As the day goes on, Douglas Feith's defense gets stranger and stranger. First, according to Eric Edelman, Feith's office was merely engaged in innocuous policy work, not (as the Pentagon IG concluded) "inappropriate" intelligence work.

Now, Feith, appearing on NPR's "Day To Day" show, is saying that, in fact, what the Office of Special Plans did was no more than offer "criticism" of the intelligence community:

CHADWICK: Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, thank you for agreeing to come back on Day to Day. And what would be your response to Senator Levin?

DOUGLAS FEITH: Well, what he’s saying is wrong and unsupported. The criticism that is being directed now at my former office is because my office was trying to prevent an intelligence failure. We had people in the Pentagon who thought that the CIA’s speculative assessments were not of top quality; they were not raising all the questions they should raise and considering all the information they should consider. And our people criticized the CIA. And they did not present an alternative intelligence analysis; they presented a criticism. And now, the inspector general is saying that criticizing the CIA was an intelligence activity that policy people should not have engaged in.

CHADWICK: That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying you briefed the president and the vice president, and you said that there was conclusive evidence that there was a meeting between the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraq spy in Prague. That was doubtful then; it’s pretty much discredited now.

FEITH: No, that’s absolutely not true. I mean, what you’re saying – there are about a dozen factual errors in your question there. It’s just not true. First of all, I didn’t brief them. I mean, that’s part of it. But there were some people from my office and people from elsewhere in the Pentagon who were challenging the CIA’s assessment of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. And they were raising questions and they were not putting out their own conclusions and analysis. They were challenging the approach that the CIA took because they believed that the CIA had a theory that ideological opponents like secular Ba’athists in the Iraqi government and religious extremists in al Qaeda could not cooperate for strategic purposes. And the critics in the Pentagon of the CIA said that the CIA was filtering its own intelligence and ignoring its own intelligence that was inconsistent with the CIA’s theory.

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Just because the Pentagon IG report has been completed doesn't mean the Office of Special Plans matter is closed.

According to Wendy Morigi, spokeswoman for Senate intelligence committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), committee staff reviewed the inspector general's report and identified "additional documents and interview transcripts" that the committee doesn't yet have related to the OSP. Today the committee asked for that information from the Pentagon IG's office.

Before determining whether or not the intelligence committee's "Phase II" investigation -- scheduled for completion around the spring or early summer -- needs to go over the question of OSP's role, Morigi said, the staff wants to have the newly-identified material. Morigi wouldn't describe what that material is, but she described it as "foundational" to the IG's judgments.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that she doesn't remember if she saw a fax detailing an Iranian diplomatic overture in 2003. Today, Michael Hirsch of Newsweek has something that should jog her memory: the fax itself.

Through a Swiss intermediary, the Iranian regime proposed the basis for comprehensive discussions. If accepted, it would have meant the Iranians would have put on the table ending its support for Palestinian terrorist groups; "action" on transforming Hezbollah into a "mere political organization within Lebanon"; "transparency" that Iran isn't trying to develop WMD; and "enhanced action against Al Qaida members in Iran." In return, the U.S. would ultimately lift all sanctions on Iran; ensure "full access" to nuclear technology (!); and provide, in general, a "halt in hostile U.S. behavior," to include action against "anti-Iranian" terrorist groups.

It's of course worth noting that the sincerity of the offer is not something to accept at face value. But that would have been the point: to create a diplomatic mechanism to find out how serious the Iranians actually were about reaching a modus vivendi with the U.S., and to determine if the price for that was acceptable. (Giving Iran access to nuclear technology, for instance, sounds like a pretty bad idea.) The alternative path, however, appears to be clear: an escalating series of tensions with an Iran that's only grown more anti-American in the intervening three and a half years. If yesterday's hearing is any indication, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee intends to explore this question in the days ahead -- and maybe now Secretary Rice will have a clearer memory.

