Former Air Force Maj. Matthew Alexander, whose questioning of a captured terrorist led to the elimination al Qaeda's top man in Iraq, said a pervasive "intolerance" of Arabs and Muslims among American interrogators led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

"Soldiers referred to them as rag heads and so on," Alexander said during a Monday talk at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, "How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq."

Last September, when the military-media complex was all-atwitter with Bob Woodward's revelations of a revolution in counterterrorism methods, I found myself talking with a confidante of Gen. David Petraeus at an off-the-record cocktail hour.

Petraeus was then commander of coalition forces in Iraq, and was generally being credited with developing a breakthrough technology to find and track terrorist suspects that was so secret that Woodward couldn't reveal the details.

But according to my interlocutor, Petraeus, whom he had talked to hours earlier, gave complete credit for the counterterror revolution to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for developing and running the program, which is still shrouded in mystery.

War reenactors, especially those who don the Blue and the Gray on weekends for play-action Civil War battles, are ubiquitous in the summertime, especially in the eastern United States.

But an enterprising college journalism student recently discovered young men in New Jersey, including veterans of Iraq and Somalia, practicing for an advanced counterinsurgency fantasy war game on a U.S. Army base in Upstate New York - with the blessing of military officials who've found the contests a good recruiting tool.

About 20 years ago I had the privilege to interview Gen. George L. Mabry, the second most decorated soldier in the history of the U.S. Army, at his home in Columbia, S.C.

Mabry had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics in World War Two. The young captain had already earned a chestful of ribbons for his "Saving Private Ryan" performance at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Only the legendary Audie Murphy earned more medals.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden more than backed up his boss's view Tuesday that U.S. and NATO troops are not winning the war in Afghanistan.

"We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost," Biden told a news conference in Brussels today after three hours of talks with NATO allies.

But an assertion by Biden that 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas could be persuaded to stop fighting or turn against their Afghan brothers-in-arms drew scoffs from experts in Kabul.

Word hasn't leaked yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if President-elect Barack Obama has already figured out that when he wants quick answers to what's going on in the world, the last person to ask is the head of U.S. intelligence.

The steady deterioration of personnel and standards of intelligence analysis, especially at the CIA, has been going on for decades, a number of former top intelligence officials I know say.

The tip of the rot surfaces from time to time, such as with the 9/11 surprise and the gimcrackery reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dogs howl and the caravan moves on. Nothing changes, many well placed former intelligence officials have been telling me.  But the current, possibly fatal dangers we face demand the problems be fixed.

We've been spending too much time chattering about the operations side of intelligence lately, they say, in particular whether Leon Panetta, the former OMB head and chief of staff to President Clinton, is up to handling the spies and back-alley guys and gals.

But officials have been reminding me that it was the dismally poor analysis of intelligence that enabled President Bush to lead the nation into the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- not faulty espionage (such as it was).   

And it's the analysis served up by the CIA and other spy agencies, they point out, that will guide President Obama's decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea, among other front-burner emergencies.

And that, say many rueful former officials, is where the agencies need a severe spanking.

Can Obama do it where so many of his predecessors have failed? One can only hope that the erstwhile professor, forged by the Socratic methods of his Harvard Law School instructors, will lay the lumber on his intelligence chiefs and briefers, asking them harder questions than they're used to.

Such as, "How do you know that?" 

Now, this is a staple of a good newsroom. It's a question editors ask reporters, and good reporters ask sources, all the time. I like to think that an old-fashioned city editor would have laughed the pre-war intelligence on Iraq out of their newsrooms.

But the melancholy truth, according to my well placed sources, is that even after the  intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq, President Obama has a better chance of getting up-to-the-minute information on, say, Hamas, from newspapers than he does the PDB - the President's Daily Brief - served up by the Directorate of National Intelligence and CIA.

"So," I asked a former intelligence agency head over seafood this week, "if I'm President Obama, and I call Leon Panetta into the Oval office and ask him to tell me how Hamas leaders are holding up under the Israeli assault, will he be able to tell me?"

The former official shook his head, nearly blushing.   

No.  "That's not the kind of information" they focus on.

"Well, what do they focus on?" I asked.

If the viability of Hamas isn't important right now, what is?
 
He said the CIA, State Department and Pentagon intelligence agencies do have people specializing on the Palestinians, and even Hamas. But it's not likely they would have up-to-the-minute information on whether, say, in response to Israeli military pressure, its leaders are fighting among each other, unifying, or even where they are.

