Barack Obama has a plan to the end the war in Iraq. Since he may well be the next President of the United States, let’s give it a respectful hearing. Here is the sum and substance of it, as presented in an issue paper posted on his website:

Bring Our Troops Home: Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.

Hillary Clinton also has a plan to the end the war in Iraq. Even though her chances of becoming President are diminishing by the day, she is still in the race, so let’s give her plan a respectful hearing, too. Here is the sum and substance of it, as presented in an issue paper posted on her website:

Starting Phased Redeployment within Hillary’s First Days in Office: The most important part of Hillary’s plan is the first: to end our military engagement in Iraq’s civil war and immediately start bringing our troops home. As president, one of Hillary’s first official actions would be to convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff, her Secretary of Defense, and her National Security Council. She would direct them to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home starting with the first 60 days of her Administration.

Obama is promising a faster withdrawal than Hillary. although Hillary has also said, “Our message to the President is clear. It is time to begin ending this war — not next year, not next month — but today.”

For those Americans who want to end the war as rapidly as possible, should we vote for him or for her?

There can be only one answer: neither.

When the United States was contemplating the invasion, Colin Powell memorably enunciated the Pottery Barn doctrine: “you break it, you own it.” Both Hillary and Obama want to walk out of the shop with the crockery in pieces and without paying. Indeed, the main issue between them is which will exit the shop faster.

This leaves Connecting the Dots with two questions: 

1.  Is there anything more shameful than their blithe indifference to the fate of the Iraqi people?

2.  Is there anything more shameful then their insouciant disregard of the iron-clad logic of events: that if the U.S. withdraws without a credible security system in place, our forces will have to fight their way back after one or another ruthless Islamic group terrorizes its way into power?

Last night I listened to Henry Kissinger speak at a dinner (honoring Norman Podhoretz for his new book) that was put on by the amazing trio running Power Line. He made one point that struck me with special force: American withdrawal from Iraq will be an unmistakable American defeat, and the consequences will not be long-term, they will be immediate and grave.

No one can predict the future, but Kissinger’s analysis and warning seems irrefutable. Is that what America wants? This election is shaping up to be even more critical than the Carter-Reagan choice of 1980. Am I correct in thinking that, of the post-war elections, only the Nixon-McGovern race in 1972 had more riding on it?

Is the Justice Department subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times a threat to the rule of law? Or, as I argue in the latest Weekly Standard, is the subpoena amply justified?

Liberals and the Left have been surprisingly mute about the issue of leaks of classified information and the Justice Department’s response. A recent exception comes from Glenn Greenwald of Salon, who is highly alarmed by the DOJ’s action:

Grand Jury Subpoenas such as the one issued to Risen have as their principal purpose shutting off that avenue of learning about government wrongdoing — the sole remaining avenue for a country plagued by a supine, slothful, vapid press and an indescribably submissive Congress.

Greenwald’s analysis is worth reading in full. He offers some interesting speculation about why this issue is coming to the fore now, most of it centering on the appointment of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. But I found the most fascinating portion of his column to be the blank spot in its very center.

Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer, but he offers not a word of discussion about the legal and constitutional issues involved in the publication of classified information by journalists. This left me curious to know several things:

1.  Could it ever be a crime, in his view, for a “whistleblower” to disclose classified information?

2.  Could there ever be a legitimate reason for the Justice Department to issue a subpoena to a journalist (even the shield law making its way through Congress has a national-security exception, too narrowly drawn in my view, but an exception all the same)?

3.  Could there ever be a legitimate reason, in his view, for the Justice Department to prosecute a journalist who publishes classified information?

Perhaps Greenwald will come up with some answers at Salon and we will see the beginnings of a proper debate.

On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times, seeking information about who in the U.S. government provided him with classified information that he published in his book, State of War. That book appeared in January 2006, more than two years ago. The CIA may have a hard time keeping secrets, but the Justice Department, we are learning now that this long-running leak inquest has come to light, seems to be very good at it.

