Missile shield is 'urgent' - Bush

US President George W Bush has said there is a "real and urgent" need for a missile defence system in Europe.

Mr Bush said the missile threat was from the Middle East, not Russia, which strongly opposes sites for the shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

He warned that Iran could have a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe or the US by 2015.

Earlier, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said the shield could be delayed while Russian concerns were tackled.

Iran threat

In a speech at the National Defence University in Washington, Mr Bush said: "The need for missile defence in Europe is real and I believe it's urgent."

He said the planned system was not designed to tackle missiles from Russia as it would be easily overwhelmed by Moscow's arsenal.

"The Cold War is over. Russia is not our enemy," he said.

Mr Bush said the US had invited Russia to "join us against an emerging threat that affects us all... we ought to respond to this threat together".

The president said if "rogue states" had less confidence their missiles would strike, they would be "less likely to engage in acts of aggression in the first place".

Mr Bush also attacked the US Congress for reducing funding to missile shield systems.

Earlier, Mr Gates had said activation of the European shield could be delayed until there was "definitive proof" of a missile threat from states such as Iran.

He said after meeting Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek in Prague: "We would consider tying together activation of the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic with definitive proof of the threat - in other words, Iranian missile testing and so on."

The missile shield system would see a radar site set up in the Czech Republic and a missile interceptor base in Poland.

Russia has vehemently opposed bases on the territories of its former Warsaw Pact allies.

Mr Gates and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice received a frosty reception when they tried to sell the plan in Moscow this month.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow saw the shield as a "potential threat" to its security and wanted to "neutralise" it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin widened the debate by also threatening to abandon a key nuclear missile treaty.

He said it would be difficult to remain part of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty unless it was expanded to include more countries than just the US and Russia.

Two marines to face Haditha trial

Two US marines, including a battalion commander, are to face a court martial in connection with the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005.

Lt Col Jeffrey Chessani is charged with dereliction of duty and failing to report and investigate the deaths.

L/Cpl Stephen Tatum is accused of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault.

The two men are the first to be sent to court martial in the biggest criminal case involving civilian deaths in Iraq.

Prosecutors allege that the marines shot unarmed people in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack that killed one of their comrades.

International outrage

In a ruling released at Camp Pendleton, California, Lt Gen James Mattis said he had decided to refer the charges against the two men to a general court martial after reviewing evidence presented during Article 32 investigation hearings.

Lt Col Chessani is the most senior US serviceman since the Vietnam War to face a court martial for actions in combat.

L/Cpl Tatum was initially charged with unpremeditated murder

Eight US soldiers were originally charged in connection with the killings, which sparked international outrage.

In August, murder charges against one of L/Cpl Tatum's fellow marines, L/Cpl Justin Sharratt, were dropped by military prosecutors because they were not supported by sufficient evidence.

Charges against another murder suspect, Sgt Sanick Dela Cruz, were dropped in April in exchange for his testimony.

Two weeks ago, investigators recommended withdrawing murder charges against Sgt Frank Wuterich, who is accused of leading the massacre, and instead trying him for negligent homicide.

Four officers were initially charged with dereliction and failing to report and investigate the killings. Those against Capt Randy Stone and Capt Lucas M McConnell have been dismissed, whereas 1st Lt Andrew A Grayson is awaiting a preliminary hearing.

Contradictions

Twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including three women, seven children and several elderly men, died at Haditha, in Anbar province, on 19 November 2005.

HADITHA CHARGES Lt Col Jeffrey R Chessani: Violation of a lawful order, dereliction 1st Lt Andrew A Grayson: Dereliction, false official statement, obstructing justice Capt Lucas M McConnell: Dereliction; Charges dismissed L/Cpl Stephen B Tatum: Involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, aggravated assault Staff Sgt Frank D Wuterich: Unpremeditated murder, soliciting another to commit an offence, false official statement Sgt Sanick P Dela Cruz: Unpremeditated murder, false official statement; Charges dismissed in exchange for testimony L/Cpl Justin L Sharratt: Unpremeditated murder; Charges dismissed Capt Randy W Stone: Violation of a lawful order; dereliction of duty; Charges dismissed What happened at Haditha? US inquiries into Iraq deaths

The US military at first reported that the Iraqis had been killed by the improvised explosive device (IED) that killed L/Cpl Miguel Terrazas, or in a subsequent gunfight with insurgents.

But Iraqi witnesses said the US troops shot dead five unarmed men in a car when they approached the scene of the bombing in a taxi.

They were then accused of killing 19 other civilians in three houses nearby over the next few hours.

Despite the accusations, there was no full US investigation into what happened until January 2006, when video footage emerged of the aftermath taken by a local human rights activist.

After a report in Time magazine showed flaws in the initial marine statement, a preliminary investigation was begun. The inquiry confirmed civilians had been shot in their homes, but described the deaths as "collateral damage".

US court rejects CIA kidnap case

The US Supreme Court has thrown out an appeal by a Lebanese-born German citizen who accuses the CIA of kidnapping and torturing him.

Khaled al-Masri had been appealing against the decision of lower courts not to hear his case against the CIA on national security grounds.

Mr Masri says he was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to Afghanistan for interrogation.

His case has highlighted the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme.

The Supreme Court's decision "terminated" Mr Masri's lawsuit and was issued without comment, The Associated Press news agency notes.

Correspondents say the decision will be seen as an endorsement of the Bush administration's argument that state secrets would be revealed if the case were allowed to proceed.

'Traumatised'

In his lawsuit, Mr Masri was seeking damages of $75,000 (£37,000).

The 44-year-old alleges he was tortured during five months in detention, four months of which were spent in a prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, nicknamed the "salt pit".

On his flight to Afghanistan, he says, he was stripped, beaten, shackled, made to wear "diapers", drugged and chained to the floor of the plane.

By his account, he was finally released in Albania after the Americans realised they had got the wrong man.

He told the BBC in February he had been "traumatised" by his experiences.

Last month, Germany reportedly dropped a request to the US to extradite 13 suspected CIA agents accused of abducting him.

The State Department responded yesterday to escalating criticism of Blackwater security guards in Iraq, announcing new measures to more closely monitor their operations as a new Pentagon report depicted a troubling lack of coordination between private security contractors and the U.S. military.

Following the recommendations of a high-level review team sent to Baghdad last week, the State Department said yesterday that it will place its own diplomatic security agents in all Blackwater convoys, mount video cameras in Blackwater vehicles and record all radio transmissions to ensure an "objective" record of any future incident of contractor use of force.

Both the classified Pentagon report and the State Department's actions follow Iraqi and congressional criticism of the use of private security contractors in Iraq after a Sept. 16 incident in which Blackwater employees guarding a State Department convoy allegedly shot and killed at least 14 Iraqi civilians.

The report, which was prepared for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, found considerable frustration among U.S. military commanders, who complained that contractors working for non-Pentagon agencies, including the State Department, often behave arrogantly, traveling through areas of military operations without prior notification and setting up their own checkpoints and roadblocks.

"There is a feeling that they are untouchable, a perception that they can do whatever they want with impunity," said a Pentagon source, who was not authorized to speak to reporters and demanded anonymity.

But the report also determined that commanders often do not use the authority available to them to hold Defense Department contractors accountable -- including expelling them from bases, disarming them and pursuing sanctions under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Pentagon contracts cover an estimated 7,300 security contractors, including about 1,500 working on personal security teams.

Applying the military justice code to civilians is a "complex process," the Pentagon source said. "We didn't ask for it, and we don't really know how to use it." In some cases, he said, enforcing the rules may be difficult, even if the attempt is made.

"From a practical standpoint, most of the PSD [personal security detail] guys are former Navy Seals and Special Forces with . . . years of combat experience," who are unlikely to take direction from "some 20-year-old corporal" in the military, the source said.

The draft report of more than a dozen pages is to be finalized and presented to Gates when he returns from South America this weekend. Designed as an overall look at the relationship between private security contractors and the military, it includes an assessment by a five-person team that Gates dispatched to Iraq two weeks ago in the wake of the Sept. 16 incident.

Among other findings, the report suggested that the Defense Department needs to increase the personnel and resources it devotes to contractor oversight.

The Pentagon source suggested that the report could generate new scrutiny of broader issues, such as the welter of separate but often overlapping private-contractor arrangements made by the military and the State Department. "An inescapable endpoint is: Why do we have two sets of contractors?" the source said.

Military protection of diplomatic and other U.S. civilian officials ended in June 2004, when the United States returned sovereignty to the Iraqis and opened an embassy in Baghdad. Since then, the State Department has hired its own private contractors, including Blackwater, which protects diplomats and other U.S. government civilians in Baghdad and the surrounding areas of central Iraq. State Department contractors are not liable under the military code, and U.S. officials have questioned whether they are covered by any U.S. law.

Last week, State announced the launch of three separate inquiries into its security arrangements -- a joint U.S.-Iraqi commission, an FBI-led investigation of the events of Sept. 16 and a broad review of private contractors' arrangements to ascertain whether appropriate rules exist and whether they are being followed.

An interim report from the overall review, led by senior State Department management official Patrick Kennedy, recommended the new arrangements for Blackwater convoys, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered that they be carried out, department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday.

The measures, which McCormack said are designed to increase operational control and accountability, reflect the difficulty investigators have encountered in determining the events of Sept. 16 and, if necessary, putting together a case that can be prosecuted in a U.S. court.

Blackwater has insisted that its personnel returned fire they received from Iraqis wearing police uniforms, but initial U.S. military and Iraqi government investigations have confirmed the reports of witnesses that only the Blackwater guards fired weapons.

Private contractors are supervised by the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, which briefs them before every "movement" of a protected person outside Baghdad's Green Zone.

