Investors Business Daily : Time To Declassify 9/11 Probe's Secret Saudi Section

Time To Declassify 9/11 Probe's Secret Saudi Section

December 11, 2013

Foreign Affairs: Congress might soon vote on a proposed bipartisan resolution calling for release of a secret Saudi section of the congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry report. It's about time.

In 2002, President Bush censored 28 pages of the report dealing with foreign sponsorship of the grisly attacks on our nation. Some of the information has leaked out over the years, and it points back to Riyadh.

Now a couple of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion and walked away "absolutely shocked" are demanding the White House make it public. Reps. Walter Jones, R-N.C., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., suggest the conspiracy was much wider than al-Qaida. They say every American deserves to know the truth.

Their resolution, H.R. 428, urges President Obama to declassify the 28-page section that deals with "foreign" sources of support for the 9/11 hijackers.

"The contents of the redacted pages are necessary for a full public understanding of the events and circumstances surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks upon the United States," it states.

"The executive branch's decision to maintain the classified status of these pages prevents the people of the United States from having access to information about the involvement of certain foreign governments in the terrorist attacks," the two-page resolution adds. It stresses that victims' families "deserve answers."

Indeed they do. Relatives have demanded the release of those redacted pages for years. We can't imagine the torture of living under that veil of secrecy. Or the anxiety of not knowing what really happened that day and who was really behind the murder of their loved ones.

The resolution sponsors insist that releasing the information won't violate national security, as the Bush administration claimed when it stepped in and erased it from a congressional report intended for public viewing.

Of course, that doesn't mean it won't hurt foreign relations. The fallout could be both diplomatically and economically damaging. There's also fear that openly punishing a Mideast ally could hurt efforts to box in a nuclear Iran. So the White House and State Department have to weigh these sensitive issues in making a decision.

But we believe it is worth the risks. The American public has a right to know if a foreign government aided the hijackers, whether that support was direct or indirect.

If a presumed ally knew of the plot to attack the very headquarters of the U.S. military, it certainly is no ally. And if there are no penalties for such a monumental betrayal, what message does that send to other nations that seek to do us harm?

Mercury News : Obama advisers: No charges likely vs interrogators

Obama advisers: No charges likely vs interrogators

By LARA JAKES JORDAN | Associated Press Writer | November 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama's incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars and human rights groups to investigate possible war crimes by the Bush administration.

Two Obama advisers said there's little—if any—chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.

The advisers spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are still tentative. A spokesman for Obama's transition team did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Additionally, the question of whether to prosecute may never become an issue if Bush issues pre-emptive pardons to protect those involved.

Obama has committed to reviewing interrogations on al-Qaida and other terror suspects. After he takes office in January, Obama is expected to create a panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission to study interrogations, including those using waterboarding and other tactics that critics call torture. The panel's findings would be used to ensure that future interrogations are undisputedly legal.

"I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture, and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture," Obama said Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes." "Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world."

Obama's most ardent supporters are split on whether he should prosecute Bush officials.

Asked this weekend during a Vermont Public Radio interview if Bush administration officials would face war crimes, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy flatly said, "In the United States, no."

"These things are not going to happen," said Leahy, D-Vt.

Robert Litt, a former top Clinton administration Justice Department prosecutor, said Obama should focus on moving forward with anti-torture policy instead of looking back.

"Both for policy and political reasons, it would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time hauling people up before Congress or before grand juries and going over what went on," Litt said at a Brookings Institution discussion about Obama's legal policy. "To as great of an extent we can say, the last eight years are over, now we can move forward—that would be beneficial both to the country and the president, politically."

But Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy.

"The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it," Ratner said. "I don't see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable."

In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the White House authorized U.S. interrogators to use harsh tactics on captured al-Qaida and Taliban suspects. Bush officials relied on a 2002 Justice Department legal memo to assert that its interrogations did not amount to torture—and therefore did not violate U.S. or international laws. That memo has since been rescinded.

At least three top al-Qaida operatives—including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed—were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003 because of intelligence officials' belief that more attacks were imminent. Waterboarding creates the sensation of drowning, and has been traced back hundreds of years and is condemned by nations worldwide.

Bush could take the issue of criminal charges off the table with one stroke of his pardons pen.

Whether Bush will protect his top aides and interrogators with a pre-emptive pardon—before they are ever charged—has become a hot topic of discussion in legal and political circles in the administration's waning days. White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto declined to comment on the issue.

Under the Constitution, the president's power to issue pardons is absolute and cannot be overruled.

Pre-emptive pardons would be highly controversial, but former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. said it would protect those who were following orders or otherwise trying to protect the nation.

"I know of no one who acted in reckless disregard of U.S. law or international law," said Culvahouse, who served under President Ronald Reagan. "It's just not good for the intelligence community and the defense community to have people in the field, under exigent circumstances, being told these are the rules, to be exposed months and years after the fact to criminal prosecution."

The Federalist Papers discourage presidents from pardoning themselves. It took former President Gerald Ford to clear former President Richard Nixon of wrongdoing in the 1972 Watergate break-in.

WaPo : At U.N., Bush Says Faith Leads to 'Common Values'

At U.N., Bush Says Faith Leads to 'Common Values'

By Dan Eggen and Colum Lynch | Washington Post Staff Writers | November 14, 2008

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 13 -- Employing unusually vivid religious imagery for the secular United Nations, President Bush on Thursday praised the "transformative and uplifting power of faith" and said religious belief "leads us to common values."

Addressing a two-day interfaith conference that has prompted mixed reactions from other leaders, Bush said religious belief "changed my life" and "sustained me through the challenges and joys of my presidency." He also suggested faith can transform relations between nations and cultures.

"One of my core beliefs is that there is an almighty God, and that every man, woman and child on the face of this Earth bears his image," Bush said. ". . . I know many of the leaders gathered in this assembly have been influenced by faith as well. We may profess different creeds and worship in different places, but our faith leads us to common values."

Bush's remarks came on the second day of a gathering championed by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who later met privately with Bush. Abdullah opened the conference Wednesday by calling for moderation in the Middle East, saying that religious differences in the region have "engendered intolerance, causing devastating wars."

Human rights groups assert that the event gives undue credibility to Abdullah even as his country enforces some of the world's harshest restrictions on religious practices. During his address, Bush instead argued that religious faith can bring people together.

The president also emphasized that democratic systems are best suited to encourage tolerance among different faiths. "We strongly encourage nations to understand that religious freedom is the foundation of a healthy and hopeful society," he said.

The conference prompted a sharp exchange between leaders who differed over the proper balance between freedom of speech and respect for religion.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the "cartoon crisis" -- a reference to the satirical Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, first published in 2005 -- was too provocative to be justified by free speech rights. "This freedom should be exercised responsibly," he said.

Norway, Germany and other European governments said they were not prepared to abandon their commitment to free speech as the price of an interfaith dialogue with Islam. "We hold the firm view that freedom of religion cannot be achieved without freedom of speech," said Norway's U.N. ambassador, Morten Wetland.

The more than 70 countries attending the conference issued a declaration affirming "their rejection of the use of religion to justify the killing of innocent people and actions of terrorism, violence and coercion which directly contradict the commitment of all religions to peace, justice and equality."

WaPo : Bush's Overseas Policies Begin Resembling Obama's

Bush's Overseas Policies Begin Resembling Obama's

By Dan Eggen | Washington Post Staff Writer | September 15, 2008

Barack Obama contends that a John McCain presidency would amount to little more than President Bush's third term. But as it turns out, an Obama presidency might look a bit like Bush's second.

On a range of major foreign policy issues over the past year, Bush has pursued strategies and actions very much along the lines of what Sen. Obama has advocated during his presidential race, according to the Illinois Democrat's campaign and many diplomatic and security experts.

The administration has pushed ahead with high-level diplomatic negotiations with Iran and North Korea, agreed to a "time horizon" for a reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq and announced plans last week to shift troops and other resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. U.S. officials also confirmed last week that Bush has formally authorized cross-border raids into Pakistan without that government's approval -- an idea that Obama first endorsed, and was heavily criticized for, last year.

Bush administration officials and aides to Sen. McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee, argue that the developments have little in common with Obama's policies and dismiss any comparison as simplistic and misleading.

But the Obama campaign views the moves as vindication of sorts, arguing that Bush has been forced by the pressure of events to move away from the hard-line policies of his first term and toward a more pragmatic path in his second. When Bush announced the new troop deployments to Afghanistan, for example, Obama said he was "glad that the president is moving in the direction of the policy that I have advocated for years."

Obama aides also say the moves by Bush complicate matters for McCain, who is more hawkish than his opponent on issues including the crisis in Georgia and the war in Iraq.