There are at least two possibilities why Risen was issued a subpoena. One is that his book badly embarrassed the CIA by exposing incompetence well beyond its familiar inability to keep secrets. In referring the breach to the Justice Department for investigation, the CIA is paying him back. The subpoena, in other words, is part and parcel of a cover-up of agency bungling.

Another explanation is that, thanks to Risen’s book, valuable intelligence sources and methods were compromised, damage was done to national security, and the Justice Department has been tasked with tracking down the malefactors in the intelligence community who broke their oaths of secrecy, violated the law, and dropped classified information of value to American adversaries into the public domain. Because Risen is the only one who knows their identity, he is being hauled before a grand jury.

Which explanation is more plausible? I offer some answers in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard.

“A Strike in the Dark” is what Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker calls Israel’s September raid on a facility in Syria that may or may not have been nuclear in nature and may or may not have been in the process of being supplied with nuclear materials from North Korea.

Hersh is skeptical of the idea that there was anything untoward going on: “In three months of reporting for this article,” he writes, “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.”

He suggests that reports to the contrary were transmitted directly from Israeli intelligence to senior members of the Bush administration in a way that kept the CIA from vetting them. In other words, it was the same “process, known as ‘stovepiping,” [that] overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.”

In writing his piece, Hersh seems to have interviewed every source in the Washington DC telephone book, and also every source in Damascus, where he traveled to interview Syrian officials. I have no evidence that contradicts his impressive reporting. But I am still skeptical of his skepticism.

For one thing, Hersh is remarkably predictable. No matter what happens in the world, Israel and the United States (especially under the Bush administration) are always made by him to look trigger-happy and sinister. But could events consistently break in one way? Or is this an artifact of Hersh’s well-known biases? 

My biases tilt the other way. I haven’t interviewed 734 sources, some of whom may or not exist, or even if they do exist may not be telling the truth. But I recently re-read a 2005 statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that is quite relevant to Israeli fears about the Syrian facility:

We remain concerned about North Korea’s potential for exporting nuclear materials or technology. At the April 2003 trilateral talks in Beijing, North Korea privately threatened to export nuclear weapons. During the third round of Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue in June 2004, Pyongyang included a ban on nuclear transfers in its nuclear freeze proposal. In April 2005, North Korea told a US academic that it could transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists if driven into a corner. IAEA inspectors in May 2004 recovered two tons of uranium hexafluoride from Libya that is belied to have originated in North Korea.

Perhaps Israel’s action was “a strike in the dark.” But so what? Even if the intelligence leading Israel to hit the Syrian facility was incomplete or wrong, this was one of those cases where it would not be wise to wait until the evidence comes in the form of a mushroom cloud.

The big news story coming out of the testimony of Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, seems to be the admission that three al Qaeda suspects were indeed subjected to waterboarding in 2002 and 2003. Evidently it hurt. The three men talked.

But far more significant were the DNI’s comments about the Iran National Intelligence Estimate. As summarized by the Washington Post,

McConnell said that, in retrospect, “I probably would have changed a thing or two” in the public presentation two months ago of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iran had stopped work on the design of a nuclear weapon. The estimate appeared to conflict with Bush administration rhetoric and undermined Washington’s effort to win support for tough sanctions against Iran.

McConnell said yesterday that the halt in the design work was the “least important part” of the program and “the only thing halted.” He said Iran had continued its production of fissile material, although he noted that it faces “significant technical problems” operating centrifuges. He also disclosed differences within the community about when Tehran could get enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon, with some saying 2009, others 2010 to 2015, but all recognizing the possibility that it could not come “until after 2015.”

This admission is of course a step in the right direction, but there is something immensely galling about it. The NIE was issued in November. Here we are, two months later, after an immense amount of confusion has set in around the world about America’s policy toward Iran. Why did McConnell wait until now to set the record straight?

What is more, he is correcting the record in the most insouciant and understated manner: “I probably would have changed a thing or two,” hardly addresses the fact that the NIE was so profoundly misleading about the real state of the Iranian nuclear project.

