In the debate over the surge, there have been a number of questions raised within the government about an important metric for understanding whether the U.S. military's strategy is succeeding -- how Multinational Force-Iraq calculates sectarian violence.

Earlier this month, David Walker of the Government Accountability Office testified that he could not "get comfortable" with General David Petraeus' methodology for determining sectarianism, considering it too inferential to be reliable. His report, echoing objections from senior intelligence officials, instead tabulated the pace of attacks on civilians and found the surge didn't appear to have a significant effect on civilian-targeted violence. However, relying on data interpreted through the MNF-I methodology, Petraeus testified that sectarian violence had fallen in Iraq to mid-2006 levels.

The actual methodology MNF-I employs has remained unknown. Until now.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed two weeks ago, MNF-I has provided TPMmuckraker with its criteria for identifying ethnic and sectarian violence. We've added the methodology to our Document Collection, and you can read it here.

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White House spokeswoman Dana Perino had a hard time with questions about the State Department's use of Blackwater during this afternoon's press briefing:

Q Why do you have to have private contractors who have, on the face of it, a lousy record?

MS. PERINO: Well, I think that there is because -- I think that is because there is a need. I don't know why it was originally set up that way....

More from the briefing below.

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Keep your fingers crossed, Ted. The AP is reporting that a recent decision in the Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) case could make it impossible to tap lawmakers' phones in corruption cases. That's good news for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), since it was just reported that he was secretly recorded by the FBI while on the phone with former Veco CEO Bill Allen.

The decision, which one watchdog group worried would be a boon for corrupt politicians, dealt with the FBI's raid of Jefferson's Congressional office. The court found the raid unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the Speech or Debate Clause because agents thumbed through protected legislative documents.

And in an appeal of that decision last week, the Justice Department argued that the ruling "'threatens to complicate numerous ongoing and future investigations' and hinder the ability to use electronic surveillance."

The decision is already starting to affect federal investigations. The AP also reported that some members of Congress interpret the ruling as protecting staffers from speaking to the FBI.

In the heat of the summer, it seemed inevitable that the White House and Congress were destined to clash in court over a number of subpoenas, most relating to the U.S. attorney firings investigation. But that's appearing less and less likely.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been warning since the beginning of the week that the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as attorney general depended on the White House turning over certain "information."

Leahy has been uncharacteristically vague about just what "information" that might be, as the negotiations are ongoing, but there are a number of outstanding requests that Leahy might have in mind. Below is our accounting of where those many requests, along with those from Leahy's House counterpart, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), stand. It's also a reminder of the many loose ends that remain in the U.S. attorney firings probe.

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Looks like Condi Rice is taking a cue from her inspector general.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday she had ordered a "full and complete review" of security practices for U.S. diplomats following a deadly weekend incident in Iraq involving private guards protecting a U.S. embassy convoy in Baghdad.

Rice said she had directed the State Department to examine "how we are providing security to our diplomats."

To recap, while the Iraqi prime minister says Blackwater killed Iraqi civilians "in cold blood," the State Department is promising to "review" its security procedures -- with details on the scope of that review to come later -- and already has Blackwater back to work. Very diplomatic.

Citing recent reports that US attorney Rachel Paulose is under investigaiton by the Office of Special Counsel for mishandling employees, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and chair of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) sent a letter to the Department of Justice again asking for documents on the decision to hire her.

The letter is available here.

The former US attorney from Minnesota Tom Heffelfinger has said he voluntary resigned and did not know at the time that his name appeared on a list of potential prosecutors to be fired. Conyers and Ellison want details on how and why the very young and very conservative Paulose was picked.

Ellison and Conyers sent a letter to Alberto Gonzales back in May asking the same questions.

Since State Department officials' ability to travel in Iraq had been severely limited by Blackwater's temporary shutdown, it was just a matter of time:

American convoys under the protection of Blackwater USA resumed on Friday, four days after the U.S. Embassy suspended all land travel by its diplomats and other civilian officials in response to the alleged killing of civilians by the security firm....

