Meanwhile, our heroic media — the same ones urging the feckless Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana to get them a "shield law" — have been drooling over the story of some American soldiers apparently burning two dead bodies of our Taliban enemies in Afghanistan. The brave, the proud, Secretary Rumsfeld limited himself to remark that "charges of that type are harmful," and to call on Pentagon investigators to move with "a sense of urgency." The Associated Press thoughtfully tells us that "Pentagon lawyers had advised him to be careful about what he says because...remarks about the specifics...could complicate the proceedings."

Heaven forfend!

But I don't think even the Pentagon lawyers could object if Rumsfeld had called attention to another set of burning bodies, twice as many as in the Taliban incident. This one took place last month, and the victims were American. One of them was burned alive. They were contractors for KBR (owned by Halliburton), and they were in a convoy north of Baghdad when they took a wrong turn. According to the London Telegraph, "dozens of Sunni Arab insurgents [how would they know?] wielding rocket launchers and automatic rifles" attacked them. Two were killed, and the other two were dragged from the vehicle. One of those was shot in the back of the head, and the other was doused with gasoline and set on fire. "Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames." Then the mob dragged the corpses through the streets "chanting anti-U.S. slogans."

I wonder why it took so long for that story to break, and I wonder why it came out in a British newspaper rather than an American one. Was it available to American journalists? The Washington Post, which picked up on the Telegraph story, said "there was no explanation for why the military did not report the deaths earlier." It's odd, but then this Pentagon, and the major media, are not very good at informing the American public about the nature of the people we are fighting. Particularly when there is great media excitement about the two Taliban bodies-which seem, so far as we know, to have been burned because they were decomposing close by our soldiers — it seems like Rumsfeld, or somebody, should have pointed out that Americans are being burned as well, sometimes living Americans. And there won't be any Pentagon lawyers investigating those "Sunni Arab insurgents."

It all smacks of media overwillingness to portray our troops in a bad light, and our government's ham-handed inability to paint a full, accurate picture of what's going on. There seems to be no assistant secretary of Defense in charge of public affairs. Maybe Rumsfeld could appoint one?

Emphasis mine.

Now here's the bottom line that the administration needs to take to heart: if you are going to make controversial or even non-controversial claims to the American people in the current political environment (one in which, in case you haven't noticed, you're on the defensive, in large part because of this foolishness), then you had better damned well be prepared to back such claims up with facts, particularly when they're questioned. That many of your critics have base or otherwise questionable motives for going against you is completely irrelevant - if a claim is true, it should hold up under legitimate scrutiny, otherwise it shouldn't be made to begin with. Of course, such a policy would also involve the administration directly addressing the issue of public ignorance as far as the current threat is concerned, something as of yet it would seem that they have no inclination of doing.

Should they decide to do so, however, my buddy Steve Hayes has some background on how things got to this point and how we might proceed from here:

The experience of the "16 words" controversy, however, led the president's aides to purge any fact or piece of evidence that could possibly be challenged--whether by vetters in the speechwriting process itself or in the media. "We didn't want to have a pissing match with the [Central Intelligence] Agency on the front page of the New York Times every time we put something out," says one former Bush administration official.

The default position was to refrain from publicly asserting anything that could possibly provoke a public debate, and the result has been that each new Iraq speech the president gives--however well written--ends up sounding a lot like the last speech the president gave. For the most part, the speeches have been heavy on assertions and light on arguments. So for most of his second term the president would claim that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror without stopping to explain why Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.

This reluctance comes not from a lack of arguments to make but from a fear that if the administration aggressively makes its case, the CIA will promptly seek to undermine it through leaks that wind up on the front pages. But this self-censorship is keeping the administration from making full use of the information at its disposal. Here are three examples.

When the president mentions Abu Musab al Zarqawi, current head of al Qaeda in Iraq, he rarely points out that Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war, and he never points out that Zarqawi's operatives were working closely with senior Iraqi Baathists even as U.S. troops were engaged in "major combat" in Iraq.

When the president notes the former Iraqi regime's support for terrorism--a rare occurrence these days--he never mentions Abdul Rahman Yasin, the lone fugitive from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who was provided assistance by the Iraqi regime in his flight from the United States. (That fact is not even controversial: It is cited in the July 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar intelligence on Iraq.) The FBI is in possession of documents that indicate Yasin was given financial support by the regime of Saddam Hussein for a decade after his return to Iraq.

There are other documents from Iraq that would help the American public understand the nature of the former Iraqi regime and why a serious war on terror required its removal. Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents currently stored in a warehouse in Doha, Qatar, as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency's document exploitation project are a case in point. Many of these documents, listed in a database known as HARMONY, have rather provocative titles:

Money Transfers from Iraq to Afghanistan

Secret Meeting with Taliban Group Member and Iraqi Government (Nov. 2000)

Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals

Order from Saddam to present $25,000 to Palestinian Suicide Bombers' Families

IIS Reports from Embassy in Paris: Plan to Influence French Stance in UN Security Council

IIS Report on How French Campaigns are Financed

Improvised Explosive Devices Plan

Ricin research and improvement

There are thousands of similar documents. Many have already been authenticated and most are unclassified. That's worth repeating: Most are unclassified.

