Israel almost certainly knows the location of some of the critical nodes in the Iranian program that it must hit if it is to set the Iranian effort back by several years. It also possesses the technology to assure that its bombs will fall close to or on their targets. But would such a strike succeed?

I look at one critical obstacle — just click on the link to read what I have to say –  in the latest Weekly Standard. 

RESOLVED: That in a free society the people need to know what their government is doing, so the media should have discretion in deciding whether or not to publish “leaked” classified national security information.

Pincus made the affirmative case and I was supposed to make the negative one. But I didn’t. As I wrote here:

I also favor the proposition. If that is how the issue is framed, there won’t be much debate. Given the huge amount of material the government classifies but which it shouldn’t classify, it would be hard to argue otherwise. Here, for example, is a link to a recently declassified photograph of a handgun. Why it was classified in the first place is a mystery. If Walter Pincus has published this picture, back when it was stamped secret, on the front page of his newspaper, I would not have been troubled in the least.

But that said, I also believe — and here is where I imagine I will part company with Pincus – that if the press is to enjoy discretion in this area, prosecutors should also enjoy discretion of their own.

They should remain free to investigate damaging leaks by subpoenaing journalists and compelling them, under pain of contempt citations, to disgorge their confidential sources. On some rarer occasions, when the press itself violates statutes governing the publication of classified information, journalists themselves should be vulnerable to prosecution.

In response to this line of argument, I received a thoughtful comment from Lawrence Kramer who wrote:

I don’t believe it is ever right to enact legislation under which an act “may” be criminal. Prosecutorial discretion refers to the prosecutor’s husbanding of resources — to declining to prosecute what is clearly illegal where there is no public interest to be served (e.g., the office superbowl pool); it does not refer to a discretion to decide whether an act is a crime. Yes, the prosecutor is charged with determining whether an act is a crime, but it is not something about which he has discretion. The law says whether the act is a crime; the prosecutor then must decide in his discretion whether to prosecute it. You are advocating a law under which the prosecutor decides whether a crime has been committed in the first place. I believe such a situation might fairly be called a “government of men.”

I’m not suggesting I have a solution to the excesses of a free press, only that you don’t have one either.

I am not sure that Mr. Kramer and I disagree about anything here, although perhaps he will see a point of discord. Some of the relevant statutes are quite vague, especially the Espionage Act of 1917. This law does not punish the unauthorized disclosure of “classified” information. Rather, it enjoins the unauthorized disclosure of “national defense information” (NDI). This distinction gives the press a great deal of latitude. In any given case, journalists can argue that information it has published is not NDI, and has been improperly classified by the government. Such improper classification happens frequently, and it is easy to dig up examples of information that is not NDI and improperly classified “confidential” or “secret.”

Thus, inevitably, the press does have discretion to publish when its comes upon classified information. That has certainly become the common practice in American journalism. Given that the classification system is so haphazard, it would be difficult to alter the practice without radically altering the entire scheme under which information is deemed secret by the government.

But since we are faced with a press that is not only eager to publish classified information, but classified information about highly sensitive and operational counterterrorism programs, some remedy is needed. And that is where prosecutorial discretion comes in. Not every leak of classified information is damaging. But some of those that are damaging could be prosecuted under existing law.

Here in New York City, the police typically do not go after jay-walkers. But a jay-walker trying to cross high-speed traffic on the Long Island Expressway, endangering motorists and himself alike, deserves to be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  And indeed, not only deserves to be arrested, but in all likelihood would be arrested by the NYPD.

A similar fate should await high-speed publishers of leaked NDI, like James Risen of the New York Times.

More than 6 1/2 years after devastating suicide attacks against the United States launched the Bush administration’s fight against global terrorism, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot is scheduled to appear in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom tomorrow morning.

In the current issue of COMMENTARY, I have an article entitled In the Matter of George W. Bush v. the Constitution, which takes up, as part of a more extended discussion of the legal knots in which we have tied ourselves, the issue of military commissions. Drawing on Jack Goldsmith’s brilliant book, The Terror Presidency, I made a comparison to our practices in this area during World War II.

They were very different, to say the least.

In June 1942, eight Nazi saboteurs were captured in the United States; one of them was an American citizen. The group had plans to blow up defense plants and other national infrastructure, along with Jewish-owned department stores. President Roosevelt demanded of Francis Biddle, his attorney general, that the men be tried by a military commission. Although Biddle had reservations about whether the law would permit this, FDR swept such scruples aside. In short order, a commission was established that had “no written procedures,” operated in total secrecy, and was not based upon law. The Supreme Court took up a habeas-corpus plea from the saboteurs but then beat a hasty retreat in the face of threats from the White House. In the end, the military commission pronounced a death sentence on six of the eight. A week later, to the approbation of the public as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post, they went to the electric chair. All this happened in the course of a mere six weeks after their capture.

Compare such proceedings with the ongoing effort since 9/11 to establish military commissions for prisoners in Guantanamo. With the executive branch curtailed, that effort is now dragging into its seventh year with no end in sight. It involves men charged with crimes outstripping anything done by the hapless German saboteurs who had managed only to wander around Manhattan and Chicago, spending $612 of the $174,588 they had brought with them. The fact that captured al-Qaeda terrorists are today being represented by blue-chip law firms and are using the federal courts to challenge every aspect of the government’s case offers a glimpse of how radically the cultural landscape has changed.

In striking contrast to its stance toward the same issue today, the New York Times editorialized back then that the military commission

was lawfully constituted; and that no cause was shown for the discharge of the prisoners by writ of habeas corpus. . . . The statements made by prosecution and defense counsel made it clear that the accused were members of the German army; that whether or not they landed in a war zone, they came through one to get ashore; and that they went behind our lines wearing civilian clothing. The fact that there were eight of them instead of 800,000 made them no less invaders, subject if captured to military law. The fact that they were not in uniform exposed them to the military penalty of death. In light of what we now know all this is common sense.

How things have changed. Common sense seems to have gone the way of the Edsel.

RESOLVED: That in a free society the people need to know what their government is doing, so the media should have discretion in deciding whether or not to publish “leaked” classified national security information.

Pincus will be making the case for the proposition, and I am supposed to make the case against. I hope that Pincus does not read my blog, because I am going to tip my hand here with a surprising admission.

I also favor the proposition. If that is how the issue is framed, there won’t be much debate. Given the huge amount of material the government classifies but which it shouldn’t classify, it would be hard to argue otherwise. Here, for example, is a link to a recently declassified photograph of a handgun. Why it was classified in the first place is a mystery. If Walter Pincus has published this picture, back when it was stamped secret, on the front page of his newspaper, I would not have been troubled in the least.

But that said, I also believe — and here is where I imagine I will part company with Pincus — that if the press is to enjoy discretion in this area, prosecutors should also enjoy discretion of their own.

They should remain free to investigate damaging leaks by subpoenaing journalists and compelling them, under pain of contempt citations, to disgorge their confidential sources. On some rarer occasions, when the press itself violates statutes governing the publication of classified information, journalists themselves should be vulnerable to prosecution.

I have made this case in COMMENTARY and in a series of articles (here and here and here and here) in the Weekly Standard. I hope Pincus hasn’t read any of these so I can ambush him with the arsenal of arguments I’ve been accumulating.

Here we are two years later and we see a short item  – together with a chart — in today’s Post by Tom Ricks that shows some numbers that also, as the author says, “pretty much speak for themselves.

The chart shows

a major improvement in the safety of driving around Iraq with the U.S. Army. In January 2007, about 1 in 5 convoys in Iraq was attacked. By the end of last year, that ratio had fallen to 1 in 33. By April, it was just 1 in 100.

One reason the attacks have declined is that many Sunni insurgents have switched sides and are now on the U.S. payroll, in local militias that U.S. officials call the “Sons of Iraq.” Another is that al-Qaeda in Iraq has come under severe and prolonged attack over the last 12 months, with many of its leaders killed or captured. Finally, the redeployment of U.S. troops out into the Iraqi population, along with a rise in the quality of Iraqi forces, has helped produce better intelligence on the people carrying out roadside bombings.

Let’s hope that this particular “fiasco” continues.

Is the CIA now crying sheep about al Qaeda? In an interview with the Washington Post, CIA Director Michael Hayden sketches a series of triumphs in the global war on terrorism:

Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally — and here I’m going to use the word “ideologically” — as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.

Before we uncork the champagne, let’s recall that it was less than a year ago that U.S. intelligence estimated that al Qaeda

is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership. Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al-Qaeda senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al-Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here.

