WH Press Corps Demands Photo Ops of Them Asking about Egypt

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I don’t see much purpose behind the letter the White House press corps just sent outgoing Robert Gibbs:

We recognize that the crisis in Egypt is a quickly evolving story and you are working to get us the information we need in a timely manner, but we are concerned about several access issues on Tuesday and now today.On behalf of the White House Correspondents Association we are writing to protest in the strongest possible terms the White House’s decision to close the President’s Cabinet meeting on Tuesday and his signing of the START Treaty today to the full press pool.

The START treaty was held up as one of the President’s most important foreign policy priorities for almost a year dating back to the trip to Prague last spring. We are concerned that now his signing of it is open to still photographers but closed to editorial, including print and wire reporters and television cameras.

We know the President came out late last night to speak on Egypt, and we appreciate the email updates from NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor, but his emails have not gone to all members of the press corps and are not a substitute for access to the Press Secretary or the President.

Prior to the President’s statement Tuesday night, the press corps had not received a substantive update from the White House all day on the situation in Egypt. In addition, the press corps did not have an on-camera briefing, or an off-camera gaggle, with you yesterday to ask the White House about its decision-making process during this major foreign policy crisis. Now for two straight days the full press pool is being shut out of events that have typically been open and provided opportunities try to ask the President a question.

These issues are vitally important for all of our members – print, TV and radio.

We value our working relationship, and we hope you will reconsider and at least open the START Treaty signing to the full pool. [my emphasis]

Aside from the futility of demanding something from a guy on his way out the door, it’s not entirely clear what the press corps believes they’ll gain.

Look, the START treaty is an important victory, and if there were a chance in hell the press would make non-proliferation the focus of a big photo op, I’d be thrilled to see it. And I would love for Obama to come out with a strong condemnation of violence and support for democracy (but that’s partly because of my own impatience with Obama’s tepid support for democracy and human rights here in the US). I would have been thrilled, too, to see the US push Egypt harder in the past; but there’s no way to go back in time and make that happen now. I also think the White House approach of canceling press conferences until Mubarak does something has put them in the very awkward position of appearing to adopt a reactive stance to Mubarak which only feeds into Mubarak’s manipulation of the media.

So it’s not that I think the White House has adopted the best approach to the press during the Egyptian revolution.

Still, I don’t know what the press corps thinks they will accomplish with more public opportunities to question the Administration about what’s going on.

That’s because, to a great extent, this is not about the United States, and certainly not about a bunch of White House reporters who know very little about Egypt. The fate of history is in the hands of the Egyptian people right now.

Moreover, I think there’s zero chance that a highly controlled Robert Gibbs presser (like the one going on right now) is going to reveal anything that an equally controlled press release can’t say just as well. To the extent the White House does have leverage at this point–and they undoubtedly do, most significantly through their ties to the Egyptian military–that leverage is going to be best exercised privately. If nothing else, to the extent friends of ours in the Egyptian military can influence the outcome, they’re going to best be able to do that by appearing to act on their own, not in response to pressure from the US.

So to some degree, both the White House Press Corps and the Administration would be best served if they released a joint notice saying “we acknowledge the government is going to have to perform the appearance of cautious distance regardless of what we’re doing behind the scenes, so let’s all agree to just skip the silly theater of us doing so.”

And if the WHPC is so interested in appearing on TV championing accountability, maybe they should be asking how our tolerance for and cover-up of Afghan corruption is dooming our efforts there. After all, that’s something that the US does have direct influence over. That’s something that more transparency might affect. That’s the equivalent of the questions about Egypt the press corps should have been asking for the last 30 years.

Unlike the Guardian, the NYT Told State Precisely What WikiLeaks Cables It Would Publish

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The Guardian has now posted its version of the US government’s efforts last November to learn what cables WikiLeaks would publish, so I’d like compare the three versions to show what we know.