Why is McConnell acting in this way? Connecting the Dots has a theory. When the National Intelligence Council released the declassified summary of the NIE, McConnell was asleep at the switch, unaware of what his subordinates were up to, and gave his approval without realizing its import. But to admit the full gravity of the mistake, and to take corrective action, including in the realm of personnel shifts, would have been a bureaucratic and political shot in his own foot. Far better to soft-pedal things all around.

Of course, Connecting the Dots finds it difficult to believe that McConnell, who has a lifetime of outstanding and highly professional public service behind him, would put the preservation of his own image ahead of the public weal. But perhaps human nature set in and the two became confused in his own mind. If so, it would not be the first time in history that that particular human frailty set in.

Today’s Washington Post reports on the intelligence challenged posed by virtual worlds like Second Life, in which millions of participants use “avatars,” computer-generated personae, to interact in an global role-playing game. The research arm under the Director of National Intelligence, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, has been studying such computer environments and finding potential dangers.

One intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no evidence of activity by terrorist cells or widespread organized crime in virtual worlds. There have been numerous instances of fraud, harassment and other virtual crimes. Some computer users have used their avatars to destroy virtual buildings.

In addition to the threat of more virtual buildings getting blown up, there is also the danger of virtual terrorist training grounds, and other possibilities yet to be dreamed of. The immediate problem is that virtual worlds offer a channel for surreptitious terrorist communication. Second Life has some 12 million users with approximately 50,000 people logged on at any given moment, making it very difficult for the CIA to track al Qaeda operatives playing the game from virtual caves.

In a world of multiplying threats, Connecting the Dots wants to know of it would make sense to create a virtual CIA to monitor this world? And if so, who should be in charge? Is this a good moment for the agency to call Michael Scheuer back from retirement?

In order to justify its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cooked the intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. That is the allegation tirelessly hurled about by opponents of the war. Norman Podhoretz put paid to it in his Who is Lying About Iraq.

If turns out that if anyone has been doing the cooking, it has been the CIA and the broader intelligence community itself. The most recent glaring instance came with the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran that opened with the flat — and flatly false — assertion “that in fall, 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

How did this come about? Are the institutions that produced this flawed estimate out of control? Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, has been testifying today on Capitol Hill today about the threats facing the United States. Just in time, John Bolton has a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal raising the key questions about the NIE that McConnell should be asked.

Was the NIE’s opening salvo intended to produce policy consequences congenial to Mr. McConnell’s own sentiments? If not, how did he miss the obvious consequences that flowed from the NIE within minutes of its public release?

This was a sin of either commission or omission. If the intelligence community intended the NIE’s first judgment to have policy ramifications — in particular to dissuade the Bush administration from a more forceful policy against Iran — then it was out of line, a sin of commission.

If, on the other hand, Mr. McConnell and others missed the NIE’s explosive nature, then this is at best a sin of omission, and perhaps far worse. Will Mr. McConnell say he saw nothing significant in how the NIE was written?
Does he believe in fact that the first sentence is the NIE’s single most important point? If not, why was it the first sentence?

These are excellent questions all. When Bolton was named United Nations ambassador by President Bush, the New York Times called it a “terrible choice at a critical time.” As I noted in my review of Bolton’s UN memoir, let us hope that more such terrible choices lie ahead. The nation needs an intelligence director who, in Bolton’s words, can “commit the intelligence community to stick to its knitting — intelligence — and return its policy enthusiasts to agencies where policy is made.” Come to think of it, John Bolton would be an excellent candidate for the job.

We will be hearing more about Wikileaks, as a report in today’s New York Times makes clear.

The deliberate release of what could be a classified document is “irresponsible and, if valid, could put U.S. military personnel at risk,” Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. military command in Baghdad, told the Times.

The document in question, if it is authentic — and there is no reason to believe it is not — shows that U.S. forces in Iraq were granted authority to enter Iran in hot pursuit of terrorists and former members of Saddam’s Hussein’s regime.

