In response to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, “[I]f the decision has been made to press on with a nuclear weapon — and there are certain things they have not done yet to eventuate that — that this would be based on a cost-benefit analysis. We don’t believe [Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei]‘s made that decision yet.”

After introducing Iran’s cost-benefit analysis, Wyden then pressed Clapper on what factors might inform it:

WYDEN: What could convince them, in your view, that their hold on power is being undermined by their nuclear effort?

CLAPPER: Well, I think a restive population because of economic extremis that the country of Iran is incurring. If you look at the plunging value of the Rial [and] the extremely high unemployment rate in Iran. This, I think, could give rise to resentment and discontent among the populace. And this is not to say there haven’t been other examples of that elsewhere in the region.

Watch the video:

Later in the hearing, Clapper added, “I think they do pay attention to international opinion and what others think of them.”

In his prepared testimony (PDF), Clapper said Iran had shifted to a more aggressive posture against the U.S. — even on U.S. soil, as a foiled alleged plot against the Saudi ambassador in D.C. shows — “in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

For the unfamiliar, John le Carre’s novel and the screen adaptations of it follow George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a dedicated spy and analyst, after his boss and mentor, Control, is disgraced and both leave the agency. In a fiendishly complicated series of events, Smiley returns to root out a mole who has penetrated MI-6—known as the Circus—and to claim Control’s chair from the people who have wrested it from him.

The men Control, and then Smiley, suspect of being the mole are played by a set of British actors so incomparable that the makers of ensemble dreck like New Year’s Eve would weep with shame if they had any upon seeing the roster. Colin Firth is the polished, charming Bill Haydon (who happens to be sleeping with Smiley’s faithless wife); Toby Jones is Percy Alleline, an ambitious climber Bill refers to at one point as “a poisonous dwarf”; David Dencik is Toby Esterhase, a refugee from the Iron Curtain; Ciaran Hands is tough Roy Bland. The team Smiley puts together to assist him includes damaged agent-runner Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch); violent and emotional scalp-hunter Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy); and intermittently disgraced Jerry Westerby (Stephen Graham) and Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke).

Even without the dispiriting quest for the mole, spycraft is, in this world, a rather grim enterprise. “All my boys. All my lovely boys,” reminisces Connie when George comes to visit her at the university where she’s nested after her expulsion from the Circus. “That was a good time.” “That was the war, Connie,” George reminds her. But even though there’s something sick about preferring a hot war to a cold one, Connie’s yearning for clarity makes a certain kind of sense. She’s tougher—and nuttier—than Rose Byrne’s oft-blown off secret agent in X-Men: First Class. “I don’t know about you, George,” she says when her guest arrives, “but I feel seriously under-fucked.” When Percy shuts down her investigation into Poliakof, the Russian cultural attache who is running the mole, it’s done less with the misunderstanding of First Class and with a more active malice. “You’re losing your sense of proportion,” he tells her. “Perhaps it’s time you moved into the real world.” It’s an expulsion from paradise with Percy as little tin God. Connie’s mourning a time when not only were the enemy and the tactics well-defined but when she was valuable and respected. (In a nice touch, we catch a glimpse of graffiti that reads “The Future Is Female” on a dingy London wall in the film’s climactic sequence.)

She’s not the only one. When Smiley recounts a meeting where he tried to turn Karla, the Soviet spymaster who’s placed the mole, it’s with a kind of grubbiness. “The Americans had had him tortured,” he recalls wearily, drunkenly. “No fingernails. It’s incredibly hot.” When he comes down to it, what he tells Karla is not that life is better in Britain, but that it’s time to recognize that both societies are irredeemably flawed. The mole, when he finally confesses, tells Smiley “It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. The West has become so very ugly.” Both heroes and villains are very tired. This is the kind of movie where a middle-aged spy going in for the kill takes off his shoes to avoid making noise, unholsters his gun, and pops an antacid.

Which is not to say these characters don’t feel things, and feel them violently. In the memory of the MI-6 staff Christmas party that frames the movie, we see Control sew the seeds of Percy’s future hatred of him, mocking him over the punch: “Did you mix this? You Calvinistic, penny-pinching Scott! It’ll take us five hours to get drunk on this monkey’s piss.” And we see Smiley’s strings cut at that same party when he discovered Bill and his wife together in a dark room while the rest of the staff sing the Communist InternationaleSoviet national anthem, conducted by a Santa Claus in a Lenin mask. Ricki cries as he describes the Soviet woman he’s fallen in love with and wants brought back for him. “I want a family, thank you,” he tells Smiley. “I don’t want to end up like your lot.”