As I noted before, these negotiations started with the NYT giving the State Department a heads up. Following that heads up, offered on November 19, some reporters met with representatives of the foreign policy and national security and law enforcement establishment on Tuesday, November 23. Following that, the NYT appears to have provided the State Department with copies of every single cable they planned to release.

Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”

Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets. [my emphasis]

Der Spiegel suggests that after that November 23 meeting, at the same time NYT was meeting in person with the State Department, it was also making phone calls to the other partners involved.

The New York Times negotiated with the White House, and there were meetings and telephone calls with the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and SPIEGEL. The US government had mustered a remarkable armada in its effort to appeal to the journalists. In addition to Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Philip Crowley and Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, it included representatives of the CIA, the Pentagon and the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — a reflection of the combined national security expertise of the most powerful nation in the world.

In addition, Ambassador to Germany Philip Murphy met with the newspaper in person on November 25.

This was also the approach taken by Philip Murphy, the American ambassador in Berlin, when we met with him at the United States Embassy. It was Thanksgiving Day, and Murphy drove from his residence in the Dahlem neighborhood to the embassy on Pariser Platz in downtown Berlin. At home, his wife Tammy and their four children were waiting for him to return for their traditional turkey dinner. Murphy, a former investment banker and national finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, wasn’t wearing a suit that day. He donned a jacket, casual trousers and loafers. In addition to all of the foreign policy turmoil Julian Assange had created, he had also ruined Thanksgiving for the ambassador and his colleagues in Washington, an offence for which Murphy would never forgive him.

“I am mad about it, and I don’t blame our brethren in the German government if they are mad, too, that someone has downloaded these documents,” Murphy said. “I’m incredibly angry. I don’t begrudge SPIEGEL and the press, who are just doing their jobs. I am criticizing those who stole this material.”

The ambassador looked haggard. He coughed a lot and had to interrupt the conversation to get some water. Like so many American diplomats around the world, Murphy would have to explain to his foreign counterparts why the embassy’s internal assessments of German politicians were so much harsher than its public statements. This is a challenge for diplomats, whose job requires them to preserve as perfect a façade as possible.

But Der Spiegel doesn’t reveal whether it told State precisely what cables it would publish. Nor does it reveal whether it spoke with the State Department directly.

Compare that to the Guardian’s description, which reveals that under pressure from the US Embassy in London, Alan Rusbridger agreed to a conference call, which took place on November 26 (so after the NYT had started meeting daily with State and Murphy had met with Spiegel at their offices).

A few days before the cables’ release, two senior figures from the US embassy in Grosvenor Square called in to the Guardian’s London offices for a chat. This discussion led to a surreal transatlantic telephone call on Friday 26 November – two days before launch.

Alan Rusbridger agreed to ring Washington. He made the conference call from the circular table in his office. On the line was PJ Crowley, the US assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

The conversation began: “OK, here’s PJ Crowley. I just want you to know in this phone call we’ve got Secretary of State Clinton’s private secretary, we have representatives of the DoD [department of defence], the intelligence communities, and the national security council.” All Rusbridger could offer in reply was: “We have our managing editor here.”

Note, the reference to “intelligence communities, and the national security council” might well include the FBI; “representatives of the DoD” might include military criminal investigators. Thus it’s possible — but by no means proven — that our government included those investigating the leak itself in meetings purportedly about editorial content.

The Guardian goes on to describe PJ Crowley and Hillary’s private secretary trying to pressure the Guardian into revealing precisely what cables they’d publish.

Crowley set out the view from the lofty heights of US power: “Obviously, from our perspective these are stolen documents. They reveal sensitive military secrets and addresses that expose people to security risks.”

Crowley made his pitch. He said the US government was “willing to help” the Guardian if it was prepared to “share the documents” it had – in other words, tip off the state department which cables it intended to publish. Rusbridger was noncommittal.

Clinton’s private secretary chipped in. She said: “I’ve got a very direct question for you, Mr Rusbridger. You journalists like asking direct questions and I know you expect direct answers. So I’m going to ask you a direct question. Are you going to give us the numbers of the cables or not?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Thank you very much.” [my emphasis]

The contrast between the NYT and the Guardian is instructive:the NYT sent over every cable they planned to publish. Whereas the Guardian refused to specify which cables they’d publish.

