Right Wing Nut House

Laura Rozen is doing some great work ferreting out the Debat story for Mother Jones. Today, she has some shocking revelations that were originally reported in the French magazine Rue89:

Riché also reported that Debat claimed to have a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne that he did not in fact complete, and that he had exaggerated his CV in other respects—claiming to be an advisor to the French Ministry of Defense on transatlantic issues, for instance, when in fact he had been a lowly desk clerk in the bowels of the ministry for less than a year; claiming to be a visiting professor at Middlebury College, when in fact he had been a visiting instructor for a short winter term at Middlebury, and other such exaggerations. Mother Jones has obtained an annotated CV the French Embassy prepared about Debat—whose claims to be a former government official have apparently long irritated the government in Paris—outlining these and other discrepancies. (ABC believed the annotated CV was prepared by the French embassy, but sources now say it may have been annotated by a Washington-based French academic.)

Didn’t anybody check this guy out before hiring him?

Evidently, Debat had a big booster at the network. Chief Investigative Reporter Brian Ross passed along some of Debat’s juicier scoops apparently without vetting the information properly. The result was an embarrassing retraction on a story involving the Pakistani military willing to turn the other way regarding the location of Osama Bin Laden as long as he didn’t cause any trouble. And another story involving the claim that “the U.S. government was advising and encouraging an Iranian Baluchi separatist group Jundullah which was carrying out attacks against the Iranian regime” was greeted the following day by a “sharp denunciation” from the Pakistani government.

Who was this guy?

Overall, the picture of Debat that emerges from these interviews is of a smart, ambitious and cunning operator who would claim to be getting text messages from Middle Eastern intelligence operatives while at meetings with Ross and others at ABC, with tips that seemed too good to be true (which some colleagues believe were bogus), yet were used as “exclusives.”

Debat seems to have had a Walter Mitty complex. (Text messages from spies in the middle of production meetings? And that didn’t set off any alarm bells?). But was there something more sinister at work here? Was this part of a Neo-Con plot to take over the news media?

Attywood thinks so:

In the meantime, little attention had been paid to the French journal Politique Internationale — which published Debat’s bogus “interviews” with Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

But the French magazine deserves closer scrutiny. In continuing to connect the dots between Debat and the push for a neoconservative agenda that includes ratcheting up war tensions with Iran, it turns out that a prominent member of the neocon movement has served as editor of Politique Internationale for much of this decade.

Iranian-borm Amir Taheri (pictured at top) — who edited a leading Iranian newspaper prior to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and has since written for a number of western publications, including several owned by conservative press lord Rupert Murdoch — has been a leading voice in Politique Internationale. It’s not clear what his current role is, but in numerous press reports from 2001 through 2006 he was listed as its editor.

To put it mildly, Attywood is barking up the wrong tree.

Taheri may or may not be a “neo-con” - and the way that Attywood and others on the left toss that appellation around makes me think they don’t have a clue regarding who or what a neo-con is - but the idea that Politique Internationale is some French offshoot of The Weekly Standard is loony. This is a French Ministry of Foreign Affairs website describing Politique Internationale:

Over the past 27 years, Politique internationale has become the most influential French-language publication devoted to international politics. It is read by leading decision-makers in the fields of politics, diplomacy, economics, industry and finance on all five continents. Its contributors include heads of state and governments, leaders of political parties and many others who either make the news or decipher it.

Sounds pretty harmless to me. But what about that fellow Taheri? After all, he wrote for Rupert Murdoch owned publications (think Fox News, not tens of thousands of dollars donated to Hillary).

Taheri has also written for Arthur Sulzberger but no one I know has ever accused the former Iranian editor of being a liberal. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and other perfectly legitimate mainstream news organizations as well. After all, he is trying to make a living as a writer and Taheri is not someone in huge demand as far as being sought after by major dailies for op-eds. He must hustle up his own business as any writer would. The fact that his views track closer to the New York Post than the New York Times - even though he has had op-eds appear in both publications - should not be considered sinister or even unusual.

Unless you’re trying to connect non-existent dots to posit a neo-con conspiracy theory.

Taheri is, for better or worse, one of the leading voices in the debate over what to do about Iran. He has made no secret of the fact that he wishes to see regime change in his native country. The left has tried to turn Taheri into something like a “Chalabi II” or another “curveball” without much success.

Attywood points out several stories Taheri has advanced that proved less than accurate, most recently a piece in Canada’s National Post that had conservatives all atwitter about a report from Iran detailing how non-Muslims were forced to wear color coded patches to identify them. The Iranian government denied it. Other Iranian experts expressed grave doubts about it. Taheri stood by the story. The Post issued a retraction.

It appears to me that the story should never have been run, that it wasn’t solid enough. But in Attywood’s own comments on the linked post, someone quite familiar with Iranian persecution of religious minorities speaks out:

Having handled the asylum cases of several Iranians who belong to the Baha’i faith, I have learned a great deal about the persecution religious minorities suffer in that country. So I was extremely interested in this part of your post, and I went to the article you linked.

