It was supposed to be, as President Bush called it, "a defining moment in the history of Iraq." And it might just be. But certainly not in the way that Bush meant it. Instead, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's offensive in Basra and Baghdad against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's forces has confirmed his government's essential weakness.

Consider: with Maliki's campaign stalled, a parliamentary delegation from Maliki's own coalition went off to Iran to broker a deal with Sadr. And the terms of that deal, which involves the release of hundreds of detained Sadr followers and the return of his followers displaced by raids and violence, will surely strengthen Sadr's political position. That's assuming, of course, that the deal holds and the fighting actually stops. All of the papers report that fighting has not stopped in Baghdad and Basra. And while it's unclear whether the deal will actually last, it's crystal clear what the deal means for Maliki. The New York Times sees no upside:

The negotiations with Mr. Sadr were seen as a serious blow for... Maliki, who had vowed that he would see the Basra campaign through to a military victory and who has been harshly criticized even within his own coalition for the stalled assault.

Last week, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Kadir al-Obeidi, conceded that the government’s military efforts in Basra have met with far more resistance than was expected. Many Iraqi politicians say that Mr. Maliki’s political capital has been severely depleted by the Basra campaign and that he is in the curious position of having to turn to Mr. Sadr, a longtime rival, for a way out.

And it was a chance for Mr. Sadr to flaunt his power, commanding both armed force and political strength that can forcefully challenge the other dominant Shiite parties, including Mr. Maliki’s Dawa movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq....

After [Sadr's] statement was released Sunday, a spokesman for Mr. Maliki, Ali al-Dabbagh, appearing on the television station Iraqiya, said that the government welcomed the action and that Mr. Sadr’s gesture demonstrated his “concern for Iraq and Iraqis.” And he insisted that the government offensive in Basra was not aimed specifically at Mr. Sadr’s militiamen but rather against rogue Shiite factions there, seemingly trying to leave room to maneuver with Mr. Sadr’s political organization.

A fighter from Sadr's Mahdi Army in Baghdad, speaking to The Washington Post, sees things similarly: "The fighting has proved they have learned a lesson. The government is dead from our point of view."

It's official: no Bush Administration official, current or former, can hold a candle to EPA chief Stephen Johnson when it comes to chutzpah.

Alberto Gonzales, to be sure, would normally be stiff competition. But for all his lies, half-truths, and careful distortions, Alberto Gonzales somehow lacked something in the way of chutzpah. Maybe it was the way he sometimes stuttered out his answers, his un-recollections, and apologies. Johnson, by stark contrast, does the job with bureaucratic sangfroid.

Last April, the Supreme Court found in a landmark ruling that the EPA could no longer avoid regulating greenhouse gases. It had to make a decision. Even then, it was apparent to all observers what the EPA's finding must be. The EPA's scientists, wonks and lawyers went to work on it. And they found, not surprisingly, that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which means they must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Johnson himself reviewed that work, disputed part of it, but agreed with the overall thrust of the finding. The EPA then, having dotted the i's and crossed the t's, sent the finding to the White House in December. And there things stopped.

So the finding is finished. It is sitting on the shelf at the White House. Also sitting on a shelf is the EPA's 300-page draft of a rule to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. But such regulation can go nowhere until the endangerment finding is made official.

We reported earlier this month that Johnson was transparently stonewalling. His stated rationale then was that the energy bill which the president signed into law last December had complicated things, a transparently bogus argument, since the only law at issue is the Clean Air Act.

But as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted in a statement last night, the Heritage Foundation has been floating an alternative strategy for stonewalling: the EPA should call for public comment on the rule. Such a move would delay any endangerment finding for months. And, The Los Angeles Times reports, "during an economic downturn, seeking comprehensive public comment and a 'go-slow' approach would be far better," the think tankers reasoned (presumably they're all for environmental regulation during boom times). At the very least, the move would push the issue into the next administration, which is really all pro-business conservatives can hope for.

And yesterday, that's exactly what Johnson did. As he proudly proclaimed in his letter (pdf) announcing the move:

"This approach gives the appropriate care and attention this complex issue demands. Rather than rushing to judgment on a single issue, this approach allows us to examine all the potential effects of a decision with the benefit of the public's insight. In short, this process will best serve the American public."

His spokesman was similarly proud:

"No matter what is shouted or screamed from the rooftops, this is truly a historic moment. No administration has taken this step to evaluate this new pollutant."

And that's what I call chutzpah.

Keep in mind that Johnson has also -- against the unanimous recommendation of his staff -- blocked California's attempt to pass stiff greenhouse gas limits. After all, what good would it be for him to stonewall instituting limits at the EPA if California and 16 other states went ahead with their proposed limits? No good at all.

Courtesy of The New York Times, I'm proud to present to you a brand new member of the Bush Administration War Profiteer Hall of Shame: 22 year-old Efraim Diveroli, whose company AEY has been awarded approximately $300 million in contracts by the Pentagon.

How does a 22 year-old get a multi-million dollar defense contract? you ask. “AEY’s proposal represented the best value to the government," the Army tells the Times. (Never mind that AEY was headed by a guy who'd been busted by the police for carrying a fake ID.)