Under cover of off the record meetings with top national security officials, the NYT collaborated with the government, at the least on damage control, if not their investigation of WikiLeaks. The Guardian, by contrast, was unwilling to do more than warn State what general topics they’d cover on a day to day basis.

One other point: the fact that the government was asking newspapers precisely which cables they’d publish makes me wonder whether they didn’t have — and may still not have, though given the numbers of copies floating around I suspect they now know — a clear idea of which cables were included in the document dump. Geoff Morrell’s press conference last week made it clear that they still only consider Bradley Manning a person of interest in the leak of the larger dump, meaning that if he leaked them, they haven’t identified how he did so. But is it possible that — at least in November — they didn’t even know what cables were included in the dump?

The $900 Million Headline Versus Our Afghan Policy Backing a Vertically Integrated Criminal Enterprise

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The NYT has one of the most stunning headlines of the day.

Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 Million

The story tells a story of Afghanistan’s own “Too Big to Fail” problem that offers opaque descriptions of precisely what caused the problem, but waits until the 17th and 18th paragraph to explain the real problem with the bank.

Kabul Bank has extensive links to senior people in the Afghan government. In addition to Mahmoud Karzai, other shareholders included Haseen Fahim, the brother of the first vice president, and several associates of the family from the north of Afghanistan. Afghan officials said the bank poured millions into President Karzai’s election campaign.

It is the loans and personal grants made by the bank to powerful people, including government ministers, that could prove the most explosive, Western and Afghan officials said. “If people who are thought to be clean and who were held up as ‘good’ by Western countries suddenly are caught with their fingers in the till, it will cause questions from donors,” said a Western official in Kabul. “They will say, ‘Why are we here?’ ”

I wondered why Dexter Filkins, who has done so much on Afghan corruption, focused on the missing money rather than the problem of corruption. But then I remembered–after I saw Alissa Rubin and James Risen on the byline–that Filkins moved to the New Yorker earlier this month.

As it turns out, Filkins has his own version of the story. The explanation of the same disappearing hundreds of millions Filkins offers in an article 3.5 times longer than the NYT’s already long 1800 words is that–as one of Filkins’ sources explains, the Afghan government is a “vertically integrated criminal enterprise.”

Much of the money disappeared (Filkins explicitly states what the NYT just suggests) in outright bribes to the key members of Hamid Karzai’s administration.

The evidence, according to American officials close to the inquiry [into the collapse of the Kabul Bank], appears to implicate dozens of Afghan officials and businessmen, many of them, like [Karzai’s finance minister and campaign treasurer, Omar] Zakhilwal, among Karzai’s closest advisers, with regulatory responsibilities over the Afghan financial system. Among the others are Afghans regarded by American officials as among the most capable in Karzai’s government: Farouk Wardak, the Minister of Education; Yunus Qanooni, the speaker of the Afghan parliament; and Haneef Atmar, the former Minister of the Interior.

[snip]

“Just straight bribes,” a senior NATO officer said of the payments to Afghan officials.

Much of that bribe money–perhaps as much as $14 million–came in response to Hamid Karzai’s request for campaign donations and went to pay for his badly discredited 2009 re-election.

Now American officials say that Zakhilwal was one of dozens of Afghan leaders and businessmen who, collectively, accepted tens of millions of dollars in gifts and bribes—some sources say as much as a hundred million dollars—from executives at Kabul Bank.

[snip]

According to several current and former Afghan officials, during the 2009 campaign Kabul Bank and Karzai’s reëlection machine became nearly interchangeable. Afghans who served in Karzai’s government say the more likely contribution from Kabul Bank was between eight and fourteen million dollars—and that it kept on doling out money even after the election, which Karzai finally won, in November, 2009. At the time, election monitors declared that about a million ballots cast for Karzai were fraudulent.

More troubling still is Filkins’ report that some of this money is being funneled to the Taliban.

