The email sent out to Department of Energy employees about opportunities opening up in Iraq …

In response to the President’s directive to provide support for the reconstruction and stabilization efforts in Iraq, the Secretary of State has requested that DOE assist in finding a qualified Petroleum Industry Expert and Public Affairs Specialists willing to work at the U.S. embassy in Iraq. The job descriptions are below.

The Petroleum Industry Expert will assist the Ministry of Oil to help strengthen management and transparency, including monitoring contracting activities. The candidate should possess a strong background in the petroleum sector, from production to marketing. This detail will be for 1 year.

The Public Affairs – Global Outreach Team Member positions (8-12) are open to all Government public affairs professionals. Selectees will generally serve on a 3-month rotational basis, although some members may be detailed or assigned to Baghdad for a full year. (Candidates should identify what duration they are interested in, subject to their manager’s approval.) These positions supervise all media aspects of news conferences, press events, media day trips, and media interaction with all high level US visitors; work with Iraqi Government officials at the local level to develop, plan, and implement media events showcasing progress in various regions in Iraq; and develop relationships with the American press corps, International press, Regional Arabic press, US and Coalition Military Forces, and Iraqi press to help facilitate media coverage of events throughout Iraq.

The positions are duty stationed in Baghdad, Iraq. Both offices and living quarters are in the International (Green) Zone, secured by U.S. military personnel and Department of State Diplomatic Security, although there is apt to be travel outside the International Zone under the protection of security forces.

Interested Federal employees must obtain concurrence from their Resource Manager in Headquarters or head of their field element. DOE Federal employees will be on a non-reimbursable detail to the State Department.

These vacancy announcements will remain open until filled. The hiring/deployment process is quite lengthy and includes attendance at a 7-day class on security and cultural issues in Arlington, VA prior to departing the U.S. and a medical clearance.

Benefits:

DOE Federal employees working in Iraq may be eligible for the following benefits.

Overtime pay
Pay for work at night
Pay for work on Sunday
Pay for work on a holiday
Danger pay
Foreign post (hardship) differential
Regional rest breaks
Home visits
Consultation trips (to Washington, DC to debrief DOE
and State)
Per Diem
Medical services
Travel expenses

Additional information on benefits to DOE Federal employees on detail to Iraq can be found at Appendix M of the DOE Handbook on Overseas Assignments, which is available at: http://humancapital.doe.gov/pers/overseas.htm, or at http://chris.inel.doe/payroll.

DOE Contacts

If you have questions regarding the duties of the positions, working conditions in Iraq, or the energy situation in Iraq, please contact ********.

Resumes should be sent to **********. If you have questions regarding your application or benefits issues, please contact ********.

If you’re new to this story see these earlier posts about emails sent out to employees of the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Commerce.

Is more of Iraqi reconstruction being funded off the books?

A bit more on the State Department’s scouring the federal employees roster for folks willing to go to Iraq. I’m told, and it’s not surprising, that the well of State Department employees willing to go for service in Iraq is pretty much dry. Apart from the inherent risks, apparently there have been other management/asignmnet issues that have led to difficulties in recruitment.

However, I’ve heard that at least in one agency, the agencies are expected to pick up the tab not only for the salaries of their employees that go to Iraq but also for the various hazard and bonus pay that goes along with the gig.

At least as it’s been described to me the process is different from the normal ‘detailee’ process in which an employee can be temporarily loaned to the White House, the Hill, or other part of the government.

Can anyone tell me more about this or share more details they might know about how this is working in their agency or department?

And as a semi-unrelated question: why does the biggest demand appear to be for public affairs specialists?

A number of readers have written in with this link to a Raw Story teaser about a piece on the Niger forgeries set to run in tomorrow’s Sunday Times of London.

It reads …

The LONDON SUNDAY TIMES’ Michael Smith — who first broke the infamous Downing Street Memo — will identify who is believed to have forged the documents that formed the basis for President George W. Bush’s infamous 16 words this evening, RAW STORY has learned. Smith will explain the chain of events in painstaking detail.

