Books on the president, including McClellan's. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

by Mark Silva

The White House isn't fond of having past and present members of the administration testify before Congress, but Scott McClellan, the now-readily-forthcoming former press secretary is ready to step up to the House Judiciary Committee and talk about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity - something that McClellan spent a lot of time refusing to talk about at the press podium in the West Wing.

McClellan, who served as White House press secretary from 2003 to 2006 and served President Bush since his last two years as governor in Texas, is now saying what a lot of outside critics have long said: The Bush administration advanced the intelligence that made the case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and attempted to discredit an outspoken critic, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who accused the White House in the summer of 2003 of manipulating that intelligence to make the case for war. The name and profession of Wilson's wife, the CIA's Plame, soon became public knowledge as well.

"I think (U.S. Att'y) Patrick Fitzgerald had it about right when he said during the trial of (former vice presidential chief of staff) Scooter Libby that she became just another talking point in this effort to discredit Joe Wilson,'' McClellan said in an interview with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night, echoing a contention that McClellan has made in his book about the administration and war, "What Happened." "That`s unfortunate. Whether or not there was any criminal activity involved, I don`t know. It was wrong to do that. And I will speak to the questions that they ask me and share exactly what I know.''

As for that pre-war intelligence: "What I do know is that the White House never wanted to have the way the case was made, the way the intelligence was used to sell the war to the American people, looked into or investigated by Congress. This was delayed for quite some time. And finally (Senate Intelligence) Chairman Rockefeller, Senator Rockefeller, pushed this forward to get to the truth. And the White House can continue to bury their heads in the sand, but the reality is still the same. I think the American people see it for exactly what it is.''

Here is the rest of that interview, courtesy of MSNBC:

by Mark Silva

Scott McClellan vividly recalls one of the serious tipping points near the end of his relationship, as press secretary, with President Bush.

They were boarding Air Force One in the early afternoon of April 6, 2006. A reporter had called out an ignored question from the tarmac, and the president, sitting in his office, asked what the "shouting'' was about.

The question involved the story of the day: A court filing in the federal trial of White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby by U.S. Att'y Patrick Fitzgerald contending that Bush had secretly declassified portions of a National Intelligence Estimate to be dished to select reporters in rebuttal of former Ambassador Joe Wilson's claims of cooked pre-war intelligence.

"He asserted you authorized the leak of part of the NIE,'' McClellan told Bush, according to his account in his new book, What Happened.

"Yeah, I did,'' Bush replied, according to his press secretary at the time, who writes: "I wasn't sure what to say.''

As if the White House's complicity in leaking the identity of Wilson's wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, hadn't done enough to turn McClellan sour on the administration, now the president was acknowledging his own leak.

"It was a bombshell,'' McClellan writes.

But is it true? The current press secretary, Dana Perino, whom McClellan had hired as an assistant before leaving the White House in 2006, spent some time dancing around that question today on, where else, Air Force One, as the president was en route to Kansas. She did appear to deny it, however...

Read on, (and for a look at the waltz that McClellan did around the question back in April 2006, see this transcript from the April 7 press briefing.)

by Aamer Madhani

With the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay preparing to formally arraign Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other suspects charged with planning and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, two former federal prosecutors are making the case that it would be more appropriate to prosecute Mohammed and other terror suspects in U.S. federal courts.

Richard Zabel and James Benjamin, both former U.S. assistant attorneys in the southern district of New York, made the argument as they released a study today that took a look at civilian courts handling of the prosecution of 123 terrorism cases over the past 15 years.

Since the tribunals were created, the procedures of the military commissions have been challenged repeatedly in court. Yet, the administration has remained steadfast in its argument that ordinary courts are not equipped to handle the sensitive national security considerations involved in trying top terrorists.

But Zabel and Benjamin, who worked with Human Rights First on the study, argue that Mohammed and others could be tried in U.S. federal courts without jeopardizing U.S. national security.

