The Washington Post interviewed a former detainee in one of the CIA's "black sites," to give the most detailed description yet of what the facilities are like.

Marwan Jabour was picked up in Pakistan in May, 2004, "beaten, abused and burned' at a jailhouse in Lahore where "two female American interrogators also questioned him and told him he would be rich if he cooperated and would vanish for life if he refused." From there, it was off to a "villa in a wealthy residential neighborhood" nearby, which is actually a detention facility run by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence. There, he "was chained to a wall and prevented from sleeping more than a few hours at a time" and was "beaten nightly by Pakistani guards after hours of questions from U.S. interrogators."

After five weeks there, he was off to the black site, a facility somewhere in Afghanistan:

Jabour said he was often naked during his first three months at the Afghan site, which he spent in a concrete cell furnished with two blankets and a bucket. The lights were kept on 24 hours a day, as were two cameras and a microphone inside the cell. Sometimes loud music blasted through speakers in the cells. The rest of the time, the low buzz of white noise whizzed in the background, possibly to muffle any communication by prisoners through cell walls.

Daily interrogations were conducted by a variety of Americans. Over two years, Jabour said he encountered about 45 interrogators, plus medical staff and psychologists. He was threatened with physical abuse but was never beaten.

Conditions "slowly improved" for Jabour, who eventually received privileges like pants, air conditioning, a library, movies, and Kit-Kat bars.

The details go on, but perhaps the most striking thing about Jabour's account is that he was eventually let go. A U.S. counterterrorism official the Post interviewed said that Jabour was "in direct touch with top al-Qaeda operations figures," was a money man for jihadists, and is "an all-around bad guy." Nevertheless, they let him go on June 30, 2006, "just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him," the Post notes. Jabour lives with his parents in the Gaza strip.

The Post also adds more details on the number of people who were held in such "black sites":

Human Rights Watch has identified 38 people who may have been held by the CIA and remain unaccounted for. Intelligence officials told The Post that the number of detainees held in such facilities over nearly five years remains classified but is higher than 60. Their whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed.

Only 14 detainees were moved from CIA custody to the Guantanamo Bay last summer. "[S]cores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret," the Post reports.

Note: There's more on Jabour at Human Rights Watch.

Two weeks ago, the Bush administration organized an intelligence briefing for journalists in Iraq to demonstrate that Iran was providing weapons to Iraqi insurgents. According to the anonymous briefers, the weapons -- particularly explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s -- were manufactured in Iran and provided to insurgents by the Quds Force -- a fact that meant direction for the operation was “coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”

Well. A raid in southern Iraq on Saturday seems to have complicated the case. There, The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.), troops "uncovered a makeshift factory used to construct advanced roadside bombs that the U.S. had thought were made only in Iran." The main feature of the find were several copper liners that are the main component of EFPs. But, The New York Times reports, "while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue."

Among those cloudy items were "cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran."

Possibly, the Times muses, "the parts were purchased on the open market" and then "the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings."

But where were the liners made? The Army captain who led the raid doesn't know. From the Journal:

Capt. [Clayton] Combs said the copper caps were smooth and perfectly symmetrical, suggesting they had been made with a high degree of technical precision. He said he didn't know where the caps came from or whether they had been made in Iran. "That's the hard thing about this war," he said.

One week after The New York Times went front page with the news that Al Qaeda had regrouped and was thriving in a tribal region of Pakistan, the Bush administration has launched a diplomatic offensive to convince Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to crack down.

But talk hasn't gotten them very far. And since the administration is extremely wary of alienating what they see as a key ally, their secret weapon is... the Democratic Congress. From The New York Times:

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unannounced trip to Pakistan on Monday to deliver what officials in Washington described as an unusually tough message to Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda....

Pakistan is now the fifth-largest recipient of American aid. Mr. Bush has proposed $785 million in aid to Pakistan in his new budget, including $300 million in military aid to help Pakistan combat Islamic radicalism in the country.

