Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Bremer’s Baby

So, people in Baghdad have worms in their drinking water and no electricity during the worst heat of the day. If someone wants to know why they hate us, that’s a good place to start.

Over 18 months, American officials spent almost $2 billion to revive the capital ravaged by war and neglect, according to Army Gen. William G. Webster, who heads the 30,000 U.S. and foreign troops and 15,000 Iraqi soldiers known collectively as Task Force Baghdad. But the money goes for long-term projects that yield few visible results and for security to protect the construction sites from sabotage.

As a result, Iraqis have seen scant evidence of improvement in their homes, streets or neighborhoods. They blame American and Iraqi government corruption.

“We thank God that the air we breathe is not in the hands of the government. Otherwise they would have cut it off for a few hours each day,” said Nadeem Haki, 39, an electric-goods shop owner in the upscale Karrada district in the east of the capital.

Of the major completed projects in Baghdad, more than $38 million went to sewage projects, $375,000 to a water main and $101.2 million to electricity generation and transmission.

Others are in the works. More than $792 million is being invested in water, sewage and electricity projects across the capital, according to U.S. military documents.

The progress is slow and the rewards incremental. Parts of the city – such as the impoverished Shiite Muslim neighborhood Sadr City, once flooded with green rivers of sewage – now have functioning sewer systems.

“The things that go below the ground and provide enough electricity are incredibly expensive, especially when you have to pay for security for that local job site,” Webster said.

Yes. All these things are very expensive. Too bad we can’t lay our hands on the 8 Fucking Billion Dollars of the Iraqis own money that went missing under Paul Bremer’s Coalition provisional Government.

When Paul Bremer, the American pro consul in Baghdad until June last year, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports. Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) “in a transparent manner … for the benefit of the Iraqi people”.

The US Congress also voted to spend $18.4bn of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. By June 28 last year, however, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20bn of Iraqi money, compared with $300m of US funds. The “reconstruction” of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan – but the US government funded the Marshall Plan. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the “liberated” country, by the Iraqis themselves.

The CPA maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces. The US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The “financial irregularities” described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated. Truckloads of dollars were handed out for which neither they nor the recipients felt they had to be accountable.

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance “security”.

[…]

Lack of accountability does not stop with the Americans. In January this year, the Sigir issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8bn – the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 – was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and most of the ministries had no budget departments. Iraq’s newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American “advisers” looked on.

“CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results,” the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430m in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8bn has gone to pay for private militias and into private pockets.

“It’s remarkable that the inspector general’s office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies,” Bremer said in his reply to the Sigir report. “At liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA’s top priority was to get the economy going.”

The Sigir has responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer’s CPA managed cash payments from Iraqi funds in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: “During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash … of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives.” They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad “did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9m”, and that agents in the field “cannot properly account for or support over $96.6m in cash and receipts”. The agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent’s account balance was “overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected”. Another agent was given $25m cash for which Bremer’s office “acknowledged not having any supporting documentation”. Of more than $23m given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors.

Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork only hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each, which has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents’ balances of between $250,000 and $12m without any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that “this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash”, pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8m more than he had been given in the first place, which “suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable”.

I urge you to read the whole story. It was published earlier this month and fell down the memory hole. It’s simply unbelievable.

I’m sure that Bush apologists will be tempted to say that’s the price the Iraqi people had to pay for their liberation, but it’s a little bit hard to understand why they would have had to pay to line the pockets of corrupt Americans and local bigshots for the privilege. If they weren’t still dodging worms in their drinking water, they might have let it slide.

Meanwhile, we struggle at home with the fact that US taxpayers are still spending a billion dollars a week — most of it on homegrown corruption, one suspects, because the troops are still having to put sheet metal on their humvees because they don’t have the proper armor. I would guess that if there is ever a proper accounting, and there will likely never be one, that US taxpayers are being screwed more royally on this than they can possible imagine. There is no transparency and congress is ironically too afraid of being called cowardly to demand explanations.

