When director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, defending the CIA's not informing Congress of an anti-al Qaeda assassination program, told The Washington Post, "It was a judgment call" and that "we believe in erring on the side of working with the Hill as a partner," was he creating a new precedent for the intelligence community? For decades, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have often taken the less-said-the-better road when it comes to keeping Congress posted on its doings.This hasn't always been an ideological or partisan matter. Washington geezers should recall that back in the 1980s, Senator Barry Goldwater, the die-hard conservative Republican chair of the Senate intelligence committee, often decried Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA chief, for not being forthcoming with the committee.

So when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the CIA has lied to her or when it turns out that an assassination program--operational or not--has not been briefed to Congress, it really ought not to be a big surprise. There are plenty of hard-working, diligent folks at the CIA,and I imagine some might have argued that the assassination program ought to have been shared with the agency's congressional overseers. Yet institutionally, the CIA has frequently been more tight-lipped than it should have--which is, of course, a natural tendency for spies and covert operators.

And when you throw into the mix Dick Cheney, who reportedly urged that this program be kept secret from Capitol Hill, the inclination to keep legislators out of the loop probably increases by a factor of 10--or 100.

There's still a lot not known about this kill-al-Qaeda program, as Slate points out. But that Post article reports that it was dormant but about to be reactivated. Thus, it was brought to CIA director Leon Panetta's attention--but months after he had taken the job. He then quickly notified Congress that Congress had never been notified about it. And since then, the rest of us have been left to puzzle over what really went on with this project.

Which brings me to this point: it would not be too hard for a congressional intelligence committee to mount a quick probe to determine what did happen and to produce a report safe for public consumption. WIthout disclosing all the details of the program--some of which might have to remain classified--the House or Senate intelligence panel certainly could tell the public what Cheney's role was in keeping the program from Congress and examine whether the CIA violated any laws (or just good Washington manners) by doing so.

This dust-up has generated a lot of smoke this past week. The public deserves some light. Will Congress deliver?

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Frightening report from NPR's website:

A scary anecdote from Iran. A trusted colleague - who is married to an Iranian-American and would thus prefer to stay anonymous - has told me of a very disturbing episode that happened to her friend, another Iranian-American, as she was flying to Iran last week. On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said "no", the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

This is very disturbing. For once, it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what's going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely - they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

Social networking can empower political opposition and dissidents. But it can also help security forces track them. During the red scare witch hunts in the United States, suspected communists were asked to name the names of friends and relatives in the party. These days, the authorities could just check out your Facebook or MySpace pages.

Speaking of excessive security activity, I was on NPR's Diane Rehm Show this morning to discuss the recent news reports about a possible torture probe at the Justice Department, the CIA withholding information from Congress regarding a super-secret assassination program that targeted al Qaeda leaders, and Dick Cheney's role in all of this.

One point I hammered: the House and Senate intelligence committees can and should investigate why the CIA did not brief Congress about this assassination program, focusing on the reports that Cheney ordered the spies not to tell the nation's elected representatives about this operation (which may not have become operational). Cheney's been mum about this. (What, no big speech at AEI?) But the public has a right to know if the vice president blocked an intelligence agency from meeting its obligations to inform Congress about its actions. Such an investigation could be conducted quickly and without blowing details of the program at issue. All you have to do is examine any emails or memos related to this and call in a few intelligence officials, a couple ofaides in Cheney's office, and Cheney himself, and ask them what happened. What are they going to do? Take the Fifth? That would be within their rights, but it would speak volumes about their fidelity to republican-style government. 

Want some amazing summer reading? Check out the Unclassified Report on the President's Surveillance Program.

The title may not be a grabber. But this report, which was produced by the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the CIA, the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is a scorcher. It covers how the Bush administration went about implementing its warrantless wiretapping program--which, the report makes clear, was just one of several new and top secret intelligence programs initiated after 9/11 that were legally dicey.

The report was released on Friday--the day of choice for government spinners trying to draw as little attention as possible to information. (Saturday newspapers--especially during the summer--are the least read editions of the week.) The report did get full write-ups in the major papers, and these reports focused on the obvious point: the warrantless wiretapping was of limited value and did not, as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have claimed, lead to counterterrorism operations that saved countless lives. The news stories also zeroed in on another key element: that the legal analysis supporting the warrantless wiretapping program and the other hush-hush intelligence programs (which the report does not identify) was of questionable merit.

