All right, we've got the official accounting about the "36 nations" cited last night by President Bush "who have troops on the ground in Iraq." And it still doesn't add up.

According to a National Security Council official, our tally of 34 was slightly off. We had been including the U.S. as a contributor to MNF-I, and we had forgotten the island nation of Tonga. Additionally, the White House relied on two other nations contributing forces to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq -- Canada and New Zealand -- in addition to the Figians. So there you have it: 26 in MNF-I; seven in the Nato non-combat force; and three guarding UNAMI. Thirty-six!

Only... not. First, Canada withdrew its single soldier to UNAMI in June. (New Zealand does contribute its own soldier -- that's soldier, singular -- to UNAMI, along with, one hopes, bootleg DVDs of Flight of the Conchords.) Second, the aforementioned CRS report (pdf) notes that Tonga has withdrawn its force from Iraq; and, accordingly, MNF-I no longer includes Tonga on its list of coalition members. Additionally, globalsecurity.org isn't sure whether Hungary has anyone in Iraq as part of the Nato force. (No one's answering the phones at the Hungarian embassy in Washington, either.) And, lest we forget, Iceland is sending its press aide -- apparently not really a soldier -- home from Baghdad on October 1.

But assume the White House is correct on Hungary. And also concede that Iceland isn't out yet. Still, by the accounting of the White House, at least two of the nations the president cited last night aren't in Iraq in any capacity anymore.

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I just spoke with Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) spokesman Aaron Saunders who said they are not commenting on the recent testimony from Bill Allen. Saunders said they are standing by the old statement they put out when Stevens' home was raided by the FBI. That statement, declaring that Stevens won't comment on the investigation "until it has concluded," is below.

But during a press conference in July, Stevens wasn't so disciplined, declaring that he'd paid "every bill that was given to us" as part of the home renovation. With Allen's testimony today, that line is looking more and more like the artful dodge it was suspected to be.

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It's getting juicy up in Alaska, as former Veco CEO Bill Allen testified again today. From the AP:

Under cross-examination by defense attorney James Wendt, representing former state Rep. Pete Kott, Allen acknowledged that the more than $400,000 he admitted spending in the bribery charge was for other legislators - and including for work done at the Girdwood, Alaska, home of Stevens, the longest serving Republican in the U.S. Senate.

"I gave Ted some old furniture," Allen said. "I don't think there was a lot of material, There was some labor."

The workers were VECO employees, probably one to four at a time, Allen said. He said the work on the home lasted for "probably a couple of months." Later, he said it might have been as much as six months.

Maybe Stevens wasn't getting all of his bills, after all?

Update: Bill Allen testified that Veco actually paid for some of the work. Rich Mauer at the Anchorage Daily News reports live from the courtroom:

Wendt: “There wasn’t a lot of material … but you paid some labor bills that went into Sen. Stevens’ house?”

Allen: “Yes.”

Allen said it the labor was from Veco employees.

Update: To clarify, according to Bill Allen's plea deal, he admitted to giving more than $400,000 worth of "illegal benefits" to politicians and their families.

We had come so close to finding 34 of President Bush's 36 countries with troops in Iraq. But now it appears we won't be at 34 for long: next month, Iceland, part of the NATO mission to Iraq, is pulling out its one lone soldier. From the Iceland Review, last week:

Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir has decided to remove an Icelandic Crisis Response Unit (ICRU) member from a NATO training program for the Iraqi army in Baghdad next month, causing disappointment among NATO leaders.

The ICRU member has been working in Baghdad for the last two years, primarily as a media representative, and will cease working there October 1, Morgunbladid reports.

(Thx to TPM Reader HT.)

It appears that Thomas Kontogiannis fun in the Grecian sun is over. Kontogiannis, despite having surrendered his passport when he posted bail, was tracked down at a five-star resort in Greece. The judge wasn't happy about it. And now he wants an explanation, Justin reports at the Blotter:

In an order Thursday, Burns wrote he had "received information from reliable sources" that Kontogiannis "has traveled outside the United States" in violation of the terms of his release.

He ordered Kontogiannis to appear at a hearing next Monday to explain why his bond should not be revoked.

About that NATO mission to Iraq: how large is the contribution from member countries? According to a June report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service, it's... less than robust.

The State Department's last weekly Iraq update lists six non-MNF-I NATO countries on the ground (sorta) in Iraq: Slovenia, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Iceland and Portugal. It says there are seven, however, and judging from CRS, State may be forgetting Hungary. (For shame!) If so, that gets us to the magic number of 34 countries on the ground in Iraq. (Alas, GlobalSecurity.org casts doubt on whether the Hungarians made it over there.) We're almost to 36, Mr. President!