According to Nato sources who spoke under condition of anonymity with the SUNDAY TIMES, an Italian investigation has fingered two employees of an embassy in Italy with forging the documents.

Speculation has been ripe over who forged the documents — and the SUNDAY TIMES piece is unlikely to stem furor and speculation in the United States over the documents that helped bring the United States to war with Iraq.

Look closely. If this is an accurate representation of what the story will contain, it is about an Italian government investigation. That’s all you need to know.

The Italian intelligence services were centrally involved in the clandestine distribution of the forgeries and in all likelihood the creation of the forgeries themselves. Everything the Italian government has done since then has been to impede any outside investigation into their role.

There’s simply no reason to credit anything an Italian government investigation of this matter reveals. If anything, its findings are probably a good bet to be the exact opposite of what is in fact the case. And the timing of such a release is no doubt in response to indications that at least two US news organizations will release new, damaging revelations about their role in the not-too-distant future.

This new article on the Niger forgeries is now up online in Sunday London Times.

The claim actually isn’t a new one. It’s been rattling around Italy for at least a year, and reported in a few Italian publications aligned with the current government. The basic argument is that the Niger forgeries were the work of two employees at the Nigerien embassy in Rome, the consul, Adam Maiga Zakariaou and Laura Montini, his assistant. And the motive was money.

How did these two come to forge the documents?

According to the story in the Times, Montini was put together with ex-Italian intelligence agent Rocco Martino by a serving SISMI Colonel named Antonio Nucera. After putting the two together, Nucera fades from the scene. But Montini goes to work for Martino providing purloined documents from her place of work.

Then Montini and her boss, the Nigerien consul, learn that Martino works for the French and there’s a lot of money in it for everyone involved if they can ‘find’ documents shedding light on Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger. Thus the forging begins and the rest, as they say, is history.

That is, needless to say, a very condensed version of the story. So read the piece in the Times for the full details.

Now, remember, this version of events is the work of an Italian government ‘investigation’. And all evidence suggests that the Italian government has very dirty hands in this whole affair, acting at least as the purveyor of the forgeries and possibly their creator as well.

There are a slew of holes in this story; and you don’t need to be too deep into the arcana of the story to see them.

First, consider Nucera’s role. He’s a colonel in SISMI, Italian military intelligence. He puts the two key players together. They’re also former SISMI employees. But that’s just a coincidence. Neither Nucera nor SISMI have any role in what happened. He was just trying to help out a couple old friends.

Montini actually says different. She gave an as-yet-unpublished interview in which she alleges that Nucera provided her with the forgeries, with the instructions to turn them over to Martino.

Here’s another point to consider. If the Italians really have this all figured out, and if the Italian government isn’t implicated in any way, why have Montini, the Nigerien consul and Martino never been arrested or accused of any crime? Each is now in Italy. No charges have ever been brought against any of them.

There are various other holes and contradictions in this story. But there’s one big one that you only need to read the papers to see. According to the story in the Times, the documents go from the Nigerien Embassy to Martino, to the French and then to the UK. Martino later sells them to an Italian journalist just a few months before the war.

Only, that’s not how it happened. It’s a simple chain of custody issue. Read up on the story and you’ll find that the US didn’t get the documents from the British or from the French. They got them from … right, SISMI. The Italians sent details of the documents and then text transcriptions of them to Washington in late 2001 and early 2002. And everyone else got them, either directly or indirectly, from the Italians as well.

Once you add that fact to the mix you realize the story in the Times just doesn’t add up.

This is the cover story concocted by the Italian government. It wasn’t a very good one eighteen months ago and it’s no better now.

There’s a lengthy oped piece in Sunday’s Post by Tom DeLay’s former Communications Director John Feehery. The opening blurb doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence: “Tom DeLay had great strengths, and one great weakness – a willingness to let his staff members run amok.”

When I read that I thought it was going to be another version of that silly DeLay whitewash Michael Barone just wrote. But it’s not.