"What we have here, in many ways, is that a McCain presidency would look a lot like a Bush first term and a move back in that direction," said Rand Beers, who served as a National Security Council staffer in Republican and Democratic administrations and is now an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. "The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don't think is the way he conceived of his campaign."

But Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, accused the Obama campaign of "rank hypocrisy" and said it was "comical" for the Democrat to now claim accord with the Bush administration on some issues. "I find the whole argument relatively amusing, given that they have done nothing but criticize Bush administration foreign policy and now claim that Bush is moving in their direction," Scheunemann said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

McCain has accused Obama of wanting to "lose in Iraq to win in Afghanistan," criticized him for endorsing direct talks with leaders of Iran and other enemies, and repeatedly called Obama "naive" for publicly advocating the Pakistan raids.

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seemed to endorse unilateral raids in Pakistan during an interview last week with ABC News, saying: "We have got to have all options out there on the table." Scheunemann said that Palin's remarks were in line with McCain's views and that McCain's criticism of Obama was focused on his decision to talk publicly about detailed counterterrorism strategies.

The renewed wrangling over foreign policy comes as Obama struggles to convince voters that he is trustworthy on world affairs and seeks to fend off McCain's overall gains in national polls. The Republican nominee has a 17-point lead on the question of which candidate can better handle an unexpected crisis and a double-digit advantage as the one more trusted on international affairs, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week.

McCain and Obama said they approved of Bush's announcement last week that 8,000 troops would be removed from Iraq by early next year while nearly 5,000 troops would be added to Afghanistan by the end of the year. But their interpretations of these events were starkly different.

Obama, although supportive of the shift in focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, criticized the effort as too little and too late. McCain said the withdrawal of troops from Iraq was possible because of the addition of 30,000 troops last year, which the Democrat had opposed. McCain said Obama's "focus is on withdrawal, not on victory."

On the diplomatic front, Obama has made a point of advocating dialogue with Iran as well as Syria, though the McCain campaign accuses him of backing off from a statement that he was prepared to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without conditions. Bush waded into the debate in May during a speech at the Israeli Knesset, when he compared talking with Iran or terrorist groups to the appeasement of Nazi Germany -- a comment widely seen as a swipe at Obama.

Then, in July, Bush sent a high-level U.S. emissary to attend nuclear talks with Iran and authorized Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to join North Korean diplomats at six-party talks about ending that country's nuclear programs. The moves prompted howls from many conservatives but were viewed by the Obama campaign as signs that the Bush administration was moving in its direction.

Another case is Georgia, the small country that was invaded by Russian forces early last month. McCain has been notably harsher in his anti-Moscow rhetoric than Obama and has called for expelling Russia from the Group of Eight major industrialized nations. The Bush administration has not taken that step, but it did announce a $1 billion aid package for Georgia that was similar to a proposal previously made by Obama and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), now Obama's running mate.

"They said it was naive to deal with Pakistan, appeasement to talk to Iran, surrender to withdraw forces from Iraq," said Ben Rhodes, an Obama senior foreign policy adviser. "The rhetoric that greeted all of these proposals from Obama does not square at all with the positions the Bush administration has been forced into in recent months."

But the McCain campaign and many other conservatives dispute the comparisons. One senior Bush administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Obama campaign was using "phony talking points."

McCain aides said the argument that the administration has moved toward Obama's positions appears intended to make their candidate appear more extreme. "There's a huge misconception that the Obama campaign has tried to foster that somehow they're in favor of diplomacy and we're not," Scheunemann said.

Gary Schmitt of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said that the range of issues amounts to "apples and oranges" and that the administration's recent policies have little in common with the Democratic candidate's views. "I don't think they're moving towards Obama's positions at all," he said.

WaPo : Conflict Over Spying Led White House to Brink

Conflict Over Spying Led White House to Brink

By Barton Gellman | Washington Post Staff Writer | September 14, 2008

This is the first of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. Original source notes are denoted in [brackets] throughout.

A burst of ferocity stunned the room into silence. No other word for it: The vice president's attorney was shouting.

"The president doesn't want this! [1] You are not going to see the opinions. You are out . . . of . . . your . . . lane!"

Five government lawyers had gathered around a small conference table in the Justice Department command center. Four were expected. David S. Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, got wind of the meeting and invited himself.

If Addington smelled revolt, he was not far wrong. Unwelcome questions about warrantless domestic surveillance had begun to find their voice.

Cheney and his counsel would struggle for months to quash the legal insurgency. By the time President Bush became aware of it, his No. 2 had stoked dissent into flat-out rebellion. The president would face a dilemma, and the presidency itself a historic test. Cheney would come close to leading them off a cliff, man and office both [2].

On this second Monday in December 2003, Addington's targets were a pair of would-be auditors from the National Security Agency. He had displeasure to spare for their Justice Department hosts.

Perfect example, right here. A couple of NSA bureaucrats breeze in and ask for the most sensitive documents in the building. And Justice wants to tell them, Help yourselves? This was going to be a very short meeting.

Joel Brenner and Vito Potenza, the two men wilting under Addington's wrath, had driven 26 miles from Fort Meade, the NSA's eavesdropping headquarters in Maryland. They were conducting a review of their agency's two-year-old special surveillance operation. They already knew the really secret stuff [3]: The NSA and other services had been unleashed to turn their machinery inward, collecting signals intelligence inside the United States. What the two men didn't know was why the Bush administration believed the program was legal.

It was an awkward question. Potenza, the NSA's acting general counsel, and Brenner, its inspector general, were supposed to be the ones who kept their agency on the straight and narrow. That's what Cheney and their boss, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, told doubters among the very few people who knew what was going on. Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA's top law and ethics officers -- career public servants -- approved and supervised the surveillance program.

That was not exactly true, not without one of those silent asterisks that secretly flip a sentence on its tail. Every 45 days, after Justice Department review, Bush renewed his military order for warrantless eavesdropping. Brenner and Potenza told Hayden that the agency was entitled to rely on those orders [4]. The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief.

But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses [5], which were prepared by John C. Yoo, Addington's close ally in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Now they wanted to read Yoo's opinions for themselves [6].

"This is none of your business!" Addington exploded.

He was massive in his swivel chair, taut and still, potential energy amping up the menace. Addington's pugnacity was not an act. Nothing mattered more, as the vice president and his lawyer saw the world, than these new surveillance tools. Bush had made a decision. Debate could only blow the secret, slow down vital work, or call the president's constitutional prerogatives into question.

The NSA lawyers returned to their car empty-handed.

* * *

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

In an interview, Card said the Executive Office of the President, a formal term that encompassed Bush's staff but not Cheney's, followed strict procedures for handling and securing presidential papers.

"If there were exceptions to that, I'm not aware of them," he said. "If these documents weren't stored the right way or put in the right places or maintained by the right people, I'm not aware of it."

Asked why Addington would write presidential directives, Card said, "David Addington is a very competent lawyer." After a moment he added, "I would consider him a drafter, not the drafter [9]. I'm sure there were a lot of smart people who were involved in helping to look at the language and the law."

Not many, it turned out. Though the president had the formal say over who was "read in" to the domestic surveillance program, Addington controlled the list in practice, according to three officials with personal knowledge. White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales was aware of the program, but was not a careful student of the complex legal questions it raised. In its first 18 months, the only other lawyer who reviewed the program was John Yoo.

By the time the NSA auditors came calling, a new man, Jack L. Goldsmith, was chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Soon after he arrived on Oct. 6, 2003, the vice president's lawyer invited him to EEOB 268. Addington pulled out a folder with classification markings that Goldsmith had never seen [10].

"David Addington was doing all the legal work. All the important documents were kept in his safe [11]," Goldsmith recalled. "He was the one who first briefed me."

Goldsmith's new assignment gave him final word in the executive branch on what was legal and what was not. Addington had cleared him for the post -- "the biggest presence in the room," Goldsmith said, during a job interview ostensibly run by Gonzales.

Goldsmith did not have the looks of a guy who posed a threat to the Bush administration's alpha lawyer. A mild-mannered law professor from the University of Chicago, he was rumpled and self-conscious, easy to underestimate. On first impression, he gave off a misleading aura of softness. Goldsmith had lettered in football, baseball and soccer at the Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., [12] spending his formative years with a mob-connected Teamster who married his mother [13]. He was not a bare-knuckled brawler in Addington's mold, but Goldsmith arrived at Justice with no less confidence and strength of will.

Addington's behavior with the NSA auditors was "a wake-up call for me," Goldsmith said. Cheney and Addington, he came to believe, were gaming the system, using secrecy and intimidation to prevent potential dissenters from conducting an independent review.

"They were geniuses at this," Goldsmith said. "They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want."

