Now that Harry Reid has gotten the Senate up in arms about the Bush’s administration’s faked intelligence on pre-war Iraq, it’s time to call in the spooks.

In the past couple of months, I’ve been talking to a lot of them, partly to put together my profile of Porter Goss’s tenure at the CIA, the cover story in this month’s American Prospect. I can tell you, there are a lot of angry spooks who would love nothing more than to come talk to the Senate about the administration’s malfeasance.

In my humble opinion, a main wrong that has be righted in the post-game analysis so far over Iraqi WMD is the notion that the CIA and other agencies weren’t pressured by the administration’s big-foot policy people.

Here’s an excerpt from my Prospect story citing Richard Kerr, the CIA veteran who headed an internal CIA task force that examined the agency’s work on Iraq’s WMD:

In fact, analysts were pressured, and heavily so, according to Richard Kerr. A 32-year CIA veteran, Kerr led an internal investigation of the agency’s failure to correctly analyze Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities, preparing a series of four reports that have not been released publicly. Kerr joined the CIA in 1960, serving in a series of senior analytic posts, including director of East Asian analysis, the unit that prepared the president’s daily intelligence brief, and finally as chief of the Directorate of Intelligence. For several months in 1991, Kerr was the acting CIA director; he retired in 1992. A highly respected analyst, Kerr received four Distinguished Intelligence Medals; in 1992, President George Bush Senior gave him the Citizen’s Medal for his work during Operation Desert Storm.

Two years ago, Kerr was summoned out of retirement to lead a four-member task force to conduct the investigation of the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. His team, which included a former Near East Division chief, a former CIA deputy inspector general, and a former CIA chief Soviet analyst, spent months sorting through everything that the CIA produced on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion, as well as interviewing virtually everyone at the agency who had anything to do with producing the faulty intelligence estimates. The Kerr team’s first report was an overview of what the CIA said about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war compared with what Kerr calls the postwar “ground truth.” The second looked specifically at a classified version of the important October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which the administration used to build its case for war. The third looked at the overall intelligence process, and the fourth was a think piece that considered how to reorganize the management of intelligence analysis “if you could start all over again.”

Kerr’s four reports, with a fifth now under way, were viewed as the definitive works of self-criticism inside the agency and were shared with the oversight committees in Congress, outside commissions, and the office of the secretary of defense. Unlike the outside reports that looked at the same issues, however, Kerr’s concluded that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration. “Everybody felt pressure,” Kerr told me. “A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions … . I talked to a lot of people who said, ‘There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.’ There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had.”

In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials hammered at the CIA to go back time and time again to look at intelligence that had already been sifted and resifted. “It was a continuing drumbeat: ‘How do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?’” says Kerr. Many of those questions, which began to cascade onto the CIA in 2001, were generated by the Office of Special Plans and by discredited fabricators such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and a secret source code-named “Curveball.” As a result, says Kerr, the CIA reached back to old data, relied on several sources of questionable veracity, and made assumptions about current data that were unwarranted. In particular, intelligence on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program, much of which was based on data collected in the 1980s, early ’90s, and more spottily until the end of the United Nations inspection regime in 1998, was parsed -- and, some would argue, cherry-picked -- in order to reinforce the administration’s case.

The sad thing about the indictment of Scooter is that he was nailed for perjury and not for war crimes. An important article by Max Fuller (“For Iraq, the ‘Salvador Option’ Becomes Reality”) provides a chilling summary of the evidence for mass murder and death squad activity in Iraq being carried out by America’s Shiite fundamentalist allies. New mass graves are turning up everywhere in Iraq, and they aren’t Saddam’s doing. Instead, as Fuller’s brilliant piece argues, they are killings conducted by Iraqi police commandos and “state terrorism by the Ministry of the Interior,” as a leading Sunni oppositionist says.

I’ve written (far less comprehensively) about this, too. Kudos to Fuller.

