[11:49 AM] It’s interesting, disappointing, and nonsensical. The administration line on the violence in Haiti is a common refrain. Yes, this is a violent situation. Once the violence ends and there’s no risk of us getting our hands dirty, we’d be happy to become involved. See Palestine-Israel and Liberia for other recent examples.

[11:25 PM] Still more on the Colin Powell front. I hadn’t read this about his recent outburst during congressional testimony. Three years of humiliation was bound to come to a head sooner or later. Is this just the beginning?

[11:11 PM] A fascinating story in today’s LA Times about CIA problems in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I suppose it’s obligatory that the story mention the “intelligence failure” angle with regards to pre-war assessment of the Iraqi threat. But this is more a story of how difficult it is to operate in conflict zones especially in the Middle East or Central Asia. Give it a read.

[10:00 AM] Colin Powell has an essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. It’s an attempt to clear up the record for all those people who think the administration’s foreign policy is too unilateral, belligerent, and arrogant.

When most people think about U.S. foreign policy these days, they think first and sometimes only about aspects of the war on terrorism: the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, the troubles of the Middle East, and the terror cells lurking in Southeast Asia, Europe, and even the United States. This preoccupation is natural. International terrorism literally hit home on September 11, 2001, and, for understandable reasons, an outraged American public wants those responsible brought to justice. The American people also want to understand why the attacks happened -- and demand a foreign policy that makes sure such events will never happen again.

It is also natural that the war on terrorism has become the United States' number one foreign policy priority. It will remain so for as long as necessary, because terrorism -- potentially linked to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- now represents the greatest threat to American lives. Defeating terrorism is a priority that drives not only military action to subdue individual terrorists and deter their state supporters but also multilateral cooperation in law enforcement and intelligence sharing. It encompasses efforts both to stigmatize terrorism as a political instrument and to reduce the underlying sources of terrorist motivation and recruitment.

But the breadth of U.S. strategy transcends the war on terrorism. Indeed, a strategy limited to dealing with immediate threats would in the end fail to defeat them -- just as bailing water out of a boat would not fix a leak. The sharp focus on the front lines of the war against terrorism, however, has made it harder than usual for people to grasp what American strategy is really all about.

This is laughable. What makes this administration’s foreign policy hard to understand is it is headed by a president who hasn’t a clue about foreign policy, no real desire to get one, and can’t sufficiently even articulate dictated talking points. All of his foreign policy speeches are about the war on terrorism. No wonder that's what everyone thinks is the extent of White House foreign policy. It’s telling that Colin Powell is writing this. He is the Secretary of State, but for a policy journal, it would have been much more powerful for the president himself to write the essay. Obviously he can’t. Unlike a speech, reader would expect the president to write it mostly himself—something that is likely beyond him. In any case, the essay is a good idea. However, it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The administration is not getting a raw deal from pundits on its foreign policy. Most of the negative things said and written are true. Powell has first hand knowledge of this. Every time he puts forth a sensible and progressive idea, the White House cuts his legs out from under him, and he’s forced to backtrack a week later. It’s interesting but forgettable reading.

[5:14 PM] More Afghanistan from today's New York Times. It may be too dangerous for scheduled elections to be held in June. Check out the link to the map of security in Afghanistan. Almost half of the country is deemed by the U.N. to be a medium or high security risk. Will this scenario be repeated in Iraq?

[4:54 PM] Remember Afghanistan? Here are two good reads concerning U.S. neglect. First, Ahmed Rashid writes in the New York Review of Books

That the Taliban are returning in force two years after their defeat is testimony enough that the West's support and strategy for rebuilding Af-ghanistan have so far been a failure. The war against terrorism is still to be won in the Afghan mountains and deserts and among the Afghan people as well. Their nation, the largest and most tragic victim of terrorism, is not being rebuilt. Until that happens there is little incentive for al-Qaeda or extremists elsewhere to lose heart.

You may remember Rashid as the author of Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia. And Nicholas Kristof chimes in (the article is actually about the sad state of affairs for women) writing

Yet now I feel betrayed, as do the Afghans themselves. There was such good will toward us, and such respect for American military power, that with just a hint of follow-through we could have made Afghanistan a shining success and a lever for progress in Pakistan and Central Asia. Instead, we lost interest in Afghanistan and moved on to Iraq.

Mr. Bush has refused to provide security outside Kabul. So banditry and chaos are rampant, longtime warlords control much of the country, the Taliban is having a resurgence in the southeast, and the U.N. warns that "there is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists."