The CPA though was a very special boondoggle, if you’ll recall. It was an experiment in Republican Party governance. They refused to allow anyone on “the team” who didn’t pass the GOP litmus test. They would not hire experts nor would they allow foreign or domestic political actors who were not deemed sufficiently loyal to Bush to help with planning and implementation. So much so that they were finally reduced to hiring kids who had posted resumes on the Heritage Foundation web-site in order to ensure ideological purity. If I recall correctly, Ari Fleischer’s brother was put in charge of setting up the new Iraqi stock market despite the fact that he knew absolutely zero about stock markets. But he had the right contacts, that’s for sure.

And, let’s not forget that all this happened because we were in such a damned hurry to “disarm” Iraq that we couldn’t take even a minute to think through how we might re-start their economy and rebuild their infrastructure in a planned and rational way. We just invaded come hell or high water and then sent in a bunch of college Republicans with planeloads of cash. This is one of the aspects of the DSM’s that hasn’t yet been properly discussed. The minutes make clear that it wasn’t that our plans just didn’t forsee the particular problems we encountered. We didn’t plan for the post war period at all.

This is a huge story for someone to truly unravel although I think it will probably take a novelist or a filmmaker to do it justice. The grand Neocon experiment turns out to be a corrupt boondoggle of unprecedented, epic proportions. Perhaps that plot is just too predictable to sell…

I can tell you one thing, though: I don’t want to hear one more goddamned self-righteous word from any Republican about the “Oil For Food” scandal. Not one.

Running On Empty

Will Marshall of the DLC has written a critique of us Michael Moore Democrats who are ruining the party with our anti-Americanism and lack of real patriotism. Don’t even bother to read it if this kind of thing pisses you off because this one’s a doozy.

There are many problems with his thesis, but this is perhaps the central thing he gets wrong:

The left’s unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, “the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism.” As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.

When Americans ponder such questions today, their frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism — a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I happen to be an American who went through 9/11 just like the conservatives and the hawkish centrists did. I don’t know who he’s talking about. We all have the same frame of reference as everyone else who has lived in our time. We live in the new reality too and we’ve come to grips with it — we simply don’t agree with their prescription for dealing with terrorism and it has nothing to do with Vietnam or patriotism.

How petty and lacking in imagination this discussion is. Apparently, all honest liberals are ex-campus radicals who went to school with Todd Gitlin and who feel “uncomfortable” with this new patriotism because their formative experience was with protest politics. Whatever. Perhaps Marshall ought to check with his boss Al From, who Rick Perlstein quotes in “The Stockticker and the Superjumbo” as saying that that his formative experience was McGovern’s loss in 1972. I think that might just be a bit more to the point.

I’m a baby boomer but I’m 48 and my formative political experience was probably Watergate, in which patriotism was shown to be a willingness to put the country above politics when the chips were down. Republicans Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater ranked as major patriots for me. Indeed, Watergate was one of those moments when I think the entire country was impressed (and surprised) by the incredible resiliency of its system of government and the integrity of men and women who rose to the occasion. To me patriotism isn’t about fighting wars, it’s about love of country.

People born in 1970 are now in their mid-30’s. Are they scarred by their parents’ youthful beliefs in “anti-patriotism?” Their formative political years were during the Reagan era, hardly a period of anti-americanism. Flag waving was a fetish.

My friends’ mother is 80 years old. She’s a child of the depression and she’s a Democrat who was adamantly against the Iraq war. It had nothing to do with Vietnam; it was because she didn’t believe in “wars of aggression.” That was the reflexive foreign policy belief of cold war liberals who learned their lessons from the two world wars. I have another friend who is 22 and was against the war in Iraq because he believes it distracts from the War on terrorism. I was against it because I gravely mistrust the neocon vision of American global hegemony and I wanted them to do the minumum possible until we could get sane people in office to assess the threat properly. We are not all singing kumbaya from the 60’s campus radical manual.

He talks about liberals (or maybe just the unbearable bi-coastal elites he describes in such loving detail) as if we are from Mars. I have no doubt that there are quite a few who really disdain the military and would be shocked to see one of their friends’ children from the elite private school choosing to join the marines instead of going to an Ivy League College as expected. But really, can we call this a particularly Democratic or liberal response? Considering the remarkable problem the military is having with recruitment, I’d have to say it’s a pretty common American response, rather than any comment on Democrats. It’s not as if Republicans are all rushing out to join up either. If it’s a lack of patriotism that’s causing that reaction I think you would have to say that most Americans are unpatriotic.