As Steve notes at the conclusion:

But if the White House refuses to challenge its critics, and refuses to explain in detail why Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, and refuses to discuss the flawed intelligence on Iraqi WMD, and refuses to use its tremendous power to remind Americans that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, a threat, then it risks losing the support of those Americans who continue to believe that the Iraq war, despite all of its many costs in blood and money, was worth it.

I would replace the "but" at the beginning with "as long as" since even if the White House has decided to take a time out from publicly challenging its critics, the critics certainly haven't themselves taken any time outs. If anything, they've only served to intensify their assault as (or if you like, and as a result) support for the war among the general public has continued to decline. While the White House seems to have taken what I regard as entirely appropriate action against those CIA officials who have decided to meddle in domestic politics in violation of the Agency's mandate, this is in effect winning a battle at the cost of the war, in the case the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.

But since they aren't willing to do so, I am, and as such I would like to address several specific stories that have surfaced over the last several weeks, all of which I came across thanks in no small part to the work of the wonderful Laura Rozen over at War and Piece whom, I think it entirely fair to say, disagrees with everything I just wrote and will disagree even more strenuously against everything I'm about to write.

Zarqawi

First, from Newsweek, we have this multi-subject story that touches on the following:

A secret draft CIA report raises new questions about a principal argument used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq: the claim that Saddam Hussein was "harboring" notorious terror leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi prior to the American invasion.

... An updated CIA re-examination of the issue recently concluded that Saddam's regime may not have given Zarqawi "safe haven" after all.

The CIA declined to comment on the draft report. But officials tell NEWSWEEK that Zarqawi probably did travel to the Iraqi capital in the spring of 2002 for medical treatment. And, of course, there is no question that he is in Iraq now—orchestrating many of the deadly suicide bombings and attacks on American soldiers.

But before the American-led invasion, Saddam's government may never have known he was there. The reason: he used an alias and was there under what one U.S. intelligence official calls a "false cover." No evidence has been found showing senior Iraqi officials were even aware of his presence, according to two counterterrorism analysts familiar with the classified CIA study who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

An intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that the current draft says that "most evidence suggests Saddam Hussein did not provide Zarqawi safe haven before the war. It also recognizes that there are still unanswered questions and gaps in knowledge about the relationship."

The most recent CIA analysis is an update—based on fresh reporting from Iraq and interviews with former Saddam officials—of a classified report that analysts in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence first produced more than a year ago. According to the Knight Ridder newspapers, the agency was originally asked to conduct that review of Saddam's dealings with Zarqawi by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Except it really isn't that simple and the document in question isn't nearly as clear-cut as the Newsweek or Knight-Ridder reporting on the topic would have you believe. Referencing the final copy of the document in question, here is what Rumsfeld said:

I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who's connected to al Qaeda who was in and out of Iraq and there's the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship and why he might not have had a relationship.

This is an important thing to understand when seeing media reporting on the document - it's a pro/con piece that reflects divisions and unanswered questions within the intelligence community. If memory serves, I believe that open source reporting on the document (presumably from the "pro" section) also states that Saddam Hussein personally intervened to free some of Zarqawi's lieutenants from prison. Bottom line, it's a lot more ambiguous than either side wants it to be.

On the issue of the alias that Zarqawi used while in Baghdad, this is a far more clear-cut issue that the SSIC addresses at some length on pages 337-338. While most of the information is still classified, the report leaves little doubt that at an absolute minimum the Iraqi regime knew both who and where Zarqawi was but declined to arrest him. The report also makes reference to the fact that Zarqawi was not simply in Baghdad for medical attention but was actively in touch with (again, at minimum) the Ansar al-Islam forces in northern Iraq as well as members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad whose statements provided the claim quoted by Powell at the UN that as far as al-Qaeda was concerned, the situation in Iraq was "good" and that Baghdad could be transited quickly.

Forged documents

Newsweek then turns to the issue of what appeared after the fall of Baghdad:

... In the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam's dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. (One cache of documents even claimed that six of 19 of the September 11 hijackers had been trained to fly in Iraq.) Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that when officials at the Bush White House learned about the existence of documents linking Saddam to Al Qaeda, they became very excited and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly to validate and decipher them. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium.

These are two extremely vague paragraphs, but I'll throw out what I can on this, including the fact that it's entirely possible that some or even all of the people in government who told me that there is documentation of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda said so on the basis of these documents (the article doesn't provide much of a time frame as far as when the CIA "ultimately established" that most of them were faked). I never heard anything like the 9/11 hijackers stuff from them either though, the closest I have heard was the past claims put forth by members of the Iraqi National Congress concerning Salman Pak (discussed on p. 332 of the report for those interested), but none of them were willing to go as far as explicitly naming which hijackers trained in Iraq. The closest one on that particular note is the Atta/Abu Nidal stuff that was used by Allawi rather than Chalabi and then leaked to the Daily Telegraph.

