Month: June 2004

Josh Marshall’s guest blogger, Spencer Ackerman, interviewed that anonymous intelligence official I mentioned the other day. Some nice insights into the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

We saw al-Qaeda execute the operation of killing one American, kidnapping another, within two days. It reinforces the idea of nearly simultaneous attacks. They posted the information about Mr. Johnson, said what they wanted, said what they were going to do, and did it. Which perhaps is the most important trademark for al-Qaeda: they tell you what they’re going to do and then they do it.

“Section 1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of Louisiana, that no governmental agency, including corporations with corporate authority only as approved by the President of the United States under the provisions of any law or resolution of the Congress of the United States, and no officer, agent or employee thereof, shall exercise in this state [Louisiana] any power not delegated to the United States by the Constitution of the United States, but reserved by the Constitution of the United States to the state of Louisiana.

“Section 2. That any persons who violate any provision of this act shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be fined not less than $100 nor more than $1,000 and imprisoned in the parish jail for not less than three months nor more than twelve months.”

This one never got to the legislature; Huey Long was assassinated before he could introduce it.

Kevin Drum writes about another salvo in the CIA/Bush war. When a high-ranking intelligence officer accuses Bush of “an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq,” you know someone’s pissed off.

Especially since he’s got to know he’s going to get outed. Consider that this comes in the wake of the Valerie Plame leak. There’s no doubt that this guy is going to be discovered and his name is going to be published and his career is going to be over. However, he’s unhappy enough that he just doesn’t care. (So why publish anonymously if you expect to be found out anyway? Two reasons: it allows him to delay the inevitable a little while, and it focuses attention on the book.)

The last week has seen a couple of interesting developments in the Tenet/Bush conflict. My predictions and thoughts about these will no doubt be as accurate as my predictions and thoughts about the Iraq war. Which is to say “semi.”

Most recently, the Pentagon broke the news that Tenet asked Rumsfeld to illegally hide a prisoner from the Red Cross. It is no accident that the Pentagon made this statement right now; it’s the first salvo in an attempt to reduce Tenet’s standing in the court of public opinion.

Second, earlier this week, the 9/11 commission put the Bush administration into a clever fork by releasing their report on Saddam/Al Qaeda links. The commission stated clearly that there were no such links, only a few days after Cheney reasserted that links existed.

This in and of itself is not really a big deal; the Bush administration can and will claim that the 9/11 commission is simply wrong. However, this puts them in a bind. After criticizing the commission’s reporting on links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, it’s going to be difficult to turn around and embrace the commission when it reports that Tenet was partially at fault for 9/11. While it’s possible to say that the commission got it right in the one instance but wrong in the other, it’s not easy, and I don’t think Bush can pull off that balancing trick right now. Tenet’s utility as a fall guy is thus reduced.

I don’t think this was deliberate on the part of the commission, by the by. It’s just a coincidence that the timing puts Bush in a fork with regard to the Tenet matter.