Blackwater, which has more than 800 employees under State Department contract in Iraq, conducted 1,800 "movements" there between January and September. The 36 diplomatic security agents stationed in Baghdad occasionally accompany convoys, but having them ride along on every detail would require more than doubling their numbers, a U.S. official said. Worldwide, the service has 1,400 agents.

Radio communications with convoys are normally monitored from the embassy but have not previously been recorded and archived. McCormack said Rice has also ordered "the expansion of existing communication links to the U.S. military" to ensure that State and military personnel "have good connectivity."

Meanwhile, another private security firm, Combat Support Associates, which provides logistics support to U.S. troops at bases in Kuwait under a Pentagon contract, confirmed it had hired a former Blackwater employee who allegedly shot and killed a security guard for Iraq's vice president last December, the Associated Press reported.

A company spokesman said that a review, conducted of all prospective employees, found nothing "untoward" in Andrew Moonen's record. Moonen allegedly was drunk when the shooting occurred and is under Justice Department investigation.

Clinton: Cut Iraq Funding To Force Change

(CBS) Congress should stop funding the Iraq war to force President Bush and the Iraqi government to "change course," Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said Sunday on Face The Nation.

"No matter how heroically and dedicated the performance of our young men and women and their officers are in Iraq - which it has been - they cannot referee successfully a sectarian civil war," Clinton told Bob Schieffer. "So I voted against funding last spring. I will vote against funding again in the absence of any change in policy."

President Bush has said that, by setting deadlines for withdrawal and cutting funding, Congress will embolden America's enemies. Clinton, however, said, "The idea that our having a policy that reflects the reality on the ground will embolden enemies, I think is off base. They have been emboldened by the policies pursued by this administration."

The junior Senator from New York pointed to continued nuclear development by Iran and North Korea - and reported cooperation between Syria and North Korea - as evidence of U.S. enemies growing stronger.

Clinton said, if elected president, she would set deadlines for withdrawing the majority of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, but said there would be a continuing American military presence in Iraq.

"I am committed to bringing the vast majority of our troops home, and I will begin to do that as soon as I am president," Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination, said.

Clinton said she recognized "there will be remaining missions" for American forces in Iraq, but she said they would not require the roughly 100,000 troops expected to be in Iraq when the next president takes office. She listed counterterrorism, protecting U.S. personnel and training Iraqi forces as the other missions.

"That's the right way to go because that is a much clearer definition of what we're trying to accomplish than what we face today," Clinton said.

Mr. Bush has compared America's future in Iraq to the peacekeeping role U.S. troops play in South Korea, where they have been stationed for some five decades, but Clinton said that she would review the basis for Mr. Bush's plans.

"I'm going to call my secretary of defense, my joint chiefs of staff, my security advisers to give me a full briefing on what is the planning that has gone on in the Pentagon," she said. "You know, planning hasn't exactly been a strong suit of the Bush administration."

John Harris, the Editor in Chief of politico.com, noted that, while Clinton was presenting a strong platform for her presidential campaign, she was leaving herself plenty of wiggle room.

"You can see her preserving her options," Harris told Schieffer. She's not promising figures or saying that we're going to have a complete exit in January of 2009. That's something a future president wants to do: preserve flexibility."

David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, said that Clinton's plans for Iraq sounded very similar to President Bush's.

"It's a very small difference, and when you tick off the tasks she said the troops would do while she was president - if that happened - counterterrorism, protection of the Kurds, training of the Iraqi army and then protecting us against Iran, that's a big set of tasks," Sanger said. "And it's very hard when you talk to Pentagon people to have them figure out how you do that with fewer than 100,000 troops."

(AP) U.S. authorities have told Germany that they will not extradite 13 purported CIA agents sought in the alleged kidnapping of a German citizen, an official said Saturday.

A Justice Ministry spokeswoman said the Bush administration told Berlin it would not hand over the group and said the ministry had, as a result, decided against giving Washington Munich prosecutors' formal request for their arrest. She spoke on condition of anonymity as required by the ministry.

The Justice Ministry last month sounded out U.S. authorities' willingness to cooperate with legal proceedings against the suspected agents, sending a legal request that officials call a common first step in dealing with international arrest warrants.

Munich prosecutors issued warrants for the arrest of the 13 purported CIA agents at the end of January, accusing them of wrongfully imprisoning Khaled el-Masri and causing him serious bodily harm.

El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, maintains that he was abducted in December 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonian border and flown by the CIA to a detention center in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was abused.

He says he was released in Albania in May 2004, and that his captors told him he was seized in a case of mistaken identity.

Human rights campaigners have focused on el-Masri's story in pressing the United States to stop flying terrorism suspects to countries other than the U.S. where they could face abuse - a practice known as extraordinary rendition. In a separate case, Italy also has issued arrest warrants for purported CIA agents.

U.S. officials have declined to address the case in public. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that the United States has acknowledged making a mistake with el-Masri.

CIA spokesman George Little said Saturday that the agency would not comment on the case.

U.S. Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames said that, as a matter of long-standing policy, "the department does not discuss whether it has or has not received an extradition request from a given country or our communication with any country with respect to such requests."

"Mr. El-Masri has pursued litigation for civil damages here in the U.S., and this litigation is ongoing," Ames said. "To date, U.S. courts have barred his suit based on the U.S. government's assertion of state secrecy concerns."

62% Believe The Iraq War Was A Mistake

Per NBC’s Mike Viqueira, Petraeus and Crocker will testify before the joint House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees at a hearing beginning at 12:30 pm. There will be a total of 107 members (!) combined at this hearing, including GOP presidential candidates Hunter, Paul, and Tancredo. The chairs and ranking members (Democrats Skelton and Lantos and Republicans Hunter and Ros-Lehtinen) will give five-minute opening statements, followed by opening statements from Petraeus and Crocker. Then all the members will be allowed five minutes to question the pair.

The New York Times: “General Petraeus … has informed President Bush that troop cuts may begin in mid-December, with the withdrawal of one of the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, about 4,000 troops. By August, the American force in Iraq would be down to 15 combat brigades, the force level before Mr. Bush’s troop reinforcement plan. The precise timing of such reductions, which would leave about 130,000 troops in Iraq, could vary, depending on conditions in the country. But the general has also said that it is too soon to present recommendations on reducing American forces below that level because the situation in Iraq is in flux. He has suggested that he wait until March to outline proposals on that question.”

Pegged to the Petraeus report, a New York Times/CBS poll finds that 62% believe the Iraq war was a mistake; 59% say it’s not worth the cost or loss in lives; and nearly two-thirds say the US should reduce its troops there now or withdraw them. That said, “Americans trust military commanders far more than the Bush administration or Congress to bring the war in Iraq to a successful end, and while most favor a withdrawal of American troops beginning next year, they suggested they were open to doing so at a measured pace.” 
 
Also, “33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats, say Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.”

The Boston Globe: “Two national polls released yesterday indicated that a majority of Americans believe the increased US troop presence has failed to deliver significant improvements in the war-torn country.”

Petraeus has been getting all of the attention, but the Washington Post profiles the man who will be testifying at his side: Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. In fact, the Post notes that Crocker’s testimony “may carry far more import for the long-term future of Iraq and the U.S. presence there. With little progress to recount in how the Iraqis have used the political ‘breathing space’ that Bush promised his war strategy would create, Crocker's inevitably more nuanced appeal for time and patience is likely to be the tougher sell.”

Not only will Petraeus and Crocker introduce their war assessment today, but TV viewers in four states will be introduced to one of MoveOn’s anti-war ads, which features children, "training to be soldiers in an 'endless war,'" reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The ad, part of MoveOn.org's $12 million ongoing anti-war campaign is rivaled by a pro-war $15 million TV ad campaign, featuring the burning World Trade Center and produced by former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer’s group, Freedom’s Watch. 

On Sunday, the New York Times wrote that seven months after Bush’s troop surge began, “Baghdad has experienced modest security gains that have neither reversed the city’s underlying sectarian dynamic nor created a unified and trusted national government… To study the full effects of the troop increase at ground level, reporters for The New York Times repeatedly visited at least 20 neighborhoods in Baghdad and its surrounding belts, interviewing more than 150 residents, in addition to members of sectarian militias, Americans patrolling the city and Iraqi officials. They found that the additional troops had slowed, but far from stopped, Iraq’s still-burning civil war.”

In a Saturday op-ed in the Washington Post, Richardson wrote, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have suggested that there is little difference among us on Iraq. This is not true: I am the only leading Democratic candidate committed to getting all our troops out and doing so quickly… Let's stop pretending that all Democratic plans are similar. The American people deserve precise answers from anyone who would be commander in chief. How many troops would you leave in Iraq? For how long? To do what, exactly?”

In a report to be released Sunday, a panel of experts assembled by the U.S. Institute of Peace calls for a 50 percent reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq within three years and a total withdrawal and handover of security to the Iraqi military in five years.

"The United States faces too many challenges around the world to continue its current level of effort in Iraq, or even the deployment that was in place before the surge," the report says. " . . . It is time to chart a clearer path forward."

The panel includes many of the experts that advised the Iraq Study Group panel led by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton, which issued its report last December. Many of its recommendations have since been adopted, some reluctantly, by the Bush administration. The U.S. Institute of Peace ran the Baker-Hamilton report and assembled the experts.

The White House blocked the reconvening of the Baker-Hamilton panel, which was evenly divided among 10 prominent Democrats and Republicans, by urging Baker not to participate, according to U.S. officials. So USIP reconvened the experts who had advised them. The group, which met through the summer, is made up of some two dozen former U.S. officials and ambassadors, former CIA analysts, and Iraq specialists from think tanks and universities.