So, according to CRS, what are those countries providing to Iraq? Here goes.

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We'd be remiss if we didn't link over to fellow muckraker Charlie Savage's stay at TPMCafe this week to discuss his new book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.

It's long been apparent that the administration has sought to expand executive power whenever possible. But Savage's book documents the extent to which this was a conscious and controlling priority, especially for Dick Cheney -- so much so that Savage calls it "The Cheney Project." Go check it out.

A particularly telling excerpt from the book is below.

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Let's clarify a bit about the Iraq coalition. President Bush last night thanked "the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq." We count 25 of them (including, um, us) as part of Multinational Force-Iraq, most of whom have a tiny presence "on the ground"; six nations that have a non-MNF-I presence as part of a Nato mission that mostly takes place outside of Iraq; and then brave Fiji, which helps protect the United Nations mission. (Also mostly outside Iraq.)

Multinational Forces-Iraq lists 25 members of the coalition. (We list them after the jump.) Nearly all of them have minuscule numbers of troops devoted to the Iraq mission, for a total of only 11,732 . The most substantial non-U.S. troop contribution, from the UK, pulled back from Basra earlier this month to assume the non-combat "overwatch" role that General Petraeus believes that the U.S. can adopt at some as-yet-undefined point in the (far) future. Others are pulling out: the Danes, proud contributors of 470 troops in Iraq, have said they would withdraw in August, but that seems not to have happened yet. South Korea is expected to get out at the end of the year. Famous ex-members of the Coalition include Singapore, Honduras, the Netherlands, Ukraine and the Philippines, as well as major partners like Spain and Italy.

But wait! Italy and the Netherlands are listed on the State Department's latest weekly Iraq status report (pdf) as being part of the Nato contribution to Iraq. What Nato contribution?

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Today at 3 PM, Alberto Gonzales will speak at his farewell ceremony at the Department of Justice. In addition to the dwindling number of remaining Department officials who haven't resigned, a coterie of law enforcement officials, such as FBI Director Robert Mueller will be there to see him out the door.

The Washington Post reports this morning that Gonzales appears "relieved and happier since announcing his resignation."

As for what he leaves behind:

Almost every senior Justice Department official has resigned or announced plans to depart this year, leaving the department under the control of more than a dozen acting officials. More than a quarter of the nation's U.S. attorneys are also temporary appointees, partly because of the mass firings that eventually had repercussions on Gonzales's tenure.

The mystery is solved! (Again) On the witness stand yesterday Bill Allen identified the "Senator B" in his guilty plea as former State Senator Ben Stevens (R-AK), son of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK).

Allen pleaded guilty to paying Stevens "consulting fees" in exchange for votes -- and made it clear that he's a briber with a big heart.

As to Stevens, he started consulting for Veco in 1995, six years before he was appointed to the Senate, Allen said. "He was real good at details. He was like Pete [Kott]. He would work," Allen said.

By the time Stevens was in the Senate, he had four kids, Allen noted. "How am I supposed to say 'now that you're a senator, Ben, I can't give you more money,' " Allen testified. "I couldn't do that."

Politicians have mouths to feed too, after all.

It's demeaning that we have to do this. But since President Bush keeps lying about the size of the coalition in Iraq, we have to. Last night, the president thanked "the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq." To which the Washington Post sighs:

But the State Department's most recent weekly report on Iraq said there are 25 countries supplying 11,685 troops -- about 7 percent of the size of the U.S. forces.

It would be funny if it weren't designed to mislead the American people about the way the international community contributes to the American mission in Iraq. But Bush is right that there are more than 25 countries contributing fighters in Iraq -- you know, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Emirate of Blackwater....

Seriously, the State Department report (pdf, page 31) lists the 25, and then ticks the number up to 33 by adding the U.S., Fiji, and "seven Nato countries" that aren't -- aren't -- a part of Multinational Forces-Iraq: Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey and Slovenia. Yes, you read that right: State says seven but only lists six.

The final three? We've got calls out to the State and Defense Departments, and we'll let you know who our mystery nations are when they tell us.