But like in First Class, it’s the tenderness between men that drives some of the movie’s most emotional sequences—and critical plot points. Control’s firing is the result of a botched operation in Budapest in which agent Jim Prideaux is shot. Most reviews of Tinker, Tailor will single out Gary Oldman’s performance as Smiley, which is indeed remarkable, but for me the career-defining moment may actually be Mark Strong’s turn as Prideaux. Thought to have died in Budapest, Jim was actually tortured and returned to the UK, after which he was exiled from MI-6 to a position as substitute teacher where he impresses his snotty, swotty pupils by killing a bird that invades the classroom and befriends Bill Roach, the terribly vulnerable new boy parked at school after his parents’ divorce. Before setting off for Budapest, Control warned him to “Trust no one, Jim. Especially not in the mainstream.” It’s a warning that seems to apply to both his spy work and his cramped private life, glimpsed in a photograph in Connie’s home of him and Bill Haydon together betraying a closeness more than friendship. When Jim befriends Bill Roach, it’s with a mix of recognition and rue. “You’re a good watcher…us loners always are,” he tells him. And later when Smiley comes to visit, Jim coaches his student in the observation of his strangely still mentor, asking “What’s the matter with him? Doesn’t he like us?”

X-Men: First Class did a beautiful job of communicating what it’s like to have someone recognize—and value—the most secret part of yourself, and the power you can recognize when you have that kind of support. Tinker, Tailor is an extended meditation on emotions that First Class addressed in its final sequence, the emotional tally when that bond is severed or that profound trust is betrayed. It’s a point not confined to the tragedy of Jim’s life: the price of working for the Circus is clear in a scene where Smiley orders one of his helpers to clean up anything in his private life that could be used against him. The man goes home and breaks up with his boyfriend, sitting stricken in his chair as his lover snaps at him “If there’s someone else, you can tell me. I’m a grownup.”

The ending of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of the campiest, most floridly emotional sequences I’ve seen on film all year, set to Julio Iglesias’s rendition of “La Mer,” and jumping from a long-ago Christmas party that includes an exchange of tender, desiring glances with the same power as the opening sequence of Shame; to an assassination; to a private coronation. It’s one of the most surprising, gratifyingly weird things I’ve experienced in a long time, a testament to the value of restraint so when you say you mean it the audience will know you aren’t kidding. And it’s a powerful statement about the casualties of the so-called Cold War, and the price paid by the people who kept it that way.

In one of the most detailed media accounts, the Washington Post describes leaks (some named) that Iran is working on a nuclear trigger that would be necessary for a bomb and that foreign experts helped Iran overcome key hurdles in the 1990s. And the Financial Times writes that the IAEA discovered, thanks to satellite images, a chamber made to contain explosive tests, with a Western diplomat commenting that “There is no smoking gun in the report but a gradual and telling accumulation of evidence of Iran’s intent.”

However, overlooked in much of the attention given to the Iranian nuclear program is that, while the IAEA report is likely to conclusively belie Iran’s claim of a peaceful nuclear energy program by pointing towards developments tied only to weapons, it doesn’t mean that the Iranians are on the verge of testing a nuclear bomb. Instead, it points toward a so-called “breakout capability.” The Central Intelligence Agency defines the term as:

Knowledge, infrastructure, and materiel, which usually lie beneath the threshold of suspicion, but which can be rapidly adapted or reorganized to allow for weaponization processes to be undertaken. Such capabilities require pre-disposed resources and often employ dual-use technology, equipment, or knowledge.

In other words, a “breakout capability” is not the same as an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon, leaving the U.S. and the West some — albeit less and less — room yet to maneuver to avoid what would be a disasterous military adventure to delay Iran’s nuclear program by one to three years.

That assessment still corresponds with comments made earlier this year by the Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. He had this exchange with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI):

LEVIN: Now, relative to Iran, Director Clapper, you mentioned in your statement that you do not, we do not know, talking about the Intelligence Community, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. I read into that that Iran has not made a decision as of this point to restart its nuclear weapons program. Is that correct?

CLAPPER: Yes, sir.

Clapper said he made his claims with “high level of confidence,” and they match up with what press reports indicate is the consensus opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies.

A 2007 U.S. intelligence assessment concluded Iran had halted its weapons program in 2003. While, in the Post today, nuclear expert David Albright said Iran’s “program never really stopped,” the Arms Control Association (ACA) said in a statement to ThinkProgress that “Clapper’s statement is not inconsistent with the notion that some weapons-related [research and development] has resumed which is not part of a determined, integrated weapons-development program of the type that Iran maintained prior to 2003.”

