Notice something odd in the recent news?

Yesterday, former New England Patriot football player Aaron Hernandez apparently committed suicide in prison. His family and their lawyer have already called for an investigation because they do not believe Hernandez would have killed himself. After all, a few days ago, he was acquitted of some serious charges. And they presumably knew him best. On the other hand, Hernandez was serving life in prison without parole and his ex-teammates visited the Trump White House yesterday.

This news seemed especially unusual to me because a number of other prominent -- even notorious -- convicted killers and sex offenders have been found dead in prison in recent days and weeks. Locally, an 86-year old ex-priest convicted of sexually abusing 29 children died in prison in early March. 

That death seemed like natural causes given the age, but a series of recently reported prison deaths seems weird...perhaps statistically improbable:

Remember the Washington (state) mall shooter? He died earlier this week. April 17, BBC:

A man accused of killing five people at a shopping mall in Washington state has been found hanging inside his prison cell, say officials. 

Arcan Cetin, 20, who had been awaiting trial for the mass shooting in 2016, was found dead in the Snohomish County Jail on Sunday night.

Remember that Utah doctor who killed his wife, the former beauty queen? Washington Post, April 10:

61-year-old MacNeill was found unresponsive and declared dead at the Olympus Facility at the Utah State Prison in Draper, where he was doing time for his 2014 conviction of first-degree murder, second-degree obstruction of justice and second-degree forcible sex abuse. 

Prison officials said in a statement that MacNeill’s death is being investigated, though there were “no obvious signs of foul play.” 

This next case did not involve prominent killers or offenders, but it did involve multiple deaths. Thus, it made the national news less than two weeks ago. CNN, April 7:

Four inmates were found dead at a South Carolina prison, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections said. 

Guards found the four men at 10:35 a.m. in a dorm at Kirkland Correctional Institution, a state maximum security site outside Columbia that holds approximately 15,000 offenders, said Sommer Sharpe.... 

The deaths "don't appear to be natural," Richland County Coroner Gary Watts told CNN affiliate WIS.

Three weeks ago, the locally-notorious "Angel of Death" serial killer (March 30):

A former nurse's aide dubbed the "Angel of Death" after he admitted killing three dozen hospital patients in Ohio and Kentucky died Thursday, two days after he was attacked and beaten in his prison cell. 

Donald Harvey, who was serving multiple life sentences, was found injured in his cell Tuesday afternoon at the state prison in Toledo, officials said. A patrol report said the 64-year-old was beaten when an unnamed person entered his cell.

Trying to recall the details of these recent incidents, I searched on Google and found a surprisingly long list of prison deaths. I'm not going to link to more of them.

Many of these deaths are first reported as suicide and some happened to older men, who seemingly died of natural causes. However, at least a few of the deaths seem suspicious, involving murder or under-explained violence in prison. Examining this string of deaths seems like (a) a potentially interesting question for a social scientist or student; (b) an important question for public policy makers responsible for securing prisons; and/or (c) the makings of a conspiracy-laden movie.

I should note that some investigative reporters have been down this road.

For anyone interested, here are other prominent examples I found in a quick search:

In 2015, an infamous California prisoner was killed after being moved into the general prison population.

Also in 2015: an Olympics gymnastics coach accused of child porn and molestation was found dead in prison.

In 2013, the Cleveland man who infamously held multiple women hostage for years in his home was found dead in prison.


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DoD Inspector General

The Defense Department Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee February 9. Gimble later briefed staff from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

His (pdf) "Report on the Review of Pre-Iraqi War Activities by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy" is posted on the OIG website. So is the "Executive Summary."

Here are some key findings from the report:

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy [OUSD(P)] developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence Iraq and al-Qaida relationship, which included assessments on the some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision makers.

Gimble is referencing Doug Feith in this sentence.

In response to questions from Senator Levin (MI), the report notes that Feith produced an alternative intelligence briefing with conclusions that differed from those of the intelligence community -- and were "not fully supported by underlying intelligence."

The Executive Summary added this:

we believe the actions were inappropriate because a policy office was producing intelligence products and was not clearly conveying to senior decision-makers the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.