With the Pentagon's Inspector General condemning the Office of Special Plans' activities as "inappropriate" and Senators openly calling them illegal, we thought we'd put in a call to Rep. Chris Carney (D-PA).

Carney was an analyst in Doug Feith's shop, even contributing to the infamous briefing to members of the administration that claimed a far more conclusive link between Al Qaeda and Iraq than other intelligence estmates. So what does Carney, who still nurses a belief that there was a connection between the two (sub. req.), think about all this? It's an answer the nearly echoes the one from his old boss, Doug Feith:

"I read the inspector general's report with interest. As the inspector general found, this activity was authorized and lawful. I trust this answers the questions raised by the Senate Armed Services Committee."

Unfortunately for Carney, the report only begins to answer questions raised by Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI), as he and Senate intelligence committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have both said that they will press on to find answers about the administration's handling of intelligence.

It's easy to forget, but in November 2003, after the Weekly Standard published a leaked summary of the Office of Special Plans's analysis of the Iraq-al-Qaeda question, the Pentagon immediately released an official statement distancing itself from the OSP's controversial findings. The central contention of the statement tracks with the positions taken in Douglas Feith and Eric Edelman's rebuttals -- that whatever OSP did, it wasn't intelligence analysis.

The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the National Security Agency or, in one case, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the intelligence community. The selection of the documents was made by DoD to respond to the committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.

Of course, digging through such raw reports to criticize the intelligence community was exactly what the OSP* was charged with doing. And after the Pentagon released its statement, the Standard shot back its disbelief: "But make no mistake--contrary to what Defense now says--these are conclusions and this is analysis."

At the time, the Defense Department's statement merely seemed bizarre. Now, however, it appears to have had a subtler purpose than simply distancing the Pentagon from the OSP. By stating that OSP didn't perform analysis and "drew no conclusions," it's likely that the Pentagon was trying to forestall criticism of illegally performing intelligence work. Curiouser and curiouser...

* By the way, we're using the term "OSP" here as the inspector general's report does: as "generic terminology" for Iraq and al-Qaeda-related program activities that occurred in 2001 and 2002 in the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy.

Word from the Senate, where Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) has been presiding over a Armed Services Committee hearing on the Inspector General's report.

Levin says that, dividing the work with the Senate intelligence committee, they will seriously pursue the issue and plan to interview members of the administration who received briefings from Doug Feith, including National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and former chief of staff to VP Cheney (and current criminal defendant) Scooter Libby.

Update: It turns out that Levin is pursuing these interviews after Hadley refused to speak with the Inspector General while he was compiling his report.

One of the more interesting assertions in both Douglas Feith's and Eric Edelman's reactions to the IG report on the Office of Special Plans is that the office's activity can't be inappropriate because it was authorized by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, then the secretary and deputy secretary of defense. As Feith puts it:

It is bizarre for the Inspector General to disapprove of policy officials' doing work that they were directed to do by the Secretary or Deputy Secretary of Defense, given that those tasks were lawful and authorized and the Inspector General found nothing at all wrong with the Secretary and Deputy Secretary directing that the work be done.

Edelman's response portrays Wolfowitz, now the president of the World Bank, as the prime mover behind the whole affair:

The Deputy Secretary of Defense ("Deputy" or "DSD") directed his Special Assistant in his front office and two staff members in OUSD(P) to take a fresh, critical look at Intelligence Community ("IC") reporting on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida.

We've got a request for comment out to Wolfowitz's office about this.

Cheney's Secrecy Fight Reaches a Key Point
"An important legal ruling is pending over Vice President Cheney's refusal to disclose statistics on document classification and declassification activity. The Information Security Oversight Office, which is responsible for the policy and oversight of the government's security classification system, has asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to direct Cheney's office to disclose these statistics." (U.S. News & World Report)

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Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, has released this statement in response to the Pentagon IG's report into his office's intelligence activities:

It is good but not surprising that the Inspector General ("IG") found that the Pentagon Policy office's activities were all legal and authorized and that Policy officials did not mislead Congress.

The Policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-War work was somehow "unlawful" or "unauthorized" and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading. The office's accusers always couched the charges in vague language, making them difficult to refute with precision. The charges have been repeated persistently despite the lack of any substantiation. The IG report has now thoroughly repudiated the smears.

In faulting Pentagon policy officials for "inappropriately" criticizing the CIA's pre-Iraq-war intelligence, however, the IG report takes an absurd position. The report says that written criticism of the CIA's work is an "intelligence activity" inappropriate for policy officials. But professional criticism of intelligence by policy officials is a good thing. The Pentagon briefing at the heart of this matter was a good thing and our government is better off when policy officials challenge speculative intelligence. Both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb WMD Commission said we need more, not less, criticism of intelligence work by policy officials.

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Back when Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he chose to defer the committee's long-awaited "Phase II" investigation into how the Bush administration used the Iraq intelligence in making the case for the war until the Pentagon inspector general's report into the Office of Special Plans was completed.

Well, now it's completed. So: Whither Phase II? We've got a call out to the office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the new chairman of the committee, and we'll report back as soon as we can.

We have the unclassified version of the executive summary of the Pentagon Inspector General's report on the Office of Special Plans here. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) is trying to declassify much more of the report, and we'll bring it to you as it becomes available.

Also not to be missed in Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman's response to the Pentagon IG report on the Office of Special Plans is this choice assertion:

We respectfully observe that the OIG's opinion on the subjective question of "appropriateness" in these circumstances is not entitled to any particular deference. The OIG does not have special expertise on this issue, which is fraught with policy and political dimensions.

So the Pentagon's inspector general apparently has no better idea of what's appropriate activity for the defense department than does... the office it's investigating.

Douglas J. Feith's successor as undersecretary of defense for policy, Eric Edelman, has put together a 53-page rebuttal of the Pentagon Inspector General's report criticizing the Office of Special Plans (caution: PDF; hat tip to McClatchy ace reporter Jonathan Landay). Its key point: what the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) did wasn't intelligence work at all, but rather policy work. It's an argument apparently generated to spare the OUSDP from the charge of illegality, which the IG doesn't in fact put on the office -- but, in his statement yesterday, Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, raised as a remaining possibility.

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What do you do if you don't like the intelligence community's assessment? You create your own!

A report out today from the Defense Department's Inspector General on the administration's DIY intelligence analysis shop, led by Douglas Feith, reopens an old and vital controversy: the administration's alleged manipulation of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq War.

Feith, the undersecretary of defense famously called "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet" by Gen. Tommy Franks, started his group shortly after 9/11 with the mandate, handed down from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to look for state sponsors of terrorism. That soon turned into a quest for signs of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq; and Feith's group was urged "to ignore the intelligence community's belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam's secular dictatorship were unlikely allies."

And, what do you know, Feith turned up evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq -- findings that resulted in briefings to senior administration and CIA officials in the summer and fall of 2002. Only, "left out of the version for the CIA, the inspector general said, was 'a slide that said there were 'fundamental problems' ' with the way the intelligence community was presenting the evidence."

The centerpiece of the briefings were "slides describing as a 'known contact' an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and an Iraqi intelligence officer." That claim, of course, has since been thoroughly debunked.

Now, what does Feith say about all this?

In a telephone interview yesterday, Feith emphasized the inspector general's conclusion that his actions, described in the report as "inappropriate," were not unlawful. "This was not 'alternative intelligence assessment,' " he said. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."

We'll have more on the report, including a copy of the declassified summary of its findings, a little later on.

A statement out from Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on the Defense Department's Inspector General's report on the Office of Special Plans contains more details....

