"This false unanimity was no accident ... It was the personal creation of Mr. Gates."

From part three of Roger Morris' series on Robert Gates and his legacy.

When it came to the Soviet Union, [President Jimmy] Carter was typically inconsistent in his first months in office, veering between one tactic and another in arms control while a bureaucratic war over SALT II erupted around him. On Gates' recommendation, the new president met with perennial hawk Paul Nitze, now representing the Committee on the Present Danger, the latest right-wing, military-industrial front fielded to attack détente. Soon, Brzezinski and Gates had won a defining victory. They had persuaded Carter to bring in the national security advisor's old friend and onetime co-author, Samuel Huntington, as a special consultant on strategic policy. The Harvard reactionary would later become one of the gurus of the neoconservative movement (and author of the ubër-Orientalist book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order).

In the summer of 1977, his cohorts would leak to the Washington Post that Huntington's job was "to scare the Carter Administration into greater respect for the Soviet Union." Working in liaison, Huntington, Gates, and hard-liners in and out of government promptly did just that -- a process which culminated in Presidential Review Memorandum #10, (in which both Brzezinski and Gates were instrumental). A time-honored "study," using flawed or confected intelligence and meant to channel presidential policy, the infamously shallow PRM-10 nodded to détente, while legitimizing the fraudulent premise of the old Team B, that 1976 group of right-wing outsiders a Reagan-nervous Ford had commissioned to counter the CIA's non-existent underestimation of Soviet strength.

The conveniently have-it-both-ways Huntington-Brzezinski-Gates document combined "cooperation and competition" into a single U.S. policy toward Russia -- the first half to be honored with pledges of faithfulness by diplomatic day; the second indulged with a serial philanderer's abandon by covert-action night. Among other historic effects, PRM-10 would be the basis for what would develop into Carter's "rapid deployment force" in the Persian Gulf, meant to protect American "access" to Middle Eastern oil, and eventually into a full-fledged Gulf military command, CENTCOM.

It would signal the beginning of what historian Andrew Bacevich has labeled our "oil wars" in the region. More generally, the "report" sanctioned, for a new era, the use of trumped-up "special" panels or consultants to incite political alarm in the body politic whenever militarism -- and especially military spending -- was thought to be in danger of waning.

Against the continuing obstruction of Brzezinski and Gates, Vance would coax SALT II, which had seemed imminent at Carter's inauguration, to a cheerless Vienna signing at a summit meeting in July 1979. By then, however, the negotiations had been eviscerated by Congressional opposition that emerged ineluctably out of the growing mood of confrontation with the USSR; and the agreement would die just six months later without Senate ratification when Carter withdrew the treaty as part of his outraged reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, just as all the hawks prodded him to do from the first weeks of his presidency, Carter went on to approve major new weapons programs -- what the Soviets, in mounting alarm, saw as "an endless build-up of power" -- that made the shell game of "cooperation" a travesty.

(...)

Meanwhile, during 1978, they were attending, with similar heedlessness, to the long death rattle of the Shah's regime. That disaster, prelude to another crisis that now confronts the new Secretary of Defense, is captured in snapshots.

There is Jesse Leaf, the CIA's analyst for Iran who has never been to Iran or met an Iranian. Like Gates, as a Soviet specialist, he is an "expert" in the country he "analyzes" only "from afar." He nonetheless grasps the coming collapse, not from the "Shahdulation" of official reporting, but from incidental reading of Alexis de Tocqueville's work on the rotten ancien régime of eighteenth century France. When he tries to warn his superiors of what the future may hold, unlike Gates, he sees his career stunted.

There is Brzezinski's call to U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran in February 1979, as fighting rages in the streets of the Iranian capital. The national security advisor tells the ambassador that the American Army attaché must have his friends in the Iranian military "overthrow" the weak post-Shah regime and "take control of the country ... to restore order." The attaché is hiding in the basement of the Iranian Army commander's headquarters, pinned down by gunfire, and can hardly save himself, much less Iran, for Washington. "I can't understand you," Sullivan replies sarcastically, "You must be speaking Polish." It might have been an epitaph for so much. ...

[In 1983] Casey names Gates as chairman of the National Intelligence Council that oversees the preparation of all National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).

Though the CIA put such documents together, intelligence analysts at the Pentagon and the State Department traditionally inserted footnotes of dissent. Now, they are suddenly prevented from doing so. "This false unanimity was no accident," comments a former ranking State Department official. "It was the personal creation of Mr. Gates." ...

[Spring 1985] Gates also convenes a special group to issue a memo arguing that the Soviets were behind the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Asked years later about the murder plot by historian Fred Halliday, he replies, "It will probably remain one of the great unanswered questions of the cold war." Reflecting White House pressure, in the same vein Gates also presses analysts to implicate the Russians in European terrorism, though most analysts know that reports prompting the White House request are false and based on the CIA's own "black propaganda" operations ordered by Casey at Gates' own urging.

In May 1985, Gates issues a Special National Intelligence Estimate on Iran reversing all previous analyses and stressing Soviet inroads into that country (even though the fundamentalist Shiite regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini loathes communism).

In August 1985, an NSC meeting discusses the illegal supplying of U.S. missiles to Iran, via Israel, whose own inventories would then be replenished by the administration.

On October 1, 1985, CIA National Intelligence Officer Charles Allen tells Gates of suspicions that funds are being illegally diverted from some unknown source to the Nicaraguan Contras, though Gates claims he will not remember being told any of this until almost a year later.

A November 22nd Gates memo reports that Iranian-sponsored terrorism has "dropped off substantially," another major reversal in analysis, though no specific evidence is cited. Later that same month, U.S. Hawk missiles are shipped illegally to Iran.

In 1985, the CIA first notices "significant" numbers of "Arab nationals" coming to Pakistan to fight with the U.S.-backed Afghan Mujahideen in the anti-Soviet war. "Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. We expected a post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide," Gates would write in his memoirs. He would be blunter with historian Halliday: "Frankly, we weren't concerned about what post-Soviet Afghanistan was going to look like." ...

January [1987], [Secretary of State] Shultz tells Gates: "I feel you all have very strong policy views. I feel you try to manipulate me. So you have a very dissatisfied customer. If this were a business, I'd find myself another supplier." It is only the first of much Shultz testimony. "I had come to have grave doubts, "he would tell Congress later, "about the objectivity and reliability of some of the intelligence I was getting."

Why Can't Mookie Behave Like All Those Sunni Sheikhs?

It looks like next week will be interesting.

A call by radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr for thousands of Iraqis to march to a twice-bombed shrine in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Samarra next week has set off alarms among U.S. and Iraqi officials, who fear the demonstration will worsen sectarian tensions and incite bloodshed.

Al-Sadr said the pilgrimage to the Askariya shrine, whose bombing in February 2006 has been blamed for accelerating sectarian violence, is intended as a display of unity between Sunnis and Shiites. He said the march next Thursday, which marks the July 1 birthday of Fatima, Islam's Prophet Muhammad's daughter, won't become a bloodbath.

Yet many fear that the event, which could see thousands traveling through some of Iraq's most dangerous areas, will turn bloody. A Shiite pilgrimage in March to Karbala, south of Baghdad, produced scores of deaths, including 90 from two suicide-bomb attacks in the town of Hillah.

"I really don't know what is the benefit of the visit to Samarra, and I don't know why Muqtada insists on sending the innocent to their deaths," said Baghdad resident Hussein al-Maliki, 34, a Shiite. "I'm sure the insurgents will do their best to kill as many Shiites as possible during the visit."

For al-Sadr, the leader of the anti-American Mahdi Army militia, the march poses a test of his popularity. A peaceful demonstration could arm him with broad political clout, which has eluded other Iraqi leaders so far, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. A low turnout could underscore the limits of al-Sadr's ability to marshal ordinary citizens.

In any case, the event promises a volatile mix of weapons and ill will, with members of al-Sadr's militia gearing up to provide security alongside Iraqi and U.S. forces that are still fighting his militiamen in the south.