Question: why did it take so long to reveal these simple conclusions?

Alternative read: isn't it great that the Democratic Congress was able to demand this information in short order?

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After the fall

If the Phase II Senate report is ever issued, maybe it will include information from the recently retired former head of CIA covert operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller. Sunday, he told Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes" a significant bit of news:

...the CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.

"This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about," Drumheller says.

"You knew you could trust this guy?" Bradley asked.

"We continued to validate him the whole way through," Drumheller replied.

According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.

At that meeting, Drumheller says, "They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis."

What did this high-level source tell him?

"He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program," says Drumheller.

"So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Bradley asked.

"Yes," Drumheller replied.

Josh Marshall reports that Drumheller told him that he had been interviewed multiple times by both the Senate investigators and Robb-Silbermann -- but his story didn't make it into the reports!

Drumheller also confirms that the CIA was skeptical about the uranium from Africa story all along -- and says that friendly intelligence was used to support the policy of invading Iraq. Intelligence that doubted Iraqi WMD, such as the information from Saddam's inner circle, was simply ignored:

"It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us," Bradley remarked.

"The policy was set," Drumheller says. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

...Once they [the administration] learned what it was the source had to say — that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to wage nuclear war or have an active WMD program, Drumheller says, "They stopped being interested in the intelligence."

..."I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time."

It's a whopper all right.

Since I'm again blogging about Iraq's non-existent WMD, let me link to the Washington Post story revealing that the National Intelligence Council had concluded the Niger documents were phony -- weeks before the President mentioned the allegation in the State of the Union address in January 2003.

The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Maybe some of this can be investigated more thoroughly if Dems claim a majority of seats in at least one House of Congress after the midterm elections?


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Filed as: Iraq wmd

Senator Mitchell's steroid probe

Steve Finley, outfielder, does not care for major league baseball's latest plan to investigate alleged steroid use over the past few seasons:

"It seems if you write a book about something, there's going to be an investigation," Finley said. "It seems that has followed the publishing of the book. I don't think that's right. You didn't hear anything about this until the book was written."

[Baseball Commissioner Bud] Selig said during the World Baseball Classic earlier this month he would wait to respond to the book until he had all the information and a chance to read it.

The commissioner appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, currently a director of the Boston Red Sox, to lead the investigation. For now, it will be limited to events after September 2002, when the sport banned performance-enhancing drugs - though Mitchell could expand the probe.

"If there was not a rule, how can you go back and punish people for that?" said the 41-year-old Finley, entering his 18th major league season.

The AP story emphasizes that Finley is a new teammate of Barry Bonds, and is thus defending his fellow player. However, shortstop and fellow Giant Omar Vizquel offers another take:

"If you have a player who doesn't hit home runs, like me, and all of a sudden he has a monster year and hits 40 home runs, and the next year hits 50, and the next year hits 40, you start to wonder," Giants shortstop Omar Vizquel said.

Why is this so interesting?

Well, Hank Aaron himself hit homers at a pretty good pace late in his career. In a Knight Ridder story, Vizquel declared:

"There is so much stuff in baseball that you don't know about players or about pitchers or about anybody," Vizquel said. "Who knows what Hank Aaron was taking."

This may sound farfetched, but a former teammate of Aaron's says that players had access to steroids in the earlier era.

More eyebrow-raising, at least to me: Steve Finley hit only 2 home runs at age 24 playing for Baltimore. Granted, that was in only about 235 plate appearances. Since that year, however, Finley has always had at least 400 plate appearances (typically 500 to 600 or more). Finley went from hitting a few homers in his 20s to becoming a serious power threat in his 30s:

HR Age
03 25
08 26 Houston (Astrodome tough hitter's park)
05 27 Age 27 is often seen as a peak.
08 28
11 29
10 30 San Diego: Never before slugged > .434
30 31 Slugged .531
28 32
14 33 Hit 15 extra doubles/triples.
34 34 Moved to Arizona. Good hitting conditions.
35 35 Slugged .544
14 36
25 37
22 38
36 39 Spent one-third of year for LA Dodgers.
12 40 Angels. Injured much of the season.
?? 41 New SF Giant.