As a result, we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment.

Let’s also recall that in January 2007, John Negroponte, then Director of National Intelligence, offered a wolf-like assessment of Iran:

Our assessment is that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons. It is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations than reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution.

In December of that year, the same office, now led by Mike McConnell, issued a National Intelligence Estimate was crying sheep:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.

And of course, the shadow hanging over all U.S. intelligence assessments is the botched 2003 estimate that Iraq had an active WMD program. But in this instance the wolf turned out to be a sheep.

Restoring the credibility of U.S. intelligence is an urgent task. What is the point of having intelligence agencies if we cannot even place a modicum of trust in their words?

But how should they go about the task? Ultimately, there is only one approach that will work: get rid of the clowns and start getting things right.

Fortunately, the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity (ODMEO) in the Defense Department has commissioned the RAND corporation to devise an outstanding plan to meet the multiplying dangers:

First and foremost, we recommend that the strategic planning process be top-down rather than bottom-up; whether DoD adopts a diversity strategic plan (either through ODMEO or as the entire organization) or a strategic plan that fully incorporates diversity into the core mission of DoD, its success depends on the leadership’s ability to champion the effort, monitor its progress, and follow through on accountability measures. The personal involvement of the Secretary of Defense provides a clear signal to the workforce that managing diversity and ensuring that it is a core value of the department is a top priority.

This involvement is essential to bring about the institutional changes necessary to achieve greater diversity. The Secretary should do more than issue a diversity statement and occasionally refer to diversity in speeches and press conferences. We recommend that the Secretary personally lead an oversight committee that approves and monitors the progress of diversity initiatives. As such, we recommend that DoD form an oversight committee of top DoD leaders from a wide range of personal and professional/functional backgrounds (e.g., intelligence, combat arms, Joint Chiefs of Staff) to oversee the development of the strategic plan and its implementation, providing both insights from their vast experience and inputs from their functional communities. More importantly, the members of the committee will become the public faces of the department’s diversity-related efforts. Therefore, we strongly recommend that the committee be equipped with adequate resources to carry out its mission.

While the Global War on Terror (GWOT) exacts heavy demands on the leadership, diversity has potentially great implications for both DoD’s present and future force readiness, which in turn will affect the safety and security of U.S. interests.  

PRESIDENT CARTER:  …Regarding the details, I am still an engineer by thought.  You know, when I run my farm or when I run the Carter Center, I want to know what is going on.  When I took on the personal responsibility, say for the Mideast peace process, I really believed that when we went to Camp David I knew more about the details than anybody there.  I had mastered the psychological and historical analysis of Begin and Sadat.  I knew everything they had done since they were born that was recorded, how they had reacted to crisis, how they dealt with pressure, who their allies were, and what their obligations were.  So when we got to Camp David, I knew them, and I knew the map of the West Bank and Gaza.

…I did basically the same thing with the Alaska Lands bill.  I knew the map of Alaska in great detail.

I read a lot.  I would say I read an average of 300 pages a day.  That is just something that I quantified years ago, so I am just not talking casually.  I took a speed-reading course.  I did, and about fifty other people did, from Evelyn Wood in the Cabinet Room within the first two months of my term.  So I could read a lot….

GE:  Another aspect of decision making, and another challenge for a president, is to get his advisors to tell him what he needs to hear as opposed to what they think he wants to hear. …How did you make sure that you heard the full range of options?…

PRESIDENT CARTER:   …we had regular cabinet meetings…. We would go around the entire table, and I would encourage each secretary to tell me the most important things that affected their departments that we needed to discuss. …If the issue was complex and they required more than two or three minutes of exposition, I encouraged them to put it in writing and submit it to me.  Those papers always came to me, and I relished the concise nature of their presentation.  It required them to get their thoughts in order, and I was very much a stickler for not splitting infinitives and so forth.

And all those papers are in the presidential library now.  I think the scholars that have been over to the presidential library to look at my notes have been impressed, I started to say overwhelmed, with the meticulous detail with which I would answer sometimes each paragraph in a complex proposal — I approve this, I do not approve this, see me about this, or explain this, and so forth.

Confused? Here is Donald Kerr,  Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, explaining the paradox on May 16 at the Second Intelligence Community Heritage Summit.

In this work there are countless stories about the importance of diversity. There’s one I recently learned from an FBI intelligence analyst who had worked on Saddam Hussein’s debriefing team in Iraq. While Saddam was being interviewed, a key component of the strategy was to keep him isolated from people outside of the FBI agencies who were questioning him, but he was fluent in several languages. Not deeply so, but sufficiently, and the interviewers needed to find guards who could speak a language that he wouldn’t understand. It turned out to be really difficult. He knew bits of Spanish, but not the rapid fire Spanish of Puerto Rico. So Puerto Rican speakers would really flummox him, they certainly do me. And that’s what the FBI settled on for his guards. U.S. military members who were native Puerto Ricans in terms of the Spanish that they spoke.

So the importance of diversity comes up in even the most unexpected circumstances.

In this global conflict, this struggle with violent extremism, the clarion call for diversity, diversity of experience, of culture, of interest, has to be our call to action.

Kerr revealed some other sensitive secrets in his talk. Among them is a new danger.

We have to watch our words. . . .We have to avoid words like jihadist, mujahedeen. We have to be clear. It’s not just political correctness, it’s to avoid legitimizing the action of terrorists.

Our spies have recently made some other new discoveries. Here’s an amazing one. CIA analysts have been working the problem for years, and here’s what they found: there’s a big country near Japan, and like the United States, it is also “diverse.”

We need to understand China, not as a vast assemblage of 1.3 billion people, but to recognize that there are differences in different parts of China. We know there are different languages, different dialects and different cultures. That’s part of what we need to understand as well.

Is Kerr’s speech the final straw? Is it time to abolish the intelligence community and start from scratch?

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Lowenthal candidly admitted that the “U.S. intelligence community has failed” both as “a public institution and as a profession.” But the failure, in his eyes, does not reside in either inability to intercept the 9/11 plot or the erroneous assessment of Iraq weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

September 11, Lowenthal argues, was not something that could have been forestalled by intelligence:

No one has yet revealed the one or two or 10 things that, had they been done differently, might have prevented the attacks. In my view, and in the view of many of my colleagues, even the missed “operational opportunities” identified by the 9/11 Commission would have done little more than force al-Qaeda to send different terrorists into the United States, especially considering the legal rules in play at the time. Even if every “dot” had been connected, they would not have led to the tactical intelligence needed to stop those four planes on that Tuesday morning.

I am not fully persuaded, but, for the sake of argument, let’s grant Lowenthal the point. He makes a similar observation about the botched 2003 WMD National Intelligence Estimate. Even if the tradecraft in producing that NIE had not been so shoddy, the result, he contends, might well have been the same:

it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to envision an NIE based on good intelligence that would have come up with the correct answer. The best my fellow analysts could have done, I think, would have been to offer three analytical options: Saddam Hussein has WMD; he does not have WMD; or we simply do not know. And of course, given his track record of gassing Kurds, attacking neighbors and resisting U.N. weapons inspections, the most likely of the three still would have been that he had WMD. But analytical responses that cover the waterfront of possibilities are not seen as very useful to policymakers, for obvious reasons. Moreover, even if we had concluded that we just didn’t know what Iraq had, Bush would have probably favored going to war anyway, and Congress would have gone along, largely out of political expediency.

This is more persuasive. But if these two alleged failures were not really failures at all, why then is Lowenthal so down on U.S. intelligence? His answer:

We failed because we have not explained ourselves adequately and comprehensibly to the public — describing our role, the limits within which we work and our view of what can be reasonably expected from us. We have failed because we have allowed ourselves to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us — or simply see us as convenient fall guys.

This is preposterous. Lowenthal is undoubtedly right that the public is ill informed about what can reasonably be expected from intelligence in view of the insuperable challenges it continually faces. I have made a similar observation in The CIA Follies (Cont’d.) in COMMENTARY. But the idea that intelligence officials have allowed themselves “to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us — or simply see us as convenient fall guys” does not hold up.

I would point Lowenthal to the 2005 declassified summary of the Inspector General’s report on the CIA’s counterterrorism branch,  including its al-Qaeda unit run by Michael Scheuer. Perhaps the CIA could not have stopped the 9/11 plot no matter what it did. But the managerial and analytical ineptitude on display in that critical unit is staggering.  

