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. 

Michael D. Brown, last seen screwing up emergency responses to Hurricane Katrina, is blogging like a  maniac.

And, in somewhat of a surprise, the former FEMA chief is railing against the new police searches of subway riders in Washington, D.C.

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.

After first denying that an American raiding party had crossed into Syria, the U.S. command now admits that it sent U.S. Special Forces in hot pursuit of armed Islamist militants who have been using Syria as a sanctuary.

Indeed, it's now claiming  that one of those captured in the raid was was Abu Ghadiya,  "the senior leader of al Qaeda's extensive network that funnels foreign fighters, weapons, and cash from Syria into Iraq," according to an unidentified senior intelligence official.

According to the Long War Journal's Bill Roggio: 

The raid to capture Ghadiya occurred in the town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, just five miles from the Iraqi border. Four US helicopters crossed the border and two of the helicopters landed to drop off special operations forces, who then proceeded to clear structures.

[Update: A CIA team led the raid, McClatchy reported.]

Last week U.S. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, who is responsible for Anbar province, which extends from Baghdad to the Syrian border, turned up the volume on a longstanding complaint that Syria had become "a sanctuary" for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"Has the Syrian border stopped you from going after insurgents?" Kelly was asked in an interview  which didn't appear -- a bit awkwardly -- until Monday, in US News & World Report.

"We don't go across the border," Kelly said, "for sure."

Right. Let's call that inoperative.

A right-wing Jewish organization that backs John McCain is flooding mailboxes in the key battleground state of Virginia with an Israeli-made film that equates some Muslims with Nazis.

A man in Springfield, Va., whose family originates in South Asia, told us he was offended by the DVD, especially when it arrived in his mailbox again and again - seven times in all, he said.

"Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," intercuts scenes of Islamist terrorist attacks with old film of Nazi rallies and contemporary footage of Muslim children reciting poetry celebrating suicide bombings.

"They should have a warning on them about the explicit violence," said the South Asian man, who is married with two young children.  He asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting his neighbors in his largely Republican neighborhood.

"My children pick up any DVD that's lying around and put it on," said the man. "It stereotypes all Muslims as ignorant and backward. I found it personally offensive, but I certainly don't want my children seeing that stuff."

Some 22 million DVDs were also delivered to homes via newspaper inserts in "100 local newspapers, with distribution concentrated in political swing states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada," Seth Hettena reported in Columbia Journalism Review.

"Obsession" was produced by Israeli filmmaker Raphael Shore, who is one of three officers of the Clarion Fund, which is sponsoring the Virginia mailings.  Adding mystery to the project, pseudonyms were used for two of the film's financial backers, because, Shore maintains, they feared reprisals by radical Muslims.

"'Obsession' gives the picture that unfortunately no one else does,"  Shore told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz back in June. "The average viewer tries to understand the conflict. It's difficult to connect all the dots and 'Obsession' does just that. It gives a coherence to a problem that people have been grappling with."

The Clarion Fund and associatyed groups are skirting the ban on nonprofit organizations backing political candidates, according to The Washington Post.

"One of the Clarion Fund's Web sites, http://www.radicalislam.com, posted an article two weeks ago that stated, 'McCain's policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while Obama's, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing the West even worse,'" the Post reported.

The article has since been pulled down, "but its Web site still links readers to a vast network of sites that promote McCain," The Post reported.

"Aside from the content itself, a number of other factors related to the film have fueled the flames of controversy," Haaretz reporter Daphna Berman wrote, singling out its "largely Jewish and pro-Israel distribution network."

The FBI made an unusual public appeal Thursday for citizen help with finding out who is sending threatening letters in envelopes sprinkled with white powder to financial institutions across the country.

 

"(W) e're releasing photographs of one of the letters and its envelope in the hopes that you might be able to help us solve the case." The FBI said.

 

 "Study the images, and see if you recognize the phrasing of the letter, the envelope label, or any other clue that you think might help investigators."

 

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, it added, is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible.

 

"What you just breathed in will kill you within 10 days," the letters say, in large, machine-printed type.

 

But so far the powder, which apparently is designed to look like anthrax, "appears to be harmless," the FBI said.

 

"So far, we've identified more than 50 letters, nearly all of which use threatening language identical to the text shown above." the FBI appeal said. "The letters have all been mailed from Texas and postmarked at Amarillo."

 

"The letters have been sent to at least 11 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia," it said.