The recommendations in "Iraq: A Time for Change," the last of several reports published in the run-up to the Bush administration's assessment of Iraq this week, also call on the United Nations to immediately begin "intense negotiations" among Iraq's squabbling politicians. The talks should not be allowed to adjourn without agreements on power-sharing, revising the constitution, oil resources, local elections, easing a ban on former Baath Party members and the future of Kirkuk, the report urges. A similar model was used to broker an end to the war in Bosnia.

With some recent security improvements, the biggest problem facing the Bush administration and Iraq is the failure of politicians in Baghdad to reconcile Sunni and Shiite factions and pass critical laws to secure the fledgling new democracy. "The situation remains fluid, but a window has opened, fleetingly, for Iraq to proceed with political reconciliation. Iraq's national politicians have been unable to take full advantage of this opportunity," says the report, authored by USIP vice president Daniel Serwer.

The Baker-Hamilton report was most contentious because of its recommendations on diplomatic outreach to Iran and Syria. The new report says the United States should block Iranian attempts to control Iraqi politics and interdict its arms supplies to Iraqi militias, while also continuing to talk to Tehran directly and accommodating some Iranian interests in a neighboring state. "As long as the U.S. and Iran engage in a zero sum context for influence, Iraq will remain in turmoil and the U.S. will be bogged down," the report warns.

The report generally blasts Iraq's neighbors for failing to help stabilize Iraq. But it also criticizes the United States for losing the confidence of key allies in the region because of Iraq.

In contrast to a growing number of recent calls for various forms of breaking up Iraq along religious and ethnic lines, the report strongly stands against partition of one of the geo-strategic powerhouses in the Middle East, but leaves the question of decentralizing power to the Iraqis.

US officers 'lax' on Iraqi deaths

A US marine general and two officers have been disciplined for a "lack of due diligence" in investigating the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005.

However, the inquiry found no evidence of a cover-up over the deaths in the town of Haditha, the Marine Corps said.

"Letters of censure" have been sent to Maj Gen Richard Huck, Col Stephen Davis and Col Robert Sokoloski, it added.

The action comes as proceedings to decide whether a lower-ranking marine should be tried for murder continue.

Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich is one of four marines initially charged. The case against a second is under review and charges against two others have been dropped.

Attorneys for the marines say the troops were responding to an insurgent attack after a roadside bomb killed one of their squad members.

Iraqi witnesses say the marines shot unarmed civilians in retaliation for the death of their comrade.

Maj Gen Tim Cross, who was the most senior UK officer involved in post-war planning, told the Sunday Mirror US policy was "fatally flawed".

His comments came after Gen Sir Mike Jackson, head of the Army during the invasion, told the Daily Telegraph US policy was "intellectually bankrupt".

John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, dismissed Sir Mike's criticism as "way off the mark".

Lt-Col Steven Jordan had faced up to five years in jail for e-mailing soldiers about the investigation.

He had been in charge of the prison's interrogation unit when pictures of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were taken in 2003.

He was cleared on Tuesday of three charges of mistreatment of detainees.

For three days, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had haggled with congressional leaders over amendments to a federal surveillance law, but now he was putting his foot down. "This is the issue," said the plain-spoken retired vice admiral and Vietnam veteran, "that makes my blood pressure rise."

McConnell viscerally objected to a Democratic proposal to limit warrantless surveillance of foreigners' communications with Americans to instances in which one party was a terrorism suspect. McConnell wanted no such limits. "All foreign intelligence" targets in touch with Americans on any topic of interest should be fair game for U.S. spying, he said, according to two participants in the Aug. 2 conversation.

McConnell won the fight, extracting a key concession despite the misgivings of Democratic negotiators. Shortly after that exchange, the Bush administration leveraged Democratic acquiescence into a broader victory: congressional approval of a Republican bill that would expand surveillance powers far beyond what Democratic leaders had initially been willing to accept.

Yet both sides acknowledge that the administration's resurrection of virtually unchecked Cold War-era power to surveil foreign targets without warrants may be only temporary. The law expires in 180 days, and Democrats, smarting from their political defeat, have promised to alter it with new legislation to be prepared next month, when Congress returns from its recess.

"The real train wreck happens in September," said a senior administration official involved in the negotiations with Congress. He was referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's declaration hours after the bill's passage that portions are "unacceptable" and that the public will not want to wait six months "before corrective action is taken."

Until September -- and possibly for much longer -- the new law will enable the high-tech collection of foreign communications without judicial scrutiny on a vastly larger scale than previously possible, allowing billions of phone calls and e-mails inside as well as outside the United States to be routinely screened for possible links to terrorism and other security threats.

Congressional, administration and intelligence officials last week described the events leading up to the approval of this surveillance, including a remarkable series of confrontations that ended with McConnell and the White House outmaneuvering the Democratic-controlled Congress, partly by capitalizing on fresh reports of a growing terrorism threat.

"We had a forcing function," a senior administration official said, referring to the intelligence community's public report last month that said al-Qaeda poses a growing threat to the United States and to lawmakers' desire to leave town in August. "The situation was key to making it work," the official said, adding that the report's conclusions were "fortuitous" rather than engineered.

The encounters left mistrust on both sides that will complicate the next round of debate. "They said, 'Trust us, we'll fix it,' " the senior administration source said of the Democrats' proposals. "But every time the bill came back, it had language [the administration] couldn't live with."

What McConnell wanted most from Congress was to be able to intercept, without a warrant, purely foreign-to-foreign communications that pass through fiber-optic cables and switching stations on U.S. soil. That provision was meant to restore a U.S. capability that existed three decades ago, when a 1978 law allowed warrantless surveillance of foreign calls that were overwhelmingly relayed wirelessly.

Since then, advances in technology have caused 90 percent of global communications to pass through wires -- mostly optic fibers capable of carrying 6,000 calls in a strand. That development has been a boon to the National Security Agency, which has worked hard to monitor the traffic with U.S.-based taps and concluded it was doing so legally.

But in a secret ruling in March, a judge on a special court empowered to review the government's electronic snooping challenged for the first time the government's ability to collect data from such wires even when they came from foreign terrorist targets. In May, a judge on the same court went further, telling the administration flatly that the law's wording required the government to get a warrant whenever a fixed wire is involved.

"All of a sudden, the world flipped upside down," said a senior administration official familiar with the rulings. The official declined to be identified by name, citing the confidentiality of court decisions involving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The decisions had the immediate practical effect of forcing the NSA to laboriously ask judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time it wanted to capture such foreign communications from a wire or fiber on U.S. soil, a task so time-consuming that a backlog developed. "We shoved a lot of warrants at the court" but still could not keep up, the official said. "We needed thousands of warrants, but the most we could do was hundreds." The official depicted it as an especially "big problem" by the end of May, in which the NSA was "losing capability."

McConnell even appealed directly to the FISA court, meeting with judges to describe the impact the decisions were having. The judges were sympathetic but said they believed that the law was clear. "They said, 'We don't make legislation -- we interpret the law,' " the senior administration official said.

The rulings -- which were not disclosed publicly until the congressional debate this month -- represented an unusual rift between the court and the U.S. intelligence community. They led top intelligence officials to conclude, a senior official said, that "you can't tell what this court is going to do" and helped provoke the White House to insist that Congress essentially strip the court of any jurisdiction over U.S. surveillance of communications between foreigners.

The opening shot in the administration's campaign was a bill sent to Capitol Hill on April 27; officials said it had been in the works since a public controversy erupted in late 2005 over the administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program" involving warrantless surveillance of communications between Americans and terrorism suspects overseas.

The administration's 66-page measure was put together by an interagency group of lawyers headed by Benjamin A. Powell, the general counsel for the director of national intelligence (DNI). Powell, who had once worked in electronic surveillance programs for the FBI and the Air Force, joined the office of the DNI last year after helping shape the administration's intelligence policy as a White House associate counsel and special adviser to the president.

On May 1, McConnell appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to press for action on amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The 30-year-old statute was badly behind the times, failing to take into account modern communication methods, he said. "We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting," McConnell told the senators.

McConnell and other officials ultimately briefed about 250 lawmakers on the issue and encountered little resistance to their proposed repair for surveillance involving purely foreign communications. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the intelligence committee chairman, who had received some of the first detailed briefings on the surveillance program, called Vice President Cheney in late June to explore options.

"I want to move forward," he said. But Democratic leaders wanted something in return: the release of long-sought administration documents describing the controversial warrantless wiretapping program Bush had authorized in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The administration declined to release the documents, which include Bush's presidential order allowing the wiretaps, as well as the administration's legal opinions justifying the action. Administration officials described a particular showdown with key Democratic leaders -- including Rockefeller and Carl M. Levin (Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which Democrats proposed a trade of sorts.

While the exchange was not a quid pro quo, the senators essentially said, "You give us the documents we want, and we'll give you the legislation," according to an administration official present, who said the response was "no." McConnell argued that the Democrats were "looking backwards" and that he was the "forward-looking guy," a witness said.

A critical moment for the Democrats came on July 24, when McConnell met in a closed session with senators from both parties to ask for urgent approval of a slimmed-down version of his bill. Armed with new details about terrorist activity and an alarming decline in U.S. eavesdropping capabilities, he argued that Congress had days, not weeks, to act.

"Everybody who heard him speak recognized the absolute, compelling necessity to move," Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the intelligence panel, said later of the closed session.

Democrats agreed. "At that time, the discussion changed to 'What can we do to close the gap during the August recess?' " said a senior Democratic aide who declined to be identified because the meetings were classified. As delivered by McConnell, the warnings were seen as fully credible. "He's pushing this because he thinks we're in a high-threat environment," the senior aide said.