The rumblings from Congress give Mr. Bush and his top advisers a way of conveying the seriousness of the problem, officials said, without appearing to issue a direct threat to the proud Pakistani leader themselves.

“We think the Pakistani aid is at risk in Congress,” said [the senior administration official], who declined to speak on the record because the subject involved intelligence matters.

The official adds that the message they're sending to Musharraf now "is that the only thing that matters is results.” Sounds like a message worth sending. And it would seem that this game of "Good Cop, Bad Cop" in general goes much better when Congress is the bad cop for a change.

"I've had enough of 'nonbinding,' " says Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA). OK, then. So what's next?

The new plan from Senate Democrats, revealed today in the major papers, is to supersede the 2002 Iraq War authorization resolution with one that would pull out combat troops starting in March, 2008. After that, only troops involved with counterterrorism operations (against Al Qaeda), training Iraqi troops, and securing Iraq's border would remain. The Politico has the best rundown of the resolution's nitty gritty details. Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Joe Biden (D-DE) are the main drivers behind it, but it has support across the spectrum of Senate Democrats. It's unclear when a vote would occur.

Meanwhile, in the House, Rep. John Murtha's (D-PA) plan to restrict funding for only those troops deemed fully rested, trained and equipped was too aggressive for a number of moderate Democrats (says Blue Dog Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN): "Congress has no business micromanaging a war, cutting off funding or even conditioning those funds."). A sort of compromise strategy settles for making President Bush acknowledge that he is sending troops into Iraq underequipped and under-rested -- but still hands over the funds, no strings attached. From The Washington Post:

Several Democratic aides say the Iraq funding bill, due for a vote the week of March 12, may contain some of Murtha's demands for more training and better equipment for combat troops. But the proposals that set the toughest requirements are likely to drop out, such as a demand that troops be trained on and deployed with the combat equipment they will use in Iraq.

More important, the legislation may include a waiver that the president or defense secretary could invoke to deploy troops who are not fully combat-ready, Democratic aides said. That way, the commander in chief's hands would not be tied.

But under such a bill the president would have to publicly acknowledge that he is deploying troops with less than a year's rest from combat, that he is extending combat tours of troops in Iraq, or that he is sending units into battle without full training in counterinsurgency or urban warfare, the aides said.

"A senior Iranian government official" sat down with CNN's Christiane Amanpour yesterday, and calling the U.S. and Iran "natural allies," he laid out the case:

"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action -- war."

He confided that what he was telling me was not shared by all in the Iranian government, but it was endorsed so high up in the religious leadership that he felt confident spelling out the rationale....

I asked whether he meant Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself.

"Yes," he said....

He said the time is right for the United States and Iran to sit down and talk directly -- to say "we recognize each other." He said neither side has done this so far "because of the mentality on each side."

"Each of us is afraid of looking weak if we take the first step," he said. "We have this fear in common with America. Before contemplating recognition, each side feels it necessary to convince the other side that 'I am not weak.'"

Sure, there's that whole Hezbollah business, and Iran's nuclear program (which the official claimed was for peaceful purposes, and mainly as a kind of confidence booster for the country), but for both countries, the "major threat" is al Qaeda. The question is whether the administration, which has a talent for making enemies proliferate, will follow the simple arithmetic of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Of course, it's by no means the first time that Iran has made a diplomatic overture to the Bush administration. But since going through diplomatic channels didn't work so well then, this time Iran chose a more reliable route: CNN.

Note: Also don't miss the follow up to yesterday's Must Read. Maliki is still on the war path, doing everything he can to infuriate every Sunni in the country.

For those of you who might have wondered about the wisdom of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki....

On Monday, a 20 year-old Sunni woman went on Al Jazeera to say that she had been raped at the hand of three Iraqi policeman the previous day (the police force is overwhelmingly Shiite). The incredibly rare spectacle in Iraq of a woman publicly and graphically describing her rape immediately turned the case into a major scandal. (The New York Times does a very good job of telling the story.)