 

Institutions receiving the letters have included the Chase Bank; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision, which regulates all federal and many state thrift institutions.

The Marines stationed at Beirut airport in 1983 could have had plenty of time to prepare for the suicide bomber that struck with devastating consequences 25 years ago this week, their commander says.

But the eavesdropping National Security Agency's intercept of an Iranian telephone call that gave the order got stuck "in the intelligence pipeline."

In all, 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors died in the Oct. 23, 1983 attack.

"Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September ...  in which the Iranian Intelligence Service provided explicit instructions to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (a known terrorist) to attack the Marines at Beirut International Airport," says Marine Col. Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, writing in the latest issue of Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute.

"The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack."

The two bombings - French paratroopers would be struck two minutes later, with the loss of 58 lives  - will be marked with a candlelight vigil at dawn Thursday in North Carolina, where a Beirut memorial is etched with the names of the fallen.

A different kind of ceremony will mark the bombings in Tehran, writes Geraghty, who also spent seven years in the CIA's Special Operations Group.

"In the Iranian Behesht-E-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran, there will also be a ceremony at a monument erected in 2004 to commemorate the Beirut suicide bombers. In attendance will likely be some dressed as suicide bombers, chanting the standard 'death to America' and 'death to Israel.'"

In paying solemn tribute to the fallen men of his 24th Marine Amphibious Group, Geraghty also rues that President Ronald Reagan had abandoned America's military neutrality in the raging Lebanese civil war.

"It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support -- which I strongly opposed for a week -- to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on 19 September and that the French conducted an air strike on 23 September in the Bekaa Valley," he writes.

"American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision."

The attacks, which went unanswered by U.S. military action, "became a turning point in the unbounded use of terrorism by radical Islamic fanatics worldwide," Geraghty writes.

"Part of what we need to do is we need to change from a model in which your assets are controlled by your, for example, your Social Security number, which is a very weak way to control your assets, to a way in which your assets are controlled by some combination of a biometric, a token, and maybe some secret knowledge that isn't kept in a database," he said.

"If you -- bear with me for a second -- If you had a system where in order to access my bank account you had to use my biometric and a token as well as a number, it wouldn't matter if you stole the number, because the number wouldn't do anything for you.  It would be like having my name.  It doesn't do anything for you...." he said.

"But in the long run, I think you want to move away from a model which I consider inherently vulnerable, where the very information that you're trying to protect is the information you have to disseminate in order to validate yourself.  So ... the more effective use you make of the information, the more vulnerable you become," said Chertoff, who gave up a lifetime job as a federal judge in 2005 for the homeland security job. 

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:

A few days ago I wrote a column trying to clear up the campaign debate over the value of having "direct talks" with Iran, North Korea, etc.  

The Obama-Biden team, I wrote, had not been clear about what it means, which I thought opened them to phony charges of "appeasement."

What both sides should agree on is what "direct talks" mean, for the good of the country, if not themselves. It does not mean, as Obama has carelessly implied in some interviews, sitting down with, say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without pre-summit talks.

Of course, there are always pre-summit talks, also called "preparation," and these are done -- Yes, Virginia - without preconditions.  Given all the e-mail I've gotten,  I guess I didn't make that clear.

As Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who refined "direct talks" with their secret dialogue with China, have often said, you cannot find out what the other guy wants, and tell him what you want, without first sitting down "without preconditions."

Think of it in terms of  Tony and Phil, in The Sopranos. First they send emissaries to lay out their position. If they still have problems, then they have the sit-down. If that doesn't work, then they apply a little pressure.

If that doesn't work, then they whack the guy. But hey, ya gotta try to tawk first. 

James Gordon Meek may have a name Dickens might have thought up. In real life he pens the always informative, often witty "Mouth of the Potomac" blog for the New York Daily News.

Meek's laughs don't come from jokes, unless you count the can-you-believe-this material he digs up day after day.

Take this item today on Sarah Palin.   (I know -- it's like shooting salmon in a basket.)

Meek followed up Palin's remarks to Katie Couric about guarding Alaskan air space from the Russians by touching base with  a spokesman for the Alaska North American Aerospace Defense Command,

"She doesn't have any role in that process," Air Force Maj. Allen Herritage told Meek.

"The authority to launch and respond to a Russian incursion lies with the Alaska NORAD Region commander" -- Air Force Lt. Gen. Dana Atkins, he said.

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days.

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS "NOVA" documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI "doesn't want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA," according to multiple reliable sources.