I don’t want to let pass the reinstatement of security clearances for House Intelligence Committee staffer Larry Hanauer without commenting on what an ugly incident this was.

Here you have a mid-level Democratic staffer stripped of his ability to do his job by the committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) as political payback against Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the ranking member who publicly released a report of an internal committee investigation of whether and how convicted felon Duke Cunningham used his position on the committee to advance his corrupt schemes.

Poor Hanauer was caught in the middle. His security clearances were suspended not because of anything he had to do with the Cunningham report but because in the course of doing his job he had requested and received a copy of the National Intelligence Estimatee on Iraq, another classified report that was later leaked to the New York Times.

There was no evidence that Hanauer was in any way connected to the leak. None. There was only the coincidence of timing. Bear in mind that numerous people inside government had access to the report, and Hanauer was only one of them. But look, Rep. Ray Lahood (R-IL) has admitted that this was payback, a shot across Harman’s bow. Walter Pincus walks us through the all details again in a piece today in the WaPo.

Hoekstra’s tenure has committee chairman has been one long decline into politicization of intelligence and of the oversight process. He hit rock bottom with the Hanauer incident. He was sitting on the Cunningham report because of its embarrassing findings: his fellow GOP committee member was running amok engaged in criminal conduct right under Hoekstra’s nose. He and the Administration had been sitting on the politically explosive NIE on Iraq, which mysteriously didn’t get distributed to members of the Intel Committee as it normally would have.

In one last spasm of coverup and denial, Hoekstra–and the rest of the GOP leadership–lashed out at a mid-level staffer. It’s a disgrace.

Good, good stuff.

(Thanks to TPM Reader SD for the link.)

I couldn’t help but return to yesterday’s Washington Post article that had the darkly humorous discussion of whether our new policy on Iraq should be to go long, go short, go big, go wide or perhaps just give it to the running back and have him try to run it up the middle. I don’t grab at humor lightly here. It’s a grim set of choices we have before us. And the cost in lives is immense, whichever course we take. But what our Iraq policy needs as much as anything is a pull-no-punches injection of candor. And calling mumbojumbo for what it is is part of that.

Consider this passage from the Ricks piece in the Post …

The purpose of the temporary but notable increase, they said, would be twofold: To do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence, and also to signal to the Iraqi government and public that the shift to a “Go Long” option that aims to eventually cut the U.S. presence is not a disguised form of withdrawal.

Even so, there is concern that such a radical shift in the U.S. posture in Iraq could further damage the standing of its government, which U.S. officials worry is already shaky. Under the hybrid plan, the short increase in U.S. troop levels would be followed by a long-term plan to radically cut the presence, perhaps to 60,000 troops.

That combination plan, which one defense official called “Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long,” could backfire if Iraqis suspect it is really a way for the United States to moonwalk out of Iraq — that is, to imitate singer Michael Jackson’s trademark move of appearing to move forward while actually sliding backward. “If we commit to that concept, we have to accept upfront that it might result in the opposite of what we want,” the official said.

Let’s start with the first paragraph. And reason one for temporary build-up of forces. To say that we are building up “to do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence” sounds to me like there is no clear strategic rationale or plan behind the build up. Of course, we want to do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence. We want to do that with the current numbers. We’d want to do it with half the number of troops there. And the same goes for if we had twenty times the number.

It would be different if they were saying, for instance, that we were going to put in 50,000 more troops to seal the borders with Syria and Iran and that that would measurably change the stituation inside Iraq and allow our current number of troops on the ground to stabilize the situation inside the country. I’m not saying that’s a good idea or that I would support it. But at least there would be a strategic rationale, a theory of what a short term deployment of more troops would do and how it would help and change the situaiton. This just sounds like, put in 20,000 or 30,000 more troops and, heck, it can’t hurt to have a few more of our guys there since we’re already having such a hard time getting a handle on the situation.

Read the rationale closely and rationale one seems like argumentative padding for rationale two: “to signal to the Iraqi government and public that the shift to a “Go Long” option that aims to eventually cut the U.S. presence is not a disguised form of withdrawal.”

But cutting the US presence by whatever number is a withdrawal. It doesn’t have to be ‘defeat’ or ‘cutting and running’ or whatever charged phrased you want to use. But it definitely is a withdrawal. And the whole danger of the policy is that Iraqis might realize that what our policy actually is: i.e., withdrawal from Iraq. Or in this memorably new use of the phrase, that we’re ‘moonwalking’ out of Iraq.

Work it out like ten different ways but what it comes down to is that the policy is largely, perhaps exclusively, an excercise in either fooling ourselves or the Iraqis about what it is we’re actually doing. That tells me we haven’t grasped the heart of the issue and taken the first step in dealing with this situation — which is to stop lying to ourselves about what we’ve gotten ourselves into, how we got ourselves into it and what bad options we can choose to start the long process getting ourselves out of this mess.

The Pentagon’s TALON database at work.