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo said the decision to resume land travel outside the heavily fortified Green Zone was made after consultations with the Iraqi governments. She said the convoys will be limited to essential missions.

If Dick Cheney or his right-hand lawyer David Addington are talking to Justice Department officials about individual cases, Congress wants to know about it.

What could be the second law change to emerge from the U.S. attorney firings scandal passed the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), would require the White House and Justice Department to detail in reports to Congress twice a year which Department officials had spoken to which White House officials about cases.

During questioning of Alberto Gonzales this spring, Whitehouse revealed that the Bush White House had thrown the door open to literally hundreds of White House officials being able to confer with Department officials about cases. A memo signed by John Ashcroft had initially opened the door. But a May, 2006 memo by Gonzales had exacerbated the problem and seemed to take special care in ensuring access for Cheney's staff. Gonzales, under questioning, was characteristically befuddled by the document that he'd signed: “I’d have to go back and look at this.... I must say I'm troubled by this.”

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Blackwater had better hope there's an Iraqi Abraham Zapruder out there. The Interior Ministry has pieced together an account of Sunday's shooting in Mansour alleging that the private-security company fired on civilians at a traffic circle in Nisour Squar with practically no provocation.

In the Interior Ministry account — made available to The New York Times on Thursday — Iraqi investigators interviewed many witnesses but relied on the testimony of the people they considered to be the four most credible.

The account says that as soon as the guards took positions in four locations in the square, they began shooting south, killing a driver who had failed to heed a traffic policeman’s call to stop.

“The Blackwater company is considered 100 percent guilty through this investigation,” the report concludes.

An internal U.S. forensic analysis is still ongoing, and an announced joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation has yet to get underway. But the Interior Ministry is already using the report as a lever for getting the State Department to cancel Blackwater's contract to protect U.S. diplomats -- a move State is refusing. The Iraqis also want U.S. security companies to be subject to Iraqi criminal liability.

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The FBI is so interested in what Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) says to former Veco CEO Bill Allen that they secretly taped his calls to hear. There is no word yet on the content of the conversations.

The recorded calls between Stevens and businessman Bill Allen were confirmed by two people close to the case who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. They declined to say how many calls were recorded or what was said.

Allen, a wealthy businessman and Stevens' political patron, agreed to the taping last year after authorities confronted him with evidence he had bribed Alaska lawmakers. He pleaded guilty to bribery and is a key witness against Alaska legislators. He also has told prosecutors he paid his employees to renovate the senator's house.

Allen pleaded guilty himself to corruption charges and is cooperating in the broad investigation. During the corruption trial of former state Rep. Pete Kott (R-AK) this week, prosecutors played a recorded phone conversation between Kott and Allen where Kott admits Allen tucked extra money into a payment for a legitimate flooring project. The Anchorage Daily News has the audio here. (On the call, Kott and Allen also touch on Kott's dream of becoming a prison warden in Barbados.)

The AP also reveals that Stevens, whose home was raided by the FBI in June, has been of interest to investigators long before that.

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President Bush yesterday refused to comment on questions about the recent Israeli bombing in Syria. However, according to the Washington Post, anonymous government sources have confirmed that Israel did in fact attack a suspected nuclear site that was being created with an undetermined amount of North Korean assistance. Further, the U.S. shared intelligence on the site with Israel prior to the attack. (Washington Post)

A former financial manager of the Iraq reconstruction, Robert Raggio, is under investigation. Raggio quit his government job for the private sector, where he helped his company get a contract to fight fraud in Iraq. Turns out, it's illegal to write policy guidelines for the government while at the same time pursing a government contract that's under the purview of those guidelines. (USA TODAY)

Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for U.S. Attorney General, is out to prove that he ain't no Alberto. In a move that sharply distinguishes him from his predecessor, Mukasey has vowed to
fire any Justice Department employee who shares sensitive case information with the White House without his approval. (Boston Globe)

At least one lawmaker is attacking the politicization of fear. Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) attacked Republicans and the administration alike for hyping bogus claims of impending terror this past August in order to facilitate the passing of an exceptionally broad FISA reform act, calling the move part of the "Rovian strategy of using terrorism as a wedge political issue." (Think Progress)

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So what defense contract in Iraq didn't involve a kickback? What contract was awarded through competitive bidding? As Pentagon investigators conduct an unprecedented review into corruption in the department's Iraq contracting, it's a rare bid that wasn't crooked.

