Mansoor Ijaz, the main figure in the "Memogate" scandal that is rocking the highest levels of the Pakistani political establishment, told his U.S. go-between Gen. Jim Jones in a private e-mail that there were three people who "prepared" the now-infamous memo, not just former Pakistani Ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani.

Ijaz is set to travel to Islamabad next week to testify before the Supreme Court of Pakistan's inquiry commission on the memo, which he delivered through Jones to then Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen last May. Ijaz has repeatedly claimed the memo was authored solely by Haqqani on behalf of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. The memo offered to replace Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership and reorient Pakistani foreign policy in exchange for U.S. government help to prevent a purported impending military coup in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Haqqani resigned over the scandal and is now living under virtual house arrest on Gilani's compound, but he has always denied being the author of the memo. Now, in the previously unreported May 9 e-mail from Ijaz to Jones that accompanied the memo, obtained by The Cable, Ijaz told Jones the document was prepared by three people, not just Haqqani.

"In further reference to our telephone discussions on Pakistan and its relations with the United States, I am attaching herewith a document that has been prepared by senior active and former Pakistan government officials, some of whom served at the highest levels of the military-intelligence directorates in recent years, and as senior political officers of the civilian government," Ijaz wrote to Jones only 8 days after bin Laden was found hiding in the military town of Abbotabad.

Last month, Ijaz handed over the e-mail to the Supreme Court's Registrar Faqir Hussain in advance of Ijaz's testimony next week. Ijaz told Jones in the e-mail that the memo "has the support of the President of Pakistan," but Ijaz didn't mention in the e-mail that Haqqani was involved in the memo or the scheme in any way.

"I personally know two of the three men," Ijaz wrote to Jones, referring to the three men who allegedly prepared the document. "I believe they are men of honor and integrity, although they have been away from the games played in Islamabad for some time."

"Thanks for standing up with me on this," wrote Ijaz. "I don't know if it will work, but we have to try."

Jones replied May 11 "Message delivered," referring to the fact he had passed the memo on to Mullen.

In an Oct. 10 Financial Times op-ed where he revealed the existence of the memo, Ijaz wrote that the scheme was devised by "a senior Pakistani diplomat" whom Ijaz later alleged was Haqqani, but Ijaz didn't mention the existence of the other two other officials in that article.

In an interview on Thursday with The Cable, Ijaz confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail he sent to Jones but said its contents did not contradict his various other statements. Ijaz said that the Jones e-mail was meant as a general overview but didn't reflect the details of the involvement of the other two men, whom he identified as Jehangir Karamat, who served as Army chief of staff and U.S. ambassador under former military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former National Security Advisor for Gilani, who was fired in 2009 over an unrelated dispute.

"There was only one author of the memo and that was Haqqani, but the way Haqqani presented it to me was that there was a team of people back in Pakistan involved and the two names he gave me were Karamat and Durrani," Ijaz told The Cable.

Ijaz said his current understanding is that Karamat and Durrani were involved in some unclear way in the scheme to overhaul Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership but were not involved in the actual drafting or delivery of the memo, as far as he knows.

"My impression at the time I wrote the email to Jones was that they had been probably a part of the thinking process about the ideas in the memorandum. They were probably involved at least in thinking through how you execute these things," Ijaz told The Cable. "They certainly did not have anything to do with the actual drafting of the memorandum or the delivery of the message. Then again, maybe they did, I don't know. Who the hell knows? What I put down in the e-mail was what Haqqani told me."

In his written statement to the Supreme Court, Ijaz claims that Karamat and Durrani were names given to him by Haqqani "as people that would be involved in forming the new national security team," but he did not identify them as being involved in the preparation of the document.

"[Haqqani] said there was a like-minded group of people  in  Islamabad  that would be brought on board by ‘the boss'; -- a reference I understood to mean President Asif Ali Zardari -- as the new national security team once tensions had dissipated. He mentioned two names I recognized (Jehangir Karamat and Mahmud Durrani) but added that they would be approached once this was all over -- a point I took to mean they were unaware of this operation in advance," Ijaz wrote in his statement.

The military-civilian rift over the memo reached even higher levels of confrontation this week as Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Wednesday sacked Defense Secretary Khalid Naeem Lodhi for "gross misconduct and illegal action." Lodhi gave the Supreme Court statements pertaining to Memogate from Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership without going through the civilian government first.

The firing of Lodhi followed a warning by Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani that Gilani's earlier statements, calling the actions of Kayani and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate spy agency Ahmed Shuja Pasha related to Memogate "unconstitutional," could have "grievous consequences." Gilani had criticized the two for submitting statements to the court without going through the civilian leadership first. The stakes could not be higher in Pakistan, where the civilian government is fighting for survival and the military is seeking to assert its dominance over politics.

The newly revealed e-mail also seems to corroborate Jones's secret affidavit to the court in which Jones swore that Ijaz "gave me no reason to believe that he was acting at the direction of Ambassador Haqqani, with his participation, or that Ambassador Haqqani had knowledge of the call or the contents of the message."

Later in the affidavit, Jones hedged by writing, "I do not recall whether Mr. Ijaz claimed that Ambassador Haqqani had anything to do with the creation of the memo. I have no reason to believe that Ambassador Haqqani had any role in the creation of the memo, nor that he had any prior knowledge of the memo."