Since I’ve been on a semi-leave for the last ten days or so, I’ve been able to watch and listen to the news a bit more like most people do. From a bit of distance, focused mainly on the headlines and without the time to read too deeply down into the details. From that vantage point, the two legislative agenda items I’ve heard the most about in the last few days are Charlie Rangel’s idea of instituting a draft and Marty Meehan’s and Barney Frank’s idea of starting off in January with hearing on the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

Now, we could quickly get into an internecine fight over the priorities of the next Congress. For what it’s worth, I think we should ditch the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. And I understand that Rangel’s proposal is in the manner of a Modest Proposal. If more political and opinion elites had close relatives in uniform we’d probably be a lot less eager to sign on to new wars for frivolous or inane reasons.

On the draft issue, I get the concept behind Rangel’s call for a draft. I understand the separate argument for a draft on national service grounds, though I think that’s a bit different from where Rangel is coming from. But this isn’t the way people hear this proposal on first contact. We’ve just had a national election that became a massive repudiation of the Iraq War. If you’re a casual news consumer who went to polls to say, enough! on Iraq, I think a vote on reinstituting the draft has got to come off to you, at best, really out of the blue. At worst, I imagine it registers with a big ‘What the hell are they thinking?’

It would be one thing if a draft would materially change our present options. But it won’t. The US military has been all-volunteer for three decades. Whatever is on paper, it would take a really, really long time for a draft to actually start putting real soldiers on the ground anywhere.

But these are both highly divisive issues, ones tailor made for Republicans hoping to trip up the new Democratic congress right out of the gate.

You start with broadly popular and critically needed changes. That allows you to build up the electorate’s confidence in your governance and gains you political capital to tackle more difficult problems. This isn’t about following a timorous legislative agenda that will offend no one. There is a war going on. Two actually. Our military faces a readiness crisis in the very near future. We are in a soldier-slaughtering drift in Iraq. These are complicated questions requiring bold solutions.

I don’t want to make too big a deal about this. We’re in a bit of a news lull. And the press jumps on stories like this. But that is the point. What’s happening here is that there’s a vacuum at the top. The incoming Speaker needs to starting laying out the Democrats out-of-the-box legislative agenda, explaining what it is, who it will help and what it will produce. Nature abhors a vacuum. And if nature abhors it, journalists frigging slash and kill a vacuum. Remain silent and the field goes to every legislative baron’s bright idea. And the country has too much to deal with to drift.

The next big question for the House leadership (i.e., Speaker Pelosi): who gets to be chairman of the House intel committee. Justin Rood has a run-down of the issue.

Let me say a few more words about the House intel committee chair issue. From what I hear Alcee Hastings (D-FL) has done a decent job at the intel committee in the various ways one evaluates committee work. And he seems well-liked by colleagues. I’ve always had a good impression of him when I’ve seen him on the chat shows. But there is no ignoring this fact: when he was on a federal bench he was charged with taking bribes. He was acquitted at trial. But a then-Democratic Congress subsequently impeached and convicted him, tossing him off the bench.

I don’t know enough yet about the particulars of the case against him. (We’re going to have a full run-down of the issues later this afternoon on TPMmuckraker.com.) But the conviction in the senate tells me the charges must at least have been pretty serious, if not enough to win a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial.

Given the centrality of intelligence work in our national policy debates today, the importance of secrecy in handling classified information and how politicized and contentious intel debates have become, I don’t see how you can have the chairman of the intel committee be someone about whom there is any serious question whether or not they accepted bribes as judges to subvert justice.

Yes, I’m going to reserve final judgment until I see Justin’s summary of the charges. But can anyone really disagree with this? How can making Hastings chairman of that committee make any sense?

Pretty amazing stuff. And it seems like it’s being treated with a near total media blackout. Stung by the voters’ rebuke, the out-going Republican Congress has decided to close its doors without doing it’s mandated job, finishing the budget bills for next year. By all rights they should send back their paychecks too.

From the AP …

Republicans vacating the Capitol are dumping a big spring cleaning job on Democrats moving in. GOP leaders have opted to leave behind almost a half-trillion-dollar clutter of unfinished spending bills.

There’s also no guarantee that Republicans will pass a multibillion-dollar measure to prevent a cut in fees to doctors treating Medicare patients.

The bulging workload that a Republican-led Congress was supposed to complete this year but is instead punting to 2007 promises to consume time and energy that Democrats had hoped to devote to their own agenda upon taking control of Congress in January for the first time in a dozen years.

We’re their employers. Shouldn’t there be some sort of garnishment?

Let me know if you see mentions of this elsewhere in the news media or on the shows.

Justin Rood has the background on the impeachment of then-federal judge Alcee Hastings, now a Democratic congressman from Florida and Nancy Pelosi’s possible choice to chair the House Intelligence Committee.

Marshall Wittman signs on to be Communications Director for Joe Lieberman, the job he used to have with John McCain.