AEY's fattest contract came in January of last year, when a Pentagon contract made AEY, "which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach,... the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces." AEY's VP is 25 and a licensed masseur. AEY also had a $5.7 million contract for rifles for Iraqi forces, among others.

As the Times found out, AEY fulfilled that contract by dealing with a variety of shady arms dealers (one Czech, one Swiss) to get their hands on ammo stockpiles in the old Eastern bloc. And as far as ensuring the quality of the munitions? Here's how it went in Albania:

Albania offered to sell tens of millions of cartridges manufactured as long ago as 1950. For tests, a 25-year-old AEY representative was given 1,000 cartridges to fire, according to Ylli Pinari, the director of the arms export agency at the time of the sale.

No ballistic performance was recorded, he said. The rounds were fired by hand.

Not surprisingly, the Afghan army has been unhappy with the product. AEY shipped the decades-old ammo in cardboard boxes -- apparently to save money on shipping charges. And the Times reports that the boxes arrived in Afghanistan spilling out of the boxes, "revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966." It's illegal to deal in Chinese arms.

In response to the Times' questions, the Army has suspended AEY "from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian."

But surely the most memorable details of the story (which is well worth reading in full) have to do with a kid trying to wiggle out of legal trouble on the basis of his work fighting terror:

By [2005, when Diveroli became president of the company at the age of 19, taking over from his father], pressures were emerging in Efraim Diveroli’s life. In November 2005, a young woman sought an order of protection from him in the domestic violence division of Dade County Circuit Court….

Mr. Diveroli sought court delays on national security grounds. “I am the President and only official employee of my business,” he wrote to the judge on Dec. 8, 2005. “My business is currently of great importance to the country as I am licensed Defense Contractor to the United States Government in the fight against terrorism in Iraq and I am doing my very best to provide our troops with all their equipment needs on pending critical contracts.”…

On Dec. 21, 2006, the police were called back to the condominium. Mr. Diveroli and AEY’s vice president, David M. Packouz, had just been in a fight with the valet parking attendant.

The fight began, the police said, after the attendant refused to give Mr. Diveroli his keys and Mr. Diveroli entered the garage to get them himself. A witness said Mr. Diveroli and Mr. Packouz both beat the man; police photographs showed bruises and scrapes on his face and back.

When the police searched Mr. Diveroli, they found he had a forged driver’s license that added four years to his age and made him appear old enough to buy alcohol as a minor. His birthday had been the day before.

“I don’t even need that any more,” he told the police, the report said. “I’m 21 years old.”

Diveroli would have been prohibited from dealing in contracts if he'd been convicted of possession of a forged document, which is a felony, the Times reports, but "to avoid a conviction on his record, Mr. Diveroli entered a six-month diversion program for first offenders in May 2007 that spared him from standing trial."

Unfortunately, it seems that AEY is unwinding with all this public attention:

[I]n Miami Beach, even before the suspension, AEY had lost staff members. Michael Diveroli, the company’s founder, told a reporter that he no longer had any relationship with the company. Mr. Packouz, who was AEY’s vice president, and Levi Meyer, 25, who was briefly listed as general manager, had left the company, too.

Mr. Meyer offered a statement: “I’m not involved in that mess anymore.”

So it seems pretty clear that Diveroli is a shoo-in for the Hall of Shame. But the question becomes whether he's in competition to be the champ. Is he competition for Erik Prince, Brent Wilkes?

Confused about what's going on in Basra? So is pretty much everyone.

For years, Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army was one of the main destabilizing forces in Iraq. But last summer, he agreed to a cease fire, a move that everyone agrees has done a tremendous amount to diminish the violence in recent months. He renewed the cease fire last month.

But Sadr's group has splintered. And Shiite militias, some connected to Sadr and some not, have been mixing it up in the southern city of Basra. The British haded over control of the province to the Iraqi government in December, and things have been downhill since then.

For weeks (or months), Iraqi forces (with U.S. encouragement) have planned an offensive to reclaim Basra from these rogue militias. Besides the violence, there's the problem of corrupt militias having control of the city's valuable ports. And as the Iraqi general in charge of southern Iraq argued, the militias has to be moved out before the elections this fall, or they might forever take hold.

So the offensive was finally launched this week, with Iraqi forces moving in on the ground with British and U.S. support by air. It came as a surprise to no one, even Sadr's people, one of whom tells The Los Angeles Times that Sadr has initially agreed to support the crackdown, provided that it targeted 'outlaws.'"

But now Mahdi representatives say that the offensive is not so "targeted." And Sadr issued a statement two weeks ago permitting the Mahdi Army to fire on U.S. and Iraqi forces in self-defense. So no matter the talk of "outlaws," everyone perceives this as a hit against Sadr.

So now it's chaos, as the operation deepens in Basra and there are clashes in Baghdad -- where the Iraqi forces are also attacking "special groups" (as an American official calls them, meaning Shiite militias with Iranian backing) with American support. Shiite insurgents have responded in part by firing rockets into the Green Zone. There's also a good deal of violence between the rival Shiite militias in Baghdad and elsewhere.

The big question for everyone is whether the cease fire will hold up. Sadr loyalists, the LA Times reports, "accuse his Shiite rivals in the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party of using the Iraqi army and police to round up the cleric's followers ahead of the elections."