In his own affidavit to the court, Ijaz directly disputed Jones' account of events. Jones says that Ijaz called him on the phone a few days before the delivery of the memo. Ijaz refutes that call ever took place. Ijaz also swears that he did tell Jones about Haqqani's involvement during their May 9 phone call, only because Jones was extremely skeptical of the authenticity of the memo.

"I made clear to him near the end of the call that Pakistan's ambassador to the US was the originator of the message," Ijaz wrote in his affidavit. "Gen. Jones continued to express reservations but when I told him this was not for him or I to decide, that if what the ambassador was saying about the potential for a military takeover was true, that we simply had a responsibility to make sure the private message Haqqani  wanted conveyed got through to its destined recipient.  He responded by saying he would do it if the message was in writing."

In his affidavit, Ijaz again claims that Haqqani was the sole author of the memo. "The content of the Memorandum originated entirely from Haqqani, was conceived by Haqqani and was edited by Haqqani," Ijaz wrote.

Ijaz has always said that his back-channel dealings were in furtherance of his desire to expose the inappropriate influence of Pakistan's military and intelligence sectors on domestic politics. That said, since the scandal broke he has been harshly critical of the civilian government led by Zardari. The entire scandal rests largely on Ijaz's credibility and his account of events as compared to Haqqani's.

Ijaz met with Pasha Oct. 22 in London and handed over evidence he says implicates Haqqani, including Blackberry Messenger communications that Ijaz says prove Haqqani's involvement in the conspiracy. In a twist of irony, when Ijaz gets to Pakistan next week, his security will be reportedly be provided by Kayani, the military leader he originally conspired to overthrow.

In his e-mail to Jones, Ijaz also claimed that he was working with Sen. Tom Daschle and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to deliver the document. Ijaz told The Cable today that he reached out to Daschle in an effort to reach Mabus as a conduit to Mullen -- but it never panned out.

"Daschle's condition [before becoming involved] was that the memo had to have Zardari's signature and be written on his letterhead. That sort of defeats the purpose [of the back channel], so that option was out," said Ijaz. "They were never involved directly in this. I never had any direct contact with Daschle or Mabus."

Have you seen this man, accused al Qaeda financier Yasin al-Suri? If so, information leading to his location, suspected to be inside Iran, will get you up to $10 million from the U.S. government.

Suri, also known as Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil, is one of six al Qaeda officials linked to Iran that the U.S. Treasury Department designated for sanctions back in July. According to two U.S. officials who briefed reporters today, he stands at the center of the link between the Iranian government and al Qaeda. That's why the State and Treasury Departments are putting out this bounty as part of their Rewards for Justice program.

"From his sanctuary inside Iran, he has moved terrorist recruits through Iran to al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has also arranged for the release of al Qaeda operatives from Iranian prisons and their transfer to Pakistan. And he has funneled significant amounts of money through Iran to AQ leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Robert A. Hartung, assistant director for threat investigations and analysis at State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. "Locating al-Suri and shutting down his operations would eliminate a significant financial resource for al Qaeda."

The announcement highlights the U.S. government's strategy of exposing the links between the Iranian government and al Qaeda.

"We have reliable information indicating that there is an agreement between the Iranian government and this al Qaeda network [led by Suri]," said Eytan Fisch, Treasury's assistant director of terrorism and financial intelligence. This is the first reward put forth for a terrorist financier, he added.

But Fisch couldn't say whether the sanctions levied against Iran-linked al Qaeda operatives in July have yielded any results. The sanctions only apply to funds held in the United States, and Treasury won't say if they have found any such funds.

"We don't generally comment on whether funds are frozen and if so, how much," said Fisch,

"That kind of makes it impossible to tell whether it has actually been effective," noted AP reporter Matt Lee.

It's also unclear what the U.S. government would do if and when Suri's location becomes known. If he is living inside Iran with the assistance of the Iranian government, would the U.S. government go in and get him?

"Once we receive information, that's provided to other government agencies to handle that information and decide how to act," said Hartung. "I can't answer questions about what they will do with that information."

Several reporters at the briefing noted that the $10 million reward is much higher than the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" that Fisch said Suri has alleged to have moved to al Qaeda. Wouldn't it be a financially smart decision for al Qaeda to turn him in itself, and pocket the profit?

"In general terms, anyone is available to receive a reward," said Hartung. He said there is some review of award recipients, but didn't give any details.

"So Mullah Omar, if he turns this guy in, isn't going to get the reward?" asked Lee.

"Correct," replied State Department spokesman Mark Toner. "And vice-versa."

If any Cable readers have a tip on Suri's location, you can tell the U.S. government by going to www.rewardsforjustice.net, e-mailing rfj@state.gov, or calling the RFJ tip line in Afghanistan at 0800 108 600. The program has paid more than $100 million to more than 70 people since it began in 1984, Hartung said.

Other aliases used by Suri include: Yassen al-Suri, Izz al-Din Abd al-Farid Khalil, and Zayn al-Abadin. The only other two alleged terrorists who have warranted a $10 million award are Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Abu Du'a, the alleged head of al Qaeda in Iraq.

NATO forces deliberately attacked two Pakistani Army outposts and ignored established rules of cooperation in the Nov. 26 assault that resulted in the death of 24 Pakistani soldiers, a senior Pakistani defense official said today.

The attack sparked the latest rift in the sinking U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The Pakistani government shut down NATO's supply lines into Afghanistan in response to the attack, refused to attend the Bonn conference on Afghanistan reconstruction this month, and indicated it would undertake a full review of its security cooperation with NATO and the United States. The U.S. government and the Obama administration expressed private "condolences" for the attack, which is currently under investigation by NATO, but has refused to explicitly apologize.