They just don't have that kind of stuff, he said.

Wow.

What about the NSA? I asked. Could the CIA's Hamas guy call his NSA counterpart and get cell phone intercepts from Gaza to help fill in some holes?

"They won't give it to him, because they don't want their information to help CIA look good."

Right.

And the National Intelligence Directorate, which was set up to put an end to that kind of horse play?

A work in progress, he smiled.  

Ok then: What can CIA briefers tell Obama about Hamas next Wednesday morning?

"They would tell them what they know," said, like squids squirting ink, until they could get back to headquarters and ask around.

But even then, said this former official, Panetta or Adm. Dennis Blair, the incoming head of National Intelligence, would probably not have anyone on staff to answer such specific questions.

Unbelievable, even to me.

He agreed: Unbelievable.

He nodded. "You tell people this and they don't believe it."

This from a man who has devoted his entire adult life to U.S. intelligence.

But doesn't the CIA have guys like Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor"? I asked, half joking, guys who read books, who specialize in more or less arcane things?

Doesn't it have people immersing themselves in subjects like Hamas, as intelligence intellectuals? A CIA version of New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, to name just one of the better known?

Not so much any more, he said. There was a time when the CIA and other agencies hired and encouraged analysts to drill down deeply in, say, Chinese wheat harvests. 

But no longer, he insisted.  And there's little intellectual curiosity in the analyst ranks today, he maintained. A roguish kind of independence among the best journalists is neither sought, nor encouraged, in U.S. intelligence these days, he said.   

Everyone in the spy agencies is feverish about "current intelligence," writing reports that might get the attention of their bosses, maybe even the President of the United States, he said.

But isn't the current leadership structure of Hamas - I kept coming back to that - "current intelligence"?

No, not necessarily, he said. "Current intelligence" is the big-picture stuff that CIA chiefs like to show off to the president -- "what we know about Iran,"  usually larded with sexy secrets -- not necessarily what the president needs to know. 

It's quite likely that the analysts' bosses might not have asked them to track the state of Hamas, he said.  And when their bosses haven't tasked them with such a challenge, the analysts then to be "passive," fixating on a hot piece of secret information that came in over the transom, no matter how incidental to the more critical question: what's Hamas up to?

After much resistance, CIA and DNI finally did set up an Open Source Center with analysts, some of whom don't even have security clearances, working from unclassified material. And they've proved to be very good, some experts say, giving the spy agency a fresh view on developments ranging from Iran to North Korea. The final verdict is far from in, but one well informed former official said that on at least one subject he was familiar with, the regular CIA analysts "couldn't hold a candle" to the Open Source Center's product.

But of course, that begs the question of exactly what the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community -- who still hoard information like children at day care, according to most accounts -- are actually doing with $65 billion a year.

And what, especially, should be done to fix the CIA, with all those floors upon floors of people scattered across Northern Virgina gathering and analyzing secret information?  

"Blow up the place," my lunchtime guest said, "and start over."

Unfortunately, that's not a new idea, either.

The Justice Department's Inspector General gigged the FBI today for allowing its agents in Iraq and Afghanistan to do some creative writing on their time sheets.

Give me a break.  As soon as I read the headline on the 88-page scolding, I thought of Frank Burns, M*A*S*H's lovably feckless martinet, and his handwringing sidekick, Hotlips Houlihan. The Army lifers revelled in uncovering minor rules violations amid the hell of war.   

Can anyone here spell Green Zone? 

 "The OIG found that the FBI inappropriately permitted employees to regularly claim overtime for activities that are not compensable as 'work,' such as time spent eating meals, exercising more than 3 hours per week, and socializing," a press release accompanying the report said.

Imagine the party-hearty life in Afghanistan.

It also said the FBI had "adjusted the work week" for its underfire agents and technicians, giving them extra pay for Sundays, etc.

Gee, these guys must be millionaires by now.

And "socializing," for anyone who knows anything about Iraq after five years there, amounts to heavy drinking, playing video games and watching DVDs, with maybe a little regretful sex thrown in, cooped up in the cheek-to-jowl enclave known as the Green Zone.

Shocking.  

"I agree, big deal," said a former top FBI official with plenty of experience investigating overseas terrorism, who also happens to be a decorated Vietnam vet.

"We were sending civilians to a war zone.  With regard to shifting the formal work week, does the IG have a freaking clue?  By that I mean that, as you well know, the work week in a Muslim country is Sunday through Thursday. Geez."