Dec. 9, 2003, the day of the visit from Brenner and Potenza, was the beginning of the end of that strategy. The years of easy victory were winding down for Cheney and his staff.

* * *

Goldsmith began a top-to-bottom review of the domestic surveillance program, taking up the work begun by a lawyer named Patrick F. Philbin after John Yoo left the department. Like Yoo and Goldsmith, Philbin had walked the stations of the conservative legal establishment: Federalist Society, a clerkship with U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence H. Silberman, another with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The more questions they asked, the less Goldsmith and Philbin liked the answers. Parts of the program fell easily within the constitutional powers of the commander in chief. Others looked dicier.

The two lawyers worked at the intersection of three complex systems: telecommunications, spy technology, and the statutory regimes that governed surveillance. After a few weeks, Goldsmith said, he decided the program "was the biggest legal mess I'd seen in my life."

He asked for permission to read in Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's new deputy, James B. Comey [14]. As always, he found Addington waiting with Gonzales in the White House counsel's corner office, one floor up from the chief of staff. They sat in parallel wing chairs, much as Bush and Cheney did in the Oval Office.

"The attorney general and I think the deputy attorney general should be read in," Goldsmith said.

Addington replied first.

"Forget it," he said.

"The president insists on strict limitations on access to the program," Gonzales agreed.

Weeks passed. Goldsmith kept asking. Addington kept saying no.

"He always invoked the president, not the vice president," Goldsmith said [15].

Comey was not exactly Mr. Popular at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He had arrived at Justice as a 6-foot-8 golden boy, smooth and polished, with top chops as a federal terrorism prosecutor in Northern Virginia and New York City. Then came Dec. 30, 2003. Comey did something unforgivable: He appointed an independent counsel to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a clandestine CIA officer, a move that would bring no end of grief for Cheney.

In late January, Goldsmith and Addington cut a deal. Comey would get his read-in. Goldsmith would get off the fence about the program, giving his definitive answer by the March 11 deadline.

"You're the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and if you say we cannot do this thing legally, we'll shut it off," Addington told him [16].

Feel free to tell the president that his most important intelligence operation has to stop.

Your call, Jack.

Goldsmith wanted to fix the thing, not stop it. He and Philbin traveled again and again to Fort Meade, each time delving deeper. They were in and out of Gonzales's office, looking for adjustments in the program that would bring it into compliance with the law. The issues were complex and remain classified. Addington bent on nothing, swatting back every idea. Gonzales listened placidly, sipping Diet Cokes from his little refrigerator, encouraging the antagonists to keep things civil.

There would be no easy out, no middle ground. Addington made clear that he did not believe for a moment that Justice would pull the plug.

* * *

Mike Hayden and Vito Potenza drove down from NSA headquarters after lunch on Feb. 19, 2004, to give Jim Comey his first briefing on the program. In the Justice Department's vault-like SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, Hayden got Comey's attention fast.

"I'm so glad you're getting read in, because now I won't be alone at the table when John Kerry is elected president," the NSA director said [17].

The witness table, Hayden meant. Congressional hearing, investigation of some kind. Nothing good. Kerry had the Democratic nomination just about locked up and was leading Bush in national polls. Hardly anyone in the intelligence field believed the next administration would climb as far out on a legal limb as this one had.

"Hayden was all dog-and-pony, and this is probably what happened to those poor folks in Congress, too," Comey told his chief of staff after the briefing. "You think for a second, 'Wow, that's great,' and then if you try actually to explain it back to yourself, you don't get it. You scratch your head afterward and you think, 'What the hell did that guy just tell me?' "

The NSA chief insisted on limiting surveillance to e-mails, phone calls and faxes in which one party was overseas, deflecting arguments from Cheney and Addington that he could just as well collect communications inside the United States.

That was one reason Hayden hated when reporters referred to "domestic surveillance." He made his point with a folksy analogy: He had taken "literally hundreds of domestic flights," he said, and never "landed in Waziristan." That sounded good. But the surveillance statutes said a warrant was required if either end of the conversation was in U.S. territory. The American side of the program -- the domestic surveillance -- was its distinguishing feature.

By the end of February, Goldsmith and Philbin had reached their conclusion: Parts of the surveillance operation had no support in law. Comey was so disturbed that he drove to Langley one evening to compare notes with Scott W. Muller, the general counsel at the CIA. Muller "got it immediately," agreeing with the Goldsmith-Philbin analysis, Comey said.

"At the end of the day, I concluded something I didn't ever think I would conclude, and that is that Pat Philbin and Jack Goldsmith understood this activity much better than Michael Hayden did," he said.

On Thursday, March 4, Comey brought the findings to Ashcroft, conferring for an hour one-on-one. Three senior Justice Department officials said in interviews that Ashcroft gave his full backing. He was not going to sign the next presidential order -- due in one week, March 11 -- unless the White House agreed to a list of required changes.

* * *

A few hours later, Ashcroft was reviewing notes for a news conference in Alexandria when his color changed and he sat down heavily. An aide, Mark Corallo, ducked out and returned to find the attorney general laid out on his back. By nightfall, Ashcroft was taken to George Washington University Medical Center in severe pain, suffering acute gallstone pancreatitis. Comey became acting attorney general on Friday.

The next day -- Saturday, March 6, five days before the March 11 deadline -- Goldsmith brought the Justice Department verdict to the White House. He told Gonzales and Addington for the first time that Justice would not certify the program.

A long silence fell. It lasted three full days.

Gonzales phoned Goldsmith at home before sunrise on Tuesday, March 9, with two days left before the program expired. Obviously there was bad chemistry with Addington. Why not come in and talk, he asked, just the two of us?

Goldsmith arrived at the White House in morning twilight. Alone in his office, Gonzales begged the OLC chief to reconsider. Gonzales tried to dispute Goldsmith's analysis, but he was in over his head. At least let us have more time, he said. Goldsmith said he couldn't do that.

The time had come for the vice president to step in. Proxies were not getting the job done. Cheney was going to have to take hold of this thing himself.

Even now, after months of debate, Cheney did not enlist the president. Bush was across the river in Arlington, commending the winners of the Malcolm Baldrige awards for quality improvement in private industry [18]. Campaign season had come already, and the president was doing a lot of that kind of thing. That week he had a fundraiser in Dallas, a "Bush-Cheney 2004 event" in Santa Clara, Calif., and a meet-and-greet at a rodeo in Houston.

Soon after hearing what had happened between Goldsmith and Gonzales, the vice president asked Andy Card to set up a meeting at noon with Mike Hayden, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, and John McLaughlin from the CIA (substituting for his boss, George J. Tenet). Cheney spoke to them in Card's office, the door closed.

Four hours later, at 4 p.m., the same cast reconvened. This time the Justice contingent was invited. Comey, Goldsmith and Philbin found the titans of the intelligence establishment lined up, a bunch of grave-faced analysts behind them for added mass. The spy chiefs brought no lawyers. The law was not the point. This meeting, described by officials with access to two sets of contemporaneous notes, was about telling Justice to set its qualms aside.

The staging had been arranged for maximum impact. Cheney sat at the head of Card's rectangular table, pivoting left to face the acting attorney general. The two men were close enough to touch. Card sat grimly at Cheney's right, directly across from Comey. There was plenty of eye contact all around.

This program, Cheney said, was vital. Turning it off would leave us blind. Hayden, the NSA chief, pitched in: Even if the program had yet to produce blockbuster results, it was the only real hope of discovering sleeper agents before they could act.

"How can you possibly be reversing course on something of this importance after all this time?" Cheney asked [19].

Comey held his ground. The program had to operate within the law. The Justice Department knew a lot more now than it had before, and Ashcroft and Comey had reached this decision together.

"I will accept for purposes of discussion that it is as valuable as you say it is," Comey said. "That only makes this more painful. It doesn't change the analysis. If I can't find a lawful basis for something, your telling me you really, really need to do it doesn't help me."

"Others see it differently," Cheney said.

There was only one of those, really. John Yoo had been out of the picture for nearly a year. It was all Addington.

"The analysis is flawed, in fact facially flawed," Comey said. "No lawyer reading that could reasonably rely on it."

Gonzales said nothing. Addington stood by the window, over Cheney's shoulder. He had heard a bellyful.

"Well, I'm a lawyer and I did," Addington said, glaring at Comey.

"No good lawyer," Comey said [20].

In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Addington started disputing the particulars. Now he was on Jack Goldsmith's turf. From across the room the head of the Office of Legal Counsel jumped in. And right there in front of the big guys, the two of them bickered in the snarly tones of a couple who knew all of each other's lines.