A senior defense official at the Pakistani embassy in Washington invited a group of national security reporters on Thursday morning to give an extensive briefing on the events of Nov. 26 -- from the Pakistani point of view.

The official placed the blame squarely on NATO forces and said it was completely impossible that the killings were accidental.

"I have a story to tell and this is the story of those brave people who left us in the middle of a cold, November night on a barren mountain top," the official said, before going into intricate details of what he called the "Mohmand Incident," named after the region where the attack took place.

The attack started at about midnight, the official said, with a helicopter assault on the Pakistani outpost named "Volcano," a small bunker on a mountain ridge near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistani soldiers at the neighboring "Boulder" outpost responded by firing at the helicopters, after which helicopters and fixed-wing NATO aircraft strafed both outposts, destroying them, the official said.

The Pakistani conclusion that this was a "deliberate" attack is based on the belief that these areas had been cleared of terrorist activity, that there was no indication of insurgent activity at the time, and  that there was no way to mistake the Pakistani outposts as terrorist encampments, the official argued.

"This was in plain view on a barren ridge, not a place terrorists would be inclined to use as a hideout," the official said.

Moreover, NATO and Pakistani officials had put in place an intricate system of operational information sharing that was completely violated, according to the official, which reinforced the Pakistani conclusion that the attack was intentional.

The official refused to speculate as to why NATO would deliberately attack and kill two dozen Pakistani soldiers, only saying that this was the official conclusion of the Pakistani military leadership.

The Pakistani official also claimed that the NATO official in charge at the nearby Pakistani-NATO coordination center had apologized for giving the Pakistani Army incomplete and incorrect information regarding where NATO forces were attacking. In fact, the official claimed that the apology came in the middle of the attack, but that the NATO airplanes kept attacking.

According to the official, NATO officials notified the Pakistani side of the operation just before it began, but gave Pakistan incorrect coordinates that indicated it was actually taking place nine miles to the north of the actual attack site. The Pakistanis asked NATO to delay the operation amid the confusion, the official said, but the NATO official in charge refused, only to apologize later as the attack was taking place.

About an hour into the attack, at approximately 1 a.m., NATO then told the Pakistani side the attack had stopped, the official said, but the Pakistanis later discovered it continued until about 2:15 a.m.

"This was at least one hour and 10 minutes beyond when our friends in NATO told us that the helicopters had pulled back," the official said. "The actual magnitude of this tragedy we knew only when day broke."

Well-established operating procedures should have dictated that the attack stop as soon as communications with the Pakistani forces in the area were established, but that didn't happen, the official said.

"We are supposed to share information about impending operations regardless of size.... And in case we are fired upon, the responsibility to take action is on the country from where the fire is originating," the official said. "It's not for the U.S. military to engage. NATO is supposed to pass on the information regarding the point of origin [of the fire]."

The official also rejected the idea that the NATO helicopters were responding to fire coming from the Pakistani side or chasing insurgents as part of some sort of hot pursuit.

"There was no prior firefight," the official said.

NATO is expected to release the results of its own investigation into the assault next week, and the Pakistani claims today could be an attempt to pre-empt that announcement by establishing its own narrative beforehand.

Either way, the fallout from the incident has already had a detrimental effect on Pakistani military and popular opinion toward cooperation with NATO and U.S. military forces.

"There is a sense of outrage," the official said. "It's there on the street, amongst the leadership -- political as well as military -- and among the rank and file of the military. The sheer magnitude of this thing is unbelievable."

Congressional Democrats on the budget-cutting "supercommittee" want to count $1 trillion that the United States will not spend fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next 10 years as "savings," even though there was never a plan to extend the wars that long in the first place.

House Assistant Democratic leader and supercommittee member James Clyburn (D-SC) mentioned this plan on Fox News Sunday, describing it as part of the supercommittee's efforts to agree on $1.2 trillion in discretionary spending cuts over 10 years before its Nov. 23 deadline. Republicans have supported this idea in the past but as of yet, not within the context of the supercommittee's deliberations.

"We believe and the CBO believes that there is around $917 billion to be saved over the next 10 years from the overseas contingency account. And we ought to count that," Clyburn said.

The problem with Clyburn's idea is that the money he is referring to -- emergency spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was never budgeted to remain at current levels over the next ten years. The money can only be counted as "savings" when compared to CBO projections from last March, which were based on a mathematical formula -- not the actual future costs of the wars.

However, it never has been anybody's plan to maintain current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next 10 years, so the "savings" are completely illusory.

The White House used this gimmick in September, when it released its $4.4 trillion plan to cut the deficit. The gimmick was also used by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in the plan he released last July to avert a debt-ceiling crisis. Paul Ryan's budget last April also included this savings in its deficit reduction calculation, which was supported by 235 House Republicans and 40 Senate Republicans.

Clyburn also said the supercommittee Democrats are interested in spending the war "savings."

"We ought to use that savings to plow it back in to fix Social Security, that will allow it to be sovereign for another 75 years, to plow it into job creation programs that would get people back to work, and paying taxes, and off of food stamps and off of unemployment," he said.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- which have cost more than $1 trillion since 2001, according to the Congressional Research Service -- were completely funded by off-budget borrowing and classified as "emergency spending," meaning that eliminating those costs does not actually return any money to the Treasury.

"Isn't that a classic Washington budget gimmick, to count savings on money that wasn't going to be spent anyway?" asked Fox host Chris Wallace.