Al-Sadr confirmed Thursday that he'll go ahead with the march despite calls to cancel it from both Sunnis and Shiites and reservations within his organization.

For Iraqis, the shrine at Samarra has a special place in the violence. In February 2006, presumed Sunni bombers destroyed its dome, accelerating the tit-for-tat pattern of sectarian violence. Hundreds died in the following days, as Shiites retaliated with killings that reached unprecedented levels by October before beginning to decline.

Two weeks ago, explosions toppled the shrine's remaining minarets. Several Sunni mosques were destroyed in the aftermath, though the retaliatory violence was far less than last year's.

No group has claimed responsibility for either bombing, and while U.S. officials have blamed them on the insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq, there's no hard evidence.

Since his return to public view after a three-month absence, al-Sadr, whose stronghold is the Baghdad slum of Sadr City and whose militia has been blamed for much of the sectarian violence, has tried to portray himself as a unifying rather than divisive figure.

Al-Maliki's government called on al-Sadr to delay the pilgrimage until more security forces are in place in Samarra and along the route from Baghdad.

Should the march occur, pilgrims would travel from Baghdad and Shiite cities in southern Iraq through Sunni Arab insurgent strongholds north of the capital to Samarra.

Update: During Friday prayers at Mookie's mosque, the officiating cleric announced that the march has been called off.

Or possibly just postponed.

Some Good Historical Questions

Robert Parry suggests some possible avenues of inquiry for a (never to be pursued) second generation of "family jewels":

What is the relationship between U.S. intelligence and Sun Myung Moon's organization? Why has Moon's operation, with its relationships with crime kingpins in Asia and Latin America, escaped legal scrutiny even after it was exposed during the Korea-gate scandal in the late 1970s as a South Korean intelligence front?

(Though the Korea-gate findings contributed to Moon's prosecution and conviction on tax charges in 1982, he and his organization have since become untouchables, a pattern of protection that some critics trace to Moon's investment of billions of mysterious dollars in publishing the pro-Republican Washington Times, in financing a right-wing political infrastructure in the United States, and in putting money into the pockets of U.S. political leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.)

--What was the CIA's hand in the so-called "perception management" operations of the 1980s aimed at influencing how the American people perceived foreign-policy events?

(CIA Director William Casey took a direct interest in establishing a "perception management" operation based in the National Security Council under the guidance of long-time CIA officer Walter Raymond Jr. Though Raymond was "externalized" from the CIA by shifting him to the NSC, this sleight of hand violated at least the spirit of the prohibition against the CIA influencing Americans through distribution of propaganda.)

--What did the CIA know about clandestine weapons shipments to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s?

(Former Reagan administration official Howard Teicher has written in a sworn affidavit that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA Director William Casey and then-deputy CIA director Robert Gates played secret roles in arranging military assistance to Saddam Hussein's government. But the full story has never been told.)

--Was the CIA aware of the 1985 activities of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and his assistant, Gen. Colin Powell, in arranging illegal shipments of weapons to Iran?

(Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane has testified that he described the operation to Weinberger and Powell in 1985 before there was a presidential intelligence finding and thus when the shipment of U.S. weapons through Israel was illegal. Weinberger denied knowledge and Powell claimed a faulty memory. Then, President George H.W. Bush blocked the truth when he pardoned Weinberger on Christmas Eve 1992, thus preventing Weinberger's Iran-Contra trial and sparing Powell some embarrassing questions.)

RFE/RL Report On Sunni Propaganda

The U.S. government propaganda agency Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) today released a report on the information operations being conducted by the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

"Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War Of Images And Ideas" (76 page PDF) by RFE/RL regional analysts Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo.

Key Findings

■ Sunni insurgents in Iraq and their supporters worldwide are exploiting the Internet to pursue a massive and far-reaching media campaign. Insurgent media are forming perceptions of the war in Iraq among the best-educated and most influential segment of the Arab population.

■ The Iraqi insurgent media network is a boon to global jihadist media, which can use materials produced by the insurgency to reinforce their message.

■ Mainstream Arab media amplify the insurgents' efforts, transmitting their message to an audience of millions.

■ The insurgent propaganda network does not have a headquarters, bureaucracy, or brick-and-mortar infrastructure. It is decentralized, fast-moving, and technologically adaptive.

■ The rising tide of Sunni-Shi'ite hate speech in Iraqi insurgent media points to the danger of even greater sectarian bloodshed. A wealth of evidence shows that hate speech paved the way for genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

■ The popularity of online Iraqi Sunni insurgent media reflects a genuine demand for their message in the Arab world. An alternative, no matter how lavishly funded and cleverly produced, will not eliminate this demand.

■ There is little to counter this torrent of daily press releases, weekly and monthly magazines, books, video clips, full-length films, and even television channels.

■ We should not concede the battle without a fight. The insurgent media network has key vulnerabilities that can be targeted. These include:

• A lack of central coordination and a resulting lack of message control.

• A widening rift between homegrown nationalist groups and Al-Qaeda affiliated
global jihadists.

The RFE/RL report is really well done, with lots of unusually detailed information about the various insurgent groups, with screen captures of examples of their PSYOP products.

New ICG Report on Iraq

Iraq can only survive if a functional and legitimate state is rebuilt from the ruins of war and occupation, drawing on the lessons of the collapse of British-ruled Basra, an influential thinktank warns today.

Overall, says the International Crisis Group, it is not enough just to resolve the confrontation between Sunni Arabs, Shia and Kurds. And if the US and Britain continue backing the same Shia political actors, the likely outcome will be the country's break-up into myriad fiefdoms. "Far from building a new state," their Iraqi partners "are tirelessly working to tear it down".

In a powerful critique of current policy, the ICG insists it is vital to avoid repeating the experience of Basra, where UK forces implemented a security plan, Operation Sinbad, similar to the current US-led surge in Baghdad. "The answer to Iraq's horrific violence cannot be an illusory military surge that aims to bolster the existing political structure and treats the dominant parties as partners," it adds bluntly.

Operation Sinbad was a "superficial and fleeting" success, and ended with British troops being driven off the streets in what was seen as an ignominious defeat by the city's militias, now more powerful and unconstrained than before. Some British data about its achievements, particularly about improved police performance, "defies credibility", the group notes.

The key failure in Basra, argues the report, has been the inability to establish legitimate government to redistribute resources, impose respect for the rule of law and ensure peaceful transition at the local level - a lesson it says has to be learnt across Iraq as a whole.

"Basra's political arena remains in the hands of actors engaged in bloody competition for resources, undermining what is left of governorate institutions and coercively enforcing their rule. The local population has no choice but to seek protection from one of the dominant camps. Periods of stability do not reflect greater governing authority so much as they do a momentary - and fragile - balance of interests or of terror between rival militias."

Basra's "multiple and multiplying forms of violence" may have little to do with sectarianism or anti-occupation resistance but involve "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighbourhood vigilantism ... and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors."

"Should other causes of strife - sectarian violence and the fight against coalition forces - recede, the concern must still be that Basra's fate will be replicated throughout the country on a larger, more chaotic and more dangerous scale. The lessons are clear. Iraq's violence is multifaceted, and sectarianism is only one of its sources. It follows that the country's division along supposedly inherent and homogeneous confessional and ethnic lines is not an answer. It follows, too, that rebuilding the state, tackling militias and imposing the rule of law cannot be done without confronting the parties that currently dominate the political process and forging a new and far more inclusive political compact. "

For the ICG, Iraq is in the midst of a civil war but has also become a failed state. It describes "a country whose institutions and, with them, any semblance of national cohesion, have been obliterated. That is what has made the violence - all the violence: sectarian, anti-coalition, political, criminal and otherwise - both possible and, for many, necessary. Resolving the confrontation between Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds is one priority. But rebuilding a functioning and legitimate state is another - no less urgent, no less important and no less daunting."

Where Is Iraq Heading? Lessons From Basra.
International Crisis Group report

Gates and the Cold War, Part II

An excerpt from the next installment of Roger Morris' lengthy series on Robert Gates and the Cold War.