Former top intelligence analyst and now Georgetown professor Paul Pillar told ThinkProgress by email:

Major Iranian decisions still have to be made before Iran produces any nuclear weapon. Such decisions will depend heavily on U.S. and western policies toward Iran — especially how much those policies constitute a threat that Iran must deter, and conversely how much it appears that an improved relationship with the West is possible.

As CAP’s Matt Duss wrote last week, “Beating the diplomacy drums may not be as satisfying to some as beating the other kind, but it remains the most effective way to protect the U.S. and strengthen international resolve toward changing Iran’s behavior.”

It is unacceptable that Iran is on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon while our intelligence analysts continue to deny that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exists.

The accusations would be hilarious if they weren’t so serious. In essence, Fleitz is writing that the consensus of the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies — that Iran has still not made the decision to build a nuclear weapon — should be thrown out and everyone should listen to him.

But Fleitz’s own tenure in government was so plagued by scandal and deeply flawed and biased analysis that it raised hackles from experts worldwide. He espoused a worldview that considers anything insufficiently edgy or hawkish enough “wimpy.” Here are some of Fleitz’s greatest hits:

– Fleitz was a CIA officer who, in 2002, took on a position as reflexive überhawk John Bolton‘s chief of staff, where, wrangling with the intelligence community about Cuba’s (non-existent) biological weapons program, he wrote to his boss that it is a “political judgment as to how to interpret [intelligence] data.”

– Fleitz was also reportedly involved in the leaking of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the media in retaliation for her husband’s public questioning of the Bush administration’s assertions about Iraq’s WMDs. Fleitz worked in the same CIA office as Plame and reportedly passed her name to Bolton, who gave it to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby‘s aides.

– By 2006, Fleitz made his way to the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee as a staffer under then-GOP Chairman Pete Hoekstra. In August of that year, Fleitz authored a report about Iran’s nuclear program that was so overblown that it elicited a letter of complaint about “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated information” from the U.N. atomic watchdog.

Given his record of sloppy analysis, bullying, and close association with some of the Bush administration’s leading hawks, there is a special irony in Fleitz’s complaint in the Journal that the intelligence community is “affected by the wave of risk aversion that has afflicted U.S. intelligence analysis since the 2003 Iraq War.” Perhaps Fleitz was the perfect man to write an op-ed for a paper that’s already more or less called for war with Iran.

Today, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) rejected these assertions. She was asked by a reporter whether the intelligence that led to the killing was the result of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of detainees. She responded:

We are in the process of a big study on the detention and interrogation of the detainees on the Intelligence Committee. The Republicans have pulled out of the study. So this has been carried out by the Democratic staff essentially. They have gone through more than 3 million emails, cables, pieces of paper looking for this.

To date, the answer to your question is no. Nothing has been found to indicate this came out of Guantanamo. And people were questioned, but there were no positive answers as to the identity of this number one courier.

Asked a few minutes later whether she considers the Bin Laden killing any kind of “vindication” of the Bush-era torture program, Feinstein said, “Absolutely not. I do not.” She continued, “I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.” Watch it:

Clapper has held a variety of military positions in his long career, including being an assistant chief of staff for intelligence at the Air Force headquarters in Washington from 1990-1991 and being director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2001-2006. Perhaps his strongest advocate is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told reporters that Clapper has “the temperament, experience and chemistry with leaders in the intelligence community to succeed as the nation’s top intelligence officer.” Gates even went as far as to joke that “when the president first asked me about this, I kind of winced with pain because the idea of losing Jim at the Defense Department is a real loss for us.”

However, the Wall Street Journal reports, “the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, which is responsible for confirming him, have both publicly opposed his appointment, favoring a civilian for the role.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who is the top Democrat, has concerns that Clapper may be “beholden to the Pentagon’s interests.” Meanwhile, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has complained that Clapper has been “evasive and slow to respond to questions and letters from members of the committee.”

Liberal critics are pointing out that Clapper, while serving as the head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, helped assist the Bush administration lie that Iraq possessed illegal weapons of mass destruction. Speaking to reporters in October 2003, Clapper suggested that the illicit weapons had “unquestionably” been moved to Syria:

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material “unquestionably” had been moved out of Iraq. [...]

He said he was providing a personal assessment. But he said “the obvious conclusion one draws” was that there “may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material.” A spokesman for General Clapper’s agency, David Burpee, said he could not provide further evidence to support the general’s statement.