Clyburn responded that these savings were more realistic than counting future economic growth as revenue, which is part of the Republican approach inside the supercommittee.

"It sounds to me like you guys have a lot of work to do in 10 days," Wallace said.  

Top Obama administration officials have divided up responsibilities for applying pressure and offering an outstretched hand to the Pakistani government, in a new diplomatic strategy that some officials have dubbed "coercive diplomacy."

"The Obama administration is totally fed up and have decided to up the ante," said one official familiar with the new approach, explaining that inside the administration, "pressing for Pakistani behavior change is the new mantra."

Outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, who has visited Pakistan 27 times since 2008, clearly assumed the role of "bad cop" when he testified on Sept. 22 that the U.S. government believes the Pakistan-based Haqqani network, with the help of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was responsible for the recent bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Mullen upped the ante further, saying the Haqqani network was a "veritable arm" of the ISI, a charge anonymous U.S. officials walked back on Tuesday.

Also heading up the "bad cop" team is new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who seemed to threaten increased U.S. military incursions into Pakistan on Sept. 16. An official familiar with the strategy said that even more threatening statements by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who declared on Sept. 25 that there would be broad bipartisan support for U.S. military attack on Pakistan, were coordinated with the administration as part of their new campaign to apply pressure on Pakistan. The State Department is also considering whether to add the entire Haqqani network to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, but no decision has yet been made.

The administration may also be using the media as part of its new campaign to exert new pressure on Pakistan. On Monday, a story appeared in the New York Times with an excruciatingly detailed account of a 2007 ambush of American officials by Pakistani militants.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leading a parallel "good cop" effort with the Pakistani government. She has sought ways out of the current diplomatic crisis by increasing her personal engagement with her Pakistani counterparts, as evidenced by her three-and-a-half hour meeting with new Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar on Sept. 18 on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

According to one official inside the meeting, Clinton told Khar, "We want this relationship to work. Give us something to work with."

"The secretary's message was that, given the efforts of the Haqqani Network on the 13th of September [the day of the assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul], that this was an issue that we had to deal with and that this is a threat to both Pakistan and the United States," a senior State Department official said about the meeting. "That part of the conversation concluded that joint efforts need to be made to end this threat from the Haqqanis, and that Pakistan and the United States ought to be working together on this and not separately."

Other U.S. officials inside that meeting included Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman and his deputy Dan Feldman. Afghan reconciliation was also a main topic of the meeting.

In her meeting with Khar, Clinton tried to find specific ways to address the threat of Pakistan-based extremists operating with impunity in Afghanistan.

"It is possible for the United States and Pakistan to work together to identify those interests that we have in common and then figure out how to act on them together," the State Department official said. "And I'd say that that if that could be the overriding philosophy or kind of headline that came out of this meeting, that'd be a very good thing for both sides."

After initially making some harsh statements against the U.S. Khar has now settled on a message that mixes her desire to defend Pakistani pride with the need to project the Pakistani civilian government's willingness to find a way out of the crisis.

Khar said this morning on NPR that the U.S. and Pakistan "need each other" and "are fighting against the same people" but "Pakistan's dignity must not be compromised."

Clinton's strategy is also reflective of the feeling of some inside the administration that the late Special Representative Richard Holbrooke's drive to transform the U.S.-Pakistan relationship from a "transactional" one to a "strategic" relationship is now a lost cause.

"The strategic relationship is over, we're back to transactional with Pakistan," one U.S. official recently told The Cable. "We can call it ‘long-term transactional' if we want, but that's the way it is now."

Amid all the tough talk, on-the-ground intelligence cooperation between the United States and Pakistan continues. CIA Director David Petraeus and ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha met in Washington on Sept. 20 and put into force a new intelligence sharing agreement, an official briefed on the agreement said. Pasha also reportedly met with top White House officials at the residence of Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani.

Inside Pakistan, there is speculation that the United States may be bluffing about its threat to increase military strikes inside Pakistan.  The Pakistani government is also grappling with a fervent anti-U.S. media and a realization that its control over the ISI, much less the Haqqani network, is ultimately limited. But U.S. aid to Pakistan will never be effective leverage in convincing Pakistani to change its basic approach to dealing with groups like the Haqqani network, the official said.

"Pakistan is unwilling to align its strategic vision with America's worldview," the official said. "Meanwhile, the mood toward Pakistan in Washington is the worst it's ever been."

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry kicked up a firestorm inside the GOP when he seemed to endorse Jon Huntsman's call for a speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan during this week's debate, but his real views on Afghanistan don't match those of Huntsman, the GOP hawks, or President Barack Obama, a senior Perry foreign policy advisor told The Cable.

"In the dynamic of a debate when you follow someone, you kind of play off of them, and what Gov. Perry wanted to do was to express a similar sentiment to Gov. Huntsman that he very much wants to bring the troops home, we all do, but he wasn't saying ‘I want to bring the troops home now,'" the advisor said.

Perry's stance on Afghanistan seems to be searching for a middle ground. Like the Obama administration, he wants to shift emphasis to handing over responsibility to the Afghan security forces as a means of bringing U.S. troops home. But also thinks Obama's announcement of a timetable for withdrawal was unwise -- and he's unsure whether the United States really needs 100,000 troops fighting there still.