The Washington Post reports that Sadr " is under immense pressure from senior loyalists to lift the cease-fire order." The New York Times gives a vivid sense of how close the situation is to tipping:

Many places in Baghdad were tense. At a checkpoint downtown, a policeman’s radio crackled with the news of the sniper shooting of a police officer in a nearby neighborhood. “We’ve heard that Sadr has canceled the cease-fire, is this true?” he asked motorists whose car he was searching....

Saeed Ammar, a government employee, said he was standing near policemen in the Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday morning when he was approached by Mahdi Army members. “They told me not to stand near checkpoints. They said, ‘We are waiting for the word from Moktada Sadr to attack the checkpoints — it may come at any moment.’ “

So far, though, Sadr has only responded by calling for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign. His statement: "we call on all Iraqis to show restraint, throughout Iraq, as a first step. If the government does not respect the demands of the masses, then the second step will be disobedience in Baghdad and the rest of the provinces." The cease fire is still in effect.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has gone down to Basra to monitor the campaign and has issued an ultimatum for the militia members to lay down their arms.

As the Post observes it's an awkward time for the biggest test yet of the preparedness of the Iraqi forces: "It was unclear why U.S. forces would take part in a broad armed challenge to Sadr and his thousands-strong militia on the eve of Petraeus's assessment, which the Bush administration has said would greatly influence its decision on whether to draw down troop levels."

And White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, as always, has put the brightest face possible on things: "I would characterize it as a bold decision — precisely what the critics have asked to see in Iraq, more movement by the Iraqi Security Forces."

When Gen. David Petraeus made his big trip to Congress last September, he came armed with a full deck of slides. But none of them captured the U.S. strategy in Iraq quite like this one:

In it, you can see a neat illustration of how we’re going to eventually get out of Iraq. By July, as you can see above, the U.S. force level will return to the approximate size it was preceding the surge. After that, well... the question marks begin.

According to the chart, the date for the subsequent drawdown was to be determined this month (the "decision point"). But it won't be, The Washington Post and New York Times report this morning.

When Petraeus returns to Congress in a couple weeks for his next big briefing, he will give a good idea of how many U.S. troops will remain in Iraq as of July. But beyond that, nothing. From the Times:

During the briefing to the president, General Petraeus laid out a number of potential options, the officials said, but avoided using the term “pause.” That word has gained traction here in Washington over recent weeks to describe the plateau in troop levels that is widely expected to last through the fall elections and perhaps beyond.

Instead, he described the weeks after the departure of the extra brigades ordered to Iraq in January 2007 as a period of “consolidation and evaluation,” a phrase first used publicly by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates during a visit to Iraq in February.

The officials said that Mr. Bush and General Petraeus, recognizing public and Congressional wariness about the toll of the war, would publicly hold out the possibly of withdrawing more troops, but only if conditions allowed it. Mr. Bush, in particular, is eager to end his presidency with the appearance that things are getting better in Iraq.

The Times concludes that "it now appears likely that any decision on major reductions in American troops from Iraq will be left to the next president." A state of affairs that should surprise no one, as the administration has ably kicked the can down the road with promises of dramatic improvement just six months away. Perhaps the only happy development from all this is that the administration has decided to chuck the farcical six month reviews and instead concentrate on a smaller review every month by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military’s Central Command, where, away from the distraction of noisy public debate, the military can privately ascertain whether it's safe to draw down troops in the last months of Bush's presidency.

"We don't have any Thomas Jeffersons here."

That's a Marine captain in The Washington Post's front page story this morning on the state of affairs in Fallujah. You're not likely to ever read a more sobering narrative about Iraq -- or a more quotable one. The focus of the piece is the city's police chief, Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a former member of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, turned insurgent turned police chief. Zobaie, and the people around him, have a talent for putting things succinctly.

The Post's Sudarsan Raghavan writes that "American ideals that were among the justifications for the 2003 invasion, such as promoting democracy and human rights, are giving way to values drawn from Iraq's traditions and tribal culture, such as respect, fear and brutality." Or, as Zobaie puts it:

"I have realized that Americans love the strong guy."

And here's Zobaie's defense of his police force's treatment of prisoners -- a statement apparently made without irony:

"We never tortured anybody," he said. "Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture."

U.S. Army Maj. Mike Cava, a military judge advocate, on the deplorable standards in the jail run by Zobaie, where inmates are not given meals and sit in cells without air conditioning (last summer, six detainees died of heatstroke):

"It's a typical Iraqi jail. Their standards are different than ours. They just do things the Iraqi way."

Capt. Mohammed Yousef from Zobaie's police force:

"Since Saddam Hussein until now, Iraq obeys only the force," Yousef said. "We are practicing the same old procedures."

Sheik Abu Abdul Salman, an imam who calls Zobaie's control of Fallujah "worse than Saddam Hussein":

Salman, the imam, said Zobaie controls the city with "a fire fist."

"But to be honest, security is restored under this guy," he said. "We have a saying in Iraq: 'Fever is better than death.' We were dead. Life stopped at 2 p.m. Everybody was afraid of themselves, including me. If he didn't use the force, the security wouldn't be restored. We don't like the weak man."