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove cites Clapper’s theory in his book Courage and Consequence to defend claims by the Bush administration that it believed Iraq posed an imminent security threat to the United States.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reports that the White House had asked Clapper to step down from his current Pentagon role before being nominated to ease concerns about his military background. Clapper refused because he “does not want to be out of a job if his confirmation hearing doesn’t go well.”

One person who was in the room for Tuesday’s intelligence briefing said Bond appeared to fall asleep for 10 to 15 minutes, but that he and other senators had spirited exchanges with the briefers. Among those there to answer questions were top officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Justice Department and the National Counterterrorism Center.

As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington’s Embassy Row in 1976, a newly released State Department cable shows. [...]

Discovered in recent weeks by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization, the Sept. 16, 1976 cable is among tens of thousands of declassified State Department documents recently made available to the public. [...]

In the Sept. 16, 1976 cable, the topic of one paragraph is listed as “Operation Condor,” preceded by the words “(KISSINGER, HENRY A.) SUBJECT: ACTIONS TAKEN.” The cable states that “secretary declined to approve message to Montevideo” Uruguay “and has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.”

The fact that this stayed classified for so long is yet another data point for the principle that we have far too much formal government secrecy in the United States. Recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on “transparency” in things like fundraising, earmarks, etc. And that’s all to the good. But the most important powers of the government are the life-and-death powers wielded by the national security establishment and they remain largely shrouded in secrecy. What operational danger would revealing the truth about this cable have created for the United States? It was just a decades-long effort to help Kissinger and the Ford administration evade democratic accountability for their policies.

Sulick followed his lecture with a lengthy question-and-answer session, although he prefaced it by saying he would not comment on any issue that might influence policy. Questions were submitted by Fordham students in advance and read aloud by USG members. When asked if the Obama administration’s ban on waterboarding has had serious consequences on the war against terror, Sulick answered in general terms.

“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about [it from] a legal, moral or ethical standpoint.”

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein writes that Sulick is in charge of “the CIA’s spy handlers, counterspies and covert action specialists — the so-called ‘dirty tricks’ people- — along with some elements of the FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency.” Spencer Ackerman notes that “for the record, it was the Bush administration that actually banned waterboarding after using it to horrific effect, a fact that has caused no end of cognitive dissonance in conservative torture advocates.”

Executive power issues are practically custom-built for hypocrisy and promise-breaking. Thins that look important when someone else is President, especially when that someone else is as loathesome as George W Bush, suddenly look not-so-crucial when the President is you and the executive branch is run by your friends and allies. And Sharon Theimer reports that there’ve been plenty of disappointments in the Obama Era:

Federal agencies haven’t lived up to President Barack Obama’s promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office.

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.

To be fair, some of FY 2009 happened before Obama was inaugurated, so to get a totally fair comparison we’ll need to wait for the FY 2010 data. Meanwhile, Obama is threatening to veto an intelligence authorization bill over two oversight-related issues. One is that they don’t like “a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities.” In other words, they want to keep congressional oversight of covert ops toothless. The other issue has to do with an investigation of the investigation into the anthrax attacks. I’m not at all familiar with this issue, but Marcy Wheeler has a brief explanation of it.

This morning on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta noted that intelligence agents have skillfully secured the cooperation of Abdulmuttalab’s family. Because his family was assured that Abdulmuttalab was not being tortured, they worked with the FBI to convince the terrorist to talk. Abdulmuttalab then provided intelligence, some of which was apparently used to capture terrorists in Malaysia.

“I think you can huff and puff as former Governor Palin likes to do, but the proof’s in the pudding — he’s talking, they’ve gotten actionable intelligence, they’re acting on it,” Podesta said. When conservative pundit Peggy Noonan complained that the administration shouldn’t have told the public that Abdulmuttalab was cooperating, Podesta suggested disclosure may not have been necessary if political leaders like McConnell weren’t criticizing intelligence agents:

PODESTA: Maybe if all those politicians stopped attacking the FBI – Mitch McConnell likened the FBI to a Larry King interview – maybe if they stopped with the politics –

RUTH MARCUS: Now that’s cruel.

PODESTA: Well, no, I think he owes the FBI an apology. But if they’d stop with the politics, maybe they wouldn’t have to respond.

Watch it:

Later, Podesta defended the FBI: “I tend to listen to the professionals, and other people tend to listen to Governor Palin.”