The FBI's response reminded me of Hawkeye and B.J. standing contrite before Colonel Potter.

"We accept that Headquarters management, in an effort to quickly develop a simple system to compensate FBI employees who volunteered to leave their domestic assignments and serve in war zones, allowed a flawed system to develop and remain in place too long," said top spokesman John Miller, in a prepared statement.
 "Early in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq ...FBI employees lived with sniper attacks, mortar fire, and roadside bombs as part of their daily work environment. They attempted to adapt a long established, domestic pay system for domestic law enforcement to unprecedented wartime assignments for FBI personnel."

It won't happen again, sir.

Here at SpyTalk HQ, we eagerly await the Justice Department's rigorous prosecution of American war profiteers.

The Great Mentioner is busy, busy, busy these days, feeding the media frenzy for names of people "under consideration," as they say, for top positions in the Obama administration - including the spy agencies.

The Wall Street Journal's estimable Siobhan Gorman weighed in Tuesday with her own interesting mentionables to lead the CIA and the National Intelligence Directorate, making the point that none of them could be accused of palling around with terrorists.

Bill Ayers, in other words, is not on the list.

"Most of those being discussed as candidates for director of national intelligence and director of the CIA have staked out a middle ground between safeguarding civil liberties and aggressively pursuing nontraditional adversaries,"  wrote Gorman, singling out former CIA official John Brennan as a leading candidate to return to the spy agency as its boss.

"Mr. Brennan is a leading contender for one of the two jobs, say some advisers. He declined to comment on personnel matters. Gen. James L. Jones, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander; Thomas Fingar, the chief of analysis for the [national] intelligence director; Joan A. Dempsey, who served in top intelligence and Pentagon posts; former Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, who served on the 9/11 Commission; and [California Democratic Rep. Jane] Harman have also been mentioned. Ms. Harman has also been cited as a potential secretary of homeland security."

Liberals would swoon over Fingar, I suspect. As head of State Department intelligence in the first Bush administration, he was the only intelligence official who called it right on Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. And he oversaw the writing of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program that many credit - or blame - for blunting what seemed like an imminent Bush administration attack on Iran.  

None of the others mentioned are likely to upset Obamamaniacs too much, either.

But Brennan shouldn't be a slam dunk, caution some intelligence insiders, who say Brennan's operational dossier is too thin for the post.

Brennan got the Terrorist Threat Analysis Center (now the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) up and running after 9/11, they acknowledge, but he wouldn't have gotten the job if he hadn't been then-CIA Director George Tenet's executive assistant. He has no counterterrorism field experience.

One CIA official who absolutely should be back in Washington running something, say some, is David Cohen, who left Langley after 9/11 to join the NYPD as Deputy Director for Intelligence. 
 
Cohen hates publicity. The NYPD's hiring statement was brief:

"From 1995 to 1997, Cohen directed the CIA's Directorate of Operations, where he oversaw the agency's worldwide operations, managed the CIA's global network of offices and personnel, and maintained agency relationships with foreign intelligence and security services. From 1991 to 1995, Cohen was deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, where he guided the agency's analysis program, which reviewed every political, economic, and military assessment prepared by the CIA for the President and his senior national security advisors. Cohen's career at the CIA was marked by his leadership in combating global terrorism, international organized crime, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

One intelligence insider said Cohen should replace Charlie Allen as chief of Information and Analysis (IA) at the Homeland Security Department.  When Allen came to DHS in  2005, he'd already spent a half century at CIA.

"Cohen has built the best homeland security Intel organization in the country" at the NYPD, this person said,  "much better than DHS/IA and comparable with both the DI and DO [the CIA's directorates of Intelligence and Operations] but at a localized level."

Many would agree.

"During a collection mission on Nov. 15, 2004, Lance Cpl. Swain volunteered to assist with security by manning a vehicle mounted machine gun. As Marines prepared to enter a building, Lance Cpl. Swain identified an insurgent ambush. He immediately opened fire, alerting his fellow Marines and suppressing the ambush but exposing himself to the enemy. Lance Cpl. Swain's heroic actions saved the lives of his fellow Marines, but cost him his own life when he fell mortally wounded."

Newly minted CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus gets a chance to see if his Iraq magic has any chance of working elsewhere next week, when he travels to Islamabad amid a swirl of negotiations aimed at getting the Taliban to halt its Afghan insurgency.