Norman Hsu, who yesterday was ordered by a Mesa County judge to be held on $5 million cash bail, is calling attention to an old fund-raising technique call "bundling." Bundling became important after the 2002 McCain-Feingold law limited the contributions individuals could make to political parties because bundlers can skirt the law by rounding up contributors and delivering contributions as a "bundle." According to the Times, Hsu enlisted 260 people to give a total of $850,000 to Hillary Clinton for President and delivered hundreds of thousands to other candidates. (Los Angeles Times)

Kim Long, author of The Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals & Dirty Politics, reminds us that the "good old days" were full of the same political patronage, scandal and sleaze that we find today. His book goes back to colonial times but Long also notes a "close precedent" to the Larry Craig story from 1964 in which Walter Jenkins, LBJ’s chief of staff was caught by undercover officers in a sexual encounter with another man in the basement of the Men’s Room of a YMCA near the White House. Though Jenkins was a close friend of LBJ's, he was dumped within 24 hours because the election was one month away. The history lesson according to Long -- "it makes you wonder about the sensitivity of the public and the media to these types of things." (Harper's)

A report distributed to Congressional offices in March, but not made public until now, reveals that Department of Commerce employees have been indulging in unauthorized, improper first- and business-class travel. ABC News notes that, "Ironically, the inspector general responsible for discovering the improper travel, Johnnie E. Frazier, resigned in June, facing multiple investigations into numerous allegations of abuse and mismanagement, including that he fraudulently charged the government for improper travel." (ABC News)

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An epilogue, of sorts:

Disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley, whose e-mails and instant messages to teenage former congressional pages shocked the country, may avoid criminal prosecution in Florida because of the state's three-year statute of limitations.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement did not start a criminal investigation of Foley until November 2006, making it nearly impossible to prosecute what some officials regarded as the best case, an explicit instant message sent by Foley to a 17-year-old high school student in February 2003, when Foley was in Pensacola, Fla.

Time to move some goalposts. The White House today released its third benchmark report (pdf) on Iraq, and, miracle of miracles, it shows some achievements. Iraq is now making "satisfactory" progress toward de-Baathification reform. Repeat after me, in your best Johnny Drama voice: Victory!

Of course, the Iraqi parliament has been on vacation for all of August, almost half of the time since the White House's last benchmark status update. Needless to say, no law relaxing the purge of overwhelmingly Sunni ex-Baath Party officials has been passed. Just last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office bluntly assessed the de-Baathification benchmark as "not met" in its report. So what gives?

What gives is the White House has seized on an agreement between the different factions of the Iraqi government in August to relax the de-Baathification program as evidence of progress. Now, the salient fact here is that the government of Nouri al-Maliki doesn't contain any Sunnis. One influential Sunni official, Tariq al-Hashemi, signed onto the agreement. But that was largely out of politesse. Not only did his Sunni political bloc not rejoin the government, but one of his deputies dismissed the agreement as "an irrelevant media production."

And that's exactly why it's good enough for President Bush. The report expects the American people to believe that yet another in an endless litany of promises is a sign of the inevitable march of sectarian healing. "The fact that legislation has not yet passed the [parliament] should not diminish the significance of the agreement," the report hectors. But the GAO included the agreement in its assessment, which is far more realistic: "No consensus exists on reforming the current de-Ba'athification policy, and many Iraqis are concerned about the prospect of former Ba'athists returning to power."

And there lies the new way forward for the Iraq war: to paraphrase Senator George Aiken of Vermont, declare victory and stay in forever.

I don't have half the brainpower necessary for economics reporting, but luckily, the Media Consortium's Brian Beutler does. Beutler examines the statistics cited by Amb. Ryan Crocker during his testimony this week, and finds that -- somehow! -- they don't really add up to the success story that Crocker related:

Perhaps Crocker's single biggest claim during his two days on Capitol Hill was this: "The IMF estimates that economic growth will exceed 6 percent for 2007." It's a true statement as far as it goes, but the International Monetary Fund's Executive Board reported the figure with less enthusiasm. "Economic growth has been slower than expected," the IMF fretted, "mainly because the expected expansion of oil production has not materialized."

Indeed, it's typical for a country as damaged as Iraq to see its economy fluctuate wildly, resulting in spurts of growth much more substantial than 6 percent.

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The going suspicion in Washington has always been that politicians are not prone to ask too many questions of contributors as long as the checks keep coming. But never has a contributor's hidden past blown up in a campaign's face quite like it has for the Clinton campaign in the case of Norman Hsu.

The story began just two weeks ago when The Wall Street Journal noticed that one of Hillary Clinton's biggest donors was a family that lived in a single story home near the San Francisco airport. The father, William Paw, was a mail carrier; his wife was a homemaker. And yet the couple and their children had given $45,000 to Clinton since 2005. The contributions closely, and suspiciously, matched the timing of those by a New York businessman named Norman Hsu. It's illegal to reimburse individuals for making campaign contributions.