In their study, "In the Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism Cases in the Federal Courts, " the former prosecutors point out that civilian courts have capably prosecuted dozens of cases involving Islamic terrorists going back to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

by Andrew Zajac

The Washington-based Secrecy News, a careful observer of government behavior in the capital, has posted this item about the appointment of a pair of federal judges, including James Zagel, of the Northern District of Illinois, to the secret court overseeing government applications for domestic eavesdropping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

INTEL SURVEILLANCE COURT GETS TWO NEW JUDGES

Two new judges were named to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this week, Secrecy News has learned, one a Clinton appointee and one a Reagan appointee.

Judge Mary A. McLaughlin of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge James B. Zagel of the Northern District of Illinois were appointed to seven year terms on the secret court by the Chief Justice to replace Judge James G. Carr and Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, whose terms expired on May 18.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is responsible for reviewing and approving government applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for domestic electronic surveillance and physical search of suspected foreign intelligence agents or terrorists.

But it does more than that. The Court also reinterprets the terms of the Act in an undisclosed fashion, producing in effect a body of "secret law," a matter discussed at an April 30 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"The FISC has in fact issued... legally significant decisions that remain classified and have not been released to the public," observed Judge John D. Bates, a member of the FIS Court, when he denied an ACLU motion for disclosure of portions of those decisions last December.

The appointment of new judges to the FIS Court assumes particular importance today because of a proposal pending in Congress that would refer existing lawsuits alleging illegal warrantless surveillance to the secret FIS Court in what would likely be a severely constrained adjudicative process. The proposal is being considered as an alternative to granting outright immunity to telephone companies that allegedly cooperated with the President's surveillance program.

Judge Mary A. McLaughlin was appointed to the bench in 2000 by President Clinton. She was formerly an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and a special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on terrorism during the Ruby Ridge hearings in 1995.

Judge James B. Zagel was appointed in 1987 by President Reagan. Judge Zagel is "an intelligent, tough-minded jurist," said the Chicago Council of Lawyers, a public interest association, in a 1991 evaluation. However, "some lawyers are concerned that he will bring a political agenda to bear in certain classes of cases."

The new appointments were confirmed for Secrecy News today by Sheldon L. Snook of the administrative office at the D.C. District Court.

A new appointment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, an appeals court, has not yet been formally announced, he said.
But the Providence Journal (RI) reported on April 14 that Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the 8th District had been named to the Review Court.

An updated roster of the membership of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is here.

"During calendar year 2007, the Government made 2,371 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and physical search for foreign intelligence purposes," the Justice Department told Congress in the latest annual report on FISA activity.

(Rep. Pete Hoekstra., a Michigan Republican. AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke)

by Matthew Hay Brown

The senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Intelligence said that lawmakers felt "used" by the White House after finally getting briefed today on alleged North Korean nuclear assistance to Syria.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra warned of a "damaged" relationship that could hinder the administration's ability to get congressional approval for an agreement on the North Korea's nuclear program.

CIA Director Michael Hayden was to show video footage and photographs showing the heads of the North Korea's and Syria's nuclear programs together at a Syrian reactor, administration officials said before the closed-door session. Some have speculated that the administration's motive in sharing the information now -- it was leaked to newspapers yesterday -- is to scuttle the six-party talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program.

Hoekstra, the ranking member on House Intel, said he had been calling for a briefing for months. "I think many people believe that we were used today by the administration because - not because they felt they had to inform Congress because it was their legal obligation to do that, but because they had other agendas in mind," the Michigan Republican said.

"Remember, it is the legal responsibility of the administration to keep Congress fully and currently informed on the issues that the administration is dealing with," Hoekstra continued. "I think we have a question as to whether the administration actually moved forward in that direction."

Dana Perino, White House press secretary, said of Hoekstra's complaint: "Obviously we would be very disappointed that he feels that way...and hope he understands our tremendous respect for members of Congress.'' Yet, she acknolwedged, that "there are tensions that exist'' between the executive and legislative branches on many matters.

She said she hoped, but could not guarantee, that further explanation by the administration today would satisfy the chairman's questions.

by Andrew Malcolm and Mark Silva

We posted an item about a speech last week by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. He may be adding a new title in the meantime: Conveyor of urban myth.

