Anti-U.S. sentiments are already seething in nuclear-armed Pakistan, as is popular hatred for the Bush administration's "indispensible" ally in its so-called war on terror, the former dictator and army chief, President Pervez Musharraf.

Yet there's President Bush calling Musharraf to give him a reassuring pat on the back as Musharraf faces growing pressure to resign.

"The president reiterated the United States' strong support for Pakistan and he indicated he looked forward to President Musharraf's continuing role in further strengthening U.S.-Pakistani relations," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

No matter how the White House spins it, Bush's call will be seen by most Pakistanis as yet more confirmation that the U.S. is out to shore up Musharraf in defiance of the results of free and fair elections in February in which Musharraf's political allies were trounced by an opposition coalition led by the party of slain prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Administration officials will undoubtedly point to that bit about Bush reiterating "strong support for Pakistan" and say that the president was just expressing his hope that Musharraf won't make things worse as the new coalition continues to self-destruct over what to do about him and the dozens of judges he purged last year. (The silence on that issue of an administration that portrays itself as a defender of democracy is a prime reason why the U.S. is so disliked.)

Yet under Pakistan's constitution, foreign policy is made by the elected federal government and the president is largely a ceremonial figurehead.

So why is Bush urging Musharraf to continue playing a key role in guiding the county's most important foreign relationship?

One of the great joys of covering defense issues is that I am all but spared from the presidential campaign. No long rides on the campaign bus only to hear the candidate give the exact same speech five times in one day. No, I leave that to my fine colleagues, and quietly laugh from an austere military outpost somewhere in Iraq. There, I am hopefully seeing and learning from the troops on the ground, which I would always rather be doing.

But alas today, the campaign bus drove right through my beat. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain sent a fundraising letter that evoked Gen. David Petraeus’ name. In the letter, McCain chastises Obama for visiting Iraq only once. If Obama is willing to sit down with Iranian President (and top U.S. foe) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, why doesn’t Obama “take the opportunity to sit down with General Petraeus and learn about the situation in Iraq firsthand.” Agree? Send your check to the McCain campaign.

A political maelstrom quickly erupted. A coterie of Democrats leaders gathered in Wisconsin Friday morning to lambast McCain for “politicizing the military.” Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, an Obama backer, hurled a counter charge, saying McCain appeared at an event the previous day and said the U.S. had already drawdown troops to pre-surge levels. “Everybody knows it’s not true. I assume Sen. McCain doesn’t know the facts here.” Indeed, there are about 155,000 troops in Iraq; before the Bush administration’s “surge” strategy began last spring, there were 132,000 troops.

A few hours later, McCain dismissed that criticism but promised he would not use Gen. Petraeus’ name in fundraising material. 

The controversy comes at an interesting time because the military is grappling with the role of politics in the new kind of war it fights. Indeed, some charge that Gen. Petraeus has become too political. They say that the general became the face for the surge strategy because the administration lacked creditability with the public. That is, he was representative for the administration, not an objective military commander. He rejects that charge outright. In fact, I spoke briefly to Gen. Petraeus after he testified on Capitol Hill last month, and he said he tried very carefully to avoid the array of political landmines before him.

Before the Iraq War began, a soldier’s job was clear -- follow orders and give your best advice to civilian leaders. But as the military adopted counterinsurgency, which demands a soldier make split-second, on-the-ground adjustments to the situation in his community, that relationship has become complicated. A captain in charge of stabilizing a small Iraqi community can’t wait for a general to tell him how to settle a local dispute. It is up to him. And the general, in this case, Petraeus, must now think far more broadly – about regional politics and sometimes domestic pressures - not just about the best military plan.

Just last week, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, published a letter in the latest issue of Joint Force Quarterly about this issue. In it, he said that “the U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times and in all ways.” Clearly, the issue is on the minds of top military leaders.

So is the military becoming more political? Or are politicians using military decisions for political gain? Unfortunately for me, I will have to keep checking in throughout the election to figure it out.  But frankly, I’d rather be out in the field with the soldiers that ultimately must carry out orders from politicians.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, admitted in an emotional television appearance four years ago that he had sold nuclear components to Iran, North Korea and LIbya. A.Q. Khan, as he is usually called, is believed to have run an international procurement network that straddled Asia, the Middle East and Europe. His name has become synonymous with the nuclear black market and weapons proliferation.

But in an interview published Friday in Britain's Guardian newspaper, his first with a Western news media organization since 2004, Khan said his confession was all a sham, forced on him by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. "It was not of my own free will. It was handed into my hand," he told the Guardian.

Khan, a national hero in Pakistan who is under virtual house arrest, also said he would never cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose investigators, along with many intelligence agencies, are still trying to track down what he sold, and to whom.

U.S. government specialists aren't buying Khan's new tune.