According to some reports, the U.S. itself is ready to talk directly with the Taliban in hopes  of driving a wedge between it and al Qaeda, which it has hosted since the 1990s. 

But while the Taliban was talking in the Pakistani capital this week, its fighters were striking in Afghanistan's capital, in a brazen attack on the Ministry of Culture in the heart of Kabul. 

According to some reports, Saudi Arabia had already quietly brokered talks between the Pakistanis and the Taliban, who were said to be tiring of the al Qaeda Arabs led by Osama bin Laden. 

Ahmed Chalabi, the erstwhile Iraqi exile who intrigued with Pentagon officials and the media to create a casus belli for toppling Saddam Hussein, is up to his old tricks.

Chalabi's star plunged when it turned out Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, as the steady stream of informants he served up to the U.S. media maintained.  

After the 2003 occupation, the crafty Shiite's effort to play a leading, if not top, role in Iraqi politics ended in humility when he won few votes at the polls. He did snag fleeting positions, as a deputy prime minister, oil minister and then the official in charge of rebuilding the capital's utilities.

But in part because of suspicions that he was an Iranian secret agent, U.S. defense officials, American commanders in Iraq, and even his neoconservative champions began to shun him.

A Pentagon investigation did not end in charges being filed, but in May, NBC reported that U.S. officials had "cut off all contact with controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, the former favorite of Washington's once powerful neoconservatives," because of "unauthorized contacts with Iran's government."

Chalabi faded from the international spotlight, but now he's back in action big time, says Aram Roston, an NBC investigative reporter and author of "The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi." 

Tell me Ray Odierno is pulling a Halloween stunt.

He can't be serious: Does the general really think that by shouting "Boo!" in The Washington Post that Iran and its agents in Baghdad are going to run away?

The joke's on him. Baghdad politicians have gone into high Inspector Renault mode over the U.S. commander's charge that some Iraqi politicians are on the payroll of Iran.

Well, what a shock. Next you'll tell us mullahs wear turbans.

Ray, Ray, Ray: Think this through.  Bribes are beside the point. Most Iraqi Shia politicians don't need to be paid. That's just hummus.

Many of them, including our handpicked Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, welcome what sometimes looks like a slow-motion anschluss by their Iranian co-religionists.

Others say the Iraqis -- Arabs -- will never forfeit their patriotism to the Persian-Iranians in the interest of advancing shia hegemony. The two fought each other to a bloody pulp for most of the 1980s.

Still, it's a powerful force. To many shia, it's 1,400 years overdue: The Sunnis kept them down for centuries. Now the Shiites finally have the Sunni boot off their necks, thanks in no small measure to us, and they're not going to lie down under it again.

Iran is going to have a powerful say in Iraqi affairs, no less than we have a say in Mexico's -- and probably a lot more. 

Too bad for you, General, that Maliki & Co. were made a "sovereign" power by the Bush administration. Now they're taking it seriously. They're threatening to throw us out if we don't drop our insistence on prohibiting the Iraqi prosecution of Americans accused of criminal wrongdoing.

Odierno, in response, threatened that $6.3 billion in U.S. bilateral aid and $10 billion worth of military sales could be cut off without a finalized status-of-forces agreement by the end of the year.

Another big "boo." The Iraqis could call Odierno's bluff without breaking a sweat.

What a mess. The current kerfuffle is just the latest manifestation of the Bush administration's strategic blunder in so quickly toppling Iran's archenemy, the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, after chasing the Sunni Taliban from power in Afghanistan.

Now the Iranians are poised to make Baghdad into their satrap via their U.S.-backed mates.  Does that define terrible irony or what?

And there's not much Ray Odierno can do about it. Like King Canute, he's shouting at the incoming tide.

The draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says that the country is in danger of flying apart in a new spiral of violence provoked by unresolved conflicts between Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and other groups.

"U.S. officials familiar with the new National Intelligence Estimate said they were unsure when the top-secret report would be completed and whether it would be published before the Nov. 4 election," McClatchy News reports.

Lawrence Di Rita, former spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, escalated his attack today on a CIA officer's charge that Pentagon dithering wasted a chance to wipe out top al Qaeda figures in northern Iraq back in 2002.

In my original story, published late last night, I quoted Di Rita's objection to the allegation by Charles "Sam" Faddis, who led a CIA team into northern Iraq following the 9/11 attacks, that  the Pentagon's "endless planning and delays" foiled a chance to wipe out a band of al Qaeda leaders who were fleeing American bombs in Afghanistan.