Yesterday, Congress learned that $6 billion worth of contracts are under criminal review. That's right -- criminal:

Military officials said Thursday that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — were under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon had previously disclosed.

In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and matériel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.

Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) called DOD's procurement process "a culture of corruption," an assessment that appears to represent the bipartisan consensus. Yet the Pentagon's deputy inspector general said the contracting corruption was attributable to "isolated incidents." Yes, $6 billion worth of isolated incidents.

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A knowledgeable government source says the account Admiral Mike McConnell gave to the House intelligence committee about the procedure for wiretapping Iraqi insurgents earlier this year is "really terrible."

McConnell told the committee today that restrictions derived by the FISA Court this year on wiretapping foreign-to-foreign communications that pass through the U.S. prevented the NSA from surveilling Iraqi insurgents who had kidnapped U.S. soldiers for 12 hours. But the source, who is privvy to the timeline of the incident, says "internal bureaucratic wrangling," and not court-based restrictions, were responsible for the lag time. "To get an emergency warrant, you just have to believe the facts support the application that someone is an agent of a foreign power," the source says. "That takes approximately five seconds to establish if you're going after an Iraqi insurgent."

Why did so much time elapse before the surveillance? Top Justice Department officials needed to approve the emergency order. But according to the source, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was out of town; Deputy AG Paul McNulty had resigned already; Solicitor General Paul Clement "had left the building"; and the other responsible official, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein was not yet authorized to approve the emergency order. Wainstein testified today, but demurred from answering questions about the incident in open session.

Despite McConnell's testimony today and Tuesday that the FISA Court unreasonably tied the NSA's hands in the case, the source says, "it stems from their own internal process, and it stems from their own reading" of the court's ruling.

More on this tomorrow.

On Tuesday, Admiral McConnell, director of national intelligence, told the House Judiciary Committee that a FISA Court ruling earlier this year prevented the NSA from eavesdropping on Iraqi insurgents who had captured U.S. soldiers. At least one FISA expert we spoke with found the claim "totally implausible." Today, McConnell offered some details about the incident to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in response to a question from ranking Republican Peter Hoekstra.

Well, sir, I have to be a little careful because of sources and method issues. But the situation was, as you know, because global communications move on wire, you can have a situation where information would pass on a wire through this country. So for us to specifically target the individuals that were involved in that kidnap, we had to go through a court order process.

Now, when we've talked about this before, people frequently say, "Well, wait a minute. Why don't you just do emergency FISA?" Well, that is the point. We are extending Fourth Amendment rights to a terrorist foreigner foreign country who's captured U.S. soldiers. And we're now going through a process to produce probable cause that we would have authority to go after these terrorists.

And then people say, "Well, why don't you just go? You got emergency authorization." Well, emergency authorization doesn't mean you don't go through the process, which is probable cause. So some analyst has got to do it and some official's got to sign it out. And it has to come to either me or some other official. Then it goes to the attorney general. Then it goes to FISA court.

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If Erik Prince of Blackwater shows up at the House oversight committee's hearing into his company's activities in Iraq, expect him to get an earful. It's not just about the Mansour incident, or the murky legal status the private-security firm possesses. According to the Iraqi government, Blackwater employees engineered a jailbreak to free a minister convicted of corruption charges.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki referred obliquely to the incident yesterday. But a Defense Ministry spokesman told Leila Fadel of McClatchy that Blackwater, in December, broke former Electricity Minister Ahyam al-Samarrai out of prison in the Green Zone, where he was awaiting sentencing for embezzling $2.5 billion in reconstruction money.

Until now, Iraqi officials hadn't named the private security company that they believe helped Samarrai, the only Iraqi cabinet official convicted of corruption, to escape from a jail that was overseen jointly by U.S. and Iraqi guards. He subsequently was spirited out of the country and is believed to be living in the United States.