The document can be found at wikileaks.org. Wikileaks describes itself as “an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.” In support of their objectives, the organizers cite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Pentagon Papers case “that only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.” “We agree,” they say.

Connecting the Dots does not agree, either with Wikileak’s purpose or with the implication that is actions are legal.

In the Pentagon Papers case the Supreme Court ruled against a prior restraint on the publication of the secrets turned over by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times. It left open the possibility of prosecution of the Times after publication.

Indeed, in his concurring opinion, Justice White (joined by Justice Stewart)wrote,

The Criminal Code contains numerous provisions potentially relevant to these cases. Section 797 makes it a crime to publish certain photographs or drawings of military installations. Section 798,  also in precise language, proscribes knowing and willful publication of any classified information concerning the cryptographic systems or communication intelligence activities of the United States, as well as any information obtained from communication intelligence operations. If any of the material here at issue is of this nature, the newspapers are presumably now on full notice of the position of the United States, and must face the consequences if they publish. I would have no difficulty in sustaining convictions under these sections on facts that would not justify the intervention of equity and the imposition of a prior restraint.

There has never been a successful prosecution of a newspaper under the espionage statutes. But does Wikileaks qualify as a newspaper? Is it even part of the press? As leakers become emboldened by this new self-proclaimedly “untraceable” medium, this is a question that is going to be asked again and again.

Finally, action. A federal prosecutor has issued a subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times, one of two reporters at the paper who compromised the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program in December 2005.

Risen himself does not appear to be under investigation. Indeed, prosecutors do not appear to be investigating the NSA leak at this moment. Rather, they are seeking the confidential sources that led to the disclosure of an entirely different secret, one that did not appear in Risen’s newspaper, but only in a chapter of Risen’s book, State of War. It reported that the CIA had attempted to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program and described a number of other highly classified details about covert efforts in that area.

Why is this investigation proceeding now? Connecting the Dots has no inside information. But Connecting the Dots was seated at the same table as Michael Mukasey and his wife at two dinners in the last three years, back when the future Attorney General was still a mere federal judge. The leaks in the New York Times did not come up for discussion, but Mukasey made plain he was a close reader of COMMENTARY.

Did he read a certain article in COMMENTARY entitled Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? That’s a question James Risen — and Bill Keller, too — should be thinking about.

What is war like? For those of us who have never had the misfortune of seeing it in person, the question is of enduring fascination. The literature is vast, and there are many vivid memoirs and histories  that convey the horror of the battlefield. A picture of a very different sort is provided by a newly released U.S. Army document entitled The Warrior Ethos and Soldier Combat Skills, a manual for fighting modern warfare.

Here is how it opens: 

Modern combat is chaotic, intense, and shockingly destructive. In your first battle, you will experience the confusing and often terrifying sights, sounds, smells, and dangers of the battlefield—but you must learn to survive and win despite them.

1. You could face a fierce and relentless enemy.

2. You could be surrounded by destruction and death.

3. Your leaders and fellow soldiers may shout urgent commands and warnings.

4. Rounds might impact near you.

5. The air could be filled with the smell of explosives and propellant.

6. You might hear the screams of a wounded comrade.

However, even in all this confusion and fear, remember that you are not alone. You are part of a well-trained team, backed by the most powerful combined arms force, and the most modern technology in the world. You must keep faith with your fellow Soldiers, remember your training, and do your duty to the best of your ability. If you do, and you uphold your Warrior Ethos, you can win and return home with honor.

A brief excerpt from the table of contents — Chapter 5 “Cover, Concealment, and Camouflage”– gives a sense of what else awaits anyone who takes the time to study this interesting document.
Chapter 5 COVER, CONCEALMENT, AND CAMOUFLAGE

5-1  Section I. COVER

5-2  Natural Cover
5-2  Man-Made Cover

5-4  Section II. CONCEALMENT

5-4  Natural Concealment
5-4  Actions as Concealment. 5-4

5-5  Section III. CAMOUFLAGE

5-5  Movement
5-5  Positions
5-5  Outlines and Shadows
5-5  Shine
5-5  Shape
5-6  Colors
5-6 Dispersion
5-6 Preparation
5-7 Individual Techniques

The Warrior Ethos and Soldier Combat Skills is important not only for what tells us about the battlefield but for the glimpse it offers of what our brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are called upon to do on a daily basis. 

