An Unhappy Union

"That's a whopper, critics say.

"'We didn't realize they were here plotting the attack until it was too late,' Bush said Wednesday at NSA headquarters.

" 'It's not true,' ex-9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey, president of the New School in Manhattan, told the Daily News. 'We knew about those two guys - the CIA lost them.' . . .

" 'The problem was the CIA and FBI not communicating and not picking them up,' said Thomas Kean, the commission's former chairman."

Libby Watch

Carol D. Leonnig writes in The Washington Post: "Attorneys for Vice President Cheney's former top aide urged a court yesterday to force prosecutors to turn over all the information they obtained from reporters about their confidential conversations with Bush administration sources in the course of a two-year CIA leak investigation. . . .

"The indictment asserted that Libby leaked information about [Valerie] Plame's CIA role to two reporters but pretended he had learned the information from Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and that he passed it along as unverified reporter chatter.

"The defense's goal is to show that Libby was not intentionally lying when he testified that many journalists had known about Plame during the spring and summer of 2003, and that he believed he had learned about her from Russert."

Leonnig notes that "the court papers filed by Libby's team highlighted Bob Woodward, a Washington Post reporter and assistant managing editor, as a crucial witness who could provide exculpatory information that might help Libby avoid a conviction."

Hamas Watch

I wrote in yesterday's column about Bush's reaction, in his morning news conference, to the Hamas victory.

Glenn Kessler writes in The Washington Post: "The upbeat rhetoric belied the fact that the election outcome was the opposite of what the administration had hoped would happen. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials scrambled to survey the wreckage of their Middle East policy."

Steven R. Weisman writes in the New York Times: "The Hamas victory was the fifth case recently of militants' winning significant gains through elections. They included the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, a radical president in Iran, and Shiites backed by militias in Iraq.

"As these elections unfolded, there has been increasing criticism in some quarters -- notably among the self-described 'realists' in foreign policy, many of them veterans of past Republican administrations -- that President Bush has naively pushed for democracy in countries without the civil society components to support it."