For some time now - since before the Democratic and Republican conventions - U.S. intelligence officials have been briefing the Democratic and Republican candidates for president on some of the most pressing issues, such as terrorism, that the winner of the Nov. 4 election will confront.

   And whoever the winner is will be given the intelligence community's most secret briefing, the one that President Bush receives every morning, beginning on Nov. 5.

   Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told a public symposium in Nashville on Oct. 30 that the intelligence briefings for Sens. John McCain, R-AZ, and Barack Obama, D-Ill, have been part of an official transition process approved by the Bush administration that has also included briefings for their campaigns.

   "What we proposed to the administration is give us the opportunity to tee up intelligence substance to the leading campaigns before the conventions. We came up with 13 topics. If you made a list, you'd probably get 11 or 12 of the 13. It's the normal thing you would expect," he told the gathering sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, an industry and promotional organization.

   "Our proposal beyond campaigns was we would like to brief the candidates at every opportunity at the time and place of their choosing. We have done so," McConnell continued. "Most of the focus has been on terrorism and a few related topical issues."

   "The third part of it is once we have a President-elect next Tuesday, we will there for the full PDB (President's Daily Briefing) to include not only intelligence substance but all the background and what we do and how we do it."

   Talk about hitting the ground running . . .

It's not quite an endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama, but it's pretty close. On Newsweek's Web site, and blogged earlier by Laura Rozen over at War And Piece, R. Nicholas Burns, formerly the State Department's No. 3 official, comes down firmly in favor of the United States talking to its enemies, including Iran.

Burns, it should be noted, has long been a close friend and ally of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and was the Bush administration's point man on Iran for most of President Bush's second term.

He writes:  Talking to our adversaries is no one's idea of fun, and it is not a sure prescription for success in every crisis. But it is crude, simplistic and wrong to charge that negotiations reflect weakness or appeasement. More often than not, they are evidence of a strong and self-confident country.

Burns does not go as far as Obama, who during the Democratic primary campaign last year told a questioner he'd be willing to meet leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez "without preconditions."

Burns continues:  I'm not saying the next president should sit down immediately with Ahmadinejad. We should initiate contact at a lower level to investigate whether it's worth putting the president's prestige on the line. We should leave the threat of military action on the table to give us greater leverage as we talk to the Iranian government.

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has ridiculed the idea of negotiating with Ahmadinejad, who has threatened to destroy Israel, over its nuclear weapons program or other issues.

Still, the former senior diplomat says the GOP attacks are misplaced:  I lived this issue for 27 years as a career diplomat, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe that's why I've been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama.

In largely refusing to deal with Iran, the United States is only isolating itself, he says:  To illustrate how far we have isolated ourselves, think about this: I served as the Bush administration's point person on Iran for three years but was never permitted to meet an Iranian.

Burns succesor, William Burns (no relation), was finally allowed to sit in on a meeting with the Iranians this past summer.

   For the second year in a row - because of an act of Congress - the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has disclosed the total amount of money spent on the bulk of the country's intelligence programs. For fiscal 2008, it was $47.4 billion.

   That amount was $4 billion more than the total spent in fiscal 2007 for what is known as the National Intelligence Program.

   The NIP covers most of the programs overseen by the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. But not all, according to Steve Aftergood, who oversees the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, and has been following the issue for years.

   Defense intelligence programs that support military operations, like those that provide tactical information for use on the battlefield, are not part of the NIP. So the amount the United States spent in fiscal 2008 - which ran from Oct. 1, 2007, until Oct. 1, 2008 - on all intelligence programs was at least $57.4 billion or more, according to Aftergood.

   The Intelligence Community for years fought against disclosing its budgetary top line, contending that doing so would damage national security. But Congress in 2007 approved legislation implementing recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and one provision requires the ODNI to disclose the annual NIP budget total within 30 days of the end of every fiscal year.

   "Disclosure is an important step as it is part of the process of normalizing intelligence and subjecting it to the rule of law," said Aftergood.

    Only twice has the Intelligence Community disclosed the full amount of annual U.S. intelligence spending. In fiscal 1997, the figure was $26.6 billion, and the following fiscal year, the total was $26.7 billion.

   In other words, spending on intelligence under the Bush administration has more than doubled, a result no doubt largely due to the so-called war on terror and the two overseas conflicts the United States is embroiled in.

   The ODNI's announcement made it clear that the national intelligence czar is not happy about having to publicize the NIP's top line.

