JACK'S BACK. Everybody watch "24" last night? For the vicariously torture-deprived, Season VII's two hour debut didn't disappoint: Bauer got his ear seriously singed by a demonic African warlord in the first hour. But that wasn't half as nausea-inducing as what's next for our counterterrorism hero: Being rendered into political pigskin and dragged before a congressional committee investigating his less sensitive interrogation techniques. Fingernail biter: Will our friend James Jay Carafano, who showcased cast members at a Heritage Foundation extravaganza in June 2006, get a cameo? . . .
SPEAKING OF TORTURE: With so much else going on in the spook world, not to mention the economy, I'd forgotten about the Justice Department's investigation of the CIA's destruction of its interrogation videotapes until it popped up near the bottom of Sunday's Washington Post story on possible Bush administration pardons. Federal prosecutor John Durham has been working on that for almost a year now, without any announced results. The CIA official who reportedly ordered the tapes' destruction, Jose A. Rodriguez, retired in 2007 and last month joined National Interest Security Company, a government contractor in Fairfax, Va., with the responsibility to "improve the current value of intelligence and create new intelligence capabilities that integrate technology into new concepts of operations."
INGRATE, REDUX: When last seen in these parts, Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi was serving up phony defectors to the New York Times in a campaign to justify toppling Saddam Hussein. Some suspect Chalabi was acting on behalf of Iran, to get rid of its major nemesis, and has continued to do its bidding in Baghdad. So imagine our surprise when we found Chalabi's byline yesterday in ... The New York Times telling the U.S. to get out of Iraq. In "Thanks, but You Can Go Now," the Iraqi Zelig writes that "there are still those in Washington's corridors of power who want to reduce Iraq to being an American puppet state, like Jordan or Egypt, nations governed through a corrosive mix of covert intelligence and military support spoon-fed to a permanent oligarchy." He should know. Years back, the portly master intriguer fled Jordan after being charged with looting a bank. But "What was the Times thinking?" wonders Aram Roston, author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi . . .
THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION: One of these days Bulgaria is just going to fly apart from corruption. Today an official there was denying a report in Sunday's Washington Post accusing the former Soviet satrap of shipping arms to Iraqi Kurdistan, which seems well on the way toward its dream of autonomy, if not independence, from Baghdad. "Such a transaction is impossible," deputy economy minister Yavor Kuyumdjiev told Bloomberg's Elizabeth Konstantinova. "We have one of the of the strictest arms export control procedures in the European Union."
But close observers of the fledgling democracy are tempted to say, "So what?" Gangsters with tentacles in the Sofia government can make anything happen there, including murder. Bulgaria "has several Soviet-era arms plants producing assault rifles, guided missiles and radio devices," Bloomberg reported. "The country was criticized by the U.S. in the mid-1990s for illegal arms sales to Africa." But Kuyumdjiev suggested the problem lies elsewhere. "Bulgaria has no control over what happens to an arms shipment after it reaches Baghdad," he said.
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