He worries that the military itself is too Republican and laments that the Democrats are not better represented. His evidence is two polls which show that the majority of officers are Republicans. Can everyone see what might be wrong with that picture?

The salient point in all this is that there are no national Democrats who are anti- military and very, very few rank and file Democrats who are anti-military. Even the hated Michael Moore shows a tremendous affinity for the grunts in his movies in which he focuses on the sacrifices of working and middle class families who are being treated terribly by the government in thanks for their sacrifice. This thing that Marshall and his DLCers see is not anti-military; it’s anti-Washington and that’s not the same thing at all.

He builds a straw man out of poll results that purport to show that most Democrats don’t want to fight the war on terrorism with the same sort of dizzying fervor he thinks is required, and calls them unpatriotic for their views. He refers to a list of foreign policy issues in which more Democrats consider outsourcing to be a bigger worry than dismantling al Qaeda.

Why is that a measure of patriotism? It’s actually surprisingly rational. The statistics would certainly show that any individual stands a greater chance of being personally affected by outsourcing than an al Qaeda terrorist attack. It’s actually kind of dumb to put al Qaeda at the top of your list of national security worries when really, it isn’t the biggest one we face — loose nukes are, and nobody gives a fuck about that.

Furthermore, it’s entirely possible that at least some Democrats realize that al Qaeda isn’t something you can just “dismantle” with a ripping good show of military might because it’s morphed into a constantly changing, moving concept, rather than a single entity you can “end.” And while terrorism is scary and we need to do all we can to protect people from it, it is not any more threatening than Leonid Bresznev potentially getting into a pissing match or losing control of his military or any other thing that could have resulted in an accidental nuclear exchange during the cold war. We lived for many years under an unimaginable threat (still do, actually) and we managed to keep our heads for the most part and not turn ourselves inside out over it. This threat of terrorism is real and it’s important, but we simply have to stop overreacting like we did with Iraq or we really are going to turn it into the existential threat these people seem to desire so fervently.

Finally, Marshall suggests that we not make such a big deal out torture.

“…the revelation that some U.S. troops aren’t saints should not come as too great a shock, at least to grownups. By dwelling obsessively on U.S. misdeeds while ignoring the far more heinous crimes of what is quite possibly the most barbaric insurgency in modern times, anti-war critics betray an anti-American bias that undercuts their credibility.”

(Yeah, it’s the liberals who are ignoring the barbaric insurgency in Iraq. And here the last I heard they were in their last throes.)

Let’s just say I’m a big believer in supporting the troops — troops like Spc. Joseph Darby, for instance, who had the courage and patriotism to stand up and say something when his fellow troopers were committing reprehensible acts — or the FBI agents who complained on the record about what they saw at Guantanamo. I will never excuse the United States using torture or abuse or holding prisoners indefinitely without due process. Never. No matter what the “barbaric insurgency” does in Iraq. And I am more than willing to throw down the gauntlet on this and say that anyone who soft peddles those things is the worst kind of anti-American there is. We’re not going to find common ground on this subject. If that kicks me out of the big tent so be it. I’m not signing on to that shit, ever.

I recognise that saying all this means that I couldn’t get elected. And for that reason there are almost no elected Democrats who do say what I’m saying. They all wave flags and shriek like old ladies every time something happens — and they back ridiculous wars, because if they don’t the chattering classes will go nuts and label them unpatriotic. But saying it doesn’t make it true. That’s inside the beltway Republican kabuki which nobody who calls himself a Democrat should ever allow himself to perform. There are legitimate reasons why we might disagree on this stuff and still take national security seriously.

Being lectured all the time by effete DC Democrats on “patriotism” because I don’t back their reflexively hawkish foreign policy is not only insulting it’s dumb. It plays into stereotypes that only serve the Republicans by turning this into a dick measuring contest when we should be turning the conversation into who can get the job done. I would submit that if anyone’s been traumatized by the Vietnam experience it’s the tired Democratic national security hawks who are always rushing to support military action, no matter how insanely counterproductive, because some Republican somewhere might call him a pussy. They’ve been around since the 60’s too. Hell, they’ve been around forever.