   "Any and all subsidiary information concerning the intelligence budget, whether the information concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs, will not be disclosed," it said.

We end the week with a quick post on a recent report from the nonprofit group Human Rights First on arms sales to Sudan.

The report (a PDF file), which can be found here says that as many as 30 countries may be violating a 2004 United Nations arms embargo meant to stop arms from flowing to Sudan's Darfur region, where the Khartoum government has been accused of fueling genocide by arming militias known as the Janjaweed.

The report found that China is Khartoum's No.1 arms supplier. No surprise there, given Beijing's close ties with the government of Sudan, where it has long been helping to develop the country's disputed oil fields. But China's not alone: Belarus, Cyprus, India, Iran, Kenya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey have all sold arms to the Sudanese government, according to the report, which is based on several sources, including U.N. data, and self-reporting by the governments involved.

U.N. Security Council resolution 1556 does not ban arms sales to the Sudanese government, only to the Janjaweed. But Sudan, according to Human Rights First, has refused to honor the arms embargo, and the fear is that weapons sold to it are being either transferred to government proxies in Darfur or used by the Sudanese government in support of Janjaweed offensives.

Many other countries, including the United States, are producers of arms that have ended up in Sudan, the report states. The report, which covers the years 2004-2006, says Sudan has imported $76.3 million in weapons since 2004, excluding combat aircraft.

That's it for this week...........

   Even as the United States and Russia spare over Georgia, U.S. missile defense plans and Iran, the two sides  have been quietly working to ensure that nuclear materials stay out of the hands of terrorists.
   The National Nuclear Security Administration, overseer of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Thursday announced the "successful" completion of a hush-hush operation in which nearly 341 pounds of spent Soviet-era highly enriched uranium fuel were transported from Hungary to a secure facility in Russia.
   The shipment was the largest of four shipments of spent HEU reactor fuel removed from facilities in former Soviet bloc countries and deposited in secure facilities over a year-long period. The other three countries are the Czech Republic, Latvia and Bulgaria. The NNSA explained that during the Cold War, the Soviet Union supplied HEU fuel to research reactors run by its allies and republics.
   The NNSA said it worked closely with Russia, Hungary, Slovenia, the International Atomic Energy Agency and EURATOM, the European nuclear agency, to transport the spent HEU from Hungary to Russia.
   The material was loaded into 13 special casks, transported under high security by rail to the Slovenian port of Koper, shipped in a special cargo vessel to a secure seaport in Russia and then taken by train to a secure storage site.
   So perhaps the state of U.S.-Russian relations is better than generally believed. On the other hand . . .

National security policy, which has been somewhat dormant in the U.S. presidential campaign recently thanks to the financial meltdown, has reared its head again. And true to the tenor of the campaign in its closing days, the arguments are getting ugly.

First came Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden's remark, at a Sunday fundrasier, that a President Barack Obama would be tested by U.S. adversaries early in his tenure. "Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy," Biden said, in remarks that undoubtedly did little to endear himself with the man at the top of the ticket.

Republicans gleefully seized on the remark, and pointed to what they see as one of GOP nominee John McCain's top selling points, his foreign policy experience.

At a news conference in Richmond today, Obama said of his running mate: "Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes." He went on: "A period of transition to a new administration is always one in which we have to be vigilant .. We have to be careful, we have to be mindful that as we pass the baton in this democracy, that others don't take advantage of it. That is true whether it's myself or Senator McCain."

But compared to the next installment, that was just child's play.

This morning, the Washington Post reported that al Qaida-related Web sites were not only trumpeting the U.S. financial crisis, but that at least one poster had suggested that a McCain win would be good for the terrorist network, because the Republican would further expand U.S. military commitments, exhausting America.

The McCain-Palin campaign sensed a problem. Or an opportunity. Or both. What did they do? Schedule a conference call with reporters for this morning, naturally. On the line were former CIA DIrector James Woolsey and McCain senior foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann. (Being from McClatchy, we can't help but note that both men were major figures in the invade-Iraq crowd right after 9/11. Woolsey, as we were the first to report, went to the United Kingdom weeks after the attacks, on a trip arranged by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in search of evidence that Iraq has been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a theory long discredited by the FBI and CIA).

While Scheunemann lambasted the Post article, and its headline, Woolsey took a different task, suggesting that if terrorists were endorsing McCain, it was because they wanted to hurt him. "This individial (blogger) knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally, so it seems to me it's pretty clear that by making this statement ... he is clearly trying to damage John McCain, not speaking from his heart."

