You can imagine the conversation Tom Ridge had with his literary agent last year.

"Governor, I've just finished your manuscript. Wonderful -- all that fascinating stuff about how the government works -- or doesn't!"  (Laughs.)

"All those alphabet agencies - NSC, ODNI, NCTC - my God. How did you keep all of them straight?" (Chuckles.)

School visits seem to have a strange effect on Condoleezza Rice's brain.

The former secretary of state and White House national security advisor has made more controversial remarks in the few months since she's been out of office than the eight years she was in it.

Last week was her attention-getting elocution on torture at Stanford. Now comes a transcript of her remarks on Sunday, May 3, at an event sponsored by Jewish Primary Day School in the nation's capital.

Revisiting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Rice said top Bush administration officials were ignorant about al Qaeda when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon. 

Careful planning, including extensive intelligence gathering and a "disinformation" campaign to lull Hamas into thinking an attack was not imminent, preceded Israel's dramatic assault on Gaza, according to a reputable Israeli newspaper.

"Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces 'Cast Lead' operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning," Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid reported.

The intelligence missions targeted Hamas's "permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities," the paper said, citing "sources in the defense establishment."

Meanwhile, to mislead the Islamist Sunni group's leadership, "Israel continued to send out disinformation in announcing it would open the crossings to the Gaza Strip and that [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert would decide whether to launch the strike following three more deliberations on Sunday -- one day after the actual order to launch the operation was issued," the paper said.

Such preparations marked a dramatic departure from Israel's assault on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon in July 2006, which quickly bogged down amid unexpectedly stiff resistance, analysts said.

Among the fiercest critics of the Lebanon campaign then was Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, notes my CQ colleague Jonathan Broder, who has reported on and in the Middle East for three decades, beginning with the Associated Press and Chicago Tribune.

 "Barak was very critical of Israel's lack of intelligence-gathering and other important preparations before the 2006 war against Lebanon, which resulted in Hezbollah's emerging victorious in the minds of many Arabs and the perception of Israel's deterrent capacity being badly damaged," Broder commented for me  "The precision of Israel's attacks against Hamas leaders and their installations this time shows that Barak was not going to make the same mistake."

But if Israel goes ahead with an anticipated ground assault, says James Abourezk, a Lebanese American former Democratic Senator from South Dakota, it will encounter "pretty stiff resistance." 

Hamas has about 25,000 fighters in Gaza, said Abourezk, who frequently leads citizen tour groups to Syria.

"So Israel might not launch a ground incursion because Hamas has some pretty tough fighters in there."

On the other hand, "Israel can do pretty much anything it wants" because of its firm backing from the United States in general and the Bush administration in particular, he said.

The White House and State Department have blamed Hamas's rocket attacks on Israel for precipitating the crisis.

"The violence will keep going until the U.S. puts a stop to it," Abourezk said.

Today Bush administration officials said they were working hard to restore a ceasefire in Gaza. 

Victor Comras, a longtime State Department diplomat and trade expert, argues that plunging oil prices and chaos in the international finance system could force Iran back to the bargaining table over its nuclear program.

Economic sanctions have also begun to show results, Comras said, as reports surfaced that the Bush administration was forcing Israel to stand down from plans to attack the Islamic republic.

"Iran's economy is already in shambles," Comras wrote for the widely read Counterterrorism Blog Tuesday.

"The downturn in the price of oil has left Iran's government with serious budget shortfalls and significantly reduced its ability to support and subsidize its extensive ongoing energy sector and other infrastructure projects," he said.

"It has also significantly reduced the profit incentives that previously enticed foreign businesses and banks to compete for Iran's business, even when that meant irritating their American relationships.

"Iran's cost of doing business is soaring, and the stepped up measures adopted by the U.S. Treasury Department, and the US campaign to dissuade financial dealings with Iran, are now actually having a significant impact! More and more Western banks are reducing their Iran exposure and pulling out of the Iran marketplace. Even non Western banks in Dubai are beginning to view triangular transactions with Iran more cautiously. These factors may serve to enhance the chances of engaging Iran in a more constructive dialogue on its nuclear program than previously."

Read the rest here.