Throughout this period, Republican lawmakers promoted the administration's version of the bill as a powerful response to the terrorism threat. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), a former chairman of the House intelligence panel, told colleagues, for example, that "this is about protecting the homeland, and it is about protecting our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

But McConnell consistently sought authority for warrantless surveillance not only of terrorist suspects outside the country, but of all foreign intelligence targets. In a letter to Senate leaders on Aug. 2, he said no such limitation existed when the FISA law was passed in 1978, "nor is one appropriate today. . . . The Intelligence Community must be able to gather needed intelligence information on the array of threats to our national security." A senior administration official mentioned the North Korean nuclear program as an example of a threat.

Where the matter became sticky -- and ultimately developed into tense exchanges between the Democrats and McConnell, with each side later accusing the other of misrepresenting their conversations -- was on the question of how to deal with surveillance of communications between persons outside the country and persons inside the country, including both U.S. citizens and foreigners.

Democrats were reluctant to give the NSA blanket permission to capture such data without a warrant unless independent oversight was provided, either by the court or by the Justice Department's inspector general. They also worried that providing warrantless authority to spy on targets other than foreign terrorism suspects would lead to potentially abusive monitoring of Americans innocently in contact with foreign targets.

Other provisions in the White House-backed bill added to the Democrats' discomfort. For instance, a Democratic bill would have authorized warrantless surveillance "directed" at individuals reasonably believed to be outside the United States. But the administration's draft -- and the one passed into law -- permitted collecting data "concerning" people reasonably believed to be outside the country. Democrats said the difference between collection efforts "concerning" foreigners and "directed" at foreigners could be enormous, allowing intelligence officials far greater leeway.

Partly, it was a matter of Democratic mistrust of the administration, due to what Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called "the administration's repeated past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror."

On July 31, McConnell met with Democratic leaders in an unusual night session to hash over their concerns. In McConnell's bill, the attorney general's office would certify that U.S. collection methods were in line with the law, a procedure Democrats told him they did not trust. In a series of conference calls, McConnell continued to complain about a Democratic-backed provision limiting warrantless surveillance to foreign suspects tied to terrorist groups. Democrats noted that an earlier, administration-backed measure had included similar language.

"There was a lot of back-and-forth," said a congressional official familiar with the discussion. Pelosi suggested as a compromise limiting the authority to "threats to national security." But McConnell -- whose office was getting e-mails throughout the negotiations from officials at the Justice Department, the vice president's office and elsewhere in the intelligence community -- remained firm, and eventually the Democrats relented and presented a bill that they believed had met McConnell's requirements.

McConnell deemed its fine print unacceptable, however, and in the end, it was the Republican bill, a near-copy of his proposal, that passed both chambers of Congress. It drew support not only from most Republicans but also from 16 Senate Democrats and 41 House Democrats. Hours after its passage, Pelosi declared portions of the bill "unacceptable" and forecast changes in the coming months.

The Bush administration's chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described.

The disclosure by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005.

In a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), McConnell wrote that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included "a number of . . . intelligence activities" and that a name routinely used by the administration -- the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- applied only to "one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more."

"This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged," McConnell said.

The program that Bush announced was put under a court's supervision in January, but the administration now wants congressional approval to do much of the same surveillance without a court order.

McConnell's letter was aimed at defending Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales from allegations by Democrats that he may have committed perjury by telling Congress that no legal objections were raised about the TSP. Gonzales said a legal fight in early 2004 was focused on "other intelligence activities" than those confirmed by Bush, but he never connected those to Bush's executive order.

But in doing so, McConnell's letter also underscored that the full scope of the NSA's surveillance program under Bush's order has not been revealed. The TSP described by Bush and his aides allowed the interception of communication between the United States and other countries where one party is believed to be tied to al-Qaeda, so other types of communication or data are presumably being collected under the parts of the wider NSA program that remain hidden.

News reports over the past 20 months have detailed a range of activities linked to the program, including the use of data mining to identify surveillance targets and the participation of telecommunication companies in turning over millions of phone records. The administration has not publicly confirmed such reports.

A spokesman for McConnell declined to elaborate on the letter. The Justice Department also declined to comment.

Specter was noncommittal yesterday on whether McConnell's explanation resolved his questions about the accuracy of Gonzales's previous testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Specter is the ranking Republican. Specter said he was waiting for a separate letter from the attorney general to provide additional clarification.

"If he doesn't have a plausible explanation, then he hasn't leveled with the committee," Specter said on CNN. Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that "the department will continue to work with Senator Specter to address his concerns" but declined to comment further.

McConnell's letter leaves maneuvering room for both sides in the political fracas over whether Gonzales has been truthful in his testimony. On the one hand, the NSA was clearly engaged in activities that were distinct enough to require different "legal bases" authorizing their use, according to McConnell's account.

"If you think about it technically, it is pretty clear that the NSA desk that does communications intercepts is separate from the desk that does data mining of call records," said Kim Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, a New York-based nonprofit group. "Those are separate processes, and to think of them as separate programs is not a stretch."

On the other hand, the activities were authorized under a single presidential order and were all part of an NSA effort to gather communications about suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That helps explain why many Democratic lawmakers and administration officials -- including FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III -- viewed the wiretapping as part of a larger NSA program, rather than a separate effort, as Gonzales's testimony has suggested.

"Both sides have a legitimate case, if you want to be legalist about it," Taipale said.

The 45-day reauthorization of a single presidential order was probably a "bureaucratic convenience" that eliminated the need to issue multiple authorizations, he added.

Kate Martin, executive director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the new disclosures show that Gonzales and other administration officials have "repeatedly misled the Congress and the American public" about the extent of NSA surveillance efforts.

"They have repeatedly tried to give the false impression that the surveillance was narrow and justified," Martin said. "Why did it take accusations of perjury before the DNI disclosed that there is indeed other, presumably broader and more questionable, surveillance?"

Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who was among a group of four Democratic senators who called last week for a perjury investigation of Gonzales, said: "The question of whether Attorney General Gonzales perjured himself looms as large now as it did before this letter.

"This letter is no vindication of the attorney general," he said.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III yesterday contradicted the sworn testimony of his boss, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, by telling Congress that a prominent warrantless surveillance program was the subject of a dramatic legal debate within the Bush administration.

Mueller's testimony appears to mark the first public confirmation from a Bush administration official that the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program was at issue in an unusual nighttime visit by Gonzales to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who was under sedation and recovering from surgery.

Mueller's remarks to the House Judiciary Committee differed from testimony earlier in the week from Gonzales, who told a Senate panel that a legal disagreement aired at the hospital did not concern the NSA program. Details of the program, kept secret for four years, were confirmed by President Bush in December 2005, provoking wide controversy on Capitol Hill.

"The discussion was on a national -- an NSA program that has been much discussed, yes," Mueller said in response to a question from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.). Mueller told another lawmaker that he had serious reservations about the warrantless wiretapping program.

His testimony presents a new problem for the beleaguered attorney general, whose credibility has come under attack from Democrats and some Republicans. They say Gonzales deceived them on a number of issues, including the NSA program and events surrounding the firing last year of nine U.S. attorneys.

"He tells the half-truth, the partial truth and anything but the truth," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), as he and three other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee asked the Justice Department yesterday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether Gonzales lied to Congress about the NSA program.

Complicating the administration's predicament, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) yesterday issued subpoenas to White House adviser Karl Rove and a deputy, demanding their testimony by Thursday as part of the panel's long-running investigation into the prosecutor firings and the alleged politicization of Justice Department career personnel jobs. The White House has refused such requests, prompting House lawmakers to move toward criminal contempt citations against a former Bush legal counsel and his current chief of staff.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said in a statement that Gonzales's testimony and statements about the NSA program have been accurate, but that "confusion is inevitable when complicated classified activities are discussed in a public forum."

Gonzales is under fire in particular for his testimony in February 2006 that there had been no "serious disagreement" about the NSA wiretapping program. Gonzales and his aides have since said that he was referring to the monitoring of international communications confirmed by Bush and not to other, undisclosed "intelligence activities" that attracted controversy within the administration.

"The disagreement that occurred in March 2004 concerned the legal basis for intelligence activities that have not been publicly disclosed and that remain highly classified," Roehrkasse said.

Other officials, including Mueller and several Democratic lawmakers who were briefed on the NSA's activities, have said that the surveillance, or some part of it, was at the heart of the dispute.

Mueller declined at the hearing to discuss Gonzales's statements on the topic. "I really can't comment on what Judge Gonzales was thinking or saying," he said. "I can tell you what I understood at the time."

Mueller's testimony is particularly striking in light of his opposition to Gonzales's view of the matter at issue during the 2004 legal dispute. Then-Acting Attorney General James B. Comey sought Mueller's help in ensuring that an FBI security detail did not evict Comey from Ashcroft's hospital room during the visit by Gonzales, then White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff.

Mueller was not present during the hospital visit but testified yesterday that Ashcroft briefed him on the conversation. He repeatedly said he agreed with Comey's version of events, which included testimony that Mueller, Ashcroft, Comey and others were prepared to quit if the program went ahead without changes to render it legal.

Bush agreed to make the changes after he met with Mueller and discussed the objections Mueller shared with Comey, according to Comey's account. Mueller conveyed that promise to Comey.

Signaling that Democrats intend to keep pursuing the issue, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) wrote to Mueller after yesterday's hearing, requesting notes about the 2004 hospital incident. Mueller testified that he kept records because the episode was "out of the ordinary."

FBI officials declined to comment.

The request by four senators to appoint a special prosecutor was sent to Solicitor General Paul D. Clement. He has taken charge of matters relating to the U.S. attorney firings and related controversies because Gonzales and numerous other aides are recused.