The next day, The Los Angeles Times made the story a scandal when it reported that Hsu had been convicted in California state court of stealing $1 million from investors in the early 90s. He'd failed to show at a sentencing hearing and been on the lam ever since.

After that story, he made his way back to California, but then promptly disappeared again after posting $2 million for bail. After sending out a "To Whom It May Concern" suicide note via FedEx to acquaintances and charitable organizations to whom he'd donated (like, ironically enough, The Innocence Project), he hopped on an Amtrak train to Chicago. On the train, he locked locked himself in a compartment. A passenger discovered him the following morning shirtless, wedged against the door in the fetal position. Pills were scattered over the floor. He was arrested after being transferred to a hospital in Colorado.

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Gen. Petraeus downplayed the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgency in his testimony and subsequent press appearances. But a report prepared by the Congressional Research Service last week pointed out that al-Qaeda in Iraq is a miniscule fraction of the insurgency. From Kenneth Katzman, the lead Iraq analyst for Congress' independent, nonpartisan research wing, AQI is:

A numerically small but politically significant component is non-Iraqi, mostly in a faction called al-Qaeda Iraq. Increasingly in 2007, U.S. commanders have seemed to equate AQI with the insurgency, even though most of the daily attacks are carried out by Iraqi Sunni insurgents.

Katzman puts AQI's active strength at between 1500 and 3500 fighters. (Terrorism expert Malcolm Nance pegs it at about 1300.) That's compared to about 25,000 Sunni insurgents, according to U.S. estimates, though the Iraqi government puts them at about 40,000, with 150,000 "supporters." AQI certainly punches above its weight class -- Petraeus said it's responsible for today's murder of anti-AQI Sunni shiekh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, though George Washington University professor Marc Lynch thinks Sunni insurgents may have killed him -- but it's important to remember that the insurgency isn't a monolith under the control of al-Qaeda.

It just goes to show: Lee County, Florida was asking for trouble when it decided to rebuff Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) pork. Now if they're hit by a hurricane and need help and can't get it, they'll only have themselves to blame.

The Department of Transportation warned Lee County, Florida in a letter last week that it has jeopardized receiving emergency funds by voting to return the extra-Constitutional $10 million earmark Rep. Don Young (R-AK) slipped them in 2005.

DOT wrote the county ominously saying:

Since Florida is in the middle of hurricane season, this action could jeopardize potential funding from the Emergency Relief Program, which provides for the repair and reconstruction of Federal-aid highways and roads on Federal lands which have suffered serious damage as a result of (1) natural disasters or (2) catastrophic failures from an external cause.

In order to ensure such funding, the DOT wants the county to revise the process by which it rejected Young's $10 million.

This won't help Adm. Mike McConnell's flagging credibility on Capitol Hill. On Monday, in response to questioning from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), McConnell, the director of national intelligence, proudly claimed a victory for the new Protect America Act -- the broad new surveillance law McConnell helped push through Congress last month that revised the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. McConnell claimed that three German terrorism suspects arrested last week for plotting to blow up nightclubs frequented by U.S. military personnel had come to the attention of German authorities thanks to U.S. intercepts made possible by the new law.

Only one problem: it had been widely reported that the suspects had been under surveillance for months. The Protect America Act wasn't even a month old at the time of their arrest. Almost immediately, intelligence officials queried by Newsweek's Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball backtracked on McConnell's dubious statement.

Yesterday, bowing to pressure, McConnell released this statement retracting his claim:

During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on September 10, 2007, I discussed the critical importance to our national security of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the recent amendments to FISA made by the Protect America Act. The Protect America Act was urgently needed by our intelligence professionals to close critical gaps in our capabilities and permit them to more readily follow terrorist threats, such as the plot uncovered in Germany. However, information contributing to the recent arrests was not collected under authorities provided by the Protect America Act.

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John Rizzo, President Bush's choice for the CIA general counsel, has gotten opposition for standing by a 2002 memo that defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death." Now the Senate intelligence committee has requested that Rizzo's name be withdrawn for the nomination.