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I just got off the phone with Flynt Leverett, a former CIA Mideast analyst and National Security Council staffer during President Bush's first term. Leverett says he finds it "really quite curious" that Secretary Rice is pleading a memory lapse on an Iranian offer shortly after the Iraq war to, among other things, recognize Israel.

Leverett himself says he "saw the actual document" detailing the offer, which arrived at the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs bureau via fax around late April or early May of 2003, when he had left the White House to return to his regular post as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Leverett wasn't around to personally show Rice the document. But, he says, "What I was told from colleagues over at the NSC, people I knew on the NSC staff -- I dont know for a fact that it was put on (Rice's) desk, but it did go to the NSC. And I know for a fact that at State, it went all the way up to [Secretary of State Colin] Powell."

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As vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) was often outmaneuvered by GOP chair Pat Roberts (R-KS), when it came to prewar intelligence. In response to the Pentagon inspector general's report on the Office of Special Plans, however, Rockefeller is hinting that era is fully closed. From a Rockefeller statement, just released:

“The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities. The Senate Intelligence Committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law.

“In the coming days, I will carefully review all aspects of the report and will consult with Vice Chairman Bond to determine whether any additional action by the Senate Intelligence Committee is warranted.”

It's kind of funny: President Bush announces in his speech on the surge that he's moving a second naval carrier group to the Persian Gulf just after he finishes talking about the malfeasance of Iran. Everyone understands that this movement is to direct a show of strength at Iran. Everyone, that is, except White House spokesman Tony Snow, who told reporters that the new deployment has... nothing to do with Iran!

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Tomorrow, the Pentagon's Inspector General will release a declassified version of a long-awaited report on the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon office that's been accused of manipulating prewar Iraq intelligence, particularly on the question of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda. Bob Burns of the Associated Press has a preview:

Some of the Pentagon's pre-war intelligence work, including a contention that the CIA had underplayed the likelihood of significant al-Qaida connections to Saddam Hussein, was inappropriate but not illegal, a Pentagon investigation has concluded.

In a report to be presented to Congress on Friday, the Pentagon inspector general clears former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith of allegations by some Democrats of illegal activities — specifically, that he misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq.

Two people familiar with the findings discussed the main points and some details Thursday on condition they not be identified.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has scheduled a hearing Friday to receive the findings by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon's acting inspector general. The committee's chairman, Carl Levin, D-Mich., has been a leading critic of Feith's role in pre-war intelligence activities and has accused him of deceiving Congress.

More soon.

The measure governing the nomination of federal prosecutors tucked into the fat USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act is heading for a change, after a Senate committee passed a revision today.

The change will revert the law back to what it was before a member of Sen. Arlen Specter's (R-PA) staff, acting on behalf of the Justice Department, inserted a measure that effectively allowed the administration to appoint U.S. Attorneys in perpetuity without Senate confirmation. Three Republicans, including Sen. Specter, voted for the change.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) tells the AP that he plans to "do everything I can" to bring the bill to the floor.

In addition to the law change, the Democrats continue to push the issue of the earlier purge.

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty admitted in a hearing earlier this week that a U.S. Attorney in Arkansas was removed for no reason except to install a former aide to Karl Rove, Timothy Griffin. And today, Democratic leaders sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanting to know more. You can read the letter in full here.

Among other questions, they asked:

In light of the unprecedented nature of the appointment, we are especially interested in understanding the role played by Karl Rove. In particular, what role did Karl Rove, with whom Griffin was closely associated, play in the decision to appoint Griffin?

And as further proof that this story won't be winding down any time soon, one of the six prosecutors who were fired on the same day in December, John McKay of Washington's Western District, has finally come out to say that he, too, was canned without any explanation: "I was given no explanation. I certainly was told of no performance issues.”

“Is it the position of this administration that it possesses the authority to take unilateral action against Iran, in the absence of a direct threat, without congressional approval?” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) asked Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice during a Senate hearing January 11th. He's still waiting for an answer.