But to get a full view of how far off the tracks the Bush-Cheney administration went, you have to read the full 36 pages. They detail how one mid-level attorney in the Justice Department--the infamous John Yoo--was able to cook up for the White House legal justification for these intelligence operations without any oversight from others at Justice. it's hard to consider this part of the report without coming to a harsh legal conclusion: this was nuts. Completely nuts.

The report also notes that because the White House--at Cheney's insistence--wanted to keep information about the warrantless wiretapping restricted to a small circle, this data could not be put to good use. The IGs also reveal that after senior Justice Department officials and FBI director Robert Mueller raised questions about all these programs, the White House modified or nixed some of them. Ponder that for a moment: the Bush administration ended anti-terrorism intelligence programs because of legal objections. If the Democrats ever suggest or do anything like this, Cheney and other GOPers go ballistic. More rank hypocrisy.

So put down that thriller or romance novel, and grab a copy of this report--a compilation of five separate classified reports--and read all about Bush era hijinks. You'll laugh. You'll cry.

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It's not that often a Washington commentator gets to talk politics and revolution in Iran on television with a famous movie mogul. I was on Hardball with Mike Medavoy, who helped make the Silence of the Lambs, Apocalypse Now, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network, Annie Hall, and many other movies and who recently wrote a book on how Hollywood can help promote abroad the positive aspects of American culture. We didn't get to discuss films. But I pointed out that John McCain could not now get away with joking about bombing Iran and poked Dick Cheney for being one of the demagogic politicians misinforming the American public about what will happen to Gitmore detainees once that detention camp is closed.

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In the latest issue of The New Yorker, CIA chief Leon Panetta says of Dick Cheney:

I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics.

Cheney today struck back, saying, "I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted."

Hours later, the CIA put out a statement:

The Director does not believe the former vice president wants an attack. He did not say that. He was simply expressing his profound disagreement with the assertion that President Obama's security policies have made our country less safe. Nor did he question anyone's motives.

This explanation hung on a thin reed: that Panetta had said that it was almost as if Cheney wanted another attack, not that he actually desired one. Still, it did look as if Panetta had been brushed back by Cheney.

And Chris Matthews, Michael Isikoff, and I sliced and diced this episode on Hardball:

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Look at this illustration that accompanied USA Today's story on a new poll on the Republican Party:

Who's missing? Sarah Palin. When Americans were asked who speaks for the Republican Party, the winner was Rush Limbaugh (13 percent). The next four were Dick Cheney, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush (who was picked by 3 percent). Palin didn't make this list. Responding to this poll, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie told reporter Susan Page, "We cannot be a party of balding white guys." Gillespie, who has a decent crown of hair, ought to check that illustration. Only one of the five is non-balding; only one of five is not white. None are non-male.

In politics, there's always time to fill a vacuum in leadership. Perhaps the more troubling indicator for the GOP is this particular finding in the poll: 33 percent of the GOP respondents said they have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party. When one-third of your own rank-and-file doesn't like you, you're in trouble. (On MSNBC, super-smart analyst Charlie Cook noted that only 4 percent of Democrats are not pleased with their party.)

But does the GOP's disaffected third want the party to go more to the right or to moderate? That's not clear. But two-thirds of the Republicans polled said they yearn for the party to hold the conservative line. (A majority of the wider pool of respondents said the GOP should seek to attract moderates.)

The bottom line: if the POed GOPers crave more conservative red meat, the party can only solidify its base by moving in a direction that will further alienate it from most voters. If those POed GOPers desire a more moderate party, they are at odds with most of their party comrades. Either scenario is bad news for the Republican Party. The party is in a spot where it may not be able to do much on its own to improve its fortunes--other than to wait for economic disaster and/or an overseas crisis that causes voters to become disenchanted with President Obama and Democrats. And that's not a strategy; that's a hope.

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Ex-veep Dick Cheney has claimed that there are two classified documents showing that the enhanced interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) used on US-held detainees were effective and helped his administration prevent terrorist attacks. Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chair of the Senate armed services committee, this past week said these documents do not support Cheney's argument. On Hardball, conservative commentator Terry Jeffrey and I try to sort it out. Guess whose side Jeffrey was on. Guest host David Shuster was on fire, going after Jeffrey on the use of torture. But we did find consensus on a critical point: President Obama should declassify those two documents--and other material--so that the public can determine if Cheney is telling the truth or not.