And back to Zobaie:

"If you go through the history of Iraq, you will see that only the tough guy can control the country," he said. He rattled off the names of every leader since Iraq's monarchy ended in 1958 with a bloody coup. Hussein, he said, had lasted the longest in power....

What Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq's current leaders are not strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: "No democracy in Iraq. Ever."

"When the Americans leave the city," he said, "I'll be tougher with the people."

Another Watergate? The scheming of would-be plumbers searching for vulnerabilities in the possible Democratic presidential nominee's past?

Or three bored cube rats who were just looking out of "imprudent curiosity?"

Thrice this year, on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14, contract employees of the State Department accessed Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) passport file. So far, everything beyond that simple data point is unclear.

The State Department refuses to release the names of the contractors (there are apparently two) or the employees -- two of whom have been fired, one "disciplined." It's not clear what information, exactly, they accessed -- "whether the employees saw anything other than the basic personal data such as name, citizenship, age and place of birth that is required when a person fills out a passport application."

And, of course, it's not clear why they were doing it. The verdict of a "preliminary investigation," the State Department says, is that they were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."

And at this point it's unclear who will do more than a preliminary investigation. Although Undersecretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy told reporters last night that they were asking the State Department's inspector general (an office still stinging from the resignation of Cookie Krongard) to investigate, but as the AP points out, the inspector general probably wouldn't be able to do much because the employees no longer work for the Department. So who else will? The searches may have violated the Privacy Act, but another State Department official says it's premature to consider whether the FBI or Justice Department should be involved. Meanwhile an "administration official" tells The Washington Times that the FBI is conducting a "preliminary inquiry."

State Department officials say that the breaches came to light as a result of a reporter's query yesterday afternoon (it's not clear exactly what that query was). The Department's database flags the access of the files of "high profile" people, so it was easy to discover the breaches once they were looking for them. Why weren't they discovered before?

"I will fully acknowledge this information should have been passed up the line," Kennedy told reporters in a conference call Thursday night. "It was dealt with at the office level."

So what about those supervisors? It's unclear. The contractors, Kennedy says, do work like data entry, customer service and other administrative tasks for the Department.

The whole thing compels a comparison to 1992, when Steven Berry, a Republican appointee at the Department, was discovered to have pulled Bill Clinton's passport records. The independent counsel selected to investigate, Joe DiGenova, found after a three-year, $2.2 million probe, that Berry had indeed been up to no good, but no one higher up the chain had known about it and it wasn't criminal anyway.

The State Department is apparently going to be briefing the Obama campaign later today. We'll keep you updated.

Dick Cheney: master diplomat, negotiator and conciliator?!

Ever since late February, the Iraqi government had been deadlocked over legislation that laid out guidelines for provincial elections. That was because one man on Iraq's three-member Presidency Council had objected to the law, calling it unconstitutional. The law would pave the way for the elections to take place on October 1st, a development that would be sure to have an effect on the U.S. election just a month later.

But yesterday, that member, Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, suddenly withdrew his objection. The move came just two days after Vice President Dick Cheney met with Mehdi. So did Cheney have anything to do with that change? Well, it depends on who you ask. From The New York Times::

[Laith Shubar, an adviser to Mr. Mehdi,] said that Mr. Cheney had called Mr. Mehdi in February to ask about his objections to the law, but that the issue did not come up again when Mr. Cheney visited Mr. Mehdi here this week. A spokesman for Mr. Cheney said he could not comment on the meeting, but in an interview on Wednesday with ABC News, Mr. Cheney said, referring to Mr. Mehdi: “I talked with him about that, and a number of others. They expect they’ll have that resolved shortly.”

Shubar says the reversal came because Mehdi "received a promise from the Parliament speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, that lawmakers would discuss the possibility of making changes to the legislation." Sounds like pretty thin gruel.

Meanwhile, the Times reports:

Early on Wednesday morning, American forces accidentally killed three Iraqi police officers, including a lieutenant in the special forces, just outside Hawija, a Sunni town about 140 miles north of Baghdad, an American military statement said. The statement said the officers were shot and another wounded when the Iraqi police, responding to a call for assistance, entered “at a high rate of speed” a cordoned area where American forces were operating about 2:30 a.m..

The police lieutenant, Abdul Amir Hamid Salih, 39, had escaped five assassination attempts and had to change his cellphone number every week because of death threats from insurgents, said his father, Hamid Salih. Lieutenant Salih’s house was burned down six months ago by insurgents, who offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who killed him, his father said.

Hamid Kareem Hussein, the wounded police officer, said, “We were surprised when the Americans asked us for help at night, so we went to this village and we faced gunfire.

“The lieutenant said, ‘Call them on the loudspeaker and tell them we are policemen and that they asked for us,’ and then everything cut out and I didn’t feel anything,” he said, adding, “It’s a tragedy. I hate the police, and I hate Iraq.”

I think everyone can agree that if you go to the trouble of organizing an Iraqi political reconciliation conference, it's generally a bad sign if a number of key players don't even show up.

The idea behind the conference pushed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was to have a national "dialogue."

The largest Sunni bloc, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, and a prominent minority party of Shiites and Sunnis all boycotted the conference. No representatives of the insurgency (either Baathist or militia members) were there. Supporters of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr walked out of the conference, as did a prominent Sunni tribal leader who's been key to the so-called "Anbar Awakening."