* * *

As the sun went down on Tuesday, March 9, the president of the United States had yet to learn that his Justice Department was heading off the rails. A train wreck was coming, but Cheney wanted to handle it. Neither Card nor Gonzales was in the habit of telling him no.

"I don't think it would be appropriate for the president to be engaged in the to-and-fro until it is, you know, penultimate," Card said in a recent interview [21]. "I guess the definition of 'penultimate' could vary from four steps to three steps to two steps to one step. That's why you have White House counsel and people who do the legal work."

Participants in the afternoon meeting, including some of Cheney's recruits, left the room shaken. Mueller worked for the attorney general, and the FBI's central mission was to "uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States." Hayden's neck, and his agency, were on the line. The NSA director believed in the program, believed he was doing the right thing. But keep on going when the Justice Department said no?

Early the next morning -- Wednesday, March 10, with 24 hours to deadline -- Hayden was back in the White House. One colleague saw him conferring in worried whispers with Homeland Security adviser John A. Gordon, a mentor and fellow Air Force general, much the senior of the two. They huddled in the West Wing lobby, Hayden on a love seat and Gordon in a chair [22].

Jim Comey was in the White House that morning, too, arriving early for the president's regular 8:30 terrorism brief. He had heard nothing since the discouraging meeting the day before.

Comey found Frances Fragos Townsend, an old friend, waiting just outside the Oval Office, standing by the appointment secretary's desk. She was Bush's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism. Comey had known her since their days as New York mob prosecutors in the 1980s. Since then, Townsend had run the Justice Department's intelligence office. She lived and breathed surveillance law.

Comey took a chance. He pulled her back out to the hallway between the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room.

"If I say a word, would you tell me whether you recognize it?" he asked quietly.

He did. She didn't. The program's classified code name left her blank. Comey tried to talk around the subject.

"I think this is something I am not a part of," Townsend said [23]. "I can't have this conversation." Like John Gordon and deputy national security adviser Steven J. Hadley and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, she was out of the loop [24].

Oh, God, Comey remembers thinking. They've held this so tight. Even Fran Townsend. The president's counterterrorism adviser is not read in? Comey towered over his diminutive friend. He chose his words carefully.

"I need to know," he said, "whether your boss recognizes that word, and whether she's read in on a particular program. Because we had a meeting here yesterday on that topic that I would have expected her to be at."

He meant national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Comey was hoping for an ally, or maybe rescue.

"I felt very alone, with some justification," Comey recalled. "The attorney general is in intensive care. There's a train coming down the tracks that's about to run me and my career and the Department of Justice over. I was exploring every way to get off the tracks I could."

Townsend had a pretty good guess about what was on Comey's mind. Cheney had kept her out of the loop, but it was hard to hide a warrantless domestic surveillance program completely from the president's chief terrorism adviser.

"I'm not the right person to talk to," she told her friend, her voice close to a whisper. Comey ought to go see Rice.

"I'm going to tell her you've got concerns," Townsend said.

Comey's concerns no longer interested Cheney. The vice president had tried to back him down. That didn't work.

Only one day remained before the surveillance program expired. Time for Cheney to take the fight somewhere else.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. Tomorrow: Bush's dilemma.

WaPo : Bush Begins Beijing Visit as China Rebukes His Rights Speech

Bush Begins Beijing Visit as China Rebukes His Rights Speech

By Michael Abramowitz and Debbi Wilgoren | Washington Post Staff Writers | August 7, 2008

President Bush arrived in Beijing late today to begin his Olympics visit, even as the Chinese government reminded the world that it opposes interference from other countries on human rights issues. The stern warning from the Foreign Ministry came a day after Bush spoke out in Bangkok against China's detention of political dissidents and religious activists.

"We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential," Bush said. "We press for openness and justice, not to impose our beliefs but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs . . .

"The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings."

Hours later, China issued a statement saying its relations with the United States "has developed steadily in the last few years" and praising bilateral communication and cooperation between the two countries.

"As for the divergence on human rights and religions, we always advocate that both sides talk from a basis of mutual respect and equality, to enhance understanding and diminish divergence, and enlarge mutual consensus," the statement said, according to a translation provided by the Associated Press.

"We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues."

Many human rights groups have criticized Bush for his decision to attend the Games and for what they call his unwillingness to confront Beijing over a crackdown on dissent and new Internet restrictions in the run-up to the Olympics. The advocates have pressed Bush to make a stronger statement while in Beijing about China's human rights practices or to meet with dissidents. But both scenarios appear unlikely. Bush has said he is going to the Olympics to cheer on U.S. athletes and to show his "respect" for the Chinese people.

Sophie Richardson, who monitors Asia for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mail that it is "absurd to try to sustain the claim that America's policies are principled while then effectively standing back and saying, 'We will watch from the sidelines while the Chinese do what they do.' " She said it is a "diplomatic travesty" for Bush not to meet with dissidents in Beijing or insist on a nationally broadcast speech on a free press or other issues.

Still, the president's comments, delivered in Thailand several hours before he left for Beijing, included stronger language than he had previously used in the buildup to the Olympics, including a statement that "America stands in firm opposition" to China's policy of detaining those who speak out against its policies. In Beijing, meanwhile, protesters continued to evade Chinese security efforts and take advantage of he Olympics spotlight to make their views known.

Even before Bush's speech, the Chinese government had bristled over Bush's decision to meet in the United States last week with five Chinese human rights activists.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president chose to make the comments this morning as part of a larger assessment of U.S. relations with Asia.

"This speech puts together what the president has been saying for 7 1/2 years but does it in a very focused way," she said. Perino said China "is one of the most important relationships that we have in the United States, and the speech is being given on the eve of his trip there. So he thought it was appropriate to talk about it at this point."

Bush divided his time yesterday between South Korea and Thailand, two close U.S. allies in the region. He spent the first part of the day in Seoul, where he held meetings and ate a lunch of American beef filet and Korean short ribs with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who has faced severe political problems after clearing the way for importing U.S. beef, which many South Koreans worry may carry mad cow disease.

A major focus of their talks was continuing efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The United States recently agreed to take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism, as part of a deal in which the communist state would disable its main nuclear facility.

At a news conference with Lee, Bush said North Korea will not be removed from the list unless leader Kim Jong Il agrees to a plan to verify that it is disarming. Monday is the first day North Korea could be removed from the list, after a 45-day congressional review period expires, but Pyongyang has yet to come up with a plan acceptable to the United States and its allies, according to U.S. officials.

"We'll see," Bush told reporters. "It's his choice to make as to whether or not he comes off the list."

After a quick trip to rally with troops at the U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan, Bush flew to Thailand, where he held talks yesterday evening with Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej. Bush also highlighted the cause of Burmese freedom by meeting with Burmese dissidents. First lady Laura Bush toured the Mae La refugee camp Thursday morning on the Thai-Burmese border, and called on Burmese strongman Tan Shwe to begin "dialogues" with opposition figures.

Even some of President Bush's critics regard U.S. policies on Asia as a relative bright spot in his foreign policy legacy: Bush -- now on his ninth trip to Asia -- and his aides have spent much time cultivating better relationships with Japan and India while engaging China on trade, currency exchange rates and security concerns such as North Korea. Polls suggest that the U.S. standing in Asia is higher than in the rest of the world.

"The administration has improved relations with China and strengthened the alliance with Japan at the same time, which is kind of gravity-defying," said Michael Green, a former Bush aide who follows Asian affairs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

A considerable part of the Bangkok speech was devoted to China, which Bush said he has found fascinating since first visiting his father there in 1975, when George H.W. Bush was serving as the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing.

"We are making it clear to China that being a global economic leader carries with it the duty to act responsibly on matters from energy to the environment to development in Africa," Bush said.

Bush also took credit for a calming of tensions in the Taiwan Strait, after pressing both Beijing and Taipei not to disturb the status quo -- meaning no Chinese military attack and no declaration of independence by Taiwan. Bush's policy has disturbed many of Taiwan's U.S. allies, who have complained that a de facto U.S. arms freeze is hindering Taiwan's efforts to cope with a resurgent Chinese military.

Bush said a "constructive relationship" on such issues has placed "America in a better position to be honest and direct on other issues," including human rights and religious freedom. "Ultimately, only China can decide what course it will follow," he said. "It will be clear for all to see that those who aspire to speak their conscience and worship their god are no threat to the future of China."

Abramowitz reported from Bangkok; Wilgoren reported from Washington.

NY Daily News : FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK | DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU | August 2, 2008

WASHINGTON - In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

"They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, "There may be some possible link" to Bin Laden, adding, "I wouldn't put it past him." Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden's henchmen were trained "how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together."