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In criticizing Barack Obama's national security speech, my fellow CQPolitics.com blogger Bill Pascoe argues that the president has lost the Gitmo debate. He writes:

Obama was explaining, in a defensive posture, how it was that he found himself whipsawed between, on the one hand, a MoveOn.org Left that wanted Gitmo burned to the ground the moment he took his hand off the Bible, and, on the other, a Congress that wanted no part of explaining to its constituents why their local jail might be fortified to hold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

I don't deny that Obama has had a difficult week. But that's largely because GOPers and Dick Cheney were being successful demagogues and fear-mongerers. When they whip up the anxieties of constituents about bringing KSM and other bad guys into the United States, they are being disingenuous.

My favorite passage from Dick Cheney's I-saved-America speech:

For all the partisan anger that still lingers, our administration will stand up well in history -- not despite our actions after 9/11, but because of them. And when I think about all that was to come during our administration and afterward -- the recriminations, the second-guessing, the charges of "hubris" -- my mind always goes back to that moment. To put things in perspective, suppose that on the evening of 9/11, President Bush and I had promised that for as long as we held office -- which was to be another 2,689 days -- there would never be another terrorist attack inside this country. Talk about hubris - it would have seemed a rash and irresponsible thing to say.

That's my emphasis, for Michael Isikoff and I wrote a book called, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Cheney, of course, is a major character in the book. I don't know if he read it, but a while back we were told by a reliable source that David Addington, who was Cheney's top legal adviser in the veep office, was spotted at a children's soccer game reading the book.

I have a more substantial review of Cheney's speech and a comparison of it to Barack Obama's same-day national security address here. What disappointed me about the Cheney event was that he did not take questions. Usually, there is a Q&A following speeches at the American Enterprise Institute (a.k.a. Neocon HQ), and it can often be a feisty session. An AEI official told me that Cheney's office had informed AEI that he would field queries after his address. Instead, he quickly trotted out of the room. The AEI people were left with no explanation of his sudden departure.

But it sure would have been appropriate if a co-author of Hubris had been allowed to question the ex-veep. At least, I think so. And I had several questions ready. One went something like this:

A few days ago, Nick Baumann and I posted a piece reporting that Philip Zelikow, a former top aide to Condoleezza RIce at the Bush State Department, had suspected Vice President Dick Cheney's office of having tried to destroy--yes, destroy--a memo he had written in 2005 disputing the Bush Justice Department's legal rationale for warterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods (a.k.a. torture).

On Wednesday morning, Zelikow is scheduled to testify before the Senate subcommittee on administrative oversight and the courts--which is chaired by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). The topic: "What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration."

It's unclear as of this writing whether the subcommittee or other congressional Democrats have yet unearthed a copy of the Zelikow memo, which Zelikow doesn't have. (When you leave government service, you're not allowed to take your files--unless, of course, you're Henry Kissinger, but that's another story.)

At the White House press briefing on Monday, CNN's Ed Henry asked a question that I had tried to put to Obama's press team on Friday, after press secretary Robert Gibbs had declined to call on me: Where are those torture documents Dick Cheney wants?

The ex-veep-who-won't-go-away has been saying in interviews that he's requested the release of two classified CIA documents that supposedly outline all the essential intelligence that was produced by torture-assisted interrogations. (He, of course, does not call it torture.)

In response to Henry, Gibbs had no information to share. "I'll check on where that is," he said.

Another scandal, another Hardball appearance.

Tuesday night's subjects: the Harman-AIPAC-Gonzales controversy and ex-Veep Dick Cheney's continuing assaults on the Obama administration.

Not much time to probe the depths of the Harman tale--because it takes a fair bit of time just to explain why it involves a possible double quid pro quo. (Harman allegedly offering -- during a conversation intercepted by the NSA -- to use her influence to reduce espionage-related charges for two AIPAC officials, and a suspected Israeli agent, in return, vowing to help her become House intelligence chair by arranging for a mega-donor to withhold campaign funds from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales blocking a preliminary FBI probe of Harman because Harman, a California Democrat, could help the Bush administration defend its warantless wiretapping program.