One of the more provocative but little noticed passages in Bob Woodward's fascinating new book, The War Within, reports on a meeting between Defense Secretary Robert Gates and retired Army General Jack Keane, the White House's secret, backchannel conduit to the Iraq War commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

President Bush and Vice president Cheney were using Keane, a plain spoken Irishman with a boxer's face, to get around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and communicate directly with Petraeus, who'd presided over a dramatic reduction in violence in Iraq.  It didn't hurt that Petraeus welcomed more troops in Baghdad, while the Chiefs worried about U.S. forces being stretched too thin to handle emergencies elsewhere in the world. He'd also managed the Sunni tribes' U-turn on al Qaeda in Iraq

On April 7, the end of Petraeus's tour of duty was on the horizon, and Keane was working hard to convince the brainy general to take over CENTCOM, where he'd be responsible for U.S. military forces across the entire region, instead of the far more comfortable, and traditionally prestigious, slot as supreme commander of NATO.

Keane also wanted Gen. Ray Odierno, the highly regarded, "unsung hero" of the turnaround in U.S. fortunes in Iraq, to take Petraeus's job in Baghdad.

Both men opposed any withdrawal timetables of U.S. forces in Iraq while the situation remained dicey there.

An Obama administration would find it difficult to oust either of them, Keane argued to Gates.

"Let's be frank about what's happening here," Keane says.

    "We are going to have a new administration. Do we want these policies continued or not? Do we want the best guys in there who were involved in these policies, who were advocates for them?"

Keane presses Gates.

    "Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price paid to override them."

After his July visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama said he would listen to the senior military leadership on Iraq, but not be bound by their advice.

    "It is clear that Gen. David Petraeus, in his role as U.S. commander in Iraq, prefers 'maximum flexibility' over a timeline for troops withdrawal. The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders tell me to do, or I am ignoring their advice. No, I am factoring in their advice and placing it into this broader strategic framework."  

An Obama spokesperson could not be reached late in the afternoon, but it's safe to say that the Democratic candidate will replace, or keep, any general he wants to as commander-in-chief.

McKelvey: You liken Obama to Britney in your famous ad, while portraying yourself as the more serious candidate. Which celebrity would you like to be compared to? Bob Dylan? Jack Nicholson?

McCain: Kiefer Sutherland. [laughs, imitates a voice from the show 24] "It's Jack Bauer." We have a lot in common because he escapes all the time.

McKelvey: Um, he's also a torturer.

McCain: Yeah, that's right. That's where Jack and I disagree. He believes in torture, but I don't. He says, "Tell me where the weapons are." The person says, "I won't." Bam! "OK, I'll tell."

If lying to FBI agents was enough to send Scooter Libby to jail, why isn't it enough to prosecute Alberto Gonzales?

Despite strong evidence in a today's Justice Department report that the former attorney general lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents, the department declined to prosecute.

Indeed, initial news reports on the Inspector General's findings didn't even mention the evidence of perjury, focusing instead on Gonzales's "mishandling" of notes and more-than-Top Secret documents relating to the administration's secret wiretapping and terrorist detention programs,

Who's going to get upset about that?

Who doesn't "mishandle" -- i.e., misplace, loose, forget where they left -- the tuition check, the gas bill, keys, glasses, the grocery list, and yes, even take-home work  -- at least once in awhile?

To be sure, the kind of information Gonzales was shlepping between his office, home, limousines, airplanes and, for all we know, the local Safeway and the dry cleaner (or maybe he left it in the car?) was so sensitive its loss "could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," according to the IG report.

At one point, according to White House counsel Fred Fielding, quoted in the IG report, Gonzales "wasn't sure where they were."  The AG duly confessed to the IG that he was "a little confused about where the notes were."  His briefcase wasn't always locked, he told investigators, and he didn't use a government safe in his house because . . .he had forgotten the combination.
    
He's only human.

For such trifles, the Justice Department "scolded" Gonzales, as the Associated Press characterized the IG's finger-wagging, and left it at that.

But the IG report shows that Gonzales did more than "mishandle" his notes, which included operational details on what he himself, somewhat ironically, called -- after it had leaked -- "one of the most highly protected [programs] in the United States ... a very, very secretive, protected program," and correspondence between congressional Intelligence Committee leaders and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. 