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John Bresnahan over at The Politico reports that a federal grand jury has subpoenaed House payroll records for Ed Buckham, formerly ex-Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) chief of staff. Bresnahan notes that it's a clear indication that the feds are closing in on Buckham, who left DeLay to found the Alexander Strategy Group, the firm that made millions as the gateway to DeLay during the heady years when he ran the Hill.

Buckham, as DeLay's bag man, has long been considered the key to prosecutors building a case against DeLay as part of the Jack Abramoff investigation. The vise has been closing on him for quite some time. But Peter Stone reports in this month's National Journal that Buckham finally turned down a deal offered by prosecutors to plead guilty, and that "he expects to be indicted soon."

Buckham would be the third former DeLay aide to be targeted in the scandal. Two other ex-aides who went on to work with Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy, have pleaded guilty.

Note: Here's our rundown on all of Buckham's many entanglements.

Update: Back in May, DeLay challenged the Justice Department to "Fish or cut bait. Do something," since they seemed to be taking their own sweet time questioning his associates about his relationship to Buckham and Abramoff. It appears that the Department has chosen the "fish" option.

In the wake of the ongoing Blackwater scandal, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants to have a frank discussion with Erik Prince, the company's founder. His House oversight committee will hold a hearing on Blackwater on October 2. And it just won't be a party if Prince doesn't attend.

Waxman sent Prince a letter today requesting his appearance at the hearing. The little-seen Blackwater official probably won't take kindly to Waxman's intent to question "whether the specific conduct of your company has advanced or impeded U.S. efforts."

The Blackwater hearing offers Waxman the opportunity to link the issue with a different investigation his committee is undertaking. Waxman is also looking into whether the State Department's inspector general, Howard "Cookie" Krongard, obstructed an inquiry into allegations that Blackwater, on a State Department contract, was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq. Krongard has been invited to an October 20 hearing before the committee.

Text of the letter below the fold.

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Last month, in an interview with the El Paso Times, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said that openly debating changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- changes requested by none other than McConnell himself -- would mean that "some Americans are going to die." At first it seemed like an unfortunate bit of demagoguery. At a hearing today of the House intelligence committee, though, McConnell again anticipated bodies piling up in the streets as the direct consequence of discussing the McConnell's favored revisions to FISA. From Reuters:

He said debate over the programs was important to ensure authorities had proper tools to fight suspected terrorists, but that the open discussion would also help U.S. enemies.

"What this dialogue and debate has allowed those who wish us harm to do, is to understand significantly more about how we were targeting their communications," McConnell told the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Asked if debates had cost U.S lives, he said, "They will."

Or as he also put it: "The intelligence business is conducted in secret. It's conducted in secret for a reason."

Why not just declare the 20 committee members enemy combatants and be done with it?

The U.S. attorney for Manhattan filed a 16-page criminal complaint against Norman Hsu today. You can read it here.

Hsu is charged with defrauding investors of more than $60 million. The scam, as described by prosecutors, was actually pretty simple. Hsu would lure investors in by delivering on small-time deals, gaining their trust. But when it came time for the big deals, he never actually invested the money as promised -- instead, he just used newer investors' money to repay older investors, and so on and so on. The classic Ponzi scheme.

Interestingly, the prosecutors say that Hsu's considerable fundraising skills (for Hillary Clinton and other Dems) were part of the fraud:

During the same time period, NORMAN HSU, the defendant, in an effort to raise his public profile and thereby convince more victims to invest in his fraudulent scheme, pressured victims into individually contributing tens of thousands of dollars to various candidates... he supported. HSU made implied threats to the victims leading them to believe that their failure to make the required political contributions would adversely affect the victims’ ongoing investment relationship with HSU.

The complaint also alleges that Hsu reimbursed two people for $20,000 in political contributions, a crime.

The charges, two counts of fraud and one of violating campaign finance laws, amount to a maximum 45-year sentence if served consecutively. Hsu also faces a maximum fine of $120 million.