Typical of Iraq, the boycotters don't even concur on their reason for boycotting. The New York Times focuses on pique by some blocs that they didn't get a proper invitation (Maliki's people say everybody got an official invitation). The AP reports that one Sunni bloc "said they would not participate in the conference until Shiite lawmakers address their political demands" -- so they won't talk reconciliation until their grievances are reconciled. And then there's a more direct explanation from that Anbar tribal leader, who's quoted in The Los Angeles Times (under the headline "A no-reconciliation conference"):

The organizer noted that Sunni tribes, which have revolted against Al Qaeda in Iraq, attended the conference. But one of their main leaders, Sheik Sulaiman, decided to lead his delegation out of the conference.

"I didn't stay any longer than it took me to smoke my cigarette. It was a total failure, because the Iraqi politicians are a failure," Sulaiman said.

This is why even Gen. David Petraeus says that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation."

Happy 5th Anniversary, everybody.

The administration threw everything it had at the Democrats. Statement after statement after statement on the White House lawn. TV ads, web ads. Letters from the attorney general and director of national intelligence raising the alarm about the danger the country is in. Even a TV appearance by the DNI himself to highlight the "increased danger."

And what did it get them? At the end of last week, nearly a month after the Protect America Act lapsed, the House passed a bill that does not contain retroactive immunity -- the bill even contains a provision that dispenses with the administration's main legal argument for blocking the lawsuits, the state secrets privilege.

So what now? No one on the Democratic side of the aisle seems to have bought the administration's line that the lapse of the Protect America Act is cause for concern. Wiretaps authorized by that law can go until August of this year. Wiretaps of new targets would have to be authorized under the old FISA law. But the authorities granted by the PAA are so broad (it authorizes wiretaps of entire terrorist groups) that as of two weeks after the law's lapse, no warrants of wiretaps for new targets had yet been required. That makes the administration's claim that such warrant requests will create a mountain of paperwork look pretty silly.

There seems to be a definite lack of urgency (despite the Republicans' terrifying web ad). And as the Politico reports, that lack of urgency on top of the considerable differences between the House and Senate surveillance bills -- most evidently on the issue of retroactive immunity -- means that the prospects for passing any bill through both houses appear dubious:

“I don’t know if there is a dire need to get it done tomorrow,” said one Senate Democratic aide. “Obviously we would like to see a resolution on this, but that is really hard to do when the House is voting on legislation that won’t pass the Senate and Republicans won’t even come to the table.”

Both houses are in recess for the next two weeks. And when the Senate gets back, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has planned a push on economic issues. How surveillance will fit into that agenda when the Senate likely doesn't have the 60 votes to even begin debate on the House's bill is not at all clear. And even if the Senate did pass something eventually, the distance between the House leadership and key Senate Democrats like Senate intelligence committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) on the issue of immunity makes the fate of such a bill unsure.

One thing that is sure is that conservatives think they have a winner of an issue here. So either from billionaire-funded attack groups or the Republican Party committees, the ads targeting House Democrats on the issue will keep coming. So far, however, such ads have had zero impact.

If no bill does pass in the next couple months, the next flashpoint seems likely to be July, shortly before the wiretaps authorized under the Protect America Act will actually begin to lapse.* You can be sure that the administration will mount another offensive. We'll see if that one is any more successful.

*Update: This post originally said that the authorizations under the Protect America Act will lapse in August. The authorizations are good for one year, meaning that authorizations from August of 2007 will lapse that month, but later authorizations will not lapse until a full year after their initiation. Thanks to TPM Reader CR for the fix.

Beyond the decision to invade in the first place, it was no doubt the most disastrous decision of the war. In May of 2003, the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army, rendering more than 200,000 armed Iraqis angry and unemployed. This morning, The New York Times provides the most detailed account yet of how the decision went down. It's not pretty.

The original plan, concocted by the seasoned and competent Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, was to not disband the army. Only the Republican Guard would be disbanded. The reason was clear, according to a March, 2003 PowerPoint presentation given at a National Security Council meeting. Said one slide of the presentation: “Cannot immediately demobilize 250K-300K personnel and put on the street.”

Exactly whose idea it was to disband the army, no one can say. No, Paul Bremer won't take the credit for it. But Bremer and his deputy did champion the idea. And in late May, he told the president and his aides that he was going to disband the Iraqi Army the next day. The president signed off on it. But it's pretty remarkable who did not:

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.

Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.

“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”

And then there's the question of whether Bremer consulted the military command in Iraq about the decision. Funny story, that. The senior commander there at the time, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, had clearly opposed the idea of disbanding the army. And when the time came to see if he would sign off on the plan to disband the army, Bremer assigned a retired officer on his staff, Col. Greg Gardner, to check in on McKiernan. For some reason, the two sides can't seem to agree on whether McKiernan signed off:

Mr. Bremer’s headquarters was in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, while General McKiernan’s was at a base near the Baghdad airport several miles away. Colonel Gardner said that there were problems with telephone communications but that he finally reached a member of General McKiernan’s staff who told him that the general accepted the decree.