Scheunemann tried a different tack, reading quotes from a virtual rogue's gallery of Middle Eastern bad-guys who have said nice things about Biden and Obama. They included a spokesman for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Ahmed Yousef; Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who merely said: "We do prefer to have relations (with the United States) whereas one of the candidates in this election would prefer that"); and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. (Last we checked, Qaddafi's country is off the State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring states, and was visited by none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently).

Scheunemann drew a line at declaring that the terrorists support Obama for president. "I am not going to characterize (the remarks), I will let others judge whether they amount to expression of support or opposition, whether they amount to expressions of endorsement or opposition," he said.

Asked directly whether he was saying that al Qaida would like to see Obama elected, Scheunemann demurred. "I'm not saying that at all," he said, adding that if Obama's preferrred policies in Iraq had been followed, al Qaida in Iraq (which is not the same as bin Laden's al Qaida) would be celebrating.

Here's a link to the audio of the conference call.

This is what passes for a serious national security and foreign policy debate in the campaign, these days.

OK, back to the economy and today's 514-point Dow Jones drop...

Your N&S trio hasn't posted much this week, as we've been tied up with a number of things, a lot of them related to foreign policy/national security in the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign.

This one falls in the category of In Case You Missed It, a phrase now being condensed in the blogosphere and elsewhere to ICYMI. We thank a loyal reader for passing it along...

As noted in several places, including the ars technica blog, a catch-all funding bill that President Bush signed into law a few weeks ago permits the start up of something called the National Applications Office at the Department of Homeland Security. Why do they always give these things such anodyne names? Like National Security Agency? Or Terrorist Surveillence Program? Never mind. We know why.

In any event, the National Applications Office will use spy satellites--intended to peek into places like North Korea and Iran--to peer down on the United States. The stated purpose of the new office is to use satellite imagery and other intelligence to help in civil emergencies, respond to natural disasters, assess vulnerabilities to terrorism at U.S. ports, and the like. But the potential for civil liberties' infringement is clear, and you don't have to be paranoid to imagine some future scenario along the lines of the Will Smith movie Enemy of the State.

As ars technica notes, the law Bush signed contains some safeguards. It limits the NAO to activities "substantially similar" to those carried out under a 1976 interagency body called the Civil Applications Committee. Those are the aforementioned natural disaster/geological survey-type uses. It also calls for quarterly Inspector General classified reports on the data collected by the NAO.

That sounds reassuring. But as our colleague Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, a yet-to-be-published report by Congress' Government Accountability Office said the Department of Homeland Security can't provide solid assurances that privacy and other laws will be respected, or that data will not be improperly shared with other U.S. agencies.

Experience shows that once you start a program like this, it tends to expand, and becomes impossible to kill. So stay tuned. Or rather, look up.

P.S. - The NAO's draft charter is here.

The U.S. military is encouraging its servicemen and women overseas to mail back their absentee ballots this week (For those who need more information on how to do that, here is the link.) I figured this week was also a good time to discuss who the troops are voting for. The question has sparked a fierce debate among some military circles, especially after the Military Times released a poll last week of its current and former subscribers.

The Times found that McCain had an overwhelming lead over Obama, 68 to 23 percent. And it said that Iraq ranked third amongst the most important issues to the troops, behind character and the economy.

Iraq was the No. 1 issue in the paper’s 2004 survey. And in that year, respondents said the voted for President Bush over Sen.  John Kerry, 68 to 17 percent.

The paper was quick to note that its readers tend to be older and don’t always reflect the diversity of the military. That is, it’s not scientific. But it’s the only poll of the military, which of course is a key – and telling – voting bloc. So what do the results mean?

I think it means that nobody really knows which way the military is leaning, or at least by how much. Troops usually vote overwhelming Republican, and Sen. John McCain’s service in the Navy and five-plus years as a prison of war in Vietnam make him a military hero by most anyone’s standards. So the numbers in some ways are not surprising.

And yet troops voting in this election likely have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their opinions about the way ahead are based on personal experiences, not political rhetoric. The drop in violence in Iraq – and the increase in Afghanistan – will shape how they think about the next four years. And the differences between the two candidates on Iraq are stark.