In an e-mailed response, one U.S. official said simply:  "We haven't changed our assessment that A.Q. Khan was a major--and very dangerous--proliferator.  He sold sensitive nuclear equipment and know-how to some genuinely bad actors."

Until now, we've resisted the temptation to post on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, which accuses the Bush White House of launching a propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

Why? It's not news. At least not to some of us who've covered the story from the start.

(Click here, here and here to get just a taste of what we mean).

Second, we find it a wee bit preposterous -- and we are being diplomatic here -- that a man who slavishly - no, robotically! -- defended President Bush's policies in Iraq and elsewhere is trying to "set the record straight" (and sell a few books) five years and more after the invasion, with U.S. troops still bravely fighting and dying to stabilize that country.

But the responses to McClellan from the Bush administration and media bigwigs, history-bending as they are, compel us to jump in. As we like to say around here, it's truth to power time, not just for the politicians but also for some folks in our own business.

Bush loyalists have responded in three ways:

1)  Scott, how could you?  This conveniently ignores the issue of what Bush did or didn't know and do about intelligence on Iraq, converting the story line into that of wounded leader and treasonous former aide. (That canard was the sole focus of a CBS news radio report Wednesday night).

2) Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Okay. When do Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al *not* say that?  Dog bites man.

3) It was an intelligence failure. The CIA gave us bad dope on WMD and, well, they're the experts. More on this in a second.

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.

Here's ABC News' Charles Gibson: "I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.” And “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently."

Really?

Or this from NBC's Brian Williams: “Sadly, we saw fellow Americans — in some cases floating past facedown (after Katrina). We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors [in Iraq]. I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and, yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary.” And this: "“It’s tough to go back, to put ourselves in the mind-set. It was post-9/11 America."

So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?

Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH.

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.

Here are Bill Moyers and Michael Massing on the media's pre-war performance.

Enough self-aggrandizing trumpet-blowing. OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that  not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki,  Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since.  The White House thought it was unneeded. It  actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.

That's what happened.

-- Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay.

The Bush administration, whose obsession with secrecy even has Republican lawmakers outraged, has created a new category of security for government data that doesn't rise to the level of secret. It's called "Controlled Unclassified Information," or CUI.

Under President Bush's May 9 decision, CUI replaces the "Sensitive But Unclassified" designation. Note the change in nuance.

A May 20 White House background paper says that the new designation is needed to protect terrorism-related information that doesn't meet the standards for classification but "is pertinent to the national interest" and "requires protection from unauthorized disclosure, special handling safeguards, or prescribed limits on exchange or dissemination."

Not so fast with that rubber stamp, responds Steven Aftergood of the Federation of the American Scientist.

Aftergood, who runs the federation's Project on Government Secrecy, says in the latest issue of his Secrecy News blog that the White House may have created CUI as a new "catch-all category for information that agencies wish to withhold."

For instance. he points out that according to the background paper, the new designation allows government officials to temporarily designate embargoed press releases as CUI until they are released.

Moreover, for all of its tortured, stilted and bureaucratic language, the background paper makes it clear that the designation pertains to all types of information, not just materials related to terrorism.

Aftergood notes that under the new directive, any member of the public who wants information stamped CUI can file a Freedom of Information Act request.

But, he continued, "anyone who has filed a FOIA request knows that the FOIA process is not quite straightforward, nor does it produce a timely result."

"The background paper thus affirms a view that information deemed 'sensitive' shall be presumptively withheld, and any exceptions shall be handled through the FOIA process," Aftergood continues. "In truth, this policy of presumptive withholding is pretty much how the Bush administration currently operates. And it makes no tangible difference if agencies use 100 different terms for 'sensitive' or replace them all with one term, 'controlled unclassified information.'"

We here at Nukes and Spooks wonder what Kafka would think.

UPDATE: A reader points out that CUI has been instituted to consolidate and streamline myriad less-than-secret classifications used by different agencies under a single designation. Okay, but the question stands.

UPDATE II: Smintheus, who writes the blog Unbossed, claims credit for being the first to write about the new CUI directive here on May 10.

Two weeks ago, North Korea's secretive regime turned over to the United States a treasure trove of nearly 19,000 pages of documents. North Korea said it is the complete operating record of its 5 megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and a nearby reprocessing plant designed to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel rods for making nuclear weapons.

The records are crucial to the Bush administration's high-priority effort to get North Korea to disarm:   they are expected to show how much  plutonium it was able to create (and therefore how many bombs it might be able to construct).

The documents are being translated and analyzed by an inter-agency team including specialists from the U.S. intelligence community, State Department and Energy Department. Government officials have been ordered not to discuss the findings of that analysis in any detail.

We're told by one U.S. official that the package of documents "is what it's supposed to be." The official said "evidently there's nothing we've found in those documents that would preclude moving forward along the diplomacy lines." (Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill is due to meet Wednesday in Beijing with his North Korean counterpart to discuss the next stage in the negotiations).