After a couple weeks of radio silence, Webb sent a letter again requesting a response last week. But despite his urging for clarity of what was "basically, a 'yes' or 'no' question," the answer he finally received wasn't good enough.

The written response, sent to Webb from one of Rice's assistant secretaries last week, "didn't adequately answer the specific question," according to Webb's spokeswoman, Jessica Smith. "It wasn't a form letter," she said, but it "was not responsive to the question."

Webb continues to push for an answer, Smith said.

Update: Here's Webb speaking yesterday about the administration's plans for Iran.

One outstanding controversy that Condoleezza Rice addressed -- or sort-of addressed -- in this morning's testimony has to do with a reported overture made by Iran to the U.S. in 2003. Only she may have contradicted what she told NPR last year.

Last June, Glenn Kessler of the Post reported that the State Department's New Eastern Affairs Bureau received a fax from the Iranians shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.

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Russert Denies Role in Plamegate
Testifying as the final prosecution witness in Scooter Libby's perjury trial, NBC News journalist Tim Russert denied ever mentioning CIA officer Valerie Plame's name, asserting that he discovered her identity only after reading an article by columnist Bob Novak. As the trial comes to its conclusion, the newsman's testimony stands as a firm contradiction to Libby's claims of having learned of Plame's identity through Russert, and could further damage the defense of the former White House official. And by the way, you can hear a recording of Libby's grand jury testimony here. (The Washington Post)

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The papers today are full of the spat between the State and Defense Departments over civilian posts in Iraq. The Washington Post quotes a State official saying "Everybody just wants to pretend this never happened."

That might be the position of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself. In response to a question from Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) this morning at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, a weary Rice promised, "These are not positions the the State Department hasn't filled." As she explained, the unfilled posts aren't exclusively State Department posts; and those that are State posts, she promised -- without giving numbers -- have been filled. However, the State Department has been charged with filling other civilian posts in Iraq, such as agronomists and urban planners, "civilian positions I don't have." Finding people to fill these positions often requires -- you guessed it -- outside contractors, as the government doesn't have enough qualified experts in these fields to go to Iraq. And the money for all these jobs is, she promised, in the State Department's budget request.

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Never underestimate the power of public shaming. After yesterday's House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform hearing into military contracting in Iraq, the Army has decided to shelve a contract worth $19.6 million to Halliburton. The defense titan, it turns out, had subcontracted the Blackwater corporation to provide private security for its operations in Iraq -- something the terms of the contract arguably prohibit. Says the New York Times:

In the dispute with Halliburton, the Army insisted repeatedly to Congressional investigators last year that it could find no evidence that Blackwater had been hired by Halliburton and its subcontractors in Iraq for security.

But in a letter dated Tuesday and made public on Wednesday, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said that additional investigation showed that Blackwater had provided private security guards for a Halliburton subcontractor, ESS Support Services, a construction and food services business, and that the costs “were not itemized in the contracts or invoices” prepared by ESS.

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What is the administration up to with Iran? Craig Unger, reporting on the neocons' saber rattling in Vanity Fair, provides two alternatives.

The first, courtesy of frequent TPMmuckraker subject and conservative uber-strategist, Grover Norquist:

"[The president's neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, 'Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.'"

The signs for this are numerous, Unger reports, from former CIA officer Philip Giraldi's comment to him that "I've heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen," to President Bush's order that the U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom) "draw up plans for a massive strike against Iran."

On the other hand, Unger points out, the U.S. may just be trying to show its strength in an attempt to contain Iran:

Gary Sick [an Iran specialist with the N.S.C. under Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Carter] is slightly more optimistic that the Bush administration's Iran strategy entails more than brute force. "What has happened is that the United States, in installing a Shiite government in Iraq, has really upset the balance of power [in the Middle East]," Sick says. "Along with our Sunni allies—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—[the administration is] terribly concerned about Iran emerging as the new colossus. Having created this problem, the U.S. is now in effect using it as a means of uniting forces who are sympathetic [to us]."