The day after Norman Hsu turned himself in to California authorities he penned a suicide note that he sent to several acquaintances and charitable organizations. The note apologized for putting people "through inconvenience or trouble." This afternoon he faces a Mesa County judge. (WSJ)

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has been forced to withdraw his assertion that a new electronic surveillance law was instrumental in the recent uncovering of a terror plot in Germany. However, four intelligence-community officials, who came forward anonymously to refute McConnell, insisted that the new law played little if any role in the unraveling of the German plot. Instead, the U.S. military should have been credited for the surveillance work they completed months before the new law was enacted. (Newsweek)

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Former Veco CEO Bill Allen testified in the criminal prosecution of state Rep. Pete Kott (R-AK) yesterday, in yet another example of how he likes to keep pols on the hook:

"... Allen talked about overpaying a flooring job done by Kott by more than $7,000 and of scheming to get at least some of that money to Kott's son so that he could work on Kott's 2006 campaign, when a poll showed he was in surprising trouble. Even the poll itself was secretly paid for by Veco, which if true would be a hidden -- and illegal -- campaign contribution by the company to Kott."

Allen also testified that Kott joked about wanting a job handing out towels to women on beaches in Barbados, but that he had genuinely planned to give Kott a job as a Veco lobbyist, which pays $6,000 to $12,000 a month.

One week later, here it is: Gen. Petraeus' definition of sectarian violence.

Ever since the GAO report last week said it was "not clear" that the surge had contributed to a drop in sectarian deaths, Gen. Petraeus has been under pressure to explain his methodology. The GAO was agnostic on whether or not sectarian attacks had declined in recent months, citing that it required knowing a perpetrator's intent -- a task beyond the capabilities of the agency. But GAO was, at least inferentially, skeptical, noting that the broader pattern of attacks on civilians -- of which sectarianism is a proportion -- hasn't declined. And further reporting suggested problems with how MNF-I has tabulated sectarian casualties: one famous Washington Post story cited a senior intelligence official claiming MNF-I looks at where a bullet entered someone's head to divine sectarian intent.

Petraeus has disputed all of this. Yesterday, in Washington, Petraeus took a stab at an explanation. And in Baghdad, the Los Angeles Times reports, so did the U.S. military command, known as Multinational Forces Iraq, to combat the accusation that it's cooking the books to exaggerate the success of the surge. However, it's not exactly clear what that methodology tells us:

Stung by accusations that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, had presented selective statistics during his testimony before Congress, the military released a statement here outlining its definition of sectarian violence: bombings, killings or other attacks committed by an ethnic group or religious sect against another, for purely sectarian purposes.

That seems a little circular. As I wrote last week, determining sectarian killings isn't a matter of determining intent. There's plenty of evidence from a body that a killing was driven by sectarian motivations. Victims of sectarianism "generally are males found without identification documents and shot execution-style. The bodies usually are blindfolded and bound at the wrists, and often bear signs of torture," writes the LAT's Tina Susman. It may be that MNF-I's methodology makes sense, and the GAO was unduly harsh. Or not.

Here's MNF-I's statement in full:

Multi-National Force-Iraq defines ethno-sectarian murder as a murder committed by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect.

Ethno-sectarian violence is defined as an event and any associated civilian deaths caused by or during murders/executions, kidnappings, direct fire, indirect fire, and all types of explosive devices identified as being conducted by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect.

In our collection of data, a shot to the front or back of the head is not used to determine ethno-sectarian murder.

The number of ethno-sectarian murders has declined significantly since the height of the sectarian violence in December 2006. Iraq-wide, the number of ethno-sectarian deaths has decreased by over 55 percent, and it would have decreased much further if it not for the casualties inflicted by barbaric al-Qaeda bombings attempting to reignite sectarian violence.

It remains unclear why, as reported, the GAO, DIA and CIA have difficulty accepting MNF-I's definition of sectarian violence.

How much opposition would Ted Olson get if nominated? Well, consider the gauntlet thrown down:

Senate Democrats will block Ted Olson from succeeding Alberto Gonzales as attorney general if President Bush nominates him, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday.

"Ted Olson will not be confirmed," Reid, D-Nev., said in a written statement. "I intend to do everything I can to prevent him from being confirmed as the next attorney general."

Surely this counts as a new land speed record for dropping something down the memory hole.

Tomorrow, President Bush will endorse the Petraeus plan for removing five Army surge brigades by July 2008. He's going to portray that incremental reduction as the spoils of victory. Just yesterday, however, Gen. Petraeus conceded that "the string is going to run out" on the deployments of the surge brigades by the summer, and since the active-duty Army doesn't have any more available brigades to send in relief and the reserve component (the National Guard and Army Reserve) is overtaxed as well, the surge just has to come to an end -- unless the Pentagon is willing to extend active-duty deployments even further, which Secretary Gates pledged in April not to do.