Instead of worrying so much about damage to Valerie Plame Wilson’s career, the media ought to be worrying about the real consequences of I. Lying Libby’s deceit: the deaths, in Iraq, or tens of thousands.

More than any other figure in the world, Ahmed Chalabi shines a harsh glare on the Bush administration’s prevarication on pre-war Iraqi intelligence. So for those seeking to keep the momentum of the indictment of I. Lying Libby going, Chalabi’s week-long visit to Washington is made to order.

Chalabi made everything even worse by making sure be photographed during a high-profile visit to Teheran on his way to Washington, where he met with Iran’s new foreign minister and with Mahmoud “Wipe Israel Off the Map” Ahmadinejad. Iran, said Chalabi, “has played a positive role in the composition and formation of the Iraqi government.” Come again? If Chalabi is saying that, it can only mean that Teheran was backing him, since to Chalabi “positive role” means “support me.” It’s almost st surreal: the neoconservatives’ principal cats-paw in Iraq meeting with Mr. Axis of Evil himself. When Hamlet noted that one can “smile, and smile, and be a villain,” he surely wasn’t referring to a meeting in which both villains smile. But smile they did.

To mix a metaphor, neoconservative spokesmen in Washington are doing back flips to square this circle. Patrick Clawson, the Iran expert at the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Affairs, who has long been a defender of Chalabi, now quietly disagrees with Chalabi’s assessment that Iran can be moderated in its fundamentalist fanaticism. Other neoconservatives are just plain quiet. Which puts all eyes on Ahmed Chalabi’s high-wire act this Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute.

Meanwhile, Knight-Ridder’s John Walcott reports that the U.S. intelligence and FBI investigation into charges that Chalabi leaked top-secret information to Iran is proceeding “very slowly, if at all.”

Steve Clemons says it bluntly: “Chalabi should be in jail for the combination of espionage, lies, and deceit that he used to help seduce America into an invasion of Iraq that has left our nation's military and economic portfolio in tatters.” True. But what has he done against us lately? That is the question we all ought to be asking—not what Chalabi did to get us into the war (we know that) but is Chalabi doing now?

ANOTHER SCARY IRAQI was in town last week, in addition to Ahmed Chalabi. That would be Iraq's "deputy president," Adil Abdul Mahdi, a short, squat and bulky Shiite fundamentalist who was in town to promote his own chances of becoming Iraq's next prime minister. Unlike Chalabi, Richard Perle's favorite Iraqi, Abdul Mahdi actually has a chance at winning the job. Like Chalabi, Abdul Mahdi has been making the rounds in meetings with top U.S. officials. Unlike Chalabi, who spoke at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, Abdul Mahdi was hosted by the more realist-minded CSIS.

When I asked him about reports that Iraqi police and interior ministry squads were carrying out assassinations and other illegal acts, he didn't deny it--but, he said, such acts were merely a reaction to the terrorism of the resistance. "There is terrorism on only one side,:" he said. "Inappropiatem acts by the other side, by the police--this is something else. This is a reaction." As far as civilian casualties in Sunni towns, he had this to say: "You can't fight terrorism without attacking some popular areas."

I also asked him about the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed paramilitary force that is the main domestic army propping up Abdul Mahdi's Shiite coalition, he said "they are disarmed," which is patently absurd. He added: "They participate fully in the political process."

Abdul Mahdi had this to say about Fallujah, the city that was obliterated by the the U.S. armed forces a year ago. "It is one of the most peaceful areas in Iraq. I don't know whether the people are happy or not. But it is one of the most peaceful cities."