The continuing priority given to analysts of the USSR proved no advantage when it came to intelligence. By the late 1960s, the Agency was already alternately missing or overestimating a genuine Soviet build-up of its missile forces, a step taken by the Russian leadership to redress the massive strategic imbalance (and humiliation) that had culminated in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. ("We will honor this agreement," a Russian envoy told his American counterpart in 1962. He was speaking of the deal President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had forged, as Moscow backed down on placing its missiles in Cuba to match U.S. bombers and warheads poised along the borders of the USSR, 30 minutes from Soviet cities and command centers. "But I want to tell you something. You'll never do this to us again.") Far worse, CIA analysts regularly underestimated by as much as half the mortal burden such staggering military spending placed on a corrupt, sclerotic Soviet economy.

Given the millions of dollars pouring into intelligence, some of the gaps were chilling. As the new, young analyst from Wichita reported to Washington in that leaden summer of 1968, NSC staff officers watched in dismay while the Agency simply "lost" whole Soviet tank divisions and other forces for several crucial days. These were finally located in Prague only as the Soviet ambassador was helpfully informing President Lyndon Johnson of the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The CIA Bob Gates joined was still largely what it had been over its first two decades -- a blunt instrument of covert intervention, now mostly in non-European politics -- and a stagnant fund of intelligence. The Baltic Syndrome had morphed into a global variation of the same half-blind and bigoted perspective. The Agency was trapped in the remarkably narrow confines that defined imperial, yet intellectually provincial, Washington. During Gates' opportunistic rise and sway over the next quarter century, it would remain, at horrendous cost, much the same.

From 1968 to 1974, Gates rose steadily through the ranks of Langley clerkdom, serving on the CIA support group for the Strategic Arms Limitation negotiations in Vienna, and eventually as an assistant national intelligence officer for the USSR. He helped to craft the periodic National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for the Soviet Union, a report that was, and remains, an Agency hallmark for any given area or issue.

His work in these years also focused to some extent on Moscow's policy in the Middle East. He had no training or experience in the region itself, but given the Agency's relatively sparse expertise in the Arab world, he soon professed specialization and authority in that as well. "Gates prided himself in being a top Middle East expert within CIA," according to a former boss, Ray McGovern -- though it was not a claim any of his colleagues in either Soviet or Middle Eastern affairs seem to have taken seriously at the time. ...

Looking back on this crucial take-off moment in Gates' career, media pundits vacantly ascribed it to merit. "The brightest Soviet analyst in the shop," Washington Post columnist David Ignatius typically wrote. Insiders knew better. "He wasn't." That was what his CIA superior Ray McGovern said gently, echoing the feelings of his colleagues that "something other than expertise" made for Gates' "meteoric" climb.

It was, in fact, a triumph of office politics, not substance. "Gates' rise did not come from knowing more about the Soviets.... than anyone else," CIA chronicler Thomas Powers concluded. "He was young, well scrubbed, well spoken, bright, hard-working, reliable, loyal, discreet, and a bit of a hard-ass when it came to the Russians." But his limits, too, were evident. Wrote British historian Fred Halliday: "He would not have been out of place as a small town bank manager: unfazed by questions, reticent in judgment, sure of his ground, but without either incisiveness or (it seemed) the awareness that international experience brings." He had, Halliday concluded, "no trace [of]…. any first-hand experience of foreign cultures or countries." He was "a man of the office, the organization." It was the candid portrait of a consummate insider as insular as the policy and politics he served.

Gates, the Soviet "specialist" and, in many ways, penultimate Cold Warrior, would not even see Moscow until May 1989, more than two decades after entering the CIA as an expert on the USSR and after 15 years in which, to one degree or another, he joined in nearly all Washington's most consequential judgments about Russia. Nor, despite his asserted expertise in the Middle East, would Gates have personal experience with nations he dealt with fatefully from 1974 to 1993 -- most notably Afghanistan and Iraq. He would not tour either until 2006-7, and then only for a few, heavily guarded days and in the most limited of ways. ...

By the early 1970s ... Nixon and Kissinger were confronted with anything but ordinary, venal resistance within the bureaucracy. To their unprecedented policy of détente (and its implicit, if unconscious, challenge to the Baltic Syndrome mentality), there arose an unprecedented opposition not only in the Pentagon but also in the CIA, where some felt Cold War orthodoxy and all it denoted were being threatened as never before.

As Kissinger recounted the experience, he could hardly testify before (Senator Henry) Jackson's Senate Armed Services Committee or other panels without facing conveniently leaked CIA or Pentagon documents that, in one way or another, armed the opponents of détente. These were often highly classified, still closely-held papers Kissinger himself had only just received -- or had not yet seen at all. As Nixon sank into the Watergate miasma, leaks (and opposition) only multiplied -- much of it using materials Bob Gates had ready access to, or had even helped produce, as assistant national intelligence officer. ...

As usual, given Washington's ceaseless traffic in leaks, there is no hard evidence about whether Gates actually leaked into this furor, though his animus in regards to Nixon's Soviet policy was unmistakable and the provenance of many of the leaked documents is damning. Clearly, however, in his first year on the NSC staff he waged a careful rear-guard action against what was to become known as the Helsinki Accords. Kissinger's diplomacy nonetheless brought the Accords to fruition in July 1975. They offered official recognition of post-World War II Soviet Bloc boundaries in Europe, but within a new international context of respect for, and unprecedented monitoring of, human rights and political dissidence in the USSR and its satellites. It would be the last hurrah of détente. While Reagan and the Right attacked the "surrender" of Eastern Europe, the Accords actually opened the way for the rise of internal opposition movements like Poland's Solidarity, leading ultimately to the decay and fall of the USSR.

Gates typically opposed Helsinki as something Moscow sought (which made it anathema automatically). As would be even more true a decade later with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he and others frozen in the Baltic Syndrome (as always, most of Washington) were oblivious to the brittleness of communist rule, cynically dismissing the Accords as "window dressing" the Kremlin and its satellites could and would ignore.

Roger Morris on Robert Gates and the Cold War

From the introduction to a long essay on the Cold War in the form of a profile on U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates by former NSC official Roger Morris.

For all his relative virtues in 2007, however, Gates remains a genuine Jekyll-and-Hyde character, a best-yet-worst of America as it flung its vast power over the world. To appreciate who and what he was - and so who and what he is likely to be now, at one of the most critical junctures ever to face a secretary of defense - is to retrace much of the shrouded side of American foreign policy and intelligence for the past half-century or more. Most Americans hardly know that record, though its reckonings are with us today - with a vengeance. At the unexpected climax of his long career, the 63-year-old Gates faces not only the toll of the disastrous regime he joins, but of his own legacy as well.

This is a vintage American chronicle with dramatic settings and dark secrets. The cast ranges from hearty boosters in Kansas to bitter exiles on the Baltic, from doomed agents dropped behind Russian lines across Eurasia to Islamic clerics car-bombed in the Middle East - all in a family saga of long-hidden paternity. As with Rumsfeld, such a sweeping history - the history, in this case, of that blind deity of havoc, the CIA - cannot come condensed or blog-sized. It is, necessarily, without apology, a long trail a-winding. Though in the end this will indeed be a profile of the US's new secretary of defense, much has to be understood before Gates even joins the story in a serious way as policy-accomplice and policymaker. But the trip is full of color, and quicker than it seems. And as usual, the essential lessons, along with the devil, are in the details.

The CIA 'Family Jewels' To Be Released

The CIA will now release the legendary "family jewels" but they won't release their IG's report on the mistakes that led to 9/11.

Interesting timing, too.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. ...

Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.

The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter. ...

Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations. ...

Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations. ...

CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."

Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.

"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."

Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Brit Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.

CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:

• The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector [Nosenko], suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."


• The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.


• Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.


• CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs." [LSD]

Former Senate Intelligence Committee member Gary Hart said privately that the "family jewels" report contained many additional revelations of a more newsworthy nature than were made public in the mid-1970's. I will bet that none of these see the light of day in the upcoming declassification.