In August, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that Sen. Barack Obama received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contribution than to McCain or one-time presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (who is fiercely opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

In addition, the paper found that “nearly eight out of 10 black service members indicated they intend to vote for Obama,” many who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. 

So will the 68 to 23 percent lead hold? Perhaps. Regardless, the final tally could be the best measure we have on how the troops really feel not only politically, but on the surge, the move toward counterinsurgency and the way ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

So read the headline in today’s Washington Post on an editorial encouraging Obama – if he wins – to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his post. It’s the latest in an increasingly growing chorus from pols, pundits, journalists and even some in military circles. Trudy Rubin, my friend and one of this nation’s premiere foreign policy columnists, wrote a fabulous piece earlier this week also pleading for Gates to stay on.

Now, I have been covering Gates’ tenure for all but six months of his time at the Defense Department, and I feel our dear readers should know how things look from inside the five-sided puzzle palace. From the day I arrived, all I heard the secretary stress was how much he is counting the days until he gets out of Washington. At first, he talked about going back to Texas A&M, where he was president until he was plucked to head up the Defense Department. Now he makes frequent references to his home in Washington State. Travel with him to enough military installations, and you will hear him tell the same jokes about how self-absorbed the Washington establishment is (and he really is right about that.). Walk into his office, and you will see pictures of his home in Washington State and his time as president of Texas A&M. He says they are there so people know he doesn’t have to be in his job; he’s got other places he could be. And most telling of all, he keeps a “Gates Countdown” clock that literally counts down the days until his time as the secretary is over. And he can tell you the number on any given day.

Gates has said he took the job out of a sense of patriotism. It was just after President Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld. Iraq was a quagmire, and troop morale was the lowest I have ever seen it. The department was suffocating, and Gates was some much-needed fresh air. And since he joined, the war has improved and morale is much better. Mission accomplished, according to many.

Regardless, I don’t think he will stay on.

Besides his desperate desire to get out of Washington, the secretary is operating like someone who is on his way out and wants to make sure the changes he has put in motion stay. In speech after speech, he calls for the military to maintain its counterinsurgency focus, not be tempted to drop it as soon as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end. That is, his focus is on what will happen when he is no longer in charge. He wants his changes to be sustainable.

Even if he doesn’t stay on, I think Gates’ tenure has spurred a renewed debate on what the nation needs from its secretary of defense, particularly as it engages two counterinsurgencies. And perhaps that ultimately will be his gift to the next administration.

In a piece that appeared in the London Times earlier this week, U.K. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, said the Taliban could not be defeated. Carleton-Smith, who had just finished serving in Afghanistan said: “What we need is sufficient troops to contain the insurgency to a level where it is not a strategic threat to the longevity of the elected Government,”

The report followed a leak earlier this month to a French publication, in which Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, reportedly said the strategy in Afghanistan was “doomed to failure”.

I don’t think the timing of these reports is coincidental, but a concerted effort to get the United States to sit up and take notice of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. And it has. Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. forces-Afghanistan commander, and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both said things will get worse in Afghanistan and pushed for more U.S. involvement. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asked eastern Europe to send more troops. And now Gen. David Petraeus, the new U.S. Central Command commander, is reassessing the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. What all this will lead to remains unknown. For now, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is adrift.

Carleton-Smith suggested that the best way to deal with the Taliban is to somehow incorporate them into political process, something akin to the political reconciliation promoted in Iraq. But which Taliban? Like the Iraqi insurgency, the Taliban is not a monolithic group. Some are more reconcilable than others.  And if they choose to join, how will the coalition protect them?

I think as the U.S. military reconsiders its strategy in Afghanistan, this idea will get more traction. Indeed, the military community is increasingly embracing this concept. The RAND Corporation had a fascinating study that found the best way to defeat insurgency is to include them into the political process. It’s the lesson of Iraq – reconciliation is more effective than fighting insurgents out.

So can the Taliban be defeated? Who knows? But all signs, from across the pond and beyong, suggest that more troops are not enough. The U.S. military and its coalition in Afghanistan will have to approach the Taliban in a more sophisticated way.

UPDATE: On Friday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told NATO leaders in Budapest that the United States would support reaching out to the Taliban. He suggested it could be similar to the reconciliation that happened in Iraq.

"We promoted a reconciliation that involved people we were pretty confident had been shooting at us and killing our soldiers," he said about what happened in Iraq. "There has to be ultimately -- and I'll underscore ultimately -- reconciliation as part of a political outcome to this," referring to Afghanistan.