Washington Post intelligence reporter Dana Priest was online Thursday, July 24 at 12:30 p.m. to discuss the latest developments in national security and intelligence. Priest will be off the two following weeks, returning on June 26.

The transcript follows.

Dana Priest covers intelligence and wrote " The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military" (W.W. Norton). The book chronicles the increasing frequency with which the military is called upon to solve political and economic problems.

Archive: Dana Priest discussion transcripts

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Dana Priest: Hi everyone. I'm here, by myself as usual. The OD (Milbank) is off on his own too. So let's get start. Lots happening overseas.

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Washington: Why is Congress apparently willing to enact legislation to protect sources and methods for the media (Media Shield Law) but not for the government to allow it to protect sensitive and classified sources and methods necessary for national security (Shelby amendment/Kyl amendment)?

washingtonpost.com: Mukasey rapped on reporter shield bill (AP, July 23)

Dana Priest: You're kidding, right? The government has plenty of tools to protect national security secrets. According to every nonpartisan panel that has looked at this issue over the past decade, the government is continuing to overclassify information you and I should have access to. This is a dangerous trend. It has come back to haunt us over and over again: in weapons of mass destruction assertions before the war in Iraq, on renditions and "enhanced" interrogation methods adopted by the CIA since Sept. 11, etc.

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Exeter, N.H.: Dana, I wanted to get your take on the proposed F-16/Pakistan deal. It seems like its primary purpose is to make the generals happy, but it will have no value in controlling the restive provinces. Can we give them sufficient rewards to encourage them to be more aggressive, or at least turn a blind eye to our activities?

washingtonpost.com: U.S. wants to shift $226 million of Pakistan aid money (AP, July 24)

Dana Priest: If there is any evidence that continuing to bribe Pakistan officials with more money and bigger weapons has or is working to achieve U.S. aims in Pakistan (getting rid of al-Qaeda and finding Osama bin Laden and Dr. Z) I have not yet seen it. The F-16 sale falls into that category big time. Oh, and let's just watch how India reacts!

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Baltimore: Awww, I miss the Dana and Dana show already. Will you be doing that again?

Dana Priest: Awww, yes. Probably once a month if I can get Milbank to settle down and stop trying to push me around!

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Seattle: What are your thoughts on the Walter Reed/Wounded Warrior hearing covered by Dana Milbank? Which is more disgraceful, that things got so bad or that the only answer to why things haven't gotten better is "I'm sorry"?

Dana Priest: A well-phrased question! And a tough call, but I'd have to say the former. It's unbelievable to me that so many things remain so dysfunctional. I can tell you, that I continue to get calls, letters, e-mails from troops in trouble during their recovery. It still boils down to the Army bureaucracy and its inability to make things happen without involving eight colonels, all tasked to assess the problem that everyone knows how to fix! Don't get me started...

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Greenwich, Conn.: The AP released an article last week about the U.S. secretly shipping 55,000 metric tons of yellowcake out of Iraq; secretly because they did not want the insurgents or terrorists to know this was happening. My question: After "administration lied about WMDs to get us into Iraq"; Joe Wilson: "nothing happening"; Valerie Plame: "I have been defiled in retribution for questioning the administration premise that Saddam was seeking WMDs"; and Scooter getting unseated and doing time, not one paper or magazine I can find has even mentioned the above. What do you think Saddam was doing with the above?? Have we become so polarized and political that we can't openly address risk? Your thoughts?

washingtonpost.com: U.S. removes uranium from Iraq (AP, July 6)

Dana Priest: Tuwaitha was a known facility. This doesn't prove Hussein he got yellowcake from Niger, if that's what you are implying. And the Valerie Plame prosecution had nothing to do with Iraq's WMD capabilities or claims; it had to do with breaking the law prohibiting the outing of an undercover CIA officer.

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Ocala, Fla.: If you could have asked the generals one question about the slow motion progress on "warrior care," what would it have been?

Dana Priest: How many new psychologist and psychiatrists has the Army hired in the past three years, and why do they insist that the vast majority be in uniform? (Okay, that's two.)

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Alexandria, Va.: I don't understand the issues in the Hamdan trial. Was being bin Laden's chauffeur a crime? If he overheard information being discussed between bin Laden and others, was Hamdan expected to immediately telephone the CIA and relay this information? Very confusing to me why he is on trial.

washingtonpost.com: Interrogator Testifies About Hamdan's Work With Bin Laden (Post, July 24)

Dana Priest: He's charged with participating in a terrorist conspiracy so that is what they are seeking to prove. If in fact he did not know that Osama bin Laden was a involved in perpetrating terrorist acts, then they probably wouldn't have a case. The opposite is emerging, however. He listened to Osama bin Laden revel in the fact that not 1,000 but 3,000 people died. He didn't have to be in his employ -- he knew what was happening and continued to help him, or so it appears.

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Chesapeake, Va.: Enjoyed the Dana and Dana show last week! There is much discussion about drawing down troops in Iraq and ramping up deployments to Afghanistan. What is the consensus in the intelligence community as to what the military is expected to achieve with the additional troops in Afghanistan? It seems like a "surge" may not work in a country that has a widely distributed population and many different tribal/clan factions.