Iran Calls BS On U.S. Taliban Claim, Won't Be Getting Their Diplomats Back Any Time Soon

If the "Iran is arming the Taliban" charge doesn't stick, we will probably have to claim that Iran is arming Russia or China. We have basically reached the end of the road credibility-wise along those lines.

Iran on Thursday rejected U.S. accusations it is arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, saying an attack on its consulate there showed the hostility of the Sunni militant group towards Shi'ite Iran.

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns on June 9 accused Tehran of supporting the Taliban and fuelling insurrection around the Middle East.

"These accusations are baseless and illogical," Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Mahdi Safari was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.

"Iran's role in reconstructing Afghanistan has always been confirmed by friends and enemies alike," he said.

Safari noted an attack earlier this month on an Iranian consulate in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and said this showed the Taliban's enmity towards the Islamic Republic, IRNA said.

Iran supported Afghan groups fighting the Taliban, including the Northern Alliance which played a crucial role in toppling the Sunni group after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

Violence has surged in Afghanistan after a traditional winter lull, with foreign forces launching attacks against Taliban strongholds in the south and east and the guerrillas hitting back with roadside and suicide bombings.

Earlier in June, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he could not link Tehran to a flow of weapons into Afghanistan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai hailed relations with neighboring Iran as especially good.

Washington is leading international efforts to isolate Iran over its disputed nuclear program and accuses it of fomenting instability in Iraq.

And Iran won't be happy to hear the following:

The United States will not release five Iranians detained in a U.S. military raid in northern Iraq until at least October, despite entreaties from the Iraqi government and pressure from Iran, U.S. officials said. The delay is as much due to a communication and procedural foul-up within the U.S. government as a policy decision, they added.

During his Washington visit this week, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari appealed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to free the Iranians, who were arrested in Irbil in January, U.S. and Arab officials said.

Zebari told U.S. officials that the release would help the new U.S.-Iran dialogue on Iraq, which brought diplomats from the two nations together last month in Baghdad at their first public meeting in almost three decades. Iran has become pivotal to U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq because Tehran exerts great influence in Iraq with a wide cross-section of parties and has armed and trained many militant groups. Zebari also warned that Tehran might not attend a second session unless the Iranians are released, the sources said.

The U.S. raid on Iran's northern liaison office Jan. 11 was designed to detain two senior Iranian officials who were visiting Iraq, U.S. officials said. The two escaped arrest, but U.S. commandos did detain five mid-level operatives working with Iran's elite Quds Force, which is the foreign operations wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and is tied to arming, training and funding militants in Iraq.

The detention of the Iranians followed President Bush's vow to break up Tehran's networks in Iraq. The fate of the five men has reached the highest levels of the White House, with Bush's top foreign policy advisers meeting to discuss the issue in the spring. They agreed to hold the men as they do other foreign fighters captured in Iraq, with their status reviewed every six months.

They were originally due for review six months after their detention -- or by mid-July. Instead, the Multinational Force headquarters reviewed their status in April, meaning they are not eligible for another review until October, U.S. officials said. Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker were unaware that a review had occurred until last week, the officials noted.

Zebari was not told of the new timeframe during his talks in Washington, U.S. and Arab officials said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned June 13 that the United States would face consequences for its January raid. "We will make the U.S. regret its repulsive, illegal action against Iran's consulate and its officials," Mottaki told reporters in Tehran.

The same day, Iran filed a complaint with the United Nations. "U.S. military forces, in violation of the most basic provisions governing diplomatic and consulate affairs and in a flagrant contempt for the most fundamental principles of international law, attacked the Iranian Consulate General in Irbil and abducted five Iranian consular officers after disarming the guards of the premises, breaking the doors into the building and beating and injuring the personnel of the Consulate General," the letter said.

Egypt and Jordan Quietly Backing 'West Bank First' Plan

Egypt and Jordan could be expected to be amicable to the 'West Bank first' plan. Islamists are their worst enemies.

The creation of separate Palestinian micro-states last week left two of America's closest Arab allies – Jordan and Egypt, which share borders with the West Bank and Gaza respectively – groping for a new policy toward a conflict that has spilled over their borders and contributes to their own instability.

These two secular and authoritarian states have far more in common with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah, which now controls the West Bank, than with the Islamist Hamas that won last week's war for control of Gaza. When Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 that were deemed free and fair, it set alarm bells ringing in Cairo and Amman; they worried their local Islamists would be bolstered by Hamas's success.

But that doesn't mean Egypt or Jordan will quickly join the US and Israel in openly supporting Mr. Abbas.

The US and Israel are rewarding Abbas – far friendlier to Israel than Hamas – in the West Bank by lifting a crippling economic embargo, while maintaining the sanctions on the much poorer Gaza Strip. Their hope is that Hamas's public support will evaporate under the weight of need, and Abbas's stature will grow as his people experience relatively more prosperity.

"Our hope is that President Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – who's a good fellow – will be strengthened to the point where they can lead the Palestinians in a different direction," President George Bush said after an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

While that's an outcome that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments hope for, given their hostility toward Hamas, it's not one they feel they can back publicly, analysts say.

"Recent events have seen Arab publics turn on Hamas a bit, but that won't necessarily hold," says Nabil Gheishan, a columnist at Arab al-Yom, an independent Jordanian daily newspaper. "If this embargo of Gaza goes ahead, and people see massive suffering there while conditions improve in the West Bank, that will shift the public mood and take the pressure off Hamas."

He says publicly backing such an approach could easily see the governments of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah branded as participating with Israeli and US-inflicted suffering on the Palestinians in Gaza.

Neither country's leaders have suggested that freezing Hamas out of the equation will make an eventual peace settlement any easier, because they doubt that Hamas's support from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians is simply going to disappear.

"For Jordan and the Arab states, things have to return to where they were. We need a reunited Palestinian government, a unity government that includes Hamas. I personally am against what Hamas stands for – religious government – but you simply can't get far towards peace without them," says Mr. Gheishan

For the moment, the two states, as well as Saudi Arabia, which helped broker the unity government that Abbas dissolved after last week's fighting, have confined their public statements to calls for Palestinian unity and the flow of humanitarian aid to all needy Palestinians, whether they live in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip or in the West Bank of Fatah.

But privately they appear to be positioning themselves to weaken Hamas. The Arab-language newspaper Al Hayat cited unnamed sources as saying Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Sulaiman, who has coordinated Egyptian relations in the Gaza Strip, called Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal to tell him Egypt was "furious" with the group.

Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the major political opposition group in both Jordan and Egypt.

"The [Jordanian] government is very anxious and worried, but they are in fact in a much stronger position than they were a few years ago," says Musa Shteiwi, the director of the Jordanian Center for Social Research in Amman.

In an April poll by his organization, 17 percent of Jordanians said they supported the country's Islamists, but that was down from 32 percent in 2005, he said. He says that while most of the shift was due to terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda-inspired militants here, he suspects that "Hamas conduct since coming to power has also played a role."

Perhaps bolstering his analysis has been the stance of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement Monday, the group, which typically offers four-square support to its Palestinian comrades, was directly critical.

"Abbas is the legitimate Palestinian president and Hamas's battle should be with the Zionist enemy, not other Palestinians, so we ask them to return to a policy of dialogue and to restore the institutions in Gaza," the statement says.

To be sure, Egypt and Jordan are not identically threatened by current circumstances. "It's easier for us, since Gaza isn't on our border," says Gheishan. "It's more of an Egyptian problem."

Signs of that problem were visible a few miles west of the Rafah Crossing, which connects Gaza to Egypt. Standing a few meters from a crumbling concrete wall, Abdel Razaq Abdel Hamid is trying to explain how bad conditions are across the border in Gaza, when a deafening blast cuts him off.

The explosion was apparently the latest attempt to breach the wall that seals off the teeming territory from Egypt. "The Palestinians bomb the border to come here – because there is no water, no food [in Gaza]," he says. "If the US and Europe want to punish [someone] they must punish Hamas, not these people," says Mr. Abdel Hamid.