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. "Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with," the ex-FBI official said. "They couldn't go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next."

jmeek@nydailynews.com

Bangor Daily News : Anti-war protesters target Bush in Maine

Anti-war protesters target Bush in Maine

By The Associated Press | August 2, 2008

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine - The scene played out Saturday for what could be the last time: a sitting president visited Walker’s Point, tourists held out hope of getting a glimpse of the president, and a group of noisy protesters paraded through the heart of town.

President Bush kept a low profile as 50 to 60 anti-war demonstrators marched to a police checkpoint less than a half-mile from his parents’ seaside home. The group chanted "Hands off Iran!" and "Jail to the Chief!" as tourists in this seaside community paused to gawk.

Within sight of Walker’s Point, peace activist Laurie Dobson called for a moment of silence "for all the people this man has killed in his two terms in office." Then Carlos Arredondo spoke of the loss of his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo, who was killed in Iraq on Aug. 25, 2004.

Then the group turned away.

For his part, Bush was making preparations for a wedding. A white tent was set up on the Walker’s Point property for the reception for two White House staffers, one of them a distant Bush cousin. Offshore, a Coast Guard cutter and several smaller patrol boats stood watch.

The number of demonstrators who set out on the 2-mile march under overcast skies was far fewer than the 1,700 who gathered last summer when Bush met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The noisy march was organized by the Kennebunks Peace Department and coincided with a series of "Hands Off Iran" demonstrations over the weekend.

Heading up the parade was a "Hands Off Iran" banner and a giant dove made from white bed sheets that was held aloft by demonstrators. Arredondo drove a pickup truck with a coffin in the back. Behind the truck, in a trailer, were empty boots, crutches and a walker in a nod to wounded veterans.

Some motorists honked their horns in support, but others honked their horns in frustration as the group made its way down Ocean Avenue past stores and inns.

Mike McKinley, a Texan who was in town for the wedding, said the family should be able to enjoy the day without the interference of protesters. "They should be able to enjoy their privacy and enjoy the celebration," he said as the protesters marched nearby.

Others, like Harold Beelte and Britta Hildebrand, visiting from Germany, enjoyed the opportunity to see U.S.-style democracy in action.

"You can call it a bonus," said Beelte as the two stopped their bikes to snap a photo of the demonstrators making their way down Ocean Avenue.

While in Kennebunkport, Bush usually goes fishing with his father but the weather wasn’t cooperating over the weekend. He did get in at least one mountain bike ride, though.

There’s talk that this could be Bush’s last visit before he leaves office in January. But a White House spokeswoman said she wasn’t certain.

Some Kennebunkport residents will he happy to see the circus-style atmosphere surrounding presidential visits come to an end. But most people don’t mind. The former president, George H.W. Bush, and his wife Barbara, are well liked and freely go about their business.

Their three-story, stone-and-shingle home overlooking the ocean at Walker’s Point has been in the family since the turn of the century.

Dawn Patten, who runs Patten’s Berry Farm, behind the Cape Arundel Golf Club, said she’s happy to see the younger Bush visiting his parents.

She didn’t have kind words for the protesters, though.

"It’s outrageous. He comes to town for two or three days and people harass him while he’s here. I don’t think it’s right," Patten said.

Robert Fischer, owner of Mabel’s Lobster Claw Restaurant, which was along the parade route, said he supports both the president and people’s right to gather.

"I’m glad that they can protest. I don’t expect everyone to agree on every issue. Luckily, in this country, everyone has the right to protest," said Fischer, who serves up an occasional coffee-flavored ice cream cone to the former President Bush.

WaPo : Bush Chooses What to Believe

Bush Chooses What to Believe

By Dan Froomkin | Special to washingtonpost.com | January 14, 2008

President Bush has apparently found a way to reconcile his bellicose views of Iran with the recent National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program four years ago.

Michael Hirsh writes for Newsweek that "in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. 'He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views' about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity. . . .

"A source close to the Israeli leader said Bush first briefed Olmert about the intelligence estimate a week before it was published, during talks in Washington that preceded the Annapolis peace conference in November. According to the source, who also refused to be named discussing the issue, Bush told Olmert he was uncomfortable with the findings and seemed almost apologetic."
Bush's Fresh Round of Sabre Rattling

Michael Abramowitz writes in the Washington Post from Abu Dhabi: "President Bush on Sunday accused Iran of undermining peace in Lebanon, funding terrorist groups, trying to intimidate its neighbors and refusing to be open about its nuclear program and ambitions.

"In a speech described by the White House as the centerpiece of his eight-day trip to the Middle East, Bush urged other countries to help the United States 'confront this danger before it is too late.'. . .

"Bush is trying to persuade Arab countries to join U.S. efforts to pressure Iran, though many appear ambivalent about the administration's campaign following a new U.S. intelligence report that concluded Iran stopped a nuclear weapons program in 2003."

About That NIE

Jay Solomon and Siobhan Gorman write in the Wall Street Journal: "The December report by the U.S.'s top spy office stating Iran had abandoned its effort to build nuclear weapons was one of the biggest U-turns in the recent history of U.S. intelligence.

"Behind the scenes in Washington, it marked a reversal of a different sort: After years in which Bush appointees and White House staff won out on foreign-policy matters, career staffers in the intelligence world had scored a big victory. . . .

"In the case of the Iran report, the about-face was made possible in part by a 2004 restructuring that gave intelligence chiefs more autonomy."

Solomon and Gorman write that the result of "new procedures for vetting and authenticating reports" was that "the White House was essentially locked out of the process. This marked a big change from the years leading up to the Iraq war, when Mr. Cheney and his top aide, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, made repeated visits to Langley to query analysts about their findings on Iraq's weapons capabilities.

"Through the summer and fall of 2007, as rumors leaked, officials in Mr. Cheney's office and on Capitol Hill grew increasingly concerned about the report's possible conclusions, according to people working at the White House and on Capitol Hill. . . .

"People in Vice President Cheney's office saw the Dec. 3 announcement as a death blow to their Iran policy. The report's authors 'knew how to pull the rug out from under us,' says a long-time aide to the vice president, referring to the way the key judgments were presented."

Cheney's Options

But what if Cheney is still intent on taking military action against Iran before leaving office? (See, for instance, my June 4 column, Cheney, By Proxy, or my Aug. 10 column, Cheney's Secret Escalation Plan?)

With the nuclear argument diminished, he could push for an attack in response to some other Iranian provocation -- real or embellished. Or he could get Israel to make the move.
Provocation Watch

Twice last week, Bush criticized an encounter between three enormous U.S. warships and five tiny Iranian motorboats as provocative and warned of "serious consequences" if it happens again. But the U.S. version of events continues to unravel.

Andrew Scutro and David Brown write in the Navy Times: "The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the 'Filipino Monkey.'"

And Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson write in The Washington Post: "The small, boxlike objects dropped in the water by Iranian boats as they approached U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday posed no threat to the American vessels, U.S. officials said yesterday, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the incident reflects Iran's new tactics of asymmetric warfare."

Emboldened Israel

And there's certainly no sign that Bush tried to dissuade the Israelis from attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. Quite the contrary.

Amnon Meranda writes for Yedioth Aharonot: "Israel will not accept a nuclear Iran and all options are being considered in this regard, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday during a meeting of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. . . .

"'Despite what has been said in the US National Intelligence Estimate, Iran was a danger and continues to be a danger. There is room to act in order to remove this danger, and the US is definitely aware of this,' the prime minister said Sunday during the weekly cabinet meeting. . . .

"According to Olmert, although the US intelligence report concludes that Iran had halted its nuclear program, 'Our conclusions are not necessarily similar to what may be understood from the report's wording.

"'As far as Israel is concerned, the Iranians are continuing their efforts to create unconventional abilities, and we must therefore use all means to stop them.'

"The prime minister added that he had discussed the issue with President Bush. 'He too said, in the sharpest way, that Iran was and still is a danger in terms of its desire to create nuclear abilities, and this is where the conclusion on what should be done is derived from.. . . .

"'I made it clear that Israel would not be able to accept a nuclear Iran, and there is no option being rejected in advance. Anything that could lead to the prevention of Iran's nuclearization is part of the legitimate context of dealing with the issue,' Olmert said."

Bush's Democracy Talk

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post about "the sharp disappointment with Bush among democracy advocates and dissidents in the region, who were buoyed by Bush's clarion call in 2005 for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. They say the White House has backtracked because of a need to cultivate an alliance against Iran with the region's autocratic leaders and, perhaps, because elections in the Palestinian territories did not go the way it had wanted."

Bush is ostensibly placing the promotion of democracy and freedom at the top of his agenda as he makes his way through the Middle East. Writes Abramowitz: "At every stop, from Jerusalem and Ramallah to Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, Bush has discussed the issue, although he has done so with politeness and courtesy to his hosts in a region where most of the countries practice some form of monarchy, or rule of one."