My clients were granted asylum on the basis of their religion alone, so I think that’s pretty conclusive that whether non-Muslims are forced to wear colored badges or not, they are in grave jeopardy in that country.

Taheri will continue to agitate for the US to overturn the rule of the mullahs. But besides the fact that he was editor of Politique Internationale and Debat contributed to that publication (on an infrequent basis over the years), I don’t get the “neo-con connection” the dots are supposed to link.

That’s because Debat was no neo-con - not by a long shot. As director of the terrorism and national security program at the Nixon Center, it would be a stretch to identify him as anything except a moderately conservative realist on foreign policy. From Sourcewatch:

While genuinely non-partisan, as reflected in the composition of its Board of Directors and Advisory Council, the Center has a philosophy of an enlightened pursuit of national interest. The specific goal of the Center is to explore ways of enhancing American security and prosperity while taking into account the legitimate perspectives of other nations.

The Board of Directors and Advisory Council is very heavy with Kissinger Realpolitik staffers as well as former Reaganauts and Bush #41 refugees. The left’s favorite, Brent Scowcroft, is on the Advisory Council as well as Lee Hamilton, Robert McFarlane, and other critics of the Iraq War (perhaps Julie Eisenhower is a neo-con spy).

The point is simple. There is little or no evidence that Debat is a neo-con so there are no dots to connect him to Taheri. The story raises enough questions about press standards and procedures without Attywood going off on conspiracy tangents.

For those, let’s go back to Rozen who sums up one of the ethical dilemmas for ABC:

One ethical issue raised by ABC’s handling of Debat concerns the investigative unit’s use of paid sources/consultants, who are often put on monthly retainer. But in ABC’s use of Debat as a paid “consultant” who also had for the past year and a half an appointment at the Nixon Center, ABC also frequently had him reporting on its blog, the Blotter, and appearing as a “source” inside others’ stories, blurring the line between source (and a paid one at that, with outside — also paid — affiliations) and a journalist, not clearly identified in the report. ABC also sent Debat frequently abroad, to gather information which he would put on the air and on the investigative unit’s website.

There is some question whether ABC is handling their internal investigation correctly by using the Ross investigative unit to look into their own potential failures. I see the potential for problems but who else could do it? These are people familiar with the stories as well as the sources and methods of how those stories were developed. It would seem that they would be the best qualified to discover anything untoward advanced by Debat in his sourcing of stories or in his reporting.

In the end, despite warning signs that Debat was a poseur of fantastic proportions, several respected media outlets (and probably the Nixon Center as well) were taken in by this fellow hook, line, and sinker. But to posit the notion that Debat was some kind of neo-con who was feeding false information to ABC and others in order to advance some kind of agenda is a big stretch. More likely, Debat is exactly who he says he isn’t; a fakir who suckered people who should have known better.

The New York Times didn’t like it. The Washington Post was lukewarm. The netroots dismissed it. The right embraced it.

I could make this the shortest post in the history of The House and just leave it at that but then, what fun would that be?

After more than 4 years of war, several different failed strategies for success, three commanding generals, two elections, 70,000 dead Iraqis, 26,000 wounded Americans, and 3700 dead patriots, the single most telling aspect of the debate over the war is how little it has changed. The same arguments, the same criticisms of each side, and we all end up in the same place; irreconcilably divided.

George Bush may think there are some Americans who want to bring the troops home now that would jump at the chance to embrace his token withdrawal of American forces. But on Capitol Hill and other places where it counts - the newsrooms and control rooms of the American media - he has zero chance of finding additional support for his policies.

Whatever small bump in political support the President received this past week was due solely to the calm, unhurried, and forthright testimony of General David Petraeus. Nothing Bush said last night altered the debate. There is nothing he can say about Iraq that will deflect the long term trend toward withdrawal. Both parties are in favor of it, albeit with different objectives. The Iraq Tar Baby has well and truly captured the Republican party and only the stupidity of the Democrats will save the GOP from total disaster in 2008. And perhaps not even then.

The Democrats have cynically tried to exploit the unpopularity of the war while trying to undermine the efforts of Petraeus and Co. who may have hit upon a strategy that will allow us to leave behind something less than roses and buttermilk but also something considerably less than total disaster. In fact, the Dems have failed to acknowledge any change in strategy at all and when they have, they switch tactics and go after General Petraeus by attacking him personally - a dubious strategy that has already backfired spectacularly (see above, “…stupidity of Democrats…”).