Leahy also raised the possibility this week of asking Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to open a perjury investigation of Gonzales if the attorney general declines to correct testimony that Leahy considers inaccurate.

Besides demanding Rove's testimony on the attorney firings, Leahy sent a subpoena to J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy political director. Rove and Jennings appear in Justice Department e-mails discussing steps in the plan to fire the prosecutors.

Most Americans see President Bush as intransigent on Iraq and prefer that the Democratic-controlled Congress make decisions about a possible withdrawal of U.S. forces, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

As the president and Congress spar over war policy, both receive negative marks from the public for their handling of the situation in Iraq. But by a large margin, Americans trust Democrats rather than the president to find a solution to a conflict that remains enormously unpopular. And more than six in 10 in the new poll said Congress should have the final say on when to bring the troops home.

The president has steadfastly asserted his power as commander in chief to make decisions about the war, but his posture is now viewed by majorities of Democrats, independents and even Republicans as too inflexible. Asked whether Bush is willing enough to change policies on Iraq, nearly eight in 10 Americans said no.

Since December, the percentage seeing Bush as too rigid has increased 12 points, with the most significant change among Republicans. Just after the 2006 midterm elections and the release of the 79-point plan from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, 55 percent of Republicans thought Bush was willing enough to change course in Iraq; in this poll, 55 percent of Republicans said he is not.

Bush's overall approval rating equals its all-time low in Post-ABC News polls at 33 percent, with 65 percent disapproving. Fifty-two percent said they "strongly" disapprove of his job performance, the highest figure of his presidency and more than three times the 16 percent who strongly approve.

Three-quarters of Republicans approve of the way he is handling his job, but just one in 10 Democrats and three in 10 independents give him positive marks.

The war has been the single biggest drag on the president's approval ratings.

Thirty-one percent give him positive marks on handling the situation in Iraq, which is near his career low on the issue. The last time a majority approved of the president's handling of the war was in January 2004.

Even among those Americans who said they had served or had a close friend or relative who served in Iraq, 38 percent approve of Bush's handling of the conflict.

At the same time, Congress fares little better with the public on the war. Just 35 percent said they approve of the way congressional Democrats are handling the situation in Iraq, with 63 percent disapproving. Two-thirds of independents give the Democrats negative marks on the war.

The latest poll was conducted July 18 to 21 among a random sample of 1,125 adults, just after Senate Democrats failed to pass legislation that would set a timetable for the start of troop withdrawals from the war zone. The results have a three-percentage-point margin of sampling error.

Overall approval of Congress stands at 37 percent in the new poll, with the 60 percent disapproval rating equal to public dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress late last year. Congress's approval rating has declined over the past three months because self-identified Democrats have soured in their assessment.

Congressional Democrats still receive higher marks than their Republican counterparts for their performance, but independents give both parties equally negative reviews.

But when it comes to judging the president versus congressional Democrats on the issue of Iraq, the public stands with Congress. Fifty-five percent said they trust congressional Democrats on the war, compared with 32 percent who said they trust Bush. (Eleven percent of all respondents and 17 percent of independents said they trust "neither.") And by 2 to 1, Americans said Congress, rather than the president, should make the final decision about when to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. Nearly three in 10 Republicans side with Congress over the president on this question.

Many would like Congress to assert itself on Iraq, and about half of poll respondents said congressional Democrats have done "too little" to get Bush to change his war policy. Democrats are especially eager for more action from their party's lawmakers: 61 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of liberal Democrats said not enough has been done to prod Bush on the issue.

The central challenge for legislators from both parties is that the deep schism in Congress over Iraq war policy mirrors a wide partisan divide on many questions about the situation there.

Overall attitudes about the conflict continue to be decidedly negative, with more than six in 10 saying that given the costs, the war was not worth fighting. Most Democrats and independents in the poll said the war was not worth fighting, but most Republicans continue to say it has been worth the costs.

And the broad disagreements between partisans are not isolated to previous decisions.

A narrow majority -- 55 percent -- support legislation that would set a deadline of next spring for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, but while that measure is backed by 72 percent of Democrats and six in 10 independents, only a quarter of Republicans are on board.

A Senate effort to append such a timeline to a defense authorization bill failed to get the requisite 60 votes in the Senate; it was defeated 52 to 47.

There is also no agreement across party lines on the timing of U.S. troop withdrawals. About six in 10 said forces should be withdrawn to avoid further casualties, even if civil order is not restored, and 56 percent want to decrease the forces in Iraq. Both figures are at new highs, but few Republicans agree with either position.

Even among Democrats, there is no consensus about the timing of any troop withdrawal. While three-quarters want to decrease the number of troops in Iraq, only a third advocate a complete, immediate withdrawal. There is even less support for that option among independents (15 percent) and Republicans (6 percent).

There is, however, more universal, bipartisan backing for several other proposals that have been floated, including changing the strategic mission from direct combat to training and support, instituting new rules on troop rest time, and reducing aid to the Iraqi government if it fails to meet certain benchmarks. Majorities across party lines support each of these potential policy shifts.

Few are confident that the Iraqi government has the ability to meet its commitments to restore civil order. But again partisan views diverge: 55 percent of Republicans are at least somewhat confident that the Iraqis will meet their benchmarks, an outlook shared by about three in 10 Democrats and independents.

And as for the new U.S. efforts to restore security in Iraq, most in the poll said the "surge" has not made much difference, and nearly two-thirds said that the additional troops will not improve the situation over the next few months.

This broad pessimism provides an early read that the public may not be as willing as some in Congress to suspend judgment about the strategy until Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, delivers his much-anticipated assessment in mid-September.

The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

But this line of defense seemed to unravel a bit yesterday with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi subsidiary.

These disclosures triggered a new round of criticism from Democrats and others who say that the administration took its eye off the ball by invading Iraq without first destroying Osama bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.

Confronted with a political brush fire, the president and his aides retreated to familiar ground, highlighting the parts of the report that they saw as supportive of their policies, particularly the need to confront Islamic radicals on the ground in Iraq.

In talking with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Bush concentrated on a single paragraph in the assessment that placed the enemy in Iraq in a larger context of international terrorism. The estimate said bin Laden's organization will "probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland."

Although only a portion of the instability in Iraq is attributed to al-Qaeda and the group had no substantial power base there before the U.S. invasion, Bush again cast the war as a battle against its members, whom his aides have described as key provocateurs there.

"These people have sworn allegiance to the very same man who ordered the attack on September the 11th, 2001: Osama bin Laden," the president said. "And they want us to leave parts of the world, like Iraq, so they can establish a safe haven from which to spread their poisonous ideology. And we are steadfast in our determination to not only protect the American people, but to protect these young democracies."

Bush's top advisers also pushed back at the proposition from many Democrats that the White House allowed the pursuit of al-Qaeda to be diverted by going after Saddam Hussein. Briefing reporters yesterday, Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush's homeland security adviser, took issue with the suggestion that the president had ignored warnings from the intelligence community that attacking Iraq would stimulate al-Qaeda's drive for recruits and influence.

"You're assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand," Townsend said. "The fact is, we were harassing them in Afghanistan, we're harassing them in Iraq, we're harassing them in other ways, non-militarily, around the world. And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet's nest, they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn't suggest to me that we shouldn't be doing it."

But many Democrats questioned the administration's explanations, seizing on the key judgments of the new intelligence estimate as yet another reason to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and changing the administration's mission of the past four years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said the current situation in Iraq "has helped to energize" al-Qaeda. "Changing our strategy in Iraq and narrowing our military mission to countering al-Qaeda terrorism -- as a bipartisan majority in the Senate now favors -- would be the single greatest thing we could do to undermine al-Qaeda's ability to use Iraq as a recruiting and propaganda tool fueling the growth of regional terrorist groups," he said in a statement.

Al-Qaeda's participation in the Iraqi violence has figured particularly heavily in recent administration arguments for a continued U.S. troop presence there, because White House strategists regard it as a politically salable reason for staying and continuing to fight.

Some terrorism analysts say Bush has used inflated rhetoric to depict al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the same group of extremists that attacked the United States on Sept. 11 -- noting that the group did not exist until after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. These analysts say Bush also has overlooked the contribution that U.S. actions have made to the growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been described as kind of a franchise of the main al-Qaeda network headed by bin Laden.

Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA analyst who has been involved in previous intelligence estimates, said that the administration has correctly identified the danger posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there are indeed links between the Iraq group and the larger international terrorist network. But he said the White House is drawing the wrong conclusion, and argued instead that it is the U.S. presence in Iraq that is fueling the terrorists' cause.

"Iraq matters because it has become a cause celebre and because groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda central exploit the image of the United States being out to occupy Muslim lands," Pillar said.

Referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq, Clinton administration official Daniel S. Benjamin, who has written books and articles on international terrorism, said: "These are bad guys. These are jihadists." He added: "That doesn't mean we [should] stay in Iraq the way we have been, because we are not making the situation any better. We're creating terrorists in Iraq, we are creating terrorists outside of Iraq who are inspired by what's going on in Iraq. . . . The longer we stay, the more terrorists we create."

Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.

For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a "Churchillian" vision of "victory" in Iraq and defend the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. "A constitutional order is emerging," he said.

Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.

"The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function."

Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: "A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable," he said, "in the short term."

Hayden's bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group's intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating."

In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing.

Among the 79 specific recommendations the Iraq Study Group made to Bush was withdrawing support for the Maliki government unless it showed "substantial progress" on security and national reconciliation. And it recommended changing the primary mission of U.S. forces from combat to training Iraqis so that combat units could be withdrawn by early 2008.