Hear that? That silence is the sound of my phone not ringing. It's been a familiar quiet since I first started trying to get some answers about Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) Coconut Road earmark last month.

Someone, apparently acting on Young’s behalf, managed to change the bill’s language in the massive 2005 transportation bill after it had passed both houses of Congress, but before the President signed it into law. The change no doubt gratified real estate developer Daniel Aronoff, who’d raised $40,000 for Young earlier that year in his push for $10 million to construct a highway interchange. Young’s language change steered that cash away from the community’s requested use and to Aronoff’s pet project.

So a few weeks ago, I decided to figure out how, in a very technical sense, a bill's language can change after it passed both houses of Congress. Surely there must be a process to keep bills awaiting the President's signature safe from tampering, or so I assumed.

But after being passed repeatedly from office to office, I’m still none the wiser as to how Young might have changed the bill’s language. It’s become crystal clear, however, that those who should know don’t have a ready answer -- and don't seem eager to find one.

I started with a call to the current House clerk in late August; I heard nothing. Then I tried the House clerk who was in place in 2005 when the rewording occurred. Jeff Trandahl, now the executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, was on a cruise two weeks ago. When he returned, his secretary called to let me know he is too busy to talk -- too busy indefinitely, that is. I pressed, asking if that means he is saying no comment. "No, he is just too busy with an upcoming fundraiser." (Classic Washington blow-off line!)

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The Congressional Budget Office's cost-analysis of a U.S. presence in Iraq following the Korea model -- stationing 55,000 troops there indefinitely, in CBO's reckoning -- allows for the crunching of numbers several different ways. But most appear to be fairly conservative.

CBO estimates that a Korea-style garrisoning will require 55,000 troops for either combat missions or non-combat missions. The former is expected to cost $25 billion annually, and the latter $10 billion annually, on top of one-time fixed costs of $4-$8 billion for the former and $8 billion for the latter. But neither scenario envisions total costs of what President Bush has cited as an "enduring relationship" between the U.S. and Iraq. Funding for the Iraqi security forces, diplomatic operations or country-to-country aid -- probably billions of dollars -- is outside the scope of the CBO report.

Totaling the full cost of the Iraq war requires accepting a range of estimates, particularly in the case of tabulating prospective costs, rather than ones already incurred. Both this report and a preceding CBO report present a ballpark, not a set projection. And an aggregate set of projections for the Iraq war's future cost can only emerge when an endpoint is envisioned. Since the Bush administration has flirted with a Korea-style model for U.S. troops, it seems reasonable to envision a 50-year endpoint, commensurate with the 54 years U.S. troops have been garrisoned in postwar South Korea.

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The Protect America Act was a near total victory for the administration. But there's one major aspect that they didn't succeed in securing -- immunity for telecommunication companies that cooperated with the administration's warrantless wiretapping program dating back to 2001. But as Newsweek reports, a cabal of connected lobbyists are making sure that the administration gets what it wants this time around:

But congressional staffers said this week that some version of the proposal is likely to pass—in part because of a high-pressure lobbying campaign warning of dire consequences if the lawsuits proceed....

Among those coordinating the industry’s effort are two well-connected capital players who both worked for President George H.W. Bush: Verizon general counsel William Barr, who served as attorney general under 41, and AT&T senior executive vice president James Cicconi, who was the elder Bush's deputy chief of staff.

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Things are going to get a lot worse for Norman Hsu before they get better. From The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.):

Federal officials are expected to bring a criminal case against Norman Hsu today, charging the Democratic super-donor with operating a $60 million pyramid scheme and violating campaign-finance laws.

The case, to be announced this afternoon by the U.S. attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, encompasses complaints by investors who gave tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Hsu, who said he was putting the money into a lucrative apparel operation. It also is expected to charge Mr. Hsu with crimes relating to his legendary fund-raising.

Update: The AP reports the prosecutors will announce an indictment at 1 PM.

Later Update: Oops. The AP now says that it won't be an indictment, but a criminal complaint.