In his speech in Abu Dhabi yesterday, Bush described the promotion of freedom as a key pillar of U.S. foreign policy and asserted that "stability can only come through a free and just Middle East."

But, writes Abramowitz: "The reaction in the region to Bush's speech appeared at best mixed, if cynical in some quarters, owing to a widespread belief that the president has practiced a double standard in refusing to recognize Hamas, the armed Islamic movement that won free elections in the Palestinian territories before seizing power in the Gaza Strip last summer. The U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist group.

"Many activists, meanwhile, say they believe the White House has flinched from aggressively challenging Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. . . .

"Oraib al-Rantawi, director of the Al-Quds Center for Political Studies in Amman, Jordan, said reformers have lost faith in the White House, while governments in the region believe they can crack down on the opposition without fear of a stern reaction from the administration.

"'Nobody believes anymore what Mr. Bush is saying,' he said."

Hannah Allam writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "Bush appears unlikely, based on the regional reaction to his address, to find many Arabs to heed his alarms against Iran, a powerful neighbor and trading partner. Nor did many endorse his speech's other theme -- a vision of 'free and just society' featuring broad political participation and a voice for moderate Muslims in a region where money and family are common keys to leadership.

"Even political analysts here who share Bush's democratic vision said that his speech painted over the daily reality for most inhabitants of the Middle East, an oil-rich region where power is largely inherited and human rights violations abound.

"Whether chastising Iran or praising Palestinian elections, analysts said, Bush left out key facts that would have offered a messier -- and more true-to-life -- portrait of the modern Middle East. . . .

"'You have all types of contradictions,' [Manar Shorbagy, an associate professor who teaches a course on U.S. politics at the American University in Cairo] said. 'Talking about freedom when you're occupying two countries in the region: Afghanistan and Iraq. Talking about justice while you're against the (Palestinian) right of return. Talking about democracy while you're against elected groups you don't like. . . . Was he listening to himself?'"
What Bush Has in Mind for Iraq

In a short interview with David Gregory on Friday, Bush indicated that he intends for U.S. forces to be in Iraq for the long term.

Gregory: "John McCain has been saying on the campaign trail that the American people would accept U.S. troops remaining in Iraq for 100 years. Do you agree with that?"

Bush: "I -- I don't know if 100 years is the right number. That's a long time."

Gregory: "Sort of long-term presence?"

Bush: "It could very well be. But it's going to be on the invitation of the Iraqi government. A long-term presence -- and again, I'm not exactly sure how you would define long-term, but it's --"

Gregory: "Ten years?"

Bush: "Yeah, it could easily be that, absolutely."

The president's cavalier attitude aside, what makes him so confident about what will happen long after he leaves office?

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh writes from Kuwait on Saturday: "In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C.] Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with [Gen. David] Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: 'We're putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington,' he told reporters. 'The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process.' The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush's Iraq coordinator in the White House -- in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

"Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president. . . .

"Last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton urged Bush not to commit to any such agreement without congressional approval. The president said nothing about that on Saturday, but Lute said last fall that the Iraqi agreement would not likely rise to the level of a formal treaty requiring Senate ratification. Even so, it would be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact. . . .

"The upshot is that the next president, Democrat or Republican, is likely to be handed a fait accompli that could well render moot his or her own elaborate withdrawal plans, especially the ones being considered by the two leading Democratic contenders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton."

For background, see my Nov. 27 column, Locking Us Into Iraq?

And here's Bush talking to U.S. troops in Kuwait: "There is no doubt in my mind that we will succeed. There is no doubt in my mind when history was written, the final page will say: Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world; that by doing the hard work now, we can look back and say, the United States of America is more secure, and generations of Americans will be able to live in peace."

Benchmark Watch

At long last, the Iraqi government has met one of the political benchmarks it set for itself more than a year ago. Sort of.

Joshua Partlow and Michael Abramowitz write in The Washington Post: "The Iraqi parliament passed a bill Saturday intended to make it easier for former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to return to government jobs and collect their pensions, a significant achievement for the divided legislature on an issue still regarded with raw emotion by many Iraqis.

"The agreement marks the passage of the first of the legislative benchmarks, a series of goals the U.S. government had once championed but largely ceased advocating publicly after months of delay, frustration and inaction. . . .

"The legislation seeks to redress the first order issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, the controversial decision that drove thousands of Baath Party members from their jobs and alienated them from Iraq's political process. That decision, along with a move to disband the Iraqi army, is widely believed to have fueled the Sunni insurgency that proved so deadly in the following years."

But wait. As Partlow and Abramowitz note: "Although the agreement was widely praised, some Iraqi legislators saw the bill as motivated by the same punitive spirit that they felt guided the initial purge of Hussein's government after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. . . .

"'The problem is that the new leaders have gone in the direction of revenge and vengeance, rather than going into healing those wounds,' said Izzat Shabender, a Shiite who is on the de-Baathification committee in parliament. 'Even if this law is passed, it cannot achieve the goal -- which is opening a new chapter with the Baathists. . . . It's got nothing to do with reconciliation. The culture of reconciliation does not exist in the heads of the Iraqi leaders.'"

Solomon Moore writes in the New York Times: "A day after the Iraqi Parliament passed legislation billed as the first significant political step forward in Iraq after months of deadlock, there were troubling questions -- and troubling silences -- about the measure's actual effects. . . .

"[T]he legislation is at once confusing and controversial, a document riddled with loopholes and caveats to the point that some Sunni and Shiite officials say it could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security ministries.

"Under that interpretation, the law would be directly at odds with the American campaign to draft Sunni Arabs into so-called Awakening militias with the aim of integrating them into the police and military forces."

A Saudi Announcement

Matthew Lee writes for the Associated Press: "The Bush administration will notify Congress on Monday of its intent to sell $20 billion in weapons, including precision-guided bombs, to Saudi Arabia, moving up the announcement to coincide with the president's arrival in Riyadh, The Associated Press has learned.

"Despite concern about the deal from some lawmakers, the State Department, which last month said it would delay the notification until after Congress comes back into session, will announce the proposed sale on Jan. 14, a day before the House returns to work and more than a week before senators return to Washington, said a senior official."

The McConnell Interview

What to make of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell? A 15,000-word story in this week's New Yorker, based on a series of interviews with the normally reticent spy, is full of shocking revelations, but few conclusions.

The Lawrence Wright article is not on the New Yorker Web site yet, but is available here, from the Wall Street Journal Web site.

In it, McConnell describes his goal of an incredibly intrusive surveillance state -- "giving government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search," Wright writes.

"The plan will propose restrictions that are certain to be unpopular. In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. . . . With the cyber-security initiative, McConnell is asking the country to confront a dilemma: Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks, and yet, historically, the government has not proved worthy of that trust. 'FISA reform will be a walk in the park compared to this,' McConnell said. 'This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens."

But, at the same time, Wright subtly demonstrates how McConnell himself isn't to be trusted. His lead anecdote, for instance -- about McConnell using the story of three missing soldiers in Iraq as a case study for the need to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- eventually emerges as an indictment of McConnell's deceit or incompetence.

What's consistently lacking in McConnell's narratives is evidence to support his positions. And nowhere does he get squirrellier than while talking about torture.

"During one conversation, I asked McConnell, 'Have we gotten meaningful information through torture?'

'We don't torture,' he responded automatically.

"'O.K., through aggressive interrogation techniques.'

"'"Aggressive" is your word,' he said. 'Have we gotten meaningful information? You betcha. Tons! Does it save lives? Tons! We've gotten incredible information. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. K.S.M. No. 3. Go pull his testimony. A lot of what we know about Al Qaeda and what we shut down came out of that.'"

But as Wright notes: "The reliability of the confession of Mohammed, who after sustained abuse claimed a role in more than thirty criminal plots, has been widely questioned."

McConnell tells Wright he signed off on the interrogation program. "I asked how he defined torture.

"'There's a history of people making claims that it's not torture if you don't force the failure of a major organ,' McConnell said, referring to the infamous 2002 memo by John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, who argued that an interrogation technique was torture only when it was as painful as organ failure or death.

"'My view is, that's kind of absurd. It's pretty simple. Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?' . . .

"'There are techniques to get the information, and when they get the information it has saved lives,' he said vaguely. 'We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened.'

"Couldn't the information be obtained through other means?

"'No,' McConnell said. 'You can say that absolutely.' He again cited the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. 'He would not have talked to us in a hundred years. Tough guy. Absolutely committed. He had this mental image of himself as a warrior and a martyr. No way he would talk to us.'"