"If increasingly the Afghans can do this kind of work, then of course we want to bring our people home. It's good for us, it's good for them. But Gov. Perry is not confident in the Obama policy, which seems to be driven largely by politics, and he's not confident in the 100,000 troops number. He'd like to know if it's possible at 40,000," the advisor said, explaining that the rationale for the specific number of U.S. troops on the ground has never been clearly explained by the administration.

"He would lean toward wanting to bring our troops home, but he understands that we have vital strategic interests in Afghanistan and that a precipitous withdrawal is not what he's recommending."

Perry's stance on Afghanistan isn't likely to fully satisfy those calling for a more rapid withdrawal, or those calling for the 30,000 U.S. "surge" troops to remain in the country past summer 2012, when Obama has said he plans to remove them.

"What [Perry] doesn't have is confidence that [the Afghan  campaign] is being done in a way that's focused on achieving the mission, which would be keeping Afghanistan free of terrorists and not destabilizing the region," the advisor said.

So how many troops does Perry believe should be withdrawn and at what pace?

"We're not in a position to answer that question, we're not in those briefings," the senior advisor said.

Perry also believes the United States should focus greater attention on how it uses foreign aid. He wants to "shine a really bright light on that whole culture of foreign aid and revisit how it is deployed as part of our larger foreign policy," the advisor said.

The advisor touted the fact that Perry is a former member of the military, and signaled that the presidential candidate is prepared to stick to his middle-of-the-road stance in Afghanistan.

"He has a clear sense of the mission and wanting to win it, but not just by throwing the kitchen sink at it," the advisor said.

Update: The Romney and Hunstman campaigns respond, accusing Perry of "flip-flop."

Former Vice President Dick Cheney argued on Friday morning that the waterboarding of terror suspects did not amount to torture because the same techniques had been used on U.S. soldiers during training.

"The notion that somehow the United States was torturing anybody is not true," Cheney told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute at an event to promote his new book. "Three people were waterboarded and the one who was subjected most often to that was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and it produced phenomenal results for us."

"Another key point that needs to be made was that the techniques that we used were all previously used on Americans," Cheney went on. "All of them were used in training for a lot of our own specialists in the military. So there wasn't any technique that we used on any al Qaeda individual that hadn't been used on our own troops first, just to give you some idea whether or not we were ‘torturing' the people we captured."

Of course, there are some differences between the waterboarding of troops as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training and the waterboarding of suspected al Qaeda prisoners. For example, the troops in training are not subjected to the practice 183 times, as KSM was. Also, the soldiers presumably know their training will end, and they won't be allowed to actually drown or left to rot in some dark, anonymous prison.

Some in Cheney's party, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), believe that waterboarding is torture. Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism consultant for the U.S. government and a former SERE instructor, has argued repeatedly that waterboarding is torture and called for prohibiting its use on prisoners.

"Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration -- usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten[ed] with its use again and again," he said.

Cheney said the George W. Bush administration had received approval for the "enhanced interrogation program" from all nine congressional leaders who had been briefed on its details: this included the leaders of both intelligence committees, the leaders of both parties, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

When asked if they thought the program should be continued, they all said, "Absolutely," Cheney said. And when asked if the Bush administration should seek additional congressional approval for the program, the nine Congressional leaders unanimously told him, "Absolutely not," according to Cheney's account.

Cheney also said the Bush administration's interrogation policies were partially responsible for recent successes in the fight against al Qaeda, includig the killing of Osama bin Laden.

"I'd make the case we've been successful in part because of the intelligence we have, because of what we've learned from men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, back when he was subjected [to enhanced interrogation]," he said.

In the one-hour discussion at AEI with the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, Cheney also talked about huddling with his wife and daughter at Camp David on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001. Camp David was the "secure, undisclosed location" that the Secret Service rushed Cheney to just after the attacks. Other top administration officials met him there over the follow days.

When asked if he ever broke down and cried in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as had President George W. Bush and other top officials, Cheney said, "Not really," and then grinned sheepishly as the crowd giggled.

"You understand that people will find that peculiar," Hayes noted.

"It wasn't that it wasn't a deeply moving event," Cheney responded. "The training just sort of kicked in, in terms of what we had to do that morning and into the next day."

This week's toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya shows that the Obama administration's multilateral and light-footprint approach to regime change is more effective than the troop-heavy occupation-style approach used by the George W. Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, a top White House official told Foreign Policy today in a wide-ranging interview.

"The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis of legitimacy for this but also will provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for communications, in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with FP. "While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition."

Despite criticism from Congress and elsewhere, President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Rhodes said that the United States is not going to be able to replicate the exact same approach to intervention in other countries, but identified the two core principles of relying on indigenous forces and burden sharing as "characteristics of how the president approaches foreign policy and military intervention."

Rhodes also weighed in on several other aspects of the Libya saga:

