In response to my note that "The Guantanamo Detainee" be named TIME's person of the year because of the legal and political convulsions and hemorrhaging that will be caused for years ahead by institutionalized extralegalism there, Michael Scheuer sent me a thoughtful note of his own on the subject that needs to be read.

Scheuer, as most know, was head of the CIA's now terminated "bin Laden unit" and authored Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Through our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, and the forthcoming Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.

From Michael Scheuer to Steven Clemons, 15 December 2007

Steve,

With respect, I would have to say that a Congress and Executive that refuse to execute the laws (borders and immigration); a Congress that has abdicated its exclusive constitutional authority to declare war and so allows wars to be initiated on one man's whim; and the negligence of Congress and the Bush and Clinton administrations to secure all the weapons in the Former Soviet Union's Nuclear arsenal -- one of which used in the United States would damage our civil-liberties environment for decades -- are far better candidates than the Guantanamo detainee group for "Person of the Year."

The failure to set these issues right will have far more impact on America's future than the detainees. The less said about Gore and Rowling the better.

The real problem with Guantanamo is that the prisoners there should have been treated as prsioners of war from the first.

Put them in World War-II-syle stockades, let them write home, and facilitate access for the Red Cross.

The most troubling issue regarding Guantanamo, CIA installations, DoD prisons, or the idea I just presented is that the men held in each for the most part can never be let go.

For me, this is the crux of the issue and it has not been addressed. For the first time in Western history we are capturing POWs who cannot be released; we already have had dozens go back to battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan after being released.

This problem is going to take folks with far better brains then mine to remedy, and so far the issue has not even be joined.

-- Mike Scheuer

Michael Scheuer hits the nail on the head. We've created a legal purgatory from which there is no easy exit. The first thing that is crucial is not to add to the scale of this problem and add any new detainees to Guantanamo.

But this kind of blunt, sensible clarity from a key player engaged in hunting and killing bin Laden's team is what many should be considering.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Gore gets Nobel prize, flies to Bali, and identifies the United States as major obstacle to talks there on global warming. Two days later the United States relents, and agrees to a compromise that apparently produces at least some progress. For this obvious contribution to the global effort to address climate change, Jack Cafferty of CNN rewards Gore by calling him a "pompous jerk."

And we wonder whether the mainstream media helps or hurts our country?

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An interesting set of headliners -- including former National Security Adviser to Ronald Reagan Robert "Bud" McFarlane, former NSA Director and Bush family pal Bobby Inman, and Committee on the Present Danger Co-Chairman R. James Woolsey -- co-signed a statement strongly opposed to torture as a tool of detainee interrogations and in support of Senator John McCain's position, with whom I agree on this issue.

I do not know what, if anything, McCain has done with the statement -- and have not seen it noted anywhere as of yet, but the statement is important both for its substance and its signatories -- some of whom I am occasionally at odds with.

But I commend all of the signers for agreeing to affix their names to a statement solidly, unambiguously against torture.

Here is the statement:

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Following Annapolis, the Israeli government made the decision to authorize another 300 plus homes in the Har Homa settlement outside Jerusalem. That is the kind of blunder that has destroyed previous attempts at negotiations.

To her credit, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quickly expressed U.S. opposition to the settlement’s expansion -- but that is unlikely to make a difference. The United States has a long record of expressing formal opposition to the settlement enterprise while doing nothing that indicates any seriousness about it. The Har Homa move specifically violates Phase 1 of the Roadmap, which both Israelis and Palestinians are committed to implement.

But even aside from the Roadmap, settlement expansion is a clear obstacle to peace. Given that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are about exchanging land for peace, specifically the West Bank, in exchange for an end to anti-Israel violence, settlement expansion is by definition a flagrant violation. As a Palestinian once told me, “Two people cannot discuss how many slices of a pie each one will get if one of them is busy wolfing slices down as fast as he can.”

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Have you watched the videotape of the torture of Abu Zubaydah? No. See how easy that is? The vast majority of folks reading this blog can answer that question succinctly. You do not have to parse. When presidents parse, they are hiding something.