No word yet on what the documents say about North Korea's plutonium production. North Korea says the Yongbyon reactor produced 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of plutonium; U.S. intelligence estimates are slightly higher. It takes about seven kilograms of plutonium to build a bomb.

An unclassified summary of what the North Korean documents contain is expected in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

I like to think of myself as a hardened war correspondent, yet I have no shame in telling you I was truly touched by the words below written by a soldier’s family. And it seemed only fitting to share them with you as the nation celebrates Memorial Day.

First, a little background: On Friday, the White House announced that Army Pfc. Ross McGinnis of Knox, Pa. will be awarded the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest decoration.

As I began researching McGinnis story, I found both him and his family interesting. McGinnis, 19, was once a troublemaker in school, at one point expelled. Eventually, he found his way to the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, in Schweinfurt, Germany.

He was in the gunner’s hatch of a Humvee Dec. 4, 2006 when a grenade flew by and landed on the vehicle near four soldiers. At that moment, McGinnis made a choice. He jumped on top of the grenade so his body could shield the blast from the others. He died so that four of his comrades could live. Almost immediately, he was recommended as a Medal of Honor recipient.

With Friday’s announcement, McGinnis will be only the fourth Iraq War service member to receive the Medal of Honor posthumously. His family will accept the award on his behalf during a June 2 ceremony.

I came across a letter his father wrote shortly after his son’s death, which I have included below. I thought it was beautifully written.  It made me think of soldiers like McGinnis that the world will never meet. And the anonymous families that sacrifice along side them.

Statement from parents of SPC Ross A. McGinnis, December 23, 2006
When the doorbell rang Monday evening December 4th, about 9:30, I wondered who would be visiting at this hour of the evening. But when I walked up to the door and saw two US Army officers standing on the patio at the bottom of the steps, I knew instantly what was happening. This is the only way the Army tells the next of kin that a soldier has died.

At that moment, I felt as if I had slipped off the edge of a cliff and there was nothing to grab onto; just a second beyond safety, falling into hell. If only my life could have ended just a moment before this so that I would not have to hear the words they were about to say. If only I could blink myself awake from this horrible dream. But it wasn't a dream.

As the officers made their way into our living room, I rushed back into our bedroom and told my wife Romayne to get up; we had company. And they were going to tell us that Ross is dead. I knew of no other way to say it.

We rushed back out to meet the officers, and then the appointed spokesperson recited the standard message that Private First Class Ross A. McGinnis had been killed in action in Baghdad, Iraq, that day. They could tell us nothing more except that Army regulations required that the family be notified within 4 hours of the event. They offered their sympathy and support, and the Chaplain prayed for our strength in the days to come, and then they left us alone in shock, grief and disbelief.

In the days that followed, we were informed of the details of his death. The entire world probably knows those details now, since there was so much excitement about his heroic deed. Hundreds of family, friends and acquaintances offered us their words of prayer and comfort. But only time will take the edge off the knives that have wedged into our hearts.

Ross did not become OUR hero by dying to save his fellow soldiers from a grenade. He was a hero to us long before he died, because he was willing to risk his life to protect the ideals of freedom and justice that America represents. He has been recommended for the Medal of Honor, and many think that he deserves to get it without the typical 2 years that Congress has required of late. We, his parents, are in no hurry to have our son bestowed with this medal. That is not why he gave his life. The lives of four men who were his Army brothers outweighed the value of his one life. It was just a matter of simple kindergarten arithmetic. Four means more than one.

It didn't matter to Ross that he could have escaped the situation without a scratch. Nobody would have questioned such a reflex reaction. What mattered to him were the four men placed in his care on a moment's notice. One moment he was responsible for defending the rear of the convoy from enemy fire; the next moment he held the lives of four of his friends in his hands.

The choice for Ross was simple, but simple does not mean easy. His straightforward answer to a simple but difficult choice should stand as a shining example for the rest of us. We all face simple choices, but how often do we choose to make a sacrifice to get the right answer? The right choice sometimes requires honor.

Our Bible tells us that God gave up his only son to die for us so that we may live. But Romayne and I are not gods. We can't see the future, and we didn't give our son to die, knowing that he will live again. We gave him to fight and win and come home to us and marry and grow old and have children and grandchildren. But die he did, and his mother, dad and sisters must face that fact and go on without him, believing that someday we will meet again. Heaven is beyond our imagination and so we must wait to see what it's like.

God bless everybody that has comforted us in our time of grief. But we must not forget the men and women who are still putting their lives on the line; we must keep them in our prayers and keep reminding them with gifts and letters that they are loved and that we want them to return safely to their families.

Here is something counter-intuitive: a study says that, rather than increasing, the amount of terrorist violence is actually on the decline globally.