It was an interesting speech for several reasons. Spooks don't talk in public all that often. He discussed the importance of intelligence for national security and the historical cycle of Americans' distaste for spies. So it tolerates them at times of obvious threat, but then typically cuts back on that dirty business when the threats appear to fade, and ultimately gets sadly surprised by cataclysmic events such as Pearl Harbor and the Korean War and 9/11.

But, it turns out, there was a serious problem with part of. McConnell's speech. He opened it, as many speech-givers do, with a funny story. It was about a historical radio conversation at sea that begins with one voice advising a ship to change course 15 degrees to avoid a collision. The ship replies that the initial radio voice should be the one to change course.

And it escalates from there, each suggesting the other change course until the ship captain announces that he's navigating a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier accompanied by numerous other ships and orders the first voice to change course immediately.

To which the first voice replies, "Dear Captain. The next move is your call. This is a Canadian lighthouse."

Hilarious, especially to Canadians accustomed to Americans throwing their weight around the way Americans do without thinking. "The point of my story," McConnell told his attentive audience at Johns Hopkins University, "is always know who you're talking to."

by Aamer Madhani

Israel’s ambassador to the United States said today that Iran was becoming a “very, very dangerous ticking bomb” and urged the world to take a more active role in forcing Iran to give up its uranium-enrichment program.

A National Intelligence Estimate issued by U.S. agencies in December concluded that Iran suspended its nuclear arms program in 2003, but the Bush administration has stressed that the report confirms that Iran had a program and continued desire to build nuclear weapons.

Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., echoed the Bush administration call that Iran remains a serious threat, but he also upped the ante in making a comparison to the international community’s slowness to head off Adolph Hitler in the 1930s.

“The writing is on the wall like in the ‘30s,” Meridor told defense reporters in Washington. “It’s not hidden, it’s stated. Everybody who doesn’t close his eyes can see it. Everybody that is not deaf can hear it. The world should act and act now and not repeat the terrible mistakes that it made in the past.”

It’s important to note that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called Israel a rotten state, has declared that the nation needs to be obliterated, and has expressed doubt about the Holocaust.

by Aamer Madhani

The Pentagon outlined its plans this morning to seek the death penalty against six terrorist suspects accused of planning, funding and organizing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks--a trial that will undoubtedly refocus attention on the controversial military tribunal system at Guantanamo Bay.

The charges filed against the six, including purported Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, are for a litany of crimes of war and include conspiracy, murder, attacking civilians, terrorism and supporting terrorism. All six are being held at Guantamo Bay, Cuba.

"These charges allege a long term, highly sophisticated, organized plan by al-Qaeda to attack the United States of America," Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the tribunal system, told reporters at news conference at the Pentagon.

Besides Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarek Bin 'Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, and Mohamed al Qahtani are charged as co-conspirators to the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S that left 2,973 people dead. Mohammed, Bin 'Attash, Binalshibh and Ali are also charged with hijacking or hazarding a vessel in connection with the four airplanes that were used in the attack.

Since its opening, Guantanamo has been criticized by some for being little more than an U.S. sanctioned gulag—where the ideals of American jurisprudence have been thrown out. The military tribunal has been criticized for it rules on legal representation for suspects, hearings behind closed doors and Guantanamo has been blasted for allegations of inmate abuse.

But Hartmann said the six accused men would be given the same rights as U.S. troops tried under a military justice system. The military is the process of forwarding to the convening authority for military commissions, Judge Susan Crawford, who can decide to refer some or all of them for trial.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell on Capitol Hill, February 5, 2008, (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

by Frank James

At today's hearing at which the nation's top intelligence officials were reporting to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the threats facing the U.S., National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell was asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about a quote attributed to him in a recent New Yorker magazine article which seemed to suggest he personally viewed waterboarding as torture.

McConnell said that when he was interviewed by writer Lawrence Wright, he did say that he personally would find it painful to have water drip into his nose but said he was basing that on his own anatomical peculiarities. He wasn't making a legal or value judgment about waterboarding.