At Kabul Bank, according to a Western official familiar with the investigation, records show that Ruhullah, the head of a private security company and an ally of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President’s half brother, transferred money into accounts believed to be controlled by the Taliban.

At the same time, Filkins explains here as he has in the past, this corruption is what drives Afghans to support the Taliban.

Read more →

What State Wanted Withheld from WikiLeaks Publication

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There are now four versions of the cooperation between WikiLeaks and its journalistic “partners:” Vanity Fair, NYT, Guardian, and Spiegel. A comparison of them is more instructive than reading any in isolation.

For example, compare how the NYT and Spiegel describe the three things the State Department asked journalistic partners not to publish during the lead-up to publication of the diplomatic cables. The NYT says State asked them not to publish individual sources, “sensitive American programs,” and candid comments about foreign leaders.

The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.

“We were all aware of dire stakes for some of the people named in the cables if we failed to obscure their identities,” Shane wrote to me later, recalling the nature of the meetings. Like many of us, Shane has worked in countries where dissent can mean prison or worse. “That sometimes meant not just removing the name but also references to institutions that might give a clue to an identity and sometimes even the dates of conversations, which might be compared with surveillance tapes of an American Embassy to reveal who was visiting the diplomats that day.”

The second category included sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence. We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed. In other cases, we went away convinced that publication would cause some embarrassment but no real harm.

The third category consisted of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials, including heads of state. The State Department feared publication would strain relations with those countries. We were mostly unconvinced.

Spiegel describes those three things slightly differently. It says State asked them to withhold government sources, cables with security implications, and “cables relating to counterterrorism.”

At first, less than a week before the upcoming publication of the leaked documents, Clinton’s diplomats wanted three things from the participating media organizations. First, they wanted the names of US government sources to be protected if leaks posed a danger to life and limb. This was a policy that all five media organizations involved already pursued. Second, they asked the journalists to exercise restraint when it came to cables with security implications. Third, they asked them to be aware that cables relating to counterterrorism are extremely sensitive.

Now the discrepancy may mean nothing. Both agree State had three categories of information they wanted withheld. Both agree State asked the newspapers to withhold both the names of sources and details on intelligence programs. But since the NYT notes the journalistic partners didn’t take the third category–candid comments–very seriously, perhaps Spiegel just misremembered what that third category was, or just remembered a particular focus on counterterrorism. Presumably, after all, the counterterrorism programs would be included in category two.

But whatever the cause of the discrepancy, I am intrigued that Spiegel emphasizes counterterrorism programs rather than candid comments about foreign officials, not least because the Spiegel article describes working with US Ambassador to Germany Philip Murphy directly. Consider the two most sensitive revelations pertaining to Germany and counterterrorism. First, there was the news of Philip Murphy personally bad-mouthing the Free Democratic Party’s opposition to US vacuuming up European data, particularly as it relates to the SWIFT database. Then there are negotiations about whether Germany would prosecute Americans involved in the rendition of Khalid El-Masri. As I showed, it appears that Condi was telling German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier one thing about a subpoena for those Americans, followed quickly by the American Deputy Chief of Mission “correcting” the US position on it.

That is, on both major disclosures about US counterterrorism cooperation with the Germans, the US has reason to be embarrassed about its two-faced dealing with German officials.

In other words, there may be no discrepancy. It is possible that the third category of information State wanted suppressed has to do not with the substance of our counterterrorism program (after all, both the details of SWIFT and of our rendition program have been widely publicized), but with the degree to which our private diplomacy belies all the public claims we make about counterterrorism.

The NYT’s “Heads Up” Meeting with the FBI on Wikileaks

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The NYT has a very long profile on their interactions with Wikileaks, about which I will have more to say.

But I wanted to point to this meeting, which Bill Keller describes as the NYT’s effort to give the government a “heads up” on the diplomatic cables.

Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer. [my emphasis]

It’s bad enough that–as Keller also reports–the NYT has no secure communications.