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“Never Tell Anybody Outside The Family What You’re Thinking Again”

This Alberto Gonzales 12 hour gap is quite interesting, but I’m sure that we all also remember that Gonzales also later reviewed every document that was produced and vetted it before it was released to the Justice Department — the Justice Department run by John Ashcroft who didn’t bother to recuse himself until three months later. Let’s just say there were many opportunities for documents to have gone astray in this process.

As I was perusing old articles about the document production, I also realized that none of the top administration aides bothered to lawyer up in the early days when they were talking to the FBI. One could assume that they were confident they’d done nothing wrong, but it strikes me that these guys may have thought it was in the bag. They had old “Let The Ego Soar” Ashcroft at justice and Alberto the torturer handling any incriminating documents.

And while one might have expected the president to say that he knew the truth would be revealed because he expected his staff to be forthcoming with the authorities, instead we got this:

“I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers,” he said. “You tell me: How many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or had been exposed? Probably none. I mean, this town is a town full of people who like to leak information.”

We always knew that somebody leaked this to Bob Novak. And unless Novak was lying, it was two senior white house officials. But the president of the United States said quite candidly that he didn’t think we would ever know the truth unless reporters burned their sources. He certainly didn’t seem to expect the “senior white house official” sources to come forward, did he?

With the benefit of hindsight, that sounds like the president of the United States was reminding the press corpse to keep its collective trap shut, doesn’t it? (Are you listening Judy?)

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Tripping Them Up

Josh Marshall points out today that Senator Pat Roberts (R- Partisan Tool) has decided that the congress must waste no time holding hearings on whether the CIA is properly protecting its covert agents. After all, if Karl Rove and Scooter Libby can find out who they are, how safe can they be?

The only other possibility — one which I’ve referred to jokingly in the past — is to argue that she wasn’t covert enough. That is to say, maybe she was covert to the CIA. But she really wasn’t covert up to the standards of say, Bill Safire or Tucker Carlson or Bill O’Reilly.

And this, understand, is the premise of the new Roberts’ hearings. Was she really covert enough? And does the CIA really know how to define ‘covert’. Asked about a bankrobber caught red-handed outside the bank, Sen. Roberts response would be to say, “But how much real claim did the bank have to that money? Did they really earn it? And what did they do to protect it?”

Roberts is one of the more reprehensible hacks in the GOP caucus and that’s saying something. That he’s chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is frankly scary. His little addendum to the SSCI report on Iraq pre-war intelligence is one of the most amazing examples of partisan smearing we’ve ever seen coming from a committee that is usually held up as the model of bi-partisan seriousness.

But his appearance on CNN yesterday had him dancing like he was challenging Ricky Martin to a samba contest. And, unfortunately, my senator, Dianne Feinstein made little effort to trip him up.

BLITZER: How big of a deal in your assessment is the fact that the CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak of that covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame? Is this a big deal in your opinion, releasing the identity of an undercover CIA officer?

ROBERTS: Why yes, it is a big deal. And in the Intelligence Committee, we’re going to go into quite a series of hearings in regards to cover. You cannot be in the business of outing somebody, if that’s the proper word.

BLITZER: I ask the question because some are suggesting she really wasn’t undercover any more. She had been working at the CIA in nonproliferation. She really wasn’t a technical…

ROBERTS: There’s a five-year period, OK? And whether or not that five-year period had been reached or not is still questionable. And I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don’t know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert.

But generically speaking, it is a very serious matter although it obviously dovetails now into the issue of the day in regards to Karl Rove and the First Amendment, and all of that.

BLITZER: The fact that the CIA asked for this criminal investigation, this probe into who leaked her name to Bob Novak, what does that say to you, Senator Feinstein?

FEINSTEIN: Well, it says to me that the CIA values this as extraordinarily important. If they can’t protect their agents, they can’t survive as an agency. And I’ve been distressed to even see in the newspapers, I believe this morning, about what some of the undercover placements were, listing them rather generically.