It will be interesting to see how Saudi Arabia -- already having internal differences about their regional policy -- deals with the organized isolation of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' Will Feature in CIA Counsel Hearing

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, at a time when the Central Intelligence Agency had long been out of the interrogation business, senior C.I.A. officers scrambled to build a program to question terror suspects in secret jails abroad.

To check on the legality of the harsh interrogation techniques they proposed, they turned to John A. Rizzo, who was then acting as the agency's top lawyer.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rizzo will go before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing to become the C.I.A.'s general counsel, giving the new Democratic majority its first chance at a public airing of agency practices that drew condemnation abroad and set off a prolonged debate at home.

Mr. Rizzo has been acting general counsel off and on for most of the last six years, serving without Senate confirmation. He was first nominated to the position last year, but a confirmation hearing was delayed.

In a report last month, the committee questioned whether the C.I.A. program was "necessary, lawful and in the best interests of the United States," particularly in view of "the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad."

Mr. Rizzo, an agency lawyer for three decades who is known for his dapper dress and his discretion, will probably be questioned in open and closed sessions about the most contentious policies: holding terror suspects in secret; subjecting them to tough physical treatment, including the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding; and delivering some to countries that routinely practice torture.

"He'll be the piñata," said A. B. Krongard, executive director of the C.I.A. from 2001 to 2004, who remains a strong defender of the detention and interrogation program.

Mr. Krongard said Mr. Rizzo worked hard to see that the program was lawful, insisting on written legal opinions from the Justice Department.

"He did everything possible to get it right," Mr. Krongard said. For any legal faults, he added, "Rizzo can be held accountable, I guess, but nowhere near as much as the Justice Department."

Committee Democrats said they planned tough questioning for Mr. Rizzo, who was a crucial link between the interrogators and the Justice Department lawyers who gave their approval.

"I have serious concerns about this nomination," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who said she wanted to gauge Mr. Rizzo's precise role in what she believed were deeply flawed legal justifications.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, C.I.A. director since May 2006, strongly defended the program and Mr. Rizzo's role in shaping it.

Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman, said, "Mr. Rizzo knows better than anyone the full range of complex legal issues that influence intelligence operations in a democracy."

Mr. Rizzo has earned a reputation for helping overseas operatives find a legal way to do what they feel is necessary. But officials said he did reject some proposed interrogation methods as excessive and illegal.

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 but is critical of the detention program, said Mr. Rizzo "bears a share of responsibility" for the program and perhaps should have counseled against actions that were "technically legal but wrongheaded."

But Mr. Radsan said top Bush administration officials deserved greater blame "for asking to push things right to the point of illegality."

Mr. Rizzo, who is not granting interviews before his confirmation hearing, is no stranger to the agency’s legal controversies. A graduate of Brown University and the George Washington University Law School, he joined the agency in 1976, when the Church Committee of the Senate had just unearthed the agency’s involvement in assassination plots.

In the 1980s, he worked for the C.I.A.'s inspector general, investigating accusations of wrongdoing at agency stations abroad. He later became the agency's point man for outside investigations into the Iran-contra affair, in which three agency officers were charged with crimes.

Since 1995, as senior deputy general counsel, Mr. Rizzo has often filled in as acting general counsel for months at a time. That was the case from November 2001 to October 2002, when top C.I.A. officials were negotiating the placement of secret jails abroad.

Interrogation was uncharted territory for most serving C.I.A. officers. A 1963 agency interrogation manual described the infliction of pain, including the use of electrical shock, but such techniques were banned by the 1980s, and by 2001, few C.I.A. officers had any experience in questioning suspects.

Mr. Krongard said deciding the limits of interrogation for Al Qaeda's top operatives was not easy. "Can you slap someone in the face? Maybe," he said. "But can you hit them as hard as you can? Maybe not."

The approved options were first applied after the capture in March 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda figure. Mr. Rizzo was responsible for the legal advice to the officers holding him in Thailand as they escalated physical and mental pressure.

But colleagues said Mr. Rizzo insisted on Justice Department approval for actions they knew might be second-guessed.

Nice One, Ambassador

Britain joined the United States' invasion to oust the Taliban in 2001 because it feared America would "nuke the shit" out of Afghanistan, the former British ambassador to Washington reportedly told a television documentary to be screened Saturday.

In comments printed in advance in the Daily Mirror tabloid on Monday, Christopher Meyer said that fear explained why Prime Minister Tony Blair chose to stand with US President George W. Bush in his decision to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- to temper his aggressive battle plans.

"Blair's real concern was that there would be quote unquote 'a knee-jerk reaction' by the Americans ... they would go thundering off and nuke the shit out of the place without thinking straight," Meyer reported told the documentary, according to the Mirror.

In other excerpts of the documentary, printed in The Observer newspaper on Sunday, members of Blair's inner circle said the prime minister agreed to commit troops to the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq despite believing that the United States had failed to prepare adequately for post-war reconstruction.

Taguba Alleges DOD Approved Abu Ghraib Abuses and Arranged To Protect Higher Ups

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba -- who led the military's first major investigation into the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib -- is saying now that senior DOD officials approved of the "strategic interrogation" tactics used there, and that these officials arranged for most of the blame to go no higher than the low-level soldiers that were caught on the pictures that were seen by the public.

An article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine -- to be published tomorrow -- takes a look at the scandal with the help of now-retired General Taguba.

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given "to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described."

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. "It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn't say, 'Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,' " Rumsfeld told the congressmen. "I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn't."

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, "it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge." As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, "I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them"; at the House hearing, he said, "I didn't see them until last night at 7:30." Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

"There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don't remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn't proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn't know, and you didn't know, and I didn't know."

"And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are," Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld's testimony was simply not true. "The photographs were available to him -- if he wanted to see them," Taguba said. Rumsfeld's lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, "Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There's no way he's suffering from C.R.S. -- Can't Remember Shit. He's trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves." It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

"The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects -- 'We're here to protect the nation from terrorism' -- is an oxymoron," Taguba said. "He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them." ...

During the next two years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press, telling his relatives not to talk about his work. Friends and family had been inundated with telephone calls and visitors, and, Taguba said, "I didn't want them to be involved." Taguba retired in January, 2007, after thirty-four years of active service, and finally agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu Ghraib and what he believed were the serious misrepresentations by officials that followed. "From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. "These M.P. troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box."...

Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003—when much of the abuse took place—Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, "Sanchez knew exactly what was going on." ...

A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba’s report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse. ...

Abu Ghraib had opened the door on the issue of the treatment of detainees, and from the beginning the Administration feared that the publicity would expose more secret operations and practices. Shortly after September 11th, Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush, had set up military task forces whose main target was the senior leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.

The military task forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command, the branch of the Special Operations Command that is responsible for counterterrorism. One of Miller's unacknowledged missions had been to bring the J.S.O.C.'s "strategic interrogation" techniques to Abu Ghraib. In special cases, the task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld's office. A former senior intelligence official told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force operations.

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who "didn't think the photographs were that bad" -- in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, "Guys on the inside ask me, 'What's the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?' " A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the "basic strategy was 'prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.' "

A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams "had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct 'executive action,' " the phrase for political assassination. "It was surrealistic what these guys were doing," the retired operative added. "They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station." ...

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned "to back off" on the investigation, because "it would spill over to more important things." ...

An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military-including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of "preparing the battlefield" could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress. ...

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to re-evaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President's failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army's Vice-Chief of Staff. "This is your Vice," he told Taguba. "I need you to retire by January of 2007." No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, "He offered no reason." ...

Taguba went on, "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff" -- the explicit images -- "was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this." He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service," Taguba said. "And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

The text of Gen. Taguba's 2004 report (pdf).

"West Bank First" Plan Moves Ahead (We Have No Other Option)

Yesterday's post about the U.S. "West Bank first" strategy is proving to be quite on the mark.

Not that it will be successful (it almost certainly will fail), but it embodies enough of the ol' Realpolitik to make it attractive to U.S. policymakers.

The violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas further dimmed the Bush administration's faint hope of moving Palestinians and Israelis toward peace. But it offered the White House a thin opportunity to pursue one long-held goal: drawing a stark contrast between the Palestinian militant group and the moderate leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

On Friday, U.S. officials made it clear that they intended to seize that opportunity as calm began returning to Gaza after days of fighting. Administration officials plan to build up Abbas' Fatah government in the West Bank territory it still controls, improving its services, while leaving primary responsibility for impoverished Gaza in the hands of Hamas.

Showing Palestinians the difference, they hope, will strengthen support for Abbas and the moderates.

Hamas leaders "are going to be responsible for feeding and providing for 1.3 million Palestinians," said Sean McCormack, the State Department's chief spokesman. "Through this attack on the legitimate institutions, they have assumed full and complete responsibility."

U.S. officials held out the possibility that with Hamas removed from Abbas' government, international donors would drop their ban on direct aid to that government. The European Union, with a strong statement of support for Abbas, appeared ready to join such a move.

Administration officials are considering ways to build up the institutions of Abbas' government, help ensure its security and bolster support from the Palestinian public. And the Americans hinted that Abbas' rump government could, before long, resume preliminary peace talks with the Israelis.

Yet major obstacles remain. It is not clear that Abbas, who is considered well-intentioned but weak, is emerging any stronger from the struggle with Hamas, experts say. His security forces fled when confronted by Hamas fighters. ...

If Abbas accepts support from the West while Gaza withers, he may appear even more a puppet of Washington and Jerusalem, as Hamas has long contended, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator who is now a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington.

"I don't think there's any Palestinian leader who could maintain traction with his public in those circumstances," Levy said.

U.S. and Israeli officials say that if Abbas' new government proves acceptable, the Israelis could make concessions that would help the Palestinian Authority president.

But experts say Abbas probably would need to win concessions that were more substantial than Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's weak government is in a position to make.

Nathan Brown, an expert in Palestinian politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said possible Israeli gestures such as halting new settlements in the West Bank would not be enough to dramatically bolster Abbas' standing.

A significant boost for Abbas would require that Israel actually dismantle settlements, or freeze construction of the barrier between the West Bank and Israel, Brown said. But with Olmert supported by only about 3% of Israeli voters in a recent poll, those are steps he probably could not take, Brown said.

Continued Hamas control of Gaza poses troubling new questions for the future of peace talks with Abbas.

"We may be at a juncture where we have to redefine what the peace process is," Porter said.

Excluding Palestinians in Gaza could ease negotiations, but it would cast doubt on any agreement, he said. "Is that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis?"

Hamas' takeover in Gaza has left the United States facing a more serious threat not only to its ally Israel, but also to the administration's policy of confronting Islamic extremism.

U.S. officials are concerned that Hamas-controlled Gaza could become a haven for other Islamist groups, including members of Lebanon's Hezbollah. McCormack called on Egypt to block smuggling through Gaza's southern border.

"That's going to be very important to ensure that you don't see an inflow of more violent extremists, more cash, more arms, more ammunition into the Gaza via those smuggling tunnels," he said.

McCormack insisted that the Gaza upheaval would not derail the peacemaking efforts of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has visited the region five times this year but has struggled to get Olmert and Abbas to meet regularly.

Many outsiders see this week's fighting as a heavy blow to a personal diplomatic initiative Rice began early last year with an enthusiasm not fully shared by some in the White House.

Brown, of Carnegie, said that he believed the U.S. plan to support Abbas may be the "best available option," but that "this is a disaster, from the American point of view."

"I've been calling this a slow-motion train wreck," he said. "But it's no longer in slow motion."

And then there is this:

Hundreds of Fatah gunmen on Saturday stormed Hamas-controlled institutions in the West Bank, including parliament and government ministries, and told staffers that those with ties to Hamas will not be allowed to return.

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, his office said. The meeting between Abbas and Jacob Walles took place at Abbas' headquarters in Ramallah hours before Abbas was expected to swear in an emergency government.

The elected Hamas government has now been evicted in the West Bank.

The "two Palestines" feature of the "West Bank first" plan is in play.

The "West Bank First" Strategy

So the U.S. has decided "to acquiesce" in the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas? It's not like we have too many more levers at our disposal. Especially since the $43 million that we recently slipped to Fatah's security services didn't carry the day.

Or maybe that was the plan all along.

Bush administration officials said Thursday that they had been discussing the idea of largely acquiescing in the takeover of Gaza by the militant Islamic group Hamas and trying instead to help the Fatah party of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, retain its stronghold in the West Bank.

The United States had quietly encouraged Mr. Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian government and dismiss Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, steps that Mr. Abbas announced Thursday, administration officials said. Before the announcement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Mr. Abbas to reiterate American support for the move, they said. ...

The state of emergency that Mr. Abbas announced has underscored the widening rift separating Gaza, where Hamas has largely routed Fatah's forces, and the West Bank, where Mr. Abbas still has a strong base. But diplomats and Middle East experts said a "West Bank first" strategy might now be the last option for Ms. Rice to salvage something from her plans to push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. ...

Many diplomats and Middle East experts said they read Mr. Abbas's decision as an attempt to cut his losses in Gaza and consolidate power in the West Bank. Israeli officials are promoting a proposal that the West Bank and Gaza be viewed as separate entities, and that Israel act more forcefully in Gaza to crack down on Hamas militants.

Senior Bush administration officials said no decision had been made. Some State Department officials argue that the administration could only support such a separation if Israel agreed to make political concessions to Mr. Abbas in the West Bank, with the goal of undermining Hamas in the eyes of Palestinians by improving life in the West Bank.

The "West Bank first" strategy -- including a strong economic aspect -- features prominently in former Ambassador Martin Indyk's op-ed in today's Washington Post:

Does Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas know something that we don't? ...

Over the past year when Hamas would stage attacks in Gaza, Fatah forces would retaliate in the West Bank, where they were stronger. When fighting began this time, Fatah did little in the West Bank to counter Hamas's onslaught. Abbas's passivity further confirms that the fix was in. Abbas and Fatah have in effect conceded Gaza to Hamas while they hold on to the West Bank. Hamastan and Fatahstine: a "two-state solution" -- just not the one that George W. Bush had in mind. ...

The failed state of Gaza that Hamas controls is wedged between Egypt and Israel. Its water, electricity and basic goods are imported from the Jewish state, whose destruction Hamas has declared as its fundamental objective. One more Qassam rocket fired from Gaza into an Israeli village and Israel could threaten to seal the border if Hamas did not stop its attacks. Hamas would then have to reach a meaningful cease-fire with Israel or seek Egypt's help meeting the basic needs of the 1.5 million Gazans. Hosni Mubarak's regime turned a blind eye to the importation of weapons and money that helped ensure Hamas's takeover. But would Egypt allow on its border a failed terrorist state run by an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood with links to Iran and Hezbollah? Or will it insist on the maintenance of certain standards of order in return for its cooperation?

Whatever transpires, Gaza has become Hamas's problem. It's a safe bet that the real attitude of Abbas and Fatah is: Let Hamas try to rule Gaza, and good luck.

This turn of events would free Abbas to focus on the much more manageable West Bank, where he can depend on the Israel Defense Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the United States to help rebuild his security forces. As chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is empowered to negotiate with Israel over the disposition of the West Bank. Once he controls the territory, he could make a peace deal with Israel that establishes a Palestinian state with provisional borders in the West Bank and the Arab suburbs of East Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza could compare their fate under Hamas's rule with the fate of their West Bank cousins under Abbas -- which might then force Hamas to come to terms with Israel, making it eventually possible to reunite Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity living in peace with the Jewish state. It's hard to believe that such a benign outcome could emerge from the growing Palestinian civil war. But given current events, this course is likely to become Abbas's best option. ...

For the Bush administration, the outcome in Gaza is an embarrassment. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has committed her last 18 months in office to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A failed terrorist state in Gaza is hardly what she had in mind for a legacy. Some will argue that it's time she talked to Hamas. But its thuggish, extraconstitutional behavior in Gaza and its commitment to the destruction of Israel make it an unlikely partner, at least until governing Gaza forces it to act more responsibly. And that leaves a "West Bank first" policy as Rice's best option, too.