A new Congressional study finds that President Bush's plans for the U.S. in Iraq over the next several decades will reach the trillions of dollars, on top of the approximately $567 billion the war has already cost. That accounting assumes a significant troop draw-down -- and still tallies a daunting expense for the United States.

We've added the report to our document collection. You can read it here.

On June 1, during a trip to U.S. Pacific Command in Honolulu, Defense Secretary Robert Gates mused about how to "posture ourselves" in Iraq "for the long term." The Vietnam experience underscored the undesirability of a sudden, abrupt withdrawal. Far better for the U.S. to follow the experiences of post-conflict garrisoning in Korea and Japan, he said: "a mutually agreed arrangement whereby we have a long and enduring presence." President Bush is reportedly intrigued by the so-called Korea model, wherein the U.S. has guaranteed security on the Korean peninsula with at least four U.S. Army combat brigades for half a century. Indeed, in his speech on Thursday, Bush declared himself ready to build an "enduring relationship" between the U.S. and Iraq.

The study, conducted by the Congressional Budget Office, decided to follow the Korea model to calculate its expense. Since it's unclear for how long or under what conditions combat operations will ensue, the CBO projects both a combat and a non-combat presence. Both, however, are projected to require 55,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The combat scenario entails one-time costs of $4 to $8 billion, with annual expenses of $25 billion, projected outward. Under the non-combat scenario, a $8 billion one-time cost -- mainly for the construction of additional "enduring" bases -- would be followed by annual costs of $10 billion or less.

A prior CBO study, released in August, estimated (large pdf) that U.S. costs in Iraq from 2009 to 2017 will total approximately $1 trillion on the assumption of a troop presence of 75,000. On top of that, under the reduced-force combat scenario envisioned in this CBO estimate, the U.S. will spend another $1 trillion by 2057 -- the lifespan of the U.S.'s Korean presence to date.

All estimates are in 2008 dollars. Both estimates are arguably conservative. In the combat scenario, for instance, Army units serve 12-month tours, whereas they now serve 15-month tours. In the non-combat scenario, the CBO ratcheted down the Defense Department's cost-of-war estimates to reflect "lower costs for such items as equipment maintenance, fuel and consumable materials."

Representative Murtha is batting 1.000 but he is not alone. Murtha has received campaign cash from every private entity that he favored with an earmark in the most recent defense bill. Murtha’s war chest (sub. req.) was augmented by $413,250 just since the beginning of 2005 and a stunning $100,750 flowed into his coffers in the two weeks leading up to March 16, the original deadline for lawmakers to file their earmark requests. Murtha is joined by Defense Subcommittee. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who also received campaign cash from all of the entities that he helped. (Roll Call)

Representative Jerry Weller (R-IL) boasts the largest foreign land holdings of any member of Congress. But Weller, who failed to disclose land transactions in Nicaragua, is now dogged by ethics questions and will probably be resigning as early as Thursday. (Chicago Tribune)

Norman Hsu may be a savvy businessman, but the guy just doesn't understand mass transit. Hsu's lawyers maintain that their client intended to board a California commuter rail, but accidentally got on the wrong train... headed to Chicago. (WSJ's Washington Wire)

Hillary's donation problems don't stop with Norman Hsu. Yesterday, her campaign announced (sub. req.) that it would return some funds associated with the bundler William Danielczyk. Danielczyk's employees made contributions to Clinton--even though they were Republican--because the donations were a "corporate contribution." That is, Danielczyk paid them back for their gifts. (Wall Street Journal)

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Blackwater: Above the law.

Yesterday we reported that not only is Blackwater immunized from liability under any Iraqi law, but the State Department has allowed it to operate under less restrictive rules of engagement than any other private military company. As a result, the State Department bears responsibility for the culture of impunity that resulted. Today The Washington Post adds more detail:

Blackwater "has a client who will support them no matter what they do," said H.C. Lawrence Smith, deputy director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, an advocacy organization in Baghdad that is funded by security firms, including Blackwater.

The State Department allowed Blackwater's heavily armed teams to operate without an Interior Ministry license, even after the requirement became standard language in Defense Department security contracts. The company was not subject to the military's restrictions on the use of offensive weapons, its procedures for reporting shooting incidents or a central tracking system that allows commanders to monitor the movements of security companies on the battlefield.