In any case, there is a thriving trade in false documents concerning the activities of the former Iraqi regime these days and has been ever since the US announced that it was willing to pay cash for such items. There was even a meme floating around various lefty blogs that the entire UNSCAM scandal was the work of forged documents put together by Chalabi, though I believe it's since been abandoned. For the right price, you can get documents in Baghdad telling you just about anything you want to know about the former regime, as anybody involved in the WMD hunt will tell you.

On the other hand, what I'm more interested in knowing as far as which documents turned out to be genuine rather than forged. In particular, I'm thinking of the following we have seen make it out into the general public that have apparently been reported as verified by our intelligence agencies:

• a Mukhabarat document from 1992 listing bin Laden as an Iraqi collaborator.

• an Iraqi Mukhabarat document detailing Iraqi meetings with al-Qaeda in Sudan in the mid-1990s.

Both of these, it should be noted, were provided by the INC, which should be taken as evidence even by their worst detractors that sometimes even the devil tells the truth. Other documents that have surfaced but have not been publicly verified or debunked include (at minimum) a document by Allawi claiming that Ayman al-Zawahiri attended the 1999 Popular Islamic Conference at the request of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and documents that Jordanian intelligence claims verifies their reporting on pre-war Iraqi support for Zarqawi, which is still the official position of the Jordanian government on the subject as can be seen from the May 2005 statements from nation's King Abdullah on the subject. I would be exceedingly interested to learn what position, if any, the United States has on these documents.

Ibn Sheikh Al-Libi

I see he's back in the news again, this time thanks to the declassification of two paragraphs from a DIA document at the behest of Senator Carl Levin. While here again Steve Hayes does a great job at debunking a lot of this (including the fact that , the document (which I can't find on Levin's website, somebody want to help me out on this one?) may well not say what Levin thinks it does. According to both the New York Times and the Washington Post summaries, the DIA assessment offers up the possibility that al-Libi may not known any more than he told interrogators as an alternative to the view that he was either lying or playing for time.

One interesting tidbit we get from the article, however, is this:

"It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers," the February 2002 report said. "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

Except here's the thing: he did end up eventually telling his interrogators more than simply that Iraq was training al-Qaeda operatives, as Powell recounted at the UN in the terrorism portion of his presentation that, as Steve notes, everyone including Levin agreed upon in the SSIC report " was carefully vetted by both terrorism and regional analysts" and "none of the portrayals of the intelligence reporting included in Secretary Powell's speech differed in any significant way from earlier assessments published by the Central Intelligence Agency."

Here's the broader version of what al-Libi told his interrogators:

His information comes first-hand from his personal involvement at senior levels of Al Qaida. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased Al Qaida leader Muhammad Atif (ph), did not believe that Al Qaida labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq. The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two Al Qaida associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

Now I myself would be interested in knowing more about this, but unfortunately the portion of the SSIC report dealing with al-Libi on p. 325 and pp. 330-331 are all classified. If Levin is really concerned about getting to the bottom of all this rather than just scoring political points, maybe he should move to declassify everything on al-Libi rather than simply those portions of it that fit with his narrative.

Two other brief points.

First of all, contrary to what Juan Cole would have you believe, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi is not exactly small fry as far as the al-Qaeda leadership was concerned. At the time of his capture on January 5, 2002 (apparently fleeing from the site of the battle at Tora Bora, he was the highest-ranking al-Qaeda leader in US custody and would remain so until such time as Abu Zubaydah was apprehended at a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Faisalabad. Moreover, again in contrast to Cole, if you actually read the SSIC report on what Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told interrogators on pages 324-325, you'll see quite a contrast between what was reported in the press and what both men actually said.

In addition, the idea that al-Libi only told interrogators what he wanted to hear because he was tortured is a bit of a stretch. According the Newsweek article, he was indeed sent to Egypt and almost certainly tortured there but unless that happened between his capture in January and when this DIA document was written in February, it wasn't the torture that prompted him to make the claims that he did. If I had to make a guess, I would say that his initial claims about Iraq/al-Qaeda but failure to talk any further were what prompted the torture, on the basis that if he was lying he'd admit it and if he was telling the truth he'd expand on it rather than be faced with an Egyptian interrogation session.

One further point that no one is really going to want to get into on this one is that if you want to turn the case of al-Libi into some kind of a morality tale as far as torture is concerned, it isn't going to get you very far since it was under those Egyptian interrogation sessions that al-Libi gave up detailed information that enabled the US to thwart a plot against our embassy in Yemen and helped to point us in the direction of Abu Zubaydah even as he was giving up detailed information on Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda. Similarly, the fact that even though al-Libi recanted his story in early 2004 US intelligence was still trying to determine the veracity of his statements as of August of that year (and as I understand it they still are) is unlikely to make many headlines because, here again, it suggests the issue is far more ambiguous and less clear-cut than many people desire it to be.