Dana Priest: I think there is no consensus and a lot of trepidation about all the alternatives in Afghanistan. To stand back and do nothing, or do nothing much than we're doing now, also seems like dooming the country to the Taliban and worse. I'm not clear if Obama means a "surge" as we know it in Iraq or something else.

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Bethesda, Md.: Too add to your rebuttal of Greenwich and the yellowcake, the following is taken from the article linked: "While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast." So, if Hussein had put this stuff in a bomb and blew it up the worst thing that would happen would be scared people. Ha ha, our government scares/scared us just fine all by themselves, thank you. Also, Libby didn't "do time" either -- he was pardoned.

Dana Priest: Passing this on.

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Washington: So what's the deal with the administration's moves with Pakistan, giving them stuff they want for their own purposes (upgrading their F-16s for to counter India) so that they will do more of what we want them to do for our own, antiterrorism purposes? What are we going to do on the central front of the campaign against al-Qaeda -- along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and in Afghanistan?

Dana Priest: I don't know what the U.S. is going to do there. I know what various groups would like to do (CIA: pay more people for information and figure out how to better use the hundreds of assets deployed there now; special ops: more unilateral ground action, more Predator strikes, and let the chips fall where they may afterwards). As you know, these all have drawbacks ... but maybe they're worth it?

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Princeton, N.J.: If what you say is true, why couldn't Hamdan be tried in a regular or military court?

Dana Priest: This gets back to the origins of Guantanamo, that the U.S. government wanted to be able to interrogate these prisons without the same restraints that would come into play in a normal judicial system (civilian or military) because they believed these people had valuable, time-sensitive information about the ongoing al-Qaeda conspiracy to attack the U.S. and U.S. interests during a time of war.

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Washington: "Dana Priest: He listened to Osama bin Laden revel in the fact that not 1,000 but 3,000 people died. He didn't have to be in his employ. He knew what was happening and continued to help him, so it appears." By that token, then, if someone in the White House knew the president or vice president did something illegal and helped them, would they be guilty? Sorry, but it seems from a spectator's view that we're going after Al Capone's driver because we can't get Capone.

Dana Priest: Well, how old of a story is that? And does it mean that Al Capone's driver is an innocent bystander just because he needs a paying job?

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Herndon, Va.: Why would the U.S. render Maher Arar to Syria for interrogation back in 2002? Is Syria cooperating behind the scenes with the U.S. in the fight against al-Qaeda?

Dana Priest: This is still somewhat of a mystery. I think they wanted Arar to disappear and probably could not find a country to disappear him to. As he wasn't picked up in some obscure corner of the world, but rather, at JFK Airport, this was going to be a little harder to carry off. And Syria, seeking to garner some favor with the U.S., obviously accepted. I don't think Syria's cooperation is very broad, but that's just a guess. I don't really know.

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Anonymous: Thanks for taking our questions. Early in the Afghan war, and in the Iraq war, quick-on-the-trigger American commanders authorized aerial bombardments based solely on denunciations from local informants. Afterward many of these aerial bombardments turned out to be based on false denunciations, where the local contacts merely used the U.S. to settle some local tribal feud or drug war. The U.S. turned out to have bombed innocent weddings or, in one case in Afghanistan, a convoy of elders who had been invited to meet with Hamid Karzai. Do you know if Secretary Gates has curtailed authorizing aerial bombardments based solely on unreliable local informants?

Dana Priest: It was curtailed long before that and I don't think it was normal or usual to have based it on one biased source.

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Sun Prairie, Wis.: Hi, Dana. Any impressions of the veterans health hearings the other day? Dana Milbank didn't seem to be too impressed, but he tries so hard to be funny and hip that it's hard to know how seriously to take him. Were the military officers there just trying to get through with expressions of contrition, or did they communicate information about actual improvement in the conditions you reported on last year?

washingtonpost.com: Oops! We Did It Again. (Post, July 23)

Dana Priest: I am sorry we didn't have a regular news story about it; in fact, I was very surprised. There are still many, many problems and progress is slow, despite all the hoopla and effort.

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Richmond, Va.: Even though it was incredibly good luck for Obama that Maliki supported a timeline that looks very close to Obama's for troop withdrawal, it has also been said by some analysts that Maliki really doesn't want the troops to leave any time soon, and that he has a reason for pushing the timeline idea. If that is true, can you explain why he is pushing the timeline, and why he doesn't really mean it?

Dana Priest: He says it because the American presence is not very popular among certain, politically powerful groups, like the Shiite. But Maliki also knows that without them, given the lack of a true, stable government and police force/military force in Iraq, the situation would likely become violent and chaotic without the troop presence. How long that would last, and how it would eventually shake out is the great unanswered/unanswerable question.

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Washington: How much do you miss Dana? Though I gotta say -- you certainly give as good as you get.

washingtonpost.com: Discussion Transcript: DAN-uh vs. DAY-nuh (washingtonpost.com, July 17)

Dana Priest: I have to, or who knows where we'd end up! Thanks.

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Dana Priest: And on that note, sorry to say but I have to sign off. Thanks for joining me. I won't in here for the next couple of weeks, but will be ready to go! when I get back! Cheers.

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