What we have seen this past week with the Petraeus testimony and the Bush speech is that facts don’t matter as much as political calculation with regards to the war. No one has been swayed by anything anyone has said about what is happening in Iraq. And no one is likely to be affected in the future by any arguments or even facts on the ground coming out of that country. Everyone’s mind appears to be made up except for a handful of GOP Senators and Congressmen who know what they believe about the war but have not quite taken the step of abandoning the President yet. That may change by January when the funding issue is revisited. Until then, Petreaus gets to continue his good work, hoping to build upon his small successes while Bush can try to push a reluctant Iraqi government toward at least the appearance of reconciliation.

We have been at this point in the Iraq debate for close to two years and nothing has changed. I suppose that there is some benefit of reiterating the same positions over and over, if only to remind us of how very far apart we are on this and other issues. Perhaps that reminder will spur us to greater efforts to bridge the gap between the two sides so that we can find an honorable way out of Iraq without leaving behind a Middle East blood bath but I’m doubting it.

For that to happen, someone would have to make the first move. And as it stands now, both sides are too proud, too rigid to make that happen.

President George Bush gave his 6th prime time speech since his presidency began in the same cocoon that he has comfortably ensconced himself since the Iraq War began.

The fact that he’s given so few speeches talking to the American people about a cause he himself has identified as vital to the War on Terror, failing spectacularly to explain as honestly and forthrightly as possible where we are, where we need to be, and where we are going in Iraq, guarantees that the American people have stopped listening to him.

In short, his credibility when talking about the war is as low as it could possibly go. It is his own fault. He can command attention whenever he desires it and the news nets must cover what he says. But over the years, his start and stop, herky jerky efforts to rally the American people to his policies has fallen far short of what was needed and necessary. Instead, he allowed his political opponents to define the war, the mission, even the president’s own motives in going to war while substituting a narrative that savaged him and people who supported him.

It would help if the President would give us the castor oil with the honey when he talks about Iraq. He never has. The Iraq he talked about in his speech does not exist. It is not a place of “freedom” or “democracy.” A legitimate argument can be made that it doesn’t even have a government. Holding elections does not define a nation as a democracy. There is no freedom without citizens being secure in their property and lives. The government in Iraq cannot guarantee either and in fact, elements of that government are consciously engaged in activities to dispossess Sunni Muslims of both.

For all the security gains in some of the Sunni provinces and all the good work being done with the tribes in enlisting them to help fight al-Qaeda, there are other areas of the country where the situation on the ground has not gotten any better and is demonstrably worse. As the Brits abandon the south, the militias are taking over and will eventually fight for control, the government in Baghdad be damned. Iran is salivating at the opportunities offered by this “civil war within a civil war” and will only gain in influence whoever comes out on top.

Our friends the Kurds, patiently waiting for the day when they can make a clean break from Iraq and declare their independence (along with fellow Kurds across the border in Iran and Turkey who are carrying out terrorist attacks against civilian targets in those countries) are experiencing hit and run attacks by Shias who seek control of the vital oil center of Kirkuk. Car bombs, suicide bombs, assassinations, and even the occasional firefight has broken out in recent months as both sides gauge the possibilities of an America that is about to pull out.

And Baghdad? No one controls Baghdad. Not the government. Not the militias. Not the criminal gangs that continue to terrorize residents almost as much as the sectarian gangs that are driving people out of their homes and the death squads who still manage a tidy body count every day despite the increased presence of American and Iraqi troops.

The Iraq I have just partially described (don’t get me started on the police, the army, the Council of Representatives, the Interior Ministry, the corruption, or that empty suit of a sectarian gangster Maliki) is Iraq as it is - a morass of security, social, political, economic, and psychic problems that no army on the planet can fix. It is also an Iraq that George Bush didn’t come close to acknowledging as existing in his speech tonight.

We are all big boys and girls. George Bush treats us like children, afraid that telling us the truth of what is going on in Iraq or at least being realistic about describing the situation will scare us or cause us to want to hide under the bed. It is depressing. The disconnect between the Iraq Bush describes and the real thing is not lost on the American people who I believe would respond much more positively to Bush if he didn’t try and sugarcoat the situation.

Even the gains in Anbar and elsewhere have been exaggerated now and war supporters have latched on to them like a dying man grasping a leaky life preserver. Contrast Petraeus’s calmly rational assessment of those gains with many on the right who believe the “Anbar Awakening” is going to sweep across the country and bring “victory.” I may be mistaken but even George Bush has stopped talking about “victory” in Iraq and has substituted the word “success.” Even that term is a stretch. When we depart, I hardly think we will be able to claim the Iraq we leave behind will be a success. It will be a mess. But I think the best we can hope for at this point is that it won’t be an unmitigated disaster. That result is worth fighting for because it is necessary to our national security that Iraq not be a failed state and Iran not be rewarded for its meddling.

I always expect too much from Bush which is why I’m always disappointed. Perhaps because in these perilous times, I think we should expect more from our presidents than the rhetoric of the stump. Bush is not a bad man nor is he stupid. He is simply inadequate.

That may be the most damning thing you can say about any president.

