Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC's Countdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.

Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.

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The New York Times and Pro Publica got an advanced look at a report on the American reconstruction of Iraq -- and it's not pretty.

The report concludes, in the words of the Times and Pro Publica, that even now, "the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale."

And it quotes Colin Powell saying that, in the months after the invasion, DOD "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces -- the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.'"

But here's our favorite detail:

When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority's abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. "To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President," wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. "His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt." With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

There was no evidence in the story that the Times and Pro Publica had offered Korologos a chance to respond, so TPMmuckraker contacted him. He responded in an email:

They did NOT give me a chance to comment. That all came from a 3 page memo I wrote on strategy for passing that first Iraq supplemental in 2003. Some $60 (b) billion was for the military side and $20 (b) billion was for the civilian side. The next sentence said, "The quicker we succeed at CPA the quicker our 150,000 boys will come marching home again."

That response doesn't do much to change the clear impression created by the IG report that Korologos cited President Bush's need to get reelected as a reason to support spending $20 billion of taxpayer money. And that OMB ultimately went along with the request.

Here are some other eyebrow-raising nuggets from the report:

In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency's reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency's plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort.

And...

Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. "Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources," said an American Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. " 'You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.'"

And here's a passage that won't exactly boost Donald Rumsfeld's already rock-bottom reputation for knowing what he was talking about:

On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few American officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several alternative rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

"What do you think that'll cost?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

"I think it's going to cost billions of dollars," Mr. Garner said.

"My friend," Mr. Rumsfeld replied, "if you think we're going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken."

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

The report was compiled by Stuart Bowen, a Republican lawyer who serves as the special inspector general for postwar reconstruction in Iraq. The Times and Pro Publica obtained their copies from people outside Bowen's office. The report will be presented February 2nd at a Congressional hearing.

As we reported, the RAND Corporation, released a long quashed critical report yesterday on the role of the White House, Defense Department and State Department in Iraq.

"After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq" was put on the RAND Corporation website late Monday. The New York Times dug into more detailed excerpts in a Blog post from their Baghdad Bureau.

The report confirms much of the conventional wisdom of our failures there, as well as what has said by military leaders-- that after the fall of Saddam Hussein there were too few people, and not enough planning.

But not for lack of trying. The report states that while there was "a range of possible postwar challenges" and "suggested strategies for addressing them," "few if any, made it into the serious planning phases" to be incorporated into Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Like the most recent study released by the Army, the RAND report also lays blame on Gen. Tommy Franks and his inopportune decision to restructure the operations in Iraq after the fall of Saddam-- a tactic that made creating a "stable, reasonably democratic Iraq" more "difficult to achieve."

On the role of the DOD in the chaos surrounding post-Saddam Iraq, the report faults the decision to make the Department of Defense the lead agency in 2003:

While this may have made sense in theory, it did not work in practice. . . DoD's lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution continued to pose problems throughout the occupation period.

The report also comes down hard on the "Future of Iraq" project designed by the State Department:

Press reports have widely described the Future of Iraq project as a State Department "plan" for the reconstruction of Iraq. Such a characterization is unwarranted. Plans require a concrete set of prioritized steps that should be taken in a given situation, and a plan ideally assigns responsibility for each of those steps. The Future of Iraq project did not contain any such prioritization; it was not something that could be taken off the shelf and immediately executed.

As we've been reporting, Phase II of the Senate intel committee's report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq has been released, and all day lawmakers have been issuing statements of shock and incredulity.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the authoring Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called today for a review of whether then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's testimony to Congress was true, given the information in the report.

Specifically cited are quotes from Rumsfeld's testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on September 18 and 19, 2002:

They now have massive tunneling systems... They've got all kinds of thing that have happened in the period when the inspectors have been out. So the problem is greater today. And the regime that exists today in the U.N. is one that has far fewer teeth than the one you are describing.
   -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002

Even the most intrusive inspection regime would have difficulty getting at all of [Saddam Hussein's] weapons of mass destruction. Many of his WMD capabilities are mobile; they can be hidden from inspectors no matter how intrusive. He has vast underground networks and facilities and sophisticated denial and deception techniques
   -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002

[W]e simply do not know where all or even a large portion of Iraq's WMD facilities are. We do know where a fraction of them are. . .[O]f the facilities we do know, not all are vulnerable to attack from the air. A good many are underground and deeply buried. . .
   -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 19, 2002.