As for Cheney, what's there to say about his compulsion to fire potshots at Obama? He's certainly not heeding what Al Gore said after the 2000 election was finally resolved: "It is time for me to go." I did note that Sean Hannity interviewing Cheney is a bit like Igor grilling Dr. Frankenstein.

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There's one quote from Dick Cheney's interview with Politico that says it all:

We did worry about [the economy], to some extent.

To some extent.

Should the new Obama Administration dig through all the dark ugliness of the Bush-Cheney years--torture, renditions, the destruction of evidence, etc.--and start prosecuting former Bush officials, including the veep? I appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with hawk-of-all-hawks Frank Gaffney Jr. to discuss the matter.

By the way, if you haven't seen Stephen Hayes piece in which Cheney grouses about Bush not pardoning Scooter Libby, check it out. The article is a hoot. I encourage Hayes, Cheney's sympathetic chronicler-in-chief, to fuel more feuding between this out-of-power couple.

Dick Cheney is just going to keep on spinning his way out the door.

In an exit interview with ABC News, he was asked if he agreed with Karl Rove's recent statement that had there been better prewar intelligence the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq. (In the months before the war, George W. Bush and others in the White House had plenty of reason to know the WMD intelligence was iffy; still, they overplayed it for public consumption--but that's another story.) Cheney shot back:

I disagree with that. I think the--as I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren't any stockpiles. What we found in the after-action reports after the intelligence report was done and then various special groups went and looked at the intelligence and what its validity was, what they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feedstocks. They also found he had every intention of resuming production once the international sanctions were lifted.

Well--how to put this?--no. Not at all. That's not true.

This was first published at www.motherjones.com....

Patrick Fitzgerald is back.

With his dramatic arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on an assortment of corruption charges--including the allegation that Blagojevich wanted to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama--Fitzgerald, the hard-charging U.S. attorney in Chicago, has returned to the national stage as a scourge of dishonest government. His last star turn was as the special counsel who successfully prosecuted Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, for having lied to FBI agents and a grand jury during the investigation of the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

Throughout that investigation, the non-nonsense Fitzgerald repeatedly insisted that the case was about a simple matter: whether Libby had lied. But he did note it had wider implications. When Fitzgerald presented his closing argument, he declared, "There is a cloud on the vice president." He added: "And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice." Two weeks later, after winning a guilty verdict on four of five counts, Fitzgerald noted, "Mr. Libby had failed to remove that cloud....Sometimes when people tell the truth, clouds disappear. Sometimes they do not." And when Bush commuted Libby's sentence, ensuring that Libby would serve no prison time, Fitzgerald huffed, "It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals."

His not-too-subtle point was that when it came to integrity, the Bush White House--or at least Cheney's wing--was, well, cloudy. (The trial had revealed much about Cheney's hard-edged political operation.)

The Libby case, for some, was a hard-to-follow affair, and conservatives and Republican allies of Libby and the Bush administration had rampaged against Fitzgerald and tried mightily to muddy up the episode. Thus, Fitzgerald's implied indictment of the Bush crowd partially got lost in the middle of a partisan mud fight. With the Blagojevich case, Fitzgerald is once again championing honest government, but this time he appears to have a case less likely to get caught up in the distracting swirl of ideological attacks. After all, Blagojevich has few friends who will go on cable TV to blast Fitzgerald for being a run-amok prosecutor. There may even be Republicans who praise his pursuit of Blagojevich, a Democrat.

All the talk is Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. As President-elect Barack Obama announced his national security team on Monday morning, the headliner was indeed the junior senator from New York State. While this move remains a surprise and perhaps even a gamble--I've had my say on this--it could be that the more important pick of the day is retired General James Jones to be Barack Obama's national security adviser.

One of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's many accomplishments was to wreck the national security apparatus of the United States government--with key assists from Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. For years, Foggy Bottom and the CIA were at war with the Pentagon and the White House, while the national security adviser (that would be Rice) became not a policy broker (as the job requires) but an enabler. She allowed ideologues to run wild and to trump expertise. She made sure that dissenting opinions were not placed front and center before the president. Foreign policy became the territory of a small band of arrogant know-it-alls who, it turned out, did not know nearly enough.