After reading that piece online, Di Rita had this further comment:

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."

Iraqi officials are howling about Bob Woodward's new book like Captain Renault in Casablanca: They are shocked that the CIA has been spying on them.

What a hoot. 

Maybe here, some Americans will truly be shocked, of course, and outraged.

Attention, K-Mart shoppers: Iraq is in the Middle East.

The Baghdad government is an Iranian Trojan Horse, bulging with Tehran agents, including, perhaps, the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself.

His government is a viper's nest of intrigue, as befits a remnant of the Byzantine Empire. It owes its existence to Iran and Syria.

"The prime minister spent long years of exile in Syria and his most important ally in Iraq is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq," notes the respected British military journalist, Patrick Coburn, "which was founded on Iran's initiative in Tehran in 1982."

They're used to spies.

"They will be used to Syrian and Iranian security monitoring their activities," Cockburn observes. 

But he makes a more salient point.

"Overall, the extent of U.S. surveillance of its Shia and Kurdish allies in Iraq reveals a deep anxiety in Washington that, in supporting a government in Baghdad dominated by Shia Islamic parties, it has promoted a government that is closer to Iran than the U.S."

So of course we're spying on them!

The only surprise is whether it's true, as Woodward alleges, that the CIA has been proficient enough to plant spies -- and eavsdropping technology -- amid the prime minister's inner circle.

To date, most accounts from intelligence sources and former CIA officers who have served in Baghdad paint the agency's spy operations there as extremely limited.

For a Vice Presidential candidate who didn't own a passport until last year, Sarah Palin's brief passages on national security Thursday night were perfectly tailored to her lack of expertise or experience in foreign affairs.

But it hit the spot -- the oil spot, to be precise -- in a rollicking acceptance speech spent mostly ridiculing the Democratic ticket and extolling the expertise hockey moms bring to high office.

The Alaska governor's office floats in a sea of oil politics. During her 20 months in office, Palin threw herself into ramping up exports of North Slope supplies to the lower 48. In fact, she accelerated the construction of infrastructure to deliver fuel.  

It's hard to imagine an Alaska governor not knowing at least something about what's going on in the rest of world's energy markets.

But it's a sure bet that the average Alaskan is as familiar with the intricacies of crude futures as ordinary Iowans are with the price of ethanol or, for that matter, Third Worlders with the price of kerosene.

But otherwise, Palin has shown little interest in the world outside the United States.

Her first, and apparently only, foreign travel came last year, to visit members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, and wounded troops in Germany, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow.

That was roughly equal to the travels of George W. Bush when he entered the White House in 2001. The erstwhile Texas governor had visited China when his father was ambassador to Beijing in the 1980s, and Israel, and there were the famous "lost weekends" in Mexico  during his drinking years -- all of which, critics say, left him woefully unprepared for the rigors of the post-9/11 world.

Historians will have the final call on that.

Palin sounded authoritative when she mentioned "Russia wanting to control a vital pipeline in the Caucasus and to divide and intimidate our European allies by using energy as a weapon...."  

Critics have credited speechwriter Matthew Scully, late of the Bush White House, with writing the words Palin merely sang.  

But as tidy a line as that was, it's likely Palin had at least as much a hand in drafting it as Scully, considering her involvement with oil infrastructure during her term as governor, no matter how brief.

She went on to talk about the scary what-ifs:

To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world's energy supplies, or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia, or that Venezuela might shut off its oil discoveries and its deliveries of that source, Americans, we need to produce more of our own oil and gas . . . .

Big applause.

And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We've got lots of both.

More big applause.

If Palin didn't write that line, she sure had obvious fun delivering it.

The next lines, though, came right out of the Republican boilerplate for the past eight years.

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines, and build more nuclear plants, and create jobs with clean coal, and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources . . . .

The problem is, it's a script grounded more in the kind of kitchen-table, hockey-mom talk that makes so much sense to so many people, until it's tested against the complicated real world.
Washington has shown only fitful interest in alternative energy supplies (the technology for which, most energy economists say, doesn't exist yet to generate meaningful amounts of power) .

And nuclear is a non-starter, unless she and McCain win the election and the Republicans take both houses of Congress -  not -- unless we want to buy them from France; U.S. companies deserted the business years ago.