“I got the impression that Lieutenant General McKiernan was not all that keen about the course of action,” Colonel Gardner said, “but was clearly told that he did endorse the draft.” Colonel Gardner added that he could not recall the name of the staff officer he spoke with.

General McKiernan, however, asserted that he neither reviewed nor backed the decree. “I never saw that order and never concurred,” he said. “That is absolutely false.”

Lt. Gen. J. D. Thurman, who serves as the Army’s chief operations officer and was the top operations officer for General McKiernan at the time, had a similar recollection. “We did not get a chance to make a comment,” he said in an e-mail message. “Not sure they wanted to hear what we had to say.”

Bremer did apparently notify Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before the decree and says that Rumsfeld approved in a phone conversation. If that is the case, Rumsfeld doesn't seem to have thought much about it. And if you sense a pattern here, it's that those who might have thought much about it weren't consulted:

“Anyone who is experienced in the ways of Washington knows the difference between an open, transparent policy process and slamming something through the system,” said Franklin C. Miller, the senior director for Defense Policy and Arms Control, who played an important role on the National Security Council in overseeing plans for the postwar phase. “The most portentous decision of the occupation was carried out stealthily and without giving the president’s principal advisers an opportunity to consider it and give the president their views.”

If there's one thing EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson doesn't like to talk about, it's his conversations with the White House. When questioned about some decision that just happened to delight the White House, Johnson, the most disciplined adherent to talking points in recent memory, responds with a version of "the final decision was mine and mine alone" or "I have routine contacts with various officials on a wide range of issues. . . . I value the ability to have candid discussions that are part of good government."

But unfortunately, sometimes you just can't keep a lid on things. Earlier this week, the EPA issued a new rule on the allowable amount of smog-forming ozone in the air. It was a decision taken against the unanimous advice of EPA scientists, who advised a much lower standard than the one ultimately decided upon. That has come to be a sadly regular occurrence. But this time, the role of the White House -- and President Bush himself -- is clear. From The Washington Post:

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The White House's intervention was so last minute and arbitrary that the Justice Department was evidently set to scrambling in an effort to find the legal support for it. As the Post reports, the effect of the decision will likely be long term: "Under the Clean Air Act, the federal government must reexamine every five years whether its ozone standards are adequate, and the rules that the EPA issued Wednesday will help determine the nation's air quality for at least a decade."

The White House's influence (first reported by The Los Angeles Times earlier this week) was made evident by documents that the EPA was forced to produce in support of the decision. And in those documents, you can see the different ways EPA scientists and White House officials approached the problem. One the one side, you have concern for the environment. On the other, concern for "personal comfort and well-being":

The EPA's documents suggest that senior officials and scientific advisers resisted the White House's position. Last year, the agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee wrote -- using italics for emphasis -- that it unanimously supported the EPA staff's conclusion that "protection of managed agricultural crops and natural terrestrial ecosystems requires a secondary [ozone standard] that is substantially different from the primary ozone standard. . . ."

When the OMB's Susan E. Dudley urged the EPA to consider the effects of cutting ozone further on "economic values and on personal comfort and well-being," the EPA's Marcus Peacock responded in a March 7 memo: "EPA is not aware of any information that ozone has beneficial effects on economic values or on personal comfort and well being."

You can be sure that Johnson's next trip to Capitol Hill will put his talking points to the test.

Later today, the House will vote on its surveillance bill, a bill that rejects retroactive immunity for the telecoms who cooperated with the administration's warrantless wiretapping program and provides a number of tougher civil liberty checks on the surveillance going forward.

The general expectation is that the bill will pass, but the vote might be quite close. As CQ reported last night, none of the 21 Blue Dog Dems seem prepared to say where they'll vote -- a number saying yesterday that they hadn't even read the bill yet.

It was a defiant move for the House Dem leadership to bring such a bill to a vote, and the administration clearly is not happy. This morning, President Bush just made umpteenth public statement on the surveillance bill, full of the usual canards about greedy trial lawyers exploiting the telecoms' patriotic participation in the program, "dangerous intelligence gaps," and the specter of the telecoms refusing to cooperate going forward because the lawsuits did not get wiped out. His message was clear: "voting for this bill would make our country less safe" and (just in case they weren't clear on this) Americans "want their children to be safe from terror." The House should not leave for its planned two-week Easter recess, he said, without passing the Senate's bill, which the White House supports.

Here's video of Bush this morning:

If the House were to pass the bill today, it would make its way over to the Senate, where it would be sure to undergo some significant modifications (including, most likely, reinserting retroactive immunity). Senate intelligence committee Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has said as much. That's a process that wouldn't get underway until April. But the White House is impatient and evidently hopes that moderate Dems will join with Republicans in voting down the leadership's bill, after which the administration would continue to exert pressure to pass the Senate bill. You can be sure that outside groups would continue to pound Dems with ads screaming that the country has been left defenseless.

Inconveniently enough for the administration, there's still plenty more to be learned about just how the administration's warrantless wiretapping program worked. For instance, just this morning, The New York Times reports that the FBI used so-called "blanket" letters -- letters that were a "one-step operation used to justify the collection of hundreds of phone and e-mail records at a time" -- at least 11 times in 2006. That and other abuses of national security letters by the FBI are illustrated in this report (pdf) by the Department of Justice's inspector general.

