler (NC-11). This pack of conservatives may caucus the right way, but they actively work to undermine progressive values, including sending a letter to Speaker Pelosi last week encouraging her to grant the telecom companies retroactive immunity. Since the final votes haven’t been cast yet on FISA, hopefully we can shame some of them into righting their moral compass and voting against retroactive immunity. If not, we’ll make sure that each one of their constituents knows about it. Vote on your least favorite here: http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/getevenforfisa Hopefully when it comes down to the wire, things will go our way, and the House Democrats will stand up for the rule of law. In the meantime, however, we would be naive not to start taking action to hold them accountable if they don’t. Thank you for taking action, Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald, Howie Klein, and the Firedoglake Team P.S. This is just the first part of this effort. You can rest assured that we’ll hold Republicans accountable for their role too.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
The Iraq-Al Qaeda link was cultivated through hundreds of the 935 false statements the Bush Administration made in the run-up to war. Without it, there would be no pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq, no case made to the public that both wars represented the same fight against terrorism.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.
As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.
Where did all this now-discredited “evidence” come from? From whom was this bogus “intelligence” gathered? From those suspects who were tortured by the CIA.
Intelligence failures had much to do with the atrocity of September 11, but those had nothing to do with a lack of torture. Let me be clear on one crucial point: it is the terrorists whom we won over with humane methods in the 1990s who continue to provide the most reliable intelligence we have in the fight against al-Qaeda. And it is the testimony of terrorists we tortured after 9/11 who have provided the most unreliable information, such as stories about a close connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I never regret that the FBI didn’t abuse its detainees. Had we done so, we would have had much less reliable intelligence, and we would have been morally debased. By instituting a policy of torture in the years following 9/11, we have recruited thousands to al-Qaeda’s side. It has been a tragic waste.
It is not just that torture is a dehumanizing and a debasing act, a recruiting poster for our enemies, and something that makes our own troops less safe. It’s that the information extracted as a result is completely unreliable. But of course that’s the point. Bogus intelligence making the President’s case for war is, to the Administration, the best intelligence money can buy.
There’s lots of new information in this NY Times article about the allegedly suspicious financial transactions that led the Feds to Spitzer’s call girl habit. It’s still vague about how these scrappy investigators came to be interested in the finances of the governor of New York, but I assume that will be dealt with. Meanwhile, I found this tidbit interesting:
The rendezvous that established Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with high-priced prostitutes occurred last month in one of Washington’s grandest hotels, but the criminal investigation that discovered the tryst began last year in a nondescript office building opposite a Dunkin’ Donuts on Long Island, according to law enforcement officials. […]
Soon, the I.R.S. agents, from the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, were working with F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors from Manhattan who specialize in political corruption.The inquiry, like many such investigations, was a delicate one. Because the focus was a high-ranking government official, prosecutors were required to seek the approval of the United States attorney general to proceed. Once they secured that permission, the investigation moved forward.
I’m just wondering when exactly last year that permission was sought. Rove and Gonzales both resigned in August of 07 under a cloud for a plot to fire US Attorneys who refused to trump up charges of “voter fraud” and pursue cases against Democratic politicians. Mukasey was sworn in in November. Peter D. Keisler was acting attorney general during the interim. Which one ordered the investigation?
Update: Fired US Attorney David Iglesias is not sitting down and shutting up. He’s written a book, due out in June. Dahlia Lithwick discusses it here.