But is it also the habit of the NYT to meet with the government–including the FBI–on upcoming stories? For all the NYT’s insistence, with Judy Miller, that they would not be an accomplice to a government investigation, what the hell were they doing meeting with the FBI before they published a story?

Rahm’s Ballot Eligibility Case Appeal and White House Interference

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right[Updated Below]

The decision Monday by the Illinois Court of Appeals to disallow the candidacy for Mayor by Rahm Emanuel as well as his name on the official election ballot stunned many people, and left Emanuel, his political supporters and Wall Street and Hollywood financial bag men scrambling with the ballots set for printing today and the election on the near horizon on February 22. By late Monday night, the Emanuel campaign had already filed an Emergency Motion For Stay Pending Appeal and Expedite Consideration of Petition For Leave To Appeal with the Illinois Supreme Court. A copy of the filing is here.

Within less than eight hours of Emanuel’s late night filing, at the crack of dawn on ABC’s Good Morning America, Valerie Jarrett, Barack Obama’s most senior and trusted advisor, was delivering a direct message on behalf of the White House commenting on the case and declaring they viewed Emanuel legally eligible:

I think that he believes that [Rahm is] eligible and I believe that he believes that Rahm will pursue his appeal in the courts.

I do not know about you, but I cannot think of any instance in which a White House and President, especially one so intimately related to one side of the issue, has so directly stepped into a state and local court proceeding at such a critical moment with its opinion on the ultimate legal determination.

Perhaps, under different circumstances, this would not be a notable event. However, when the President’s closest advisor weighs in with such a statement as to what the law should be, right as the sensitive matter is being presented on an emergency basis to a state supreme court, it is of highly questionable discretion and ethics. The impingement on the local situation is only exacerbated by the close ties Obama has to Emanuel, Chicago, the Daley political machine behind Emanuel (A Daley now serving as Obama’s Chief of Staff) and Illinois. It was an unnecessary and completely inappropriate meddling in a state and local judicial matter that the Obama White House had no business engaging in.

Jarrett’s imposition of the White House thumb of comment here is even more telling when juxtaposed with the consistent position she and Obama insisted on taking, and still maintain, with relation to the court process in the legal challenges to the discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. Obama, Valerie Jarrett and the White House have consistently refused to take a position on how the DADT constitutional litigation should be decided in public statements and appearances and, in fact, are STILL officially supporting the disgraceful policy in courts under the guise that law must be supported and courts left undisturbed to decide the matter unfettered. Apparently such ethical and moral restraint does not apply when it comes to their friend and political crony’s local election litigation.

Which brings us to the law Mr. Obama and Ms. Jarrett are so positive stands for the eligibility of Read more →

Peter King’s “Danger from Within”

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As Adam Serwer notes, one of the most interesting things about this long story on how Peter King came to split with a Muslim community close to his district as he increasingly attacked Muslims in general after 9/11 is the description of the way a novel of his tied al Qaeda, Long Island Muslims, and the IRA together.

But for some of King’s Muslim constituents, his most hurtful words came in the form of his 2004 novel, “Vale of Tears.” The story revolves around a fictional congressman who stumbles across a plan by terrorists – who are associated with a Long Island mosque and work with al-Qaeda and remnants of the Irish Republican Army – that could kill hundreds.King dedicated the novel to “those who were murdered on September 11” and explained his purpose in the preface: “It describes how vulnerable we can become if we lower our guard – for even the slightest moment – and if we fail to recognize that our terrorist foes comprise a worldwide network with operatives active within our borders.”

Adam writes,

King’s love affair with the IRA ended shortly after 9/11 as well, because King said his former allies had adopted a “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” in response to American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it’s still extraordinary that someone as actively supportive of the use of political violence in the past as King would be running these hearings.

His decision to take some kind of bizarre emotional revenge by slapping his former allies together in a novel with an implausible plot in which violent Islamic extremists somehow lose their distaste for “infidels” and the IRA suddenly decide they’d like to start targeting the United States is also really strange, but I find myself wishing King had stopped there.