I would point him to the decision to put Richard Immerman, an anti-war activist professor, in charge of analytical standards and integrity in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I would point him to the tendentious declassified summary of the December 2007 NIE on Iran.

I would point him to the endless leaks from the intelligence community designed to undercut the policies of the administration it is tasked with serving. The intelligence community has not been vilified; rather, elements in it have been villainous and the entire operation has been paying the price. One doesn’t need to be a Jeopardy grand champion to understand that.

DHS’s traffic-light warning system is easy to mock, especially by New Yorkers like me who routinely expect traffic delays and, thanks to the vagaries of the subway system, are constantly compelled to practice alternate routes to work–whether we want to or not. 

But what about the DHS itself? In 2003, in the aftermath of the worst attack on our country in its history, the establishment of the agency was the centerpiece of the biggest reorganization of government since the New Deal. Five years later, how is it faring? By the most important measure, it is faring very well indeed. Against all expectations, the United States has not been struck again since September 11. The homeland appears to be secure.

But is that the work of the DHS or the FBI and CIA or the U.S. Army, or dumb luck, or a combination of all of the above? It is impossible to know. What is possible to know is that DHS is plagued by a number of severe problems. It ranks last or next-to-last in the U.S. government’s survey of Best Places to Work survey. In addition to “serious morale” issues–a GAO finding–some of the ailments of the previous fractured system of homeland protection are re-emerging, and some new ills are cropping up as well.

In creating the DHS, President Bush declared that “the changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” His idea was to reconfigure “the current confusing patchwork of government activities into a single department whose primary mission is to protect our homeland.” That seemed reasonable enough in theory, promising efficiencies of all sorts in agencies with complementary and overlapping missions.

But it also promised to be extremely problematic in practice. Anyone with any familiarity with federal bureaucracies knows that combining two into one is as arduous a task as mating kangaroos with rabbits. In this instance, the proposal was to unite 22 very different bureaucratic animals, ranging from the Secret Service to the Coast Guard. The result is a lumbering behemoth, with a massive 180,000 employees spread out over hundreds of locations and subject to oversight by 86 Congressional committees. Although strong in certain things, it is also an unwieldy creature that may be quite ill-adapted to its initial primary mission of keeping the country secure from a major terrorist attack.

One problematic part of the venture is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2005, as is well known, it did a heckuva of a job in mishandling the consequences of Hurricane Katrina. Lessons are said to have been learned from that experience and immense resources have been invested in reconfiguring FEMA’s plans to cope with future natural disasters, ranging from tornados to earthquakes. That is fine, and necessary. Yet it means that DHS as a whole ends up compelled to devote a significant fraction of management resources to preparing for weather-related contingencies rather than focusing on the central threat.

 ”June 1 is, of course, as you know, the kick-off for hurricane season,” explained Michael Chertoff, Secretary of DHS, at a press conference earlier this month. “I don’t think the official prediction for the season is out yet…In 2006, it was also a pretty mild season, but I hope that doesn’t lull us into believing we don’t have to prepare for 2008.” If the highest registers of the bureaucracy are deeply into weather forecasting, some of the lower registers are off into other ventures that also have zero connection to the larger goals of the reform. 

Another component of DHS is the United States Fire Administration, whose mission is to reduce the financial and human costs of one of our country’s major killers. “Take a flashlight with you,” the Fire Administration advises anyone checking into a hotel or motel. “If the fire is in your room, get out quickly. Close the door, sound the alarm and notify the front desk.” No reasonable person would quarrel with such instructions, but how relevant is this to stopping the next Mohammed Atta?

The Coast Guard, too, has major missions completely unrelated to homeland defense. These include the regulation of maritime navigation and safety, protection of the marine environment, search and rescue, and ice-breaking. All of which raises the question: has consolidation of so many disparate agencies, each with its own set of objectives not directly related to homeland security, made us safer or merely rejiggered the organizational charts?

The question is unanswerable and we are confronted with an unpleasant paradox. Whether the warning light is green, light, or red, unless and until a second major terrorist attack takes place, we won’t know whether DHS is up to its job. And at that moment, by definition, the DHS’s protective function will have been shown to fail. If the target happens to be a motel or hotel, we will be needing our flashlights and calling the front desk.

Thrall is back in today’s New York Times with an equally splendid op-ed (coauthored with Jesse James Wilkins) that explains, by means of a vivid historical example, exactly what is wrong with the idea of negotiating with ones enemies without preconditions–precisely the kind of negotiations that Barack Obama has promised to hold with the leaders of Iran.

Kennedy’s one presidential meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, suggests that there are legitimate reasons to fear negotiating with one’s adversaries. Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings – his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” – he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.

What happened in that summit? The title of Thrall and Wilkins’ piece, Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed, says it all.

I will admit to having forgotten that particular chapter of the disaster. In this document, negotiated by Carter’s Secretary of State Warren Christopher and signed by Iran and the United States on Carter’s last day in office, the United States gave the Iranians quite a bit of candy, if not the whole store.

Reading over the Algiers Accord, I am still not at all convinced it would fair to give Carter credit for resolving the crisis. It would be more accurate to say that his fecklessness throughout the 444-day ordeal came to a culmination in that moment, bringing the United States to a new low. Ronald Reagan had made it pretty clear that the ayatollahs would a high price for further dithering. Jimmy Carter rewarded them for holding out to the last possible moment of his term in office.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Two people were arrested Wednesday after a worker was stopped at the entrance of a Swedish nuclear plant with a bag containing traces of an explosive which has been used in terror attacks.

Police said a welder was stopped during a random security check at the facility. Plant spokesman Roger Bergman said a second suspect was arrested because “there is some uncertainty about who owns the bag.”

The full story is available here. This could be nothing, but if it’s not nothing, it would be a very big deal.

The new category is designed to safeguard information that doesn’t rise to the level of “secret” or “top-secret,” but should be kept out of the public domain nonetheless. Things like blueprints for tunnels and bridges that might be of use to terrorists fall under its rubric.

One novel feature of the new regulation is the requirement that, as Pincus explains, “one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: ‘What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination.’”

This is a curious turn that intersects interestingly with the ongoing prosecution of two employees of AIPAC, facing charges of illicitly receiving and transmitting classified information. One of the issues in the case revolves around the fact that no documents changed hands. All of the allegedly classified information the defendants received was conveyed to them in conversation. The defense is claiming that they had no way of knowing what, if anything, was classified in what was given to them.

The new secrecy policy tightens up the secrecy regulations to deal precisely with that kind of situation. It left me wondering whether the step was taken in response to the gap revealed by the AIPAC case.

Pincus says nothing about this. Instead, quite predictably, he quotes two experts mocking the new policy.

Michael Clark, a contributing editor to the blog Daily Kos, who first wrote about the Bush memorandum, said the White House “seems to have used the crafting of new rules as an opportunity to expand the range of government secrecy.” Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, described it as a “not even half-baked” exercise in policymaking.

Also predictably, Pincus quotes no experts from the government or on the side of the government explaining the timing and significance of the new policy.

Connecting the Dots is left wanting to know more — yet another subject to dig into.

Like his father, the Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, has insisted on an economic strategy of autarky. This has perhaps bolstered his rule, insulating the country from foreign influences. But as an approach to well-being — as an approach to even bare self-sufficiency — it has been a complete flop.

The Peterson Institute reports on the food situation:

North Korea is highly dependent on aid. The country has effectively become a ward of the international community, receiving large amounts of food aid year after year.

The willingness of donors to support the regime has declined. In addition to the country’s provocative foreign policy behavior, North Korea has proven unwilling to guarantee the integrity of its aid programs and as a result aid relations have repeatedly been roiled by evidence of diversion of aid to both the military and the market.

The regime has proven unwilling and in the current juncture perhaps also unable to adequately tap commercial sources of supply. Until the last several years, aid has consistently outstripped commercial imports. Now the country is more dependent on commercial imports just as prices are spiraling upwards. Moreover, the country’s lack of creditworthiness and foreign exchange earnings and reserves makes it a highly unreliable partner.

The bottom line: “North Korea is once again headed toward widespread food shortages, hunger, and famine.”

What if any leverage does this give us in the nuclear negotiations? None, it seems. If anything, we are going to have to beg them to let us help them feed themselves, even as we also beg them to give up their nuclear weapons.