• Rhodes confirmed the comments by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on Tuesday that the TNC can choose whether to prosecute Muammar al-Qaddafi themselves or hand him over to the International Criminal Court, which has indicted him on war crimes. ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, however, has argued that the decision is not up to the Libyans.
• "We believe it's something that the Libyans and the [Transitional National Coalition], were they to capture Qaddafi, would then be in charge of, in consultation with the ICC," said Rhodes. "Were he to go to any third country, they would have an obligation to turn him over to the ICC."
• On the role of the NATO operation in Libya, Rhodes said the civilian protection mission continues but that consultation will soon begin in Brussels on the conclusion of the mission. The need for the NATO protection mission is still present for now, Rhodes said, but the White House doesn't anticipate the TNC requesting a peacekeeping force from NATO or the United Nations that involves any foreign boots on the ground. "There's no plan for that type of effort," he said.
• Rhodes said the drive to release between $1 billion and $1.5 billion of Qaddafi's frozen assets to the TNC is moving along quickly. "We think that should be complete in the next few days and we don't foresee an insurmountable problem there," he said. The Obama administration feels confident the TNC can manage the money and prevent it from being stolen or funneled to unsavory actors. The administration will also try to ensure the money goes to the urgent needs identified by the TNC.
• Rhodes also addressed the effects the developments in Libya may have on Syria, saying that "it sends a message to Damascus that a crackdown of the sort that Qaddafi and [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad have pursued is not a means of maintaining legitimacy and staying in power in the long run."
• Rhodes said that a transition to democracy in Syria is in the U.S. national interest, and would weaken Iran's ability to influence regional events. "The Iranians have suggested that the Arab Spring was somehow a positive development for Tehran, the fact you see their principal ally in the region having completely lost legitimacy... would be a blow to Iran," he said. But he emphasized that the administration does not see a military intervention in Syria as the right step.
• On the fate of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi, who senior lawmakers and GOP presidential candidates said on Tuesday should be re-arrested and extradited to the United States, Rhodes said the extradition issue was a legal question for the Justice Department, "but the president never thought he should have been released in the first place ... so that continues to be our view."

First it was Congress's Libya debate that was postponed due to the ongoing fight over the debt ceiling and the budget. Now, oversight of the war in Afghanistan is falling victim to the chaos in Congress as well.

The Senate Armed Services Committee cancelled a scheduled Tuesday hearing on Afghanistan that was supposed to feature testimony from two prominent and outgoing officials: Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. James Cartwright. A separate panel was to be comprised of Ambassador James Dobbins, Gen. Wesley Clark, and Gen. John Keane.

"It was canceled due to other Senate business. We expect it to be rescheduled after the Senate's August recess," SASC spokeswoman Tara Andringa told The Cable.

Another Hill aide confirmed that "other Senate business" referred to "debt ceiling related craziness."

Meanwhile, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is still planning on going ahead with confirmation hearings for two ambassadors currently serving under recess appointments: Frank Ricciardone, Jr., to be Ambassador to Turkey and Norm Eisen, to be Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

And Wednesday the fireworks will fly when SFRC holds confirmation on two of the more controversial State Department nominees: Robert Ford, the recess appointed ambassador to Syria, and Wendy Sherman, the nominee for undersecretary of State for political affairs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) newest plan to cut the deficit includes $1 trillion in "savings" from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the numbers just don't add up.

Reid's plan, unveiled in a press conference today, claims to save $2.7 trillion over 10 years, including $1.2 billion in cuts to discretionary spending, $400 million in "interest savings," and over $1 trillion from "winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The $1 trillion in defense "savings" that Reid is claiming his plan provides is based against a projection the Congressional Budget Office put out last March that said war costs would top $1.67 trillion over the next ten years. However, that projection was never meant to accurately forecast the costs of the wars over the next decade. The report just took this year's costs for Iraq and Afghanistan ($159 billion) and added inflation for every year in the future.

The CBO made its projection based on simple math and it never had any connection to policy realities, as the Congressional Research Service explained in a new report today.

"The CBO baseline reflects CBO's March 2011 estimate of FY2011 overseas funding with increases at the rate of inflation in subsequent years," said the new report, which was crafted for congressional offices but obtained by The Cable. "It is important to note that the administration projection is not really a policy-based estimate -- CBO takes the most recent number and that becomes their baseline."

In other words, the CBO number, which puts the cost of the wars at $1.7 trillion over the next ten years, was the projection if the U.S. kept the current number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2020. However, nobody ever thought that was the plan. The CBO was required to do the math that way, as they do with all such projections.

The reality is that it is impossible to estimate the costs of the wars, because fundamental questions about U.S. policy toward both countries remain unanswered. For example, will the Afghanistan drawdown be complete by 2014, and what will be the pace of the drawdown? Will all U.S. troops be out of Iraq by the end of the year?

The CBO also put out numbers for war costs that assumed a gradual drawdown of troops. In fact, they put out two numbers, based on two different possible policy options. If U.S. policymakers decided to drawdown to 45,000 troops in both countries by 2015, the CBO projected that the cost of the wars would be $624 billion over 10 years. A steeper drawdown to 30,000 troops by 2013 would make the projection $422 billion over the next decade.

Reid appears to be counting the difference between the CBO's $1.7 trillion projection and its estimates of the cost of the wars after a steep drawdown as "savings." But that's problematic, because the base figure is simply a very high projection that has no connection to policy. Either way, the actual future drawdown plan is unknown.

A fact sheet issued by Reid's office only said, "Winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will save $1 trillion. Paul Ryan's budget also included this savings in its deficit reduction calculation, which was supported by 235 House Republicans and 40 Senate Republicans."

It's ironic that Reid defends his $1 trillion figure by pointing to the Ryan budget, because that document took its projections of future war costs from the Obama administration's February budget.  In that report, OMB budgeted an annual sum of $50 billion for the both wars. But that estimate was also made without knowing future U.S. policies toward Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's doubtful that the wars will cost $50 billion each year until 2020.

Gordon Adams, who led OMB's national security division during President Bill Clinton's administration, wrote that the $50 billion estimate was "what budget folks (like me) call a ‘plug' -- we know something will go there, but we don't know what it is."