But something else struck me about the story (which was billed as a “religion” story). It’s the story’s treatment of whether King’s concerns about terrorist sympathizers (aside from himself, of course) are justified.

Few take issue with King’s assertion that homegrown terrorism is rising dramatically.

In the past two years, according to Justice Department statistics, nearly 50 U.S. citizens have been charged with major terrorism counts – all of them allegedly motivated by radical Islamic beliefs.

But many law enforcement leaders disagree with King’s allegation that most Muslim leaders do not cooperate with authorities. In the past, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has praised the community. And in a speech last month, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said: “The cooperation of Muslim and Arab-American communities has been absolutely essential in identifying, and preventing, terrorist threats. We must never lose sight of this.”

Experts also point to a string of recent terrorism cases that were foiled or reported by Muslim leaders.

Within King’s district, Nassau County Lt. Kevin Smith said he couldn’t recall the last time police received a tip from local mosques. But the detective said: “It’s hard for us to judge what that means – whether that’s because they’re not reporting something or if there’s just nothing to report. On the whole, though, I think we have a good relationship with the mosques in our county.” [my emphasis]

Now, I will try to hunt down the statistics the WaPo used to make the assertion that all homegrown terrorists–or even all US citizens charged with major terrorism counts–were “allegedly motivated by radical Muslim beliefs.” DOJ released stats last year that were specifically defined as terrorists tied to international terrorist groups. It focused on convictions as opposed to charges, but in that list, at least, were included a number of people with ties to terrorist groups like FARC and even anti-communist Cambodians convicted of what DOJ classifies as major terrorist offenses. And while our government tends to interpret the use of WMDs by white people differently than it does by people of color, it did indict the Hutaree militia last March on WMD charges under 18 USC 2332a, among other things, which is one of the statutes DOJ considers a major terrorism charge.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think the Hutaree militia are even allegedly motivated by radical Islamic beliefs.

So the WaPo claim, whether because DOJ gave it bad data or because it interpreted that data incorrectly, is plainly false.

And all that’s before you consider the growing list of right wing terrorist attacks, not least the still unsolved bombing of a FL mosque, the George Tiller murder, and the recent bombing attempt in Spokane.

This false claim that all the terrorists indicted in the last two years are allegedly motivated by Islamic extremism is not just sloppy. It serves to excuse one of the biggest problems of King’s fear-mongering: the way it tautologically focuses on Islamic extremism and ignores other terrorists that pose an important threat to this country.

Of course, that might be inevitable in a story treating King’s fear-mongering as a religion story.

Who Is Paying for Dewey Clarridge’s Old Spy Novels?

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Update: I’m wrong about this being buried–it will be in tomorrow’s NYT, so big coverage.

When Jeff Stein reported that Mullah Omar was rushed to a hospital for heart treatment, I was pretty sure the real story was about Dewey Clarridge’s Eclipse group, which the NYT had suggested before might be involved in a privatized PsyOp network. As Stein described,

Mullah Omar, the elusive, one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban, had a heart attack Jan. 7 and was treated for several days in a Karachi hospital with the help of Pakistan’s spy agency, according to a private intelligence network run by former CIA, State Department and military officers.

The intelligence network, operating under the auspices of a private company, “The Eclipse Group,” said its source was a physician in the Karachi hospital, which was not identified in the report, who said he saw Omar struggling to recover from an operation to put a stent in his heart.

[snip]

The Eclipse Group is run by Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a former head of the CIA’s Latin American operations who was the first chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center; Kim Stevens, a retired U.S. diplomat who served in Bolivia and Italy; and Brad A. Patty, a civilian advisor to the U.S. Army’s 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team in Iraq from 2007 to 2009.

The Eclipse Group’s reports are available “by invitation only” on its Web site, Stevens said.

By all appearances, the Eclipse network is the just the latest iteration of a shadowy, Pentagon-backed operation that began contracting with former CIA and military operatives to supply intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009. Amid adverse publicity last year, the Pentagon supposedly cut off its funding.