He also described a 90-minute back and forth he had with the New Yorker writer as he tried to get the journalist to change the quote to, in McConnell's eyes, better reflect what he insisted he meant.

Here's McConnell's exchange with Feinstein:

SEN. FEINSTEIN: And I was reading a New Yorker article about your interview on the subject of waterboarding and coercive interrogation techniques, and I gather that you felt that for yourself, if used, waterboarding would, in fact, constitute torture. Is that correct?

MR. MCCONNELL: No, ma'am, that's not correct. The discussion was about something entirely different. It was a personal discussion about when I grew up and what I was doing as a youngster. And the discussion was framed around being a water safety instructor. Some people, and I'm one of them, have difficulty putting my head under water. If your head goes under water, I ingest water in my nose.

So what I was having the discussion with the journalist is about being a water safety instructor and teaching people to swim. He said, "Well, what about when water goes up your nose?" And I said, "That would be torture." I said it would be very painful for me.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, center, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, before the Senate Intelligence Committee. From left are, Assistant Secretary of State Randall Fort, FBI Director Robert Mueller, McConnell, CIA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, second from right, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Maples. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

by Frank James

President Bush has often said it's important to fight al Qaeda "over there" in Iraq so the U.S. doesn't have to fight it closer to home.

Seems like the nation's intelligence community is ever more concerned that a result of fighting al Qaeda in Iraq could lead to AQI metastasizing like a cancer beyond Iraq. "Over there" could become an ever bigger battle field.

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell said this:

"Al Qaeda's affiliates also pose a significant threat. As noted, al Qaeda in Iraq remains al Qaeda's central, most capable affiliate. We are increasingly concerned that even as coalition forces inflict significant damage on al Qaeda inside Iraq, they may deploy resources to mount attacks outside that country.

Al Qaeda's North Africa affiliate, known as al Qaeda in the Lands of Islamic Maghreb, that group is active in North Africa and is extending its target set to include U.S. and Western interests. Other al Qaeda regional affiliates in the Levant, the Gulf, Africa and Southeast Asia maintained a lower profile in 2007 but remain capable of conducting strikes against American interests.

Homegrown extremists, inspired by militant Islamic ideology but without operational direction from al Qaeda, are on an evolving course for danger inside the United States. Disrupted plotting last year, here at home, illustrates the nature of the threat inside the country.

In addition, our allies continue to uncover new extremist networks inside Europe for their version of the homeland threat, homegrown threat."

by Mark Silva

So, either the intelligence community was getting it wrong for the last few years, when they asserted that Iran was developing a nuclear-weapons program, or they got it wrong now -- when they report that Iran actually abandoned that program in the fall of 2003.

Stung by criticism over the reversal in assessments of Iran's ambitions, the Director of National Intelligence's office today insists that it's getting it right now -- with the deputy there calling the newest National Intelligence Estimate "solid analytic tradecraft.''

Donald Kerr, the principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, whose name also accompanied the release of select portions of the NIE earlier this week revealing that authorities now believe with a high level of confidence that Iran shelved its development of a weapon in the fall of 2003, released another statement today rebutting the flood of criticism that has followed.

The DNI's office had this to say today: "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States Intelligence Community, Dr. Donald Kerr has released the following statement:

"National Intelligence Estimates contain the coordinated judgments of the intelligence community regarding the likely course of future events and the implications for U.S. policy. The task of the intelligence community is to produce objective, ground truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate.”

by James Oliphant

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and other Democratic lawmakers demanded an immediate investigation Friday after the Central Intelligence Agency admitted it destroyed two videotapes that showed agents using extreme methods to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, asked Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey to probe whether CIA officials willfully obstructed justice in failing to turn over the tapes during the criminal trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who was later convicted of terrorism charges.

"This is very troubling," Durbin said in an interview. "One must simply conclude that there is something on those videotapes that they did not want the world to see."

And in a fiery Senate speech, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) invoked the ghost of Watergate. "The agency was desperate to cover up damning evidence of their practices," Kennedy said. "We haven't seen anything like this since the 18 1/2-minute gap in the tapes of President Richard Nixon."