Nor is there's going to be any explosion of offshore drilling, which all the Republicans, except those who actually would have to look at them from their patios, seem to be for. (Likewise, look up Ted Kennedy's position on windmills in Nantucket Sound.)

Meanwhile, even capitalist icons, notably, T. Boone Pickens, have given to issuing Al Gore-like pronouncements that natural gas, not oil, is only a temporary solution to our energy problem.

So, like it or not -- and nobody outside Saudi Arabia does -- we'll be mired in global oil politics for decades to come, particularly in the Middle East

So when Palin falls back on right-wing red-meat rather than thoughtful alternatives, as she did Thursday night, she sounds like nothing more than an echo of Harry and Louise on the Republican ticket -- not a serious contender for the second highest post in the land.  

"Victory in Iraq is finally in sight, and he wants to forfeit," she said of Barrack Obama, in a disturbing slander. (Has anyone noticed that the Iraqis themselves have forced the Bush administration into adopting Obama's position?)  

She goes on, in a similar vein:

Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay; he wants to meet them without preconditions.

and:

Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.

The Republicans lapped it up. 

Do they really believe it? Does she?

If so, God help us.

If it's hard to imagine Sarah Palin touting her foreign policy experience tonight, it's even harder to imagine her taking up where Dick Cheney left off at the CIA.

Cheney famously visited the spy agency to quiz its analysts about Iraq, Afghanistan and terrorist threats, and took a leading role in formulating the administration's national security policies and tools, from warrantless wiretaps to waterboarding.

But whether you agreed with him or not -- and many at the CIA did not -- Cheney brought heavyweight foreign policy credentials to the table as a former White House chief of staff, a Secretary of Defense (who oversaw the 100-hour war to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991), and as chairman and CEO of Haliburton, which has extensive business in the Middle East, during the five years before he was elected Vice President.

But Palin, it hardly needs saying, would be starting at ground zero when it comes to intelligence and foreign policy experience, notwithstanding Alaska's geographic proximity to Russia and her nominal command of the Alaska National Guard, which her most fervent supporters count as national security credentials.

As Vice President, she's not likely to rush out to CIA headquarters to challenge its analysis of Sunni splinter groups in Iraq. But if she did, it's fun to picture senior CIA officials greeting her while grinning through gritted teeth.

Of course, her reception there would be far different it came as President of the United States. 

In the face of such qualms, Palin may well take a swing tonight at critics of her foreign police experise, according to John McCain's strategist Steve Schmidt.

"People will hear about her reform-and-change message" and about energy and its links to national security, Schmidt told USA Today.

In stark contrast to Palin, it's easy to foresee Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, picking up where Cheney left off.

As my CQ colleague Jonathan Broder wrote back in January:

"Unlike many lawmakers who can't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, Biden is a man who not only knows the difference, but also can speak knowledgeably about the allegiances of different Iraqi tribes, the shifting demographics in the northern city of Kirkuk, and the finer points of the Iraq constitution."

Indeed, Biden may well play Al Gore to Obama's Bill Clinton, another president who had little interest in national security, to the extent that he eventually abolished his daily CIA briefing.

Despite Barack Obama's chairmanship of a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe, the first-term Illinois legislator has shown neglible interest in national security, as opposed to domestic, issues during his political career, which began with anti-poverty work in Chicago's South Side.

As for finding a parallel to a McCain-Palin administration, you have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon's choice of Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate.

Like Palin, Agnew had no foreign policy credentials to speak of, either. But Nixon, a two-time Vice President under World War Two hero Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, had a long and deep involvement in national security affairs, particularly in regard to the Soviet Union -- which evidently made the issue moot.

In any event, Agnew wasn't hired to play the role of statesman. He was dropped onto the electorate like a torpedo, with the single duty of blowing the Democrats out of the water, which he did with obvious relish until his resignation in disgrace over corruption allegations in 1974.

Considering Palin's likewise meager acquaintance with foreign policy, it looks like she's being positioned to follow in Agnew's wake, starting tonite.

"As Agency officers current and former (officials) have made clear, those charges are false," the CIA statement said, noting that the White House and relevant British intelligence officials have also repudiated Suskind's charges.

"Those denials are powerful in and of themselves," the CIA said. "But they are also backed by a thorough, time-consuming records search within CIA and by interviews with other officers--senior and junior alike--who were directly involved in Iraq operations."

"At this point, the origins of the forgery, like the whereabouts of Habbush himself, remain unclear," the CIA said. "But this much is certain: Suskind is off the mark."