That, at least, is what the Los Angeles Times reports today in a lengthy puff piece about Thomas Fingar, the director of analysis at the ODNI and the fellow who drafted the egregious National Intelligence Estimate of last December that stated, misleadingly, that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

The article also describes some of the training new analysts are given in a six-week course called Analysis 101.

During a recent class in northern Virginia, students from a dozen agencies formed teams to work on a war scenario. It was their first day of class, but many seemed to have arrived having absorbed the lessons of Iraq.

Dissent was encouraged. Attempts to goad students into policy debates were rebuffed. As one young analyst went through the mock exercise of briefing a general who was considering an invasion, she offered a pointed warning.

“Once you go into a country and take it over,” she said, “it would be best to have a plan.”

Perhaps a better name for the course is “Analysis for Dummies.”

There are some outstanding people in the U.S. intelligence community, and the fact that we have not been hit a second time after September 11 is testimony to their achievement.

But the stars appear to be those doing operational work, keeping the terrorist watch lists in order, running covert operations, and managing drones armed with Hellfire missiles in places like Waziristan.

Analysis remains a chronic weak spot; the products of this side of the intelligence house are typically either irrelevant or wrong. Indeed, the more one learns about what is going on there, the more convinced one becomes that the CIA and other spy agencies should be concentrating their efforts on purchasing (they are available for a good price in China) 20,000 dunce caps. These would be a good complement to the cards analysts are now required to wear around their necks. Fingar — and his deputy Richard Immerman – should be at the head of the parade.

As I noted in the Weekly Standard last July, President Bush has the power to revoke it or modify it or supplant it by issuing a new executive order. Under certain circumstances, like an attack or an impending attack on the United States, such an amendment or new order need not be published in the Federal Register. It is possible, in other words, that Bush might already have qualified the ban in some instances and not let us or our adversaries know.

I have no idea if Bush has fiddled with the executive order after September 11. I do know that some of our adversaries are continuing not to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules.

Iran has been directing assassination operations in Iraq using trained snipers, in some cases killing Iraqi officials opposed to Iran, according to an officer who has recently served as a senior adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

The officer in question is Army Col. H.R. McMaster, who spoke yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.

Iran’s activities are “obvious to anyone who bothers to look into it,” and should no longer be “alleged,” he said in response to a question. Senior American military officials said last month that the U.S. military in Iraq has compiled a briefing with detailed evidence of Iran’s involvement in Iraq violence, but the briefing has yet to be made public.

Should the United States respond by assassinating the assassins and/or the taskmasters of the assassins? Or is that still against the rules?

in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”

One of Hersh’s sources was Barack Obama’s non-proliferation adviser, Joseph Cirincione, who told Hersh flatly that

Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing.

In the face of unequivocal evidence, Cirincione has acknowledged his error, saying “no one bats 1000.” That of course is true. And the difficulty of assessing what Syria was up to was certainly compounded by Syrian deception. David Albright’s outfit, the Institute for Science and International Security, has put out an important study (complete with photographs) of the “extraordinary camouflage” methods the Syrians employed to disguise the facility.

In assessing the track record of an expert like Cirincione, let’s also keep in mind that tight secrecy, camouflage, and deception in nuclear affairs are nothing new. On the eve of the first Gulf war, thanks to secrecy, the United States was almost completely in the dark about the far-reaching scope of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.

In the run-up to the second Gulf war, the problem was reversed. The intelligence community persuaded itself that Saddam had an active nuclear program when in fact he had none.

One would expect experts to draw appropriate lessons from both experiences. First among them is that humility and a measure of self-doubt are important when trying to penetrate other countries’ secrets.

Such qualities were conspicuously absent in Cirincione’s analysis of al Kibar: “There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political,” is what he categorically told Hersh.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The CIA seems to have taken my comments to heart. On its website, it is now boasting about the inexperience of its intelligence analysts. It features a self-portrait of one of them — “Scott” — who hails from Michigan and has been with the agency for less than a year.

What are Scott’s credentials?

“[M]any people think that CIA employees spend their entire lives preparing to work at the Agency. Not me!”

Scott had a different plan: “I focused my studies on domestic politics and planned to work as a U.S. policymaker, not as a foreign-intelligence analyst.” But this lack of preparation was no barrier to entry for him or anyone else: “I’m not alone. I’ve been surprised to find how many officers did not expect to end up in the CIA.”

What is the CIA like these days? It certainly confounded Scott’s expectations. “Officers didn’t walk around in black suits; they dressed somewhat casual, many even wearing jeans on casual Fridays.” Even more significantly: “Headquarters didn’t feel like an intelligence agency; it felt like a college campus.”

Maybe it didn’t feel like an intelligence agency to Scott because it is not an intelligence agency at all, just a large government bureaucracy pretending to be one. As Scott puts it, it is a “great” place “for somebody like me who studied domestic politics and never expected to work with foreign intelligence.”

Here is another page from the CIA website addressed to another set of inexperienced recruits: K-through-5 elementary school students:  

You may have heard about the Central Intelligence Agency. But, do you know what we really do and how we do it? The people of the CIA do very important work. They help keep our country safe. They give our leaders information so they can make good decisions. And they take pride in their important jobs.

We have a lot of different jobs here. We have analysts, doctors, lawyers, scientists, geographers, and librarians, to name just a few.

Look through our pages and you will learn all about us. If you read carefully, you can become a CIA expert. We also have some fun stories and games for you.

Okay, let’s take a short time out from sharing fun stories and play a little game: where in the world is Osama bin Laden and can Scott help us find him? Run Scott run.

Several factors have converged to make this more probable than in any recent election. I explore what they are in today’s Wall Street Journal.

It sends a “signal that we’re engaged and we are going to be in the vicinity, and that’s a very important part of the world.” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At the same time, an anonymous Bush administration official told CNN the deployment demonstrates that “the U.S. is concerned about the situation in Lebanon, and we want to see the situation resolved.”

Now that things are falling apart in Lebanon, what are these ships going to do?

Even without the American statements and naval deployment, a successful effort by the Iranian-backed Hizballah to seize control of large swaths of Beirut and impose its will on the Lebanese government would be a setback of the first rank: for Lebanon, for Israel, and for the broader Middle East. The disaster for us is compounded by the fact that we have put our prestige on the line.

Having failed to respond to Iranian aggression in Iraq in so many  instances (even as we loudly denounce it), and having failed to check Iran’s nuclear-weapons program (even as we loudly denounce it, too), the ayatollahs are clearly feeling emboldened. They are now making their move in Lebanon. What are our ships going to do? Maintain a symbolic presence while Lebanon burns? The bill for our fecklessness is coming due.

How did this intelligence fiasco happen? Leonard Spector and Avner Cohen, two close students of nuclear-proliferation, recently co-chaired a “roundtable” composed of intelligence officials and outside experts. According to what they learned, the Bush White House itself played a significant role in the botched nature of the declassified summary:

those responsible for the NIE on Iran knew that the heads of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had agreed that its key findings would not be declassified. But the White House, fearful that the findings might leak to the media without any official explanation of their significance, overruled the agencies.

By the time the White House decided to release an unclassified summary, the classified version had been produced and was about to be handed over to the congressional intelligence committees. That created a problem. Even though the estimate’s “key findings” were originally intended to be understood in the context of the whole classified report, the intelligence community and the White House felt that they needed to repeat them almost verbatim in the unclassified summary. They worried that any rephrasing of the findings would open them up to accusations of playing politics with the estimate.

That still leaves the question of why the intelligence community spotlighted the finding on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. We know that important new evidence on Iran’s nuclear activities in 2003 had been obtained and that it had required changing a 2005 estimate that the country was pursuing a nuclear weapon. In highlighting the new data, the authors of the 2007 unclassified summary unfortunately left out the context of the previous estimate — that a rogue Iran remained well on course to developing a nuclear capability.

All in all, Spector and Cohen offer an alarming glimpse of serious disarray at the upper levels of the intelligence community. The Iran NIE, they note, is not the only thing it has recently botched.

Last month’s unclassified congressional briefing on Syria’s clandestine nuclear reactor, which was destroyed by Israel on Sept. 6, 2007, was yet another reminder of the challenges confronting the U.S. intelligence community. Still smarting from its gross overestimation of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the community bent over backward to avoid overstating its case against Syria — and in doing so, it stumbled badly.

In the Syrian case (as with the release last year of part of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program) the intelligence community was unnecessarily cautious, and thereby underestimated the threats posed by Syria and Iran. Its efforts to improve precision have only created new confusion and uncertainty.