In effect, the report from the bipartisan group -- co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III, a Republican, and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- was an urgent message from the old Washington establishment to the Bush administration to change the direction of its Iraq policy. But Bush did not initially embrace any of the key recommendations, although bipartisan groups in the House and Senate have recently introduced legislation that would make them official U.S. policy.

Instead, the president in January announced that he was sending more troops to Iraq as part of a "surge," which he said would lead to the victory that had so far eluded U.S. forces.

Both Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, have repeatedly said that there is no military solution to Iraq and that the sectarian strife and the insurgency can be resolved only by the Iraqi government.

Hayden's description of Iraq's dysfunctional government provides some insight into the intelligence community's analysis of Maliki and the situation on the ground. Five days before his testimony, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had written a memo to Bush raising doubts about Maliki's ability to curb violence in Iraq, but his assessment was not as bleak as Hayden's.

Bush's own optimistic statement to members of the study group did not reflect the viewpoint of his CIA director. But a statement from another administration official interviewed by the panel the same day -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- took it into account.

Asked by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a member of the study group, if she was aware of the CIA's grim evaluation of Iraq, Rice replied, "We are aware of the dark assessment," but quickly added: "It is not without hope."

A spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, disputed this account of Hayden's testimony to members of the study group. "That is not an accurate reflection of what Director Hayden said at that meeting, nor does it reflect his view, then or now," Mansfield said.

A senior intelligence official familiar with Hayden's session with the Iraq Study Group said that Hayden told the panel his assessment was "somber" and acknowledged that Hayden had used the term "irreversible." But the official insisted that Hayden instead said, "The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity."

But another senior intelligence official confirmed the thrust and detail of Hayden's assessment, saying that the intelligence out of Iraq this month shows that the ability of the Maliki government to execute decisions and govern Iraq remains "awful."

Hayden, 62, a four-star Air Force general and career intelligence officer, has a reputation as a candid briefer. Since 2003, the CIA, which has more than 500 personnel in Iraq to assist in providing intelligence and analysis, has offered the most pessimistic view of any intelligence agency of both the Iraqi government's performance and the situation on the ground there.

Testifying publicly before the Senate Armed Services Committee two days after meeting with the study group, Hayden was more cautious in his conclusions. He said that there were serious problems in Iraq but that the government was "functioning."

Former defense secretary William J. Perry, one of the five Democrats on the Iraq Study Group, confirmed that Hayden told them the Iraqi government seemed beyond repair.

"That was what we'd been hearing everywhere," Perry said. "He just said it a little more clearly and more explicitly than other people."

O'Connor, a Republican, also confirmed Hayden's assessment. She said she did not agree with his conclusion that it was irreversible, but she said she was pessimistic.

"It is a dire situation," she said. "I don't think it has gotten any better. It just breaks your heart. . . . Iraqi people are dying, American soldiers are dying. So far it does not seem we have achieved any kind of security there."

Arriving at the White House on the morning of Nov. 13, members of the study group spent the day interviewing almost every key figure involved in Iraq policy. In addition to Hayden, Bush and Rice, they also questioned Rumsfeld; Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Zalmay Khalilzad, then U.S. ambassador to Iraq; and, by videoconference from Baghdad, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Bush was joined in the interview by Vice President Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and Hadley, but they did not speak. "We thought with that whole group there, we were going to get briefings, we were going to get discussions," said Perry. "Instead the president held forth on his views on how important the war was, and how it was tough."

In his meeting with members of the study group, Hayden described a situation in which the Iraqi government either would not or could not control the violence consuming the country and questioned whether it made sense to strengthen its security forces. He depicted the United States as facing mainly bad choices in the future.

"Our leaving Iraq would make the situation worse," Hayden said. "Our staying in Iraq may not make it better. Our current approach without modification will not make it better."

According to the written record and others in the room, Hayden at one point likened the situation in Iraq to a marathon. He said there comes a point in each race when the runner knows he can complete the challenge. But Hayden said he could see no such point in Iraq's future.

"The levers of power are not connected to anything," he said, adding: "We have placed all of our energies in creating the center, and the center cannot accomplish anything."

Numerous U.S. generals already had told the study group that success in Iraq could not come without national reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shiites. Hayden agreed, saying: "The Iraqi identity is muted. The Sunni or Shia identity is foremost."

But he clearly saw no end to sectarian killings. "Given the level of uncontrolled violence," Hayden said, "the most we can do is to contain its excesses and preserve the possibility of reconciliation in the future."

He compared the Iraq situation to the prolonged warfare in the Balkans. "In Bosnia, the parties fought themselves to exhaustion," Hayden said, suggesting that the same scenario could play out in Iraq. "They might just have to fight this out to exhaustion."

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

Members of the study group said Hayden's stark assessment of the Iraqi government dovetailed with what they had heard in September during their visit to Iraq. There, they met with a senior CIA official who held an equally unenthusiastic view. "Maliki was nobody's pick," the CIA official had said, according to written notes from that meeting. "His name came up late. He has no real power base in the country or in parliament. We need not expect much from him."

Given the constant threats and persistent violence, the official had said, it was remarkable that Iraqi government employees showed up for work.

"We continue to be amazed that the Iraqis accept such high levels of violence," he told the study group. "Maliki thinks two car bombs a day, 100 dead a day, is okay. It's sustainable and his government is survivable."

But the government itself was responsible for some of that violence, the CIA official said. "The Ministry of Interior is uniformed death squads, overseers of jails and torture facilities," he said. "Their funds are constantly misappropriated."

In his testimony, Hayden said that the United States had fundamental disagreements with Maliki's Shiite-dominated government on some of the most basic issues facing Iraq.

"We and the Iraqi government do not agree on who the enemy is," Hayden said, according to the written record. "For all the senior leaders of the Iraqi government, Baathists are the source of evil. There is a Baathist behind every bush."

Several participants in the interview described Hayden as dismayed by the startling level of violence in the country but skeptical of the ability of Iraqi forces -- either the military or the police -- to do anything about it.

"It's a legitimate question whether strengthening the Iraqi security forces helps or hurts when they are viewed as a predatory element," he said. "Strengthening Iraqi security forces is not unalloyed good. Without qualification, this judgment applies to the police."

In one bit of qualified good news, he said that the training of the Iraqi army had produced better results than that of the police. "The army is uneven," he said, adding: "Uneven, in this case, is good."

Hayden's frustration with Maliki provides a context to the administration's continuing efforts to pressure the Iraqi leader into finding a political settlement between Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq. During one week last month, three senior administration officials visited Baghdad to try to speed up the political process.

In her testimony Nov. 13, Rice recounted her discussions with Maliki in which she bluntly told him the importance of making progress on national unity and reconciliation. Rice said she had told the prime minister, "Pretty soon, you'll all be swinging from lampposts if you don't hang together."

Brady Dennis and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.

CRAWFORD, Texas - Cindy Sheehan, the soldier’s mother who galvanized the anti-war movement, said Sunday that she plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. That’s when Sheehan and her supporters are to arrive in Washington, D.C., after a 13-day caravan and walking tour starting next week from the group’s war protest site near Bush’s Crawford ranch.

“Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership,” Sheehan told The Associated Press. “We hired them to bring an end to the war. I’m not too far from San Francisco, so it wouldn’t be too big of a move for me. I would give her a run for her money.”

Messages left with Pelosi’s staff were not immediately returned. The White House declined to comment on Sheehan’s plans.

She plans her official candidacy announcement Tuesday. Sunday wrapped up what is expected to be her final weekend at the 5-acre Crawford lot that she sold to California radio talk show host Bree Walker, who plans to keep it open to protesters.

Sheehan announced in late May that she was leaving the anti-war movement. She said that she felt her efforts had been in vain and that she had endured smear tactics and hatred from the left, as well as the right. She said she wanted to change course.

She first came to Crawford in August 2005 during a Bush vacation, demanding to talk to him about the war that killed her son Casey in 2004. She became the face of the anti-war movement during her 26-day roadside vigil, which was joined by thousands. But it also drew counter-protests by Bush supporters, many who said she was hurting troop morale.

Disenchantment with Democrats
Sheehan, who has never held political office, recently said that she was leaving the Democratic Party because it “caved” in to the president. Last week, she announced her caravan to Washington, an undertaking she calls the “people’s accountability movement.”

“I didn’t expect to be back so soon, but the focus is different than it was before,” Sheehan said Sunday. “Instead of talking and making accusations, we’re going into communities and talking to the people who’ve been hurt by the Bush regime. We’re finding out how we can help people.”

Sheehan, who will turn 50 on Tuesday, said Bush should be impeached because she believes he misled the public about the reasons for going to war, violated the Geneva Convention by torturing detainees, and crossed the line by commuting the prison sentence of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. She said other grounds for impeachment are the domestic spying program and the “inadequate and tragic” response to Hurricane Katrina.

Libby was convicted of lying and obstructing justice in an investigation into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity.

Sheehan said she hopes Pelosi files the articles of impeachment so Sheehan can move onto her next projects, including overseas trips for humanitarian work. But if not, Sheehan said she is ready to run for office.

‘She let the people down...’
“I’m doing it to encourage other people to run against Congress members who aren’t doing their jobs, who are beholden to special interests,” Sheehan said. “She (Pelosi) let the people down who worked hard to put Democrats back in power, who we thought were our hope for change.”

Pelosi was elected to the House in 1987 and became the first female speaker in January.

Sheehan said she lives in a Sacramento suburb but declined to disclose which city, citing safety reasons. The area is outside Pelosi’s district, but there are no residency requirements for congressional members, according to the California secretary of state’s office.