Just don't tell any of that to Tony Snow. "Wrong. You don't have to pull 'em out," Snow said today at the daily press briefing when challenged by a reporter.

Snow tried to portray the reporter's inquiry as an attack on Petraeus' credibility, even though Petraeus himself acknowledged the fact yesterday.

On at least three occasions that I counted during the Petraeus/Crocker hearings, Gen. Petraeus flatly stated that the U.S. is not providing weapons to the Sunni tribal fighters who, over the past year, have turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq. On Monday I noted how the U.S. was giving the tribes money that they used to buy weapons, making Petraeus' assurance precious and legalistic.

But it turns out that earlier this year, U.S. commanders weren't so defensive about the terms of their deal with the tribes. Here's Major General Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. troops in northern Iraq, on those terms in June:

[Question] (on camera): Will the assistance or the coordination with these former insurgent groups extend to arming [them] or helping them out in logistics in any sense?

GEN. BENJAMIN MIXON, U.S. REGIONAL COMMANDER IN IRAQ: It certainly will. We have seen this in counterinsurgency operations before, using local nationals, if you will, arming them, forming them into scouts, if you will. And that's the primary role that we want to use them in. They know the territory, they know the enemy.

Did Mixon misspeak?

Last month, Freedom's Watch, a conservative group dedicated to urging public support for the Iraq War and the president's surge, began its campaign of TV, radio and Web ads. But the $15 million, five-week blitz was just the beginning to a campaign that's seemingly as open-ended as the Iraq War itself. And that's thanks largely to the financial support of billionaire Sheldon Adelson, reports the National Journal's Peter Stone (not online).

"Sources say that the group has lined up commitments of almost $200 million (from Adelson and others) to finance its operations," he reports, noting that "the group has several A-list donors," but "Adelson by far has the most firepower."

Forbes recently listed Adelson as the sixth richest person in the world, with $26.5 billion in assets. He's made his fortune mainly off of hotel-casinos and owns the Las Vegas Sands company. Stone reports that Adelson doesn't serve on Freedom's Watch's board of directors, but "the group’s chairman is Bill Weidner, president of the Las Vegas Sands."

Also on that board of directors, of course, are Ari Fleischer, and Brad Blakeman, both veterans of the Bush White House (spokesman and scheduler, respectively), who've served as the public faces of the group.

Gen. Petraeus didn't say that there isn't a non--al-Qaeda Sunni insurgency in Iraq anymore. But he's certainly been at pains to diminish its role. That might have to do with both his campaign plan against that very insurgency -- and a great deal with politics -- but it certainly paints a misleading picture to the public about who it is we're fighting in Iraq.

Today at the Press Club, he very briefly referred to the Sunni insurgency, urging reporters, "don't get me wrong" about its existence. But it would be very easy to get the general wrong, since his description of the ongoing Iraqi Sunni insurgency against the U.S. consigned it to an afterthought compared to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Shiite militias.

But it's the Sunni insurgency, primarily, that's responsible for the approximately 93 soldiers killed on average in Iraq each month this year. "It's not Al Qaeda in Iraq -- they are strictly a [car bomb] and occasional ambush group," says Malcolm Nance, a longtime counterterrorism expert and former adviser to the U.S. military in both Afghanistan and Iraq. "Nope, it's the ex-Ba'athists and Iraqi religious extremists."

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It's all over but the arguing. In a few days, Gen. Petraeus will be back at Camp Victory and Amb. Crocker will be back in the Green Zone. The next comprehensive official assessment of Iraq's political and military fortunes will come in March 2008, when Petraeus will decide when and if to schedule further reductions below the pre-surge force of roughly 130,000 troops.

But, until then, what information are we still missing, despite the last two days' worth of testimony? Here are a few of what Donald Rumsfeld used to call the "known unknowns."

Stastical Methodology. Forgive us for harping on this point, but at least twice yesterday, Senators noted to Petraeus that his figures for determining the status of security in Iraq are under question, only to decline to pursue any answers. By some estimates, Iraq in 2007 is more deadly for civilians than Iraq in 2006. Similarly, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, following on concerns from both the CIA and the DIA, said last week that it can't determine that sectarian killings are in fact on the decline. Petraeus referred today to his command's "pretty logical and rational" methdology, and said on Monday that the tabulation has remained consistent since before he took over the command. But though he hinted at it today, he didn't discuss how his command tabulates sectarian killings; whether his command relies on the Iraqi government for its total of civilian casualties; or if they revise its total of "insurgent" deaths after an engagement when eyewitnesses claim civilians were killed.