[2:27 PM] While we’re talking about intelligence failures in Iraq, it would seem to me that the larger “failure” has actually occurred in Iran. While Iran continues parse words about what it will or won’t do now that its uranium enrichment facilities have been discovered, the U.S. should remind itself that we know of these facilities not because of the prowess of the U.S. intelligence community, but because and Iranian opposition group told us about them.

[9:46 AM] I’ve mentioned here before how in this whole Iraq intelligence mess, many times the media is asking the wrong questions. Despite many outlets focus on the administration overstating the case for war in Iraq, an excessive number of stories continue to run with the phrase “intelligence failure.” This article reports that the classified versions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimates have many more caveats and cautionary language than the cleansed excerpts released from the CIA. A couple of points before I go on: This is not new news, this article is just suggesting that the differences between the two versions is deliberate, beyond simply redacting material that can’t be released to the public; secondly, this should be the case for an intelligence document released to the public. Despite raising some good points, the article seems surprised that there would be differences between the classified and unclassified versions.

In any case, the article is a good reminder that the continual drumbeat of intelligence failure not only lets the administration off the hook, it doesn’t seem to be accurate. Here are some of the key paragraphs

The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows…

The two documents are replete with differences. For example, the public version declared that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and says "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade."

But it fails to mention the dissenting view offered in the top-secret version by the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR. [A note: this is not unusual. You can look at other declassified versions of old NIEs pre-9/11 and pre-Bush and see the same language. And from what I’ve seen of unclassified NIEs, the specific agencies are never mentioned by name. So while the article is hinting at something untoward, I don’t think that’s the case.]…

But while top U.S. officials may have been told of differences among analysts, those disputes were kept from the American public in key areas, including whether Saddam was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and whether he might dispatch poison-spraying robot aircraft to attack the United States.

Both documents have been available to the public for months. The CIA released the public version, titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," in October 2002, when the Bush administration was making its case for war. The White House declassified and released portions of the NIE's key findings in July 2003.

Knight Ridder compared the documents in light of Tenet's speech and continuing controversy over the intelligence that President Bush used to justify the invasion last April. There are currently seven separate official inquiries into the issue.

What that comparison showed is that while the top-secret version delivered to Bush, his top lieutenants and Congress was heavily qualified with caveats about some of its most important conclusions about Iraq's illicit weapons programs, those caveats were omitted from the public version.

The caveats included the phases "we judge that," "we assess that" and "we lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs."

These phrases, according to current and former intelligence officials, long have been used in intelligence reports to stress an absence of hard information and underscore that judgments are extrapolations or estimates.

[4:22 PM] Everyone’s playing the “what should Tim Russert ask GWB on Meet the Press” this Sunday game. Lot’s of questions regarding National Guard service and missing WMD are being thrown around. I fully expect Russert to go very easy on Bush, Bush to give incoherent and non-responsive answers, and I expect there will be a lot of my least favorite Bush tactic: answering a completely different question (at least just give me some related spin) and acting as if he just delivered the Gettysburg Address. For what it’s worth here is my one and only suggested question:

Mr. President, Jack Kennedy, a true war hero and Cold Warrior, got bad, misleading and arguably deceitful intelligence as he presided over a botched invasion attempt of Cuba. He took full responsibility for that. He later stood toe to toe with the Soviets over missiles in Cuba while the world came perilously close to nuclear war. During his 1,000 days in office, some good and some bad, he held 66 solo press conferences. In three years in office you’ve held 11. Why is this? Why are you reluctant to answer unscripted questions from the media? If we are facing a crucial point in our nation’s history and are a country at war, why will you not talk to the American people through the media more often? Jack Kennedy’s 66 press conferences in 1,000 days is a rate of a press conference around every two weeks. Will you commit here and now from this day forward to holding a news conference at least every two weeks while troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan and at least once a month once troops leave both of those countries for however long you are in office? If not, why not?

[11:38 AM] David Kay, Joseph Cirincione, Rose Gottemoeller, Robert Litwak, and Janne Nolan examined global proliferation strategies at the Carnegie Endowment the other day. Click here to see a transcript of the event.

[5:50 PM] This certainly isn’t a Democratic Party talking point, nor should it be, but if the administration is going to shift Iraq war rationales from WMD to “Saddam was a bad guy” we ought to then be asking: Who is next Mr. President? Burma? The Democratic Republic of Congo? Of course the U.S. has no strategic interests in either of these states or in a number of places under the rule of brutal dictators. But if the White House is going to so effortlessly shift rationales for war from security risks to humanitarian reasons – and of course this has nothing to do with oil (of course it does, but I consider that a legitimate U.S. security interest) – then this is a legitimate question to ask.

[5:22 PM] Call it lack of imagination. Perhaps it won’t lead to Islamist radicals. But why are we just finding out about this now?