"To characterize it right, I would say, right: it came to us, George had a raised eyebrow, and basically we passed it on--it was to--and passed this on into the organization. You know, it was: 'Okay, we gotta do this, but make it go away.' To be honest with you, I don't want to make it sound--I for sure don't want to portray this as George jumping: 'Okay, this has gotta happen.' As I remember it--and, again, it's still vague, so I'll be very straight with you on this--is it wasn't that important. It was: 'This is unbelievable. This is just like all the other garbage we get about . . . I mean Mohammad Atta and links to al Qaeda. 'Rob,' you know, 'do something with this.' I think it was more like that than: 'Get this done.'"

Rob Richer, the former CIA official at the center of  sensational charges that the White House ordered the spy agency to fabricate a document tying Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, repeated today that author Ron Suskind gravely misrepresented their interview on the subject.

The legitimacy of a web site that popped up Saturday, Aug. 8,  with Richer's formal statement denying Suskind's charges, has come under attack in recent days as possibly a fabrication itself.

But in a brief telephone interview today, Richer reaffirmed that the statement on the controversial Web site, headlined "Richer Response," was indeed his.

"It's mine," he said. 

But the Web site, he said, wasn't.

"I did not create the Web site," he said, joking "I wouldn't know how."

Richer said he didn't know who created the Web site, guessing that it was someone who wanted to give wider circulation to his categorical denials earlier in the week that statements and views attributed to him by Suskind in his book, The Way of the World, were false.

Close observers of the controversy have grown increasingly skeptical of the accuracy of  Suskind's interviews with CIA officials, who are portrayed as telling the author that the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate a "captured document" that would show former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein conspiring with al Qaeda and importing uranium from Africa.

Adding to the mystery, the document did surface in a number of stories in conservative media outlets in  Dec. 2003, but U.S. intelligence officials dismissed it as a forgery.        

"Far from being comfortable" with his quotations, as Suskind maintains, Richer says he "told Mr. Suskind that many of the things he wrote about what I did and said were wrong."

"Mr. Suskind has now released an edited transcript of an apparent conversation between us that he alleges supports one of the central themes in his book.  It does not," Richer writes. 

"I stand by my earlier statement and my absolute belief that the charges outlined in Mr. Suskind's book regarding Agency involvement in forging documents are not true."

"I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from [Saddam Hussein's intelligence director, Tahir Jalil] Habbush [al-Tikiriti] as outlined in Mr. Suskind's book."  For the record, no one outside my chain of command directed me to do so either."

Former top CIA official Rob Richer said that orders to fabricate a letter showing that Saddam Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks probably came from the office of Vice president Dick Cheney, according to an interview transcript author Ron Suskind released today.

"(A)lmost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president," says Richer, the agency's former deputy chief of clandestine operations, in the transcript.

"But he didn't say that specifically," says Richer.

Then again, the CIA man adds:

 "I would naturally--I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president."

Richer had denied earlier in the week that he ever "received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document ... as outlined in Mr. Suskind's book."

Suskind told SpyTalk Thursday night (see below) he was releasing portions of the transcript to defend himself against accusations by Richer and another CIA official, John Maguire, that he had misinterpreted their remarks in his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism.

But, as with Richer's remarks about Cheney and Libby, the transcript falls far short of clearing up who said what to whom on the main issue: White House involvement in a clandestine plot to manipulate public opinion on the invasion of Iraq.

To add even more mystery to the affair, Richer suggests the target "wasn't so much to influence America--that's illegal--but it was kinda like a covert, a way to influence Iraqis."

Still left unclear is exactly what the CIA was supposed to do with the letter, allegedly provided by the White House, purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had conspired with al Qaeda on 9/11 and obtained uranium from Niger.

Here's Richer, on Suskind's transcript:

"To characterize it right, I would say, right: it came to us, George had a raised eyebrow, and basically we passed it on--it was to--and passed this on into the organization. You know, it was: 'Okay, we gotta do this, but make it go away.' To be honest with you, I don't want to make it sound--I for sure don't want to portray this as George jumping: 'Okay, this has gotta happen.' As I remember it--and, again, it's still vague, so I'll be very straight with you on this--is it wasn't that important. It was: 'This is unbelievable. This is just like all the other garbage we get about . . . I mean Mohammad Atta and links to al Qaeda. 'Rob,' you know, 'do something with this.' I think it was more like that than: 'Get this done.'   