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Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is well connected in the state's scandal circuit. He came up twice yesterday in two separate Alaska cases, one criminal and one civil, that both hinge on the financial ties between public officials and company leaders.

In the favors-for-votes corruption trial of former state legislator Pete Kott (who dreams of a topless beaches and a Barbados prison gig), the FBI played a videotape of a secret meeting between Veco executives discussing Stevens' arrival, just in time to support legislation they wanted pushed through the state legislature.

In the grainy video, VECO Corp. executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith can be heard talking about how to ensure passage of an oil tax bill. If approved, the bill would increase chances that a natural gas pipeline would be built, a deal that could mean huge profits for VECO.

Allen and Smith said they wanted to ensure Stevens was asked "good questions" that would steer him toward discussing the bill and the pipeline. The senator, Allen said, would make clear that "we need oil."

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Neil Volz, ex-Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) former chief of staff, and one of Jack Abramoff's partners in crime was richly rewarded for his ample cooperation with investigators today. Judge Ellen Huvelle sentenced him to two years probation and $2,000.

Prosecutors had suggested no jail time for Volz since he'd been such a helpful cooperator in putting away Ney and offering muck on other lawmakers. The judge went along with that, saying that "The government has clearly viewed you as the key to their case against Congressman Ney."

Ney's other former aide who cooperated against him, Will Heaton, also got off with no jail time.

Update: More from the AP here.

Now we're getting somewhere. At the National Press Club this morning, Gen. Petraeus for the first time peeled back the curtain behind his questioned methodology for tabulating ethno-sectarian violence. Calling his methodology "pretty logical and rational," the general said he has a "three-page document" -- he read from it at his Press Club podium -- that refutes a senior intelligence official who told Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post that Multi-National Force--Iraq doesn't count front-of-the-head executions as sectarian incidents. "It's just not true," Petraeus said. So what is a sectarian murder?

"Civilians who show signs of being blindfolded, tortured or being shot anywhere, and so forth."

No word on how MNF-I tabulates civilian casualties. (Does it use Iraqi government data? Morgue data?) Also no word on why two of the larger U.S. intelligence agencies, with the largest analytic capability in the intelligence community, reportedly take issue with MNF-I's stats. So we'll be filing a Freedom of Information Act request for the methodology document today.

The administration rolled out its new disaster recovery plan this week, and the states aren't happy about it. Despite drafting the new system for two years, they allege, the government has still left unclear any chain of command during a disaster, and the plan gives no substantive detail for guiding officials through different types of disaster. The government fired back saying that the final plan would be a "collaborative process": the states have 30 days to digest the plan and come up with improvements. (Washington Post)

Hsu- you're freaking me out, dude. An investor with Norman Hsu is complaining that the money he gave to the investment company of the fundraiser-turned-best-story-ever is now missing. The investor? Joel Rosenman, one the original creators of Woodstock. (Wall Street Journal)

Hillary Clinton has long told her staff that the biggest threat to her presidential campaign would be to accept questionable funds, which would link her, in the minds of voters, to Democratic scandals from her husband's tenure. Whoops. (NY Times)

On the plus side, presidential candidates are buckling down on campaign contributions, with both Edwards and Clinton performing criminal background checks on all donors. (LA Times)

The Justice Department has announced that it will not prosecute executives of Chiquita Banana for paying bribes to Columbian paramilitaries that are designated as terrorists by the U.S. government. I guess preventing the funding of terrorists is not on the list of DOJ priorities. Although it always helps when your college roommate was Michael Chertoff. (Washington Post)

Apparently Senator Vitter (R-LA) has been mixing business and pleasure more than we knew. A former New Orleans prostitute has come forward to declare that she had a “pure sex relationship” with the Senator. He “would come in and do his business” and “I want the truth to be known.” (Associated Press)

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The field for Alberto Gonzales' replacement has narrowed to two, with Ted Olson remaining the front runner, The New York Times reports this morning. Olson in unequivocally not the nonpartisan pick Democrats had urged President Bush to make.

As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) puts it to the Times:

“Clearly if you made a list of consensus nominees, Olson wouldn’t appear on that list.... My hope is that the White House would seek some kind of candidate who would be broadly acceptable.”

How staunch of an opposition to Olson's candidacy Democrats would offer is an open question. The Times reports that the administration is betting that Democrats "will pay a political price if they try to block confirmation of a new attorney general. The thinking inside the White House is that Democrats cannot call for new leadership at the Justice Department, then block it."