And as we learned only this Monday (thanks to The Wall Street Journal), the FBI's data feeds the NSA's massive driftnet, which in turn can result in wiretaps through the Terrorist Surveillance Program. But the administration, of course, wants the issue closed. Dems should "stop playing politics with the past," as Bush put it this morning -- it's time to succumb to the politics of the present.

If there's one thing the Bush Administration has demonstrated, it's the difficulty of proving a negative.

It took a number of months after the invasion of weapons inspectors crawling all over Iraq to show that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, have weapons of mass destruction. And it's time to chalk up another victory for completeness.

A good portion of those 935 false statements uttered by administration officials in the run-up to the invasion had to do with claims of Iraq ties to Al Qaeda. That was, in part, thanks to the intelligence shenanigans of Doug Feith at the Pentagon, but of course it was an administration-wide mentality. Which explains that even after the 9/11 Commission found that there was no significant relationship, they kept on pleading the point.

Well, I think it's time to finally consider this negative proven:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

So what's next?

It is the closest thing I've seen to a complete explanation of the surveillance program the Bush Administration has assembled.

Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the National Security Agency has assembled what some intelligence officials admit is a driftnet for domestic and foreign communications.

Here's the way the whole thing works, according to Gorman: into the NSA's massive database goes data collected by the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Treasury. This information includes data about email (recipient and sender address, subject, time sent), internet searches (sites visited and searches conducted), phone calls (incoming and outgoing numbers, length of call, location), financial information (wire transfers, credit-card use, information about bank accounts), and information from the DHS about airline passengers.

Then the NSA's software analyzes this data for indications of terrorist activity. When it hits upon a suspicious pattern, the NSA "feeds its findings into the effort the administration calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program and shares some of that information with other U.S. security agencies.”

Here's a more in-depth explanation:

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city -- for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans -- the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

The data sifting is supposedly legal because it's limited to so-called "transactional" details. In other words, the NSA cannot read the content of an email, but can use other data about the email (i.e. subject line, sender/recipient, data and time). If a suspicious pattern emerges, then the NSA, via the Terrorist Surveillance Program, may seek to wiretap.

Gorman describes the NSA's effort (elements of which have been reported before) as basically a resurrection of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, which of course was de-funded by Congress once the details became public. This time around, of course, the details have remained secret. Although the budget for the NSA's driftnet is classified, Gorman cites one official as estimating it at $1 billion. One wonders what the reaction will be this time around:

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who led the charge to kill TIA, says "the administration is trying to bring as much of the philosophy of operation Total Information Awareness as it can into the programs they're using today." The issue has been overshadowed by the fight over telecoms' immunity, he said. "There's not been as much discussion in the Congress as there ought to be."

We'll have more on this in a bit.

How are things really going in Iraq? And should the American public know about it?

Next month, The Washington Post reports, the intelligence community will complete a national intelligence estimate on the situation in Iraq. If Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell has his way, the estimate will stay classified.

That's because McConnell is no fan of public debate of intelligence issues. He's said that all this debate about the surveillance bill " means that some Americans are going to die." And he thinks that NIEs should stay secret.

It was a policy that he tried to maintain with regard to the recent NIE on Iran -- which effectively undercut the administration's increasing alarmism about the nuclear threat of Iran by proclaiming that the intelligence community thought that Iran had suspended its nuclear program. McConnell and the administration only begrudgingly agreed to release that NIE, he explained to Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker, due to "the fear that, if we didn't release it, it would leak, and the Administration at that point would be accused of hiding information."

The intel community produced two NIEs last year, one in January (which used the phrase "civil war"), the other in August. Declassified versions of the key findings were released for each. Both sized up the shifting universe of security threats and emphasized the perilous political situation in the country.

This time around, however, things might be different. McConnell decreed in October that NIEs should no longer be released. And:

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

So here's the question. The NIE, which is apparently expected to be issued in April, would most likely be the last word from the intelligence community on the situation in Iraq before the election. Will the administration be able to keep it under wraps? Or will the fear of the report leaking again force it out into the open?

On February 1st of this year, National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) abruptly released a statement about recently discovered "irregularities in our financial audit process." That was it: no details about whether money might have been stolen, just word that they'd seen fit to bring in the federal authorities.

The details, as they've come, have been embarrassing for the committee, which works to get Republicans elected to the House (which was already hurting in comparison to its Democratic counterpart before all this began).

According to The New York Times this morning, it all began to unravel when Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), a CPA, asked to meet with the audit firm that was supposedly checking the NRCC's books, an idea that apparently no one had had for several years. Christopher Ward, then the NRCC's treasurer, finally relented, but then chickened out 30 minutes before and fessed up that there actually hadn't been any audits.

It was ultimately discovered that Ward had been faking the audits since 2003. The Politico, which laid out this general outline of events early last month, reported that Ward had forged everything, including the letterhead. So when it came time to actually talk to the people who'd supposedly written those fake reports, it all unraveled.

The FBI is currently investigating, and it's not clear yet why Ward was so keen to hide the real numbers. But as the Times reports this morning, the signs are not good. NRCC internal audits since Ward's discovery show that "hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen." And it gets worse: there are apparently indications that "the financial irregularities might extend beyond the national committee to the campaign funds of individual Republican lawmakers who also worked with Mr. Ward, a longtime party operative."