So let me explain why I am certain that George W. Bush, and probably Dick Cheney, watched the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and maybe that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Let’s begin with the White House smoke screen on this issue. When spokeswoman Dana Perino was asked the other day:

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The campaign for next month’s parliamentary elections in Pakistan is underway, with leaders rallying their campaign workers and posters popping up around the country. In the city of Lahore in eastern Pakistan, big green banners with the symbol of a bicycle to represent the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q) began appearing last week on the main thoroughfare (Because about half of Pakistanis are illiterate, the election commission allots each party a symbol so that people know which party to vote for in the election). Few observers have high hopes that the coming elections will be free and fair, and some worry that terrorist groups might seize the opportunity to conduct major attacks in the four weeks. Pakistan is in for a bumpy month as the January 8th election draws nearer, and it is not clear that these elections will resolve the struggles for power playing out in the different corners of the country.

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For my final post, I’d like to return to the federal sentencing guidelines. It’s been a historic week for sentencing: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal judges are free to disagree with the sentencing guidelines and can impose what they believe to be reasonable sentences even if they are lower than the guideline range. Also this week, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) voted to give federal inmates a chance to reduce their sentences based on the new, shorter sentences for crack cocaine related offenses that the USSC established earlier this year. Such reforms are long overdue as efforts to revise the guidelines—specifically the notorious 100:1 ratio between crack cocaine and powder cocaine related offenses—have repeatedly stalled in Congress. And for at least a decade, the USSC has issued reports on the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine only to have Congress reject or ignore its findings.

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Picking the biggest policy mistake of the past few years is no easy task, but long-time readers of this blog know that the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 is a leading contender.  Nowadays, it isn't just activist types who think so.

A recent working paper by economics professor Michelle White (who is a far cry from crazy liberal) discusses some of the harmful consequences of the law (a nice summary is available here).  One tidbit: during the first year after the law was enacted, revolving debt increased 4.6 percent.  White points to more evidence that poor planning, short-term greed, and government short-sightedness haven't just been confined to the mortgage market.  Hopefully this time Congress will act appropriately -- with credit cards in particular -- before it's too late.

And now for a little break from the campaigns.

I’ve been meaning for months to post something about Richard Rorty. After he died this past June, I contributed a little thing to a a forum at Slate, but I’d misunderstood the assignment, and I'd written about 1200 words for a 300-word slot. Editors hate it when that happens! But they were judicious and kind about which 900 had to wind up on the cutting-room floor. So I was going to gather the clippings in my arms and write a followup here, partly because I devoted my very first Café post to a discussion of Rorty’s essay, “Religion as Conversation-stopper.” But the dang thing just kept getting longer and longer and less blogworthy, so I decided to make it into a full-dress Essay of some kind and to write it for this fine publication.

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A TPM reader saw the conversation here about SEIU's challenge to Bank of America. He sent along news that UNITE HERE launched a campaign last week against Countrywide Financial Corp., calling on their members and on other consumers to boycott the mortgage lender's banking subsidiary. The union wants Countrywide to halt foreclosure actions against borrowers who have fallen behind on escalating loans.

The union push back against financial services companies is a sharp reminder that the channels of organized consumer interest are very limited. Some have argued that unions should stick to collective bargaining issues, but I'm not sure I follow the criticism. If the union is willing to provide a platform and an organizational structure for a consumer boycott, they can bring a little balance to a playing field that is badly tilted in favor of big banks. No other group with the organizational reach of unions seems willing to do this.

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In response to Ethan’s question, the 5K game is not over, but it should become more transparent and adversarial. Of course, cooperation is now less valuable, if only because it is no longer the only realistic basis for a below-the-guidelines sentence. The game is not over, however, for a number of reasons. First, 18 U.S.C. 3553(e) still provides that a government “substantial assistance” motion is required before a judge can impose a sentence below the statutory minimum (as opposed to the guidelines minimum). Also, sentencing departures are not the only benefits available to cooperators: for example they can get charges dropped or reduced before they ever get to sentencing. Moreover, even after Gall/Kimbrough, judges still need to calculate the guidelines in setting sentences and so cooperation is likely to remain, at least for a while, a valuable commodity in persuading judges to impose lower sentences.

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Pakistan is not the central front in the so-called “global war on terror,” or GWOT. As I argued in yesterday’s post, there is no “central front” in meeting this diffuse and decentralized threat. And what’s required to achieve progress and make more people around the world safer is marshalling a broad range of policy instruments that go beyond the almost singular focus on traditional warfare that we have seen in the last six years. The coming months in Pakistan will be a vital test case for whether the United States and other global powers can make a clean break from the past and shift towards a more pragmatic and effective set of policies. Though I don’t offer up a popular catch phrase or slogan here and don’t have the space to write a treatise, here are four suggestions on what the United States should do to make this global course correction, employing events in Pakistan in making the case for why these shifts are necessary.