The case against Olson is considerable. The chief issue driving opposition to Olson's nomination as solicitor general back in 2001 (he very narrowly passed, 51-47) was his role in the so-called Arkansas Project, the well-funded and unscrupulous effort to unseat the Clintons via scandal. Olson sat on the board of directors for The American Spectator, the organ for the effort, but when he was questioned about his role, he downplayed it, leading to accusations that he'd lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee. So you have a confirmed partisan (don't forget his role as representing the administration in Bush v. Gore) who was less than candid in testimony to Congress. Hardly much of an improvement from Gonzales.

But there are some mitigating factors. Olson lost his third wife, Barbara Olson (author of a screed against Hillary Clinton) on 9/11. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the administration could thus gain "an emotional political advantage," with Olson's nomination.

More considerable is Olson's role in the administration as solicitor general. James Comey testified to Congress, for instance, that he'd sought out Olson to serve as a kind of backup for him after the infamous Ashcroft/Gonzales hospital showdown in March, 2004. Because Olson is someone that Comey "respects enormously," as Comey testified, he asked Olson to accompany him to his late-night meeting with Andrew Card in the White House to serve as a witness. Olson's role in that showdown -- he backed Comey in the dispute -- might serve to temper Democrats' view of his past.

On the other hand, the position of solicitor general is much different from that of attorney general. And Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) opposed Olson's nomination as solicitor general back in 2001 because he was unconvinced that Olson's "sharp partisanship over the last several years might not be something that he could leave behind." That doesn't sound like a person who could fix the Justice Department.

Olson isn't the only nominee in the running. George Terwilliger, George H.W. Bush's former deputy attorney general, is still in it. Though the Times reports that Leahy is "cool" to that option and that Terwilliger "may also be criticized for partisanship, given his association with conservatives who have embraced the administration’s expansion of executive powers during wartime."

The Times reports that the other three names floated in the past week have all bowed out. So it seems fair to conclude that this is not a nomination that will go smoothly.

Finishing up, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) asked what's standing in the way of continued contracting fraud in Iraq. Neither Gen. Petraeus nor Amb. Crocker had much in the way of a detailed answer, but both singled out the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, as a key bulwark against waste, fraud and abuse.

Given that Petraeus wants to speed up weapons purchases by Iraq under the Pentagon's Foreign Military Sales programs, maybe those safeguards should be looked at in greater detail.

Gen. Petraeus ranked the enemies the U.S. is fighting in Iraq at the behest of Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), and there was a notable absence: the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgency. All of a sudden, practically every Sunni anti-U.S. fighter is now defined as al-Qaeda.

Petraeus listed al-Qaeda as "the wolf closest to the shed," followed by Shiite militias, who are the cause of much of the "ethno-sectarian violence in Baghdad." After that came the "non-kinetic" enemies, such as getting the "institutional structures" established for the Iraqi government, problems with training the Iraqi security forces, corruption and so forth. As he was finishing his list, Petraeus then realized he had forgotten someone: "There are certainly still some Sunni insurgents out there."

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is, at most, 15 percent of the Sunni insurgency. One expert, Malcolm Nance, who's worked with the U.S. military and intelligence in Iraq, puts AQI at two to five percent of the Sunni insurgency. It's good news that several insurgent groups, like the 1920 Revolution Brigades, have turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and toward us. The August National Intelligence Estimate is silent on the Sunni insurgency, but certainly doesn't say it has been marginalized.

That shouldn't be surprising: the recent ABC/BBC/NHK poll found that 93 percent of Sunnis believe that attacks on the U.S. are justified. What's more, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni clerical powerhouse, recently issued a communique to the entire, fractious Sunni "resistance." If there's only a rump Sunni insurgency, someone forgot to tell the AMS.

Petraeus has repeatedly referred to himself as a "realist" over the past two days. But suggesting the Sunni insurgency is diminished to the point of marginality after the anti-al-Qaeda shift is, at best, wishful thinking.

Good question from Sen. John Thune (R-SD) to Gen. Petraeus. If the Iraqi security forces are ready to take over responsibility for Iraq before sectarian reconciliation has occurred -- not an unlikely scenario, given the dismal prospects for political progress, Crocker notwithstanding -- is the U.S. mission, you know, accomplished? Petraeus' answer: not necessarily. If the government was set to collapse, the U.S. might stay in Iraq to prop it up, even if the Iraqi Army and police are able to control the country. That's quite an extraordinary statement. Petraeus probably means to avoid limiting his options, but it's never before been suggested by anyone in uniform that we would stay in Iraq to support an Iraqi government after the Iraqi military has Stood Up.