Not confused enough? There's more ambiguity on Suskind's web page. 

Author Ron Suskind says he will release transcripts of his interviews with a top CIA official that will confirm his story that in 2003 the White House ordered the agency to fabricate a phony document linking Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

The letter, written by an Iraqi intelligence official under the control of the CIA, according to Suskind, was concocted to mislead the public into believing that Saddam Hussein conspired with Osama Bin Laden in the attacks, and had gotten uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons, thus justifying the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Then-CIA Director George Tenet directed agency officials to carry out the subterfuge under orders from the White House, Suskind writes in a new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism.

One of the CIA officials involved, Robert Richer, the agency's then-deputy director of clandestine operations, issued a statement this week denying Suskind's allegations.

"I never received direction from George Tenet (CIA director at the time) or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document ... as outlined in Mr. Suskind's book,"  Richer said in a statement that was initially released by the White House .

But in a telephone interview this evening, Suskind said he is planning to release transcripts of his on-the-record interviews with Richer to back up his story.

"There are lots of transcripts, lots of tapes," Suskind told me. "In the next couple days the transcripts will be coming out."

Suskind said he will probably post them on his own Web site.

The author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, said he had no plans at present to post transcripts of his on-the-record interviews with another CIA official caught up in the imbroglio, John Maguire.

Maguire, who oversaw the agency's Iraq Operations Group in 2003, also denied complicity in the alleged forgery operation, via a statement issued through Richer.

"I never received any instruction from then Chief/NE Rob Richer or any other officer in my chain of command instructing me to fabricate such a letter," Maguire said. "Further, I have no knowledge to the origins of the letter and as to how it circulated in Iraq."

Suskind says that Richer had pledged to him that he would not deny his quotes when the book came out.

"He said, 'I will stand tall.'"

Suskind says he "felt great sympathy" for both men, who he'd warned that "the heat will be white hot" when the book came out.

But Suskind said he would not release transcripts of his "hours and hours" of interviews with Maguire, "at least at this point,  because "he hasn't had a chance to read the book yet."

Maguire is said to be traveling in the Middle East and could not be reached for comment.   

"I'm prepared to post some transcripts (of interviews) with Richer," he said, "so people can judge for themselves."

"This is a battle between truth and power," Suskind said, "which is what the whole book is about." 

Rob Richer, the CIA's Near East Division chief in 2003, and John Maguire, who oversaw the agency's Iraq Operations Group, are on the record confirming the existence of a fake, backdated letter purported to have been written by Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks and Niger uranium.

The allegations -- angrily dismisssed by the White House and  former CIA Director George Tenet -- are contained in The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, by Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Suskind also quotes Alan Foley, the head of WMD analysis for the CIA at the time, as saying, "It is, in my opinion, true that the administration, for whatever reason, was determined to have a showdown with Iraq that predated this whole WMD stuff."

The authors of an authoritative book on the Niger uranium affair, meanwhile, were skeptical of Suskind's charges.  

"I find it hard to believe that CIA would ceate such a forgery just to please the White House," said former Newsday reporter Knut Royce, another Pulitzer winner and co-author of The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War,  

"I don't find it hard to believe that the White House asked for it." 

His co-author, former Washington Post editor Peter Eisner, said, "What would be better is proof of the forged letter, allegedly produced by the CIA. How can Suskind show that this is true? We don't know."

For more details go here.

The Islamic Army is the core of the coalition of 'nationalist-jihadist' insurgency factions which have expressed interest in joining the political process (the Reform and Jihad Front, the Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance) and is one of the key factions believed to have joined up with the Awakenings Councils / Sons of Iraq in force.  Its public break with [al Qaeda in Iraq] in April 2007 was probably the most important turning point in the transformation of the Sunni insurgency.

"Former congressman Curt Weldon is helping broker deals between Russian and Ukranian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments as part of his new job with a private American defense consulting firm," says Weinberger, author of A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry.

Weldon did not respond to e-mails and phone requests to be interviewed or comment for this article. But in a 2006 interview, before the FBI probe was public, Weldon spoke enthusiastically about setting up a "front company" to work with the Russian arms agency, Rosoboronexport. Weldon hoped this company could sell weapons to the Middle East, and other regions, particularly to countries where the U.S. has strained relations. He claimed the director of Rosoboronexport approached him to work with "an American company that would act as a front for weapons these nations want to buy."

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.