There's a big caveat, we hasten to add. The stark decline is apparent only when violence in Iraq is excluded. That may seem ludicrous, but read on. The authors of the study at Canada's Simon Fraser University  argue that the killings of civilians in wartime, such as in Iraq, is not normally described as "terrorism," but rather as a "war crime" or "crime against humanity." In fact, they point out, most major databases of terror count violence against civilians in Iraq as terrorism, but not violence against civilians in Sudan's Darfur region.

Without Iraq included, the report said, two major databases -- one at the University of Maryland and one at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism -- charted a more than 40 percent decline in fatalities from terrorism since 2001.

Even when Iraq is included, terrorism fatalities have dropped recently, the report says.

The report's authors caution that a decline in deaths from terrorism does not necessarily mean the threat from terrorism, especially Islamist terrorism, is decreasing. But they argue there are signs that international counter-terrorism efforts are having an effect, as well as evidence of "bitter doctrinal infighting" within the global Islamist network and reduced support for al Qaida and similar groups in the Muslim world.

Check out the report. Decide for yourself.

    Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were really angry over what they condemned as White House foot-dragging on briefing them on the Sept. 6 Israeli air strike that destroyed what U.S. intelligence experts concluded was a nuclear reactor that Syria secretly built with North Korean help.

     So the Republicans joined majority Democrats this week in approving legislation in the 2009 Intelligence Authorization Act that would require the administration to keep all committees members, not just the chairman and senior minority member, informed on all intelligence activities other than covert actions.

     Under the proposed amendment to the National Security Act of 1947, the president could seek an exemption from the requirement if he asks - in writing - that access to information be limited because of "extraordinary circumstances affecting the vital interests of the United States."

    But it would be up to the chairman and ranking minority member to actually decide "whether and how to limit access to the information or material."

    That could be a big "BUT" for an administration that believes the power to make such decisions lies with the president, not the Congress. Tell that to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the committee's top Republican.

    "It is likely that there is no single current issue on which there is stronger bipartisan consensus than our shared deep concern that the administration is not fulfilling its statutory duty to keep each member of the committee fully and currently informed with respect to certain intelligence matters," said a statement of Republican views released by Hoekstra.

    The statement noted that the committee members were briefed on the al Kibar reactor on the same afternoon - April 24 - as the media despite a request to President Bush for a briefing "several months earlier."

    "With respect to another matter, the administration refuses to brief all members of the committee even though it has briefed five members of the committee staff," continued the GOP statement. "This follows other incidents in which no member of the committee was briefed in a timely fashion, if at all."

    What that "matter" and "other incidents" were, the statement didn't say.

    They're classified.

Tish Wells, our masterful researcher came upon this study that tackled blogging and the military. Written by James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning for a U.S. Special Operations Command class, it proposes the military consider “clandestinely” hire bloggers to present the military view on the war on terrorism.  It points out the military is in the middle of an information operation, or IO, campaign.  And in Iraq, some insurgent groups, Iraqi politicians, academics and everyday citizens have blogs that share observations interspersed with agendas. So far, the military does not have a go-to blog that is both popular and sly enough to get the military message out.

The authors argue that this war demands an Internet campaign. And so far, the military is losing.

“Just as during World War II, the military recruited the top Hollywood directors and studios to produce films about the war (in effect conducting domestic influ¬ence campaigns in the name of maintaining the national morale and support for the war effort), waging the war against terrorism and its underlying causes, as spelled out in the National Security Strategy, may require recruiting the prominent among the digirati (probably those native to the target region) to help in any Web-based cam¬paign.”

The idea already has come up at least once during this war. Earlier this year this article revealed that the Pentagon had handed out talking points to retired military commanders sitting in the talking pundits’ chair.  The Pentagon was called propagandist.

To be sure, this paper doesn’t purport to represent the Defense Department. Indeed, it was written in an academic setting. But still, it is an interesting and controversial proposition. And it gets at the festering frustration amongst soldiers: The military doesn’t aggressively defend itself against attacks from critics or bloggers. Out on a military base in Iraq, I found it usually came up when someone asked me: “Why don’t you write about all the good things we are doing here?”

The military is quite strict about who can blog out of Iraq, and frankly the Internet service at most bases is so lacking, it would be difficult to keep a blog going. Some argue that letting any soldier share his views, however complementary to the military, could eventually lead to a slip up. A soldier may inadvertently alert his/her enemy to secret security plans. Still others say a military engaged in a complex counterinsurgency battle needs to think in more sophisticated ways. Where firepower is not enough, the military must do more, they argue.

But will hiring people to pose as objective bloggers solve the problem? Probably not. But silence doesn’t seem to be working either.

UPDATE: A very astute reader, J, points out that the Defense Department regularly invites bloggers to roundtables about current defense issues. Here is a link to some of their recent forums. Is there more the military can do? Thoughts?