"The Iraqis despised them, because they were untouchable," said Matthew Degn, who recently returned from Baghdad after serving as senior American adviser to the Interior Ministry. "They were above the law." Degn said Blackwater's armed Little Bird helicopters often buzzed the Interior Ministry's roof, "almost like they were saying, 'Look, we can fly anywhere we want.' "

Last year, Congress passed a law placing contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law that establishes legal conduct for U.S. forces. Little follow-on work has established what exactly that means for private security companies, however. While the Pentagon has issued a number of so-called fragmentary orders seeking to regulate the private security firms, Blackwater is exempt, since its contracts are with the State Department and CIA. Blackwater isn't required to keep the U.S. military command informed of its operations or file incident reports to it.

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A newly-identified key player in the investigations of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK), construction worker Robert Williams, told the AP about the testimony he gave a federal grand jury on his double-duty rolls while on the Veco payroll:

Williams said he was in charge of "special projects" for VECO founder Bill Allen, and the renovation of Stevens' home was one such project. Others included working three or four fundraisers for Stevens while on the clock with VECO. Federal elections laws prohibit candidates from accepting donations or free services from corporations.

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He didn't get anywhere near the media attention yesterday that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell did. (Including from me.) But James Baker (not that James Baker), who until earlier this year helmed the Justice Department office in charge of preparing FISA warrants, testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the process in place for obtaining FISA warrants "worked during wartime."

Indeed, the portrait Baker painted of the FISA process doesn't bear much resemblance to the one on display from McConnell, who's been aggressively pushing to keep FISA's oversight role diminished.

Baker described FISA as an intelligence tool rather than a hindrance. The process yielded "information that the intelligence community could use to take action to thwart the activities of our adversaries, including terrorist groups." It was never the case that foreign-to-foreign communications, even those that passed through the U.S., were considered under the auspices of the act.

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The Anchorage Daily News has what we've all been waiting for, new information on the imfamous "Corrupt Bastard Club" hats the FBI seized last year when they raided the offices of half a dozen Alaska politicians, including Ben Stevens'.

According to testimony from former Rep. Pete Kott's girlfriend, she was paid $900 to embroider "Veco" on 100 hats, with the "CBC" logo on the back of about a dozen.

The prosecution had a box of different color CBC hats in the courtroom. A red one was entered into evidence.

Alaska's Republican Gov. Sarah Palin wants Ben Stevens to give up his seat as the national committeeman for the Alaska Republican Party now that former Veco CEO Bill Allen testified to bribing Stevens while he was state Senate president.

Palin probably won't get her way since there is no mechanism to remove him, though, (ouch), Alaska Republican Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich said:

"[Stevens] will serve through the March 20008 convention. We look forward to electing a new committee man at that time," Ruedrich said.

Yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Admiral Michael McConnell, casually informed the House Judiciary Committee that the FISA Court had gotten so restrictive that its rulings required the NSA to obtain warrants before spying on Iraqi insurgents that had kidnapped U.S. troops.

That sounded dubious to us. Would the FISA Court have really issued such a patently absurd ruling? And it turns out we're not the only ones. FISA expert Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies also finds McConnell's statement dubious.

"It's totally implausible, like the claim about the arrests in Germany. Doesn't NSA have collection capabilities in Iraq? If so, they are totally outside FISA," Martin says. "Even if they're taking the Iraqi insurgent calls off the wire in the U.S. talking to each other, they don't need a court order and no court is going to bar them. Or is it that the NSA is so incompetent that it doesn't know they are Iraqi insurgents talking to each other and they were just blindly searching all traffic, which the court said they weren't allowed to do?"

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Here's a copy of the request for an ethics investigation into Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) murky Coconut Road earmark that we mentioned earlier.

Last month I spoke with executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Melanie Sloan who said there's virtually no chance that the famously inactive House ethics committee will pursue the issue. But as Paul just noted, maybe the sleeping giant has awakened. We here at TPMmuckraker like to think of the glass as half full.