The key problem has been the intelligence community’s astonishing awkwardness in making clear what’s a fact and what’s an inference. In the case of Iraq, there were few facts on which to build a convincing case that Saddam Hussein was arming himself with weapons of mass destruction. But Hussein’s past pursuit of them, coupled with the anxieties unleashed by 9/11, led U.S. intelligence analysts and many policymakers to infer the worst and leap to conclusions unsupported by the facts.

The intelligence community has now jumped to the opposite extreme with respect to Iran’s and Syria’s nuclear ambitions, where there are more than a few facts. Yet it has virtually refused to draw any conclusions, no matter how obvious, about the two countries’ nuclear programs. The effect has been to seriously understate the dangers Iran and Syria pose and to distort the policy options available to the U.S. to manage them.

The more we learn about the performance of our intelligence agencies, the darker the picture grows. The intelligence community was subject to a radically reform after 9/11. Perhaps some good came of that, including better interagency coordination of counterterrorism operations. Clearly, however, some fundamental problems have not been solved. The analytic side of the house is simply is not up to the job of understanding the outside world, including matters of fundamental importance to our security.

What should be done? Repeatedly discovering that the CIA’s “info is worthless,” Richard Nixon came up with the right idea: His instructions were: “Get rid of the clowns.  – cut personnel 40 percent.”

Mr. Clinton’s frenetic schedule spared no time for the distractions that often crop up on the campaign trail. When a young woman collapsed from the heat at an event on Sunday afternoon in Marion, he did not stop speaking for a second. And when an elderly man fainted later that day at an outdoor event in Lenoir, the former president appeared visibly irritated at onlookers hovering over the fallen man. “You folks don’t make so much noise,” he said into the microphone.

One of those is Zakaria’s “dubious” contention that  “over the last six years, support for bin Laden and his goals has fallen steadily throughout the Muslim world.” Taking issue with this, Kakutani complains that Zakaria ignores the contrary views of “Qaeda expert” Michael Scheuer.

Interestingly, back in April, reviewing Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, Kakutani chastised Amis for “completely ignoring . . . experts like Michael Scheuer.”

Reviewing Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV back in October, she scored him, too, for guess what:  “he ignores experts like Michael Scheuer.”

And reviewing Dinesh D’Souza last February, she complained that “He ignores the host of experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer.”

Listening to this broken record makes me all the more curious about Kakutani’s review of Scheuer’s most recent book, The Road to Hell. She called it “wildly uneven,” “intemperate,” “shrill,” and a “messy agglomeration” “seeded” with “alarming rants.”

These appropriate judgments leave me wondering why, in repeatedly enlisting the crackpot Scheuer to chastise various authors, Michiko Kakutani completely ignores — of all people — Michiko Kakutani.

Whatever his precise status in the campaign, there is no question about his views. Cirincione has backed away from his assertion that the Syrian facility destroyed by Israel last September was not a nuclear reactor. But does he stand by his views on missile defense?

Writing in the Globalist back in October, Cirincione compared the Bush administration’s effort to defend against Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles to “the Israeli settler movement,” saying that both “want to create facts on the ground that will make it difficult for successors to reverse course.”

On the one hand, he argues, spending billions to build radar stations and interceptor sites in Poland and the Czech republic is pouring money down the drain: “All evidence indicates that this U.S. anti-missile system is incapable of intercepting any long-range missiles.”

On the other hand, he argues, we are terrifying the Kremlin through our recklessness. “Russian military planners cannot count” on the fact that the system won’t work.  Indeed “the U.S. bases would have a real, though limited, capability against Russia’s nuclear deterrent force.”

Will it or won’t it work? Or will it only work against Russian missiles and let Iranian ones fly through? I confess to being confused.

Either way, what does Cirincione propose instead? “If the administration had any sense,” he writes, “it would ditch this technologically weak and strategically unnecessary plan — and instead seize the Russian proposal to use the radar at its Azerbaijan base bordering Iran.”

True, “that radar is not as powerful as the American radar” slated for deployment in the Czech republic. But never mind, even if the Russian proposal won’t work, it will work. The Azerbaijan radar would serve to “provide real military capabilities against any future Iranian threat.”

Am I alone thinking that this line of argument is a remarkably brazen attempt to have things both ways?

Memo to Barack Obama: when the time comes this fall to debate John McCain on defense issues, it might be helpful to get a second opinion from another adviser rather than two contradictory ones from Joseph Cirincione.

Here is the video clip that he calls attention to in his Washington Post column:

Governor Rendell endorsed Hillary Clinton back in January.

Barack Obama has now forcefully — if tardily — denounced the hateful Reverend Wright, with whom he had a close association over two decades.

Through Rendell, Hillary now enjoys two degrees of separation from Louis Farrakhan — but even six degrees of separation would be too close. Whatever she now says or does not say about Rendell’s willingness to associate with Farrakhan, and to heap praise on the Nation of Islam, this is a sickening video.

To begin with, reports ISIS, “the United States does not have any indication of how Syria would fuel this reactor, and no information that North Korea had already, or intended to provide the reactor’s fuel.”

True enough. But does that offer reason for comfort or prove anything at all? After all, up until the U.S. discovered that North Korea was helping Syria build a reactor, it also had “no information” that this particular proliferation activity was going on.

“The lack of any identified source of this fuel,” continues the ISIS study, “raises questions about when the reactor could have operated.” Furthermore, neither the U.S. nor Israel has “identified any Syrian plutonium separation or nuclear weaponization facilities.

Also true enough. But what do these gaps in the picture mean? If a country expends the resources, and takes the considerable risk, of building a secret plutonium-producing reactor, is it likely to be doing so to turn it into a museum? That seems to be ISIS’s conclusion: “[t]he apparent absence of fuel, whether imported or indigenously produced, . . . lowers confidence that Syria has an active nuclear weapons program.”

ISIS also calls attention to some other encouraging news: “North Korea has committed to end its proliferation activities.” But even if the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il says cross my heart and hope to die, is this a promise one can take to the bank? According to ISIS — yes — and moreover there is this heart-warming fact, “[t]here is no evidence that nuclear cooperation between Syria and North Korea extended beyond the date of the destruction of the reactor.”

All told, Pyongyand has been a paragon of non-proliferation virtue: “engagement is working and is increasing U.S. and regional security.”

ISIS’s motto is “Employing Science in the Pursuit of Peace.” Perhaps a better motto would be “Employing Science in the Pursuit of Peace at Any Price.”

This was remarkably deceptive. The statement was accompanied by a disclaimer buried in a footnote saying that “For the purposes of this Estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.”

In other words, the NIE reached its conclusion that Iran’s nuclear-weapons program had come to a halt by describing uranium-enrichment efforts as civilian.

Today’s New York Times has a remarkably important story by William Broad containing photographs of Iranian officials touring the uranium-enrichment site at Natanz.

One surprise of the tour was the presence of Iran’s defense minister, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar. His attendance struck some analysts as odd given Iran’s claim that the desert labors are entirely peaceful in nature. In one picture, Mr. Najjar, smiling widely, appears to lead the presidential retinue.

Also participating in the tour was Mossein Mohseni Ejehei, Iran’s minister of intelligence. The caption indicating his presence is mysterious absent from the Times’s website, but is included in the printed edition of the paper.

The presence of the defense and intelligence ministers on this tour, with the defense minister appearing to lead it, are not definitive indicators of anything. But they do surely cast strong additional doubt on the NIE’s flat contention that the enrichment effort is only “civil work.”

The more we learn about the NIE, the more it appears to be a disgrace. Ranking U.S. officials have already contradicted its findings in their public statements. But it’s clear that it needs to be officially withdrawn, and its authors reprimanded for botching it, undermining U.S. foreign policy, and badly embarrassing U.S. intelligence yet again.  

A bill now before Congress would exempt journalists from having to testify in such cases. The bill is called the Free Flow of Information Act, but a better name might be the Free Flow of Classified Information Act. By making it almost impossible to apprehend leakers in government, the flow of highly secret information, already substantial, is likely to grow into a flood.  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both supporting this legislation. So, also, is — of all people — John McCain. In addition to criticizing it sharply–he has called it “a license to do harm, perhaps serious harm,” he has also performed a pirouette to praise it as “a license to do good; to disclose injustice and unlawfulness and inequities; and to encourage their swift correction.”

McCain’s effort to have it both ways is either evidence of serious intellectual confusion or shabby political calculation. For its part, the New York Times is insisting that without the law, the flow of news will slow and the public’s “right to know” will be seriously impaired.