BLITZER: Have you been briefed, has the committee been briefed by the CIA about the potential damage that has been done, if any lives have been endangered, her contacts, undercover spies, if you will, as a result of her name being made public?

FEINSTEIN: I have not been briefed.

BLITZER: Have you been briefed on that?

ROBERTS: We are going to have those hearings, or those briefings, pardon.

BLITZER: But have you received a preliminary assessment of damage? Because usually when someone has been exposed like this, they do a damage assessment.

ROBERTS: I’ll tell you what we have done in the 511 page document that we’ve released from the WMD report: We went into considerable detail in regards to the veracity of Admiral Wilson’s testimony.

BLITZER: Ambassador Wilson.

ROBERTS: Pardon me. Admiral. All of a sudden, I’ve got him in a different, you know category. But the ambassador. And I’m just going to be very blunt about it. I don’t think the White House had any need to discredit him. He discredited himself. He was all over the lot.

Now, I’m not going to say anymore about that because that’s one issue.

I want to know basically who assigned him and what role she played. And then obviously we want to find out exactly what happened in regards to her covert status.

Now, we’re going to have to wait on that in regards to the special prosecutor. But overall, Dianne is exactly right. If we’re in the business now where somehow, through some means, a covert officer working in the CIA, if that becomes public, that just can not happen. And so that is why the committee is going to be so aggressive in really taking a look at it.

BLITZER: Should the president’s top political adviser, the deputy White House chief of staff, Karl Rove, who has now apparently, according to sources close to him, acknowledged speaking to reporters about Valerie Plame Wilson, should his security clearances, based on what you know, Senator Feinstein, be revoked?

FEINSTEIN: Well, based on what I know, I think yes for the time being. I think you have to look at this: Who had opportunity, who had means, and who had motive? And if you look at those three things, you see the White House somewhere, some way figures into it.

Now, the details and the precise statements are being analyzed by the prosecutor, very well-regarded Mr. Fitzgerald. It’s going to be very interesting to see what he comes up with. But in the meantime, I mean, you have somebody that quite possibly either corroborated or volunteered information that shouldn’t be in the public sector.

BLITZER: Let’s talk about the new Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts.

ROBERTS: I had another comment by the way, but…

FEINSTEIN: I figured you would.

BLITZER: Well, go ahead. Briefly comment and then we’ll move on to John Roberts.

ROBERTS: Well, I think you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. And I think we ought to wait on the special prosecutor. If you go down a laundry list of leaks in this town as to who was involved and who wasn’t, you’d probably have 10 or 12 people, and some of them are in the CIA. And there’s been leaks from the CIA.

You know, in this town, when there is a leak, nobody gets wet until there is a leak. And right now we’re about up to here on this particular issue. So let’s wait on the facts.

Roberts refused to say if he’d been given a damage assessment, which is kind of interesting. But, he’s just a blunt tool, not a very sharp one, so it could be that he was just rushing to the next talking point. But he was all over the map with that little exchange, ending with the “everybody leaks classified information so what’s the big deal” excuse.

Dianne said that Rove should probably have his security clearance revoked for the time being and that the white house had the means and the motive to leak Plame’s name. Well, doesn’t that just blow the lid off this thing? As if we don’t know that the white house was involved ferchirstsake. She wasn’t well prepared, as usual.

She and all the Democrats should be trying to tie these guys up in knots with the obvious contradiction that the tough-guy national security Republicans have been caught red-handed being loosy-goosy with classified information for political reasons. They should always bring up the president. This isn’t too difficult to do.

Imagine if Feinstein had said in reponse to Wolf’s question about revoking Rove’s security clearance, “Well, Wolf, it is well established already that Karl Rove was involved in leaking Valerie Plame’s identity to the press. His lawyer admitted just this week that he was one of Robert Novak’s two sources. I have every faith that the special prosecutor will find out if there is evidence that he or anyone else broke the law by doing this. But I think that even Pat here would have to admit that regardless of whether it was legal or illegal, Karl Rove and others in the White House have shown an appalling lack of judgment. As the man in charge, the president has a responsibility for the actions of his staff. He should have called Karl Rove into his office and demanded an explanation and withdrawn his security clearance the minute it was found that he was involved in this. Breaking the law isn’t the issue here, Wolf. This is about national security. We’re at war. The president shouldn’t be playing politics with this stuff.”