Iraq strategy geared to U.S. pullout

BAGHDAD — U.S. commanders plan a summer of stepped-up offensives against Al Qaeda in Iraq as they tailor strategy to their expectation that Congress soon will impose a timeline for drawing down U.S. forces here.

The emphasis on Al Qaeda, described by commanders in interviews here this week, marks a shift in focus from Shiite Muslim militias and death squads in Baghdad. It reflects the belief of some senior officers in Iraq that the militias probably will reduce attacks once it becomes clear that a U.S. pullout is on the horizon. By contrast, they believe Al Qaeda in Iraq could be emboldened by a withdrawal plan and must be confronted before one is in place.

When the Bush administration began sending additional troops to Iraq, U.S. commanders spoke frequently of the threat posed by the Al Mahdi militia, and they issued thinly veiled threats against its leader, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Although military leaders say the militia remains a priority, Sadr has tacitly cooperated with the U.S. troop buildup, telling his followers to avoid confronting U.S. forces. He is also a key supporter of the U.S.-backed government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

Now, with the final infantry troops of the U.S. "surge" strategy having arrived in Iraq, the military is increasingly focusing firepower on the Sunni Muslim side in Iraq's civil war, especially Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"These operations are more on towards Qaeda because they … are the ones that are creating the truck bombs and car bombs that are having an effect … on the populace," Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations said in an interview this week. "So we are going after the safe havens that allow them to build these things without a lot of interference."

Al Qaeda in Iraq is one of several high-profile Sunni Arab groups in the insurgency against U.S. and Iraqi forces. Its fighters are believed to include a significant number of non-Iraqis. Despite its name, the extent of the group's links to Osama bin Laden is unclear.

U.S. officials, burned by previous claims of progress that turned sour, are offering only the most guarded of forecasts for the current offensives.

"This is the most diabolical enemy out there. I've never seen anything like it," the top U.S. commander here, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, said in an interview.

"It is far and away the most complex situation we've been in during my time in uniform," he said. "I've done two other tours here, and this is far and away, orders of magnitude, more complex."

The point of the current mission, said David Kilcullen, Petraeus' top counterinsurgency advisor, is not to help Iraq "turn a corner" that would allow the U.S. to leave the country in a state of peace. Instead, U.S. strategists hope to beat back militant groups enough to give Iraq's Shiite-led government a chance to achieve some measure of stability.

"I don't know how many times senior leaders in America have said we have turned a corner in Iraq. We've turned a corner so many times we are all getting dizzy," said Kilcullen, a former officer in the Australian army.

"We haven't turned the tide. We haven't turned the corner, there isn't light at the end of the tunnel. But what we have done is take a failing enterprise and put it on a sound long-term footing."

A reduction in U.S. forces will happen, he added. "We will downsize. Absolutely," he said. "But what we are trying to do is put the operation on a sound footing so the Iraqis can handle it, and we can make it sufficiently stable."

The push against Al Qaeda in Iraq, including the offensive over the last two weeks in Baqubah, north of Baghdad, offers several potential advantages for U.S. forces.

The fight involves the kind of high-intensity operations that play to U.S. strengths. It pits American forces against an opponent that the U.S. public already considers an enemy, and provides clear "metrics" for measuring success.

After largely steering away from body counts of insurgents for most of the Iraq war, U.S. officials recently have been reporting the number of militants killed in operations against Al Qaeda.

Beyond these immediate advantages, the strategy is driven by the belief of senior officers that they have a window this summer in which to suppress Al Qaeda activity before a withdrawal timetable is determined.

Al Qaeda's attacks against Shiite religious sites and civilians brought the Shiite militias into the conflict last year, Petraeus said. Reducing the threat of Al Qaeda will reduce the militia threat, he added.

"Al Qaeda gave them an excuse. Al Qaeda is their raison d'etre," Petraeus said. "So you really have to reduce Al Qaeda's ability to carry out sensational attacks."

If the U.S. can show dramatic progress against Al Qaeda, other pieces of the Iraqi puzzle may fall into place, Petraeus said. For example, Petraeus predicted that pushing back Al Qaeda would help advance what he sees as the most promising development of recent months, the decision by some Sunni tribal leaders to turn against Al Qaeda militants.

Bush faces eavesdropping subpoena

The US Senate has issued a subpoena ordering the White House to give up documents related to its surveillance of domestic terror suspects.

The Senate Judiciary Committee asked the Bush administration to give up the papers as part of its inquiry into the controversial spying programme.

The administration has refused a series of requests to release the documents.

The president rejects claims that he broke the law by ordering surveillance without first securing warrants.

The programme, authorised after the 9/11 attacks, enabled the government to monitor the overseas e-mail and telephone communications of Americans suspected of ties to terrorists.

While the president says his wartime powers allowed him to authorise surveillance without the need for a warrant, critics say he violated Americans' civil liberties.

The secret spying programme became public in 2005.

July deadline

The Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoenas target the White House, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the National Security Council and the Department of Justice.

Their intention is to shed light on any discussion that may have taken place within the administration on the legality of the spying programme.

"Our attempts to obtain information through testimony of administration witnesses have been met with a consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection," the Senate Committee's chairman, Patrick Leahy, says.

"There is no legitimate argument for withholding the requested materials from this committee."

The White House has until 18 July to comply with the demand, according to the Democratic-led Senate committee.

It is unclear whether it will do so, or mount a legal challenge to the subpoena.

"We're aware of the committee's action and will respond appropriately," a White House spokesman told the Associated Press news agency.

"It's unfortunate that congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation."

GOP support for war slips

After four years of combat and more than 3,560 U.S. deaths, two Republican senators previously reluctant to challenge President Bush on the war announced they could no longer support the deployment of 157,000 troops and asked the president to begin bringing them home.

"We must not abandon our mission, but we must begin a transition where the Iraqi government and its neighbors play a larger role in stabilizing Iraq," Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Bush.

Voinovich, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released his letter Tuesday — one day after Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel's top Republican, said in a floor speech that Bush's strategy was not working.

"The longer we delay the planning for a redeployment, the less likely it is to be successful," said Lugar, who plans to meet later this week with Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser.

Lugar and Voinovich are not the first GOP members to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon made similar remarks earlier this year. But their public break is significant because it raises the possibility that Senate Democrats could muster the 60 votes needed to pass legislation that would call for Bush to bring troops home.

Their remarks also are an early warning shot to a lame duck president that GOP support for the war is thinning. The administration is not expected until September to say whether a recent troop buildup in Iraq is working.

"Everyone should take note, especially the administration," said Snowe, R-Maine, noting Lugar's senior position within the GOP. "It certainly indicates the tide is turning."

Lugar told reporters Tuesday that he does not expect the fall assessment to be conclusive and would only fuel sentiment among lawmakers that Congress should intervene with legislation to end the war.

"The president has an opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy," Lugar said. "I don't think he'll have that option very long."

The White House on Tuesday appealed to members for more patience on the war in Iraq.

"We hope that members of the House and Senate will give the Baghdad security plan a chance to unfold," said White House spokesman Tony Snow.

Snow also said Lugar was a thoughtful man and that his remarks came as no surprise.

"We've known that he's had reservations about the policy for some time," he said.

Republican support for the war has declined steadily since last year's elections, mirroring public poll numbers. In an AP-Ipsos poll earlier this month, 28% said they were satisfied with President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, down 5 percentage points in a month.

Earlier this year, Voinovich and Lugar said they doubted the troop buildup in Iraq would work. But they declined to back a resolution expressing opposition to the troop increase because they said it would have no practical effect. The two senators also refused Democratic proposals to set a timetable for troop withdrawals.

Other Republicans, including Sens. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Susan Collins of Maine, expressed similar concerns about Iraq but recently have said they will wait until the September assessment before calling for a change in course, including possible troop withdrawals.

Voinovich and Lugar said they still would not support a timetable for troop withdrawals and are unlikely to switch their vote. But softer alternative proposals are in the works that could possibly attract their support.

After the Fourth of July recess, "you'll be hearing a number of statements from other (Republican) colleagues," predicted Sen. John Warner, R-Va., a longtime skeptic of the war strategy.

Warner spokesman John Ullyot said the senator is drafting a legislative proposal on the war, but declined to discuss the details. The measure would likely be offered as an amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill on the floor next month.

In the meantime, Democrats say they will try again to set an end date on the war and cut off funding for combat.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Lugar's speech "brilliant" and "courageous" and said it would later be noted in the history books as a turning point in the war.

"But that will depend on whether more Republicans take the stand that Sen. Lugar took," Reid added.

Also on Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted in favor of confirming Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as Bush's personal adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pete Geren as Army secretary. A full Senate vote on the nominations has not been scheduled.

The CIA today released hundreds of pages of formerly top-secret documents on activities ranging from a plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro to domestic espionage against Americans.

The documents, described in internal CIA memoranda as the "family jewels," mostly cover activities in the 1960s and early 1970s that the agency considered likely to cause embarrassment if revealed. They include material compiled as part of a directive to review CIA activity that apparently violated federal law or could be construed as nefarious.

Totaling 693 pages, the "family jewels" describe assassination plots, eavesdropping on American journalists, spying on civil rights activists and opponents of the Vietnam War, the surreptitious testing of dangerous drugs on citizens, break-ins at the homes of former CIA employees and sources and the opening of mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China.

The documents were turned over to three investigative committees in the early 1970s and fueled probes that damaged the CIA's reputation and led to a congressional crackdown. Much of the information has been made public in some form since then, but today's massive release of documents provided greater detail on a number of closely held activities, including cases of domestic spying that violated the CIA's charter.

The material was released at the direction of the CIA's director, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, in an effort to come clean about some aspects of the agency's past and to set the historical record straight.