"The Bush White House has already built the fire," Unger concludes. " Whether it will light the match remains to be seen."

It's getting to be a familiar story. Soldier or Marine hears about detainee abuse; reports it up the chain of command; and the official investigation says no such abuse occurred.

This time it happened to Marine Sergeant Heather Cerveny, who heard people identified to her as Guantanamo Bay guards bragging about beating detainees. The investigator on the case, Army Colonel Richard Bassett, found no evidence of abuse -- only he didn't interview any detainees:

In an affidavit filed to the Pentagon's inspector general, Cerveny — a member of a detainee's legal defense team — said a group of more than five men who identified themselves as guards had recounted hitting prisoners. The conversation allegedly took place at a bar inside the base.

"The evidence did not support any of the allegations of mistreatment or harassment," the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in southeastern Cuba, said in a statement.

Investigators conducted 20 interviews with "suspects and witnesses," the Southern Command said. Bassett did not interview any detainees, said Jose Ruiz, a Miami-based command spokesman.

"He talked to all the parties he felt he needed to get information about the allegations that were made," Ruiz said by telephone from Miami.

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Poor Carl Levin. First the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee insists on getting a list of the fabled "benchmarks" that President Bush said the Iraqi government had agreed to, only to see that the actual benchmarks are pretty insubstantial ("November 2006: Approve a Flag, Emblem and National Anthem Law") and none were met. Now, in his press briefing today, White House spokesman Tony Snow derided the very idea that the Iraqi government ought to be held to its stated commitments:

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Today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) continued his string of hearings on government waste and fraud with one concentrating on Blackwater USA. First up to testify were the families of the four Blackwater guards who were dragged through the streets of Fallujah in 2004.

From their written statement (pdf):

Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East, Blackwater treated them as a fungible commodity. For example, Scott Helvenston was physically and verbally attacked one night by a Blackwater program manager, when Scott indicated that he was not well enough to leave the following morning on a mission. Despite two other Blackwater operators offering to go in Scott’s place, the Blackwater manager burst into Scott’s room late one night, confiscated his weapon, and told Scott that if he personally did not go on the mission the following day, he would be fired. It was under this threat of being fired and abandoned in the Iraq that forced Scott to leave for Baghdad the following morning.

However, late that night, Scott sent his last email. It was addressed: “To the Owner, President and Upper Management of Blackwater Security.” The treatment of the security operators was so bad that after working for Blackwater for just 11 days, Scott felt compelled to write an email to the owner and president of the company that began:

“It is with deep regret and remorse that I send you this e-mail. During my short tenure here with Blackwater I have witnessed and endured some extreme unprofessionalism.”

In this lengthy email, Scott detailed all of the problems with the entire program and the treatment of the operators. There was no response from Blackwater management to this call for help. Instead, our men were dead four days later.

Update: Here's the video of the families' opening statement, as delivered by Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel, Stephen Helvenston's mother:

From the AP:

Vice President Dick Cheney seemed surprised in 2003 when told where his chief of staff had learned the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"From me?" Cheney asked, tilting his head, according to the grand jury testimony of the aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is on trial on charges of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI....

"He didn't say much, something about 'from me?'" Libby told the grand jury. The vice president "tilted his head, something he does commonly, and that was that," Libby recalled.

The indictments just keep coming. From the AP:

Three Army Reserve officers and a U.S. contractor were indicted Wednesday as part of a bid-rigging scam that steered millions of dollars of Iraq reconstruction projects to a contractor in exchange for cash, luxury cars, jewelry and other pricey goods....

The indictment says the three officers — Col. Curtis G. Whiteford of Utah, Lt. Col. Debra M. Harrison of New Jersey and Lt. Col. Michael B. Wheeler of Wisconsin — directed at least $8 million to a construction and services company. In return, they allegedly demanded cash, a Nissan sports car, a Cadillac SUV, real estate, a Breitling watch, business-class plane tickets and other items.

