Hal O'Brien

jaylake points to a piece by Sy Hersh in The New Yorker about the various plots and counter-plots in the Bush Administration about Iran. But while interesting, there's a definite "kremlinological" moment that goes by in passing.

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency." {emphasis added}

Oh.

Really.

"The most important..." you say?

Huh.

Because the head of the Iraqi Operations Group was once described as, "a desk jockey." In fact, while the head of Iraqi Operations Group was a covert officer, then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that their identity wasn't a secret at all.

Who was the head of Iraqi Operations Group?

Valerie Plame.

"In 1997 (Plame) returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group."

So, let's not mince words with what Karl Rove did, when he burned the identity of Valerie Plame in a fit of pique (or at the orders of Cheney, depending on how grim you want it): Not only was she a covert operative. Not only was she working in Counterproliferation. Not only, out of the spectrum of CPD's work, was she in charge of operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq, the single most sensitive country being monitored by CIA at the time.

She was in charge of CIA's "most important (group) in the agency"!

That was the level of damage Karl Rove did.

This administration keeps insisting we're in a fully legal "war."

If so, the evidence continues to build that Karl Rove violated Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, and if convicted, should be locked up as the treasonous bastard he is.

From Lance Knobel, over at Davos Newbies:

"Apparently the CIA is going to classify its report on scientific openness."

...just to show I'm not thinking only of Iraq (or the spooky, independent congruence between my posts and Josh Marshall's, as I read them).

Japan just launched its first solely owned spy satellites.

The thing is, Japan is a very close military ally of the US. Or has been. Heck, one could even say (as many did, when Japan was more economically prosperous) that Japan is a military protectorate of the US.

So, um... Why would Japan even want its own satellites?

The answer, reading between the lines: They don't trust us to tell them the truth, and they're pissed off. Some sample quotes:

Japan currently buys commercial satellite photos from the US and France.

North Korea's launch of a Taepodong-1 ballistic missile over Japan... served as a wake-up call.

"It really shocked the Japanese. They realised that they've got to wake up and not be 100% reliant on the US," Victor Cha, professor of government and Asian studies at Washington DC's Georgetown University told BBC News Online.

Mr (Shuichiro) Yamanouchi (president of Japan's National Space Development Agency (Nasda)) admitted earlier this month: "It's a kind of technological independence. Information independence. For the Japanese it's very important."

The quality of the pictures they will produce is said to be inferior to that already bought from Japan by the US.

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North Korea has strongly protested against Japan's plans to launch the satellites, arguing that this is a sign of the country's growing militarism.

Japanese intelligence has indicated that North Korea may respond with a ballistic missile test.

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Let's restate that:

Japan is so concerned the US will not pass along vital satellite intelligence that it is willing to risk a North Korean missile launch... for the sake of inferior pictures.

But pictures which will be all theirs.

What a vote of confidence in their trust of us (and US), eh?

According to Mr. Bush's speech last night, Iraq is anywhere from one to five years before being capable of launching a strike against us. Which is why it's so desperately urgent we hit them... um, tomorrow. {cough}

But the most disturbing thing about this whole scenario is how it plays out if you look at it logically.

There're two axes here: Either Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or it doesn't. And Iraq will either use them, or they won't.

That means there're four outcomes, one of which is impossible:

Iraq doesn't have WMD, and won't use them. For me, this is the most likely outcome. You can see it all over the place in our own planning, with the devil-may-care attitude we're showing both about how long this war will last (over quickly enough for Tony Blair to stay PM a day or two, we hope), and the possibilities about retaliation. Then again, that means we're about to send 300,000 combined troops over to a country looking for weapons that don't exist. According to some polling data released during today's Talk of the Nation call-in show, 80% of Americans think Iraq has WMD, and that disarming Iraq is a major criterion for "victory". (Dear 80% of the US: Iraq is likely already unarmed, and you're likely to get a massive disappointment.) Either that, or I would look really carfeully at the serial numbers of whatever WMD we "find" -- especially after the fiasco of the forgery of the documents purporting to show Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Also, this is the scenario most likely to generate the previously predicted 1-14 vote in the Security Council calling for sanctions against the US (and maybe the UK, if they're still in the game).

Iraq has WMD, and uses them. But if that's true... then we're sending 300,000 soldiers good and true to basically be burnt to a crisp so the Administration can then justify massive retaliation. And the Administration is doing this knowingly, with malice aforethought. Oddly, this doesn't comfort me. (Marshmallows at the Reichstag, anyone?)

Iraq has WMD, but won't use them. This appears to be the Officially Approved Plan. I hope Mr. Hussein has been properly briefed, and he sticks to the script. But it's the only way to explain the combination of no obvious contingencies for the use of WMD against our trops, intertwined with no apparent hesitation about the fact that months of concentrated effort through inspection, espionage, satellite flybys, and surreptitious signals listening has turned up... radio chatter with nothing else to back it up. {ooh! aah!} Ruel Marc Gerecht appears to have gotten it right in The Atlantic back in July 2001 -- our intelligence agencies appear to have about zero assets in the Near East region. Almost every breakthrough we've had appears to have been done by either the Israelis or the Pakistanis, with Our Boys brought in at the last minute for the photo op.

Iraq doesn't have WMD, but will somehow use them. This is the outcome that's logically impossible. Unless Mr. Hussein just rang up a massive credit card bill tonight. Or unless he just cut a deal with the North Koreans -- who almost certainly do have WMD at this point, which is why the Cowardly Lion treats them with such shyness -- to bomb us on his behalf.