I'm not accusing Finley of using steroids, but he is one of those players that no one ever talks about.

Which is stranger? Steve Finley went from 11 to 36 HRs, ages 29 to 39. That's an increase of 25 dingers, and 227%!

Bonds went from 46 at age 28 (near peak) to 73 at 36. That's an increase of 27, but only 59%.

Incidentally, I never replied to Avery's discussion of the ethics of athletes using steroids, which he posted on the Cardinal Philosophy blog. Essentially, Avery equates steroid use to other costly measures athletes take to improve their game, like weight-training or lots of practice.

Maybe.

But, I will make this point -- steroids have been a controlled substance in the US since 1990. If Jose Canseco and teammates used these drugs to create the Oakland dynasty of the late 1980s, Avery's argument carries a great deal of weight. Non-US athletes (Dominican players, for example) who use steroids at home in the off-season may also be acting perfectly legally (though now against the rules of baseball).

But if sluggers of the 1990s were using steroids, they were violating US law and that seems different to me than just weight-training or extra practice.

Finley, I would note, is certainly on Avery's side:

"They're [players are] the ones that risk their health," he said. "This is not just about baseball. This is about long-term. This is about your life after baseball. Your baseball life is very short."

Finley doesn't reflect on the evidence that steroid use may shorten one's life.


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The administration's deceptions

In the wake of President Bush's Veteran's Day speech and the Senate Intelligence Committee decision (finally) to begin "Phase 2" of their investigation of the use of pre-war Iraq intelligence, Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, and other prominent bloggers are revisiting this question: "Did the Bush administration mislead the country during the runup to the Iraq war?"

During the discussion of this issue, a number of related questions always recur, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to compile my answers.

1. Did Congress vote to go to war in October 2002?

On October 13, 2004, I wrote "Keeping Track of One Lie."

Also relevant, July 26, 2004 entry: "Kerry's Iraq Vote."

And, September 23, 2004: "Did Kerry Vote for War or Leverage?"

2. Did Congress vote "to remove Saddam Hussein from power" (as the President claimed) -- or were they voting for disarmament?

On January 15, 2004, I wrote "The Disarmament Mission."

See also, my January 10, 2004 entry "A Better Case?"

3. Was the question of political manipulation of intelligence already investigated, either by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the so-called Robb/Silberman Commission?

On July 9, 2004, I examined the new "Senate Intelligence Report."

April 2, 2005, I looked at Robb/Silberman: "Presidential Intell Commission."

4. Did "everyone" believe that Iraq had WMD?

January 25, 2004, I blogged "Which analysts said "no WMD" before the war?"

On July 16, 2004, I wrote "Powell's 'Ad - Lie' Presentation."

This is also relevant: February 3, 2004: "Blair too calls for WMD inquiry."

5. Did Congress have access to the same intelligence?

January 19, 2004, I blogged about the administration's efforts to cherry-pick worst-case intelligence: "Good Read: The Lie Factory."

After making the worst-case, they stripped away the caveats. See my reports of February 20, 2004, "Working Group Publicity," and January 27, 2004, "New Spin on Iraq."

See also January 28, 2004: "David Kay Visits Congress."

6. Did the Duelfer Report prove that Iraq actually had a threatening WMD program?

My most extensive remarks are in this November 9, 2004 report on the "Oil for Food Scandal."

7. Would the US have gone to war if Iraq merely had chemical and biological arms, rather than nuclear weapons?

See my October 10, 2004 entry "War fever?"

And check these out: December 9, 2003, "His Gift from the Wizard: A Spine!" and October 25, 2003, "Imminent threat?"

This is related, from August 19, 2005: "New Report: Iraq WMD intell was willfully distorted."

Phase II

Earlier this week, Democrats used Senate rules to force the completion of the second phase of the Intelligence Committee's investigation into Iraq-related intelligence.

Phase II is supposed to investigate the Bush administration's uses of the Iraq information.

What might the Senate find?