I have sought to explain some of the problems with this contention in several articles: Why Journalists Are Not Above the Law, A License to Leak and Not Every Leak is Fit To Print. Whatever one makes of my conclusions, the assertion by the Times that the news will dry up without a shield law is a ridiculous position for a newspaper that is currently in the process of slashing its staff by a hundred editors and reporters. Unless its newsroom is currently populated by a forest of deadwood, those cuts will limit its ability to report the news far more than the purely hypothetical loss of stories caused by the absence of a shield law.

“No way”?

With all due respect to Joseph Cirincione, I stand by my claim that he serves as Senator Obama’s top adviser on matters nuclear and I am astonished that he would deny it.

In a March 12, 2008 article in the New Republic by Michelle Cottle in which he was extensively quoted, Cottle wrote that Cirincione “agreed last spring to advise the candidate on non-proliferation.”

If that statement is true, and I see no evidence that Cirincione has disputed it, then he is their adviser on nuclear proliferation, and indeed their top adviser unless he can point to a more senior nuclear expert advising the campaign.

Cirincione has been widely identified as an Obama adviser all over the blogsphere by publications spanning the political spectrum, from National Review to the Weekly Standard to the DailyKos, where he was even given the title “Informal National Security Adviser.” I did not find a disavowal from Cirincione in the comments section of that web document.

Stephen Zunes, chairman of  the program in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, described Cirincione as a “key Obama adviser.” Once again, I did not find a disavowal from Cirincione in the comments section of that web document.

Will the real top Obama nuclear advisor please stand up.

It is therefore fascinating — and disturbing — to recall the alacrity with which Joseph Cirincione, Barack Obama’s top expert on matters nuclear, the author of a book called the Bomb Scare, was so quick back in September to dismiss the report as “nonsense.”

To Cirincione, writing on the blog of Foreign Policy Magazine, the stories surrounding surrounding the Israeli strike, namely that North Korea was building a Yongbyong-type plutonium reactor not far from the Euphrates River, was nothing more than a lie. It was a reprise, wrote Cirincione, of the way in which administration officials “misled the press” in the run-up to the second Gulf war.

Who was behind this nefarious manipulation? It seems, wrote Circincione, “to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted ‘intelligence’ to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda.” What exactly was that political agenda? “[I]t appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement.” There was also a dose of Zionist mischief thrown in: “Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.”

Along with Israel and the American hardliners, another villain in Cirincione’s take is the American press, which treats “selective leaks” from the administration “as if they were absolute truth.” Indeed, the lazy reporters pushing the story appear not “to have done even basic investigation of the miniscule Syrian nuclear program.”

All told, the “misleading story” of North Korean nuclear proliferation “will now enter the lexicon of the far Right” and “attempts to negotiate an end to North Korea’s program are bound fail in the face of such duplicity, etc., etc.”

In writing all these things, Cirincione sounds remarkably similar to Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations. “There was no Syria-North Korea cooperation whatsoever in Syria. We deny these rumors,” Bashar Ja’afari said yesterday.

Cirincione’s instant dismissal of the Syrian-North Korean nuclear axis raises a number of interesting questions.

One of them is: has Cirincione changed his mind in light of the latest intelligence?

A second: is he going to be the official called by Obama at 3AM when an intelligence cable comes in reporting that North Korea has shipped nuclear materials somewhere else?

A third: why are so many of Obama’s advisors so prone to blame, in whole or in part, the machinations of Israel for the problems of the world? See here and here and here.

A fourth: Is Joseph Cirincione going to go the way of Samatha Power and get dropped from the campaign like a radioactive potato.

Worldwide pressure is growing on it to negotiate with Hamas. Jimmy Carter is leading the way. But whether it is wise to talk directly or indirectly with a terrorist organization sworn to one’s own destruction is an open question that Israelis will have to answer for themselves.

While thinking about that, they might look at the U.S.-Iraqi experience protecting the Green Zone in Baghdad. Like Sderot, the Green Zone is adjacent to a densely populated slum much like Gaza, controlled by radical Arabs — Sadr City, the territory of the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Some 697 rockets and mortar rounds have been fired on the Green Zone from this area since March 23 alone. Only 114 hit the Green Zone, but U.S. coalition forces were struck by 291 of them.

Coalition forces have now managed to suppress the fire. “Attacks On Green Zone Drop Sharply, U.S. Says” is the headline of a story in today’s Washington Post.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that a military campaign in the stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has succeeded in nearly eliminating the deadly rocket and mortar attacks launched from the area.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have been battling for weeks in the capital’s Sadr City neighborhood against Shiite fighters tied to Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The U.S. military said at least 142 suspected fighters have been killed, including at least 15 Tuesday night.

“We accomplished what we were trying to do, which was to stop the indirect fire,” said Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff for Multinational Division-Baghdad. “The manifestation of the violence that you’re talking about has pretty much stopped.”

Are their lessons here for Israel?

One interesting mystery concerns the timing of this episode. When Pollard was arrested, Israel publicly claimed that Pollard was its only U.S. spy. But according to Haaretz, in 2004 Israel reversed course and told the U.S. that there was a second agent. But it would be very strange if Israel did that without identifying the agent in question to the U.S. And if it did identify him, why did the U.S. wait four years until they pounced?

Already various explanations are being put forward to explain the timing. Eitan Haber, an assistant to the late Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s defense minister at the time Pollard was arrested, thinks the Kadish case is a way to assure that President Bush will not pardon Pollard at the end of his term. But this seems far-fetched. Especially since there is no indication that Bush is planning to pardon Pollard in the first place.

Other Israelis are speculating that the arrest is timed to tarnish Israel’s celebration next month of its 60th anniversary, which Bush is scheduled to attend. This also seems far-fetched. Kadish’s activities allegedly took placed in the 1980’s and his arrest not likely to do any sort of serious damage to U.S.-Israeli relations today.

Another possibility is that there is a link to the AIPAC case, in which two members of the pro-Israel lobbying organization have been charged with providing classified information to Israel. The trial had been scheduled for the end of this month, until it was delayed once again. Lately prosecutors in the AIPAC have experienced setback after setback, and are even appealing some of the judge’s rulings against them to a higher court. Does the timing of the Kadish arrest have anything to do with the possible impending collapse of the AIPAC case? This seems slightly more plausible, but also far-fetched. What exactly would be the point of such a maneuver?

“One would be a fool to believe that the timing is a coincidence,’ Haber told Haaretz. Thus far, however, I haven’t seen anything to suggest it is more than a coincidence.

Count me a fool.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking at West Point last night, said that Iran remains “hell-bent” on acquiring nuclear weapons.

Does Michael Hayden, CIA director, agree? Speaking with Tim Russert  on Meet the Press on March 30, he said that “we stand by the judgment” in the NIE. That seems unequivocal.

But Hayden then began to equivocate. Russert asked him point blank: “Do you believe the Iranians are trying to develop a nuclear program?” Here is the transcript:

GEN. HAYDEN:  I–personal…

MR. RUSSERT: Yes.

GEN. HAYDEN: Personal belief? Yes. It’s hard for me to explain. And, you know, this is not court of law stuff. This is, this is, you know, in terms of beyond all reasonable doubt, this is, this is Mike Hayden looking at the body of evidence. OK. Why would the Iranians be willing to pay the international tariff they appear willing to pay for what they’re doing now if they did not have, at a minimum, at a minimum, if they did not have the desire to keep the option open to, to develop a nuclear weapon and perhaps even more so, that they’ve already decided to do that? It’s very difficult for us to judge intent, and so we have to work back from actions. Why the continuing production of fissile material, and Natanz? They say it’s for civilian purposes, and yet the, the planet, the globe, states around the world have offered them fissile material under controls so they can have their, their, their civilian nuclear program. But the Iranians have rejected that. I mean, when you start looking at that, and you get, not just the United States, but you get the U.N. Security Council imposing sanctions on them, why would they go through that if it were not to develop the technology that would allow them to create fissile material not under international control?

What about Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence? Here he is defending the NIE in congressional testimony on February 5:

I’d start by saying that the integrity and the professionalism in this NIE is probably the highest in our history in terms of objectivity, and quality of the analysis, and challenging the assumptions, and conducting red teams on the process, conducting a counterintelligence assessment about were we being misled or so on.

That sounds unequivocal. But then McConnell, too, begins to equivocate:

The only thing that they’ve halted was nuclear weapons design, which is probably the least significant part of the program. So if I’d had until now to think about it, I probably would have changed a thing or two.