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Alexandra makes what I think is perhaps the most valuable point of the whole discussion: namely, 1) that “Ninety-five percent of all felony cases are resolved through plea, not trial. As a result, judges and public adversarial procedures such as trials are decreasingly relevant; much of what goes on remains informal and undocumented.” So, I have a question for Alexandra—and perhaps Douglas, too.

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just updated their invaluable data series on income inequality and the results are startling. Income inequality among households, both before and after Federal taxes, grew more quickly over the last two years of the series, 2003-05, than over any other two-year period on record, back to 1979.

Over those two years, the growth of inequality transferred $400 billion dollars from the bottom 95% to the top 5%. That is, had the income distribution remained as it was in 2003, the income of each of the 109 million households in the bottom 95% would have been $3,660 higher in 2005.

If this is the ownership society at work, I think we need to have a serious talk with the owners.

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I know Mr. and Mrs. Shaheen. I raised money for her candidacies. I think she served her state well.

But Billy Shaheen went way way too far in his attack on Obama. This is what happens when the inevitable candidate finds the race is not over after all, and when the old guard local chairman has just gotten chewed out by the inevitable one's campaign.

The Shaheens helped Gore pull out New Hampshire against Bradley in 2000. But this sort of nasty campaigning may mean not just that Clinton is in trouble, but that the Shaheens are. New Hampshire may have moved on to a new generation, and it is possible that an Obama victory will spell the end of the Shaheens in New Hampshire politics.

Nowadays it is standard for most Democrats and other opponents of President Bush’s Iraq strategy to highlight the fact that the Iraq war diverted resources from finishing the mission in Afghanistan and tracking down top Al Qaeda leaders like Usama Bin Laden. A press release issued today by Senate Democrats offers a meant-to-be punchy “tick tock” of the 2,283 days that Osama Bin Laden has been at large. One might debate the merits of this approach from a political communications standpoint, but the Democrats raise an important substantive issue here– the national security opportunity costs of Iraq. The standard Democratic criticisms, however, don’t address the fact that the “global war on terror” is a failure of conservative ideology, and not simply a massive misappropriation of precious U.S. national security assets. The hot spots where terror organizations thrive around the world – Gaza, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan– are places that have many of the same things conservatives want for America: there’s no government, everyone has a gun, and extremist religion dominates the politics.

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Glad to have both Douglas and Mark in on the conversation now because both make separate, solid points about legalization and sentencing. To Mark: when I wrote that “legal drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes arguably cause more harm than most illegal substances” this was not meant as an argument for the legalization of illicit drugs. In fact, as I wrote in the very next sentence “If illegal drugs are legalized, what sort of harms will that present (emphasis mine), given the harms caused by alcohol and cigarettes?” In other words, let’s acknowledge that alcohol and cigarettes are perhaps uniquely harmful but let’s also ask about the harms and effects that legalizing illegal drugs might have. I don’t know the answer to this question and that’s why I wanted to bring Mark back into the conversation. I’m also very glad that Mark brought up the question of addiction. One fascinating—and much under-discussed, I think—facet of our drug policy is that we seem to know very little about addiction or even the effects of individual drugs themselves.

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Many thanks to TPM for hosting this discussion about snitching, and inviting me to participate. One of the challenging aspects of this public policy arena is its secrecy, and, until recently, the lack of public debate. Discussions such as this one simply did not take place a few years ago.

Snitching should be understood in the larger context of our modern, massive criminal justice system, which is characterized by two features: discretion and negotiation. Police and prosecutorial discretion is paramount. Ninety-five percent of all felony cases are resolved through plea, not trial. As a result, judges and public adversarial procedures such as trials are decreasingly relevant; much of what goes on remains informal and undocumented. As Doug points out in his post, this makes determinate sentencing extremely powerful.

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I've had a hard time taking Thomas Friedman seriously ever since his advocacy of the war in Iraq. But I have to acknowledge that there are still occasions when he's right on the money -- as he has been in urging cooperation between the U.S. and China on clean energy technologies.

Unfortunately, Friedman's punditry may be taking a turn for the worse. His article in today's New York Times is one of his most illogical and ill-considered since his "invade Iraq" days.

In suggesting that the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has reduced U.S. leverage in moving Tehran towards capping or eliminating its nuclear enrichment program, he uses one of the most tortured (and inaccurate) analogies I have seen in a long while.