UPDATE

For reaction, I always check Allah first since he’s only half as cynical as I am and half again more brilliant:

Four minutes of highlights for you including the surprise announcement of the night — plans for an “enduring relationship” with Iraq, presumably on the model of South Korea, that will involve a “security engagement that extends beyond my presidency.” That’s an odd thing to announce now, when he’s trying to reap the political benefits of a (very limited) withdrawal, but there you go. It also flies in the face not only of Sadr’s nationalist rhetoric but poll after poll of Iraqi citizens who say they want the United States out (eventually). Bush wants U.S. troops there to keep Tehran on its toes, though, and also to act as a “tripwire” (again, a la South Korea) in case Iranian forces try to assert themselves inside the country. The more menacing Iran is, the more you can expect Iraqis to grudgingly accept the idea, so long as the “security” part of the enduring relationship involves a small number of troops and, in all likelihood, bases in Kurdistan.

The other scoop is that he’s asked Petraeus to give another progress report in March. The Republicans up for re-election next year will have their life vests on and will have already been seated in the lifeboats by then, so unless that report’s as rosy as the desert sun, it’s game over.

I wasn’t as surprised about the “enduring relationship” theme as I was, like Allah, disconcerted by the timing.

And I agree about the Iraqi people’s attitude toward the Iranians. Many on the left have a heart attack every time Maliki and Ahmadinejad meet, breathlessly telling us of the coming Shia convergence between the Iraqis and Iranians.

Both peoples may be Shias. But there was the little matter of the Iran-Iraq War not to mention the historical enmity between Arabs and Persians. The Iraqis don’t trust the Iranians, period.

My own pessimism about the political will necessary to sustain any kind of serious effort in Iraq matches Allah’s own. By March, there will be general agreement to draw down faster than the 5 combat brigades Petraeus has called for. By election day 2008, we’ll have less than half the troops in Iraq that we do now.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is “Contemptible” by Done With Mirrors. Finishing second was yours truly for “The War to Remember 9/11.”

Finishing first in the Non Council category was “Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt” by Small Wars Journal.”

If you would like to participate in the weekly Watchers vote, go here and follow instructions.

This story is getting more bizarre as we dig deeper.

A former ABC News consultant on terrorism has been exposed as a gigantic fraud, faking interviews with famous people and having them published in a French news magazine.

Alexis Debat, a former French defense official who has been working as a consultant for ABC News since 9/11, says he hired a freelance journalist to conduct an interview with Barack Obama. When it came out in another French magazine that the Obama camp was denying the interview ever took place, Debat claimed he was “scammed” by the freelancer.

Debat says the freelancer, a Robert Sherman from Lombard, IL was paid $500 to conduct the Obama interview. A local newspaper checked out the address Debat gave for Sherman and found that no such address exists in Lombard, IL.

The French magazine where the fake interview was published, Politique Internationale, has now heard from several other subjects of supposed sit downs with Debat, all of whom claiming they never participated:

Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant.

“This guy is just sick,” said Patrick Wajsman, the editor of the magazine, Politique Internationale, a prestigious publication that has been in business for 29 years. Wajsman said he was removing all articles with Debat’s byline from the magazine’s Web site.

Yesterday, a spokesman for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said a supposed interview with Debat, published in the June 2007 edition of Politique Internationale, never occurred and was a fabrication.

And before you start feeling sorry for Politique Internationale, the magazine was contacted in 2005 by the UN Deputy Director for Communications about an interview they were going to run under Debat’s byline with Kofi Annan that never took place, threatening to expose it as a fake if the magazine went with it:

Despite that, Debat continued for the next two years to be cited as the author of interviews with a range of prominent U.S. public officials in Politique Internationale.

The U.N. official said a second supposed interview of Annan by Debat, posted earlier this year by Politique Internationale, was actually portions of a speech the secretary-general had given at Princeton University.

The magazine editor, Wajsman, told ABCNews.com he thought the problem with the Annan interview, one of the first he submitted, was “maybe a technical one” or a misunderstanding.

Wajsman said he had referred the matter to his lawyer for possible action against Debat.

“I was a victim of this man. I had no reason to suspect someone like him could lie,” Wajsman said.

Methinks Mr. Wajsman is an idiot. He had “no reason to suspect” Debat would lie after having done so with one of his first interviews for him? Sorry Mr. Editor, you were too greedy for the good stories, never questioning where they were coming from, and you have now gotten caught with your pantaloons down around your ankles. Take your medicine and resign immediately.

Debat had already been fired by ABC for a little fib he told about his PHD; he apparently never got one. Now in light of these revelations, ABC is scrambling, looking at every story Debat has done in the last 6 years to determine if he was pulling some of the same crap with them. They evidently did a cursory examination after they let him go back in June and found nothing. They now say they are doing another examination to make sure.