On page 50 the report states it's conclusion after investigating these statements from Rumsfeld:

The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information. [Emphasis ours.]

Wyden had a thing or two to say about Rumfeld's "not substantiated" testimony:

This is stunning: the Secretary of Defense, testifying before Congress about whether or not ground forces would be strategically necessary in a war against Iraq, said that the Executive Branch "knew" something that it did not know.

The intelligence available at the time made this clear, and two months later a report prepared specifically for Secretary Rumsfeld directly contradicted what he told the Committee. As far as I know, neither Rumsfeld nor anyone else from his office made any attempt to contact the Committee and correct the public record, and the result was that Congress and the American people were misled on a question of the utmost importance. I do not think that this is a matter that Congress can afford to ignore and I hope that the Armed Services Committee will take a serious look at Secretary Rumsfeld's statements.

We'll be bringing you more from Phase II, but please, keep your comments and observations coming.

Last month, The New York Times published its front-page exposé of the Pentagon's strategy of using military analysts. The retired officers who frequently appeared on TV were the ideal vehicle to broadcast the administration's message on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Message force multipliers," Pentagon officials called them.

Well, earlier this week, the Pentagon released all of the documents that had been turned over to the Times. It is a staggering load. But most immediately intriguing is audio of some of the briefings at the Pentagon, including two featuring Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The audio we've excerpted here comes from a meeting on April 18, 2006. It was an emergency meeting called because earlier in the month, several retired generals had hit the airwaves demanding that Rumsfeld resign. 17 analysts attended the briefing, which featured Rumsfeld and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace. It was a remarkable display of servility, with one analyst at one point proclaiming that Rumsfeld need to get out there on the "offense," because "we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy." Here's the audio:

Another analyst chimed in to the effect that, though PsyOps or "brainwashing" are dirty words, it was necessary to get out there on offense. "You know what they call PsyOps today, they call those public relations firms," another said approvingly. Finally, Rumsfeld had to throw up his hands: "You people should be taking notes. I'm taking all the notes!" It sure was an eager group.

A transcript is available here (pdf) for those who want to follow along at home. The excerpt above begins at the bottom of page 18. It cuts at one point to the top of page 20. The full audio of the briefing is here (wav).

Unfortunately, the transcript does not name the analysts when they speak (it just says "Question"), meaning that it is not easily possible to figure out which of them said what. A list of the participants, however, is here.

The Times reported that the meeting was a rousing success for the Pentagon:

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Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, like his infamously inconstant predecessor, still won't admit that Iraq is in a state of civil war, but that non-civil war is apparently, one of four ongoing wars in Iraq.

From today's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee:

There are four wars going on in Iraq right now, simultaneously: Shia on Shia conflict in the south; sectarian violence, particularly in Baghdad, but also in Diyala and a couple of other provinces; an insurgency; and Al Qaeda.

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized. Not for rudely telling Americans to "back off" in their criticism of his lousy performance; not for going to war in Iraq without adequately planning for stabilizing the country; not for running the U.S. armed forces into the ground; not even for infecting Bartlett's with inanities about "unknown unknowns."

Donald Rumsfeld didn't even apologize to America. He apologized to Turkey.

Last month at a NATO training seminar in Rome, a U.S. lieutenant colonel showed his audience a map displaying a "Free Kurdistan" where parts of Turkey are today. That's kind of a painful idea for Turks, who like their country the way it is. Several Turkish officers stalked out of the event. Back home in Turkey, the incident re-ignited fear that the United States secretly harbored plans to carve up the country -- an abiding worry due to the U.S.'s close diplomatic relationship with the Iraqi Kurds.

You see, Turks were already on edge about this "secret plan." In June, the Armed Forces Journal -- a non-government publication -- published an article by retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters that featured a very similar map. Titled, "Blood Borders," the piece imagined the geography of the Middle East if colonial powers hadn't created artificial boundaries in the earlier part of the century.

I spoke with Peters today by phone. He was, perhaps ironically, unapologetic. "The fact these societies have descended into self-destructed paranoia isn't my problem," he told me. "I have no regrets about writing it, and I would do it again."

Besides, Peters grumbled, "anything that makes Donald Rumsfeld's day more unpleasant is a good thing."