Here are some things I'd like them to unearth:

1. Office of Special Plans was thoroughly politicized.

Ranking Democrat Jay Rockefeller already wondered aloud if the Pentagon's Doug Feith was "running a private intelligence failure, which is not lawful." Various journalists have charged that OSP received information directly from the Iraqi National Congress -- and then "stovepiped" that data to the White House and Office of the Vice President. INC already says that the bogus intelligence didn't matter since the group succeeded in achieving its political goals. Is the same true of the Feith-based crowd?

2. The key intelligence report followed the political uses of the intelligence, not vice versa.

The White House was making bold statements about alleged Iraq threats before any new National Intelligence Estimate was produced. Veep Dick Cheney talked tough to the VFW in August and President Bush lectured the UN in mid-September. Condi Rice worried about smoking gun mushroom clouds on national TV in September.

The NIE came out in October.

3. Analysts were forced to work with politicians looking over their shoulders.

The administration denies that it pressured CIA analysts, but Cheney and Scooter Libby apparently visited Langley on multiple occasions to challenge the intelligence analysts working on Iraq.

4. The attempt to discredit Joe Wilson meant that intelligence was politicized.

Someone leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak in order to discredit Wilson -- and perhaps to silence future critics. We still don't know who talked to Novak. Patrick Fitzgerald might not be willing to say anything more than "Official A," but the Senate can learn the truth and expose the leaker.

5. The administration ignored the caveats in the intelligence data and completely overlooked the 2003 IAEA and UN findings.

Go back sometime and look at the certainty in the administration's words. Officials kept using these clauses when talking about Iraqi WMD: "there is no doubt," "we know for a fact," "intelligence...leaves no doubt," "there is no question," etc. And they compounded this error by not only ignoring the IAEA, but also by denigrating the institution that got it right.

Who is John Doe #2?

April 19 was the tenth anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (OKC). On that date, California Representative Dana Rohrabacher announced that he is thinking about holding hearings on unanswered questions surround the bombing -- including questions about the so-called "third terrorist," unindicted co-conspirator "John Doe #2."

as chairman of the investigative arm of the Committee on International Relations, I was asked by several people whom I respect to direct my attention to the Oklahoma City bombing and to a possible foreign connection. That this mass murder of Americans was accomplished by two disgruntled veterans acting alone seems to be the conclusion reached by those in authority. However, there are some unsettling loose ends and unanswered questions that deserve to be considered before joining those affirming the official explanation.

Rohrabacher's office received a tip in March, reportedly from a mobster in prison, that additional weapons remained hidden at Terry Nichols's home in Herington, Kansas. The FBI found previously unknown explosives, so Rohrabacher and others have been claiming that we should all have a "degree of skepticism" about the official story about Oklahoma City.

Rohrabacher, a very conservative Republican, seems intent on investigating whether a so-called "third terrorist" had Middle Eastern connections. Indeed, after years of saying that Timothy McVeigh and Nichols had links to a former Iraqi soldier, or even to Saddam Hussein, some on the right are now saying that the Oklahoma City bombing was backed by Iran.

What was in Orwell said so memorably about war? Oh, this:

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

In this case, however, the alleged Iran/Iraq/Middle East link to OKC might not fly.

Today, the AP is reporting that a letter written by Terry Nichols from prison acknowledges that a third man helped with the bombing. The man named by Nichols is Roger Moore (who may also be known as Robert Miller). From the letter Nichols wrote to a member of an OKC victim family member:

"That case of nitromethane came directly from Roger Moore's Royal, Arkansas, home, and his prints should be found on that box and/or tubes, and Karen Anderson's prints may be there as well," Nichols wrote.

"The Fed Gov't knows of Roger Moore's corrupt activities and they are protecting him and covering up his involvement with McVeigh at the OKC bombing!" Nichols wrote.

Moore was a gun dealer, apparently robbed by Nichols before the OKC bombing. McVeigh, Nichols and Michael Fortier sold the stolen guns to earn cash to finance the operation.

At trial, Nichols disputed Moore's account of that robbery, alleging that Moore was commiting insurance fraud. Many of the stolen weapons were previously found at Nichols's home.