It’s actually well worth your time to read. And though it plays to the good man brought down by bad staffers story line, Feehery only takes that so far. The really bad ones — like Buckham and Rudy and Scanlon — rose to the top because DeLay naturally gravitated toward them and heeded their advice. And he gravitated toward them because … well, because they were bad. And he liked that.

No, Feehery doesn’t use those words. And, yes, I’m making a bit more black and white. But not much. DeLay, Feehery explains, was attracted to these three because of their willingness to cut corners, to ignore limits, to do anything to win.

The overwhelming majority of DeLay’s staffers were professional, honest and working in Congress for the right reasons. But Tom prized the most aggressive staffers and most often heeded their counsel … A former hockey player, Tony Rudy was DeLay’s enforcer; he wasn’t evil, but lacked maturity and would do whatever necessary to protect his patron. Ed Buckham, DeLay’s chief of staff, gatekeeper and minister, constantly pushed DeLay to be more radical in his tactics and spun webs of intrigue we are only now beginning to unravel. And Michael Scanlon, who, in my experience, was a first-class rogue and a master of deception. People like Rudy and Scanlon pleased DeLay because they were always pushing the envelope … I don’t know if Tom always knew what his staff was doing — I know that I didn’t. But I had my suspicions, and now I have seen them borne out.

This one’s worth a read.

Editorial pages are for opinion. But legitimate opinion journalism is constrained by facts, as nearly as we can know them as we put pen to paper. And by that measure, the Washington Post’s editorial page has skidded outside the boundaries of journalistic legitimacy on any number of issues but most glaringly on our involvement in the Middle East. Today’s editorial on the Bush-Cheney-Libby leak of classified portions of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate is a case in point.

One might simply say that presidents play hardball; and they play politics. And President Bush or his untethered vice president played hardball against a prominent critic by releasing information the law allowed them to release. And get over it. Politics, like life, isn’t fair. And if you swipe at the president, expect to get hit back.

You may not agree with that. But it’s an opinion. And it contains an uncomfortably large element of fact.

But the authors of this editorial don’t appear to read the news pages of their own paper or their best competitors. The clock has simply run out on any attempt to claim the president and his key advisors weren’t acting in bad faith with their constant advocacy of an alleged traffic in uranium between Iraq and Niger. It’s over.

As consistent reporting both from within the executive branch and the intelligence agencies has shown, the only reason this canard ever caught any life outside the vice president’s office was not because of its credibility but rather its irrelevancy. By the time Libby came to leak more information about it months after the war, it had been still further discredited within the administration.

The Post also sticks to the up-is-down claim that Wilson’s trip to Niger supported rather than undermined the Niger-uranium claim. That is a viewpoint that can only be maintained if you are willfully ignorant of the backstory to the Niger canard. Wilson’s report didn’t add a lot to what most in the intelligence community already thought about the pretended Niger story. But that was because it tended to confirm the reasons why most in the intelligence community didn’t find the story credible in the first place.

For whatever reason, the Post has chosen to throw in its lot with the flurry of mendacious rhetoric and the white-washed investigations, all of which amount to a grand pen and paper and word game truss barely holding together the body of official lies that is still governing the capital.

They’ve made their deal with power. They should justify it on those grounds rather than choosing to mislead their readers.

The DOJ slow-rolls the Guam-Abramoff-Rove investigation. And Sen. Burns may be the new Tom DeLay. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Mitchell Wade’s MZM helped run the Iraq War.

If you’re really, really guilty, be sure to get a really, really good lawyer.

Richmond Times-Dispatch profiles DeLay lawyer Richard Cullen.

(ed.note: To TPM Lawyer-Readers, yes, I know. Everybody needs a good defense. It’s a joke. Next.)

In this morning’s White House ‘gaggle’ Helen Thomas got things started with a simple question: “Is the U.S. going to attack Iran?”

See the entire exchange, with Libby/leak questions too, here.