The woman said the Americans rescued her and gave her medical treatment. She was, according to the U.S. military, admitted to Ibn Sina Hospital, which the U.S. runs. A nurse who treated her at a clinic for Sunnis (it's unclear to me if this was before or after her visit to the hospital), interviewed by the Times, "said that she saw signs of sexual and physical assault."

The U.S. military would only say that they're investigating the case. Maliki was not so circumspect.

After initially issuing a statement promising a full investigation, Maliki suddenly issued a second statement a few hours later, declaring that the woman was a liar and a wanted criminal, and that the three officers were to be rewarded:

“It has been shown after medical examinations that the woman had not been subjected to any sexual attack whatsoever, and that there are three outstanding arrest warrants against her issued by security agencies.... After the allegations have been proven to be false, the prime minister has ordered that the officers accused be rewarded.”

Now, I've never run a country riven by sectarian tensions. But I'd say that's not the best way to handle the situation.

Maliki has continued his rampage, firing, or attempting to fire, the head of the agency that tends to Sunni mosques and shrines in Iraq because he called for an international investigation into the rape allegations. The problem with that, apparently, is that he doesn't have the authority to fire him... or at least so the Sunni official says.

This is the man who holds the U.S.'s fate in Iraq in his hands.

With Scooter Libby's trial speeding to a close, the focus today is partly on Libby, but mostly on the man behind the curtain for all of Plamegate: Vice President Cheney.

In National Journal, Murray Waas reports on the ugly facts Cheney avoided having to publicly confront when Libby's defense team suddenly decided not to call him to testify:

At the time that Libby offered his explanation to Cheney [in the fall of 2003, after the Plame investigation had begun], the vice president already had reason to know that Libby's account to him was untrue, according to sources familiar with still-secret grand jury testimony and evidence in the CIA leak probe, as well as testimony made public during Libby's trial over the past three weeks in federal court.

Yet, according to Libby's own grand jury testimony, which was made public during his trial in federal court, Cheney did nothing to discourage Libby from telling that story to the FBI and the federal grand jury. Moreover, Cheney encouraged then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan to publicly defend Libby, according to other testimony and evidence made public during Libby's trial.

Before the grand jury testimony, Libby testified that Cheney had only "tilted his head" when he'd heard Libby's recounting of things. And later, after Libby had discovered from his own notes that Cheney himself had actually been the one to tell Libby about Plame, he went back to Cheney. Upon hearing the news, Cheney only said, "From me?" and "tilted his head."

All this is not lost on prosecutors, Waas reports:

If Libby is found guilty, investigators are likely to probe further to determine if Libby devised what they consider a cover story in an effort to shield Cheney. They want to know whether Cheney might have known about the leaks ahead of time or had even encouraged Libby to provide information to reporters about Plame's CIA status, the same sources said.

But wait! That's not all, you Cheneyphiles. The New York Times reports on how the trial has "spotlighted" Cheney's "power as an infighter" (read: liar and manipulator), and The Washington Post reports on how Cheney's influence within the administration has waned in favor of what the paper calls a new "pragmatism" (I think that means problem-solving as opposed to problem-making).

Note: Nothing like a front page exposé in The Washington Post to get results. The Post reports this morning that the Army has suddenly decided to begin repairs on patients' housing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

We know how things are going in Iraq and in Afghanistan -- so how's the fight against Al Qaeda going?

Badly, reports The New York Times -- so badly that the Times invokes a comparison to Al Qaeda under Taliban rule as a gauge of its strength:

Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

Officials said the training camps had yet to reach the size and level of sophistication of the Qaeda camps established in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. But groups of 10 to 20 men are being trained at the camps, the officials said, and the Qaeda infrastructure in the region is gradually becoming more mature....

“The chain of command has been re-established,” said one American government official, who said that the Qaeda “leadership command and control is robust.”...

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, told the House Armed Services Committee last week that Al Qaeda “is on the march.” He said, “Al Qaeda in fact is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it,” because, he said, Qaeda leaders are planning major attacks and inspiring militants to carry out attacks around the globe.