In one of those stories the NYT loves to bury in the Saturday news hole, Mark Mazzetti provides more detail of what Clarridge is up to.

Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.

[snip]

His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

[snip]

On May 15, according to a classified Pentagon report on the private spying operation, he sent an encrypted e-mail to military officers in Kabul announcing that his network was being shut down because the Pentagon had just terminated his contract. He wrote that he had to “prepare approximately 200 local personnel to cease work.”

In fact, he had no intention of shuttering his operation. The very next day, he set up a password-protected Web site, afpakfp.com, that would allow officers to continue viewing his dispatches.

[snip]

When the military would not listen to him, Mr. Clarridge found other ways to peddle his information.

Read more →

Report Concludes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Personally Killed WSJ Reporter Danny Pearl

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A long-term report on the murder of Danny Pearl has just been released. The WaPo describes the report this way.

A recently completed investigation of the killing of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan nine years ago makes public new evidence that a senior al-Qaeda operative executed the Wall Street Journal reporter.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who is being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — said at a military hearing in 2007 that he killed Pearl. But there have been lingering doubts about his involvement, and the United States has not charged him with the crime.

According to the new report, which was prepared by faculty members and students at Georgetown University, U.S. officials have concluded that vascular technology, or vein matching, shows that the hand of the unseen man who killed Pearl on video is that of Mohammed. The report also says Mohammed told the FBI that a senior al-Qaeda operative advised him to take control of Pearl from his original kidnappers.

The 31,000-word report, published in conjunction with the Center for Public Integrity at www.publicintegrity.org, is among the most complete and graphic accounts of Pearl’s death. The 3 1/2-year investigation, called the Pearl Project, was led by Asra Q. Nomani, a former colleague of Pearl’s at the Journal, and Barbara Feinman Todd, director of the journalism program at Georgetown.

I’ll have more to say about the report in a bit–consider this a working thread in the mean time.

But I did want to point out the final conclusion of the report:

Pearl’s actual murderers will likely not stand trial for their crime. Federal officials decided in the summer of 2006 not to add the Pearl murder to charges against KSM in military tribunals because they concluded that would complicate plans to prosecute him and four alleged accomplices in the 9/11 attacks. KSM’s suspected accomplices aren’t expected to be charged, either. One nephew is being tried for the 9/11 attacks, and the whereabouts of the older nephew aren’t publicly known.

“Foreclosure,” “Housing,” and “HAMP” Not Part of Epic on Obama’s Recovery Plan

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Peter Baker has an almost 6500-word article describing Obama’s efforts to fix the economy.

Obama’s frustration could set the tone for the remainder of his term. For all the trials of war and terrorism, the economy has come to define his presidency. During the first half of his term, he used the tools of government to shape the nation’s economy more aggressively than any president in 75 years.

It describes the counter-productive relationships of his first economic team and the introduction of a second one.

Over the last two months, I interviewed nearly all of the team’s main figures, past and present, and when we talked about their relations with one another, it was like picking through the wreckage of a messy divorce.

It describes Obama’s purported rocky relationship with business (with extensive quotes from the Chamber of Commerce’s Tom Donohue). It describes Timmeh Geithner’s longevity even while quoting him dismissing legitimate critiques of the last two years as “marginal.” It includes the credulous judgment that the tax deal “amounted to a second stimulus package.”

But nowhere in this epic does Peter Baker once use the word “foreclosure.” Or “housing.” Or, god forbid, “HAMP.”

Now, there’s no way to tell whether Baker neglected any discussion of the entire cause of the economic crisis and one of the elements that continues to rot out the core of the economy because he simply didn’t ask about it–in two months of interviews. Or because his sources didn’t or wouldn’t talk about it.

But somehow the paper of record wrote what was supposed to be a definitive article on how the Obama Administration plans to fix the economy without once mentioning that part of the economy, housing, that has traditionally led recoveries but that, partly because of the obstinance of Obama’s economic team, continues to drag down the recovery.