Finally, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle -- if President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have the stones to do what's right.

A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaeda suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant.

"We're seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was not the program Risen and Lichtblau wrote about. The scandal is that they wrote about it.

On August 2nd, Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reported that: "A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years."

On December 5th, the Jerusalem Post reported that Mohammed el Baradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb.

"My, how time flies. It hasn't seemed as if ten years have elapsed since last summer.

The CIA could be right, and Mossad and the IAEA could be wrong. But given the CIA's forecasting record -- it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11, and Saddam's WMD -- that's not the way to bet.

Intelligence analysis isn't the only thing the CIA does sloppily.

There hasn't been a successful terrorist attack in the United States since Sep. 11th, 2001. Congress may be about to change that.

Several critical provisions of the Patriot Act will expire at the end of the year, because a Democratic filibuster in the U.S. Senate blocked their renewal. Without these provisions, the FBI will lose most of its ability to track terrorists, the head of the FBI's national security division told the Washington Times.

The most important of these provisions is for roving wiretaps, said Gary Bald. "We've had that capability for years on the drug side of the ship and frankly what it does is it cuts out the requirement for us to go back to a judge every time a drug dealer throws his cell phone into the river and gets another one."

Before denying those who are trying to protect us from terrorists the tools law enforcement has had for years to wield against less dangerous criminals, Congress – thanks to Senator John McCain – moved to make it unlikely we will ever again get useful information from interrogation of terror suspects.

The president went on television to announce: “Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.”

“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years,” the vice chairman of the Intelligence committee told the Senate.

The president was Bill Clinton (Dec. 16th, 1998). The senator was Jay Rockefeller (Oct. 10th, 2002).

These statements should be kept in mind when assessing the hissy fit Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid threw Tuesday when he called the Senate into secret session to discuss whether Bush administration officials had exaggerated prewar intelligence about Iraq.

Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda chieftain in Iraq, has had a bad week.

If it turns out Zarqawi was among seven al Qaeda leaders killed in Mosul Saturday, it'll have been a really bad week. But even if Zarqawi got away again, it's been a rotten week for him.

It's also been a bad week for antiwar Democrats, who had their bluff called in the House of Representatives.

Al Qaeda has claimed credit for a large, sophisticated attack Monday on the two hotels in Baghdad where most foreign journalists and many defense contractors stay.

The attack failed, but it was a near run thing.

The Palestine and Sheraton hotels are across a short street from each other, adjacent to Firdous Square, a traffic roundabout where the statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down on April 9th, 2003.

The attack involved three suicide bombers and an unknown number of other fighters. The attack took place at dusk, over a span of four minutes.

Several news organizations were tipped off in advance, and cameras were rolling. And we wonder which side the media is on?

On the morning of Oct. 12th, Syria's Interior minister, Maj. Gen. Ghazi Kanaan, was found dead in his office from a gunshot wound to the head. Kanaan's death was ruled a suicide, but there were doubters.

"For those of you who don't know what 'committed suicide' means in Syria, it means someone committed it for him," said Anton Efendi, an American PhD candidate who lives in Lebanon.

Kanaan's "suicide" may lead to the suicide of Syria as an intact country.

On July 9th, Ayman al Zawahiri, the number 2 man in Al Qaeda, wrote a 6,000 word letter to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda chieftain in Iraq. The letter was captured by U.S. forces, translated, and posted on government Web sites.

Democrats and journalists scoff at President Bush's claim that Iraq is the central front in the War on Terror. Zawahiri agrees with Bush:

There were more than a dozen bombings in Baghdad Sept. 14th, four of them suicide bombings, which killed at least 152 people. Yet this may be "early signs of diminishing jihadist capability." Here's why:

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss,for what I think is a good reason. Spoehr is the director of materiel for the Army staff. He had a good news story to tell Moss, which Moss converted into a bad news story.

Here is the story as Spoehr tells it:

The 14 Marine reservists killed last week when the amtrac in which they were riding was struck by a powerful roadside bomb would have been safer if they had been riding in up-armored humvees, opined CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

"I'm very disappointed that we don't have the good vehicles in the al Anbar province," Blitzer said. "It's a very sensitive issue for me, because I was there in March."

An amtrac with 15 combat loaded Marines aboard weighs more than 23 tons. The IED -- reportedly made from a 500 lb. bomb -- flipped it over like a toy. An up-armored humvee weighs less than four tons. Only an idiot would deem it more survivable, especially since an amtrac has more armor than an up-armored humvee.

Blitzer, alas, is typical of the near perfect ignorance of most in the news media about matters military.

There is good news and bad news in the attacks Thursday in London. The bad news, of course, is that the attacks took place. The good news is that they were so clumsily executed.

The attacks mirrored those of July 7th. Now as then, three subway trains and a bus were targeted. NBC has reported the Brits have told American authorities that both the backpacks used in Thursday's attacks and the (homemade) explosives in the backpacks were identical to those of July 7th.

What was different is that this time only the detonators went off. Just one person -- apparently one of the bombers -- was injured in Thursday's attacks. The fact of the attack, coupled with its ineffectiveness, is more likely to infuriate than to intimidate the British. When an attack inspires more contempt than terror, the terrorists are in trouble.

Why is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursuing so zealously the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, since it is all but impossible to prove that the leaker or leakers committed a crime?

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act requires that the leaker have learned the identity of a "covert agent" from authorized sources. And it requires that the leak be deliberate. The law defines a "covert agent" as someone working undercover overseas, or who has done so in the last five years. Plame has been manning a desk at CIA headquarters since 1997.

So why is Fitzgerald acting like Inspector Jauvert in Les Miserables? The answer may lie in a sentence Walter Pincus of the Washington Post wrote on June 12th, 2003.

What recruiters tell prospective recruits makes a difference, says retired Army Major Donald Sensing, whose son is a Marine lance corporal. Though they have suffered, proportionately, three times the casualties the Army has, the Marines are meeting their recruiting goals.

His son chose the Marines over the Army because the Marines appealed directly to his patriotism, while Army recruiters talked of job training and pizza parties. “The problem is the Army’s recruiting strategy with its heavily civilianized marketing influences,” Sensing said. The Marines don’t hide what they’re about.

Recruiting is harder because many parents wont let their children talk with Army recruiters, said Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Recruiting Command. Parental concern for the safety of their sons and daughters is understandable. But there is another group of influencers whose behavior borders on sedition.

Any high school or college which denies military recruiters access to campus should lose all of its federal funding immediately. Any high school or college which does not expel students who disrupt recruiters at job fairs should lose all federal funding immediately.

According to the Iranian government, former secret policeman Mahmoud Ahmadeinejad defeated former president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, 62 percent to 37 percent, in a runoff for the presidency last Friday. Turnout was 60 percent, the government said.

AP reported the government's figures as if they were true, even though there was a boycott of the election (photographs taken throughout the day showed polling places in urban areas virtually empty), and Rafsanjani claimed massive ballot box stuffing.

The blatant manipulation of an already sham election to install a hardline reactionary as president suggests that the Ayatollah Khameini, chief of the Guardian Council, no longer sees a need to put a "reformist" face on the regime.

That suggests to me that Iran is very close to -- or already possesses - a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it.