He also welcomed the Arab League initiative for a reconciliation conference. But ominously, he said that there is no point in trying to create a dialogue with the Sunni-led opposition and the insurgents. "We don't know their names. We can't dialogue with ghosts and masked people." That, of course, is silly. The Iraqi government knows exactly who they could be talking to, but they refuse. Asked to clarify, he uttered the delphic sentence: "Respect our views, and don't try to find out what's behind those views." And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

In my report on Adil Abdul Mahdi's visit to Washington, below, I described how blithely the SCIRI official dismissed allegations of Shiite abuses, death squads, and other charges. Now we learn how accurate those charges are. If the story of the secret torture prison run by Iraq's ministry of the interior and its Badr Brigade commandos gets the proper play in the media, it will be the final nail in the coffin for the U.S.-backed regime in Baghdad. And it ought to hasten the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The right question to ask is: How is it possible that the United States is committing its blood and treasure to a regime whose minions peel the skin off captives and use electric drills on them?

The Washington Post reports that allegations of the torture prison have been known since last summer. Where has the Post's coverage been? If you read the Post story, you will see that the allegations included a report that the prison was "run with the help of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran."

The Post also reports something that I've been following closely, but which has mostly been ignored by the mainstream media, namely, Shiite death squads. From the same Post article:

On Tuesday, Col. Abdulhadi Hussein of the Interior Ministry police confirmed the discovery of 28 bodies at the town of Jassan, near the Iranian border. When police found the men Monday, Hussein said, they all were dressed in civilian clothes and had been shot in the head and chest.

Separately, police patrolling a south Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday found 18 men who had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and chest, Hussein said.

All 46 were believed to have been Sunni Arabs, he said.

As with previous mass killings of Sunnis, Sunni leaders questioned how killers could have moved dozens of corpses through Iraq's many road checkpoints without discovery by security forces.

This is a stunning scandal. It far exceeds Abu Ghraib in importance. It is a catastrophic embarrassment to the United States and its failed policy in Iraq.

Sometimes I wonder if I am living in the same universe as Sally Quinn. She's never invited me to a dinner party, but then I haven't invited her to one of mine either. Anyway. In today's Post, she pens a loooong piece about Ahmed Chalabi's visit to Washington. In it, she manages to find various high-level Washington officials who proclaim their allegiance to Ahmed. "Suddenly many have positive things to say." Come again? Of course people in Washington (at least among you-know-which circles) have nice things to say about him! He has been their stooge for decades! The problem is, no one in Iraq has anything nice to say about Chalabi. "Today," she writes, "he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections." He is? According to whom? Only (as Chalabi himself tells Quinn) if the decision to pick a prime minister is made in a "smoke-filled room"--and even then it might depend on what they are smoking. Quinn goes so far as to quote a Bush administration official on Chalabi thusly: "Very astute fellow." Well. One thing we know. The person who said that is not a very astute fellow.

So it looks like it will be announced this afternoon that the Pentagon's inspector general will launch an investigation into the activities of one Douglas Feith. Feith, as we know, was the inside ringleader for the neoconservative cabal during the run-up to the war in Iraq. He created the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG) and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the Orwellian-named successor to the CTEG. As I documented extensively here and here, Feith's Pentagon shop was the principal Lie Factory for bogus intelligence on Iraq's supposed ties to Al Qaeda and on Iraq's WMD programs.

Pentagon sources say that Acting Inspector General Tom Gimble will announce this afternoon the scope of the inquiry into Feith and Co. His action comes in response to two letters, one from Senator Carl Levin (D.-Mich.), sent on Sept. 22, and one from Senator Pat Roberts (R.-Kan.), sent Sept. 9. Roberts, of course, chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). Gimble, who took over as Pentagon I.G. only in September, is the former Deputy Inspector General for Intelligence, who served as the Principal Advisor to the IG and the DoD on all matters relating to DoD-wide intelligence programs and operations, according to DOD. He's a civilian with no apparent ties to the cabal himself--so it's likely that he will apply the typical flinty-eyed look at Feith that we usually associate with an I.G.'s work.