STOP THE PRESSES!

The slumbering beast awakens?

The House Ethics Committee announced an investigation Wednesday of Rep. Bob Filner's run-in with a baggage worker at Dulles International Airport last month. The incident resulted in misdemeanor assault and battery charges against the congressman.

As we noted this morning in the Daily Muck, the new investigation was actually triggered by the new ethics rules recently passed into law that require a review of members charged with a crime. Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) is the unhappy inaugural case.

Will this mean that it's still more likely that a member of the House become a target of an FBI investigation rather than an ethics investigation? I'm afraid so. But at least now, those members are sure to face the fury of the ethics panel after they see criminal charges.

Once he was known as the "Flies On The Eyeballs" guy. Lately, he's been the vice president of controversial private security company Blackwater. Now, Cofer Black has a new position: top counterterrorism adviser to Massachusetts Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

The one-time chief of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center got his flamboyant nickname after delivering a famous post-9/11 briefing to President Bush about the CIA's plans to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. ("They'll have flies on their eyeballs" when CIA is done with them, Black is reported to have said.) But that wasn't Black's most famous utterance. In September 2002, in his first-ever public testimony before a joint Congressional inquiry into 9/11, Black -- by then the head of the State Department's counterterrorism shop -- acknowledged that in terms of the CIA's "operational flexibility," after 9/11, "the gloves come off." In retrospect, it's considered the first public reference to the agency's detention, rendition and interrogation policies.

Black left government in 2005 to join Blackwater, whose activities in Iraq have drawn both the ire of the Iraqi government and the opprobrium of House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA). But that hasn't disqualified Black from advising Romney's campaign.

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The Democratic candidate running against Rep. Don Young (R-AK) has asked for an official investigation by the House ethics committee into Young's extra-Constitutional Coconut Road earmark.

The earmark was rewritten after Congress voted on the legislation, prompting legal experts and watchdogs to question the ethics and legality of the earmark and call for an investigation into how it happened, as the candidate, Diane Benson, noted in her announcement of the complaint.

She also told Alaska Public Radio Network that despite the many scandals Young faces, including a federal investigation into his Veco ties, she has decided to focus solely on the Coconut Road earmark controversy.

"I don't want to see this be ignored because I think the implications are too great," Benson said on APRN. "This is exactly how we end up where we are now with people getting indicted. We have a responsibility to say: we want you to tell us the truth."

Blackwater doesn't just operate in a legal black hole in Iraq. The private-security firm has grown expert in protecting itself from oversight and regulation in Washington as well.

Over at POGO, Nick Schwellenbach connects Blackwater to House oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman's investigation of Howard Krongard, the State Department inspector general whom Waxman alleges stifled numerous corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of those probes involved an alleged Blackwater scheme to funnel weapons into Iraq, and, Schwellenbach notes, it wouldn't be so difficult for Blackwater to know how to get around an IG probe. Its parent company, the Prince Group, recently hired the Pentagon's ex-IG, Joseph Schmitz.

Indeed, all throughout Blackwater are ways to get around government oversight: Cofer Black, the company's vice chairman, used to work at the CIA with A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, formerly CIA's executive director. And, yes, you read that last name correctly: Krongard of CIA is the brother of the current State Department IG. Think Schmitz or Black knew which numbers to call in the event of a State inquiry into the company?

That's not all.

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Yesterday news broke that the Office of Special Counsel is investigating US attorney Rachel Paulose for personnel practices in her office, which was roiled with a major staff shake-up this spring when four top administrators stepped down from their leadership positions in protest. Paulose declined to comment in the original story, but acknowledged the investigation when the Minneapolis Star Tribune followed up:

Paulose declined to discuss the specifics of the investigation. "Since the matter is ongoing it would be inappropriate to comment at this time. I am confident the truth will be brought to light," she said.

"I am focused on doing the work of the people, which is what I was appointed to do."

Paulose is reportedly under investigation for such bad acts as retaliating against a lawyer who reported how she mishandled classified information and for using racial slurs against another employee.

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