Why not do the job right the first time? Perhaps ABC News didn’t want to know if Debat had scammed them. They wouldn’t be the first institutional organization that went through the motions when carrying out an investigation just so that later they could say, “Well, we looked into it at the time and didn’t find anything.” Now that the pressure is on, they apparently are going to do a thorough job of it.

Blogger-Journalist Laura Rozen points up the tightrope that ABC was walking by keeping Debat on as a consultant:

My own feeling as primarily a print world reporter, and this is just one part of the complicated matter, is that it is deeply problematic for a news organization to have a paid source/consultant to sometimes put on the reporter hat and act as the reporter too. (Indeed, I don’t like the idea of paid sources at all, but it seems to be a frequent practice at TV news networks). Seriously, imagine if a New York Times reporter put an ex NSC or CIA operative on the payroll for about $2,000 to $4,000 a month as a source, cited in articles as a source, and then sometimes let him or her report news stories with a byline, without glaringly indicating to readers what was going on. But this is what ABC was doing with Debat. ABC must have known they were stretching the rules on this one. For instance, their consultant Richard Clarke is never presented as the reporter. But ABC changed the rules in the Debat case, presumably because he was bringing them such sexy scoops, that they loved flacking at the time. Now they insist the scoops were solid, but Debat misrepresented his credentials. They’re blameless.

Just a few days ago, Rozen points to this piece in the Times Online where Debat talks about a “3 day blitz” against Iran:

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

Do we believe that he has inside information about the bombing campaign? Or is he doing one of his Walter Mitty routines?

Debat is one of those figures so beloved of today’s media; a witty, urbane scholar who comes across as authoritative on television. He bridges the gap in knowledge between a reporter and the audience and is used most frequently to fill in the background on personalities and events, usually buttressing the point being made by the reporter and producer of the piece.

Behind the camera, consultants are good for fleshing out details on stories, getting inside information by using their sources in government, and for confirming facts gathered in the course of reporting.

But Rozen is asking should these people be journalists as well? It’s a good question and something of a dilemma. Should a source for news also report it? I’m no journalist but even I can see the potential conflict. And ABC, knowing of his work with Politique Internationale as a by lined reporter, might have asked themselves some tough questions. If they had, they might not be spending the next few days combing over every story Debat ever had a hand in, making sure he did nothing untoward.

Bottom line: Guys like Debat, Jason Blair, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and Stephen Glass get away with it because the stuff they write or bring in is just too good to be true.

And many times, it is.

Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of his own destruction, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, a convicted thief of classified documents, has been hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign as a foreign policy advisor.

Giving an ex-con a helping hand is fully in keeping with Mrs. Clinton’s compassionate nature so I’m loathe to criticize her for hypocrisy. But as a result of the scope of Berger’s crimes - stealing and destroying classified documents that reflected badly on her husband’s presidency - he may be just the man Hillary needs to white wash the historical record so that her foreign policy, instead of being a mish mash of liberal bromides and bewildering zig zags on Iraq and the War on Terror, may actually acquire a coherence so far lacking.

Perhaps he can get started on any documents connecting Norman Hsu to the campaign and work his way up from there.

It will certainly be a novel experience having our next president’s foreign policy shaped by a convicted felon. Aside from the obvious advantage that Berger will bring to the Clinton Administration when having to deal with other criminals like Syria’s Bashar Assad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, just think of the benefits of having an advisor that actually thinks like a crook. This opens up possibilities far beyond the foreign policy sphere - one reason Berger may have been hired in the first place.

Seriously, this is truly incredible. Richard Miniter outlines Berger’s crimes:

My informed sources suggest that what Berger destroyed were copies of the Millennium After-Action Review, a binder-sized report prepared by Richard Clarke in 2000—a year and half before the 9-11 attacks. The review made a series of recommendations for a tougher stance against bin Laden and terrorism. There are 13 or more copies of this report. But only one contains hand-written notes by President Bill Clinton. Apparently, in the margin beside the recommendations, Bill Clinton wrote NO, NO, NO next to many of the tougher policy proposals.

You can see why Clinton might be happy to see these records vanish down the memory hole.

So Berger was stuffing in pants and socks and later shredding the evidence that President Clinton did not want to take a tougher line on bin Laden, following the 1998 attack on two U.S. embassies that killed 224 people (including 12 American diplomats).

Recall that Berger was ostensibly preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission while at the same time, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Commission investigators:

The commission’s former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was “a little unnerving” to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI —including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

“If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?” Brachfeld said in an interview. “I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time—in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records.”

What do you think the reaction of the Commission would have been to Berger if it had been known that he absconded with or destroyed hundreds of terrorism-related documents from the Clinton Administration?

All of this is water under the bridge, of course. Perhaps Berger was good enough to write a note to future historians to be published after his death exactly what it was he destroyed and why. Someone as intelligent as Berger, a man who spent so many years at the center of history, would, it is hoped, eventually have enough self respect to not keep future historians in the dark.