He also referenced Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) “blanket hold” on Obama’s 70 executive nominees — two of whom include the head of the State Department intelligence official and the Homeland Security intelligence official. “What gives here?” Podesta asked. “Are these people serious or are they just playing politics?

Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, was cautiously optimistic about Obama’s move, saying that while it depended on the implementation, “there are some real innovations here” that represent “a major step forward” towards rolling back government secrecy. Obama’s establishment of new National Declassification Center at the National Archives is expected to speed the declassification of “more than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents” that are currently backlogged.

The suspect reportedly had explosive powder taped to his leg and tried to light it on fire. He told investigators he was given the device by al Qaeda operatives in Yemen. “This guy claims he is tied to al Qaeda, specifically in Yemen,” the official said. “He claims he was on orders from al Qaeda in Yemen. Who knows if that’s true?”

Two passengers aboard the plane noticed the attempted attack, and “a third person jumped on the man and subdued him, an airline official told NBC News.” Flight attendants ran to get the fire extinguisher and the fire was soon doused. One passenger, Syed Jafry, remarked, “It was the time to be proud to be an American for sure.”

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking member on the House intelligence committee and current candidate for governor of Michigan, saw an opportunity to score quick political points:

“It’s not surprising,” U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Holland Republican, said of the alleged terrorist attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight in Detroit. … “People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration,” Hoekstra said. [...]

Hoekstra hadn’t yet been briefed on the incident but said he is already calling or the Obama administration to meet with Intelligence Committee members to fully inform them about the alleged terrorism attempt at the Detroit airport.

In an effort to try to prove his case for why the Obama administration is failing to “connect the dots,” Hoekstra issued this condemnatory tweet last night:

While Hoekstra hadn’t been briefed, his colleague Rep. Peter King (R-NY) was. And King — the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee — wasted no time alerting the media to much of what he was told. King rushed to Fox and CNN last night to begin issuing blame against security officials who allowed the suspect to board. “His name was in a database indicating significant terrorist connections,” King said, adding, “I’m not trying to be a Monday morning quarterback here…but let’s see what was missed.”

The Obama administration announced that “additional security measures are being taken in response to the incident, without raising the airline threat level.”

MADDOW: Why is it Pete Hoekstra who’s taking it upon himself to tell the press that this radical cleric is having his email read by U.S. intelligence agencies? The FBI had not said publicly that this cleric had been emailing Hasan. The CIA, the NSA, the White House — nobody else had reported this cleric was e-mailing Hasan. This is just Pete Hoekstra letting us know — and letting the radical cleric who is under surveillance know — that he’s under surveillance.

Maddow’s guest, The Nation’s Chris Hayes, said Hoekstra’s reputation is “of an epic grand-stander.” Watch it:

Asked if there was a concern that Hoekstra was leaking sensitive information, a Republican spokesman for the House intelligence committee told Maddow’s show, “I do not know, guessing, since [Aulaqi] was deported, he knew he was a target anyways.” Maddow noted that Aulaqi wasn’t “deported,” but rather left the country voluntarily, according to the 9-11 Commission. (Aulaqi had contacts with some of the 9-11 hijackers.)

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) said, “I am disappointed that some have rushed to the news media with unfounded information in order to gain headlines.”

Hoekstra has been trying to use the Ft. Hood shootings to engage in a political attack against Obama, claiming “administration officials delayed briefing members of Congress about the alleged gunman,” thus raising “red flags” about what the White House was hiding. “What do they know that they don’t want us to know?” Hoekstra said on Fox News.

I try really hard not to be a JFK assassination theorist, but the CIA is not really helping matters:

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.

It’s extremely hard to believe that 40 year-old documents would compromise present-day operational security. It’s also elementary public choice reasoning to understand that the CIA is going to be inclined to massively overstate its need to keep things secret. Presumably they’re just trying to cover up some minor source of institutional embarrassment rather than concerned that these files reveal that Oliver Stone was right all along. One way or another, people should see these files.

ThinkProgress interviewed Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) earlier today, and asked him to respond to that accusation by Rove:

First of all, leaks come far, far, far more often from the administration than they do from Congress. So if the issue is we can’t tell anyone because they might leak it, well then you better not do it at all, because you’re going to have to tell somebody and somebody’s going to leak it. Vastly more amounts of secret programs have come out of the administration than they have come out of Congress.