This comes in the context of the Bush administration's continuing free-fall on Iraq. Bit by bit, Congress is turning against him, and the SSCI will conduct its own Phase II inquiry into pre-war intelligence manipulation by the Bush people--an inquiry that can't help but look into the Feith-based intelligence system. Bush is scrambling around Asia sounding like Richard I-am-not-a-crook Nixon, saying, "I didn't lie! I didn't lie!" In my humble opinion, as I've told all my friends, Bush in fact didn't lie, simply because he is Too Stupid To Lie. He just read the scripts handed to him by the VP and by Feith. After all, this is the president who said, in June 2003, "We found the WMD." No doubt he will be as surprised as anyone when he finds out that Dick and Dougie made all that stuff up.

It's beyond me why Wolf Blitzer called on Robert Kerrey as a counterpose to Richard Perle on Sunday's CNN Late Edition. Perle, as usual, was unflappable, though Blitzer treated him with kid gloves. But Kerrey chimed in every few minutes not to challenge Perle but to say things like "I agree with him." Huh? That's a debate? Kerrey showed that he is miles and miles behind the rest of the Democrats, even the pro-war ones, who are tectonically shifting ground now that it is convenient to do so. Maybe Kerrey wants consistency points for his stand. He took pains to note yesterday, "I wrote the Iraq Liberation Act," the Ahmed Chalabi-inspired law in 1998 that among other things committed U.S. funds for Chalabi's INC openly (as opposed to earlier covert funding) and committed the United States to "regime change" in Iraq. Alas.

But Kerrey's stand was reminiscent of John Kerry's 2004 confusion. At one point he said that if we "stay the course" as Bush says, then we will "cut and run" because Congress will cut off funding for the war. What does that mean, exactly? Kerrey utterly failed to articulate what he would suggest we do, other than to agrree with Perle that we need to win the war. (Perle: "Yes I think we can win this war.")

Perle, of course, was his provocative self. "All this talk about exit strategies is an encouragement to Al Qaeda." And: "If we were to abandon Iraq, that would be the greatest gift that we could give to the terrorists." I guess that sets the marker down: some (like me) argue that staying in Iraq is the greatest gift to bin Laden we could give, also the argument made by Mike Scheuer, who ran the CIA's OBL unit.

On intelligence, Perle attacked those who accuse the administration of lying about intelligence. But he added, slyly, "Some people [in the administration] may have characterized the intelligence in a way that intelligence analysts might not have wished." Indeed.

The Post's Ellen Knickmeyer snagged a chilling interview with Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the turban-wearing cleric who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Hakim, of course, is the radical-right, Iran-linked SCIRI chieftain who headed the group's feared Badr Brigade, a paramilitary force of 20,000 commandos armed and trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. He usually disguises his radicalism and commitment to a Shiite theocracy with polite rhetoric, but in the Post interview a lot of his real colors shine through.

Hakim castigates the United States for tying the hands of the Shiite alliance, and he makes it clear (without being explicit) that left to their own devices the Shiites' crusade against the Sunnis and the Iraqi resistance would be brutal and bloody. "There are plans to confront terrorists, approved by security agencies, but the Americans reject that," says Hakim. The Americans reject confronting terrorists? While thousands of U.S. troops raid city after city in Iraq, killing hundreds? What Hakim, the Shiite fanatic means, is that the United States has so far rejected making a one-to-one equation that every Sunni is a terrorist. Adds Knickmeyer:

Hakim gave few details of what getting tough would entail, other than making clear it would require more weapons, with more firepower, than the United States is currently supplying. He also urged the United States to take a tougher stand against countries harboring insurgents and their supporters, and called for faster trials of insurgent suspects.

His repeated assertion that the United States was being too weak against Iraq's insurgency, allowing attacks to mushroom, appeared to suggest that any future Iraqi government that included him would share his view.

And listen to this: "The ministries of Interior and Defense want to carry out some operations to clean out some areas," says Hakim. "There were plans that should have been implemented months ago, but American officials and forces rejected them." What Hakim is saying, when he says "clean out some areas" sounds very close to "ethinic cleansing, I'd say.