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The media are woefully ignorant on the subject of waterboarding and torture. Consider the coverage of former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who is telling his story as an interrogator of Abu Zubaydah and insisting that waterboarding is an effective technique. ABC and CNN are repeating this absurd propaganda. However, if you read the transcript of his interview some key points are obscured in the media propaganda push: (part 1 and part 2):

• Kiriakou never witnessed the waterboarding. It was carried out by another group of individuals (nfi).
• None of the information provided by Zubaydah concerned threats inside the United States.

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As I jump into this fray, I'd like to focus a bit more on the snitching phenomenon that is the focus of Ethan's book (even though a "war on drugs" debate is also appropriate and timely given the book's themes). Specifically, as a sentencing geek, I want to spotlight that, though snitching "issues" will always be a part of criminal justice realities, the move toward greater sentencing certainty and severity ensures that these "issues" get magnified in the admininstration of modern criminal justice systems.

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"The man crowned by Tommy Franks as “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet” just made the dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet."

That's MoDo sweetly reminding a few million readers who Douglas Feith is, what he did to this country, and how utterly unrepentant one of America's leading chickenhawks is.

She calls the piece, "The Dream Is Dead," but I think that may be a tad optimistic. The neocons' dream, and America's nightmare, was to secure Israel ("the Realm," as the neocons called it in their famous "Securing The Realm" blueprint) by taking out Iraq, Syria, Iran and whichever other state they did not like.

Their dream coincided nicely with Bush's, Cheney's and Rumsfeld's who didn't much care about Israel but had their own reasons for embroiling us in the Iraq adventure. (If it wasn't for the NIE, Iran would surely have followed).

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John McWhorter asks:

What if hard drugs were available legally and inexpensively?

The good news is that we don't have to guess, because we've already done the experiment. We made an addictive, neurotoxic, mind-altering drug available, legally and inexpensively. The drug is called alcohol. Are we having fun yet?

Ethan points out that alcohol and nicotine do more damage than most of the illicit drugs. He could have stated that more strongly: alcohol alone does more damage than all illicit drugs combined. I can't figure out why that counts as an argument for legalization; if the drug we legalized does more harm than the drugs we still prohibit, doesn't that suggest that legalization tends to increase harm by increasing the number of problem drug users?

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“The United States must work to break this trade union of dictators being created at the international level,” said Asma Jahangir, sitting in a dimly lit conference room in her law office in Lahore. Jahangir, recently released from a period of house arrest that began when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf introduced emergency law last month, described how leaders in different countries working to quell democratic dissent are learning lessons from each others experiences by closing down free media and attacking the independence of the judiciary. The chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a distinguished group that has been fighting to improve Pakistan’s human rights record for more than two decades, Jahangir spent the previous day leading a protest through the main street of this city in eastern Pakistan. She makes a passionate case for why the United States, now more than ever, needs to support a real transition to democratic rule in her country.

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Thanks to John for such a thoughtful—and highly thought-provoking—post. I’d been thinking about prohibition recently because I just attended—and spoke at—the Drug Policy Alliance’s Drug Policy Reform Conference here in New Orleans. The DPA’s anti-prohibitionist message is very similar to what John lays out in his post, so its conference has had me thinking about larger issues surrounding the drug war itself. Here are some stray thoughts:

1) The way in which we have fought the drug war—particularly in the past 20 years where we pursued the policies of mass incarceration—is one of the great public policy failures in our country’s history. The United States is the world’s leading jailer and yet, as I believe I may have written in my initial post, drugs are cheaper, more pure and just as available as ever. Worst of all, our mass incarceration policies are profoundly inequitable in terms of who they imprison. Here’s the New York Times summarizing the Department of Justice’s most recent numbers on our vast system of prison and jails:

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Big news: James K. Glassman will be the next undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, succeeding Karen Hughes, Margaret Tutwiler, and Charlotte Beers in charge of Bush's global sales force. The AP mentions Glassman's former journalistic gigs. It doesn't mention his 1999 book, co-authored with Kevin Hassett: Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.

To me, the central thesis of Ethan Brown’s SNITCH is invaluable. If there is anything the well-informed liberal knows today about the War on Drugs, it’s that there is a sentencing disparity between powdered and crack cocaine that has massively disproportionate impact on blacks.

SNITCH gives us another “meme” to retain: the sleazy hood making up stories about someone else in order to avoid a long sentences, and then probably going out to wreak more havoc.