The United States is at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against the dispersed cells of al Qaeda and Islamist affiliates around the world. Is the CIA also at war, or is it business as usual at the agency? 

The CIA proudly announced last week that it has opened a new office building designed according to state-of-the-art “green” principles. Fifty percent of the building has been constructed from “waste diversion from landfill.” Among other achievements, the new campus features such high-tech wonders as “bike racks” and 22,000 square feet of “vegetated roof.”

The interior has facilities worthy of a James Bond movie, including not only “low-flow” toilets but also “waterless urinals.” For the first time, CIA agents will also be cleared to use “individual lighting controls” in their cubicles; formerly, in the tightly run agency, the light switches were under the control of top spymasters.

The new CIA facility “is an ecologically sensitive building – reducing our impact on the global environment while improving the quality of the workspace for the individual,” crows a ranking CIA official.

Congratulations are due the CIA for investing its time, effort, and materials “in creating a comfortable workplace that fosters efficiency and collaboration while respecting our natural resources.”

But Connecting the Dots has only one question for the CIA as it celebrates its new “ecologically sensitive” and “comfortable workplace”: Where is Osama bin Laden?

What are we to make of President Bush’s final State of the Union Address? The New York Times has an answer. When it comes to Iraq, says the paper,

Mr. Bush’s annual addresses will be remembered most for his false claims — the fictitious “axis of evil,” nonexistent aluminum tubes and African uranium, dangerous weapons that did not exist. No President can want that as his legacy.

There’s a lot to unpack here. To begin with, is the “axis of evil” really “fictitious”? What is the Times driving at here? Perhaps it is quarreling with the use of the word “evil” to characterize North Korea, Iran, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. But if the editors of the Times do not regard these particular dictatorships as evil, than what is?

Alternatively, perhaps the paper is quarreling with the word “axis.” But Connecting the Dots seems to recall that it was only this past September when North Korea was observed supplying some sort of nuclear technology to Syria, a close ally of Iran. Some reports suggest that Israel seized the material in its raid on a Syrian facility that month. Doesn’t such proliferation activity — along with North Korea’s collaboration with Iran in the field of offensive missiles — make for an “axis”? If not, how does the Times define “axis”?

One might also ask in response to the Times editorial: was Iraq under Saddam Hussein part of an axis of evil? True, only scant and highly debatable evidence has emerged suggesting Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. But did he not have ties to al Qaeda, and isn’t al Qaeda evil?

Here is an October 2002 letter from CIA Director George Tenet to Senator Pat Roberts that is quite relevant:

We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade.

Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [the military operations that commenced shortly after September 11, 2001], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action (emphasis added).

How about the aluminum tubes? According to numerous reports, including in the Times itself, Iraq had acquired, or was in the process of acquiring, some 60,000 of them before the U.S. invasion. 60,000 doesn’t sound like “non-existent” to Connecting the Dots. The real issue, as the Times presumably knows but found inconvenient to say, was what the tubes were going to be used for, a nuclear program or a rocket program? As the Times also presumably knows, there was a vigorous debate inside the intelligence community about this question. 

How about the African uranium? Was that also “non-existent”? Here the Times is referring to Bush’s first State of the Union address in which he uttered the soon-to-be controversial sixteen words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Whatever the Times might now be insinuating in its editorial, every single one of those words is true. That is exactly what British intelligence had learned and exactly what it told the United States. Bush’s speech had been vetted by the CIA, which had left the sixteen words in.

Finally, there are the non-existent “dangerous weapons” referred to by the Times. But the newspaper itself was warning about Iraq’s “dangerous weapons” at the very same moment, and on the basis of roughly the same evidence, that Bush was relying on, when he made the allegedly “false claims.” The question is: were Bush’s statements about these weapons (and the Times’s statements) “false” or were they knowingly false? There is a world of difference between the two, which the Times editorial page elects to fudge.