By comparing fake numbers to each other, politicians can appear to be saving money, he claimed, without having to make actual defense cuts. Meanwhile, there's no real impact on the deficit.

"It abuses the budget process because the savings are mythological, not real, so they enforce no discipline on the Defense Department," Adams wrote. "And they are a fraud on the public, who will think a budget deal has cut the defense budget, when it has done no such thing."

In an interview today, Adams told The Cable that the whole episode is just another example of our leaders focusing on optics rather than getting down to the hard work of actually fixing our fiscal situation.

"Because it's too hard to really tackle the defense budget, first Ryan and now Reid have reached for these pseudo savings," he said. "The bottom line here is these are not budget savings. It doesn't make any sense."

When the late Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) Richard Holbrooke created the SRAP office at the State Department, he took a big chunk of the authority and staff from the Bureau of South and Central Asia (SCA). But now that he's gone and the Afghanistan war is maybe, possibly, starting to wind down, the two bureaus should move toward a reunion, the State Department's Inspector General said in a new report released today.

"Communications between SCA and S/SRAP have not been as effective as they could be," the report stated. "With a likely transition of the [Afghanistan and Pakistan] desks and other S/SRAP responsibilities back to SCA in the next several years, SCA needs to begin to be more broadly engaged in or aware of S/SRAP programs and activities that it may inherit at that time."

When Holbrooke entered the Obama administration, he hired 28 staffers -- none of them from SCA --and then told SCA that the bureau no longer had any control over Afghanistan or Pakistan and its current Af-Pak staffers now worked for him. The Nelson Report's Chris Nelson described a February 2009 meeting, which he dubbed the "Grand Confrontation," in which Holbrooke beat down attempts by then-SCA Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher to hold on to his Af-Pak personnel.

"At a summit in Boucher's office with the assembled DAS's [deputy assistant secretaries], et al, Boucher said something to the effect, ‘As you know, you work for me, and you will continue to report TO me, is that clear?'" Nelson reported. "Holbrooke, not looking at Boucher, responded directly to the stunned staffers with, ‘What part of 'you will report directly to ME did you NOT understand?', and there the meeting ended."

Boucher left later that year to become deputy secretary general of the OSCE and was replaced by Robert Blake.

With the looming figure of Holbrooke gone, SRAP's activities, now guided by Marc Grossman, have been pared down. The office has been directed to focus on Afghan reconciliation, which apparently isn't going well. The report often mentions that the key official in charge of coordinating between SRAP and SCA is a Deputy SRAP who is dual-hatted as a DAS in SCA; that's  Frank Ruggiero.

The coordination between SRAP and SCA has actually gotten worse since Holbrooke's death, according to the Inspector General. For example, SRAP and SCA hold their weekly meetings at the same time, so nobody can attend both, and SRAP involvement in SCA work has trailed off.

"The flow of communication between SCA and S/SRAP is inadequate, as is SCA's awareness of S/SRAP programs and activities in such areas as strategic communications and regional economic issues," the report said.

But the report treats the eventual incorporation of SRAP back into SCA as inevitable, and advises both sides to start preparing for it.

 "When the transition takes place, SCA's awareness of S/SRAP programs and activities will be essential for continuity. To meet its responsibilities, SCA - particularly the bureau's DASes and office directors - will need to be aware of and participate in appropriate S/SRAP meetings and events."

One of the most prominent, remaining Obama administration justifications for continuing the war in Afghanistan is the need to squash the threat of attacks on the U.S. But top administration officials don't believe there has been a terrorist threat coming from Afghanistan since at least 2004.

"The goal that we seek is achievable, and can be expressed simply: no safe-haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland, or our allies," President Obama said in his Wednesday evening speech to the nation, where he promised to withdraw 10,000 troops this year and all 33,000 surge troops by next summer.

In a conference call with reporters earlier Wednesday, a "senior administration official" said no terrorist threat from Afghanistan has been present for 7 or 8 years, well before the Obama administration surged troops there in 2009.

"On the threat side, we haven't seen a terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan for the past seven or eight years. There has been clearly fighting and threats inside of Afghanistan, but the assessment of anywhere between 50, 75 or so al Qaeda types that are embedded in Haqqani units, basically, tactical fighting units inside of Afghanistan, they are focused inside Afghanistan with no indication at all that there is any effort within Afghanistan to use Afghanistan as a launching pad to carry out attacks outside of Afghan borders," the official said. "The threat has come from Pakistan over the past half-dozen years or so, and longer."

Later in the same conference call, the "senior administration official" repeated the administration's view that there's no terrorist threat coming from Afghanistan and used that assumption to argue there will be no danger in removing the surge troops.

"And so, in taking a look at the drawdown of U.S. troops, the 10,000 this year and then the 33,000 by next summer, it is certainly the view of the people who have been prosecuting this effort from the administration that this is not going to increase the threat," the official said. "Again, we don't see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan in terms of the terrorist threat and it's not going to affect at all the threat in Pakistan either."

Of course, if the Taliban regain control of Afghanistan, that could all change. Obama's GOP critics were quick to criticize the president for talking extensively about wrapping up the war and apparently going against the advice of ISAF Commander Gen. David Petraeus.

"When America goes to war, America needs to win. We need to close out the war successfully, and what that means now is not nation-building. What it means is to follow General Petraeus's advice and to get those security forces built up where they can pick up the slack as we draw down," said GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty.

"I think we have undercut a strategy that was working." Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CNN. "I think the 10,000 troops leaving this year is going to make this fighting season more difficult. Having all of the surge forces leave by next summer is going to compromise next summer's fighting season."