CIA Director Michael Hayden said Thursday that the agency destroyed the two tapes to protect the identities and safety of the undercover officers involved and "only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not related to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries." The CIA made the admission in response to inquiries from The New York Times.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) labeled Hayden's rationale "pathetic." "They'd have to burn every document at the CIA that has the identity of an agent on it, under that theory."

See the rest of the story in today's Tribune:

by Frank James, updated with RNC response at 2:08 pm

It's one of the most clichéd questions asked in Washington ever since Sen. Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, said during the Watergate hearings about President Richard Nixon: "What did the president know and when did he know it."

Today, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.,) the Senate Majority Leader, puts the question to the White House. He wants to know what President Bush and Vice President Cheney were told in August about the U.S. intelligence agency's revised view that Iran in 2003 essentially stopped its head-long pursuit of nuclear-weapons.

In a press release, Reid said:

“I am growing increasingly concerned about the White House’s inconsistent explanations of when the President was told about important new intelligence information regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. It appears the President and Vice President were briefed in August on this information, before both the President and Vice President began to ratchet up their increasingly-heated rhetoric on the threat of Iran.

"I urge the White House to fully and accurately explain what the President and Vice President knew and when they knew it, and why the Administration’s rhetoric was not adjusted when presented with new data this summer. I find it surprising the Administration did not learn the lessons of Iraq; it was exactly this type of misleading rhetoric that led us into a misguided, unilateral war.

“I also again urge the Administration to announce a top-to-bottom review of its Iran policy, including new steps to launch a major diplomatic surge to address the challenge of Iran.”

The White House likely won't be giving Reid what he asks for. But the National Intelligence Estimate released earlier this week provides Reid with another club to bash Bush on the question of credibility, to keep him on the defensive as he enters the last year of his presidency, and to try to win the public-relations war between the Democratic Congress and the White House.

by Siobhan Gorman

It's musical offices time for the nation's spy chief--again. Come next Spring, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell plans to move his 1,000-plus crew from its current headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base just across the Anacostia River from downtown Washington D.C. to a new building at the rapidly-expanding Liberty Crossing campus at an "undisclosed location" out near the CIA in Northern Virginia.

The decision dashes the hopes, for now at least, of those who had eyed downtown real estate, which would have vastly reduced the amount of time the nation's highest intelligence officer spends in traffic headed to meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

The winners in this latest round of real estate roulette are the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA officers currently assigned to McConnell's shop.

by Mark Silva, and updated by Siobhan Gorman

Federal law requires Mike O'Connell, the director of national intelligence, to disclose the total amount of money appropriated by Congress for the National Intelligence Progam no more than 30 days after the fiscal year's end.

So McConnell, 30 days out from FY 2007, is reporting in:

$43.5 billion.

"Any and all subsidiary information concerning the intelligence budget, whether the information concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs, will not be disclosed,'' the Office of Director of National Intelligence reports this morning. "Beyond the disclosure of the top line figure, there will be no other disclosures of currently classified budget information because such disclosures could harm national security.''

If they told you, they'd have to -- you know... (DNI McConnell, above.)

by Frank James

The FEMA public-relations official who staged the by-now infamous fake press conference during the California fires apparently was fired from a new job before he could even start it, a position as the top spokesman for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.

John Philbin was supposed to start that new job today, according to the Associated Press. But the offer went up in smoke following the outrage that ensued after Philbin's blunder became public knowledge.

It didn't take much time at all for McConnell to decide that the last thing the intelligence community needed was a guy who staged a fake press conference. The spooks are is still trying to live down their own credibility problems related to that "slam dunk" intelligence they provided in the run up to the Iraq War.

Maybe Philbin should be forgiven however for what he did. This is the same Bush Administration, after all, that produced the phony "video news segments" which it then distributed to small-market television news programs.

Remember this New York Times story from a couple of years ago?

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

by Frank James

Who said our counterterrorism officials at the Central Intelligence Agency don't have a sense of humor?