No President, concludes the Times editorial, wants all these “false claims” as his legacy. But when the history of this period is written, it is the knowingly false claims found day after day on the editorial pages of the New York Times that will deserve a chapter of their own.

Last week we noted that the Center for Public Integrity, a public-interest group in Washington DC, had created an online database of the 935 “false statements” uttered by ranking officials of the Bush administration to push the United States into war with Iraq. The New York Times, reporting on the new research resource, compared the scandal the center had documented to Watergate.

But if the Bush lies were bad, how about the lies told by Bill Clinton on the same score, or for that matter, the lies told in the editorials of the New York Times?  Connecting the Dots has uncovered a couple of whoppers, which the Times, in its story on the matter did not — or affected not to –  notice.

Here is a New York Times editorial on February 13, 2003, on the eve of the second Gulf war:

The Europeans and the United Nations must recognize that Saddam Hussein does pose a clear and present danger to the peaceful international order that the United Nations purports to protect. The credibility of the United Nations is at issue — not because President Bush says so, but because Mr. Hussein is a serial violator of both international law and Security Council resolutions forbidding him to acquire terrible weapons of mass destruction, and because he is a serious threat to his neighbors.

It is easy to find many more such “lies” in the editorials of the Times. Here is another one from November 4, 1997.

Closing down Baghdad’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction requires the continuing pressure of international sanctions until U.N. investigators are completely satisfied that Baghdad is no longer hiding anything from them. Iraq now demands that the Security Council set a timetable for lifting all sanctions in exchange for full Iraqi cooperation. The sanctions are indeed supposed to be lifted when Iraq has fully complied with U.N. requirements. But Baghdad has no right to negotiate over the degree of its cooperation with U.N. investigators. Iraq has been flagrantly misleading U.N. experts and obstructing inspectors’ efforts to examine suspected storage sites.

And here is President Clinton “lying” to the American people on December 16, 1998, as he justifies military action against Iraq:

Earlier today I ordered America’s Armed Forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.

Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States and, indeed, the interest of people throughout the Middle East and around the world. Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons.

Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there’s one big difference: He has used them, not once but repeatedly, unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops during a decade-long war, not only against soldiers but against civilians; firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Iran, not only against a foreign enemy but even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq.

A question Connecting the Dots has asked before is: did the Bush administration lie when it relied on the CIA’s estimates of Iraq’s WMD program? Did the Clinton administration also lie? Are the Clinton administration’s lies included in the database of the Center for Public Integrity? Are the “lies” of the New York Times?

Or perhaps the Bush administration’s lies were not lies after all but something else. Or perhaps the George Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity lacks integrity, as does the New York Times.

�

“A White House plan to broaden the National Security Agency’s wiretapping powers won a key procedural victory in the Senate on Thursday, as backers defeated a more restrictive plan by Senate Democrats that would have imposed more court oversight on government spying,” the New York Times reported this morning.

This is good news. The defeat of the Democratic Senators’ plan will make the country safer. It also makes clear exactly how phony the entire controversy over so-called wireless wiretapping is.

In making their case, the Senate Democrats, led by Senator Leahy, have pointed to past abuses, including especially the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP)  disclosed to the world by the New York Times. 

“In December 2005,” Leahy’s report on the FISA Act amendments states, “the American public learned for the first time that shortly after 9/11 the President had authorized the NSA to conduct secret surveillance activities inside the United States completely outside of FISA, and without congressional consent.”

One is compelled to wonder, in reading such statements, whether Leahy and his colleagues believe what they are saying to be true, or want the public to believe it to be true even as they know it to be false.

When the Bush administration initiated the Terrorist Surveillance Program, Congress was briefed on the program. The briefing was, of course, confined to the “gang of eight,” the leaders of both parties in both houses of Congress, and the ranking members of the intelligence committees of the two chambers, but this was done according to Congress’s own rules regarding highly sensitive information.