Some years ago, credible news agencies reported that Robert Millar, the leader of the white separatist Elohim City "compound" in Muldrow, Oklahoma, was secretly a government informant! This is kind of interesting because McVeigh supposedly visited the compound on occasion and may have been there at the same time as several bank robbers associated with the supremacists (the so-called "Aryan Republican Army"). When the robbers were arrested, they apparently had in their possession Roger Moore's fake driver's licence in the name of Robert Miller, as well as some blasting caps similar to the type used by McVeigh in OKC.

If you surf the internet, the identities of Roger Moore/Robert Miller/Robert Millar seem to fuse, even though Moore/Miller resides in Arkansas and Millar was in that camp in Oklahoma. Plus, I've found a picture of the elderly Millar on the web, and he died in 2001. While I have not been able to find a photo of gun seller Roger Moore on the internet (fans of mediocre James Bond films know why), I did find a court drawing by a trial artist. Moore was 62 in 1997, Millar was 72 then; they are not the same person.

They were both too old to be the man sketched as "John Doe #2."

In any case, the bank robbers appear to link either Moore/Miller or Nichols/McVeigh to Millar and Elohim City, but that angle is apparently still under investigation by authorities. It may be that Moore's fake ID was stolen in the gun robbery and McVeigh passed it along to the bank robbers while at Elohim City.

What should be made of the latest news involving Nichols? While the right wants to use this twist in the OKC case to focus potential blame on the Middle East, it still appears as if the real links are to the world of right wing anti-government, white supremacist, and pro-gun types (terrorists?), ticked off by the sieges of Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Investigations update

I need to update the "neo-convicts" post already.

First, all four investigations I mentioned yesterday may be the same.

The Franklin case is apparently linked to the Plame leak and linked to the Feith op and linked to the Chalabi case.

Former CIA agent and current MSNBC talking head Larry Johnson said the other day that the Franklin affairs "was linked to the investigation on the forged uranium documents." I've found a MSNBC transcript from August 27 on LexisNexis:

I've heard about this investigation for, you know, several months now. And you know it is -- it actually is tied into the forged memo regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq from Niger.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: What I've been told is that there's a strong belief that the forgery was carried out by Israel in an effort to help build up the evidence to allow the United States to justify going to war. So, this whole thing that started with the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer, started growing and expanding when they saw that there's this forged memo and then people linked to the office of -- in the office of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife [sic] at the Department of Defense were seen as having some very close contacts and sharing information with the Israeli intelligence sources.

The Marshall, Rozen, and Glastris story doesn't mentioned Israeli agents present at the Franklin/Rhode meetings with Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and SISMI in Rome.

Hmmmm.

Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder more directly makes a connection that I suggested yesterday. The Franklin-Israel investigation does tie directly to the Chalabi-Iran leaks:

An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.

The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.

In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran....both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

Richard Sale of UPI links several investigations together indirectly. For example, he ties the "non lawful" intelligence op Feith was allegedly running to the neocons in Vice President Cheney's office -- the primary area of interest to the Plame investigators, apparently:

[William] Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.

According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.

Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."

In regard to the Chalabi leak, Sale specifically discusses Harold Rhode a great deal, saying that he has had his security clearances lifted in the past (as did Ledeen in the '80s) and may even now be on administrative leave:

According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."

This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.

It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Sale also reports that Michael Ledeen worked on a contract basis for OSP under Feith!

Cheney's office, where Libby and Hannah worked, dispatched Luti to Feith, who already served as boss to Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode. Did these guys prompt someone (Israel? Italy?) to cook up the Niger uranium story, burn Plame when that forgery was found out, and leak all kinds of state secrets to their pals in Israel and the INC? And then, Chalabi screwed them all over by leaking to Iran?

That's the picture that may be coming into focus.

It is such a tangled web. Thanks go out to uggabugga for the visual aid.



Notes: Wolfowitz's name is starting to pop up in the stories, but so far I've seen no allegations tied to him.