Ward had been with the NRCC since 1993 and worked for dozens of Republican campaign committees, political action committees, and other organizations. It'll be interesting to see what the FBI turns up.

While there's a lot of attention on picking a new president, you might not want to take your eye off the current one.

The idea, once scandalous, that Bush would just be handing the Iraq mess off to his successor is now an accepted reality. But he won't be doing it in an informal way, either.

Since last year, the administration has been working towards a long-term security agreement with Iraq, an "enduring relationship," as they had it. The basic outlines were clear: a long-term American troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments in return for a guarantee of security for the Iraqis.

To give you an idea of the outline, the Iraqis said that it would be silly to expect that Iraq would be able to defend itself alone until at least 2018. Forever seems a fair conservative estimate.

But there was a problem. There was a strong case to be made that for the administration to strike such a deal without the consent of the Senate was unconstitutional. Democrats were set to fight such a move.

You know what Bush and Cheney think about asking Congress for anything. So, abruptly, the administration's position changed. The administration would be striking a long-term pact along the same lines, but there would be no security guarantee. None at all. According to the letter of the agreement, if Iraq were attacked, we'd just let it burn.

For some reason, some cynics think this is just a workaround. Without the actual security guarantee, the administration can hammer out the treaty without any hassle from Congress.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) is such a cynic. And yesterday Ackerman had the opportunity to press David Satterfield, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, about the deal. The exchange, printed today in The Washington Post, had that taint of absurdity so common to Congressional testimony from administration officials:

Update: Here's video of Ackerman's questioning.

Read more »

Bush has been beating the drum for weeks (danger! terrorists! attack!). And finally the Dems seem to be marching in time.

As we noted yesterday, there are clear signs that whatever surveillance bill emerges from the House-Senate negotiations, it will more than likely contain immunity for the telecoms for their participation in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. But Bush is not a man to settle. He wants more. Here he is speaking yesterday before a gathering of the state's attorneys general:

Now the question is, should these lawsuits be allowed to proceed, or should any company that may have helped save American lives be thanked for performing a patriotic service; should those who stepped forward to say we're going to help defend America have to go to the courthouse to defend themselves, or should the Congress and the President say thank you for doing your patriotic duty? I believe we ought to say thank you.

Now, as The Washington Post reports this morning, the bill negotiations are ongoing. So it's not entirely clear what will emerge. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the Post reports, has been polling the Dem caucus on the immunity issue, with "the liberal camp" content with doing nothing (keeping the old FISA law) and "the moderate wing" pushing for retroactive immunity.

But it's not clear if Hoyer has yet gauged support for this new telecom thanking provision. Perhaps it would come as a completely separate bill (the Thanks for Protecting America Act?), or perhaps all the lawmakers could just go down onto the steps of the Capitol and blow kisses. You never know what novel arrangement could emerge from the bill negotiations.

Two weeks ago, the Protect America Act lapsed. And ever since then, Republicans and the administration have shown impressive stamina in continually hyping the "increased danger" -- and insisting on retroactive immunity for the telecoms' participation in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

For two weeks, the Democratic leadership did not budge. But now there are signs that the administration may finally be getting what it wants.

And why has President Bush been pushing so hard for immunity? The Washington Post walked through the issue this weekend. Though the Republican talking point has been that trial lawyers have been licking their chops over "billion dollar" lawsuits, there is a much more compelling reason for the administration to want the lawsuits quashed: it is the only legal avenue likely to be successful in forcing disclosures about the warrantless wiretapping program. In other words, while the administration has consistently sought to focus the issue as one about the telecoms; the administration itself arguably has much more to fear from the suits.

There were a couple different indications this weekend that the Dems were getting close to a compromise that would result in retroactive immunity.

Appearing on CNN this weekend, House intelligence committee Chair Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) sounded like a man inclined towards supporting "blanket immunity," as he called it, and just dotting his i's and crossing his t's. Reyes had earlier refused to declare his position on retroactive immunity, saying that he needed more time to study the issue. The administration finally turned over documents from the program last month. And Reyes said yesterday that "we are talking to the representatives from the communications companies because, if we're going to give them blanket immunity, we want to know and we want to understand what it is that we're giving immunity for." When Wolf Blitzer asked him whether he's "open" to such immunity, he answered "absolutely." He said that he and the other House and Senate Dems working on hammering out a compromise would probably be finished "probably within the next week."

Update: Here's the vid:

The Los Angeles Times gave a glimpse of what a final vote on that compromise bill might look like in the House. The House leadership might divide its final vote on a compromise bill into two parts, the second vote being solely on the issue of retroactive immunity:

"The objective would be to pass something that is less controversial," yet still allow Democrats to register their objections to the immunity provision, said one senior Democratic aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and other party leaders have yet to reach a decision on the matter.

The clear expectation is that more than enough Dems would cross over to vote for retroactive immunity to have it pass. How many Dems would "register their objection" -- whether it would be more in the House than in the Senate, where the vote on immunity was surprisingly lopsided -- well, only a vote would tell. In any case, the long, mighty struggle seems to be winding down to a whimper of an ending.