More than a dozen successive briefings were repeated at regular intervals over the following years. Though Congress did not formally approve or disapprove of the program in a vote, that would not be a normal procedure for a highly classified program. In the context of secrecy, Congress did give its “consent” to the TSP program in the normal meaning of that word.

What is more, a key detail that the Leahy report fails to note, but which eight Republican senators on the Committee include in their “minority views,” is that the FISA Court itself, in a 2002 ruling, pointed out that all courts that have decided the issue, have held “that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. . . . We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”

The Democrats who are raising a hue and cry about illegal warrantless wiretapping are wrong on the merits, and if they have read their own report, including the minority views, they know they are wrong.

They are also, undoubtedly, wrong on the politics. Could it possibly be a winning theme to block one of the of intelligence community’s most critical efforts to connect the dots and avert a second September 11? The fact that the Senate yesterday voted by 60-36 to set aside Senator Leahy’s proposals, suggests that, in at least some quarters of the Democratic party, wisdom, or honesty, or perhaps mere electoral prudence, can still be found.

Today’s Washington Post carries good news about the Hermit Kingdom. David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, and Jacqueline Shire, a former State Department official, tell us there’s no reason for us to worry about the lack of North Korean progress in meeting its obligations under the various agreements it has signed. Indeed, the “finger-wagging, told-you-so naysayers in and out of the Bush administration should take a deep breath.”

To begin with, they argue, North Korea’s full declaration detailing the scope of its nuclear program, due on December 31, and now 24 days late, is not really late at all: “After some tail-chasing, it emerged that North Korea had quietly shared an initial declaration with the United States in November.” The North Koreans there admitted came clean about their plutonium stockpile but they denied having “a uranium enrichment program.”

Albright and Shire acknowledge the “ample evidence that North Korea acquired components for a centrifuge-enrichment program” but they explain that few observers now believe that it actually managed to enrich any uranium. In any case, their efforts in this area are nothing to worry about: “The success or failure of this latest agreement with North Korea must not hinge on the uranium issue,” even if the full declaration was not really full at all.

Then there is North Korean cooperation with a covert Syrian nuclear program. This is “troubling,” Albright and Shire tell us, but “must also be kept in context.” What is the context? The necessity of keeping North Korea engaged in dialogue. In the face of Pyongyong’s provision of “sensitive or dual-use equipment to Syria,” the main imperative is “keeping the deal together.” This will help bring “North Korea into the fold, bit by bit, making it harder for it to slip back into the arena of illicit deals and keeping a bright light on its activities.”

As for the nuclear facility in Syria that Israel bombed in September after a North Korean shipment of some unknown sort arrived there, this also must be kept in context, and in any case “it is gone now and whatever has replaced it is almost certainly not a reactor.” Reports that North Korea provided plutonium to Syria “are baseless.” The evidence: “The transfer of such material for weapons would be a casus belli with dire consequences for both countries, and this surely is understood by both Kim Jong Il and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

Albright and Shire complain that the advocates of the “the six-party process” have been “unfairly maligned.” Perhaps. But perhaps they are maligning themselves. In their op-ed, these advocates of the six-party process are adducing evidence that is not really evidence to explain away every North Korean transgression, large and small. Where they have no evidence, not even the tissue-paper-thin kind, they adapt a slightly different approach: they simply tell us to close our eyes to the North Korean violations in order to keep “a laser-like focus” on the talks.

Connecting the Dots has asked readers the same question before: What is the best word to describe such an approach to the North Korean nuclear problem?

What is a false statement? If the New York Times, relying on an outside team of meteorologists, reports that there is 100 percent probability of rain in Central Park tomorrow, but tomorrow comes and the sun shines all day, has the newspaper lied to the American people? 

The question arises because of an article in today’s paper about a new online tool developed by an organization specializing in “investigative journalism in the public interest.”

In a story by John Cushman, the Times reports that “[s]tudents of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of c