Good. But there are two other thoughts SNITCH leaves me with. First is that while I disagree with Prof. Kleiman that Brown seems in favor of the “Stop Snitchin’” movement, the cultural juice that the “Stop Snitchin” ethos currently has overlaps only partially with indignation over people indulging in “The 5K Game.”

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Last Thursday, the 6th of December, I spent my evening at a 50th Anniversary black tie dinner commemorating the founding of the Japan America Society of Washington DC with former Vice President of the United States and Ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale. I was the guest of Society President and former Ambassador John Malott -- and I've taken a few days to mull over both Mondale's speech and a discussion I had with the former vice president privately.

On one level, Walter Mondale's speech seemed safe and non-controversial, but reading it again -- his remarks were densely packed with some important messages.

First of all, Mondale addresses the realities of 'divided government' in both Japan and the U.S. -- and in a nuanced passage refers to Japan Ambassador to the U.S. Ryozo Kato's comment that the "relationship is under stress." And then Mondale notes that Japan as a subject, language, and focus of diplomatic efforts is no longer drawing the best and brightest.

Mondale stated:

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After querying former intelligence officers and reviewing the letter from the U.S. Attorney’s in Richmond, Virginia, I can clarify some issues surrounding what’s what with respect to the question of the “destruction” of interrogation tapes and speculate on others.

The bottom line is: Jose Rodriguez, the recently retired Deputy Director of Operations, has been fingered as acting unilaterally, but that is not true. He did check with both the IG and the DO’s assigned Assistant General Counsel before destroying the DO’s copies of the tapes. Although Jose is a lawyer, he made the mistake of trusting fellow lawyers, and now is likely to get chopped up in the political meat grinder while trying to clear his name and reputation. (UPDATE: See today’s NY Times piece by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti confirming Jose got a legal opinion before destroying the tapes.)

Why destroy the tapes?

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America in 2007, ya gotta love it!

Last night Douglas Feith, the Pentagon official who devised the whole system of lying and manipulating the United States into Iraq, was honored with a major speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He was joined by Richard Perle and a host of the other neocon miscreants who joyfully took this country into a war that has, so far, cost us some 3900 young American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Feith, who General Tommy Franks famously called, "the stupidest #%^&#@@ who ever lived" is writing a memoir about how he was right about Iraq all along. He is also, incredibly, a professor at Georgetown University, a school founded and run by the Society of Jesus, one of the most principled orders in Roman Catholicism.

For those who might have forgotten, here is a wonderful piece on this man, Doug Feith. Also, see what Carl Levin thinks about Feith.

Full disclosure, I'm a Washingtonian and have known about Feith for some 25 years. Until this administration and this war came along, I had no idea that he had any interests in life other than promoting West Bank settlements. He was (and is) the most outspoken Likudnik in the Washington Jewish community, basically a very fringy character (viciously anti-Rabin, anti-Oslo, anti-peace). I would not have guessed that he could find the United States on a map, so utterly and completely involved is he with the Israeli far right.

But then he turns up at the Pentagon. The rest is history.

And thousands of dead Americans. Meanwhile, Michael Vick is going to jail for 23 months for killing some dogs. At the very least, Feith should be sentenced to spend the holidays with some of those families who are missing a son or daughter thanks to his war.

Another good piece on who Feith is from James Zogby, Democratic party and Arab-American activist, and champion of two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. He wrote it at the time Feith was appointed by President Bush.

SEIU is a creative union. They just announced a new initiative to link up their interest in protecting working families (unionized and non-unionized) by targeting banking practices that destroy financial security. In classic union style, they aren't waiving their arms at the financial industry generally. They are taking specific aim at America's biggest bank, Bank of America.

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The United States faces some of its most difficult national security dilemmas in the country a Newsweek magazine cover recently dubbed “the most dangerous nation in the world.” Serious stakes hang in the balance, with Pakistan at the nexus of the most pressing security challenges: nuclear weapons, international terrorism, religious extremism, endemic poverty, and political reform. Pakistan directly impacts international efforts in Afghanistan, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda finding safe haven in the lawless border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet hardly anyone knows what to do about Pakistan, including our most experienced national security hands. For decades, the U.S. approach to Pakistan has suffered from ad hoc, reactive, and short-term thinking, and the coming year will present even more difficult choices for U.S. policymakers.