Berger has now been rehabilitated to the point that Mrs. Clinton is rewarding his service to Bill’s legacy by making him one of her top foreign policy advisors. There is very little chance he would have any job in a new Clinton Administration for which he would have to be confirmed by the Senate. His nomination would never get out of committee. But there are a couple of positions to which he might be considered a front runner - positions where the prying eyes of the Senate would be blocked because he wouldn’t need any confirmation hearings.

How about National Security Advisor?

Now that the Wall Street Journal has made their article on the Hsu swindle of Source Financing Investors available for free, we can see the scope of the grifter’s con of Joel Rosenman is absolutely incredible. I may have been right when I speculated that Mr. Hsu’s entire life was one big Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Rosenman’s partner, Ms. Cheng, met Mr. Hsu while working for an Internet company in 2000. She began investing in one of his businesses and made a profit, according to someone familiar with the matter. In 2002, she joined JR Capital and introduced Mr. Rosenman to Mr. Hsu. That year, Mr. Rosenman invested and also made a profit. He began telling friends and relatives about the investment opportunity.

Mr. Rosenman described the deal in a pitch letter he provided to prospective investors for Source Financing Investors, which he launched in 2005. The investment pool would “lend to U.S. private label designers that needed interim financing to fill orders for a select group of well-known, high-end U.S. apparel retailers.” Since 2001, he writes, “the return of these short-term (typically 4½ months) loans has been no less than 40%.”

That last bit about a 40% return on the investment was pure hooey. It was Hsu up to his old tricks of paying off early investors by victimizing later ones. The idea was to appeal to simple human greed - a get rich quick scheme that seemed to work. The early investor’s excitement would lead him to tell a lot of friends about the “opportunity” and, in Rosenman’s case, even set up an investment company to unwittingly assist Hsu with the scam:

Mr. Rosenman described the deal in a pitch letter he provided to prospective investors for Source Financing Investors, which he launched in 2005. The investment pool would “lend to U.S. private label designers that needed interim financing to fill orders for a select group of well-known, high-end U.S. apparel retailers.” Since 2001, he writes, “the return of these short-term (typically 4½ months) loans has been no less than 40%.”

In a “step-by-step” outline of a typical transaction prepared for investors, Source Financing describes the way a deal worked with Mr. Hsu. Source Financing would agree to provide bridge loans for seasonal high-ticket, high-quality retail goods made in China for exclusive brand names, according to investors. Mr. Hsu told the company that he would obtain from Chinese manufacturers a price quote for apparel production. He would then add a mark-up and give the quote to a high-end buyer in the U.S.

If the U.S. buyer accepted, according to the outline, Source Financing would transfer by wire what Mr. Hsu said was 80% of the necessary loan, with Mr. Hsu saying he would provide the other 20% himself. Mr. Hsu told the investors he would then receive a letter of credit from a Chinese bank and that the manufacturer would ship the apparel to the U.S., where Mr. Hsu would deliver it to the merchant.

That Hsu must be a fast talker. I’m no investment expert but does anyone else see where an investor could get screwed 6 ways from Sunday? The deal is dependent on a rickety house of cards indeed. And how much do you want to bet that some if not all of those “US buyers” who accepted those quotes were shell companies set up by Hsu in order to fool investors everything was on track!

But this to me, would have been the biggest “tell” that something was amiss:

Mr. Hsu would give the investment firm a check, post-dated for 135 days beyond the wire transfer, for the amount of the loan plus profit. When the check matured, Source Financing would deposit it and allocate the money to investors. The company that would carry out these transactions, Mr. Hsu told investors, was Components Ltd., set up in 1997.

Some investors in Source Financing said they got involved through friends who knew Mr. Rosenman. Some did not know who Mr. Hsu was until news about him broke in late August.

Again we see the power of greed at work here. What possible guarantee is a post dated check? It is a worthless piece of paper until the date it can be made good. If Hsu was going to skip out - as he evidently was doing - what possible good would a post dated check be? It still came down to Rosenman placing his full faith and trust in Norman Hsu - his biggest and most tragic mistake.

I may be off base with this and if someone can give me a rational explanation why any sane businessman would think that accepting a post dated check in a deal like this would protect him somehow, I’m open to hearing it.

It is doubtful that Hsu fulfilled any of the promises he made about the deal - the exact same thing he did for 1/40 the amount of money in 1991 in the latex glove scam. No clothing manufacturers were contacted. No letter of credit from a Chinese bank. No product at all. Hsu was able to succeed in his con the way that all grifters make a living; feeding off the avarice of their marks.

As I said in the post below, Hsu is a first team all American crook. I look forward to more revelations about his swindles so that before long, he may be inducted into the Con Man Hall of Fame.

The Wall Street Journal has partially solved the riddle of where Norman Hsu got the money he used to donate substantial sums to Hillary Clinton’s Senatorial and Presidential campaigns as well as numerous other Democratic candidates.