Also, one potential problem with Sale's story is that he quotes Karen Kwiatkowski and may have used her as a source for many of his claims. Some bloggers wonder if she's 100% reliable on all this, since she allegedly tried to peddle her story to one of Lyndon LaRouche's rags. The Weekly Standard throws a lot of mud too.

Blair too calls for WMD inquiry

A reporter based in London contacted me today asking whether I thought Tony Blair's call for a commission to investigate the WMD intelligence would satisfy his public and the war critics.

Here's my reply (it was an email exchange, and I've edited a little):

An inquiry into pre-war WMD intelligence may not help Blair much more than the Hutton investigation already should have. After all, unlike his counterparts in the Bush administration, Blair has now been cleared of charges that he inflated intelligence. The current question is whether the intelligence itself was sound. Hutton avoided that specific point.

If the inquiry proceeds quickly, and reaches "bureaucratic" conclusions (i.e., the intelligence agencies did a good job based on what was available, but they need more money and human agents in places like Iraq), then a new inquiry might bring closure that will allow Blair and Britain to "move on." Critics may not be fully satisfied, but the public would probably be forgiving.

However, Blair's long-term popularity has been partly based on technocratic skills. He made the trains run on time, as the saying goes. If his technocrats failed on something so important as war and WMD, then Blair's political strengths might be weakened significantly.

In the US, the congressional majority and the weapons inspector (David Kay) are both blaming the intelligence agencies for failure. However, Bush officials still face charges by critics (Democrats and former intelligence officers like the State Department's Greg Thielmann) that they "cherry picked" worst-case scenarios and thereby inflated the threat for public consumption.

It remains possible that new revelations in a US inquiry could travel across the Atlantic and damage Blair as well. That seems unlikely, but it could happen. Much will likely depend upon whether the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans is carefully scrutinized.

One other wildcard in these investigations is the pre-war work of the IAEA and the failure of the US and UK to acknowledge their conclusions. ElBaradei testified in March 2003, "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq." In this speech, he dismissed the aluminum tubes and disclosed the forged documents about uranium imports from Africa. At the time, lots of war critics thought it devastated the case for war.

If this IAEA work should become a major issue in the UK again, because of the failure to work within the UN process, the issue will not go away and Blair will continue to face dissent. Unlike Bush, Blair faces the defection of his political base, which would tend to be skeptical about the use of force, pro-UN, and supportive of arms control inspections.

"Deny, deny, deny"

Josh Marshall wrote today that he is suspicious about Scott McClellan's denials that either Scooter Libby or Elliot Abrams leaked Valerie Plame's name to the media.

Marshall is concerned because McClellan uses the same phrase over and over again and does not explicitly say that they did not leak Plame's name. McClellan says that neither was "involved in leaking classified information."

I did some hunting around on the web and found a story at Slate by Jack Shafer that might reflect White House spin on this issue, essentially providing a way for these guys to deny the specific charge without lying. Here's what Shafer wrote:

The problem with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is that it doesn't appear to apply to the Novak case. To win a conviction, the law requires, among other things:

1) That the individual has or had "authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent." If Novak's administration sources had only unauthorized access to the information about covert officer Plame, learning about her identity and her mission, say, in a hallway conversation from a visiting CIA officer, the law wouldn't apply here. Perhaps they might go after the hypothetical CIA officer, but they'd run in to a slew of other legal problems sketched out below.

David Corn wrote, additionally, about a Newsweek claim that there's a NSC staffer who knew of Plame's identity because he or she previously worked closely with Plame. If White House insiders started talking about Plame's work and her marriage to Wilson, and then someone unauthorized to have the information went to Novak and other members of the media, then that person is as innocent of "leaking classified information" as Novak is.

This, perhaps, is their theory of the case. Daniel Drezner seems to buy some approximation, emphasizing the apparent lack of criminal/malevolent intent.

Then again, I'd think the NSC staffer would be guilty of the felony.

However, the second criterion is about the leaker's intentions. Back to Shafer:

2) That in addition to having had authorized access to the information about the covert agent, the individual must have "intentionally" disclosed it to an individual not authorized to receive classified information.