The Times paints the administration as somewhat nonplussed about what to do. A missile strike? "State Department officials say increased American pressure could undermine President Musharraf’s military-led government." But Musharraf's own diplomatic forays into the tribal region, called North Waziristan, seem to have only made the situation worse. Today's front page story, however, will certainly rachet up pressure on the administration to do something... or at least to claim that something is being done.

Note: I'd be remiss if I didn't also link to The Washington Post's investigative report on the dire conditions for wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Ousted! Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove whom the administration installed as a U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, is out, reports the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

“I have made the decision not to let my name go forward to the Senate,” Griffin said Thursday evening....

Griffin on Thursday blamed “the partisanship that has been exhibited by Sen. [Mark ] Pryor [D-Ark. ] and other senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the recent hearing” for his decision to bow out....

Griffin said Thursday that if he were to go through the confirmation process, “I don’t think there is any way I could get fair treatment by Sen. Pryor or others on the judiciary committee.”

He said he will continue to serve in the top law enforcement position in the state’s eastern district as long as the White House keeps him there under the interim title or “gets someone else that I can help transition into this job.

“But to submit my name to the Senate would be like volunteering to stand in front of a firing squad in the middle of a three-ring circus.”

It's been a rough couple weeks for Griffin, who was the most egregious case among the seven prosecutors purged in December. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty admitted to the Senate last week that Griffin's predecessor had been forced out for no other reason than to make room for Griffin. And this morning, The New York Times revealed that Griffin had been installed as per the wish of White House counsel Harriet Miers.

There does seem to be some question, though, as to why Griffin is bowing out...

Pryor’s spokesman, Michael Teague, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Thursday, after Griffin said he was withdrawing his name from consideration, that [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales himself had called Pryor earlier Thursday “and told the senator he was not going to submit Tim Griffin’s name.”

It seems clear that the threat of Senate confirmation ended Griffin's tenure -- but who it spooked more, the administration or Griffin himself, is not so clear.

But remember: it's probable that the only reason that Griffin was facing Senate confirmation at all is because of pressure from the press, public and the Senate. Otherwise, thanks to that law slipped into the PATRIOT Act last year, Griffin might have stayed in place for as long as he, and the administration, wished.

Update: A couple commenters have made a good point -- that Griffin says that he'll stick around until the White House names a replacement, which could be... forever, under current law (thanks to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ)). The Justice Department has declared that the administration will put forth nominees for all of the spots cleared in December's purge, and the ADG reports that Gonzales says that he's already working with Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) to find a replacement for Griffin. But it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

It's not exactly a state secret that the Bush administration did a shoddy job of planning for postwar Iraq. But in today's New York Times, Michael Gordon shows just how bare Gen. Tommy Franks's cupboard was at U.S. Central Command:

When Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, it reflected a decidedly upbeat vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place. The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace. And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.

Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command’s PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be.

The general optimism and some details of General Franks’s planning session have been disclosed in the copious postwar literature. But the slides from the once classified briefing provide a firsthand look at how far the violent reality of Iraq today has deviated from assumptions that once laid the basis for an exercise in pre-emptive war.

Let us meditate on the words "performance related."

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty explained that six of the seven federal prosecutors who were suddenly dismissed last December were axed for "performance related" issues.

Today, McClatchy reports that of those six, five of them "received positive job evaluations before they were ordered to step down." But there's an explanation:

A Justice Department official who spoke on behalf of the administration said the dispute might simply be a matter of "semantics."

"Performance-related can mean many things," said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because the Privacy Act bars officials from discussing personnel decisions. "Policy is set at a national level. Individual U.S. attorneys around the country can't just make up their policy agenda."

So "performance-related" doesn't necessarily mean that the prosecutors performed badly -- it's just a coded way of saying they were not sufficiently lockstep with policy at the "national level" (although a number of them got no explanation for their dismissal).

And who sets policy at the national level? Well, according to The Washington Post, it's not the Department of Justice:

One administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing personnel issues, said the spate of firings was the result of "pressure from people who make personnel decisions outside of Justice who wanted to make some things happen in these places."