The "family jewels" documents were compiled in response to a 1973 order from the CIA's then-director, James R. Schlesinger, who wanted CIA employees to report activities they thought might be illegal.

Also released today was a collection of 11,000 pages of analysis and research dating from 1953 to 1973. Those papers focus primarily on the "Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies" and on Sino-Soviet relations.

"The CIA fully understands that it has an obligation to protect the nation's secrets, but it also has a responsibility to be as open as possible," Hayden said in a statement announcing the release. He called the declassification of historical documents an important part of the agency's "social contract with the American people."

Despite the disclosure, some information in the documents apparently still is considered too sensitive to make public. The released material contain numerous blanked out pages, passages and words.

After the documents were provided to Congress in 1974, the CIA said today, they were "exhaustively reviewed" by three panels: the Rockefeller Commission appointed by President Gerald R. Ford, the Senate's Church Committee and the House's Pike Committee.

Today's document release answers a Freedom of Information Act request that dates from 1992, the agency said. It described the move as part of the CIA's "concerted effort to close out its old [FOIA] cases under the law."

The "family jewels" were originally collected as a byproduct of the Watergate scandal. Schlesinger had been angered by press reports that the CIA had provided support to two men who were convicted of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington: E. Howard Hunt and James W. McCord Jr.

Schlesinger ordered top CIA officials "to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this agency," a reference to the National Security Act of 1947. The law bars the CIA from engaging in domestic spying.

The resulting documents were inherited by Schlesinger's successor, William E. Colby, who subsequently briefed the Justice Department on what he called the agency's "skeletons."

Bill Clinton used to be a stealth presence in his wife’s presidential campaign, raising money and schmoozing supporters largely out of the public eye.

This week, the former president stepped into the spotlight, from his humorous turn in a new Web video to the announcement that he will join Hillary Rodham Clinton on high-profile campaign visits to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Aides say Bill Clinton has long planned to campaign publicly for his wife, and Hillary Clinton often promises audiences they’ll see a lot more of him.

Mindful of his charisma and tendency to hog the attention, the campaign has played the Bill card carefully—keeping him in the shadows while giving Hillary Clinton time to establish herself independently. They followed a similar pattern in 2000 when she first ran for the Senate in New York.

“The president’s plan all along was to gradually escalate his involvement, so you’ll be seeing him more and more,” said campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson. “We think he is a huge asset and we’re excited to have him.”

Recently, Bill Clinton has cut back on his paid speeches and completed the manuscript for a book on citizen activism that will be published later this year. Aides say he’ll continue to be very active with the charitable foundation that bears his name, and he plans a weeklong trip to Africa next month on the foundation’s behalf.

The Clintons plan a three-day campaign swing
But his top priority continues to be “making sure the candidate he believes will be the best president who also happens to be his wife is elected,” said his spokesman, Jay Carson.

Behind the scenes, he’s increased his fundraising since last quarter, headlining numerous high-dollar events for his wife across the country. He also narrated a five-minute biographical Web video and loaned his acting skills to a witty send-up of the final scene of “The Sopranos.”

While the couple appeared together at several fundraisers throughout the year, they’ve attended just one campaign event together—a civil rights commemoration in Selma, Ala., where Sen. Clinton was competing with rival Democrat Barack Obama for attention and support.

That will change the first week in July, when the Clintons plan a three-day campaign swing through Iowa. Polls there show the New York senator in a tough fight with Obama and John Edwards, even as she leads in national polls and most other state surveys.

The Clintons will also campaign together in New Hampshire July 13.

‘Bill Clinton’s third term?’
Bill Clinton did not compete in the Iowa caucuses when he first ran in 1992, but he won the state in the general election that year and again in 1996.

He credited New Hampshire with his political salvation in 1992, finishing a close second there after a bruising primary where he fought allegations of draft-dodging and philandering. He went on to win the state in both the 1992 and 1996 general elections.

Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, noted that Bill Clinton’s support in the state came primarily from middle- and working-class Democrats and from men. Campaigning at his wife’s side could boost her standing with those groups, Scala said.

“I don’t think they’re feeling desperate or that she is faltering, but my guess is that they are trying to buttress her support,” Scala said. “She needs to appeal to middle-class voters and centrists, since progressive types might wonder, ‘Is this going to be Bill Clinton’s third term?’”

A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found Hillary Clinton with twice the support from women as Obama, but dwindling strength among men.

‘We’ll see an interplay between them’
For many voters, joint campaign appearances for the Clintons will also satisfy the curiosity factor: How is this much-scrutinized couple handling a significant role reversal.

“People want to see Mrs. Obama, they want to see Mrs. Edwards. They want to see the team,” said former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who co-chairs the Clinton campaign. “He’s a terrific surrogate, she’s a great candidate, and we’ll see an interplay between them which will be very helpful to her.”

To be sure, rival Democrats contend that Bill Clinton’s increased involvement in his wife’s effort suggests some nervousness in the Clinton campaign about her standing in the race. And the Obama campaign recently indicated its intent to make Bill Clinton a campaign issue—distributing a research document criticizing his friendship with billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle and his $300,000 in speaking fees from Cisco, a company that has moved U.S. jobs to India.

While polls show the former president remains wildly popular with Democrats, Republicans looking down the road said they don’t believe he’ll help persuade Hillary Clinton skeptics to change their minds about her.

“I think Republicans and many independents are very, very eager for her not to be the president of the United States. And that’s regardless of how many times her husband campaigns for her,” said Wayne Semprini, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman now with Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid.

Clinton Draws Cheers From Liberal Group

Appearing before a liberal group that booed her last year for not supporting a firm deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) came armed with more antiwar positions on some issues and received a much more favorable reception today. Activists from the antiwar group Code Pink booed Clinton, shouting, "End the war now!" But they were drowned out by cheers as Clinton talked about her vote last month against $95 billion in funding for the war and about a bill she wrote to remove President Bush's authority to wage the war.

"I see the signs, 'Get us out of Iraq,' " she told a conference of the Campaign for America's Future, a liberal activist group. "That is what I'm trying to do." Last year, Clinton told more than 2,000 activists at the group's conference that it was not "smart strategy to set a date certain" for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. "I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country," she said. The crowd then booed so loudly that it was hard to hear her remarks.

But over the last year, Clinton has embraced firm deadlines for withdrawing troops and has made her pledge to "end the war in Iraq" one of her signature lines on the stump. Her aides said she has shifted as conditions in Iraq have become more dire. Aides to her 2008 rivals privately suggested that Clinton changed her stance after voters confronted her about the war in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"The American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions that are important for their own people," Clinton said. "That's like blaming the victim," said Jodie Evans of Code Pink.

Generally, activists said that while they wish Clinton and other leaders would do more in Congress to end the war, they were happy that Clinton's position on the issue has changed. "She's been kind of slow to come to the antiwar position, but she's there now," said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the Washington-based group that hosted the conference. "Her position on the war has improved dramatically."

Democrats Court Anti-War Crowd

(AP) A trio of Democratic presidential candidates appealed to anti-war passions that run deep in their party Tuesday, with each portraying himself as most strongly against the war in Iraq.

In separate speeches before liberal activists, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards each stressed differences that set them apart in a field of Democratic White House aspirants who say they would bring U.S. troops home.

Obama pointed out he opposed the war from the beginning; Richardson said that unlike his rivals, he would pull out every troop from Iraq and Edwards pressed his fellow candidates still in Congress to force an end to the war.

"For me it's simple," Edwards said in an excerpt provided by his campaign. "No more pontificating. No more vacillating. No more triangulating. No more broken promises. No more pats on the head. No more we'll-get-around-to-it-next-time. No more taking half a loaf."

Obama said he warned his rivals and others serving in Congress in 2002 not to authorize the war. He was serving in the Illinois state Legislature at the time and won election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

"We knew back then this war was a mistake," Obama said in excerpts prepared for delivery provided by his campaign, casting himself in solidarity with more than 3,000 activists expected to show up. "We knew back then that it was dangerous diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th. We knew back then that we could find ourselves in an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences."

Richardson, making slow progress in the race but trying to break out into the top tier of candidates, tried to differentiate himself by stressing that he would leave "zero troops" in Iraq. He pointed out that his leading opponents have supported legislation that would leave behind an undetermined number of residual forces to train and equip Iraqi forces, among other things.

"With all due respect to my outstanding Democratic colleagues ・Senators Clinton, Obama, Dodd and Biden ・they all voted for timeline legislation that had loopholes," the New Mexico governor said. "Those loopholes allow this president, or any president, to leave an undetermined number of troops in Iraq indefinitely. And this is the same legislation that former Senator Edwards says we should send back and back to the president over and over again until he signs it."

Richardson would leave a small Marine contingent behind in Iraq to protect the U.S. Embassy. But, he said, "if the embassy is not safe, then they're all coming home, too."

He announced a Web site for supporters of his plan to sign a petition backing it ・Notroopsleftbehind.com.

Activists at the conference organized by the Campaign For America's Future are overwhelmingly opposed to the war. A year ago, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was booed at the conference for opposing a set date for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq.

In a separate speech to a union members Tuesday, Clinton said a residual force was necessary to fight terrorism and defend Americans, but combat troops should start coming home now.

If the Iraqi government won't do its part, "we should not continue to support them," Clinton told a presidential forum hosted by the powerful American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews pressed Clinton at the labor forum on her thoughts about whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby should be pardoned. Clinton artfully dodged: "I think there will be enough to be said about that without me adding to it."

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted in March of lying to investigators and obstructing Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's inquiry into the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity. A federal judge said last week he will not delay a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for Libby in the case.

Obama and Edwards were scheduled to speak midday Tuesday, while Clinton and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich were scheduled to speak Wednesday.