The FBI said today that a letter containing a vial of the poison ricin was mailed in November to the White House. That disclosure followed an announcement by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist that authorities have confirmed the white powder found in a Senate office building yesterday was ricin.

The White House incident had been kept secret until now.

The cynic in me says it’s further example of how this government refuses to really seriously take protecting its citizens from terrorist threats – “We’re at orange alert level, but go about your business.” I suspect however that we would have heard about the White House threat if it the letter had been signed “Allah is great” rather than “Fallen Angel.”

[10:10 PM] Definitely check out Ken Pollack’s piece in the Atlantic (it is now available online). Here’s a lengthy excerpt that gets at a number of issues surrounding analysts being pressured by the administration over Iraq intelligence (something David Kay is pretty much denying happened)

The intelligence community's overestimation of Iraq's WMD capability is only part of the story of why we went to war last year. The other part involves how the Bush Administration handled the intelligence. Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about precisely that. According to them, many Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information or analysis that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq. Many of these officials believed that Saddam Hussein was the source of virtually all the problems in the Middle East and was an imminent danger to the United States because of his perceived possession of weapons of mass destruction and support of terrorism. Many also believed that CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the United States. They believed that the Agency, not the Administration, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias.

Intelligence officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the pre-existing views of senior Administration officials were subjected to barrages of questions and requests for additional information. They were asked to justify their work sentence by sentence…Reportedly, the worst fights were those over sources. The Administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded; instead they were beset with further questions about their own sources.

On many occasions Administration officials' requests for additional information struck the analysts as being made merely to distract them from their primary mission. Some officials asked for extensive historical analyses—a hugely time-consuming undertaking, for which most intelligence analysts are not trained. Requests were constantly made for detailed analyses of newspaper articles that conformed to the views of Administration officials—pieces by conservative newspaper columnists such as Jim Hoagland, William Safire, and George F. Will. These columnists may be highly intelligent men, but they have no claim to superior insight into the workings of Iraq, or to any independent intelligence-collection capabilities.

Of course, no policymaker should accept intelligence estimates unquestioningly…However, at a certain point curiosity and diligence become a form of pressure. If your employer asks you every so often about your health and seems to take an appropriate interest in the answer, you probably feel that he or she is kind and considerate. If your employer asks you about your health every ten minutes, in highly detailed, probing questions, you may have a more nervous reaction.

As Seymour Hersh, among others, has reported, Bush Administration officials also took some actions that arguably crossed the line between rigorous oversight of the intelligence community and an attempt to manipulate intelligence. They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, in order to sift through the information on Iraq themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel "cherry-picked" the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.

Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false. In particular it gave great credence to reports from the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader was the Administration-backed Ahmed Chalabi…

For the most part, the problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of Administration officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for which I cannot hold Administration officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for going to war.

As best I can tell, these officials were guilty not of lying but of creative omission. They discussed only those elements of intelligence estimates that served their cause. This was particularly apparent in regard to the time frame for Iraq's acquisition of a nuclear weapon—the issue that most alarmed the American public and the rest of the world. Remember that the NIE said that Iraq was likely to have a nuclear weapon in five to seven years if it had to produce the fissile material indigenously, and that it might have one in less than a year if it could obtain the material from a foreign source. The intelligence community considered it highly unlikely that Iraq would be able to obtain weapons-grade material from a foreign source; it had been trying to do so for twenty-five years with no luck. However, time after time senior Administration officials discussed only the worst-case, and least likely, scenario, and failed to mention the intelligence community's most likely scenario.

[11:36 AM] George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace writes "Truth be told, I would sleep much better if lying explained how we got the WMD and terrorist threat so wrong in Iraq. Unfortunately, the situation is much worse."

[10:16 AM] Looking over the David Kay's recent Senate testimony, I zeroed in on what he said about the issue of the administration pressuring intelligence analysts to conform their analysis to the administration view on Iraq

I think the aim, and certainly the aim of what I've tried to do since leaving, is not political and certainly not a witch hunt at individuals; it's to try to direct our attention at what I believe is a fundamental fault analysis that we must now examine.

Now, let me take one of the explanations most commonly given. Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.

As a leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections; it's typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies. In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

And never, not in a single case, was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often the limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this; I now see that there's another explanation for it I didn't, and each case was different. But the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that at least to the analysts I dealt with I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to take that position. It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had -- the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.

And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who in fact were exercising that. The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong.

I’ve heard Kay give this analysts came to me to apologize explanation several times. But it doesn’t address a simple possibility—he just hasn’t talked to the specific analysts who may have been pressured. I watched him on Wolf Blitzer this morning give the same story. But clearly some analysts felt pressure.