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Mark's post represents a pretty staggering misreading of both the tone and content of 'Snitch.' Allow me to clear my throat--which is choking on outrage apparently--and respond:

No, I don't think there's anything "intrinsically wrong with testifying against co-conspirators" nor do I think there's anything wrong with providing some benefit (ie, a sentencing reduction) to cooperators. As I stated in my introductory post here, "Of course, cooperators are a necessary tool in building cases ranging from drug conspiracy to public corruption and providing some benefit cooperators for assisting prosecutors is certainly reasonable."

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This morning’s Wall St. Journal features an editorial praising Whoopi Goldberg’s rant against the estate tax on a recent episode of “The View.”

From this we establish a few things:

• "The View" is not a good venue for discussing tax policy;
• Whoopi doesn’t get this and is spreading destructive misinformation.

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Ethan Brown's Snitch is rich in description and anecdote, but the author nearly chokes on his outrage and, as a result, fails to come to grips with the hard choices.

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Disturbed by what many observers are calling an “unfocused” and “incoherent” message from Republican presidential candidates, the Republican National Committee has announced a campaign to rally the party faithful -- and its national leaders -- around a “hard core” of political themes involving atheists, immigrants, Muslims, gays and lesbians, and even evolution and taxes. The campaign, titled “Coordinate the Hate,” plans to open in Ames, Iowa this week and launch an eight-week tour of major primary battlegrounds.

“Huckabee’s surge is just the latest symptom of the problem,” said one analyst. “Before this, it was the attempt to cast Thompson as Mister Excitement. The root problem is that we have an array of niche candidates who offer intense, concentrated hatreds of one group or another, but no ‘big tent’ candidate capable of hating everyone at once. We need to coordinate the hate for 2008.”

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Michael Rubin offers a bizarre entry at National Review Online today:

An apology owed to John Bolton [Michael Rubin]

The most recent Iran NIE confirms that Iran was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon back in 2003. Forgotten in much of the recent press coverage is that this proves John Bolton, at the time was undersecretary of state for Arms Control, correct. Many of the people under and around him, perhaps fearing that his analysis might get in the way of their initiatives, attacked him and leaked anonymously in the press to undermine him. And yet, now we know that Bolton was right. It seems that a number of journalists, diplomats, and Senate staffers owe Mr. Bolton an acknowledgment, if not an apology.

As one of the lead critics of John Bolton's brand of pugnacious nationalism, I find this appeal by Michael Rubin to be strangely deficient on Bolton's record.

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Leave it to the intrepid Larisa Alexandrovna to ferret out a key piece of information–the torture tapes were not destroyed in 2005. Just take time to read the letter U.S. Attorneys, Novak and Raskin, sent to the Federal Court on 23 October 2007.

The New York Times' Helene Cooper has a useful primer on which presidential contenders got a boost or got headwind from three major foreign policy issues last week.

She noted that President Bush hand signed a personal letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, a man Bush had called a "pygmy" and who John Bolton several times called "human scum." The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran also set back Iran hawks. Last, there was the news that the CIA videotaped the harsh interrogation (i.e. torture) of certain high value prisoners and then destroyed the tapes.

I mentioned that before even consider how the current campaigns were affected, one had to consider Chuck Hagel -- even though not in the campaign. He is the one person whose profile in national security and foreign policy issues would have anticipated all these bits of news and is well positioned in the country on them. He is pro-engagement, anti-torture, pro-transparency, and wants the government to prepare for things as they are not as ideological fabulists would have them be.

From Helen Cooper's article, "Winners and Losers of the Week in Foreign Policy":

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Before I start I just want to say just how thrilled I am to be here, not simply because I’m an obsessive TPMCafe reader but because drug policy is so rarely discussed and debated in a such a widely read forum as TPM. Huge thanks to Andrew, Josh and the whole TPM crew for having me. I’ll begin by providing some background about how I formed the thesis of my new second book, Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice, which was published by Public Affairs last week: the federal sentencing guidelines for drug related offenses established in the mid-late 1980s and how such policies have a largely unregulated “cottage industry of cooperators” who routinely fabricate evidence about others in order to receive reduced sentences for themselves.

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Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by Allen Raymond, Republican operative best known for his involvement in the 2002 New Hampshire phone jamming scandal. He is joining us to discuss his new book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. The book is said to be an unprecedented look inside GOP electioneering.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Jacob Soboroff, Sam Quinones, Jeffrey Toobin, Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sen. Russ Feingold, Brian Katulis, Jonathan Stevenson and Steven Simon, and Ari Melber.