So, with Secretary Gates joining in, we now have a trifecta of confusion. The top three intelligence and defense officials of the Bush administration are disavowing the NIE even as the adminstration stands by it.

The expected yield was to be in the neighborhood of four to six megatons. In the event, the bomb was significantly more powerful: fifteen megatons. Forty-two species of coral never recovered from boiling at temperatures so high. Indeed, they were vaporized along with much of Bikini Atoll, the test site.

But National Geographic reports that an amazing recovery is under way:

It was awesome to see coral cover as high as 80 percent and large treelike branching formations with trunks 30 centimeters (11 inches) thick,” Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies said in a statement.

Nonetheless, anyone who watches a video of the blast itself, available here, will understand that even if coral recovers nicely after half a century, it would be wise to keep these weapons out of the hands of Iranian ayatollahs.

How he is able to perform this job while himself being a partisan in the intelligence wars is a mystery. As recently as this past January, Immerman published an essay lambasting the “Bushites” for manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They made “every effort to ‘cook the books,’” Immerman wrote, ” they ‘hyped’ the need to go to war, and they lied too often to count.”

Matters are complicated by an additional wrinkle. While at Temple, Immerman became the target of a lawsuit. The student who filed it, Christian M. DeJohn, was a master’s candidate in history, He also happened to be a decorated tank commander in the Pennsylvania National Guard, who days after September 11, 2001 was called up to serve on a counterterrorism mission in Bosnia.

While at Temple, Sgt. DeJohn had clashed with Immerman about some of the professor’s left-wing views. Then, while he was stationed in Bosnia, the Temple history department began sending him anti-war fliers, inviting him to take part in its teach-ins against Bush’s “imperialist” foreign policy. Sgt. DeJohn objected, and asked to be taken off the list.

When Sgt DeJohn returned to the states in April 2003 and attempted to resume his education at Temple, it seems, according to the complaint, that a campaign of retribution ensued, carried out by Immerman and some of his history department colleagues. Matters became so serious that Sgt. DeJohn filed a lawsuit alleging that his First Amendment right of free speech was being infringed.

In the course of discovery proceedings, email correspondence among history department faculty members came to light in which Sgt. DeJohn was accused of suffering from “paranoid delusions,” being “mentally imbalanced,” “trained to kill by the U.S. Army,” and being “literally obsessed with the idea of liberal bias.”

Among the emails was one from Richard Immerman in which he stated that “Christian is a gnat whom I hope will self-destruct without any help from us.”

This is interesting language for a professor to use about one of his students, especially a student who voluntarily chose to put himself in harm’s way to defend Immerman’s right to spout nonsense.

If dissenting students were treated in this way at Temple, how are dissenting analysts within the intelligence community treated now that Immerman is responsible for investigating their complaints of left-wing and/or any other form of bias?

I would welcome receiving reports from any ”gnats” who have had experience dealing with the good professor.

JAPSL is badly outnumbered. Almost every media corporation in the country is backing the establishment of a shield law. So too are numerous lobbying organizations that purport to defend the First Amendment. The House of Representatives has already passed a shield-law bill by a bipartisan landslide margin of 398 to 21. The Senate may act on the matter at some point soon.

I am the founding executive director of JAPSL and my arguments against a shield law can be found in Commentary and the Weekly Standard.

According to JAPSL’s bylaws, there are two categories of members: those whom I induct (regular members), and those whom I induct who then object to being inducted (objecting members).

The roster of regular members of JAPSL spans the political spectrum and includes a number of distinguished writers from leading publications. So far, these include:

Jack Shafer of Slate, author of We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Shield Law.

Steven Chapman of the Chicago Tribune, author of The News Media vs. the Innocent.

Anthony Lewis, formerly of the New York Times, author of Freedom For the Thought We Hate.

Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post, who has challenged the idea of a shield law in the Nieman Watchdog.

As of yet, JAPSL has no objecting members. To become a regular or an objecting member, simply post a comment below indicating either your desire to join or your wish to object to being inducted into this vital organization.

But human as al-Qaeda members are, they have human foibles. The weather can become very hot in some of the countries in which they operate. And who doesn’t have a fondness for air-conditioning?

Here is Mohammed Atef chastising one of his underlings:

I obtained 75,000 rupees for you and your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder claiming you have a right to do so. . . . Also with respect to the air-conditioning unit, . . . furniture used by brothers in Al Qaeda is not considered private property. . . . I would like to remind you and myself of the punishment for any violation.

Atef was a military leader in al Qaeda until 2001 when a U.S. smart bomb fell on his head. Was the AC unit in question a Kenmore, a Friedrich, or some other brand? That information, along with the tax ID number of Atef’s accountant, is not available.

The chastising memo appears in a collection of al-Qaeda documents compiled by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. They paint a picture of an organization that, along with a millenarian mission, has quite a few quotidian concerns. The Los Angeles Times carries a summary of the collection in today’s paper.

Michael Scheuer may or may not be right that Osama bin Laden is “gentle.” There is no evidence for that bizarre judgment in the documents.

Here, courtesy of the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute, is the Saudi Cleric Omar Al-Sweilem extolling their virtues, which include great skin that remains soft even without any cream — “no Nivea, no Vaseline”:

Harith Ibn Al-Muhasibi told us what would happen when we meet the black-eyed virgin with her black hair and white face — praised be He who created night and day. What hair! What a chest! What a mouth! What cheeks! What a figure! What breasts! What thighs! What legs! What whiteness! What softness! Without any creams — no Nivea, no Vaseline. No nothing! He said that faces would be soft that day. Even your own face will be soft without any powder or makeup. You yourself will be soft, so how soft will a black-eyed virgin be, when she comes to you so tall and with her beautiful face, her black hair and white face – praised be He who created night and day. Just feel her palm, Sheik! He said: How soft will a fingertip be, after being softened in paradise for thousands of years! There is no god but Allah. He told us that if you entered one of the palaces, you would find ten black-eyed virgins sprawled on musk cushions. Where is Abu Khaled? Here, he has arrived! When they see you, they will get up and run to you. Lucky is the one who gets to put her thumb in your hand. When they get hold of you, they will push you onto your back, on the musk cushions. They will push you onto your back, Jamal! Allah Akbar! I wish this on all people present here. He said that one of them would place her mouth on yours. Do whatever you want. Another one would press her cheek against yours, yet another would press her chest against yours, and the others would await their turn. There is no god but Allah. He told us that one black-eyed virgin would give you a glass of wine. Wine in Paradise is a reward for your good deeds. The wine of this world is destructive, but not the wine of the world to come.

But what about the covert military side of the Iranian program itself? Did it really come to a halt in 2003 as the NIE states with “high confidence”? Back in February, reports came to light that an laptop with extensive information on Iran’s covert nuclear program had fallen into the hands of U.S. intelligence in 2004. Comprehensive and alarming stories about what was contained in the laptop appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

The deputy director general of safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency briefed member states, including Iran, about the contents of the laptop in February. The briefing notes have now been posted online by the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington D.C.

The IAEA official describes, among other things, instructions on how to communicate  within the Iranian program using only first names and the “timing of firing devices-leading to an explosion at an altitude of about 600 meters.” The IAEA’s evaluation of Iran’s “Tests of High Power Explosives” is unambiguous:  

The high-tension firing systems and multiple EBW detonators fired simultaneously are key components of nuclear weapons.

There are a limited number of non-nuclear applications (high performance technique for exploratory drilling).

The elements available to the Agency are not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.

The Agency does not have sufficient information at this stage to conclude whether the allegations are groundless or the data fabricated

Some U.S. officials initially believed the documents contained in the laptop might have been an elaborate forgery. But a consensus has emerged among Western intelligence agencies that they are in fact authentic. The documents do not indicate whether the covert nuclear program actually came to a halt in 2003 as U.S. intelligence has concluded. Nonetheless, the scale and scope of what Iran was doing up until that point is staggering. The IAEA document is essential reading.

”Last night’s explosion in Shiraz was as a consequence of an accident and not the planting of a bomb,” explained Abbas Mohtaj, the deputy interior minister in charge of national security, according to a Reuters report.

What sort of accident?

Mohtaj did not give details, but the Associated Press, citing a statement on Iranian television, “said the blast may have been ’caused by explosives left behind from an earlier exhibition commemorating’ the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.”