It would be helpful to show Bush as being either impotent to deal with Karl Rove, or covering for him, because it is imperative for Democrats over the long haul to begin to show the Republicans as being unable to deal responsibly with national security. If you look at what Roberts was saying it was basically, “Joe Wilson is a liar and his wife worked in Washington and anyway everybody leaks.” Hardly the stuff of a macho “never complain, never explain” warrior, is it? This is an opportunity for Democrats to change the long standing narrative that the Republicans have built up about their national security prowess. If the Commander in Chief can’t even call his own staff on the carpet when they screw up, then how tough is he?

This is the second time in 25 years that we’ve had a two term GOP president who has to be portrayed as dumb, distanced and out-of-it in order to cover for his staff running amuck. They’re always out of the loop, aren’t they? Never quite in charge when the bad shit happens, only the good. It’s time for the Democrats to start tying this into a bigger narrative about national security. These tough guys, these people who are going to keep us safe, seem to continually elect presidents who are cluelss about what’s going on around them. Or, at least, that’s what they are always forced to use as an excuse when they fuck up.

It takes time to build new storylines. Even if this one isn’t very good, we really need get started on something. And that means that Democrats have to agree among themselves on a basic framework of criticism for Republican national security policy and practice. They need to internalize it so that when a guy like Roberts starts blathering, they can respond with vigor and authority without having to think too much about it. Vague, off-point pablum like Feinstein’s is exacerbating our problem. We look weak because we won’t confront a blowhard like Roberts. And we are weak because we refuse to take every opportunity to show the American people that the Republicans are screw-ups on national security. That last should actually be pretty easy, because it patently true.

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Second Track

Meanwhile, a parallel investigation is under way into who forged the Niger documents. They are known to have been passed to an Italian journalist by a former Italian defence intelligence officer, Rocco Martino, in October 2002, but their origins have remained a mystery. Mr Martino has insisted to the Italian press that he was “a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me”, but has not specified who that might be.

A source familiar with the inquiry said investigators were examining whether former US intelligence agents may have been involved in possible collaboration with Iraqi exiles determined to prove that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear programme.

Well now. That would be something, wouldn’t it?

Josh Marshall, who was once hot on the trail of this forgery story, wrote this a couple of weeks ago, the night O’Donnell revealed Rove’s name on the McLaughlin report:

One other note along these lines.

I’ve gotten hints or suggestions from several sources over the last month that new information is bubbling to the surface, not about who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, but who was behind the underlying caper that started the whole drama afoot in the first place: those phoney Niger uranium documents.

As longtime readers of this site know, last year colleagues of mine and I were able to trace the documents back to a former Italian intelligence agent named Rocco Martino. Martino was the ‘Italian businessman’ who tried to sell the documents to Elizabetta Burba, the journalist who eventually brought them to the US Embassy in Rome.

We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino’s hands by a then-serving member of SISMI — Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.

This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.

Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.

Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?

This story and Plame ar running on different tracks, but they come to the same station eventually. And, once again, the spectre of Judith Miller hangs over it — she’s the Zelig of the iraq operation.

I don’t have enough information to speculate about this, but I think it is significant that information is leaking out about this case as well. It’s hard to know whether it’s because people are fed up or because the white house is weak or some combination of both. But the veil is lifting on this administration’s shenanigans, for sure. It’s going to be a very interesting time.

Here’s the immediate political result for Dear Leader:

Across the board, those stellar character ratings which supposedly meant Bush could weather any political storm have become mediocre to poor. And he’s lost the most ground among independents, only 38 percent of whom now believe Bush is trustworthy or cares about people like them. Even more amazing, less than half (48 percent) of indepedents now think Bush is a strong leader, which is a massive 24 point decline since Pew’s previous measurement.

And how about this: in February of this year, the two leading one word description of Bush were “honest” and “good”, cited by 38 percent and 20 percent of the public, respectively. Today, honest has declined to 31 percent, closely followed by “incompetent” (26 percent, up from 14 percent) and “arrogant” (24 percent, up from 15 percent).