But, as Wright notes: "Among the things that Mohammed confessed to was the murder of Daniel Pearl. And yet few people involved in the investigation of Pearl's death believe that Mohammed had anything to do with the crime; another man, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was convicted of killing Pearl."

McConnell's comments on waterboarding are particularly hard to reconcile.

"'You know what waterboarding is?' he asked. 'You lay somebody on this table, or put them in an inclined position, and put a washcloth over their face, and you just drip water right here' -- he pointed to his nostrils. 'Try it! What happens is, water will go up your nose. And so you will get the sensation of potentially drowning. That's all waterboarding is.'

"I asked if he considered that torture.

"McConnell refused to answer directly, but he said, 'My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.'

"Did waterboarding fit that description?

"Referring to his teen-age days as a lifeguard, he said, 'I know one thing. I'm a water-safety instructor, but I cannot swim without covering my nose. I don't know if it's some deviated septum or mucus membrane, but water just rushes in.' For him, he said, 'waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture.'

"I queried McConnell again, later, about his views on waterboarding, since this exchange seemed to suggest that he personally condemned it. He rejected that interpretation. 'You can do waterboarding lots of different ways,' he said. 'I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning.' That would certainly be torture, he said. The definition didn't seem very different from John Yoo's. The reason that he couldn't be more specific, McConnell said, is that 'if it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.'"

Bling Watch

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post: "When President Bush showed up Sunday to meet United Arab Emirates President Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, he was presented with the biggest bling Secret Service agents said they had ever seen: a giant necklace set with hundreds of rubies, emeralds and other precious stones, holding a medallion that included a hand-painted enamel American flag.

"It was just one example of the kind of lavish wealth on display as Bush makes his way through Persian Gulf countries bursting with oil money.

"The president and his party stayed here Sunday night at the Emirates Palace, a giant Taj Mahal-like hotel that cost more than $3 billion to build. The hotel has a nearly mile-long private beach with sand imported from Algeria. The interior hallways are lined with gold and marble."

Here's a picture of the bling; and one of Bush waving a sword around.

Pool Report Watch

For journalists, going on international trips with Bush is typically not an enviable task. But the Chicago Tribune's Mark Silva blogs about his night at the Emirates Palace: "[M]y room was running somebody 1595 USD a night, and the amenities include a PDA to control all of the entertainment. The NEC flat screen, I am estimating 60 inches. . . .

"Red and yellow rose petals were strewn, or actually arranged on white towels, on the floor of the bathroom, and I was doing my best to navigate around them so as not to spoil the effect. . . .

"However, I have it from a highly credible junior administration official that I was staying in the UAE equivalent of maid's quarters."

Culture Clash

Terence Hunt writes for the Associated Press: "One is a night owl who likes to do business after midnight. The other is an early-to-bed guy who brags about going to sleep around 9:30 p.m. . . .

"One of them is King Abdullah of oil-rich Saudi Arabia. The other is President Bush.

"So what happens when the president comes calling on the king? Call it the battle over bedtime.

"It appears Bush is willing to make some concessions for the king.

"Bush, after a day of meetings in Dubai on Monday, is scheduled to arrive in Saudi Arabia for his first visit to the kingdom. He had an appointment at the palace beginning at 9:05 p.m. -- the time he usually is getting ready for bed.

"The big question is, how long will the president stay?"

From a background briefing with an unidentified senior administration official yesterday:

Q: "The President is kind of an early-to-bed guy -- (laughter) -- and the King likes to stay up late, and the meeting tomorrow starts at 9:00 a.m. What do you think, how long is it going to go?"

Senior Administration Official: "Well, we'll see."

Q: "We have a wager, hence the giggling. (Laughter.)"

Q: "We have a wager. (Laughter.)"

Q: "You think it could go pretty late, though, right? I mean -- (laughter.)"

Senior Administration Official: "You know, this is a matter of great sensitivity and I don't really want to be wading in -- (laughter) -- very significant. But if someone wants to offer me 10 percent on the side, I could see what I could do. (Laughter.)"

[more including live links at the link]

SAAG : Bush, Blair: Their Man In Islamabad

BUSH, BLAIR: THEIR MAN IN ISLAMABAD

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR -- PAPER NO. 109

By B. Raman | August 20, 2006

A hilarious novel by Graham Greene titled "Our Man in Havana" became a best-seller in the 1970s. It was about a mediocre officer of the MI-6, Britain's external intelligence agency, posted to Havana as a punishment for failing to produce any worthwhile intelligence in his career. One day he sends to his headquarters a sensational report, which he claims to have obtained from a mole, about the arrival in Cuba of a highly lethal Soviet missile for use against the US.

2. The MI-6 and the CIA examine the report. There is excitement in both the agencies over this intelligence coup. They inform their respective political leaders. The MI-6's man in Havana is flooded with encomiums.The more the MI-6 asks him for further details of the missile, the more he gets from his mole.

3. One day, the excitement in the MI-6 breaks the ceiling when they receive from their man what he claimed was a copy of the diagram of the missile.The UK Defence Department, the Pentagon and the political leaders of the two countries are informed. The British and American analysts are mystified.The missile, going by the diagram, looks like no other missile the USSR was known to have produced before.Studies are ordered as to how to counter it.

4. One British analyst has a vague feeling that he had seen a similar diagram somewhere before, but he cannot recall when and where.One day the vacuum cleaner in his house goes out of order.He opens it. Hey presto, he finds inside a diagram of the vacuum cleaner. He realises that what their man in Havana had sent as the diagram of a new Soviet missile, was actually the diagram of a vacuum cleaner.

5. There is utter consternation in the MI-6 headquarters. They call their man to London and question him. He admits that he never had a mole in the Cuban security set-up and that he had fabricated all his reports. He got the idea about the new missile while repairing his vacuum cleaner one day.

6. The chief of the MI-6 and his officers ask him to wait outside while they discuss his cheating.The senior officers advise the chief not to admit to the Prime Minister and the CIA that there was no such missile and that their man had made an ass of them.It would destroy the organisation's credibility and that of the chief.

7. They decide to request their man to apply for premature retirement and recommend to the Government that his request be accepted despite his outstanding work. They also decide to recommend him for knighthood for his outstanding performance in Havana. He remains on the records of the MI-6 one of the greatest intelligence operatives produced by the British intelligence.

8. One is reminded of the MI-6's Man in Havana as one watches with amazement the encomiums being showered on President Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan as a stalwart ally in the war against terrorism by President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair despite an avalanche of evidence regarding his duplicity. What is the evidence available against Musharraf so far:

* His reluctance to hand over Omar Sheikh to the Americans for questioning regarding the kidnapping and beheading of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist.

* His continued refusal to hand over A.Q.Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, to the US for interrogation on his links with Iran,Libya,North Korea, Syria, Iraq and Al Qaeda.

* His non-co-operation in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri and other remnants of Al Qaeda, who are now operating from Waziristan in Pakistani territory.

* His reluctance to act against Mulla Mohammed Omar, the Amir, and other leaders and cadres of the Taliban, who are killing Americans, British, Canadians, Afghans and others from their sanctuaries in Pakistani territory.

* His refusal to act against the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and its mother organisation the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD) despite the LET's global ramifications and its links with Al Qaeda.

* His indignant denials of Indian and Afghan allegations regarding the jihadi terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani territory, which continues to encourage terrorism in India and Afghanistan.

* His making a deal with the Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants in Waziristan under which they have agreed to observe a cease-fire inside Waziristan in return for Musharraf's closing his eyes to their raids into Afghan territory

9. And, so on and so on and so on. In spite of all this, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair keep showering praise on Their Man in Islamabad. Their praise shows no sign of stopping despite new evidence of the General's duplicity regarding the alleged plot to blow up 10 US-bound aircraft, the discovery of which was announced dramatically by the British police on August 10, 2006.

10. Musharraf and his officials proclaimed that it was Pakistan, which discovered the plot and alerted the British about it on August 9. They projected Rashid Rauf, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, as the chief co-ordinator of the plot on behalf of the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. What strip-tease they have been playing about Rashid Rauf!

* They said he was arrested while crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan a week before the British announcement.

* Sections of the Pakistani media reported that he was actually arrested in Bahawalpur in southern Punjab on August 8. He had acquired an expensive house there and married the sister-in-law (wife's sister) of Maulana Masood Azhar, the Amir of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which was designated by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation in December,2001.

* After the publication of the report of his arrest in Bahawalpur, the Pakistani officials changed their version. They said they had actually arrested an associate of Rashid Rauf while crossing over into Pakistan from Afghanistan and he led them to Rashid in Bahawalpur. They have not given the name of this associate.

* They said that the entire plot was conceived by the No.3 of Al Qaeda who, according to them, is based in Afghanistan, but they could not give his name except to say he was close to No.2 Zawahiri.