Smith added that the importance of informing Congress is because of the need for checks and balances. “We have oversight responsibility for the intelligence community,” he explained. Smith said that if the intelligence community pursues wrong or illegal activities, Congress is held responsible for it. “If we’re not briefed fully and in a timely manner,” he said, referencing the recent example of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “then we’re being held responsible for things we didn’t know about.” Watch it:

Smith is of course correct that the Executive Branch leaks a great deal. After all, while working in the White House, Karl Rove himself leaked classified national security information, helping to damage the career of a covert CIA agent. Moreover, the secret program that has been reported in the press in recent days (purportedly a targeted assassination program) was leaked to the Wall Street Journal by “two former intelligence officials familiar with the matter” in its report — not Congress.

Following the revelation, congressional Democrats have called for an investigation into the hidden program, which the Wall Street Journal reports involved “an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” But on the Washington Times’ America’s Morning News radio show today, Cheney’s daughter, Liz, lashed back at his critics:

CHENEY: There’s this big piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning that says that it was a number of different concepts for ways that we could capture or kill al Qaeda leaders in the days after 9/11. I am really surprised that the Democrats decide that that’s what they want to fight over. I mean, if they want to go to the American people and say that they disagree with the notion that we ought to be capturing and killing al Qaeda leaders, I think it’s just going to prove to the American people one more time why they can’t trust the Democrats with our national security.

Cheney claimed that complaints by Democrats that the program was concealed from Congress are surfacing only because they are “very worried about Speaker Pelosi” and the attacks on her over her claim that the CIA misled her about the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. Listen here:

Of course, Cheney is dodging the issue of whether Bush and Cheney fulfilled their obligations under the National Security Act of 1947, which says that congressional intelligence committees must be “kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”

Cheney also responded to news that Attorney General Holder is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate “the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices,” calling it “shameful.” She added that her father is “very angry” about the development:

CHENEY: His reaction to the story that we may well be prosecuting folks, I’m happy to talk about that. … You know, he is very angry, as you’ve heard him say publicly. You know the notion that this administration is going to come into office and they’re going to prosecute the brave men and women who carried out this program that kept America safe. It is, it is un-American. It’s something that hasn’t happened before in this country, in terms of somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration. He’s been very public about that.

Cheney says that Holder would be investigating people “who carried this program out according to the Department of Justice opinions,” but Newsweek reports that Holder is more concerned about “startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions.”

On the Sunday shows this morning, several Republican lawmakers attempted to defend or divert attention away from the revelation about Cheney. “I don’t think we should be jumping to any conclusions,” said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) on ABC’s This Week. Kyl claimed that Cheney’s alleged actions were “not out of the ordinary”:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But this allegation of the vice president ordering it be kept secret, you believe that should be investigated?

KYL: Look, the president and the vice president are the two people who have responsibility, ultimately, for the national security of the country. It is not out of the ordinary for the vice president to be involved in an issue like this.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But to order it be kept secret?

KYL: What if it’s a top secret program? Of course he and the president would both be responsible for that. Let’s don’t jump to conclusions is what I’m saying.

On Fox News Sunday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said that while he agrees that “the CIA should brief the Congress,” any mention of Cheney is just the Obama administration trying to “blame the Bush-Cheney administration” for everything. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he doesn’t “know whether it was appropriate,” but dismissed the concern by saying, “the CIA is in the secrecy business.”

Also on CNN, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) said that it “is wrong if somebody told the CIA not to inform the appropriate members of Congress,” but tried to cast the debate as an “attempt” by Democrats “to basically undermine the capacity to protect and develop intelligence.” Watch it:

On NBC’s Meet The Press, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said he doesn’t “know what the details of this are” and that Cheney “should obviously be heard from if the accusations are leveled in his direction.” “If I know Washington, this is the beginning of a pretty involved and detailed story,” said McCain, adding that he doesn’t know if there should be “a, quote, investigation.”

Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. … Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. [...]

“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”

Saddam “felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from ‘fanatic’ leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a ‘security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.’” If that could not happen, only then, he said, would Iraq reconstitute its WMD programs.

Piro revealed to CBS’s 60 Minutes last year that Saddam “didn’t want to associate” with Osama bin Laden and viewed him “as a threat to him and his regime.” The new documents expound on Saddam’s distrust of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, whom he called “a zealot”:

Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot…that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”

When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and numerous members of the Bush administration repeatedly cited the (now debunked) threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD program and Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to Al-Qaeda as the main justifications for launching the invasion of Iraq more than six years ago. The U.S. could end up spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and today, 130,000 U.S. troops remain there, 4,321 have died (4,639 total from coalition forces), and more than 30,000 have been wounded. Over 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion while millions have been displaced.