Unfortunately for the administration, this story just keeps on going. Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will be briefed again by McNulty behind closed doors, where he'll present the job evaluations.

Finally, after weeks of delay, and presumably after it was made to "focus on the facts" and scrubbed once again by intelligence analysts, the administration's big slideshow on Iran's military ties to Iraqi insurgents was unveiled Sunday in Baghdad.

The PowerPoint presentation had a central purpose -- to prove that the most dangerous form of explosive being used against U.S. troops in Iraq, called explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s, were of Iranian manufacture. Roughly 170 (of the more than 3105) American casualities in Iraq were caused by EFPs, the briefers said. Serial numbers on the explosives were cited as the main piece of evidence linking the explosives to Iran.

The briefing took off from there:

The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans.... “We have been able to determine that this material, especially on the E.F.P. level, is coming from the I.R.G.C. - Quds Force,” said the senior defense analyst. That, the analyst said, meant direction for the operation was “coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”

And who gave the briefing?

The officials were repeatedly pressed on why they insisted on anonymity in such an important matter affecting the security of American and Iraqi troops. A senior United States military official gave a partial answer, saying that without anonymity, a senior Defense Department analyst who participated in the briefing could not have contributed.

And why now?

“The reason we’re talking about this right now is the vast increase in the number of E.F.P.s being found,” one official said. American-led forces in Iraq, the official said, “are not trying to hype this up to be more than it is.”

Just F.Y.I. And just another day of what Vice President Cheney's national security advisor John Hannah has dubbed “the year of Iran."

Note: The Washington Post reports today that the Army is scrambling to equip Humvees with the necessary armor to withstand EFPs.

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.

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."

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.

It's a quandary. Is L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, being unfairly scapegoated as the reason for U.S. failure in Iraq? Or is he just the man responsible for some of the most disastrous decisions made in the aftermath of the invasion? Hopefully, this morning's congressional hearing will provide an answer.

The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran (who wrote the book on the CPA's incompetence) lays it out:

The last time L. Paul Bremer testified before Congress, he was lauded as an American hero. Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) congratulated Bremer, who was leading the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, for a "tremendous success." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) commended his "energy and focus." Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) praised his "brilliant analysis."

When Bremer returns to Capitol Hill today to appear before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he will receive a far less effusive reception than he did in September 2003....

For many Republicans, who believe they must acknowledge mistakes if they want to increase public support for continued U.S. military involvement in Iraq, defending Bremer may be too much to ask. Even senior Bush administration officials who were once effusive in their descriptions of Bremer privately point to some of his decisions as key errors....

Some who worked for Bremer in Baghdad contend that he is a scapegoat for Bush administration decisions that were out of his control....

The criticism of Bremer is often indirect, but the implication is clear. When Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top military commander in Iraq, testified before the Senate last month, he called the occupation authority's "de-Baathification" and dissolution of Iraq's army two of the most "significant mistakes the U.S. has made to date in Iraq." Bremer made both decisions in Baghdad without extensive consultation with the State Department, the National Security Council or other U.S. government agencies....

[Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT)] indicated that GOP committee members are inclined to take a dim view of decisions other than the expenditure of oil money, particularly the dissolution of the Iraqi army and de-Baathification.

In those cases, "it's hard to imagine a lot of members coming to his defense," one congressional GOP official said. "He's got to defend himself."

Get your popcorn!

Since there were two pieces today that just have to be read side by side, today's must read is a twofer.

First up, The Washington Post on Gen. David H. Petraeus' circle of war doctors, a brilliant, independent-minded bunch of PhDs whom he's brought together to steer U.S. strategy in Iraq. "Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents," Thomas Ricks writes, "who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way."

Among the "Petraeus Guys," as they're called, all "military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq," there's Petraeus (PhD, Princeton), Col. Michael J. Meese (PhD, Princeton), Australian Army. Lt. Col. David Kilcullen (who holds a PhD in anthropology), Col. Peter R. Mansoor (PhD, Ohio State), Col. H.R. McMaster (PhD, Univ. North Carolina), and other advisors, like Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant (PhD in political science) and Ahmed S. Hashim (PhD, MIT).