Hmmm, a mosque stages an exhibition featuring live ammunition? If true, it tells us something interesting about the state of Islam in Iran. If false, it tells us something even more interesting about what Iranian officials obviously regard as a credible way to deny the fact that a bomb was set off in a mosque.

“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran.”

This should be followed with a simple explanation: “As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people.”

Such an approach has its undeniable appeal, but would it suffice to assure Israel’s security needs, or even survival, in the face of a nuclear-armed Iran?

In some scenarios, perhaps. It certainly might give the Iranians pause before launching a nuclear-missile fusillade against Tel Aviv directly from their soil. But there are many far more ambiguous forms in which an Iranian nuclear weapon might be employed, and not only against Israel, but against other countries in the region. The provision of a nuclear weapon to a terrorist surrogate group under Iranian control is one. Coercive nuclear threats are another.

Would the United States really follow through on its word and destroy Tehran if, say, Hizballah smuggled a nuclear device into Haifa and detonated it? Somehow, I doubt it. And we are not even contemplating here the possibility that it might be Barack Obama who has to answer the phone at 3AM before calling General McPeak and asking him what to do.   

The fact is that a nuclear-armed Iran will be a far more assertive and dangerous power than it already is. No words from an American president, no matter how ringing, can solve Israel’s defense dilemma at a stroke. Unless the U.S. or Israel takes action, we may yet have to learn to live with an Iranian bomb. But it’s folly to believe we can solve major security problems with declarations.

The logic part is easy. As a former secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan and a highly decorated combat veteran of Vietnam, the Senator from Virginia can be sold to voters as at least as ready as John McCain to answer the telephone at 3AM should it ring. This certainly won’t fill the gap left by Obama’s own dearth of foreign-policy and military experience, but nothing will.  

As for the clue part, Obama has made a point of pressing for negotiations with anyone and everyone, even if they head regimes engaged in supporting terrorism, supplying arms to insurgents killing American soldiers, and acquiring nuclear weapons.

Webb has been busy bringing himself into synch. On This Week with George Stephanopolous, Webb pointed out that he had been shot at in Vietnam with weapons made in China, which didn’t preclude talking to Beijing:

We developed a diplomatic relationship with China that over the years paid out. And the greatest mistake over the past five years of this occupation is that our national leadership has not found a way to aggressively engage Iran without taking other options off the table.

Of course, the idea of talking to anyone and everyone is  proving to be a delicate one, made all the more tricky by Jimmy Carter’s mission to Damascus to meet with Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas.

An spokesman for his campaign says that Obama ”does not agree with President Carter’s decision to go forward with this meeting because he does not support negotiations with Hamas until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements.”

But how about Ahmadinejad? Has he renounced terrorism, recognized Israel’s right to exist, and abided by its agreements, including, most importantly, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? And if the answer to these questions is no, why would Obama meet with him?

James Webb is very smart. But even if he is chosen for the Veep slot, he is not going to help Obama find a way to resolve the contradiction brought into plain view by our worst ex-president.  �

known by the acronym PCASS, for Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, uses a commercial TDS Ranger hand-held personal digital assistant with three wires connected to sensors attached to the hand. An interpreter will ask a series of 20 or so questions in Persian, Arabic or Pashto: “Do you intend to answer my questions truthfully?” “Are the lights on in this room” “Are you a member of the Taliban?” The operator will punch in each answer and, after a delay of a minute or so for processing, the screen will display the results: “Green,” if it thinks the person has told the truth, “Red” for deception, and “Yellow” if it can’t decide.

“We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, told MSNBC, which reports on the deployment of the device today.

It’s a good thing that the DoD is not promising “perfection.” That would be very hard to achieve, to say the least. Even non-portable lie-detector systems have a startlingly poor record of ferreting out deception. And these are almost always used in highly-controlled circumstances in which the psychological pressure on the individual being questioned is at its maximum.

The list of spies who have defeated the polygraph to penetrate U.S. intelligence is lengthy and includes Aldrich Ames, the Soviet mole in the CIA, Robert Hanssen, the Soviet mole in the FBI, and Ana Belen Montes, who toiled away in the Defense Intelligence Agency on behalf of Cuba for a decade-and-a-half, until her apprehension in 2001. The most recent case is that of Nada Nadim Prouty, the Lebanese woman arrested this winter, who moved from sensitive positions in the FBI to even more sensitive positions within the CIA despite a fictitious marriage and ties to the terrorist organization, Hizballah.

The idea that our troops can rely on primitive polygraphs to make snap decisions on the battlefield about whom to trust and whom to suspect is a formula for disaster. One of our most attractive and useful characteristics as a society is fascination with and love of technology. Sometimes, however, fascination and love turn into obsession. We seem to be in the grip of a clinical case of that disorder here.

Yoo takes the view that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are virtually unlimited, and can ride over federal statutes banning interrogation techniques like assault and maiming. The Justice Department disavowed this doctrine nine months after it was enunciated, and that seems entirely appropriate. Even in wartime, our constitutional history makes fairly clear that there are limits on what a president can do.

But where exactly do those limits reside? And how exactly do they bear on another controversy involving executive power: President Bush’s decision in late 2001 to authorize the National Security Agency to launch the Terrorist Surveillance Program. This program involved the interception of international calls between al-Qaeda suspects abroad and persons in the United States? Because the program seemingly violated the plain language of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and, as some also argue, the Fourth Amendment prohibition on warrantless searches, was it also every bit as much an overreach of executive power as the actions outlined in John Yoo’s torture memo?

The answer, in my view, is emphatically no.

To begin with, strong arguments have been made that to the extent FISA limited the president’s power, it was itself an unconstitutional usurpation of the president’s power. At first glance this assertion seems to be merely a restatement of Yoo’s thesis that the president’s powers are unlimited. But the difference is that for very good reason warrantless wiretapping in wartime has a long history in this country. For very good reason, legalized torture does not.

The numerous examples of warrantless searches carried out for foreign-policy purposes, some under taken by the Clinton administration even after FISA was on the books (as in the case of Aldrich Ames), suggest that the NSA activities are well within the boundaries of constitutionally acceptable wartime measures. That, in any case, was also the consensus of a panel of retired FISA court judges who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006.

Second, Congress was repeatedly briefed about the NSA program over a period of years. Although one or two members expressed reservations, no formal objection was ever lodged. When the program was disclosed to the public by the New York Times in December 2005, members of Congress from both parties voiced dismay that a valuable counterterrorism program had been compromised. The assent of Congress must carry considerable weight in any assessment of the legal status of the NSA program.

Reasonable men (and women) can disagree about this, of course. There was considerable disagreement about the NSA program within the Bush Justice Department itself. But such disagreement, one of the pretexts for the New York Times’s decision to reveal the highly secret program, is not itself a sign of trouble but of health. If these matters were simple, there would be no need for an extensive legal bureaucracy to consider them. But in the final analysis a mere declaration by the New York Times or any other critic of the Bush administration that an intelligence program was illegal or unconstitutional does not make it so.

More than 60 years ago, during World War II, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t think that his similar, even more daunting, mission was impossible. By the time he had completed his crusade in Europe and thanked his staff for a job well done at a farewell ceremony in Frankfurt in July 1945, the German army, or Wehrmacht, no longer existed, Hitler was dead, the Nazi Party had been dissolved, war criminals were behind bars awaiting trial and retribution, de-Nazification had begun, and western Germany — the part not occupied by the Soviet army — was on its way to becoming one of the most successful liberal democracies of the Western world.

So writes David Stafford in Sunday’s Washington Post. Stafford is the author of Endgame 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II. He finds in Iraq “poignant echoes of the post-WWII experience” and wonders if we could have avoided major mistakes by paying more attention to that historical episode. But he also finds “some small crumb of comfort for optimists” and notes that it

is too soon to declare that the mission has failed. Sen. John McCain’s 100-year horizon for a U.S. presence in Iraq may be stretching things. But let’s not forget that the postwar occupation of Germany lasted for a full decade.

Iraq, as Stafford notes, is vastly different from the conquered Germany of 1945. But still, the parallel is compelling.

Rebuilding a nation is possible. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes effort, time, patience and pragmatism. As 1945 confirms, liberation from a dictator in itself offers no easy path to peace or democracy. Battlefield victory is the easy bit. Building peace is a constant struggle — and it’s a matter of years, not weeks.

Stafford’s reminder of the difficulties we as a nation faced in the past is vitally important. The question of the day: will the U.S. stay in Iraq for the years needed to finish the job?