This morning, the Pentagon Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble found that former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith developed, produced, and disseminated “alternative intelligence assessments” to falsely claim that a relationship existed between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Testifying about the report before the Senate Armed Services Committee today, Gimble said Feith’s office “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was making the public case for war at home.

While Feith’s “intelligence” analysis was presented to the White House, Gimble explained that he was unable to determine to what extent the White House used Feith’s false reports. Under questioning from Sen. John Warner (R-VA), Gimble revealed that White House attorneys refused to allow National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to be interviewed:

GIMBLE: Senator, we requested an interview with Mr. Hadley. The lawyers at the National Security Council did not let us interview him. So we requested and were unable to. Frankly, he is not a member of our department, so we don’t have any authority to interview…

WARNER: I understand that. But the simple fact is you made a request, for whatever reason. On counsel’s advice, he declined.

GIMBLE: Right.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) pledged that his committee would pursue both Hadley and Scooter Libby. “We will be talking to witnesses who presented [the Feith analysis] to the Vice President’s Office and to the National Security Council.” Addressing Gimble, Levin said, “So if you would supply us with the names of the people from the Feith office that did make this presentation, we will be interviewing those folks.” Stay tuned.

Digg It!

Earlier this week, both Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace and Defense Secretary Robert Gates disputed the argument that a resolution opposing Bush’s escalation strategy would harm the troops and “embolden” our enemies:

PACE: “There’s no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period”

GATES: “Gates said troops understand members of Congress want to find the best way to win the war. ‘I think they’re sophisticated enough to understand that that’s what the debate’s really about,’ he said.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the Senate’s most ardent escalation supporters, slammed Pace and Gates this morning in the conservative Washington Times:

Sen. Lindsey Graham said he was outraged that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would say U.S. combat forces “understand” politics back home and won’t be disheartened by a symbolic no-confidence vote against the commander in chief.

“It shows a lack of sophistication about how this would play in newspaper headlines throughout the world,” said Mr. Graham, South Carolina Republican.

Instead of concerning himself with newspaper headlines, Sen. Graham should focus on getting the policy in Iraq right.

“According to a congressman’s wife who attended a Republican women’s luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president’s amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: ‘I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.‘”

I asked yesterday what Rudy Giuliani’s awesome national security credentials were supposed to be, and people replied that he seems mean and therefore tough and therefore good. Jonathan Alter makes an important point about this (via K-Drum): As any actual New Yorker should recall, Giuliani’s kind of crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I thought he was a pretty good mayor! I was too young (16, I think) to vote to re-elect Giuliani in 1997, but I’m exactly the sort of liberal New Yorker who he won over during his first term to be able to sweep to a crushing re-election victory.

It’s worth recalling, though, that in his second term he basically went berserk. He’d always had “His ridiculously thin skin and mile-wide mean streak” but in his second term that came to dominate everything. There were two basic directions in which it would have been reasonable to take that term. He could have tried to apply the hard-charging zeal he’d brought to reforming police procedures to some other significant area of urban policy. Alternatively, he could have focused on keeping his policies in place while trying to heal some of the wounds that implementing them caused. Michael Bloomberg has basically managed to do both. Giuliani, in essence, did neither. Instead, he picked a series of bitter-yet-pointless fights that served to reveal both a basic vindictiveness and a fundamental lack of interest in policies outside the realm of law enforcement.

These are not characteristics which, when combined with the gross opportunism we’re now seeing on various cultural issues, are desirable in a president. Also recall his post-9/11 efforts to suspend the City Charter and extend his term in office, adding a dose of power-hunger into the mix.

“The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.” Read the full op-ed.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George Bush’s Catholic outreach coordinator, 54-year-old Deal Hudson, was outed as a sexual predator for taking advantage of a drunken 18-year old while he was a professor. The National Catholic Reporter reported:

According to documents obtained by NCR, Hudson invited a vulnerable freshman undergraduate, Cara Poppas, to join a group of older students for a pre-Lenten “Fat Tuesday” night of partying at a Greenwich Village bar. The night concluded after midnight in Hudson’s Fordham office, where he and the drunken 18-year-old exchanged sexual favors. The fallout would force his resignation from a tenured position at the Jesuit school, cost him $30,000, and derail a promising academic career.

Following the report, Hudson resigned from the Bush campaign, withdrew as a White House adviser, and was forced to step down as publisher of Crisis magazine, a D.C.-based conservative Catholic monthly.

Yet at least one prominent right-wing figure came to Hudson’s defense: the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, who has spent the last several days calling for the heads of two John Edwards bloggers. Donohue ardently defended Hudson in a statement, even invoking the Virgin Mary in downplaying his sexual assault:

In a press release, Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, minimized the charges against Hudson and attempted a joke at the Virgin Mary’s expense. “Effective today,” Donohue wrote, his organization had “a new requirement for all future employees: all candidates must show proof of being immaculately conceived, that is, they must demonstrate that they were conceived without sin.”

The American Spectator reported later, “Responding to complaints, the Catholic League has removed the press release from its website.”

The administration has recently forced at least seven U.S. attorneys to resign. Several of these prosecutors were working on high-profile corruption cases, such as Carol Lam, who successfully investigated the corruption of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham. In their places, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has appointed partisan administration allies.

Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty admitted that the U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Bud Cummins, was pushed out to make way for a “37-year-old protege” of Karl Rove. Initially, the Justice Department tried to claim that Cummins left on his own. Cummins said the matter was “handled poorly” and he was given no explanation for his forced resignation.

According to McNulty’s Senate testimony, the other six were fired for “performance-related” issues. But of those six, two have now spoken out, rebutting McNulty’s empty excuses. They state that the Justice Department never cited poor performance — or gave any explanation at all — as a reason for being pushed out:

Daniel G. Bogden, former U.S. Attorney in Nevada:

“I was told I serve as a presidential appointee. Any further explanation than that, no, I was not giv[en] any explanation or reason for the request to step down. … We’ve done more gun cases, drug cases, gang cases, child exploitation cases, identity theft cases than any office has done in any five year period of time.”

John McKay, former U.S. Attorney in Washington:

McKay said he was called Dec. 7 by Michael A. Battle, head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, who only months before had sent him a congratulatory letter for the laudatory report issued by the Justice Department audit team. He said Battle told him to resign by the end of January. “When I was composed enough to ask him why, he told me he couldn’t answer any of my questions. … He said nothing about performance issues or management or anything else.”

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed back on the Bush administration’s attempts to install unqualified administration allies as U.S. attorneys. It passed legislation repealing a little-noticed provision in the Patriot Act that allows the attorney general to appoint U.S. attorneys for indefinite periods of time.