Their job: "to reverse the effects of four years of conventional mind-set fighting an unconventional war," as an officer puts it to Ricks.

Meanwhile, in Iraq...

A growing number of Iraqis blamed the United States on Sunday for creating conditions that led to the worst single suicide bombing in the war, which devastated a Shiite market in Baghdad the day before. They argued that the Americans had been slow in completing the vaunted new American security plan, making Shiite neighborhoods much more vulnerable to such horrific attacks....

In advance of the plan, which would flood Baghdad with thousands of new American and Iraqi troops, many Mahdi Army checkpoints were dismantled and its leaders were either in hiding or under arrest, which was one of the plan’s intended goals to reduce sectarian fighting. But with no immediate influx of new security forces to fill the void, Shiites say, Sunni militants and other anti-Shiite forces have been emboldened to plot the type of attack that obliterated the bustling Sadriya market on Saturday, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 300 from a suicide driver’s truck bomb....

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American military spokesman in Iraq, called for patience as the new security plan rolls out. “Give the government and coalition forces a chance to fully implement it,” he said in remarks carried by several news agencies.

His comments, however, came as more than a dozen mortar shells crashed on Adhamiya, a Sunni area of eastern Baghdad, in what appeared to be an act of retaliation by Shiites. At least 15 people were killed and more than 56 wounded, an Interior Ministry official said.

Clashes in western Baghdad between Sunni and Shiite militias left 7 dead and 11 wounded, and the authorities found 35 bodies throughout the city, many showing signs of torture.

With the administration trying to whip up hysteria about Iran's alleged training of attackers, Tom Lasseter of McClatchy details Muqtada al-Sadr's success in getting the U.S. to train his own men:

After U.S. units pounded al-Sadr's men in August 2004, the cleric apparently decided that instead of facing American tanks, he'd use the Americans' plans to build Iraqi security forces to rebuild his own militia.

So while Iraq's other main Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade, concentrated in 2005 on packing Iraqi intelligence bureaus with high-level officers who could coordinate sectarian assassinations, al-Sadr went after the rank and file.

His recruits began flooding into the Iraqi army and police, receiving training, uniforms and equipment either directly from the U.S. military or from the American-backed Iraqi Defense Ministry.

The result:

"Half of them are [Mahdi army]. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division.... "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city [Baghdad]. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory."

"There are four wars going on in Iraq right now," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said. Turns out he underestimated it by about twenty.

From The Boston Globe:

The messianic Soldiers of Heaven militia that fought US and Iraqi troops in one of the fiercest battles of the war Sunday is among the more than two dozen extremist militias operating across Iraq that are fast becoming a powerful, and hidden, new enemy.

US officials this week expressed concern about the explosion of splinter groups in Iraq, noting that their sheer number makes a political resolution to the ongoing violence in Iraq increasingly difficult. One Defense Department official said in an interview yesterday that the military is tracking at least 28 militias, many of them Shi'ite splinter groups, but knows little about their leadership or command structure.

From Shi'ite factions in southern Iraq to Sunni groups in Anbar Province to extremist Islamic militias operating in Kurdistan, it's a dizzying array. Take just the Shi'ite splinter groups, for example:

...more than a dozen Shi'ite factions command their own armed followings in southern Iraq, including two competing groups that both call themselves "Hezbollah," a family-run private army of the Garamsha tribe and armed fighters loyal to the Prince of the Marshes, an autocratic leader of Iraq's marsh Arabs, said Juan Cole , a Shi'ite specialist and University of Michigan professor.

Certainly, the proliferation of militias "makes a political resolution to the ongoing violence in Iraq increasingly difficult," as the Globe notes. In fact, "the Iraqi Constitution prohibits the formation of militias," and, well, that doesn't seem to have done much good.

Note: Don't miss another must read from today: Reuters on the plight of Iraqis trying (and failing) to get safe harbor in the U.S.