For those on both the left and right who wanted Obama to withdraw from Afghanistan even more quickly, the acknowledgement that no terrorist threat exists there only reinforces their argument for a speedy exit.

"Our troops have done everything we've asked them to. They've routed the Taliban, dismantled Al Qaeda, and facilitated democratic elections," said GOP candidate Jon Huntsman. "Now it is time we move to a focused counter-terror effort which requires significantly fewer boots on the ground than the President discussed tonight."

"It has been the hope of many in Congress and across the country that the full drawdown of U.S. forces would happen sooner than the President laid out - and we will continue to press for a better outcome," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Meanwhile, former officials and experts complained that Obama's speech seemed to acknowledge that the U.S. will never be able to prevent the Taliban from playing a role in Afghanistan's future, but failed to spell out a diplomatic solution that addresses how to incorporate the Taliban into the Afghan government.

"I would have liked to have heard much more from him about a diplomatic strategy," Vali Nasr, a former top advisor to the late Richard Holbrooke, said on MSNBC immediately following the speech. "If you cannot end the war militarily, the only other way the war is going to go away is through some kind of deal in which the protagonists agree to a peace settlement. And we haven't done much of that. It hasn't been part of the debate about sending the troops in and it hasn't been a part of the debate of pulling troops out."

"Ultimately wars are fought on battlefields, but they have to finish around the table, and the administration hasn't really outlined how it is going to get there," Nasr said.

What a difference 18 months can make. When President Obama decided to withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan this year and 33,000 troops by next September, he apparently took the advice of Vice President Joseph Biden and rejected the advice of ISAF Commander -- soon-to-be CIA director -- Gen. David Petraeus.

In December, 2009, when Obama made the decision to surge 33,000 troops to Afghanistan in the first place, the move was widely seen as a victory for the military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon, joined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, over the lighter footprint advocated by Biden. Biden and Petraeus have often been seen to be on opposite sides of the debate over how to fight in Afghanistan, although the vice president has always been supportive of Obama's policy decisions once they were made.

But when Obama announces his decision in a speech from the White House tonight, he will cement a shift in power and influence over the Afghanistan decision making process, away from the general who is in charge of the war, according to the New York Times:

Mr. Obama's decision is a victory for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has long argued for curtailing the American military engagement in Afghanistan. But it is a setback for his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who helped write the Army's field book on counterinsurgency policy, and who is returning to Washington to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Two administration officials said General Petraeus did not endorse the decision, though both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is retiring, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reluctantly accepted it. General Petraeus had recommended limiting initial withdrawals and leaving in place as many combat forces for as long as possible, to hold on to fragile gains made in recent combat.

Petraeus will leave Afghanistan to head the CIA in September and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has often called for a "modest" reduction of troops, retires next week. Administration officials have been quick to say that Petraeus presented Obama with a "range of options," but Obama's decision to withdraw troops faster than what Petraeus and Gates would prefer is a stark departure from his decision-making process last time around.

Conservative pundits are already seizing on the Times' reporting to criticize Obama's decision. "This is an amazing decision to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," wrote the American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka. "Those in the field believe that lower numbers will result in higher U.S. casualties, reduce the chance of success in stabilizing Afghanistan, and concede territory to the enemy."

SINGAPORE - Political reconciliation talks with the Taliban could begin as early as this winter, but only if the U.S. keeps up the military pressure and convinces the Taliban they are losing the war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday

"There is a generally accepted view that nearly all conflicts of this kind eventually come to a close with some kind of a political settlement, but the reality is, in my view, that the prospect of a political settlement does not become real until the Taliban and the others... begin to conclude that they cannot win militarily," Gates said following his remarks here at the 10^th annual IISS Shangri-La Security Dialogue.

After 15 months of ejecting the Taliban from their home territories in the regions of Helmand and Kandahar, the momentum is on the side of the Afghan government and the NATO coalition, but if there's a military pullback, the prospects for negotiations decrease, he said.

"If we can sustain those successes, if we can further expand the security bubble, we have enough evidence that the Taliban are under pressure and that their capabilities are being degraded, that perhaps this winter the possibility of some kind of political talks or reconciliation might be substantive enough to offer some hope of progress," said Gates.

The Obama administration is devising a strategy for the way forward in Afghanistan referred to internally as "Plan 2014" that may call for U.S. troop reductions beginning this year. But Gates, who leaves office July 1, is warning against such a pullback.

"My own view is that the political opportunities will flow from military pressure. And only as long as the military pressure is kept on and there are further gains, will the prospects for a political solution improve," he said.

Gates reiterated the U.S. position that any reconciliation with the Taliban must include their agreement to sever ties with al Qaeda, agree to adhere to the Afghan constitution, and lay down their arms. But he acknowledged that the Taliban are here to stay.

"The Taliban are probably a part of the political fabric of afg at this point and can... potentially have a political role in the future of that country," said Gates.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told The Cable in a Saturday interview that he totally agreed with Gates's assessment and would continue to press for heavy military pressure to continue.

"It's very simple. What motivation would the Taliban have to talk if they think they're winning. It clearly is a situation where if they think that they losing... then they will be willing to have serious talks," McCain said.

But McCain admitted that whatever progress has been made militarily in Afghanistan, problems remain with the effort in Pakistan, the relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and corruption in the Afghan government

"If they had good government, they probably wouldn't have the insurgency in the first place," McCain said.