The remarkably convenient timing of various parties suggesting a "West Bank first" strategy would lead some folks to suspect that this eventuality had been foreseen and probably even planned for some time in advance of Hamas' recent military success in Gaza.

Getting Twitchy in Tehran

There is a longstanding truism that "you are not paranoid if they are really out to get you."

But sometimes it can be advantageous to restrain the impulse towards a wholesale indulgence in shadow-chasing.

A party to mark the Queen's birthday by the British embassy in Iran is "psychological war" planned with the United States against the Islamic Republic, a hardline Iranian newspaper has said.

Kayhan, accusing the embassy of expanding its list of Iranian invitees, wrote: "The British embassy acts as America's psychological war wing. It seems the different kind of programming for the Queen's party is a joint American-British project."

The embassy is often a focus for anti-western protests in Iran, where the US has no mission after cutting ties in 1980.

The embassy's birthday party for the Queen is an annual event, but this year it will be held against the backdrop of tension with the West over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The gathering takes place today in the embassy's leafy Tehran compound - renovated a few years ago during a period of warming ties.

A British diplomat in Iran dismissed the charges.

"We are just doing what we normally do in embassies all over the world, inviting people from all sorts of walks of life," the diplomat said, adding those invited included officials, members of civil society and others.

Hardline student groups said they would hold a news conference outside the embassy to note the "betrayals and the historically cunning behaviour of the British government in Iran".

Kayhan put the party in context of the arrest of three American-Iranians, including academic Haleh Esfandiari, on security-related charges.

It quoted one Iranian invitee as saying: "Especially after the recent arrests of Iranians with American passports for espionage, the British embassy is trying to show there is nothing bad about having relations with foreigners."

Iran has linked the arrests to a so-called "soft revolution", a perceived plot by the US to undermine the government using intellectuals and others inside Iran.

What Will Post 9/11 Hysteria Bring Us?

What created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, until the day he died in 1972. By then, Hoover had evolved into an untouchable autocrat, a man who kept secret files on millions of Americans over the years and used them to blackmail presidents, senators and movie stars. He ordered burglaries, secret wiretaps or sabotage against anyone he personally considered subversive. His target list included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, even Eleanor Roosevelt.

Yet when Hoover showed up for his first day of work at the Department of Justice in June 1917, he was a bright 22-year-old, just out of law school. He still had boyish good looks and was cocky and driven. The country had just entered World War I, and Hoover had avoided the wartime draft. Instead, he was ready to help win the war at home, to save the country from spies and subversives.

What changed this young eager beaver into the crass, cynical tyrant of later years?

The fact is, Hoover learned his attitudes and worldview from teachers at the Justice Department during his early years there, when the country was going through a period much like today's war on terror.

In March 1919, Hoover landed a dream assignment on the staff of new Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer just in time to participate in the first Red scare, in 1919-1920, and its signature outrage, the notorious Red Raids, also known as the Palmer Raids. For Hoover, it would shape his outlook for life.

On the night of June 2, 1919, bombs exploded in nine cities across the United States, leaving two people dead, including one of the bombers. One of these bombs destroyed Palmer's Washington home, almost killing him, his wife and his teenage daughter.

These bombs capped months of escalating upheaval during which the country convinced itself that we sat on the verge of a Russian-style socialist revolution. The first Red scare came on the heels of multiple traumas: World War I, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Argentina. In the United States, the economy had collapsed, prompting waves of strikes, riots and political violence.

Americans vowed vengeance after the June 2 bombings, and the targeted Palmer pledged to crush the reign of terror. He ordered a massive preemptive strike, a nationwide roundup of radicals. To manage the operation, Palmer chose his talented new staff counsel, young J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover seized the opportunity. With Palmer's blessing, he laid plans for a series of brutal raids across the country. Backed by local police and volunteer vigilantes, federal agents hit in dozens of cities and arrested more than 10,000 suspected communists and fellow travelers. They burst into homes, classrooms and meeting halls, seizing everyone in sight, breaking doors and heads with abandon. The agents ignored legal niceties such as search warrants or arrest warrants. They questioned suspects in secret, imposed prohibitive bail and kept them locked up for months in foul, overcrowded, makeshift prisons.

It turned out that virtually none of these prisoners had anything to do with violent radicalism. Nearly all were released without being charged with a crime. Palmer's grand crackdown was one big exercise in guilt by association, based primarily on bogus fears of immigrants being connected to vilified radical groups such as the recently formed American Communist Party.

Still, Hoover relished his moment on the national stage. He appeared twice at Palmer's side during congressional hearings, and he faced off against future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in a Boston courtroom in raid-related cases. Behind the scenes, Hoover demanded more arrests, higher bail and fewer rights for prisoners.

Ultimately, the public recoiled in disgust at the excesses and illegality of the raids, and Palmer saw his political career destroyed. But his young assistant fared much better.

Hoover never lost his anticommunist religion, nor his disdain for and distrust of "liberals" who defended "subversives" on grounds of free speech and civil liberties. He also never lost his sense of entitlement to bend the rules, either to protect the country or to protect himself.

Almost 90 years later, today's war on terror exists in an echo chamber of the 1919 Red scare. The federal government demands more powers at the expense of individual rights: secret CIA prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, suspension of habeas corpus. Even the president openly claims powers that are beyond the reach of laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The same kinds of teachers who transformed the straight-laced, young Hoover in 1919 seem to be on the loose again in Washington. And that raises a troubling question: Are we today creating a whole new generation of young J. Edgar Hoovers, dedicated government agents learning the wrong lessons from the war on terror, who will stick around to haunt us for decades to come?

U.S. Losing What Little Control It Had Over Iraqi Political Development

Events on the ground are superseding the U.S. attempts to make political headway in Iraq.

Suspected al-Qaida insurgents on Wednesday destroyed the two minarets of the Askariya Shiite shrine in Samarra, authorities reported, in a repeat of a 2006 bombing that shattered its famous Golden Dome and unleashed a wave of retaliatory sectarian violence that still bloodies Iraq.

Police said the attack at about 9 a.m. involved explosives and brought down the two minarets, which had flanked the dome's ruins. No casualties were reported.

The attack immediately stirred fears of a new explosion of Sunni-Shiite bloodshed. There are close ties between al-Qaida and some Iraqi Sunni militants. State television said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki quickly imposed an indefinite curfew on vehicle traffic and large gatherings in Baghdad as of 3 p.m. Wednesday.

The 30-member bloc loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suspended its membership in parliament Wednesday, saying they will stay away from the 275-seat house until the government takes "realistic" steps to rebuild the Askariya shrine.

The suspension, announced in a statement by the bloc, is likely to weaken al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government and delay the adoption of a series of laws needed to build national reconciliation to reduce violence in Iraq.

The U.S. cajoling of the Maliki government towards sectarian unity will probably be falling on deaf ears today:

Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte visited Baghdad on Tuesday to press Iraq's Shiite-led government to complete a series of political reforms intended to reconcile the country's warring sects.

It was the second visit Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki received this week from a high-profile American official; on Sunday, the top military commander for the Middle East, Adm. William J. Fallon, warned that the Iraqi government needed to make tangible political progress by next month to counter opposition to the war in Congress.

Mr. Negroponte, the former ambassador to Iraq, met with Mr. Maliki at his office in the fortified Green Zone and emphasized the need for accommodation and compromise among Iraq's combative factions.

After today's bombing of the shrine, Maliki will hardly be in a position to hold back his Shiite brethren from taking revenge.

And the Bush administration will still refuse to admit that there is a civil war in Iraq.

Budgeting For 3rd Generation Warfare in a 4GW Environment

The big bucks for the defense contractors comes from big weapons systems, most of which are not the kind of things currently being used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The defense industry lobbyists have their way in Washington. I would not expect the recommendations below to be acted upon.

From a piece by George Wilson originally published in CongressDaily.