* Then, they said it was actually a son-in-law of Zawahiri, who conceived the plot and tried to use Rashid to have it executed. They gave the name of the so-called son-in-law. When it was pointed out to them that this son-in-law was reported by them earlier this year to have been killed in an American air raid in the Bajaur tribal agency, they have gone silent. Musharraf has advised his agencies not to give any more briefings to the media.

11. Musharraf has suddenly become a stickler for the law. In the past, the Pakistani authorities had informally handed over to the Americans without following the due process of the law Mir Aimal Kansi, Ramzi Yousef, Abu Zubaidah, Ramzi Binalshib, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Abu Faraj al-Libi and many others without informing their courts about their arrests.Abu Faraj was handed over despite the fact that he was the principal accused in the case relating to the plot to kill Musharraf in December,2003.

12. In the case of Rashid Rauf, they are following the entire procedure as laid down in the law. They informed a court of his arrest. They produced him before a magistrate and obtained his remand in police custody for interrogation. They have reportedly requested the British for a formal written application for handing him over so that they can put it up to the Magistrate for orders. A British police team is waiting in Islamabad patiently for an opportunity to question him.

13. Any police would have been anxious to question him as urgently as possible in order to neutralise any other threat before it materialises, but not the British. It is now 10 days since the plot was discovered, but the British are yet to interrogate the so-called principal co-ordinator of it. They are showing remarkable patience.It is like a clip in slow motion from a Charlie Chaplin movie. The whole case relating to Rashid is moving at a pace which would make the proverbial snail look a great sprinter.

14. Rashid Rauf may well go down in history as the terrorist, whom nobody wanted to interrogate. The Pakistanis don't want to interrogate him too much lest their duplicity be exposed.The British and the Americans don't want to be in a hurry to interrogate lest their own gullibility be exposed.Moreover, there is a great danger if it comes out that they again let themselves be taken for a ride by Musharraf.Not only will their credibility be in ruins, but they may even face claims for damages from airline companies and passengers, who incurred losses amounting to billions of dollars as a result of the drama staged by the British police.

15. The only way of avoiding all this is to persist with the drama and to go on showering encomiums and lollipops on Musharraf. It would be dangerous to admit that he was a trickster, who took them for a ride. Better to let him go down in history as the world's greatest warrior against terrorism and as the hero of the discovery of a plot to blow up 10 US-bound planes.

16. They sink or swim with Their Man in Islamabad.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: itschen36@gmail.com )

NYT : Bush Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend

Bush Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG | November 18, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — In the six years since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, joined President Bush in the fight against Al Qaeda, it has been an unlikely partnership: a president intent on promoting democracy and a military commander who seized power in a bloodless coup.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly called Gen. Musharraf “a friend.” In 2003, the president invited the general to Camp David, a presidential perk reserved for the closest of allies. Last year, at the general’s insistence, Mr. Bush risked a trip to Pakistan, jangling the nerves of the Secret Service by spending the night in the country presumed to be home to Osama bin Laden.

But now that the general has defied the White House, suspending Pakistan’s Constitution and imposing martial law, old tensions are flaring anew. Mr. Bush is backing away from the leader he once called a man of “courage and vision,” and critics are asking whether the president misread his Pakistani counterpart.

They said Mr. Bush — an ardent believer in personal diplomacy, who once remarked that he had looked into the eyes of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and had gotten “a sense of his soul” — was taken in by the general, with his fluent English and his promises to hold elections and relinquish military power. They said Mr. Bush looked at General Musharraf and saw a democratic reformer when he should have seen a dictator instead.

“He didn’t ask the hard questions, and frankly, neither did the people working for him,” said Husain Haqqani, an expert on Pakistan at Boston University who has advised two previous Pakistani prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. “They bought the P.R. image of Musharraf as the reasonable general. Bush bought the line — hook, line and sinker.”

White House aides said Mr. Bush is clear-eyed about his pact with the general, a pact that was sealed on a Saturday evening in November 2001, over an intimate dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. They had just met face-to-face for the first time, during a meeting of the United Nations, and, despite past tensions between their countries, an air of cozy familiarity filled the room.

“It was a lovely dinner, very sociable,” said Wendy J. Chamberlin, the former ambassador to Pakistan, who attended. “I wasn’t nervous, because I knew Musharraf and I knew how charming he is, and I could see that they would get along fine. And besides, the mood was exuberant. Musharraf was like a conquering hero, Musharraf had done the right thing. He was the man of the day.”

Today, of course, the general is hardly the man of the day. On Friday, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte — who was the host at the Waldorf dinner as the ambassador to the United Nations then — arrived in Pakistan to press General Musharraf to end Pakistan’s state of emergency. Back in Washington, Mr. Bush was close-mouthed, saying little about the man he once praised as “a courageous leader and friend of the United States.”

The two have spoken just once, on Nov. 7 by telephone, in the two weeks since General Musharraf imposed de facto military rule. Mr. Bush, who initiated the call, termed it “a very frank discussion” — Washington code for a pointed airing of differences.

“My message was very, very plain, very easy to understand,” the president said. “And that is: the United States wants you to have elections as scheduled and take your uniform off.”

The “Bush-Mush relationship,” as some American scholars call it, has always been complicated, more a bond of convenience than a genuine friendship, some experts said. When he was running for office in 2000, Mr. Bush didn’t even know General Musharraf’s name; he couldn’t identify the leader of Pakistan for a reporter’s pop quiz during an interview that was widely replayed on late-night television.

Relations between the nations had been tense over Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions even before Mr. Bush took office, and American aid to Pakistan had been all but cut off. But Sept. 11 threw the United States and Pakistan together. Mr. Bush demanded General Musharraf’s allegiance in pursuing Al Qaeda — and got it. General Musharraf demanded military aid that could help him maintain power — and got it.

Experts in United States-Pakistan relations said General Musharraf has played the union masterfully, by convincing Mr. Bush that he alone can keep Pakistan stable. Kamran Bokhari, an analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence company, who met with General Musharraf in January, said the general views Mr. Bush with some condescension.

“Musharraf thinks that Bush has certain weaknesses that can be manipulated,” Mr. Bokhari said, adding, “I would say that President Musharraf doesn’t think highly of President Bush, but his interests force him to do business with the U.S. president.”

In his autobiography, “In the Line of Fire,” General Musharraf writes glowingly of the trust Mr. Bush placed in him. But he passed up a chance to praise Mr. Bush on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” where he was promoting the book. Mr. Stewart asked who would win a hypothetical contest for mayor of Karachi, Mr. Bush or Mr. bin Laden.

“I think they’ll both lose miserably,” the general replied.

Mr. Bush, by contrast, was “favorably impressed” with General Musharraf, according to Ari Fleischer, the president’s former press secretary. Mr. Fleischer recounted one session where the general had been warned in advance not to ask the president for F-16 fighter jets, because the answer would be no.

“Musharraf brought it up anyway,” Mr. Fleischer said, “and Bush told him the answer is no. But I think Bush liked the fact that he does what he wants to do, and says what’s on his mind.”

Their ties have not always helped General Musharraf; critics in Pakistan have accused him of being a tool of the United States, and derisively call him “Busharraf.” In Washington, Mr. Bush has faced criticism as well, from those who say he should have been tougher on General Musharraf, especially with top Al Qaeda operatives like Osama bin Laden still on the loose.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, said one of Mr. Bush’s biggest mistakes was not pressing General Musharraf to turn over A. Q. Khan, the former chief of Pakistan’s nuclear program, to American interrogators.

“I don’t see that the Bush administration was wrong in 2001 to put its chips on Musharraf, who promised democracy and who promised to take off his uniform, but something has gone very badly wrong,” Mr. Holbrooke said, adding, “The question is, is this because Bush was soft on Musharraf the way he was soft on Putin?”

As the state of emergency drags on, the administration has begun thinking about alternatives to General Musharraf, and is reaching out to generals who might replace him. Mr. Haqqani, the Boston University professor, and Ms. Chamberlin, the former ambassador, said the effort was long overdue.

Mr. Haqqani has been cautioning the administration for years not to “personalize this relationship,” while Ms. Chamberlin said it is a mistake to view General Musharraf as indispensable. “Our relationship with the army and with the people of Pakistan is indispensable,” she said, “but it is not based on one man.”

Yet, having declared General Musharraf a friend and an ally, Mr. Bush is not ready to give up on him. The president places a high premium on loyalty; when top aides like Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, and Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general, disappointed him, he was reluctant to cut them loose. So it is with General Musharraf.

“President Musharraf made a decision the president didn’t agree with,” said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary. “We are disappointed with it, but the president doesn’t want to pre-emptively throw up his hands. He wants to help him get back on track.”