On Bush and Cheney's watch, the system broke down--by design. It's imperative that the foreign policy machinery of the US government be revived and restored. There needs to be a working balance between the intelligence community, the military, and the diplomats. There needs to be a free flow of ideas. The views of true experts inside and outside the government ought to be factored into major decision-making. And it is the job of the national security adviser to ensure this happens.

That mission will fall to Jones. At a press conference on Monday morning, Obama said that Jones

This time it's personal.

Then again, it was personal in 2004.

In September 2003, I published a book immoderately titled, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Its contention was a simple one: that Bush had gone beyond the normal boundaries of presidential spin in using falsehoods and misrepresentations to skew the public discourse on many fronts: stems cells, global warming, tax policy, and, above all, the invasion of Iraq.

At the time, this was not--in certain circles--a well-received argument. Conservative pundits, pointing to my book and others that came out at the time (Al Franken's Lying Liars, Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked, written with Lou Dubose, and Joe Conason's Big Lies), declared a new phenomenon was at hand: rabid, irrational Bush hatred. MSM commentators, ever looking to reside within the comfortable, above-it-all middle, observed that the left was now mirroring the extreme rhetoric of the Limbaugh-crazy, Coulter-loving right. I noted some examples of this dismissive reax in a recent Mother Jones essay. The New York Times' Matt Bai, citing my book, wrote, "the new leftist screeds seem to solidify a rising political culture of incivility and overstatement." Conservative columnist David Brooks proclaimed that "the core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves." (Yes, I was more dangerous than George W. Bush.) What few of these commentators of the center and right bothered to do was to evaluate the case I (and the others) had put forward. That is, to confront the facts I had presented. Their aim was to discredit the very idea of anyone going so far as to call the president of the United States a liar. And National Review editor Rich Lowry opined, "I don't think the public is going to buy the idea that [Bush is] a liar."

Lowry got it wrong. By Election Day 2004, polls showed that a slight majority believed that Bush was not honest and trustworthy. Still, Bush managed to best John Kerry in an election that was something of a referendum on Bush's first term. But that election came too early. Had it been held a year later--post-Katrina--any Dem would have thrashed Bush and Cheney at the polls. And now about seven out of ten disapprove of his presidency, and most of the public agrees with the premise that Bush deliberately misled American citizens about WMDs and the threat supposedly posed by Iraq. Bush is heading toward the door widely regarded as a failure: Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown. He has become the vanishing president. Hardly seen. Barely relevant.

Bush's style of politics, his policies, his political party--it's all been discredited. Whatever happens in the presidential race, the GOP is poised to take a beating in congressional races. He has led his party to ruin. The battle over the W. story has been won by his critics--at least in the short run. The view that Bush has been a dishonest president and bad for the United States has become the majority position in the United States. If McCain somehow manages to win, it will be in spite of Bush.

Many presidents are elected as reactions to the previous president. George W. Bush's (faux) victory in 2000 was a reaction to the Bill Clinton soap opera. And a Barack Obama triumph would be the natural reaction to the W. years. Obama is the most progressive (or liberal) Democratic nominee since FDR ran for reelection. He is black (or biracial). He is an intellectual. He is no child of privilege. To sum up: he is the opposite of George W. Bush. Not only has Bush started two wars he couldn't finish, presided over a government that lost a major American city, and did little as a financial tsunami hit the nation; he has (I am guessing) created a yearning among many Americans for a non-Bush. And within the realm of conventional U.S. politics, Obama is about as non-Bush as it gets. No wonder Obama has a strong chance of becoming president. He spoke (endlessly) of change; he is an antidote to the Bush presidency.

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is a big deal--but it ought to be difficult for Obama-backers to raise a full-throated cheer for it. Obama's chief selling point at the start of the campaign was that he had been right on the Iraq war. Powell, of course, was not only wrong; he had lent his prestige to the invasion, fronting for the Bush White House on the phony WMD case. And while some may view Powell's Obama endorsement as a stab at rehabilitation, Powell has never fully come to public terms with his role in the Iraq WMD scandal.

On Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw gently approached the matter:

BROKAW: I want to ask you about your own role in the decision to go to war in Iraq. Barack Obama has been critical of your appearance before the United Nations at that time. Bob Woodward has a new book out called "The War Within," and here's what he had to say about Colin Powell and his place in the administration: "Powell didn't think Iraq was a necessary war, and yet he had gone along in a hundred ways, large and small. He had resisted at times but had succumbed to the momentum and his own sense of deference -- even obedience -- to the president. Perhaps more than anyone else in the administration, Powell had been the `closer' for the president's case on war." ...What's the lesson in all of that for a former -- for a new secretary of state or for a new national security adviser, based on your own experience?

POWELL: Well, let's start at the beginning. I said to the president in 2002, we should try to solve this diplomatically and avoid war. The president accepted that recommendation. We took it to the U.N. But the president, by the end of 2002, believed that the U.N. was not going to solve the problem, and he made a decision that we had to prepare for military action.I fully supported that. And I have never said anything to suggest I did not support going to war. I thought the evidence was there. And it is not just my closing of the whole deal with my U.N. speech. I know the importance of that speech, and I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong. But three months before my speech, with a heavy majority, the United States Congress expressed its support to use military force if it was necessary. And so, we went in and used military force.

My unhappiness was that we didn't do it right. It was easy to get to Baghdad, but then we forgot that there was a lot more that had to be done. And we didn't have enough force to impose our will in the country or to deal with the insurgency when it broke out, and that I regret....

BROKAW: Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation, because we now know that they did not exist, was it then a war of necessity or just a war of choice?

POWELL: Without the weapons of mass destruction present, as conveyed to us by the intelligence community in the most powerful way, I don't think there would have been a war. It was the reason we took it to the public. It was the reason we took it to the American people, to the Congress, who supported it on that basis, and it's the presentation I made to the United Nations. Without those weapons of mass destruction then, Iraq did not present to the world the kind of threat that it did if it had weapons of mass destruction.

That last sentence is a syllogism. Of course, without WMDs, Iraq was not the threat it would have been had it possessed WMDs. The point was that it did not possess WMDs. And as Michael Isikoff and I showed in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the Bush administration purposefully exaggerated the error-ridden WMD case that was in itself based on faulty and incomplete evidence. But Powell dumps all the blame here on the intel gang for screwing up the intelligence. That's too convenient a dodge. Here's a case in point: the Bush White House claimed that aluminum tubes obtained by Saddam Hussein could only be used for nuclear centrifuges. Yet the nuclear scientists within the intelligence community with the most expertise on the subject disputed this. That did not stop Dick Cheney and Condi Rice from making claims on this matter that were utterly false--claims that analysts at Powell's Department of State would have known were false.

Last night, as I noted yesterday, was the annual Radio and TV dinner in Washington. George W. Bush sent his regrets, citing a higher calling than dining with 2000-plus broadcasters, journalists, and others: that is, hosting a dinner for the pope. Yes, Bush passed up the chance to make jokes about the Iraq war, as he did four years ago. Bush's stand-in at the dinner as stand-up-in-chief was Dick Cheney.

Cheney did not sling any jokes about the war. Instead, he riffed on global warming and his own lack of enthusiasm for that particular threat, noting that he prefers to refer to global warming "as spring." And, he added, it's going to get a lot warmer and then it's going to get cooler. Get it?

His routine was good enough, if predictable. But what was not entirely predictable was that night passed without serious mention of the fact that U.S. troops are now at war. Cheney made not a reference to the war and the Americans serving overseas. Not that e should have worked them into his ghostwritten gags. But there was no moment at the end when the Veep got serious and noted that as journalists and Washington players eat, drink, and make merry, this is a nation at war, with thousands of its sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters in harm's way.

I don't want to come across as a stuffy killjoy. But there was a frivolity at the dinner that was out of sync with...well, the real world. I'm sure hardworking broadcasters and journalists could use a night out. But there was no recognition from our national No. 2 that this country is in a moment of trouble (and that would include economic trouble). And there was no nod to the guys and gals he dispatched to Iraq, Americans who are not able to take time out to joke around at a formal dinner. Talk about no class--or elitism.

This is not a first. Following the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2005, I wrote:

No mention of the US troops being killed in Iraq but a horse jerk-off joke--that is one way to sum up the First Couple's appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday evening.

So there is now a tradition in Washington. The president or the vice president laughs it up at the fancy dinners and ignores the troops in Iraq and the war they are supposed to be overseeing night and day. No wonder I needed a drink.