In a statement that doesn't pass the laugh test, Gonzales told IG investigators he didn't know the documents were secret.

Gonzales said that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes. Gonzales also stated he did not recall thinking that the notes themselves were classified.

But the IG found the smoking gun -- in Gonzales's hand, no less.

The envelope containing documents related to the NSA surveillance program bore the handwritten markings, "TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY - ARG" [the attorney general's initials] followed by an abbreviation for the SCI codeword for the program.

Inside the envelope, moreover, were "documents relating to a detainee interrogation program," which were all classified with cover sheets and markings in the top and bottom margins, as Top Secret/Sensitive Classified Information.

And yet Gonzales told the IG investigators "that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes."

That is patently absurd.

Poor Scooter Libby, the national security aide to Vice President Cheney, who suffered million-dollar legal bills and lifetime disbarment for a perjury conviction related to the relatively trifling Valerie Plame affair, only to be snatched from the jaws of prison by a pardon from President Bush.   

Today, the Justice Department revealed that it had saved everybody the bother in the case of Alberto Gonzales.

It just let him skate.

(UPDATE: Inspector General Office spokesman Paul Martin called back late Wednesday afternoon after this blog item was filed and left a voice mail message to call back. Because of a medical appointment, I was not able to retrieve his message for almost 24 hours. When I finally reached him Thursday, he said he would have "no comment" for this story. I regret the delay, which had left the misimpression that the department had not bothered to reply.-js) 

Russia's punishing attack on Georgia has already harvested bitter fruit beyond the Black Sea.

On Thursday U.S. and Polish officials reached agreement to install a battery of American  missiles in Poland, a plan sure to infuriate Russia and escalate tensions with its former  puppet states in Eastern and Central Europe.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the deal includes a "mutual commitment" between the two nations -- outside of the NATO alliance -- to come to each other's assistance in case of danger.

With a wary eye on Russia's lightening attack on Georgia, Tusk said NATO would be too slow to act if it was threatened by Moscow, according to an A.P. report from Warsaw.

"Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later -- it is no good when assistance comes to dead people. Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of -- knock on wood -- any possible conflict," Tusk said.

Russia, meanwhile, has positioned ballistic missile launchers in Georgia, WIRED's Noah Shachtman reported Thursday, based on a transcipt of a little noticed briefing by Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Jeffrey and other Bush administration officials earlier in the week.

"The President was informed immediately on Friday, when we received news of the first two SS-21 Russian missile launchers into Georgian territory," Jeffrey said.

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans think they can use Russian aggression in Georgia to bludgeon the Democrats into supporting the deployment of an American "missile shield" in Eastern Europe, according to a story by CQ's enterprising Josh Rogin:

In September, lawmakers will resume their debate over the missile sites -- this time amid fresh concerns over Russian threats to U.S. allies in eastern Europe. Though the administration has presented the missiles sites as a defense against Iranian attack, missile defense advocates say they now plan to cite the Russian threat as a way to get Democrats to let construction begin...

"Russia's actions represent compelling data that should be convincing to Democrats that we don't want to delay this thing," said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., a leading missile defense champion.

"This is not just about missile defense; this is about demonstrating to Russia that America is still a nation of resolve . . . and we're not going to let Russian expansionism intimidate everyone."

But some key congressional Democrats aren't budging from their opposition to the plan, Rogin reports.

The American Civil Liberties Union vowed Wednesday to sue President Bush before the ink is dry on his signature putting new electronic snooping measures in play.

"This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans' international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment."

The Senate approved legislation earlier in the day overhauling the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which includes legal immunity for telecommunications companies which collaborated with the administration's warrantless monitoring of Americans' e-mails and telephone calls.   

The White House hailed passage of the act.

We know that information we have been able to acquire about foreign threats will help us detect and prevent attacks on our homeland," Bush said in a statement. "Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, has assured me that this bill gives him the most immediate tools he needs to defeat the intentions of our enemies. And so in signing this legislation today I am heartened to know that his critical work will be strengthened and we will be better armed to prevent attacks in the future.

The ACLU called the bill "a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy." See its full statement, here.