One predicted crisis in Iraq that hasn't materialized is an all-out war for control of Kirkuk -- the multi-ethnic, oil-rich city in northern Iraq that the Kurds call their Jerusalem. A major reason why the battle for Kirkuk hasn't yet happened is because U.S. and Iraqi officials have consistently deferred resolving the city's political status over the past four years. This year, however, that all changes.

The Iraqi constitution stipulates that by the end of 2007, a referendum will take place in Kirkuk to determine whether the city becomes part of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government or will continue to be administered from Baghdad. Since 2003, Kurds who had been displaced by Saddam Hussein's campaign of ethnic cleansing have been returning, a vast demographic shift within the approximately-700,000-person city that very likely will ensure that the Kurds prevail.

According to the just-released National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, "The Kurds are moving systematically to increase their control over Kirkuk to guarantee annexation of all or most of the city and province into the Kurdistan Regional Government," something the NIE considers understandably destabilizing.

Qubad Talabani doesn't necessarily disagree. Talabani, the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the Washington representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, told me that "the aftermath of the referendum may be messy, undoubtedly." But for Talabani, the issue is that, especially after the hanging of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, "we can't leave their racist handiwork intact." For a population that experienced a genocide a mere 20 years ago, making Kirkuk Kurdish again is first and foremost a matter of justice. As part of that, Talabani says, "we can't rectify a crime with another crime," which is why he and the Kurdish leadership support financially compensating Arabs who Saddam moved into Kirkuk as part of the "Arabization" campaign of the 1980s. But the Kurds have been similarly firm in their demand that those Arabs do indeed have to leave the city.

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Is the White House politicizing United States Attorney offices across the country? The controversy continues to roil after the Senate hearing on the topic yesterday. But that may be only half the story: a new study shows that such federal investigations may have been politicized throughout the Bush administration.

A study of reported federal investigations of elected officials and candidates shows that the Bush administration’s Justice Department pursues Democrats far more than Republicans. 79 percent of elected officials and candidates who’ve faced a federal investigation (a total of 379) between 2001 and 2006 were Democrats, the study found – only 18 percent were Republicans. During that period, Democrats made up 50 percent of elected officeholders and office seekers during the time period, and 41 percent were Republicans during that period, according to the study.

"The chance of such a heavy Democratic-Republican imbalance occurring at random is 1 in 10,000," according to the study's authors.

The vast disparity came not from the more high-profile investigations of state-wide or federal officeholders (the disparity there was 55-44 Democratic), but from the far more numerous investigations of local officials. The study found that 85 percent of the 309 local officials and candidates who faced investigation were Democrats.

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Quick! Which former Bush administration official was caught shoplifting? Which one was convicted for lying about his relationship to Jack Abramoff? Which one is heading to prison for soliciting sex from an underage girl?

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has the answers, in their list of 25 most corrupt administration officials, snappily titled, "Criminals and Scoundrels."

And those with an unending appetite for catalogues of administration corruption will also enjoy our list of scandalized administration officials that we painstakingly compiled back in December.

As the new Baghdad security plan gets underway -- otherwise known as phase I of the surge -- State and Defense Department officials are again at odds over the division of labor for the "build" end of the "clear, hold and build" strategy. And that's something that, according to the military officers in charge of implementing the surge, could doom it from the start.

In Senate testimony yesterday, it was revealed that while the State Department is creating 350 new positions to support the Iraqi government during the surge, it has a manpower shortfall so severe that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is requesting the U.S. military -- already overburdened -- to fill up to a third of the civilian jobs. Defense Secretary Gates told Senators pronounced himself disappointed by Rice's request; be sure that Rice will have to answer for it in testimony tomorrow before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And that's because of the broader logic of the surge. Both General David Petraeus and incoming Central Command chief Admiral Bill Fallon stated in their confirmation hearings last month that ultimate success in Iraq depends not on military victory, but on political and economic developments -- the idea that there's a better life for Iraqis who renounce violence. In other words, without sustained support from the State Department and other civilian agencies to improve the daily lives of Iraqis, arguably the most important aspect of the surge will never have a chance.