The NSC staffer could be protected by this requirement, perhaps figuring that someone like Libby, Rove, Abrams (or whoever) had authorization to know the information. Or, that person might even say the leak was inadvertent.

Here's the third requirement, again from Shafer:

3) That the individual knew he was disclosing information that identifies a "covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States."

Shafer says that the administration officials might be able to claim that the US was not trying hard to conceal the agent's identity for a future assignment. Or, the person(s) who went to the media without first hand knowledge could claim not to have known that Plame's CIA job was a secret. This might be why people like Novak are now trying to say that Plame-Wilson's identity was not secret. It was common knowledge on the cocktail circuit, or some such thing.

McClellan's parsing thus works out for people like Libby, Abrams or Rove, if they claim only that they did not have authorization to know of the classified information. By the time they heard about it, by definition, the info was not secret anymore. Someone else had spilled the beans. Again, the leaker is as innocent as Novak, at least before the law.

The NSC staffer would be technically guilty of leaking information, but probably did not have intent -- evinced by the fact that the person did not go running to the media.

So, someone in the press needs to push the relatively small group of suspects on the key question. Did you leak Plame's name or confirm her job?

The "classified information" angle is clearly a clever plot -- but I'm not buying McClellan's answer. In this view, the guys who had intent were leaking classified information, even if they didn't have authorized access to it.

Additionally, the administration has used that spin to widen the scope of the investigation so far that the President can express lament that the leaker may well never be caught. Why question the dozen likely suspects when 100s of people can be bothered to show their phone and email logs?

9/11, the Warren Commission and Government Transparency

A great deal of my academic work concerns transparency, which one colleague calls simply "the opposite of secrecy." The logic of transparency resonates widely, whether applied to governments, markets, or businesses. Citizens, investors and consumers ought to be able to make informed decisions about the large and powerful institutions that have a great impact on their lives.

Governmental transparency, which in the US is embedded in the Freedom of Information Act, helps promote democratic accountability.

For example, there is great demand for a more detailed and public investigation of 9/11. This is not to say that wild-eyed conspiracy theorists should be embraced. Rather, without much greater disclosure of the intelligence failings and other mistakes that helped cause the tragic events of that day, the conspiracy theorists are far better positioned to peddle their nonsense.

Interestingly, a number of widows of 9/11 are among the most ardent supporters of greater governmental transparency surrounding this issue. They are quite dissatisfied with the results that have made public to date. Of course, a bipartisan collection of US Senators and House members also supports the release of more information about 9/11. The Saudi connection, apparently, still remains largely hidden.

As readers might know, the US relatively quickly and thoroughly investigated the events leading to Pearl Harbor more than half a century ago. Leaders wanted to avoid making the same mistakes -- even if some individuals or institutions might be embarrassed by the findings.

That's the kind of real national security work that is needed in this case.

Then again, given how often government officials have lied in the recent past (and often gotten away with it), many US citizens will distrust even authoritative findings. For example, there are still fairly serious people who doubt the Warren Commission's report about the assassination of JFK.

Barr McClellan, a lawyer and father of current White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Mark McClellan has written a new conspiracy-theory book about the Kennedy murder.

Barr's theory (purportedly supported by new evidence) is apparent from the title: Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ killed JFK.

Given that 9/11 is now more than 2 years behind us, it may already be too late to put this kind of wild theorizing to rest. Imagine the decades of conspiracy theories that may lie ahead surrounding 9/11. Already, the range is mind-boggling.

The same problem may well pervade the war against Iraq -- especially if WMD are never found. As readers may know, the Johnson administration clearly trumped up the Gulf of Tonkin incident that directly resulted in escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Less well known is the private and non-American intelligence evidence suggesting that Iraq was NOT, in fact, preparing to attack Saudi Arabia before the first Gulf War. Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former science advisor on arms control for the state Department, recently wrote about this lie in the Washington Post and linked it to more recent questions about the evidence for attacking Iraq in 2003.

I'm not sure how to conclude other than with a call for greater transparency -- and specifically, more thorough and public reporting about 9/11, Iraqi WMD and its alleged connections to international terrorism.