Joel Rosenman, the producer of the Woodstock rock concerts in 1969 and 1994 gave Hsu’s company an astonishing $40 million “investment” with which Mr. Hsu has apparently absconded: (WSJ Subscription required):

New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.

In a letter this Monday, Mr. Rosenman told investors that the 37 outstanding deals with Components Ltd. are set to mature “over the next four months.” But he indicated that was not likely. He said he had deposited two checks from Components that “matured Sept. 7.” He was informed by the banks that there were insufficient funds.
“This development, coupled with recent revelations,” he wrote, “led us to believe that payments due on our recent transactions with Components and Hsu may not be made.”

Forty million dollars? This fellow Hsu must have a golden tongue with an uncanny knack of separating people from their money. And I think it is obvious we underestimated his abilities. Norman Hsu is not some run of the mill grifter. He is a superstar in the world of con men; a first class, top of the line, first team all American crook.

No word on exactly when Rosenman invested this money with Hsu but the Journal article mentioned it was “recently.” If so, that hardly explains the great bulk of donations Hsu has made to Democrats going back at least 3 years. How many others has Hsu bilked? And is his entire life one big Ponzi scheme where he scams mark after mark, using the proceeds from his most recent victims to pay off some of the past investors?

There is nothing “common” about this criminal. Which brings up several troubling questions that few seem to be asking at the moment:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign couldn’t explain yesterday why it blew off warnings about felon-turned-fund-raiser Norman Hsu - and the Daily News learned FBI agents are collecting e-mail evidence in the widening scandal.

Clinton was forced Monday to give back a whopping $850,000 raised by convicted scam artist Hsu after learning his investment ventures were being probed by the FBI as a potential Ponzi scheme.

She earlier gave to charity $23,000 Hsu donated himself after reports revealed he fled sentencing for a $1 million scam in California in 1992.

Yesterday, the campaign insisted it did all it should to vet Hsu after California businessman Jack Cassidy warned in June that Hsu’s investment operation was fishy. Cassidy e-mailed his tips to the California Democratic Party, which forwarded them to the Clinton campaign.

We should also be asking questions about Mrs. Clinton’s security. How could the Secret Service let someone like Hsu within 50 yards of Hillary? Or were their objections overridden?

But the question the Justice Department is going to want answered is who in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign knew about the Cassidy warning and then failed to adequately vet Hsu’s shady dealings? Or, more troubling, discovered Hsu’s history and still took the money anyway.

Meanwhile, See Dubya at Hot Air has dug into Clinton’s donor list and pulled out several contributions from Rosenman’s family as well as others connected with his investment company:

Source Financing, Mr. Rosenman’s company, has asked the beneficiaries of Mr. Hsu’s largesse to quit giving it away to charity in order to recover it for their investors.
No word on whether Mr. Rosenman wants his own contributions to Hillary back, nor those of a Ned Rosenman who also works for Source Financing, nor those of a Molly Rosenman, also of Source Financing–each of whom gave her $4600 back in March.

Mr. Rosenman’s partner, a Mr. Yau Cheng also donated $4600 to Hillary. See Dubya asks whether all of these checks were part of a bundle delivered by Hsu to the Clinton campaign. In fact, there were 260 individual donors whose checks were bundled by Mr. Hsu. Malkin rightly calls on Hillary to come clean and cough up the list. She’s already returned $850,000. Why not make the names public?

Timing will be critical in this case. When did Hsu receive the $40 million? All the donations from Source Financing were made in March of this year. Was there some kind of understanding between Rosenman and Hsu about part of that $40 million when repaid offered as reimbursement to donors scared up by Source Financing? Was more of that $40 million earmarked for political donations to Democrats? How many operations like this exist to get around FEC regulations?

This could be the biggest election financing fraud in history, even surpassing the Nixon crimes committed during the 1972 election.

Some of the questions about the source of Norman Hsu’s largess spread around the country to Democratic candidates have been answered. But as in all scandals, each question answered raises additional problems. This is a very serious scandal for the Clinton campaign, one that could even sink her candidacy even if it doesn’t touch Hillary directly. And depending on how extensive the lawbreaking was, it may pull down the Democratic party a notch or two nationally.

My latest column at PJ Media is about the Petreaus hearings. A sample:

There are few things in Washington that get the political juices flowing more quickly than an important Congressional hearing. Part heavyweight title bout, part high school musical, when the gavel comes down and the kleig lights click on, America’s leaders paste on their most serious faces and prepare for their five minutes of notoriety with all the care and solemnity of a bride getting ready for her walk down the aisle.

This is why rather than asking the witnesses questions, members generally gave speeches about why they support/oppose the surge, usually concluding by asking some rhetorical question along the lines of “How many times did you beat your wife today, General?” or “Why do puppies find you so irresistible, sir?”

What a difference a week makes.