So why is State having such a hard time sending people to Iraq? I asked a State Department contact for a wingtips-on-the-ground perspective, and here's his candid, off-the-cuff response.

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From the AP: "US Senator Tom Coburn [R-OK] says he will not run for re-election if an ethics bill that's passed the Senate becomes law."

Cheney's Son-in-Law Hindering DHS Oversight Effort
"The Department of Homeland Security refuses to cooperate on oversight activities, according to testimony offered today by GAO Comptroller General David Walker and Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner. The investigators highlighted the role of Philip Perry — Chief Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security and Vice President Cheney’s son-in-law — as the major stumbling block in their investigations." (Think Progress)

Continue below for the rest of the day's muck...

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For those who haven't read Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker profile of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), it's a defining portrait of a man who finds it lonely in the Senate -- where, he says, “a lot of Democrats are essentially pacifists and somewhat isolationist" -- and, one has to think, lonely at the movies:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

But Goldberg doesn't quite penetrate the possibly impenetrable veneer of Lieberman's persona, a man who claims that he "can't explain why" Democrats might be upset when Lieberman accuses them of giving comfort to the enemy by opposing the administration's plans for escalation in Iraq.

Unsurprisingly, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) does perhaps the best job:

McCain told me that one explanation for Lieberman’s obdurate support for the President was politics. Lieberman, he implied, had invested too much in his advocacy of the war to back away now. “It might be that Joe was assaulted so harshly in the campaign that he felt that if he showed any chink in his armor, people would exploit it,” he said. “You could do the commercial yourself.”

Note: Perhaps the best clue of how Lieberman sees himself was lost on me. If anyone can explain in comments Lieberman's remark "I'm the Lorax... I'm saving that one tree" (referring to Dr. Seuss' lorax, I gather), I'd appreciate it.

With Brent Wilkes speeding towards indictment, the AP churns up more details about his close friend Dusty Foggo, the former Executive Director of the CIA, helped him land a multimillion deal in Iraq.

The contract, previously reported to be worth between $2 million and $3 million, was a no-bid, unneeded deal to distribute water in Iraq. In other words, it was right up Wilkes' alley, since he specialized in selling unneeded and drastically overpriced equipment and services to the government via acquaintances like the now-incarcerated Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA).

The problem for Dusty Foggo, who left his senior post at the CIA shortly before federal agents raided his house, is that CIA officials, according to the AP, are saying that the recommendation to hire Wilkes' company -- which was headed by his young nephew and had existed for only a few months -- came from Foggo. The AP reported last week that prosecutors are planning to file honest services fraud and conspiracy charges against Foggo and Wilkes.

Of course, Foggo's lawyer has earlier said that he had no idea that the company had any connection to his best friend. Prosecutors must be pretty confident about how that story would play in front of a jury -- especially since Foggo reportedly told his poker buddies that "he may have tipped off Wilkes that CIA contracts were coming up for bid."

What happened to billions in Iraqi funds that were overseen by the Coalition Provisional Authority? That's not "important," according to David Oliver, the former Director of Management and Budget of the agency.

A recording of the unfortunately candid remarks, previously made by Oliver to the BBC, were played during this morning's oversight hearing by Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA). The hearing has focused on the CPA's administration of nearly $9 billion in Iraqi funds in 2003 and 2004 -- money that Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has said was inadequately accounted for.

"I have no idea, I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it is important," Oliver says on the tape . "Billions of dollars of their money disappeared, yes I understand, I'm saying what difference does it make?"

At the hearing this morning, Oliver was more circumspect in his remarks:

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Defense Secretary Bob Gates delivered an implicit slap at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today before the Se