The terrorizing tactics of the bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan all but unfurl a banner reading, "It's asymmetrical warfare, stupid."

Yet nobody in Congress, the White House or Pentagon seems to have read the banner and considered what it means for our armed forces and defense policies.

Asymmetrical warfare is a fancy term for finding the chinks in your enemy's armor and stabbing into them until he either gives up or bleeds to death.

The have-nots in military hardware have adopted this strategy, like the Vietcong before them. They are not trying to match the United States tank for tank, plane for plane, gun for gun, soldier for soldier. They are instead using terror, infiltration and propaganda to level the fighting field.

When all is said and done, the wars confronting the United States are for men's minds, not territory. So terror, infiltration and propaganda can be great equalizers.

Anti-American leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan are demonstrating their appreciation of these arts every day. Given that reality, our leaders in Congress and the executive and judicial branches need to be asking some tough questions on behalf of our country.

In the military realm, Congress -- whom the founding fathers put in charge of "the common defense" -- need to ask such politically incorrect questions as these:

What will the Army's $162 billion Future Combat System do to reduce casualties from Improvised Explosive Devices and their successors? The Pentagon says these hidden bombs account for 80 percent of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

How will the Navy's $3 billion-a-copy Virginia class killer submarine help us combat asymmetric warfare? Same question for the Air Force $355 million-a-copy F-22 fighter and Marine Corps $119 million-a-copy V-22 Osprey.

Granted, all the military threats facing us would not be carbon copies of the war in Iraq if it came to that.

Pentagon hawks are quick to say the Chinese are coming. But it will be years, probably decades if ever, before China or any other potentially hostile nation will field weapons as deadly and sophisticated as the ones in our arsenal today.

So why not redirect some of those billions earmarked for super weapons like the Future Combat System to resuscitate our worn-out Army? There is no threat out there to justify a hurry-up approach to fielding these colossally expensive super weapons.

Nobody in Congress since the late House Armed Services Chairman Les Aspin, D-Wis., left that office has shown the boldness to ask such "emperor has no clothes" questions in a systematic way.

The jobs attached to weapons inhibit the politicians to such an extent I think only a non-partisan royal commission comprised of former Defense secretaries can do the much-needed matchup of enemy threats and Pentagon plans.

This interregnum between the exit of the current administration and entrance of the next is a good time for qualified outsiders to assess where the Pentagon plans to go and where it should go, in view of radically changed threats.

The House and Senate Armed Services committees could appoint such a commission and make the most of its report public. The White House National Security Council would do the country a favor if it did a serious study of the matchup between forces planned and threats envisioned.

The series of toothless, stick-to-our-knitting, self-endorsing Quadrennial Defense Reviews issued by the Pentagon have proved anew that government agencies cannot be entrusted to devise the right strategies and tactics to win future asymmetrical wars.

The decisions that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the murder of civilians by our troops in Iraq, denial of legal rights of suspected terrorists and parts of the USA PATRIOT Act have handed ammunition to our enemies.

We desperately need our best and brightest legal brains to stop giving our enemies fodder and embark on a cleansing mission. The House and Senate Judiciary committees have raised crucial questions about whether the PATRIOT Act has proved to be more drag than lift for our democracy and about what we lose as a democracy when we deny people their legal rights.

The panels would do well to name an impeccable commission, perhaps of retired judges, to tell us where we've been, where we are and where we should go to regain our reputation as a democracy respectful of legal rights.

Scraping The Bottom of the (Oil) Barrel

Oil-rich Sudan is a most likely friend of the White House.

As much as it is politically incorrect to admit to it.

Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq, an example of how the U.S. has continued to cooperate with the Sudanese regime even while condemning its suspected role in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Darfur.

President Bush has denounced the killings in Sudan's western region as genocide and has imposed sanctions on the government in Khartoum. But some critics say the administration has soft-pedaled the sanctions to preserve its extensive intelligence collaboration with Sudan.

The relationship underscores the complex realities of the post-Sept. 11 world, in which the United States has relied heavily on intelligence and military cooperation from countries, including Sudan and Uzbekistan, that are considered pariah states for their records on human rights.

"Intelligence cooperation takes place for a whole lot of reasons," said a U.S. intelligence official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing intelligence assessments. "It's not always between people who love each other deeply."

Sudan has become increasingly valuable to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks because the Sunni Arab nation is a crossroads for Islamic militants making their way to Iraq and Pakistan.

That steady flow of foreign fighters has provided cover for Sudan's Mukhabarat intelligence service to insert spies into Iraq, officials said.

"If you've got jihadists traveling via Sudan to get into Iraq, there's a pattern there in and of itself that would not raise suspicion," said a former high-ranking CIA official familiar with Sudan's cooperation with the agency. "It creates an opportunity to send Sudanese into that pipeline."

As a result, Sudan's spies have often been in better position than the CIA to gather information on Al Qaeda's presence in Iraq, as well as the activities of other insurgent groups.

"There's not much that blond-haired, blue-eyed case officers from the United States can do in the entire Middle East, and there's nothing they can do in Iraq," said a second former CIA official familiar with Sudan's cooperation. "Sudanese can go places we don't go. They're Arabs. They can wander around."

The officials declined to say whether the Mukhabarat had sent its intelligence officers into the country, citing concern over the protection of sources and methods. They said that Sudan had assembled a network of informants in Iraq providing intelligence on the insurgency. Some may have been recruited as they traveled through Khartoum.

The U.S.-Sudan relationship goes beyond Iraq. Sudan has helped the United States track the turmoil in Somalia, working to cultivate contacts with the Islamic Courts Union and other militias in an effort to locate Al Qaeda suspects hiding there. Sudan also has provided extensive cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, acting on U.S. requests to detain suspects as they pass through Khartoum.

Sudan gets a number of benefits in return. Its relationship with the CIA has given it an important back channel for communications with the U.S. government. Washington has also used this channel to lean on Khartoum over the crisis in Darfur and for other issues.

And at a time when Sudan is being condemned in the international community, its counter-terrorism work has won precious praise. The U.S. State Department recently issued a report calling Sudan a "strong partner in the war on terror."

Some critics accuse the Bush administration of being soft on Sudan for fear of jeopardizing the counter-terrorism cooperation. John Prendergast, director of African affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, called the latest sanctions announced by Bush last month "window dressing," designed to appear tough while putting little real pressure on Sudan to stop the militias it is widely believed to be supporting from killing members of tribal settlements in Darfur.

"Go Long" Plan For "Post-Occupation" Iraq Troop Presence Seen

The military has apparently settled on the "go long" recommendation made late last year by the Pentagon's Iraq Options Study led by Colonels H.R. McMaster and Peter Mansoor of the Army, and Thomas C. Greenwood of the Marine Corps.

That is, after trying a plan (the "surge") -- that had been referred to in the Pentagon as "Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long."

U.S. military officials here are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years.

This goal, drawn from recent interviews with more than 20 U.S. military officers and other officials here, including senior commanders, strategists and analysts, remains in the early planning stages. ...

Such a long-term presence would have four major components. The centerpiece would be a reinforced mechanized infantry division of around 20,000 soldiers assigned to guarantee the security of the Iraqi government and to assist Iraqi forces or their U.S. advisers if they get into fights they can't handle.

Second, a training and advisory force of close to 10,000 troops would work with Iraqi military and police units. ...

In addition, officials envision a small but significant Special Operations unit focused on fighting the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. "I think you'll retain a very robust counterterror capability in this country for a long, long time," a Pentagon official in Iraq said.

Finally, the headquarters and logistical elements to command and supply such a force would total more than 10,000 troops, plus some civilian contractors.

The thinking behind this "post-occupation" force, as one official called it, echoes the core conclusion of a Joint Chiefs of Staff planning group that last fall secretly considered three possible courses in Iraq, which it categorized as "go big," "go home" and "go long." The group's recommendation to reshape the U.S. presence in order to "go long" -- to remain in Iraq for years with a smaller force -- appears to carry weight in Baghdad, where some of the colonels who led that planning group have been working for Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq since February.