Spencer Ackerman on the curious refusal of the National Intelligence Estimate on al-Qaeda to broach the Iraq War’s contribution to al-Qaeda’s strength.

In today’s episode of TPMtv we look at President Bush’s largely successful effort to get the press to report the story in Iraq as though bin Laden’s al Qaeda is the main enemy we’re fighting in the country …

There’s a lot of news today. But don’t miss this article in the Post about the mechanics and possible consequences of withdrawal. The piece surveys a lot of interesting ground. And I’ll just try to touch on some of the highlights, if that’s the right word for it.

One point is the divergence between war gaming of a withdrawal from Iraq being done in the White House press office and in the Pentagon. The idea that Iraq will be taken over by al Qaida doesn’t even come up in the military’s thinking. Their war-gaming focuses on civil war, partition and possible intervention by neighboring states — no picnic, but not sufficiently threatening to the American public to be useful to the White House.

Another daunting point centers on the purely logistical difficulties of getting out. The situation in a destabilized country can change very quickly once the word gets out that the occupying power is pulling out. There are some harrowing examples from the Soviet pull-out from Afghanistan, particularly cases where they literally had to fight their way out of certain areas. A key issue here is that when you figure not just how many people but how much equipment the US has in Iraq you can’t just airlift everything out.

To me this is an argument not to remain in denial for so long that we literally have no choice but to get out quickly. We still have time to manage a phased withdrawal which is integrated with a political plan. Not clear whether that will be the case in a year when we will no longer be able to sustain our current deployment.

Must be pretty complicated. Sen. Stevens (R-AK) gets another extension on his senate disclosure filing.

One of our sharp-eyed TPMtv sleuths CS just caught White House Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend saying Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Mesapotamia (aka al Qaeda in Iraq), a group that appears to have no operational ties to bin Laden’s group are in fact “the same organization.” (For background on the distinction, see this morning’s episode of TPMtv.) We’ll bring you video soon.

Late Update: Here’s the clip:

Later Update: The Bamboozle Continues:

There’s been a lot of discussion on the blogs today about whether the Republicans can short-circuit the Democrats’ plan tonight simply by making a quorum call. We called up some experts on parliamentary procedure and senate rules in particular and they say it’s not true. Here’s our report.

A political scientist looks at the data and claims that Rudy is heading for a hard fall in the polls. That and other political news in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

It’s amazing what people will do when they’re into politics.

One thing I know a lot of you are going to do is stay up all night watching the filibuster hijinx in the senate. We’re going to watch a lot of it here at TPM. But we’re not going to be able to watch it all. So we want you to help us find the key moments for a highlight reel we’re going to put together tomorrow morning.

So if you’re watching tonight and you see some really choice moment, jot down the time and the time zone you’re in with some very brief explanation of what the incident or statement was and then send them in to our contact email on the upper right side of the site along with the subject heading “Filibuster Video”.

McClatchy on why tonight’s filibuster isn’t a filibuster …

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said Republicans would speak on the floor, not just yield to Democrats, but that it wouldn’t be a true filibuster because the lawmakers in the minority party weren’t the ones who wanted it.

Here’s another beaut just out from the AP in which David Espo describes tonight’s events but refuses to use the word ‘filibuster’ until he gets around to describing what the Democrats did four years ago in the judicial appointments fight — that is to say, when the Democrats did precisely what the Republicans are going to do tonight. (ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader AR for the catch.)

Like I said, the ploy that dare not speak its name — except when Democrats use it.

(ed.note: Honestly it’s gotten so flagrant, especially with AP, that I start to wonder if it’s not intentional rather than a product of sloppiness and being cowed by GOP flacks)

Late Update: And then there’s Reuters. When is a filibuster not a filibuster? When it’s a “procedural roadblock.” (ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader AH.)

Because Filibusters Must Stay in the Closet Update: Even the Washington Post goes in for the song and dance. In this story in tomorrow’s paper, the word ‘filibuster’ doesn’t appear until the final graph when Moveon.org’s “counter-filibusters” are mentioned. (ed.note: This one was flagged by TPM Reader AS.)

Really Late Update: Sigh. I’m not sure anyone can top this nonsense from Diane Sawyer who says Harry Reid “vows to filibuster.”

Let me return one more time, at least for today, to this issue of who’s al Qaeda and who’s not. Obviously, at one level it is simply a semantic question. And it can seem like a lot of ink to spill on a point of words and definitions when so much carnage and controversy are unfolding before our eyes. So it is worth stepping back to see just what the big deal is and how it plays into our predicament in Iraq and how we might get our way out.

Beginning in the months just after 9/11 and ever since the president and his deputies have tried to float their foreign policy on the shock, fear and desire for revenge spawned by the 9/11 attacks. The first signs (though these weren’t clear in their details at the time) came in the decision to pull troops away from the hunt for bin Laden himself in late 2001 in order to ready them for the assault on Iraq little more than a year later. There we have the kernel of deception which is like the original sin of the Iraq War and, because of that, keeps coming resurfacing again and again. The claim that attacking Iraq was attacking the people who attacked the United States on 9/11, that the two things were related in anything more than a mental figment.

So at the outset it was that Iraq and al Qaeda are connected and either did attack us together (as Dick Cheney frequently suggested) or could in the future (as everyone else did). Then the beginnings of the insurgency were not a problem because we were drawing al Qaeda into Iraq to fight them on our own terms. Then we couldn’t leave Iraq because doing so would hand it over to al Qaeda.

As the cycle progressed there was an mounting tendency for the administration to argue that we could not abandon its policies precisely because of the scope of the failure of those policies up to the present point — a veritable perpetual motion machine of incompetence and disaster. But setting that aside, the enduring pattern has been for the White House to ask us to make our decisions about Iraq not based on what is happening in Iraq but on what happened in New York and Washington on 9/11.

Don’t look at Iraq to make this decision, look at the Twin Towers. That’s been the administration strategy for over five years. So when we see the scam popping up in a slightly different guise, even if it requires getting deep into the weeds and raising an alarm over key points of word choice and emphasis, then we simply must do so. Because this is the original sin, the founding deceit upon which everything has been built and from which the entire catastrophe unfolded.