Reality bites.

Update: Just to be clear, what’s new about the Guardian story isn’t that the FBI suspects Iraqi exiles of being involved, it the part about retired US intelligence being involved that I was unaware of.

Seymour Hersh has speculated that it was a sort of reverse sting by appalled ex-CIA operatives, but this would indicate a less byzantine explanation. People with common interests helping each other out.

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Waivering

Via Atrios I see that Steve Clemens has it on good authority that John Bolton is known to be a regular source for Judith Miller, although we don’t know if he was her source on this.

We know that whoever spoke with Miller waived his or her confidentiality. Does anyone know who all signed waivers?

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Too Tired To Be Outraged

This is just sad:

This morning the Wall Street Journal reported that Senate Democrats were planning “to grill Bush confidant Karen Hughes” about her involvement in the ever widening leak-case. But, Senate Democrats must have gotten lost on the way to the hearing. Not one showed up. Instead, according to the Associated Press:

“A scaled-back Senate Foreign Relations Committee showered praise Friday on Karen Hughes and put the former political adviser to President Bush on a fast track to confirmation as the State Department’s top public relations official.”

The absence of the Democrats is even more glaring considering just today the New York Times reported that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald called Karen Hughes before the grand jury to testify as to her involvement in the leak-case. Of course, this begs the obvious question: Karen Hughes, did you have a role in leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent?

Instead of any substantive questions, the Democrats simply didn’t show up. But we did get this statement from ranking minority member Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):

“Mr. Chairman, I regret that previous commitments prevent me from attending the confirmation hearing this morning.

I am particularly interested in and supportive of the nomination of Karen Hughes to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. What this job requires, among other things, is continuity. The last two undersecretaries have stayed six and 18 months, respectively.

I met with the nominee yesterday and understand that, barring unforeseen circumstances, she is willing to stay through the president’s term.

I believe that she is highly qualified because of her professional background, and, importantly, enjoys the full confidence of the president and the secretary of state…

Well, that’s awfully friendly of him. No need to provide the evening news or the Sunday news shows with footage of Karen Hughes being grilled about getting called before the grand jury in the Plame case. That would be what Republicans would do in our situation and that wouldn’t be nice at all.

Think Progress has a list of questions the Democrats might have asked if they could have gotten it up to attend the meeting. I assume they were too busy with their preparations to lionize John Roberts and didn’t have the time.

We just don’t have the killer instinct. They do. So they win and we lose. I guess we have to wait for total economic armageddon or nuclear meltdown in which case we will win by default.

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Executive Infallibility

It would appear that the president is sticking to his belief that he has the sole right to order torture, hold people indefinitely and secretly and make up the rules as he goes along. To hell with the congress. It doesn’t matter what Senator John McCain, former torture victim and POW says; it doesn’t matter what Senator Lindsey Graham, former JAG lawyer says; and it doesn’t matter what Senator John Warner,former Secretary of the Navy says. (I won’t even mention that “elections have consequences” and Democrats are supposed to STFU for the duration.)No one has any right to tell the president nothin’ bout prisoners in a time ‘o unending, ever-present war. And they have no right to ask any questions about it either.

The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year’s defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.

The Bush administration, under fire for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and questions over whether its policies led to horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, put lawmakers on notice it did not want them legislating on the matter.

In a statement, the White House said such amendments would “interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war.”

“If legislation is presented that would restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice,” the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said after meeting at the Capitol with Vice President Dick Cheney that he still intended to offer amendments next week “on the standard of treatment of prisoners.”

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was working on legislation defining the legal status of enemy combatants being held in Guantanamo, also said he would offer an amendment.

They were working with Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia on amendments intended to prevent further abuses in the wake of the scandal over sexual abuse and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and harsh, degrading interrogations at Guantanamo.

And just look at what these unAmerican, commie bastards are trying to do:

Possible measures included barring the holding of “ghost” detainees whose names are not disclosed, codifying a ban against cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and using the Army manual as a basis for all interrogations.

Really, what business is this of the congress anyway? Who do they think they are — elected representatives of the people?