I honestly didn’t expect a large boost for Fred Thompson after he officially declared his candidacy. He had been “on the verge” for so long that I believed most Republicans had already accepted him as a candidate and that any bump he got from announcing would be a blip, barely beyond the statistically significant.

But polls taken in the last 72 hours tell a different story. Apparently, many conservatives who had been flirting with both Romney and Giuliani are taking another look at Thompson, tightening the race nationally while showing a definite “Fred Surge” in one key state.

First, the national numbers. Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that Fred Thompson is enjoying a bounce from his formal entry into the Presidential race.

In the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination, Thompson is on top for the first time since late July. The former Tennessee Senator is currently the top choice for 26% of Likely Republican Primary Voters. Rudy Giuliani, who has been the frontrunner for most of the year, is close behind with support from 22%. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney earns the vote from 13% while 12% prefer Arizona Senator John McCain. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee remains atop the second tier at 6% (see recent daily numbers).

Now that’s what I call a surge.

CBS has Fred moving up as well, narrowing the gap with Giuliani:

After seeing his support among Republican primary voters rise to 38 percent in August, Giuliani was backed by only 27 percent of respondents in the most recent survey, narrowing his lead over Thompson to 5 percentage points after holding a 20-point edge last month.

While Thompson, at 22 percent support, is now a close second to Giuliani, he was not the only Republican to seemingly benefit from Giuliani’s fading numbers. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who was written off by some after months of staff upheaval and disappointing fundraising, saw his support increase 6 points since the last survey to 18 percent. On the other hand, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won August’s straw poll in Ames, Iowa, saw little benefit nationwide, scoring 14 percent support - largely unchanged since last month.

Gallup gives Fred a smaller bump (19% - 22%) but still significant.

Obviously, Fred is tapping into a conservative base that was unhappy with Romney and especially, Giuliani - for different reasons. Romney’s calculated moves to the right have not sat well with many while Giuliani makes no bones about his differences with many conservatives, although he’s probably conservative enough for most Republicans. Unease with Giuliani’s experience as well as his stands on root Republican issues like abortion and gay marriage have some of the base looking for an alternative.

Romney, still mired in the mid teens nationally, may be getting a little desperate. A poorly disguised political dirty trick directed against Thompson has backfired:

A top adviser to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney appears to be behind the launch of a new Web site attacking GOP presidential rival Fred D. Thompson during his first week on the trail.

The site, PhoneyFred.org, painted an unflattering picture of Thompson, dubbing the former TV star and senator Fancy Fred, Five O’clock Fred, Flip-Flop Fred, McCain Fred, Moron Fred, Playboy Fred, Pro-Choice Fred, Son-of-a-Fred and Trial Lawyer Fred. Shortly after a Washington Post reporter made inquiries about the site to the Romney campaign, it was taken down.

Before it vanished, the front page of the Web site featured a picture of Thompson depicted in a frilly outfit more befitting a Gilbert and Sullivan production than a presidential candidate.

The Republicans have a long way to go as far as being internet savvy. You can bet if a Democratic candidate set up an attack website, there would be no way to trace it back to the campaign. The Washington Post was able to unmask the fake Fred site in no time.

Meanwhile, in California, the latest Survey USA (GOP) poll has Giuliani edging Thompson 28%-26%. Their last poll in early August had Fred trailing Rudy by 11. The Mother of all Primaries on February 5 next year will include California, Illinois, and New York along with 16 other states - at least (it is still not clear whether Michigan and Florida will toe the party line and push their primaries back to February 5 or later). Fred’s best chance for a big state win on Mega Tuesday will probably be California since Romney’s dad was a governor of Michigan and Rudy looks unbeatable on his home turf of New York. Florida is another possibility for Fred as several of his key advisors have ties to Jeb Bush. Regardless, all of these numbers should give a little momentum to Fred as he wades in to the money morass and attempts to raise funds.

That, of course, is the key; turning these surging numbers into a flood of mother’s milk. With the constraints on his fund raising abilities off, Fred is going to have to raise at least $1.5 million a week between now and the end of the year by my calculations in order for him to be competitive in the early primaries and caucuses. This is more than doable if his operation is finally set and he has the people he wants in key positions. Any confusion at the staff level from here on out will reflect badly on the candidate and this will almost certainly affect his ability to raise money.

What The Fred Surge says about the race is that it is still wide open. You have to wonder if New Gingrich isn’t seeing the reaction to Thompson entering the race and contemplating his own prospects.

At this point, anything and everything is possible.

UPDATE

Steve Smith emails from the Romney campaign with an explanation of the “PhoneyFred.Org” website that the Washington Post charges a top aide to the campaign with involvement:

As reported in the Boston Globe, the site has no direct affiliation to our
campaign, and we had no knowledge of its development.

The person responsible is not an employee of ours, but we took immediate action
to make sure it was clear the site was not affiliated with the campaign.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2007/09/romney_camp_dis.html