The important lesson of the Hakim interview is that the United States has virtually no common interest with the Hakim-led Shiite alliance. The American interest in Iraq is to allow the Sunnis (including the resistance) back into a position of political equality in Iraq, so the insurgency ends. The Shiite-Hakim interest is to exclude the Sunnis and kill all who object. As Knickmeyer concludes: "Tthe leaders of many Shiite religious parties, reflecting their years in exile and their bitterness over the killing of relatives and supporters during Hussein's dictatorship, say the endgame is a military one."

Finally, many long months after it became obvious that Iraq's Shiite government, police and militias were operating death squads and torturing prisoners, the U.S. media has caught up to this story. I've been making noise about this all year (see, for example here ), and more than a year ago I wrote about it in the American Prospect.

Now it's front-page news in both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

The LAT version is headlined "Killings Linked to Shiite Squads in Iraqi Police Force," and it begins: "Shiite Muslim militia members have infiltrated Iraq's police force and are carrying out sectarian killings under the color of law, according to documents and scores of interviews." It's a massive, stunning, and tragic investigative coup, and it demolishes the Bush administration's pretension of creating a democracy in Iraq. Here's one excerpt:

The Al Mahdi army has a heavy presence in the regular police force, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said. One high-ranking U.S. military officer estimated that up to 90% of the 35,000 police officers working in northeast Baghdad were affiliated with Al Mahdi.

The U.S. officer said that "half of them are in a unit called 'the Punishment Committee,' " suspected of committing abuses against civilians believed to be flouting Islamic laws or the militia's authority. The officer said that Sunni Arab Muslims were frequently targeted by the committee.

Haider Albadi, spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, confirmed the existence of the secret police squad and its possible involvement in mass slayings.

The NYT version is headlined thus: "Sunnis Accuse Iraqi Military of Kidnappings and Slayings." And it begins:

As the American military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

All of this follows the revelation of the torture prison operated by the government-linked Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed militia that reportedly has 20,000 fighters. As I wrote in TomPaine. there are "our monsters.

Bring him on! President Bush today launched his final offensive to defend his failed war in Iraq. Bush smirked, shrugged, and stuck out his chin defiantly during his overlong speech in Annapolis today. But no one was listening. The military isn't listening: even as Bush spoke, the generals are making plans to scale back the U.S. presence in Iraq. Congress isn't listening: more and more, even Republican members of Congress are eyeing the polls and looking nervously toward November 2006, when voters get a chance to express themselves on America's failed Iraq adventure. The public isn't listening: polls continue to show a steady downturn in support for the war.

Bush is battling two insurgencies, and losing badly against both. The first insurgency is the one in iraq, which is showing no signs of going away. The second one is the domestic "insurgency," the widespread revolt by voters, more and more Democrats (except, of course, the ever-treacherous Joe Lieberman, whose Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday was cited by Bush in his speech), and lots of Republicans.

Stunningly, in his speech -- and in the 38-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" document -- Bush had literally nothing to say about diplomacy. Nowhere did Bush suggest a role for a U.S. mediator in Iraq, like the one that George Mitchell played in Ireland. The White House makes only a back-of-the-hand reference to the Arab League, whose breakthrough conference in Cairo last weekend was the first hopeful sign for bringing in the Iraqi resistance into a deal for U.S. withdrawal. In his speech, Buish made only a passing reference to the United Nations, which holds one of the keys to resolving the war in Iraq.

Let's leave aside the issue that the man who declared "Mission Accomplished" two and a half years ago is now organizing a nationwide political offensive for a "Strategy for Victory." The idea of "victory" in Iraq has long since been eclipsed. There is no chance that the United States can achieve victory. By rejecting a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal, by refusing on annouce a diplomatic initiative, by continuing to insist that the war in Iraq is really a war against terrorism, Bush revealed only that he hasn't the slightest idea of what do to in Iraq.