It would be very nice to see the president veto the defense bill over this but, needless to say, it will not happen. But someday, if the country survives this wretched radical era, people will look back on this with particular disgust, not just because the president of the United States openly seeks to preserve his right to torture (which is stomach churning) but also the total abdication of responsibility by the Republican congress.

And people say the Democrats are the chickenshits. Another big lie. Nobody, but nobody, is more gutless than a congressional Republican cowering at the feet of the flatulent Rove and his little dog George.

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Leaking Briefs

Talk Left has an excellent primer on how to figure out who’s doing the leaking.

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Overlooking The Obvious

In this week’s editorial The New Republic discusses the rightwing push back on Rovegate. They complain that the emphasis on Rove obscures the more important story of Iraq lies. I submit that without Rovegate, there would be no coverage of the Iraq lies at all, so we should not knock the hook that gives us the opportunity to talk about the bigger picture.

The editorial brings up something else, however, that I think is quite important. It mentions the single most important weapon in our arsenal when arguing about the bigger picture surrounding Wilson’s trip:

As that investigation has spilled onto the front pages in the last few weeks, supporters of the administration have picked up where they left off two years ago, saying that Wilson was unqualified for the Niger investigation and declaring that his credibility is in tatters. It’s true that Wilson has made himself an easy target for such accusations by posing with his wife for Vanity Fair magazine and taking a very public role advising the Kerry campaign last fall. But the most serious charge that Wilson’s critics level against him is the allegation that he was wrong in his assessment of Iraq’s dealing with Niger. Supporters of Rove have revived this accusation in an effort to claim that, when Rove spoke to reporters about Plame, he wasn’t trying to disparage Wilson so much as warn them off a “bad story.” But what, exactly, was “bad” about Wilson’s story?

Both the national security adviser and the CIA director at the time (Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, respectively) issued public apologies for the Niger claim, admitting it was unsubstantiated. And the most authoritative report on the matter comes from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which spent a year combing the Iraqi countryside for alleged weapons of mass destruction. Its conclusion: “ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material.”

Because of all the deliberate obfuscation coming from the Rove machine, this central piece of evidence has not been discussed nearly enough. Ivo Daalder on TPM cafe brought this up some time ago, but it’s worth repeating: Wilson’s conclusions have been born out by the Iraq Survey Group, who spent a year inside Iraq, looking at all the records and speaking to the parties. There is no point in speculating about meetings in 1999 or the Butler Report or any other reports that testify to evidence that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. The fact is that it didn’t. Period. End of story. The non-believers were right, the true-believers were wrong, whatever their motives.

It’s two years later, we have a definitive report from the ISG, and people are still saying that Wilson was a flake, he was sent by his wife, he was trying to set up the Republicans, whatever. In a normal world, that fact that Wilson’s conclusions (along with others) were correct would have some salience in this argument — particularly since the Reublicans are basing theirs on the the mistaken premise that Wilson’s credibility is in question when quite clearly, he was right.

Rick Perlstein relayed in the comments of one of my other posts a comment from a right wing correspondent of his who said of Plame: “she was part of a CIA attempt to discredit the elected government. She should be swinging from a lamp post.” And yet, there was no uranium deal. There were no WMD. This comment therefore means that naysayers (in and out of the CIA, presumably) were trying to discredit the elected government with the truth.

It’s enormously frustrating to argue with people who have so little intellectual integrity, but that’s the way it is. They continue to dig themselves in on this point — even as the huge elephant holding a sign that says “there were no WMD in Iraq” is sitting in the middle of the room, mocking them.

But over time, through all the bickering and small bore detail and gossip, that elephant comes more and more into focus for average Americans. And it lays the groundwork for a scathing Democratic critique of Republican foreign policy for the first time in many years if we can just find the nerve to claim it. The Republicans are going to have Iraq hung around their necks like a burning rubber tire for a long time to come, as they should.

When you strip all the fulminating away, the Republican argument for the massive failure in both concept and execution of Iraq is that they didn’t do it on purpose — they just screwed up. That’s the same excuse Karl Rove is using, as well, and it’s no surprise. At this point, it’s realistically their best case scenario. Would you want to run on that record?

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